#121. Holiday Influencer Marketing – Best Practices from Gatsby | Podcast

Vira: 0:40

Hi everyone and welcome to Flowium podcast. I’m your host, Vira Sadlak. I’m a marketeer at an agency called flowium. Here at Flowium, we are very passionate about what we do about email marketing. And because we love what we do, we want to share our insights with you. Delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment. That’s what we are here about. And today’s guest definitely knows a thing or two about delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment. So today I’m joined by Brett Bernstein from Gatsby. Say hi, Brett.

Brett: 1:13

Hi, everybody. Hi, Vira. Thanks for having me on today.

Vira: 1:15

Yeah, excited to have you. So you guys, Brett is the founder and CEO of Gatsby AI. This is the platform, a very highly efficient community management tool or platform that adds Instagram and TikTok insights to tools like Klaviyo stamped so you can get more done with the information that you have on the platform. We’re really excited to have you, Brett.

Brett: 1:41

Yeah, likewise. I met your CEO Andriy over the years and really impressed with Flowium and everything you guys are doing for clients.

Vira: 1:50

Awesome. Thank you. Well, before we go to all of the juicy questions, let’s play a little this or that kind of game. Just like to get to know you better. Okay, sure. Cool. Okay. Pineapple pizza or candy corn?

Brett: 2:03

Oh my God, neither.

Vira: 2:05

It’s a hardcore question.

Brett: 2:07

I guess if I had to pick, I would eat pineapple pizza.

Vira: 2:10

Yes, yes. I’m a pineapple pizza girl myself. But not a candy corn. Definitely. Okay. Shopping online or shopping offline in store?

Brett: 2:19

Depends what I’m shopping for. But you know, a few years ago I would have said shopping in store, but more recently, actually I’ve really gotten pretty used to shopping online. I’m getting married in a few weeks. We have to do a lot of shopping for different things.

Vira: 2:33

Oh yeah.

Brett: 2:34

And a lot of the returns are so easy now. So it’s on the shopping online. It’s pretty, pretty simple.

Vira: 2:39

Oh yeah, returns are amazing. Like today or like a few days ago, I actually realized that to return stuff to Amazon, you don’t even need to bring them to the post service. Places anymore. You can just like leave it on the porch and they will pick it up for you. Do you guys have it in the States as well?

Brett: 2:55

I mean it’s.

Vira: 2:56

Oh yeah, that’s amazing.

Brett: 2:58

Or box for you. Just walk in with it. And that was really the hard part of shopping online. I think now the returns got figured out. Amazon’s one option. Also all the Shopify plugins that help too.

Vira: 3:09

It’s really easy.

Brett: 3:10

So.

Vira: 3:10

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay. I’m curious about the next one. Instagram or TikTok?

Brett: 3:15

Well, I personally use Instagram. I have a TikTok for all of our Gatsby related things. TikTok, like it’s fun. When I go on there. I get sucked into some of the videos.

Vira: 3:24

Oh yeah.

Brett: 3:25

So personally Instagram, but professionally I’m pretty excited about TikTok. What we’re doing on that front too.

Vira: 3:31

Okay, cool. Sort by price or sort by rating?

Brett: 3:37

Ratings.

Vira: 3:37

I sort by price always just like I see what it’s there for like different categories and stuff. Email or sms?

Brett: 3:45

Well, and both are super valuable as a business. As a consumer, I actually have started to opt in SMS for the brands that I’m most excited about. So I’m actually wearing right now a melon hat. I just bought new sunglasses. I’m on those SMS journeys and I do them though like not forever. So I do them when I’m most actively buying. So I think sms. I’m really excited to get the right message at the right time for a promotion. But email is good because it hits me just over time if that makes sense.

Vira: 4:18

Yeah, yeah. I mean I do believe in like marrying the two. You know when you like combine SMS and email, that’s what we’re doing for our clients. It’s powerful, honestly. Yeah. Okay, cool. The last one, if you had a theme song playing every time you entered the room, what would it be?

Brett: 4:38

Wow, let me think really quick. First thing that came to mind. I guess I gotta go with it, right? I don’t even know the rationale here, but Mr. Brightside from the Killers just came to mind.

Vira: 4:49

That’s a good one. That’s a good one. That’s a good start. Okay, cool, awesome. So let’s go to all of the juicy stuff, all of the serious questions. So before we start talking about all of the exciting strategies that you can implement for your influence marketing and ambassador programs, first things first, what is Gatsby and how does it work?

Brett: 5:17

So as you mentioned, I’m the founder and CEO of Gatsby. I started the company back in 2016. And really though, we took off during the pandemic when Klaviyo announced our new integration with them in 2020. And that really put us on the map because it opened up for me like just a tremendous amount of value that I was sort of inching towards. For the first three or four years of this business. I was trying to figure out how to make influencer marketing more scalable. I always said I wanted to make it as efficient as advertising spend, right? So you go onto a Google Ads or a Facebook ads and you just toggle on and off your spend. A lot of marketers know this now because a lot of them are toggling it down right now as the changes on paid ads. But it was always a really cumbersome and manual process to run influencer marketing historically. So I approached that problem with how could I scale it? I was recreating the wheel left and right. I had a pop up builder, I had an email system embedded in our tool. It was really hard to do well back in 2018, 2019, somewhere in that time period, we had an inbound request from a super impressive brand and they bought Gatsby and Klaviyo at the same time. And they said, hey you two, we want to get these Gatsby insights, these Instagram and TikTok. Well at the time, Instagram insights from Gatsby into Klaviyo so we can trigger Klaviyo flows based upon follower counts, engagement mentions. And that was like a light bulb moment. And I think to be really transparent, I think I didn’t think I’d have a chance to get into Klaviyo. I thought, you know, we’re a small upstart app. I didn’t even approach Klaviyo cause I was, it was like, why waste my time? But when this really big enterprise put us in touch, we sort of escalated the integration with them. And that was just life changing for us and the business and myself personally. And as you saw in the demo video that you watched before our call and we talked about before with your team, like there’s a lot, a lot you can do now with Gatsby and Klaviyo and it’s branched out Attentive. We have similar feature parity there with Attentive so you can send SMS when a customer tags you in content on Instagram or TikTok loyalty lion and stamped and Yotpo loyalty so you can give loyalty points for an Instagram DM coming into your, into your chat or an Instagram mention or Vice versa. So just long story short, we make influencer marketing and ambassador programs scalable, automated, super easy to run and we are really close partners with the ecosystem in Shopify in particular.

Vira: 7:50

That’s super cool. So guys, by the way, all of the links and resources that we will mention in this episode, they will be linked in the description box. So just like scroll to the description box and you can check out that video that Brett just mentioned. So basically what you’re saying that once you’ve integrated Gatsby with like Klaviyo or other platform, you’ll be able to pass that like customer’s data or like insights from Gatsby directly where to customers profile or like where is that like information stored?

Brett: 8:21

Yes, let me kind of walk through, let me kind of walk through from start to finish. Sort of the experience a merchant has when they use Gats.

Vira: 8:27

Yeah, that’d be great.

Brett: 8:28

Klaviyo. So the first thing is a consumer on your website. Let’s say you’re a brand. A consumer on your website is typically seeing a form or a pop up some point to give their email address or their phone number. Right. For email or SMS marketing. Well if the, if you the merchant choose to embed Gatsby or install Gatsby you can now ask for social handle. So we, we provide insights on social profiles. So instead of only asking for email or phone number, you can now ask for social handle. It could be in any form, location, anything you want. So some merchants do it in the pop up window itself. Most merchants though do it post purchase. So right after you check out on the Shopify store, you see that order confirmation page there. Well you can now easily embed a Klaviyo form, an attentive form, a type form, just you know, form a privy form, whatever you want, you can embed it right there and you can ask them, hey, thanks for your recent purchase. Do you want to join our ambassador program? And instead of having a really cumbersome like connect your PayPal and do all this affiliate stuff, it’s just do you want to join our ambassador program? And it’s a simple Klaviyo form. All it needs is email address and social handle. That’s it. Once that consumer ops in and provides you that that handle which we’re seeing across the board, between 4 to 7% opt in rates post purchase. That information that handle syncs to Gatsby, Gatsby tells you how influential they are. It tracks every time they mention you in content. So Instagram story post, real TikTok video DMS, you can do DMing now from Gatsby as well. And then what you were kind of alluding to is those insights don’t stay in a silo in Gatsby. We are a very much an open platform. So the amount of followers that customer has that syncs to their Klaviyo profile, a referral coupon code, or any coupon codes you want to give them for any campaigns or purposes, create them in Gatsby. You can use their Instagram handle as their code that syncs to Klaviyo any segments they’re in. So you want to find all your customers who have mentioned you more than five times in the past 30 days and have over a thousand followers. Boom. That thanks to Klaviyo. So you can create really smart segments like customers who have purchased any of these collections or SKUs in the past 90 days, has a thousand followers and mentioned us before. Let’s reach out to them so they can get early access to the next related product and give them the ability to promote it ahead of time. And then lastly, before I end this long monologue is whenever they do mention you in content, we pass that event to Klaviyo or Attentive, et cetera. So you can trigger an email or an SMS saying, hey, thanks so much for your Instagram mention. Here’s your reward we promised you. Here’s that code for 20 bucks off your next order. One more thing I’ll mention actually is we now also pass revenue tracking metrics. So we’re just talking about roi. I’m sure on this call it always comes up. We can track every order and every dollar that your ambassador is either spending to increase their LTV with your brand or referring to your business from their Instagram posts. And we can pass that to Klaviyo. So we pass an event called Order Tracked Gatsby, which means, hey, they refer to client, they refer to a new customer, trigger a Klaviyo flow. If they refer five orders or$100, trigger a Klaviyo flow that says, thanks for your referrals. Here’s 25 bucks off or whatever you want to do. So that’s a lot of information. Hopefully that wasn’t too much at one time.

Vira: 11:56

No, that’s amazing. I didn’t realize that you can even basically group your customers based on following they have, which is like super cool because you can create different campaigns for like micro influencers versus like big influencers. Or you can sort of like send different offers to people based on their lifetime value or Based on like how many, how much money they brought to your brand. That’s, that’s insane. And you can also like customize the flows, right? Every time customer like tags your brand in their Instagram story or something, you can basically like customize the flow. Wow, that’s powerful.

Brett: 12:32

Everything and the. So not only is the entire influencer marketing process from sourcing to tracking to rewards, all automated through the Gatsby strategy, but in addition you have this data inside of Klaviyo, right? Where you have everything else you know about that customer. So you know their order history, their, their newsletter open rate history. And you can layer this on top of that to make it really, really smart. You know, segmentation and logic.

Vira: 13:02

Right. And I kind of also like that you mentioned that most of the brands are collecting that information in the post purchase step versus the pop up, like a welcome pop up. Although I’m sure some of them are collecting the welcome as well. But in the post purchase it just like makes more sense because they kind of, they kind of trust your brand more. They kind of have some sort of like relationship with you already. That’s like make total sense. What are the email and SMS strategies that you can sort of like build with your platform to amplify the success of your influence marketing and ambassador programs, especially around the holidays. Because this time of the year is like the time of the year, right? To use everything you have to make the most revenue. So what are your recommendations for the strategies?

Brett: 13:52

So I’m not sure how quickly this will be published if it is, you know, still in November, a couple of weeks before Black Friday. We had a customer sign up yesterday and go live on their own within 30 minutes. Like there’s a lot of really easy ways to launch with like the baseline value prop. So what we typically recommend. There’s a few case studies right now that just came out that show sort of the same strategy. And 17x ROI and 16x ROI were both of those two case studies that just came out. In fact, Klaviyo themselves published one of those case studies. So we got the Klaviyo stamp of approval on it. They went through the, the, the process internally to talk to the client, get all the data. So really powerful and really meaningful for us to see that, that third party case study from Klaviyo. But here’s what we recommend and I’ll give you the very high level version. When you install Gatsby, we recommend creating three coupon codes through our system. The first coupon code you give to the customer of Yours say, hey, thanks for signing up for our ambassador program or applying to our program. Here’s five or ten bucks off your next purchase. Go buy something else to talk about online. Make sure you have enough product at home, whether it be protein powder or hats or socks, whatever it is you’re selling, make sure they have more product in at their home to talk about. It also makes them feel special. That alone, by targeting this really loyal customer base who already gave you their handle with another promotion right away we’re seeing like a 6-7x ROI, you know, increase in LTV from pretty much like nothing you have to do. It’s fully automated. The second coupon code is like say, hey, here’s a code you can, you can have, it’s your Instagram handle and you can share with your followers and they can come buy products on our site for 20% off. And it makes them feel special. Their handle being the code is huge. Like they just, they feel this relationship with the brand, it feels very personalized and they make those automatically at scale for you in Gatsby. And then the third code, you don’t give them right away, you hold it back. But this is a code that they’ll get once they do a post about your brand. So like hey now, also once you post an Instagram story or a video or a reel or a TikTok video showing your new hat or your new, you know, protein powder, you know, drink. Once you do that, we will give you this$25 off your next order. And that whole process of rewarding them for that content, you don’t have to give them cash for it. These are mostly customers, micro influencers. They’re perfectly happy and quite thrilled to be getting such a high discount off in exchange for that content. So they feel special. You don’t break the bank, you get great UGC at scale. We have a lot of customers that are doing a lot of volume. So we look into the data at aggregate and we’re seeing about 12% of customers who are given an option like say 20 bucks off to post content. Go on and do that all through automation. So 12% of customers converting into influencers and it doesn’t take any manual work on the brand’s part.

Vira: 16:57

That’s so cool. And I really like that part where you said that you can basically acknowledge when they publish the user generated content and give them additional discount. I think it’s super, super cool. And can you like remind them to publish the user generated content as well? Is there a way to see whether or not they have posted or not posted about you.

Brett: 17:18

Exactly. So when, when we. The reason why this brand yesterday was able to go live so quickly or any client really goes live pretty fast unless they do a lot of customization with us is we have Klaviyo Flow templates. So once you install a Gatsby app, either on Shopify or outside of Shopify, you’ll receive an email from us with like the three or four steps to go live. And one of them is, hey, invite us to your Klaviyo this email address. We’ll clone the flows over for you. So that flow template includes a reminder in it. So it’s like, hey, it’s been seven days. They haven’t mentioned you yet. Remind them to do so.

Vira: 18:19

Right. Oh, wow. That’s pretty cool. That’s pretty cool. What about the campaigns? Well, you already mentioned all of the segmentation that you can do for the campaigns. Like, what’s your strategy for the holidays?

Brett: 18:33

Yeah, yeah. So also in that Kulani Kinis case study that Klaviyo published, and we did an extended version on our website, Gatsby AI case studies, you actually can see one off campaigns. So there’s a really good example of this in there where Kulani Kinis in particular launched this program where they said we’re going to run a for them. It’s called Sun Chasers, but basically they’re ambassadors, an Ambassador of the Month program. So by publishing content about us, not only do you get acknowledged and perhaps a coupon code right away, you also get entered into this pool of people who could potentially become an Ambassador of the Month. And that gives them additional reason to post and you highlight them and you get this pack of like goodies if you win. So anyways, they do these campaigns all the time. They’re like, hey, here’s a link to our new lookbook. We’re launching a new set of products for the, let’s say the fall or the spring line. Take your favorite page from this lookbook and post it on your Instagram story. And we’re gonna pick somebody to win the Ambassador of the Month this month. Now, this was so successful for them, they changed it from per month to per week and they’re picking people much more often because it was such a win. Some brands don’t have the bandwidth to do that, obviously. But basically the great example I want to, I want to leave listeners with is when you’re releasing new content or new, a new product line, give that heads up to your ambassadors ahead of time and give them some content to post about and then give them an incentive to do it, whether it be a coupon code or a chance to win. And you’ll start to build up that awareness ahead of time. It doesn’t cost you much money and it’s super authentic. You get all that ugc, right?

Vira: 20:10

How do you grow like an affiliate ambassador and all of those programs like how do you grow that list of affiliates or ambassadors?

Brett: 20:19

So by having it on your post purchase page you get, like I said, 4 to 7% opt in rate. So paying how big your store is, you can grow pretty quickly. And then we also recommend doing is adding that klaviyo form or attentive form to a landing page and then going, we actually have a template for this in our case study as well. You could just copy it. You know, we have the text for you, we have the picture you want to basically put in that newsletter and you send this back to your previous customers and you say, hey, we’re launching a new ambassador program. Go to this landing page and give us your handle to apply. And for that we’re seeing upwards of a 50% open rate on that email and oftentimes a 4 to 7% which is ironically the same number as checkout page conversion rate. So once they, I’m sorry, even better than that, my mistake. Half of them will go to the page and then about. I’m sorry, let me go back one second. The stats. So half of them will open the email, 7% or so will click to the landing page and then once they’re there, about 1/3 fill out the form. Long story short, if you send it to 20,000 customers, you probably get about a thousand handles in one day and that helps really build up the initial push.

Vira: 21:28

Right. You briefly mentioned that you can connect like loyalty programs with your platform. Can you talk a bit about that? Can you like incentivize them through. Yeah. Loyalty programs? Yeah.

Brett: 21:42

We had a review come into our Shopify app store yesterday talking about our Gatsby loyalty line integration and they said it was. Maybe I could read this to you really fast. I think I have it handy right here. I mean I was just. This was a quote. She sent us over email and said, yeah, feel free to use this. After I asked her for it, she said the people I’ve signed up say it’s the best ambassador program they’ve ever seen. They all really love that they can get rewarded for IG and TikTok posts. And it’s really taking a lot off my plate now trying to individually manage those Relationships. I mean I was blown away by this. So essentially with our integration with with Loyalty lion and Stamp and Yacht Po Loyalty, you can now give points loyalty points for mentions. So essentially you can give points for them giving you their handle inside of Loyalty Lion. It’s like a really easy form that you get points for points for mentions and points for DMs. So which basically says, hey, you want to get points for a lotta program. Social media is now a place to do that as well.

Vira: 22:40

Yeah, and the best thing, that you literally don’t need to do anything. You just set it up once and then it works for you, the entire program. You don’t even have to manage it and stuff. Wow, that’s all powerful stuff. And yeah, you definitely can build it into the flow, I’m sure as well because we do connect Klaviyo with loyalty programs. So now I’m thinking connecting the Klaviyo with loyalty program with your SMS program as well. Pretty much like creating that like omnichannel experience almost. That’s such a powerful approach. Especially around the holidays. Right.

Brett: 23:16

Hey, we even go into Gorgeous too. So customer support the whole journey. So if there’s a support ticket that comes in, you can have the follower accounts in there, you can have segmentation history, all that stuff. Yeah, we want to be like you said, just we are this con, we’re this data layer for social media, social data for your customers.

Vira: 23:32

What are like from your own experience? Is there such thing as too much of communication with your social media followers? What are some of the sort of bad experiences that you’ve witnessed or bad practices that you’ve seen?

Brett: 23:50

Well, okay, so I guess there’s a couple of things I can mention. Maybe not bad practices, but just things I’ve learned that work better or not as well. So for example, when you’re doing a referral code percentage is fine, like 20% off. If you come use my code is fine. But when you give a gift to an ambassador in like, thanks for your mention. Here’s a code. Dollar amounts work a lot better. They don’t a percentage off, even if it’s ultimately more cash and like more off doesn’t feel as much of a gift as a dollar amount off the dollar.

Vira: 24:24

That’s interesting. I’ve noticed it with like different brands. Like younger people, they prefer like dollars. But I have brands who are like I have this supplement brand and they are customers or like people in their 60s and stuff. And they know their math. They would not be fooled with like a dollar amount if like, percentage is higher. That’s like, just like, one interesting thing I’ve noticed with, like, different generations and how they sort of, like, communicate and, like, interact with email. But that’s a good. That’s a good advice, actually. Dollar versus percentage. Yeah.

Brett: 24:56

And we’re rolling out some functionality later this quarter to be able to make those coupon codes in Gatsby, like, collection or product specific too. So in theory, you could actually say, hey, here’s 100% off this item for you. Come back to the store and you can get your free item.

Vira: 25:10

Now, how do you generate codes? Since we started talking about it, how. How do you generate codes in Gatsby? Can they be influencer, unique, or do you need to generate it on, like, Shopify ends? Like, what’s the process?

Brett: 25:24

Yeah, we have a Shopify integration. So we. They are Shopify codes, but you make them pretty easily in Gatsby, like automatically at scale. So essentially just create a segment in Gatsby. So you say, all right, everybody who has, I don’t know, at least one Instagram follower, let’s give them all codes. And you just create that segment and then you push a few buttons, you give it some definition, like what the code is worth, and you press go. And then we’ll create codes for everybody in that segment at that moment and in the future as they come into that segment.

Vira: 25:56

Can you create, like, influencer specific code? Say, like, use code, Brett, for 10% off, like this product or something like that?

Brett: 26:04

Yeah, yeah. So the code itself is going to use their handle or their first name as the code. It just. We just. You make them all at scale. So you just say, here’s the segment. Everybody in this. Everybody in this group gets their own code with their handle as their code.

Vira: 26:18

Oh, I see. That’s super cool.

Brett: 26:20

Yeah.

Vira: 26:21

Okay, well, thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming to our podcast, Brett. I know we’re running out of time, but if people want to learn more about your platform or if they want to learn more about what you guys do, how can they find you?

Brett: 26:34

So our website is Gatsby AI. On that site, you have a chat widget on the bottom right that goes directly to most often my colleague Jared, who is a former paramedic and loves to help people. So give him a shout out. He’s happy to help answer any questions. And then our Shopify app as well. Just search for Gatsby. You’ll find us there. Look at our reviews. And just the best thing I would say is install the app. There’s no payroll required. There’s no payment required to install the app. So you can get in there and start playing around a little bit. And then there’s also a free trial period, too.

Vira: 27:07

That’s awesome, guys. And definitely check out their videos on their website where they basically show you how everything is working, how you can, like, integrate the things and check out the case studies as well. Well, we will link them in the description box to this podcast. Thank you so much, Brett. A lot of. A lot of good information, you guys, when you hear this audio post that you will still have two weeks until Black Friday Cyber Monday. So still enough time to implement all of the strategies that we discussed today. Thank you so much, Brett. And we hope to have you back on our podcast someday again.

Brett: 27:40

I’d love to. Thanks, Vira.

Vira: 27:42

Thank you. Take care.