Podcast: Brian Eberman Joins Host Aaron Pearson On “The Optimized Store Owner” Podcast

Zeenk’s CEO, Brian Eberman, continues this podcast tour to share how to apply a Customer Centric approach to your marketing strategy to grow your profits. This time Brian joins host Aaron Pearson on the podcast: “The Optimized Store Owner.”

Included in this episode

• Ways businesses can focus on both growth and profit using a customer centric approach
• How managing to the idea of an “average customer” is flawed and how segmented your customers based on their value will grow profits
• The correct way to measure your real cost per customer (CAC)
• 3 different ways to use customer value to optimize each of your marketing channels

Transcript

0:00:27.6 Aaron Pearson: Hello, and welcome to The Optimized Store Owner Show, a podcast that helps frustrated store owners become optimized store owners. We are your hosts, Aaron…

0:00:33.8 Christian: And Christian. We want to invite you to join us each week as we share tips, tactics, and strategies from the most inspiring entrepreneurs in the e-commerce industry. This podcast will help you add flexibility, stability, and happiness into your life. Ready? Let’s go.

0:00:51.5 AP: Hey, I hope you’re having a great day. This is a super fun episode. We have Brian here. He is from Zeenk, and it is a software company that not only understands the data that you have for your customers, like basically “everybody else,” where there’s all these inside information on what’s going on in your business, but this software company, Zeenk, is very valuable, something that I have not ever seen before, that really breaks apart like the individual data points that you need in your business to make better decisions. So, let’s go ahead and just talk about this. So there’s gonna be three main things that you’re gonna get from this episode. Number one, how to figure out which customers are actually profitable for you, and no, not every customer is actually worth the same amount. It’s really cool the way he breaks this down.

0:01:36.1 AP: Number two, why lifetime value of your customer is crucial for business growth. And number three, how to focus on growth and profit for your business long-term. How can you actually do both, focus on growth and profit? Usually, somebody says you need to focus on growth first and then profit or then profit and then growth, but he’s talking about how can you do both at the exact same time. Super exciting episode. Enjoy. Hey, Brian. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast.

0:02:00.1 BE: Hey, Aaron, thanks for having me.

0:02:02.1 AP: Absolutely. I say us, because typically my business partner’s on here. He just had a baby, so he’s on daddy duty right now, but… So, you get just me.

0:02:10.3 BE: Well, that’s super exciting for him, first or second?

0:02:14.2 AP: It’s his first, so…

0:02:14.3 BE: Oh, no, huge transformation.

0:02:16.6 AP: It is, it definitely is. Alright. Well, I’m super excited. We will… Maybe babies have something to do with software. I don’t think so, but maybe they do. There we go, there we go. There’s a lot of… Our business coaches talk about it actually, there’s a lot that has to do with raising a child and growing a business that are very, very similar.

0:02:43.7 BE: Yeah, they definitely have some similarities. I’m on the other end of that. Once you get to… They’re still raising them, even when they’re adults.

0:02:47.2 AP: Oh, got you, so you’re on the adult child side of things. At least they can talk to you, I don’t know if it’s as good or not, but they can talk back to you, which is good, I guess.

0:03:00.8 BE: Yup.

0:03:00.9 AP: Okay, so speaking of things that cannot talk back to us or at least can’t give us verbal confirmation anyway, give us a lot more, I guess, written side of things. So, Zeenk is the company that you’re representing from what I understand, and I really just wanna dive into analytics. So a lot of people kind of… And I wanna preface this with, their eyes kinda like glaze over ’cause they don’t know what numbers to pay attention to, what numbers to look at, right? They’re so busy trying to grow the business. So I wanna talk a little bit about what you guys are doing and what makes you different, ’cause I think even one of the things when I was looking at, is like, nobody can see this visually right now, but I’m doing like air quotes here like, “all analytics are the same or all analytic companies are the same.” So I just wanna throw it to you, what is different about Zeenk than other analytic companies out there, specifically to the e-com direct-to-consumer type of space?

0:03:54.6 BE: So we come out of a data science side quite a bit, and what we really focus on is what we call customer analytics, which means giving brands insights into their customers at an individual level. A lot of companies provide really important reporting. We also provide reporting, but I think we differentiate on the customer analytics side and it’s the lens through which we provide actual insights against… For all the e-commerce companies. And there are a lot of ways you could think about this, but the primary thing we’re focused on right now is individual customer value and individual customer cost and churn. It’s kinda the… It’s an upgrade essentially of the recency, frequency, monetary value analysis you might do on your retention kinds of studies for email, but it’s a much more actual number ’cause it tells you, what is this customer actually worth to me in the future?

0:04:52.2 AP: And it’s… Sorry, I don’t wanna cut you off there, it can predict but also give me the numbers as of today or how exactly?

0:05:02.8 BE: Yeah, so what we do, and this is where I think we distinguish ourselves. Like many companies, we pull in the data that help to run the e-commerce company on the sales and marketing side. We’re pulling in the advertising data. We have deep, deep, deep, deep experience with Facebook and other channels, and then we’re pulling in your sales data and we’re attaching the two with a first-party cookie, so that… In a first-party pixel, so we can attribute sales back to particular channels. But we don’t worry as much about the attribution, we worry more about the CAC. So what we’re doing is figuring out, what is a customer that has bought from you worth today, what is the likelihood they’re gonna buy in the next three months, six months, 12 months? What’s that cadence? And different customers are different.

0:05:56.1 BE: If you’re a product that gets re-consumed, you might have a person who used that product a lot, and for them, they buy it every single month, and if they’re now six, seven weeks out without having bought it again, they’re likely just trying to… The likelihood that they’re gonna churn has gone up, right? But another customer who buys from you once a quarter, that’s six weeks, that’s normal. So we have a data science technique that looks across all the data and builds models for each individual customer and says, “What is their pattern of buying? What are they likely to… When are they likely to buy from you again? Are they likely to buy from you again? And if they do buy from you again, what are they worth? So that’s your churn, that’s your value. And then using the advertising data and the first party pixel, we can figure out, “Okay, I can do the finance thing. I can say I spent $100,000 in January and I had thousand new customers, so my CAC is $100.

0:06:58.0 AP: I wanna get… Before we get too much further, I wanna share… For those who do not know what… When you’re saying CAC, what exactly does that mean for them?

0:07:06.5 BE: Right. So let’s talk about how people compute CAC today. In addition to what we do and what you do, that you could do yourself or what you can do with finance, or what a lot of reporting platforms do. So basic understanding of CAC or Customer Acquisition Costs is really important for running your business, right? Everybody should know what their CAC is. And the most fundamental way of computing CAC, and the way you really should be able to do, everybody should be able to do is you look at all your campaigns, you look at all the marketing activities you’re running, and you say, “Which of these are acquisition marketing efforts?” And if you’ve been careful and you’ve segmented your accounts or your campaigns between acquisition and retention, and you’ve blocked people who have already bought from you from campaigns that are acquisition, then you have some nice clean campaigns that are saying, “Well, okay, how much should I spend? So, how much should I spend in January?”

0:07:56.2 BE: Let’s suppose I spent… Or let’s take August. August is closing out right now. Let’s suppose I spent $100,000 on acquisition campaigns in August. And then I look at my customers, not my number of orders, the number of customers buying, but the number of customers who bought from me for the very first time, right? And never bought from me before August. And let’s suppose that’s 1000, right? So, you spent $100,000, you’ve got 1000 new customers, you have a CAC of $100, you divide the two numbers. Now, that’s what everybody should be able to do. That’s what a lot of reporting platforms do. We do that too. But the problem with that number is, you can track it month over month, and you can decide, am I getting better? Am I getting worse? Maybe you split your campaigns into two different acquisition campaigns and you’re very, very careful about it. And you can run an AB test and see which one of them has a better CAC. But it’s not very actionable except for telling you the direction of the business and whether you’re gonna make money or whether you’re gonna run outta cash.

0:09:07.7 BE: What we do is we say, “Alright, well, that’s the right number. That has to be the number on average.” But what you really wanna do is you wanna say, of those thousand people who bought, a ton of other people came in on those campaigns who never bought from you, and are not likely to ever buy from you. Right? ‘Cause there’s like something called censoring at the very end of August, but we’ll deal with that. So all the costs for the people who didn’t buy from you have to be assigned to the people who did buy from you. And you wanna do that in a way that maintains the like to like, what we call the heterogeneity.

0:09:47.4 AP: Okay. Okay.

0:09:48.3 BE: Right? So people who look the same on the first-party pixel. So the people who actually bought should… Their costs for the ones that didn’t buy should be assigned to the ones that did buy.

0:10:01.1 AP: Interesting. Okay.

0:10:02.5 BE: So we do that and we do that at a very, very fine grain. So that allows you to then say things like, “What are the costs of people who first bought this product? What is the cost of people who come from Illinois? What are the costs of people who came in first on this campaign and then I test with this other campaign?” And most interestingly, the thing we’re doing now is, what happens… Now, you can’t see my air quotes, but… Or my picture here, but imagine as if you have a nice plot of cost of acquisition on the bottom versus value, right? Managing to the average, which is what people do, finance, basically. Someone, CEO of finance, whatever, says, “In order to run this business, I need to have a cost of acquisition or a cost per CPA,” sometimes called CPA, of $20, right? And as long as my average CPA is $20, we’re gonna make money. So that’s like matching this little tiny dot on that graph.

0:11:02.5 AP: Yeah. Yeah.

0:11:04.0 BE: And then maybe you say, “Well, what I really wanna do is track it month over month. And so I compute that month over month away. We just say, “Are we making… Things are getting better or worse?” And then, Aaron, you run an agency, they turn to you and they say, “Why are things getting better? Why are things getting worse?” You’re like, “Well, we improved the creative. Oh, it’s seasonality. We found a new audience.” All these suit the message. What we say is, “Well, you can do all that, but I can show you that there’s this massive cloud. Some of your people are only costing you $5 to acquire and they’re worth $100.”

0:11:38.2 AP: Wow. Wow.

0:11:39.1 BE: Some of the people cost you $150 to acquire and they’re worth $10, and you’re just bleeding money having acquired those people. So, what we are recommending is that you use this kind of analysis to then segment your advertising, to segment the calculation, to really bid on a return on ad spend model on all the advertising platforms. And to analyze, this is why I said we take a customer-centric viewpoint. If I tell you this information, I can then take this as a lens through which I look at creative, I look at product placement, I look at first experience, and look at this ratio on an individual basis of CAC to C of… Computed value and say, what we want is a really high ratio. Like, I would love to get everybody for $5 and have more for $100. And if I can do that, if I can sort of look at like, “Well, okay, how did this affect the bad part of my distribution? How did it affect the good part of the distribution? Are there opportunities?” The other thing I often see with companies is they’ve got some people that are worth like six times the average, especially on a repeat purchase company, because they really love the product or they’re reselling the product or they’re using it with friends and it’s a bias, but who knows? You have to investigate that. But they’re not spending the money to get them because they’re managing to the average. Someone said the CPA is $20. Well, okay, if you want the guys that are worth $300, you’re gonna have to spend $100.”

0:13:15.9 AP: Right, right.

0:13:17.0 BE: Right. And so that’s our lens. And that’s how I think we’re really different is we take that lens and we think about how that applies to all aspects of e-commerce company’s business. How does it apply to the experience you give people from the ads through the landing pages, to the product selection, how does it apply to what areas you target? How does it apply to your segmentation of your audience? And that’s how we go about thinking about this.

0:13:46.0 AP: Okay. So a lot of… Just a lot of eye-opening type of information there. So, I’m glad you broke it down the way that you did. Whenever you have that information, how do you begin to tell a platform that’s… Like social media platform like Facebook or TikTok or whatever, how do you begin to tell them to find people that we know were already going to be a better cost per purchase or a better lifetime value for us? Like, how does that work?

0:14:14.0 BE: So there are two things that we’re doing today and a third that we’re looking at, which I’m not sure will work, but I’m gonna… I’ll explain all three.

0:14:20.9 AP: Okay. Okay.

0:14:21.5 BE: So the first one is, I know who these people are. You do too once I tell you, because we have their email address, they bought from the company. So it’s straightforward to create audiences on all these platforms and say, “This audience is worth more, this audience is worth the middle, this audience is worth the least.” But crucially, you can also say that “This audience is really, really bad. They may be worth a lot, but they cost a fortune to achieve and I don’t want them anymore.” That gives you… You can just go create custom audiences. We can feed that information directly into the platforms. So an agency or the individual company who’s using the technology can then use those to create lookalikes and see the increase in performance.

0:15:09.3 AP: Okay, okay.

0:15:12.4 BE: The second thing is, all these platforms now provide a API level interface for sending value. For companies that have multi purchase, so it’s not just subscription companies, but companies that usually… They usually have a consumable. Some of those companies, the people really love it, they buy the consumable a lot. The value you wanna send is not the value of the purchase, it’s the net value of the customer. And when I mean net value, I mean the future value that you’re likely to see on some discounted rate, ’cause you really wanna discount that against your cost of capital. But you gonna need to include your costs. What’s it gonna cost me to ship it? What’s the cost gonna be to make it? What’s it gonna cost me to hold it? And what are the likelihood of returns? And you gotta take that all into account to compute value.

0:16:08.1 AP: Okay. Okay.

0:16:09.0 BE: And we have… Because we’re sort of an enterprise-class capability, ’cause we worked with Thrasio for years, for quite a while, and Thrasio’s an enterprise-class company, we have the ability to take in this data from the company, any scale company in form of a data feed, and then build that kind of model for them to say, “This is the discounted value of that customer in the future.” And so we can feed that directly to Facebook and Google. I haven’t actually looked at TikTok, but I suspect you could do the same thing. So those are the two things we can do. And then the third thing which we’re looking at is… And here, it’s more of a decision process that we’re still looking at. Sometimes, those high CACs are caused by you, you’re basically advertising too much to people who don’t really wanna buy from you, and you keep sending it to them ’cause they haven’t bought. So, we’re looking at whether we can provide companies a decision algorithm about whether they should continue to advertise to a particular individual. And it is possible to then, basically through custom audiences, to block the people on the platforms if you decide you don’t wanna advertise to them anymore. So the first one’s like, improve targeting, the second one is, improve value, and the third one is basically saving money.

[music]

0:17:30.7 BE: Hey, Store Owners, are you ready to grow and scale your online business predictably and profitably? We’ve created a free 15-minute training that will walk you through the five key areas every online store needs to achieve financial success. You can grab the free training by going to optimizedstoreowner.com/ecomm-training, or clicking the link below in the podcast description. Again, that is optimizedstoreowner.com/ecomm-training.

0:18:00.6 BE: Wow, okay. So there’s… How many, I guess from this, how many different data points or what size of businesses actually can take advantage of this? Or what size does it actually make sense for them? I’m sure every business needs to look at it from, what are the costs of acquisition? But… Costs to acquire the customer, or anything like that. But what point does it start to make sense that like, okay, we’re… We can really use this basically.

0:18:30.4 BE: Right. So the analysis itself to understand where you are, right? We can do a lifetime value versus likely they’re still gonna buy, as long as you connect your Shopify, we’ll just give you the answer, right? And as long as you have a couple thousand customers, we can start giving you a reasonable number. You need, and you need to, if it’s this highly seasonal product, you have to have gone through that season a couple of times.

0:18:56.1 AP: Got it.

0:18:57.2 BE: So if you are brand new, I only sell in the summer and I launched in June, that’s gonna be challenging.

0:19:05.2 AP: Yeah. Yeah.

0:19:05.3 BE: So, that and then if you attach, you implement our pixel and let us use your advertising information depending on your decision time, like how long does is take a buyer to buy, right? Is it an immediate buy? Is it gonna be a three month buy? We’ll need to collect some data and then we can give you of the CAC. So, we can make this plot for anybody, and then you can use it as a lens through which you look at all of your activities. Now, whether or not you need enough people to segment them so that you can build them audiences. If you don’t have a good spread, we’ll basically tell you whether you have a spread pretty quickly. If you have a good spread and you have enough people to have multiple audiences on Facebook and Google, and then you can take advantage of the first thing I said.

0:19:57.7 AP: Got it.

0:20:00.3 BE: The second thing, everybody can take advantage of, ’cause you have to be in that class of companies that has some set of people who buy the thing again. So, if you’re a pure one and done company, that’s not gonna help you, only your audiences is really gonna help you. Plus the way of looking at it, against your creative, against your product, against your experience. So, I think that should give you some color.

0:20:27.1 AP: Yeah, it definitely does. And I think it de-allows us to be able to make the decision on, what do we end up doing with it or how do we make better decisions not even just with our ads, but is this able to… So, you put a pixel on there and I guess I can try to understand, but is there a way to also like you’re connected to the Shopify store, like some way to figure out with the email or SMS? ‘Cause I’m just thinking too, if I know the lifetime value of this customer or roughly the information about this customer. And I know they haven’t purchased in five or six weeks and I know they purchase every two or three weeks, and it’s been a couple of more weeks. I can send them an email or I can send them a text message. Or I could run an ad on Facebook. Is there a way to integrate other areas outside of the advertising side of things too?

0:21:17.8 BE: Yeah, so on the messaging and retention, that one’s really quite straight forward.

0:21:21.2 AP: Okay.

0:21:22.9 BE: So, just a pure Shopify integration and we will give you back effectively. We’ll give you back an estimate of what each customer is worth, ’cause we are talking only our customers at that point not just people who visited but customers. And whether they’re likely still gonna be a customer that’s that waiting is it six weeks, is it a three months before that I should worry about this guy. And then you can just divide it into three segments. We recommend basically three groups, you’re very likely they’re still a customer and they’re worth a lot. Those people are your advocates, you should be treating them as advocates through your mining of the value of your product, you should be giving them things to… We would recommend you give them… Obviously, you should do best in-class email, we don’t do that. Messages that are relevant to the buyer, but that’s your advocate group, you should be doing things around advocacy with them in our opinion.

0:22:17.3 BE: Your middle group, which is like 30% at 70% still likely a customer so they’re 70% likely to return, 30% likely to return. Middle value, those are the people you need to give an offer. To get them to come back and then track the performance that offer, obviously crafting the offer with best-in-class email knowing what they bought in the past, knowing whether they be likely in a new off… I’m not gonna get into that. There’s lots of great practices there. And then you have the ones less than 3%, those are the people who have probably churned. So, you have to decide how many messages are you gonna send them before you basically say, “Okay, we’re done. I don’t wanna span these people ’cause I need to maintain high email policy.” So, that you can do purely with the Shopify integration with our software. We can send the data directly back to Shopify, and then it can be a planning platform they can read the data from Shopify based on augmentation on the customer record, or it could be sent to Klaviyo.

0:23:14.2 AP: Okay. I was as well wondering if like Klaviyo, okay. And then, I’m just curious like how does it know or estimate the sof… It’s just an algorithm that was built basically saying, “Jill down the street buys %300 a month worth of clothing, she happened to spend $200 with you, so that it means that likely she would spend 300 with you if she loved your product enough.” And so it’s predicting like, “Okay, next month, if you can do enough here, you can get Jill to spend her extra $100 at your store versus somebody else’s?” Is that how it worked, or…

0:23:49.2 BE: It is not looking across stores, we may eventually do that but we right now we protect the information of each store. So, it’s done purely on your own store. It’s looking at all the buyers and looking at the patterns of purchase and treating them as they have a certain variation and they have a certain propensity to like each other. So, who’s like each other and what’s the overall variation we’re gonna allow across the whole group. And then it works to predict the overall revenue for the business as best possible against all the individuals.

0:24:26.8 AP: I got it.

0:24:27.9 BE: And it’s quite accurate at that.

0:24:31.0 AP: Got it. Okay, that makes more sense. And I try to understand something that’s all technological base, but that’s… Okay, so what are some… We work with a lot of clothing stores in general, but then just e-commerce which clothing is obviously a high frequency purchase at that point. But, what are some best practices with using this data or more, so I guess what would be… What would somebody expect from using this type of software? Do you have any like… I know you can’t talk specifics about which companies, but some examples of any type of DTC brand that has used it and then maybe some results that they’ve had from that, I think it’d be insightful.

0:25:13.9 BE: Well, we’re actually right now running a number of trials.

0:25:18.5 AP: Oh, okay, cool.

0:25:19.2 BE: Right, so I’m not gonna speak to specific results, but actually a clothing brand would be terrific because in a clothing area, like you just said, it’s a high repurchase and it’s got high value spread. It probably also has very high CAC spread. And so it’s gonna fit this model very well, ’cause you’re gonna have some people that are super engaged and super products they wanna keep buying it. You have to hit them correctly, you’re gonna have other ones who try, they’re like, “I’ll probably go to a different store right there in the middle bucket.”

0:25:53.7 AP: And then the others was like, “I just don’t think I’m done with this”.

0:25:56.8 BE: So they can have that spread and then you’re gonna have, since you have probably a large header demographic and demographic spread, you gonna have a big variation in CAC.

0:26:10.4 AP: Awesome. Well, that’s very good to know. And then, just so I was on the website, and I just wanna clarify here too for people, audibly as well, how does the pricing work as far as like… ‘Cause it’s based off of seats, and so does that just mean, just to clarify, just the amount of users you have access to log into the software or is it like…

0:26:31.0 BE: Yeah, so there’s two parts to our offer. And the first one is, we will give you straight up reporting and give you overall cohort-based numbers, against what we’re talking about, on a seat basis. So in a seat, is just a person that has a log in, it could be the agency, it could be the company we encourage, we’re also built for agencies to use with multiple clients.

0:26:58.3 AP: Okay.

0:27:00.4 BE: ‘Cause our company comes out of an agency software background, we delivered software agencies for a long time prior to starting Zeenk. So basically, you can flip between companies and look at the experience across the companies and have the same seat for the agency.

0:27:12.5 AP: Nice.

0:27:13.5 BE: And then you can share a report just for sending a URL to the company and they can have a seat if they click on it, they’ll see after where you’re sitting. That’s a proceed model. We want people to use it broadly, and it’s quite inexpensive on a perceived basis, $90 a seat per month. And then the individual customer analytics will be an additional cost, it’s not the lens, but the individually things I talked about Facebook, Google, Klaviyo. And that we’re currently planning on pricing on a gain share basis with agencies, so the agencies can sell through to different companies.

0:27:50.8 AP: Got it.

0:27:51.6 BE: And basically, if we increase your profitability a lot, we expect to get some fraction of that.

0:27:56.1 AP: Got it. Okay. And then does that rolled out now or… We’re talking in August of 2022, is that rolled out now, or plan to be rolled out or what does that look like? I know you said two trials right now.

0:28:07.4 BE: The company launched publicly to… Or started recruiting customers in June, so the [0:28:12.8] ____ procede models available today, we have people who’ve bought the [0:28:16.8] ____ procede models trying to use it, that’s what Thrasio uses. Then the individual custom analytics is in trial.

0:28:25.7 AP: Got it, okay.

0:28:26.1 BE: And it works today, we’re offering a 30-day free Initial Date that will give you a report and tell you what the opportunity is.

0:28:34.6 AP: Okay, is it all desktop-based, or… I see a couple of screenshots on here, I’m just trying to figure out for a customer to just quickly look at their analytics, is it all desktop or you guys plan to roll something mobile or a report?

0:28:51.8 BE: It is currently all desktop. At the end of September, we will have mobile and tablet.

0:28:57.3 AP: Awesome, okay. Yeah, ’cause that’s… Just for me, I’m just thinking of like, we’re doing the video, you can’t really see too much, but eventually maybe this will be release on YouTube, who knows, but I just like to be able to see like, “Okay, this is what’s going on for today”, very quickly, but you have to give an answer. And is that data done in real time or updated in real time?

0:29:17.9 BE: We pull it every day across everything, and then your updates on the custom analogue are updated. You can at the enterprise level do it hourly.

0:29:28.3 AP: Okay. So it’s a little delayed on that part, but it’s still better data even if you have to wait, like you’re making the decision from what happened yesterday, basically is what…

0:29:37.0 BE: From a customer analytics perspective, from when your lens is customer analytics, except for the people who just arrived and you wanna do behavioral things, which we’re looking at, it’s actually… You actually want some history, so it’s not gonna change on a daily basis.

0:29:53.1 AP: Yeah. Okay, very cool. What’s kinda the future here with that? Is be able to get in direct-to-consumer brands, give them the analytics that they need to run behind for the advertising? And I see on here that has Amazon and TikTok and Facebook and HubSpot connection and Shopify and Klaviyo connection here, is it eventually going to go out to partner with other platforms outside of the Google and Facebook? Like you mentioned, into something like a TikTok and…

0:30:20.4 BE: Well, we support Google, Facebook, TikTok, Shopify, Amazon spend and Amazon advertising, we’re adding Amazon sales, so it can be your single platform of choice for keeping track of all your sales and advertising spend.

0:30:34.9 AP: Nice.

0:30:35.5 BE: For all the companies that are multiple, and we actually have some really interesting analytics between them to help people understand how the mix of their advertising impacts their sales and multiple sales channels.

0:30:44.8 AP: Got it.

0:30:46.9 BE: So our goal is to be a universal platform for optimization with a customer lens.

0:30:54.0 AP: Will that eventually, I know you said it wasn’t as big of a deal, but would that eventually also help with the attribution to or figuring out where attribution is? Or at least so the people have an idea… I’m just thinking to cross platforms, spend more money on TikTok or spend more money on Facebook, and it’ll give attribution per campaign as well.

0:31:12.9 BE: Yeah, we will eventually add that. It’s kinda a variant of the way you do CAC. We currently offer last touch, we currently offer a couple of basic models for attribution, but a machine learning-based model of attribution will probably do [0:31:28.9] ____ cues for us.

0:31:30.2 AP: Oh, very cool. Okay. Well that’s moving very quickly, ’cause sometimes the test people are like, “Yeah, that’s a plan for 12 months from now”, it’s like, “Okay, well, that’s a little far”, but we’re actually pretty dang close to fourth quarter right now, and the pin out when this release is, people are like, “Okay, Fourth Quarter is like now, so very realistic there. Okay, and then you said the biggest way here, okay… I was just looking at the site here. 30-day free trial, you guys will give the data, you guys will send over all the data and walk through everything for us for free at that point?

0:32:05.5 AP: Very cool. Okay, I’ll link that up there. What am I missing here? ‘Cause one of these things, it just seems very straight forward. It’s like you’re gonna tell me what my customer is likely to spend so I can spend more money on that customer to make purchases. And then, I can basically decide which platform, eventually, is actually going to generate the most sales. I don’t know, I just… To me, I’m like, “There must be something missing, why has somebody not created this before? Or… ” Yeah, ’cause it just seems like a no-brainer at that point. I don’t know, I’m just trying to… I gotta be missing something.

0:32:42.5 BE: Yeah, I mean its… We come from a decade of data science and AI background in this space, so I think we just really are bringing a different lens to it by looking at this customer analytics model. And you can make, just, other decisions beyond marketing. We really can help inform, depending on how you set things up, your product selection and your pricing. So for example, one company we did the analysis for, found that the product that actually produced the highest value for them in terms of feature value, was the least sold product.

0:33:19.3 AP: Wow.

0:33:19.8 BE: And that, of course, has to do with the way they’d set up their marketing campaigns because they thought some other products were worth more. So it’s a more general lens to look at how you’re thinking about your overall marketing, writ large, strategy.

0:33:37.4 AP: That is so… There may be a… We may need to do a part two at the end of fourth quarter, beginning 2023, or something like that, just to kinda see… ’cause I would love to see how people are using that. And then also, I’ll link this up in the show notes too, just to make sure that people get on there. And if you go and use the software, let us know too. But just as people start to use it, ’cause I think that will be a big part of this too, is like, “Okay, this software sounds amazing. So now, actionably, what can I do, from a brand that’s doing $200,000 a year, or a brand that’s doing a million or 10 million dollars per year?” How were they able to increase sales or increase profitability? I think that’s the biggest thing that you’re providing here. It’s not just top-line revenue, but, “How can I become more profitable still spending the same amount that I’m spending?”

0:34:23.5 BE: Exactly, we’re very focused on profitability. And a lot of, I think, brands these days, because of the change in the economy, they’re changing their overhang of inventory, have become very focussed on profit. But just… Every company should be focused on profit growth, it’s ultimately what drives value.

0:34:41.4 AP: Yeah, we can agree on that. Awesome. Well, I’ll get everything linked into this. Brian, thank you so much, this was super valuable. I’m gonna go check it out a lot more for myself and for the customers we’re working with. So I appreciate the time and we’ll definitely be checking out the software. Thank you.

0:34:58.0 BE: Thank you, Aaron. It was great talking to you.

0:35:00.5 AP: That’s a wrap. Before you go, screenshot this episode and tag us on Instagram stories @bitbranding and let us know what you thought about this episode. And next, make sure to leave us an honest rating and review on Apple podcast. This helps us reach more people, continue to improve the podcast for you. Alright guys, have a great day and we’ll talk to you next week.

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