How OLLY Built a Retention Engine for a Brand Sold Everywhere

[00:00:00] Taylor Holiday: When I think about traditional email, email and SMS programs in our world for DTC sort of more exclusive brands, it's a lot about trying to think about the offer and value generation to get them to come back and shop online.

But for you all, it would seem that the messaging's much more complicated than that in that sense that not every email in SMS can exclusively be about, come by now on.com when they have a much broader option for distribution. Tell me a little bit about how you guys think about the role of emails and SMS for your brand with that kind of distribution.

[00:00:29] Jennifer Peters: Yeah, I mean that's definitely a challenge and it's, and it's a discipline. I would definitely say it's a discipline that we have to keep because it's so easy to just wanna blast your whole list every time you send something out. 

[00:00:39] Taylor Holiday: Welcome back to another episode of the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. Today we're going a slightly different direction than you may have become accustomed to with me. A lot of focus on acquisition, a lot of focus on the front of the funnel, but today we're making money off the customers that we've already got.

We're gonna talk a little bit about retention and lifecycle strategy, and I'm joined today by the Director of DTC, MarTech and Digital Compliance from OLLY, Jennifer Peters. Jennifer, thank you for coming to hang out today.

[00:01:07] Jennifer Peters: Hello. Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.

[00:01:10] Taylor Holiday: That's like, maybe the most words I've seen in a title in a while. So tell us what you do, what do you do at OLLY? And then tell us a little bit about OLLY for those that dunno.

[00:01:17] Jennifer Peters: sure. So my title is kind of like three things that nobody else wanted to do, kind of smashed together, so, yeah. But it's great. It's super fun. It's always, everything's always new. Everything's always changing. It's super interesting. So at OLLY I run the direct-to-consumer business, including retention.

So that kind of all falls under my team. If you don't know OLLY, if you have ever been to a Target and walked in and turned right, we're always on that first end cap. So we are a gummy vitamin company. We do make things other than gummy vitamins, but we're known for our gummies. We were acquired in 2019 by Unilever.

So we're Unilever brand in the wellbeing collective. And we, it's a super fun product. Really great, really yummy. It's a great brand to work for. It's been been there five years, which is crazy.

[00:02:00] Taylor Holiday: And you all were gummies before gummies were cool.

[00:02:03] Jennifer Peters: We really were like, I feel like we were the ones that made it the norm. I mean, like, we were the first to be like, Hey, little kid, it tastes like candy.

I mean, the Flintstones vitamins that we grew up on are not in the same, not in the same realm for sure.

[00:02:17] Taylor Holiday: I think DTC X, I don't know if you're on X these days, but we have this unfortunate problem of thinking that things that happen on X are the first time they've ever happened. And the gummies

I feel like has been this lately is like, oh, we, like, everyone's like, oh, there's gummy brands that are exploding everyone.

And I'm like, guys, this has been around a while. There, there are some really great brands that have pioneered this category, and you're certainly one of them.

[00:02:36] Jennifer Peters: Well, you can't put everything in a gummy. I think that that is a key, and I think that as the science progresses. People have figured out how to put more and more things that are unpleasant and not a delightful experience in a gummy. So I know like there's creatine gummies now and it's like a gross, disgusting powder that's gritty and it doesn't dissolve well.

And if you put it in your drink, and so having that in a gummy is like, oh, what a relief. It's not gross anymore. Or like green powders. I think they were such a great example too, like who enjoys drinking a big green goo drink? Like nobody wants that. If you could put that in a gummy, why wouldn't you want that?

[00:03:05] Taylor Holiday: I mean, children are the easiest test of this, right? You just, you, you can find out how good a green juice is by setting it in front of a 6-year-old, and you'll find out real

[00:03:13] Jennifer Peters: that's the truth.

[00:03:14] Taylor Holiday: So what is true about gummies though is that they're consumables, which means that businesses like this are often predicated on being able to get people to come back time and time again. Fairly low. A OV I'm assuming for most of the product categories a big subscription part of your business, is that fair to say

[00:03:31] Jennifer Peters: Huge. Yeah. Huge part of our business. I mean, kind of the foundation of our DTC business for sure.

[00:03:35] Taylor Holiday: That's right, so, so in those cases, so often their growth potential is predicated on how good they are getting

[00:03:41] Jennifer Peters: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:42] Taylor Holiday: to come back through the life cycle and building a relationship with them for a long time.

So why don't you tell us a little bit about how all the approaches this then we're getting into some of the specific tactics. But tell me a little bit about your people use these different phrases. Maybe you guys could tell me too. Do you call it retention? Do you call it lifecycle marketing? How do you define this portion of the customer journey and how do you guys organizationally. Handle trying to improve or consistently increase the value of those customers once you have them.

[00:04:07] Jennifer Peters: I think we generally refer to it as as retention because it is more than just subscription. There are other sort of tools in that toolbox. So we've got subscription, we've got our loyalty program and referrals and kind of all of those things that sort of fall into that bucket. We think of it as retention.

It is definitely a strength of ours. We are very lucky to be in the supplement space because. A huge advantage already is that people generally don't jump from brand to brand month to month on supplements. Like I think people know you need to stick with something if it works and it takes time to work and you don't wanna jump, jump around with brands all the time.

So that is definitely an advantage for us. I think everyone is kind of feeling the, the tightening of the belt when it comes to acquisition. And I'm not saying that retention is easier, but it is a little bit lower hanging fruit and it is sure less expensive. So, for us, retention is, is a huge, huge piece of our DTC business, especially when you think about like our products we're CPG brand.

You can buy our stuff anywhere, like literally anywhere. So for customers to come shop on our DTC site, these are already the most brand loyal customers that we have. Like they're dedicated to the brand, they really care about it. They feel very close to us. And so that customer group is really the most important group for us because they are the ones who know our brand the most, probably take the most products from our brand.

So we wanna be able to keep them and we wanna be able to keep them very, very happy.

[00:05:30] Taylor Holiday: Do you guys, I'm always curious about how you handle CDP when you have broad retail. Like do you guys classify customers? I know that face, you're like, this is the pain of my life

[00:05:37] Jennifer Peters: it's the hardest thing. It is.

[00:05:40] Taylor Holiday: So do you, do you characterize customers as, like, I've seen brands do it where it's like new to store, new to online.

Try like some, try and reconcile them. How do you guys handle CDP and thinking about what is a customer in your sort of lifecycle map? Like how do you handle that?

[00:05:54] Jennifer Peters: That's a great question. It's been the, it's been the challenge we've been digging in on for probably the last two years. So for us it is very hard. Probably 80% of our revenue and customers are shopping in brick and mortar stores, so knowing who those people are is really important. I mean, that's the bulk of our customer group, but the customers that we know.

Our much smaller percentage of our business. So what we have decided to do it is really, it is almost a near impossible task. What we've decided to do is to really leverage our loyalty program to try to capture that data and try to capture those customers. So in the last year, we rolled out receipt scanning for our loyalty program.

And so we have like. Kind of like your run of the mill DTC loyalty program, pretty plug and play. But we had talked with them about, about this challenge and so they did add the functionality of receipt scanning, which is very cool. So now if you shop at Walmart, you can scan your receipt and earn points.

And then the flip side of that too is that we don't, we don't wanna ch channel shift anyone. We, we want customers to shop in the channel that they like to shop in. Like we're not here to try to move people from channel to channel. We really wanna just understand. Their behavior, what they do, what they want, what they don't want, and be able to market to them only the things that they care about.

Like they don't need to know if we're having a promo on DTC, like they wanna know if there's a new product in their Walmart or their target or whatever. So we added we also added a merch store that's about to go live, and that is specifically made for these customers that are in-store shoppers to redeem points to get OLLY merch.

So we wanna bring them, we want them to feel close to us, we want them to feel close to the brand and like have a little bit of that stickiness. Without like, them feeling pressured, like, oh, they're just trying to get me to shop on the, the brand website because we're, we don't want that at all. So it was kind of one of those things that started off as like, if we could just add receipt scanning, but they're like, but what about customers?

They don't want a discount off of their DTC purchase if they're shopping in store. So, you know, we kind of, it, the project kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And there is a reason why CPG brands don't, and that have DTC are not doing this 'cause it's very hard and very expensive. But we really think it's so, so important to capture those people because.

They could be the most brand loyal people in the world and they only wanna shop in their store and they only wanna get their women's multi when they're at the grocery store or whatever it is. And we wanna make sure that they feel as valuable as our DTC customers do.

[00:08:08] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, I, it seems like an immense challenge, like, so take this to something like email and SMS. When I think about traditional email, email and SMS programs in our world for DTC sort of more exclusive brands, it's a lot about trying to think about the offer and value generation to get them to come back and shop online.

But for you all, it would seem that the messaging's much more complicated than that in that sense that not every email in SMS can exclusively be about, come by now on.com when they have a much broader option for distribution. Tell me a little bit about how you guys think about the role of email s and SMS for your brand with that kind of distribution.

[00:08:43] Jennifer Peters: Yeah, I mean that's definitely a challenge and it's, and it's a discipline. I would definitely say it's a discipline that we have to keep because it's so easy to just wanna blast your whole list every time you send something out. And the segmentation piece is so, so important to our business. We use attentive for email and SMS, so having both of those in one database is already like a huge, huge advantage.

And I think email is really like the bread and butter of retention. I mean, it's sort of the thing that everyone does. Some brands do it well, some brands kind of phone it in, but for us it's so, so important to keep those communications kind of coming, coming and going. And, you know, I know there's been so many conversations over the years, like, is email dead?

Is email, not email's definitely not dead. Email makes a lot of money, let's be honest. But I think the SMS piece of it is different. Like it's a different flavor of that same thing. It has like more urgency and feels more personal. You know, it feels like someone, someone sent you a text saying like, Hey, there's a new product that just launched in your Walmart.

You should go check it out. It feels like it's coming from a person. It's coming from a friend, especially when it's coming from us because we do try to be super delightful. We wanna be, you know, we wanna relate really well to our customers. So, I think the SMS drives a little more urgency than email.

Like email feels kind of like the newspaper, or, or maybe it's like the news and SMS is like the breaking news, you know what I mean? So like, it just draws people to move a little faster and, and it feels a little more personal.

[00:10:06] Taylor Holiday: That's great. I have two, so two follow ups. One I have to ask because I think. The question you, you have MarTech in your title and you told me that you guys use attentive for email and SMS.

So, why did you choose attentive for email? Because I'd say right now that's a, maybe I'd say a novel choice in the market relative to the existing player.

So tell me a little bit about that choice for you and why it made

[00:10:28] Jennifer Peters: Yeah, absolutely. So we have been, we've used s tenant for SMS previously and, and we're very, very happy. I mean, I think they're such a great partner. They're especially great for teams that are small and kind of scrappy, like we don't have a ton of resources, and so they're able to really kind of white glove that piece that, you know, maybe we can't do or we can't do as fast as we would like to.

In terms of like creative and just like journey building and that sort of thing. So you, you get a lot of support there. When they, when they launched email several, several years ago I think we were really excited because just honestly, the concept of having everything in one place is, is what you want.

I mean, it's, it just makes everything so much easier. It makes strategy so much easier. But we also knew, we already knew what great partners attentive would be, so I think there was a lot of trust there from us that they're gonna roll this out. Like we know it's gonna be good and we know we're gonna have support.

There are a lot of email providers out there that I think are very DIY, which is fine, which is great, especially if you have someone on your staff that's really good at using them. That's awesome. We don't, so we need more help. We need more white glove. We need, we need more support. And guidance and sometimes just more hands on keyboards.

So for us, that was made it a pretty obvious choice. And I've been doing this a long time, and it used to be moving your ESP was like the one thing you never want to do. Like 

[00:11:50] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. And don't move your inventory. Don't move your ESP.

[00:11:52] Jennifer Peters: literally the worst. Now it's moving subscriptions, that's the worst. But it used to be ESP. And so we had like sort of a novel approach to it where we moved all of our journeys first.

Like everything that was like triggered and journey focused, we moved all of those first. And kind of use those to like do all the IP warming and all of that stuff. And so then when we were ready to move over to campaigns, it was just like super easy.

[00:12:14] Taylor Holiday: That's sequential. That's

[00:12:15] Jennifer Peters: I mean, I never, never wanna move ESPs, but this one honestly was, they made it really, really, really easy.

Very low barrier.

[00:12:24] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. Well I have this like, so I've been public about this thesis I have about sort of the convergence of software and SaaS or I mean service and software into a similar business model. And so you're saying something there that I think mimics this, which is that for every brand, the reality is that no tool out of the box is gonna be.

The perfect solution for you in every edge case. And so the relational equity that you have and the attention that you can receive to solve your problems really matters. Like, and so there's something about sometimes when a business gets really big. It's really hard for you to individually matter to them, and that's just like, it's a tension that you feel all the time.

So I think service is this like, underrated component of these choices. And it sounds like maybe you guys, did they help you develop that transition strategy or like, has that experience been consistent for you, that you seem to matter a lot to them in a way that's been good for your business?

[00:13:11] Jennifer Peters: Yeah. I think one of the things we talk about all the time and, and when people ask me like, why don't, why do you use this instead of this? I mean, everybody has foundationally the same technology. I mean, I will say like Attentive has way more AI and cooler tools built into it, and that's really great. But the, the differentiator is really the people, and it's the way they make you feel in terms of importance, but also like knowing that they're an extension of your team, knowing that if something happen, if you lose your designer, like they can be like, you know, we'll do everything we can to help you.

Like that is. Is not something you just get everywhere. And the vendors that we work with, the partners we work with and we love the most, they're, they're the ones that truly care about our business as much as we do and act as though they are an extension of our team. And that's something we've always gotten from attentive.

In fact, it's even, I would almost say it's gotten even better over the years because I think that they realize that that's a huge advantage that they have is literally just their people. Like that is the best thing they bring to the table. The technology's awesome, but the people. That is a place where you can really be competitive.

[00:14:12] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, I, I, I think that's a good note for all of us in the service and software businesses that all the features are awesome, but at the end of the day, there's still a very human brand oriented perception about the experience that matters a ton. So I wanna go back to like this, this complication, 'cause I'm still, my head's spinning a little bit thinking about measurement.

So you mentioned, okay, I'm gonna send this SMS out and it's gonna be a drive to Walmart. There you have all these points of distribution that you're trying to impact with this communication. Like how do you set goals and what do you measure the retention and SMS efforts on? Like how do you think about KPI against such a broad distribution obligation?

[00:14:45] Jennifer Peters: What we've learned is that you have to bucket the, you have to bucket these because you cannot expect a conversion rate of something. Like if you're sending out, Hey, we have a new blog article on sleep and we're having a sale. Buy two, get one free. Obviously the conversions are gonna be wildly different and the expectations should be different.

So that I think is something that as we've gotten a little more content driven and more thought leadership driven, that we've had to pivot internally around, around like how we measure success. Especially now that we have this like very focused approach to people who are in store shoppers. Like we don't, we don't wanna see conversion dollars from them.

That would be bad. Like that's a bad news. So, we really had to create these buckets. Of their own kpi, like KPIs for each type of, of send or each type of content or each type of email or SMS, so that we're number one, being accurate and not, not like coming into a meeting and being like, well, we had this goal and it was very lofty, but we sent so many blog articles out this week, this year that we didn't reach that goal.

Like we didn't wanna set ourselves up for failure. And we also wanna make sure internally, 'cause you have to, you know, you have to prove success sometimes internally as well. We wanted to make sure that the expectations were really clear for every type of content, and that everybody was on board and everyone understood why and how they need to be different.

And even this year, like we just had our QBR with, with our attentive team, and that was something we talked about a lot is like what it, what should success look like for a new product launch? What should success look like for a sale? What should it look like for a, like a new blog article that's been posted or whatever it might be.

And, and looking back at all the historicals, like how do we benchmark that and how do we make sure that then we're measuring against like, the model for that and not, you know, just sort of this like one blended, it's like looking at your whole marketing program and being like, our ROAS is this, like, it should be different for different channels.

And, and this is kind of the same way. It's just like a, a segmentation within a channel.

[00:16:46] Taylor Holiday: What a, you just said what's a software QBR like, like you do full like QBR with your software team. Like

[00:16:52] Jennifer Peters: Yeah, I mean, I honestly like, it's, IW we don't do it with everyone. I would say not every partner does that. Attentive does. And it's really just like a great time to measure success, look at goals and for also like a great opportunity to share what we're doing differently this year is a business, you know what I mean?

Like, everyone right now is talking about a EO and, and LLM discoverability and how big of a priority that is and how you could just talk about it for hours and hours and hours and still get nowhere. You know, so I think it's kind of nice to be able to share what the other priorities are because sometimes there are synergies there that maybe, like, we didn't think to tell them that we're working with this group to try to do this thing with a EO, and they're like, oh my gosh.

We know that, you know, I mean, there's so many things. I, I feel like the more information they have, the better they can help us and support us. So it's a lot of that and, and it is looking at results and it is like planning future and, and measurement and that segmentation. Sometimes it's about new tools that are coming out and things that are on the roadmap, and that's great too because that's one of our favorite things to hear from our partners is that like, Hey, we're constantly pushing the envelope with technology.

Like, we're always getting better. This is how we're gonna use AI now. This is how we're gonna do this. When you don't hear that, it's a little concerning actually, when you're like, when it just feels like a black box, it's not 

[00:18:06] Taylor Holiday: they're supposed to help drive you forward to that. I feel

[00:18:08] Jennifer Peters: Yeah. And I think that's really great because then you can also kind of have that in your roadmap of like knowing like, okay, in September we're probably gonna be launching this, so we need to kind of set some resources aside for that.

It just helps us all plan better, I think, and just like feel more like a team and and be able to sort of act in a way that is great for the whole business.

[00:18:28] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. So let's talk about the AI thing a little bit. 'cause I feel like there's this end state that, that I think gets promised a lot in email asset S, which is this like one-to-one endless personalization forever for every customer, right? Like, where do you think this is going and where have you seen it show up in ways that have been effective?

Where do you feel like it's kind of over, like what's your state of AI in the email and SMS world right now, and where do you think it's headed?

[00:18:53] Jennifer Peters: it's, that was, if I knew the answer to that question, oh, that'd be the best. Atten has actually been, probably pushed more AI out to us than we were expecting, or even in some cases, like ready to use. And it solved some problems that we hadn't even fully identified yet, which is great. Like some of the segmentation stuff that we were like, I don't know.

AI is suddenly like, yes, this is a segment and here's evidence to support that. And we're like, oh, cool. Well, we don't have to do that research now. Awesome. So I think in the SMS email world, a lot of it's about timing, about like, you know, when do you send this, when is the best time to send this? But the segmentation piece I think is even more challenging for us because as we have discussed, we have many, many segments.

That all have different expectations of what they receive from us digitally. And that tool has been super helpful for us to just help us identify blind spots that we have because, you know, we think about our brand all the time, and so it's easy to get blind spots around. Like maybe, you know, millennial women are our audience.

They always have been. But there's this like 45 and up group of between 45 and 55-year-old women who spend a lot of money on supplements and, and even though that might not be our target market, there's definitely something there. And it's easy for us to pull retention levers with that group. We would've never created that on our own.

Like that's something that the AI tool was like, Hey, this is here and this is real. And look how much, look how much revenue it is. Like you need to dig in here. So I think that's really important. You know, with, with discoverability, like I think the checkout right now, like, I, I don't, I just wanna like, put that on the shelf.

Like, I don't think anybody really wants to check out in Chad, GBTI, I don't think, I don't know that it could be a good experience yet. But the discoverability stuff, it's like right now it's an arts, not a science, and everyone has different opinions about it and everyone has their own data sets. It sort of proves what they think.

I mean, for us it's about doing. First of all, doing SEO well and doing it the right way creating what we call human-centered a EO. And for us, like we're not gonna just go and just start manufacturing content for our blog with an AI tool because some software told us we should our kind of criteria is, okay, so this is a suggestion of content around this area, but like.

Do we think customers also will like that? Like do we think human people will like that? And that has to intersect for us, for us to act on it. Because otherwise, like we will literally just be pushing the print button, you know, on these, on this like garbage content. What are the AI slop like? We don't wanna be that person.

Like if it's not valuable, we real humans, then we're not gonna invest resources in it. We have limited resources for creative. So like what we do, we wanna do it well and we're gonna do it well and we're gonna invest a lot in it, but. Not just to check a box.

[00:21:33] Taylor Holiday: I've been playing trying to get the, like A-C-P-U-C-P sort of protocol thing design, and I, because, because the, the only one I've seen trigger. The actual instant checkout experience in Tache, BT is Glossier.

[00:21:46] Jennifer Peters: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:47] Taylor Holiday: and the instant checkout, but it's like, it's very clear that Tache Bt at this moment isn't prioritizing it.

It's kind of hidden as a sub 

[00:21:53] Jennifer Peters: feels like a novelty.

[00:21:55] Taylor Holiday: yeah. It doesn't 

[00:21:56] Jennifer Peters: Writing in a Waymo for the first time, you're like, well, that was fun.

[00:21:59] Taylor Holiday: yeah. So I'm not like, it'll be really interesting to sort of see where that heads. The other thing I'm curious about is, do you think that at some point you will be sending messages to agents instead of people?

[00:22:11] Jennifer Peters: I don't know. I think that's a great question. I mean, we have on our site, we have a agentic chat. It's very good. I think there has been this kind of like theory for a while that there will be a point where like. The agent will talk to that agent. And so having that already on your site, having that agent already be super, super educated about everything that's on your site and all the products is going to be an advantage.

And right now, I think, I feel like what we're doing is trying to create all the advantages we can because we don't really know how it's gonna play out in the future. So maybe, and if that's the case, then we wanna make sure that our agent is ready to go and is educated and smart and knows how to upsell. So.

[00:22:50] Taylor Holiday: It's fascinating. Like have you been following all the malt book drama, like the Agentic Social Network? Have you seen this?

So yeah, it's like, because I was messaging with Matt from Okta and just like, hey, like what do, what do you think a brand could do here? And he is like, get an agent into the.

Environment, have them interact with it and you're just like, man, I like, is it someday now we're gonna be advertising in an ecosystem of agents to try and get them to act like on behalf of the person because we don't make decisions about our sleep gummies anymore. We just receive them from our agent who does the research.

Like it's really hard, and this has been my experience with AI, is that it's such a fast moving river that I don't know where to step in. 

[00:23:28] Jennifer Peters: Yeah. 

[00:23:29] Taylor Holiday: because the second, especially for a large organization, it takes time to implement technology. And so I I, it seems like the second you step into the river and you make an investment, that thing is now useless.

You know? And so you're just like, where do I actually plant a flag? So how do you think about this? Is someone in charge of marketing technology for an org large organization? Like how do you decide when something is consequential enough to try it?

[00:23:54] Jennifer Peters: First of all, my thoughts on a, on AI in general, AI strategy in general, it shouldn't be driving your strategy. You should have a strategy. You should have OKRs, you should have KPIs that you've already established for your business that makes sense for your business. AI should be the thing that helps you get there faster, better, more efficiently.

It shouldn't be a thing that you do to do. And that is a really hard thing, I think, for all brands right now, because there's such a pressure from people's boards being like, what are we doing with ai? And you know, I, I think you can be super reactive and, and just try to scramble and do things, but it's not gonna pay off for you long term.

So for us, it's just about kind of taking the careful, thoughtful path forward, making sure everything we do is still human centered as well. You know, we have some great tools that sort of help un help us understand our visibility in certain segments. We have products that are in all different segments, so there are some segments that for us, are the most important and some that, some that are less important.

So we have to make sure that the ones that are priorities for us, that we're winning that, and if we're going to invest time and resources that we're investing them there. But I think like Amazon didn't become Amazon overnight, like none of these things happened that fast. So. I do feel like there is this sort of like false sense of urgency around you should do all these things and you should have 'em, you, you're behind.

Everyone's behind. I don't know that. I think that's true. I think we're trying to be very pragmatic and very focused on, but is this the best thing for our whole business? Not just is this the best thing for a bot? I mean, it, it's not different than like the old ad words day where you're like, are we doing this for Google?

Are we doing this for customers? I mean. It's just a way of thinking that just makes you be more thoughtful around, you know? But, you know, there are definitely brands out there just like firing off chat, GPT blog articles nonstop to try to get, you know, to try to get more visibility. But we're not gonna do that.

[00:25:43] Taylor Holiday: I think you're right that like you have to ultimately understand too that the organ, the platforms has an. Desire to be aligned to the user's interest too. And so, like even though like anytime you get into sort of hacking or short-term arbing, the algorithm type behavior, you are just building sort of these short-term value capture things, their exploitation of gaps in the system versus like, no, I'm gonna have a perpetual strategy of providing value to the end user that I trust. The organiza, the platform itself is gonna try to align towards eventually.

Like they have to bring value eventually. And so I

[00:26:12] Jennifer Peters: I mean, remember the days that we put white print on websites so that Google would read it, like, that's terrible. That's shameful.

[00:26:19] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, that doesn't benefit. Like the, the, the thing that the Google's trying to do in that case is to surface a website that's valuable to the user and that hidden text isn't actually, so even if you happen to game it at some point, eventually they're gonna realize it through, whether it's the bounce rate or the

[00:26:33] Jennifer Peters: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:34] Taylor Holiday: or whatever it might be, that there's something here that isn't truly actually delivering on the promise.

Like, and so I think that that obligation is, is important one. Okay. So I'm gonna give you a, a challenge. This is last here thing here. Before I let you go, I uproot you. You are no longer at OLLY, and I have. Dropped you into let's say an emerging consumer e-comm business that's selling the next great gummy, whatever, and you're now in charge of lifecycle retention email, SMS.

What is like your process look like? So your first 30 days you're coming in and what are you trying to understand? If it's occurring, what do you wanna see happening? And what would you see as the area of greatest opportunity that you would begin with, have planted into that position?

[00:27:13] Jennifer Peters: Ooh, that's fun. First of all, I believe everybody who goes into a new role should really take some time to understand kind of the, the status quo and, and what's been, what is happening right now. So understanding what all of journeys look like, understanding what your segmentation looks like, and just really kind of asking questions and learning and getting to a place where you understand.

One of the things we're doing right now, and this is like a little bit of a. Offshoot of this conversation. It's like we've integrated direct mail into our journeys, and so like that is, talk about low hanging fruit, man. People love direct mail. So I, I think it's more about just like evaluating like what is.

And then understanding, I'm a person that always wants to execute the basics. Like I feel like the basics are the most important thing. You should be executing them consistently and well. And that is where I would start, is looking at like, what does your abandoned cart journey look like? What does your discount look like?

What are we, you know, how are, what does the frequency that we're offering customers, what does abandoned cart look like? And, and kind of like, what's your welcome series look like? Like the really basic stuff. I always would wanna start there. Make sure that the creative is up to date, because a lot of times people build journeys and then they never look at the creative again.

And then you get one in your email box like two years later and you're like, we don't sell that product anymore. Why is it on here? So I think being really familiar and keeping the creative up to date is really important. But I, but to me it is really about executing the basics. Like campaigns are fun, everybody likes doing campaign emails, but the journeys are your bread and butter.

They're the things that make money so that you can afford to camp, send campaign emails. So really the journeys, I think, to me, are the critical piece. And looking at like, where, where's the drop off in this journey? Do we have enough emails in this journey? Do we have too many, you know, what is, where's the sweet spot for each one?

I think that's where I would pretty much always start. Is there.

[00:28:57] Taylor Holiday: I think it, I am constantly blown away at how neglected. Basic flows are inside of organizations. There's just so much organizational energy that goes towards advertising and so little that goes towards this, but yet it is constantly a reality that improvements to your welcome flow, post-purchase flow are actually the delta in the efficiency in the media account that may actually help push it over the edge, right?

These things are so much more interwoven than I think sometimes. We lead to believe. So you heard it from Jennifer Go audit all of your flows. Like you mentioned something like do you have some general heuristics around revenue from flows versus campaigns that you see as like a signal that right away if someone was listening and they were like, I don't know, are my flows good?

Like, how, how would they know? Like what, what should they think about in terms of how much impact? And

[00:29:47] Jennifer Peters: I mean, I think you have to understand your benchmark, first of all, as your brand. Because not every brand, like we are a pretty low a OV brand. There are other brands that have, you know, a $300 a OV, like understanding the sales cycle of when customers decide they're going to make a purchase, I think is, can be wildly different.

Like. Most of our products are 1399. Like they're not gonna sit in like hem and haw over that for like three months. But if somebody's buying something that is higher priced or luxury, you know, they're really, they really are gonna think this sales cycle's probably longer. If it's something complicated, it probably requires more education for customers to understand what it does and all the value.

So they think understanding your own brands benchmarks, and if you don't have them, set them somewhere. Just like start. Like, pull all your abandoned cart, pull all your welcomes, and then establish some data that is based on your historical data, because you can just improve on that. Like it doesn't 

[00:30:35] Taylor Holiday: Progressive self-improvement.

[00:30:37] Jennifer Peters: Yeah, you don't have to do all this research to understand how your peers are doing and what their conversion rates are like. You can do that for yourself, and as long as you're improving, then you are making an impact on those flows. I mean, and then you're gonna see too, if something drops below that benchmark that you set that benchmark so you know something's going on.

It's not just like coincidental. So I, yeah, I would do that. I mean, I think that every brand is different and everyone needs to kind of set their own levels of measurement of what success looks like, and it starts with your historicals.

[00:31:06] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, I agree. Data in context of expectation is powerful. And so I think the key is look at that historical performance, set some expectation for improvement into the future, monitor it

[00:31:15] Jennifer Peters: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:15] Taylor Holiday: get better. Love it. Jennifer, thanks for coming in and hanging with us.

I appreciate you stopping by and dropping some wisdom

[00:31:22] Jennifer Peters: Yeah. Thanks for having me. It's so fun.