The TL;DR:
- Let’s Chat D2C: The Importance of Testing into Segments.
- What I’m Thinking about this Week: Onboarding New Team Members and Setting them up for Success.
- The D2Z Podcast: In this week’s episode, I sat down with Dan Deren, Senior Partnership Manager at Klaviyo, an ecommerce marketing automation platform.
- App Highlight - Rebuy & Klaviyo: Our go-to tech stack implementation with EVERY Electriq client and how they work together.
- Upcoming Events: I’ll be in Boston from 3/13-3/19 to hang out with Klaviyo. Let me know if you’re around and want to connect! I’m also speaking at ChargeX in D.C. from 4/26-4/28 and have discounted brand tickets if anyone wants them. More details to come around the keynote, some of the events, etc., so stay tuned!
Random tip: Most recurring meetings can be reduced to bi-weekly, monthly, or just outright canceled.
Let's Chat D2C: The Importance of Testing into Segments
Testing into Segments
It’s one thing to A/B or multivariate test. It’s another to run these tests into specific segments.
I’ll use a recent client example.
Instead of sending the A/B test to the entire engaged list, we broke it out into:
- Engaged past purchasers
- Engaged never purchased
The A/B test was relatively simple. Send a promotional text with a selfie of the founder versus one without to see which increased CTR.
For the past purchaser's group, the text without an image outperformed the text with a picture, but for the never purchased group, the text with a picture had a higher CTR. Both results were statistically significant.
If we didn’t test into these different segments and instead sent it to the entire list, we would’ve ended up with the result that gave us a false assumption – that our list either did or did not respond better to a selfie.
Documenting your Testing Results
It’s one thing to A/B or multivariate test. It’s another to log these tests to reference them and inform your subsequent testing initiatives. I can’t tell you how many brands I’ve spoken to that “A/B Test,” but when asked what types of segments respond better to what types of messaging, there is no information to be found.
Testing for the sake of testing without documenting it is just a waste of time. Make sure you’re logging your A/B tests!
What I’m Thinking About This Week: Onboarding New Team Members
How to Not Do It
First, let me paint a picture. I was just about to graduate from USC, and I was primarily freelancing for Shopify businesses helping them with SEO & Content Marketing. So, my first hire ever was tasked with just immediate client work because of how much demand we had coming into the door for our SEO and content services. This was back in May of 2019.
Our onboarding process was utterly nonexistent.
I met the said team member at the office, walked her through what I was trying to accomplish and what we were working on, and then it was off to the races.
We didn't even have 90% of our processes defined at that point either, so there wasn't a whole lot to onboard through because a lot of what we were doing was being created and defined on the fly.
This is NOT scalable.
How you Should Do It
As we scaled, we were forced to develop a more formal onboarding process to set team members up for success.
Looking back at it now, it feels like the journey went extremely quickly, but in reality, it is the culmination of almost four years of nonstop day-in and day-out effort to get to where we are today. In fact, we are still updating our onboarding processes continually.
I meet with each new Electriq team member for at least 15 minutes, and one of the main questions I ask them is how their onboarding process could be improved. We’re very quick to implement their feedback to enhance the experience for new team members continually.
What Our Process Looks Like
We have two onboarding processes for each new team member. One that is company-wide (i.e., “Internal Ops,” “Account Access,” and “EIQ Processes”) and one that is specific to their department (i.e., “Email/SMS Training”).
We didn’t want to overcomplicate things, so we simply built Monday.com templates that we can duplicate for each new team member that comes on board and allows them to go through a checklist of items.
Document, Document, Document
We give each team member a Loom account, and it’s stressed that ANYTHING they do that could be helpful for another team member to see is recorded. That way, we can continue building our library of resources and onboarding materials.
How we Surived Our Hyper-Growth
Starting in 2021, we had eleven team members in January, ending the year with around 40.
The #1 thing we did to survive this growth was institutionalizing processes and onboarding.
Each team member has at LEAST two weeks before they even touch client work, going through an onboarding process where we have documents, training procedures, resource guides, and the whole gamut required to immerse people into the Electriq process and the Electriq system.
If you just throw your new team members into the fire, a few will thrive, but most will not be set up for success. They won't have a positive experience with the organization, and clients won’t be happy either.
Hiring For a Future Need, not Yesterday’s Need
We didn’t have this luxury to start as a completely bootstrapped company, but for the last year and a half, we’ve been able to start hiring for the future as opposed to the early days where I would sort of sell the service and then go find out how we could deliver upon it.
Now we are in a position where we can hire five additional team members who weren't adding any revenue whatsoever for the first couple of weeks, get them up to speed, train them effectively, and ensure they are set up for success.
This Week’s The D2Z Podcast
#51 – Making the Most of Klaviyo, Post-Purchase Journeys, and the Importance of Partnerships with Dan Deren, Senior Partnership Manager at Klaviyo
🎧 Listen Now 🎧
In this week’s episode, I sat down with Dan Deren, Senior Partnership Manager at Klaviyo, an ecommerce marketing automation platform. Specifically, we explored the following:
💰 How ecommerce brands can get the true value of Klaviyo as a CDP through integrations
📲 The post-purchase journey and the significance of personalization strategies
😎 What a typical day looks like for a partnership manager and how he keeps up with rapidly changing features and new opportunities in the industry
🚀 How strategic partnerships can help businesses achieve their goals
App Highlight - Rebuy & Klaviyo: Our go-to tech stack implementation with EVERY Electriq client
We leverage very few apps for every single client we work with, but Rebuy and Klaviyo are two of them. The best part? They work better together. I’ won’t cover the specifics of each platform in this newsletter (you can watch my video on Rebuy here and my video on Klaviyo here); instead, I’ll focus on how the two work together.
SMS Opt-In
Capture phone numbers compliantly in the Rebuy Smart Cart to effortlessly grow your SMS subscriber list.
Reorder Landing Pages
We leverage reorder landing pages for one-shot customers to make it a frictionless process for them to reorder their previous order, while incentivizing trying other products to increase AOV.
The reorder landing page includes a pre-built cart with the customer’s previous order and relevant cross-sells. You can also have a free shipping or gift-with-purchase threshold (or both) to incentivize increasing order value further.
And we can make it seamless for these customers to convert into subscribers by including a one-click Switch-to-Subscription functionality.
Reactive Landing Pages
For brands using Recharge, you can send your churned customers an email and SMS to a reactivate landing page that allows customers to reactivate their subscriptions with a single click while offering them incentives like an automatic discount or a gift.
Data-Driven Product Offers
Instead of sending customers product recommendations and cross-sells that you think will convert well, leverage Rebuy’s AI to embed personalized product recommendations in Klaviyo emails to increase conversion rate and LTV.
Upcoming Events
I’ll be in Boston from 3/13-3/19 to hang out with Klaviyo. Let me know if you’re around and want to connect!
I’m also speaking at ChargeX in D.C. from 4/26-4/28 and have discounted brand tickets if anyone wants them. More details to come around the keynote, some of the events, etc., so stay tuned!
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