First things first,I have a request for all of you! If you have a moment, please subscribe to my YouTube channel here!
The TL;DR:
- Let’s Chat D2C: The Power of Personalization
- What I’m Thinking about this Week:ChatGPT and its applications for business and ecommerce.
- The D2Z Podcast: Humanizing Brands with Purpose and Real vs. Ideal Customer
- App Highlight - Gatsby.ai: Capture IG and TikTok handle to unlock special flows in Klaviyo to automate influencer outreach, UGC, and rewards.
- Book of the Week - How to Talk to Anyone: 92 tips and tricks - some useful, some ridiculous, but an enjoyable read nonetheless.
- Upcoming Events: NONE! Enjoy the Holidays! If you missed my masterclass with Fairing last week, you can watch it here.
Random tip: Write down all the tasks you do in a given week and see which can be delegated and done more effectively by someone else on your team.
Let's Chat D2C: The Power of Personalization
Does Personalization Work?
Yes.
Are you Sure?
Yes. Time and time again, no matter how many A/B or multivariate tests we run, personalized emails and texts outperform generic ones (okay, maybe 95%+ of the time).
A Case Study in Personalization
One of the most recent proof points for personalization is our case study with Windsor and immi. Windsor allows you to create personalized AI videos and include them in your Klaviyo emails and texts.
Kevin, the immi Founder, recorded a script to train Windsor’s AI, and now we’re able to create personalized videos almost instantly and embed them into our campaigns and flows. Our first A/B test was in the abandoned cart, where 50% of people were sent a personalized video from Kevin explaining the background of immi and why he is so excited for them to try it. It produced some significant results:
- 176% lift in revenue in split testing
- 42% increase in net profits per email delivery
- 300% increase in recovery rate
- $8 increase in AOV
We’ve even had users replying to some of the emails, showcasing how this level of personalization drives positive responses and engagement from our subscribers!
How to Incorporate Personalization into Your Retention Strategy
Start small and go from there. Ask yourself, what sort of personalization would make the experience for a first-time customer we’re trying to get back to place order #2 more relevant? For example, a skincare brand. Knowing what skin type they have (i.e., dry skin) would inform all your emails, texts, and messaging to get the customer back to place order #2. Now that you’ve aligned on knowing skin type as a crucial component to rolling out a personalization strategy, how do you get the data? Maybe a quiz, post-purchase survey, product review process, etc.
Once you know how you want to personalize the customer experience, you can figure out whether you can achieve it with first-party data or if you will need to collect some form of zero-party data.
What I’m Thinking About This Week: ChatGPT
“Write me a 10-page essay on the political system of Brazil.” ChatGPT has taken the internet by storm, taking roughly five days to surpass 1 million users (Instagram took 75 days for context), and I reallllyyyy wish I had this software available to me in high school and college 🥲
So, where will this type of software have the most significant impact?
Accounting
ChatGPT could generate reports or summaries of financial data, such as income statements or balance sheets. It could also be used to generate responses to frequently asked questions about accounting topics or provide information about specific financial transactions or accounts.
Development Work
“This code to add a product to the cart is not working. Can you troubleshoot?”
Not only can it help troubleshoot code, but Jason DeBolt, an Amazon Employee, tweeted how ChatGPT was able to generate hundreds of lines of Python code to do multipart uploads of 100GB files to an AWS S3 bucket from the phase “Write Python code to upload a file to an AWS SW bucket.”
Product Recommendations
ChatGPT could also generate personalized product recommendations for customers based on their past purchase history and preferences.
Copywriting and Content Creation
“Write a Black Friday promotional email for 30% off our entire supplements website.”
ChatGPT could generate unique, high-quality content for websites, blogs, and other digital platforms.
Marketing Automation
ChatGPT could be used to generate personalized marketing emails or social media posts that are tailored to individual customers. For example, it could be used to create dynamic email subject lines or social media headlines that are more likely to catch the attention of specific customers.
Customer Service & Support
ChatGPT could be used to generate automated responses to frequently asked questions, freeing up customer services resources to focus on more complex inquiries.
Business Insights, Budgeting & Forecasting
One potential use for GPT-3 in budgeting and forecasting is to generate financial reports and projections based on data inputs. For example, you could use GPT-3 to create a budget forecast for the next quarter based on your company's historical financial data, current market conditions, and any known future events that may impact your business.
Another potential use for GPT-3 in budgeting and forecasting is to assist with data analysis and modeling. For example, you could use GPT-3 to analyze large amounts of data and identify trends or patterns that might be useful in making financial projections. You could also use GPT-3 to build and test financial models, such as scenario analysis or Monte Carlo simulations.
Overall Ecommerce Marketing Impact
Overall, chatGPT has the potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of ecommerce marketing by automating tasks and providing personalized content to customers.
Potential Issues
This isn’t the first time businesses have experimented with chatbots. In 2016, Tay was a bot launched by Microsoft that Twitter users taught misogynistic and racist language in less than 24 hours.
ChatGPT has implemented Moderation API, an AI-based moderation system, but it openly admits its limitations.
This Week's The D2Z Podcast
#39 - Humanizing Brands with Purpose, Real vs. Ideal Customers, and Niching Down
🎧 Listen Now 🎧
In this week’s episode, I sat down with Monica Sharma-Patnekar, Founder of Business with Monica, a brand and growth strategy consultancy that helps social or environmentally-conscious D2C brands communicate and connect with their audience. Specifically, we explored the following:
💰 The power of purpose-driven brand strategies to establish loyalty, build trust, and foster longevity.
📲 The value of understanding your real customer through empathy and conversation-led market research.
😎 The 5 P’s of business principles and niching down.
🚀 Use clear and defined brand purpose as a tool to attract and align people around meaning.
App Highlight - Gatsby
❓What is It: A fully connected influencer CRM that starts simply by adding a field for Instagram or TikTok handle to any existing form on your website.
🏅Differentiator: Integrated with our preferred Shopify tech stack, allows you to track tags in Instagram stories, read and reply to creator DMs, and automate Email & SMS flows by syncing Gatsby insights with Klaviyo and automate offers/rewards using flow logic.
💰Starting Price: $300/mo
🚀How we use it: To segment our customers by their level of influence, auto-track when our customers mention us in an Instagram story, post, or TikTok video. Gatsby syncs all of its insights with Klaviyo, Gorgias, and more so we can implement automated outreach, thank you’s, and rewards and build custom flow logic.
For example, with Gatsby, the following Klaviyo flows and customer journeys would be possible:Flow 1 - Entered TikTok Handle into Form
As soon as the customer enters their TikTok handle into a form (either in lead capture, during the checkout process, or post-purchase), they are entered into a “New Influencer Flow” that conditionally splits into four different cohorts:
- Brand advocate: <1000 followers
- Micro-influencer: 1K-10K followers
- Influencer: 10-25K followers
- Strategic Partnership: 25K+ followers
Flow 2 - Mentioned Brand on Social
One of the coolest things about Gatsby is that it tracks when customers mention your brand in an Instagram story, post, or TikTok video and sends this data to Klaviyo so you can trigger emails, texts, and rewards based on mentions. For example, you could have a flow that conditionally splits into three different cohorts:
- 1st mention: “Thanks so much! Here’s a $5 store credit as a thank you. Once you mention us five times on social, we’ll send you a gift.”
- 5th mention: “Free gift. Once you get to 10 mentions, we have a special surprise.”
- 10th mention: “You’re a VIP! Insert special surprise here.”
Overall, Gatsby is a powerful tool to uncover and unlock relationships with your most impactful customers and is a unique way to build out a loyalty and rewards program based on social activity and mentions.
Book of the Week - How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships
In the day and age of email, text, and social media, verbal communication is a lost art. 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships attempts to help people improve their real-life, interpersonal communications.
While I found some examples to be exaggerated and cheesy, comparing how I currently conduct myself in relationships with each of the suggested 92 tricks was interesting. There are some things I’m already doing that I just wasn’t aware of, things I’m not doing that I’m going to start incorporating, and also some things that I’m not doing that I’m NOT going to start doing… but that’s the great thing about advice, it doesn’t mean you need to follow it!
Key Takeaways:
- I knew first impressions are essential, but I didn’t realize just HOW impactful they are. Research shows that the first 3 seconds are critical in how new people perceive you.
- Small talk is essential. When someone asks you where you went to college, don’t give one-word answers (unless you want that conversation to come to a swift conclusion).
- Forming relationships with people doesn’t have to be complicated or scary.
I found “Greet an Old Friend” to be the most exciting trick in the whole book. Anytime you meet someone new, mentally think that you are seeing someone you really like for the first time in 5+ years.
Upcoming Events
No events for the rest of the year! But, if you missed my masterclass with Fairing last week, you can watch it here.
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