#124. How to Keep Consistent Sales with Relo | Podcast

Vira: 0:41

Hello. Hello everyone and welcome back to Email Einstein the podcast by Flowium. I’m your host Vira Sadlak and marketeer at an agency called Flowium. Flowium is one of the fastest growing email marketing agencies in the world and we specialize in providing a premium full service e commerce email marketing experience to all of our clients. Delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment. And that’s actually what we will be talking about today. Delivering the right message to the right person in the post. Holidays time, you guys, we almost made it right now when we are recording this podcast, we are almost at the Black Friday sort of like time. But when you will be listening to this podcast, the Black Friday will be over and you will start getting into that like post holidays like little, little slump after the Christmas, right? And by that time most customers are all shopped out. So it becomes like harder to target customers with your marketing efforts. And after spending like a significant amount of money in the months of November and the first part of December, some shoppers may have experienced like blues after receiving their credit card bills in January. And actually fun fact, the months of January and February are some of the lowest spending months of the year for the average US consumer. I’m not sure about the Europe and we’ll probably talk about it as well today with our guest. But the question is how can you stay in touch with your audience and like motivate them to come back and spend again with you? And today I’m joined by a very special guest. His name is Harry Willis and he is the partnership led at Blueprint and Rallo. Harry and his team, they are helping brands with their DTC race and they help brands to scale and find smarter ways to target customers and drive repeat revenue. Say hi Harry.

Harry: 2:38

Hello everybody. Vira, thank you very much for having me on and yeah, looking forward to sharing some ideas with you.

Vira: 2:45

Oh yeah, we are super excited to have you on the podcast. But Harry, before we go to all of the serious questions into our juicy e commerce conversation, let’s play a little this or that game just to get to know you better.

Harry: 2:58

Okay, let’s do it. Yeah, sounds good.

Vira: 3:00

Cool. Texting or calling.

Harry: 3:03

Calling.

Vira: 3:05

Really? That’s very interesting that you mentioned that, because I know most of the art generation. Right. Yeah.

Harry: 3:12

It’s very tempting to text a lot, and it’s very tempting to kind of take an easy route. But I think if you want to properly have a good connection with somebody, picking up the phone is still very valuable.

Vira: 3:24

Cool. I’m curious about the next one. Shopping online or shopping offline?

Harry: 3:29

That’s a good question, I think. Yeah, probably shopping. Depends what it is, actually. I think if it’s things like clothes, I would say shopping in person is the one. But for more boring things, like just simple things around the house or stuff that might be particularly tricky to get hold of, then definitely, definitely online, rather than embarking on a expedition to some tiny shop somewhere.

Vira: 3:55

Cool. Okay. Early bird, Black Friday sale. Yay or nay?

Harry: 4:02

Yay.

Vira: 4:02

Okay, cool. Then Christmas tree in November. Yay or nay?

Harry: 4:07

Absolutely never.

Vira: 4:09

Really? Like, I’m that person who has the Christmas tree, like, the day after Halloween. Probably, like, November 1st, we get our Christmas tree. Yeah, that kind of people. We are in Canada. That’s a thing. You know, just like, we don’t have the Thanksgiving at the end of November. Ours is, like, the first two weeks of October, so we need something to celebrate. Right.

Harry: 4:30

Well, that’s fair. Yeah. I mean, in England, it’s. It’s traditional that you would start all the Christmas stuff on December 1st, and then I think you take it down. You take down all the Christmas decorations before New Year’s Eve, I think is the. Is that. And if it goes beyond that, you have terrible bad luck, and all your Christmases of the future are ruined.

Vira: 4:50

Oh, my goodness. I never knew that. Because I have. I usually have my Christmas tree, like, until mid January just because my family, like, I’m Ukrainian, and we celebrate our Christmas in, like, January 7th. So I, like, get to celebrate two Christmases, and I get to enjoy my Christmas tree from November until the mid January. So, yeah, that’s a definitely best.

Harry: 5:11

That’s a big proportion of the year that you have a Christmas tree.

Vira: 5:14

Yeah, pretty much. Okay, Harry, if you had a theme song playing every time you entered the room, what would it be?

Harry: 5:21

Oh, my God. It’s got to be Eye of the Tiger. I think, just for the sheer cinematic image, I think that would get me somewhere.

Vira: 5:30

Yeah. You’re probably the fifth or, like, the sixth guest who picked this song as the entry song. And it’s a good one. It’s a good one, too. So. Yeah.

Harry: 5:38

What would yours be?

Vira: 5:39

Okay. Gosh, I don’t Know, maybe something from Coldplay. You love them so much, like Viva la Vida or something like that.

Harry: 5:46

Yeah, yeah, that’d be pretty uplifting.

Vira: 5:48

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Cool. Okay, Harry, so we already made a little introduction of you, but tell us a bit more about yourself and especially about your role at Relo.

Harry: 5:59

Absolutely, yeah. So I’m the partnership lead at relo, so that means that I’m responsible for both the agency partnership side and our tech partner program as well. And at Relo, we’re a repeat revenue platform for D2C brands and we’re the easiest way for customers to reorder, to try a subscription, and ultimately to stay loyal. We are an official strategic Klaviyo technology partner, so we work very closely with them and also with Recharge. And yeah, I’ve been in this role for around a year and a half now. Before that, I was still in the kind of messaging app space working on solutions for e commerce brands to connect with their audiences in interesting ways through WhatsApp and Facebook messenger. And yeah, prior to that, I was in the music industry doing a very similar thing. So my career has turned into something around just activating audiences in interesting ways on direct channels generally. So, yeah, previously WhatsApp and Messenger and now more into the email and SMS which Klaviyo provides.

Vira: 7:05

Interesting, interesting. So let’s talk more about Relo. You mentioned what it does briefly, but how does it work and how it can help my brand, especially in that time after the holidays?

Harry: 7:23

Yeah, absolutely. So we work in three very particular kind of areas. Firstly, we improve the timing of reorder reminders which are going to. Which are going to be sent out. So the way that we do that is the moment you connect to reload, we ingest all of your historic Shopify data and we look at various different elements of it. So it takes us a couple of hours to analyze and we look at things like each customer and their average consumption rate, each SKU and its average reorder time frame. And we pull in lookalike audiences and various different elements to come up with a really accurate view about when a customer might be about to reorder. And we can do this on a level which is far deeper than what the typical Klaviyo tooling can offer. Now, from there, there’s not much point in having that insight unless it’s making it into Klaviyo. So what we do is we sync directly into the Klaviyo replenishment flow and it means that now that flow, our native integration becomes dynamic. With all of that insights from the analytics that we’ve run. So it means that the timeframes at which you’re sending out those native klaviyo email and or SMS are adapting to each customer dynamically. From there, what most merchants tend to do is they’re using email or SMS to send people back to product pages on their websites. Now product pages on websites, they’re not particularly personalized, they’re not particularly contextual to whether it’s a first time customer or a returning customer or even a lifetime long subscriber. So they don’t convert as well as they could and you end up leaving money on the table as a brand. So what we do is we then convert the customer through what we call the magic cart, which I guess we can go into a little more detail later. But essentially we just remove all the friction points around that end of the customer journey to just make the checkout process as smooth as possible. So those are the three kind of key areas that the product works on.

Vira: 9:20

No. That’s so cool. And for me the biggest, probably the feature that I want to try with my brands would probably be that like predictable reordering because like for most brands you don’t necessarily know when the customers are ready to reorder or like to try like subscription. Right. I mean you have some like basic data. You know that for example for one of the supplements brand that I work with that like generally speaking the probiotics are reordered like every 60 days because there are like 60 capsules in the bottle. But what if the person is like bigger, their doctor recommended them to take like two pills instead of one, then their average order value would be like 30 days. So while it’s good to have that like big data, right, big picture data, but like customizing email and SMS flows to avoid that like one size fits all experience. That’s a super powerful feature.

Harry: 10:20

Yeah, I was just going to say we actually interviewed hundreds of merchants to understand how they were currently solving that problem. And we found that most of them were setting their replenishment cadence. So how long a delay they were leaving before they sent a reorder reminder. They were typically doing that just based on qualitative understanding. So just like you were saying with like a pack of 60 capsules, the customer’s supposed to take them off to once a day. So that’s a 60 day replenishment reminder. Perfect. That’s just going to be what we use forever.

Vira: 10:47

Yeah.

Harry: 10:47

Rather than constantly reviewing it and looking at the data. And also that one Size fits all approach really doesn’t take into consideration those customers who might be way less engaged and they might actually only end up taking a few capsules and they have a history of doing that, but you’re not taking that into consideration in your flow. So yeah, it was kind of qualitative understanding and best practice were what most of the replenishment cadences were being set on. So that’s basically where we saw the opportunity there to actually just pipe data straight into Klaviyo because then it would mean that all of those cadences of how you wanted to get people to reorder could be updating in real time rather than just being static and set forever.

Vira: 11:25

And in what flows can you use this feature? So definitely in the replenishment flow, but are there any other flows that can be specifically customized with this Klaviyo Relo integration?

Harry: 11:42

So most of our work in the sense of driving reorders is done in the replenishment flow. It is also possible to send campaigns so that obviously wouldn’t have the dynamic trigger of okay, some really smart timing on when that’s going to go out, but it would mean you could send people straight into our magic cart for a very easy checkout experience. But the other two key areas we work on is moving customers from a repeat purchase onto a paid recharge subscription and then moving people from or not moving, but basically helping people to manage their recharge subscription. So those are two kind of key areas. So those are the other two flows that we typically work at.

Vira: 12:19

Yeah. Let’s talk more about how Relo can help you drive more revenue after the holidays by say turning few time buyers into customers or into subscribers. I mean. Yeah. What’s the process?

Harry: 12:34

So. Well, I guess the first thing to just note about these key holiday areas in the calendar is that there’s a huge extra volume of first time orders. So it’s one thing to just convert those people into first time sales, but really you want to have some kind of system in place that can turn those into long term value and ultimately just increase your lifetime value of customers. So that’s why we propose using a kind of retention focused tool like Relo across those key moments of the E Comm calendar because then you can capture the repeat revenue potential of those one time purchases. And yeah, when it comes to upgrading customers onto subscriptions specifically, firstly, reload will work on driving people into habitual regular purchasing. So let’s imagine that like a coffee brand for example, you would be just as you’re running out you would receive an email or an SMS saying hey, it’s time to reorganize order. You would think, oh great, that’s really convenient. Make the purchase super simple. Now once you’ve done that three or four times, reload would then see that happening in our, in our analytics and we would, we would mark you as somebody who we believe would be relevant for a subscription. So from there we would push your, your profile into the klaviyo flow designed around upgrading customers onto a subscription. And it would mean that we could send a very contextual offer out about that particular customer onto that specific product, onto a subscription. So they would open up a very similar email or SMS to what they usually do, but this time the call to action would be try a subscription. So instead of just reordering, what we would do is when they open up the magic cart from that email or sms, it would say, hey, based on your purchasing behavior, you’ve been purchasing once every month. We would suggest maybe trying a monthly subscription because it’s going to mean you could save 10%. And we would load that subscription product into the magic cart for them. We would pull up the frequency at which we feel that they’d be most relevant to subscribe at. We would highlight that frequency for them. So the whole idea is you’re making it as smooth and useful as possible to try a subscription. And the reason this really works is because most merchants, when we ran all these interviews, they basically explained that the tactics they were using to get people onto subscriptions was typically just send a message to anyone who’s purchased more than four or five times and give them a really heavy discount. And when you focus on discounts like that, you immediately just erode all your margins because you’re just selling at a loss a lot of the time. Then people cancel the subscription when the discount runs out. So yeah, that’s kind of an alternative there of something you can do. And also with the other tactic that these merchants were using was just trying to basically message everybody who’d purchased, as I said, more than four or five times. So it just means that a lot of the people who are being targeted aren’t necessarily keen on subscribing. They’re not showing the behaviors to actually be a subscriber. And so it’s just a wasted use of their attention, which obviously just pulls down your engagement rate long term as well.

Vira: 15:27

Yeah, that’s actually pretty cool that you can not only personalize, obviously the time when you’re sending this email, but you can also personalize the Recommendations and you can personalize the cadence of subscription. Right. As far as I understand. So is that based on their previous purchases or how does it work exactly?

Harry: 15:49

Yeah. So let’s say we have. Yeah, Vira has been purchasing coffee four times in a row and she’s done it pretty regularly on a monthly basis. What we would then do is we trigger an email or an SMS to go out directly to you and it would say, hey, try a subscription. You’d click on the link, it would open up the magic cart. And what our API would then do is we would check with Recharge and we’d see, okay, Vira has been purchasing once every month. We would check in Recharge to see if there were any subscription offers that matched your purchase behavior. Okay, perfect. There’s a monthly subscription option. So you would find when you opened up your magic cart that there would be the product, that coffee product that you wanted to potentially subscribe to, but also there would be the frequency selector of what subscription would be right. To move on to. But it would be highlighted with a monthly subscription. And we have a tooltip there that just says due to your purchase history, we recommend this monthly subscription because it’s going to save you some money and you’re already purchasing like that basically. So. So yeah, built around being useful rather than just being, let’s hammer them with a discount. Which.

Vira: 16:53

Yeah, which happens most of the time, honestly. Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of brands doing that subscription thing even before you’ve purchased the product, which I think doesn’t make sense at all. It’s like, I don’t know, asking someone to marry on the first date. Right. It’s just like I don’t feel it’s ready. And just like you said, a lot of brands are like heavily discounting their products just like for you to try that subscription product. And while it’s a cool strategy for you as a user, as a brand, you don’t want to train your customers to expect the discount codes from you. Right. So I really like that you guys have this like not one size fits all solution but more like a customized experience. And like internally with my client, what we were doing, we made it this like subscription recommendation as a part of the post purchase flow for the people who have placed three plus orders.

Harry: 17:51

Okay.

Vira: 17:52

But I see how it makes sense to offer it to people who are like four time buyers, five time buyers, you know, to people who come back to your website to purchase more from you.

Harry: 18:03

And also like if you’ve purchased as a. Yeah, let’s say we have Vira has purchased coffee after two weeks and then after six months the next time and then after a year the other time. That’s not. Although they’ve purchased three times in total. That’s not necessarily a customer who would be, whose lifestyle and behavior is suited to a subscription. That’s just a customer who likes your brand and is probably not likely to convert onto a subscription. And therefore sending them a subscription offer is actually a wasted opportunity where you could be trying them on, on a cross sell, for example. So yeah, there’s just something I think in uncovering those customers who are doing that kind of regular, kind of mechanical, predictable reorders and just getting that into MRR instead of the kind of revenue which might drop off if they change their mind.

Vira: 19:19

Yeah. So Harry, you already mentioned briefly the magic card. Let’s talk more about it. How you can personalize customer experience with that magic card tool. Like especially in, specifically in Klaviyo because like most of our listeners are Shopify plus Klaviyo people.

Harry: 19:38

Yeah. So yeah, the magic cart is basically designed as a, as a kind of intermediary cart. So between when someone clicks that they would like to reorder something and the Shopify checkout, we have the magic cart so they, we can give them a super personalized experience. So the problem with product pages as I mentioned is they’re typically not very personalized depending on who’s viewing them. So if you’re throwing traffic to a product page, they’re getting the same experience whether they’re a first time customer or a longtime subscriber, for example. Now the thing that we have changed here is with the magic cart, when they click on the call to action in the email or the sms, it pops open and we do as much to personalize it as possible. So they have a personalized greeting at the top. So it could say like hi Vira, welcome back. We also preload, in the case of reordering, we would preload the magic cart with the last product that that customer ordered. And then underneath that, what we would also do is have a dynamic new product offering like a cross sell of something that they might also be interested in trying. So that’s what our predictive analytics would have maybe come up with a suggestion there. So for the customer, what that means is instead of being back to a product page where they have to go through a first time customer journey again, they are just presented with the thing that they wanted to come back buy and then they also have an option of maybe bundling in something else that Month and if they, if they then click checkout now what the magic cart will do is load all of the things that they’ve chosen there straight into the native Shopify checkout. And what we do is we pre fill the first name, last name, billing address, shipping address, all of that annoying stuff that usually causes friction in the customer journey and causes people to just abandon the cart. We remove all of those steps so they can just then pay with Shop Pay or Apple Pay. So, so yeah, essentially the idea there is just remove as much friction as possible to make the repurchase journey in as fewer steps as we can possibly do.

Vira: 21:32

Yeah, no, since the Apple update in June 2021, a lot of brands were struggling really badly with the personalization. We all had to kind of rethink our approach to email personalization and because while cookies may be going away, personalization is definitely here to stay. And obviously the more personalized message you can deliver, the better your conversions will be. It all comes down to that, delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment. And yeah, that’s why I think your tool is pretty powerful when it comes to personalization.

Harry: 22:15

Yeah, the cookie obviously all the cookie restrictions and kind of shuttering of all that side of a lot of kind of media strategy is all just because that’s built around third party data. Whereas everything really that’s happening through Klaviyo in this instance is all first party data. So there’s a huge amount of personalization that can be done there just as long as customers are opting in for that and sharing their email address or their phone number which is naturally happening at the checkout process anyway. So once you have that data, there’s a lot that can be done around building customer profiles to do really nice, nice personalization like that en masse as well.

Vira: 22:54

Yeah, well Harry, you work with a lot of different tools and with a lot of different agencies with a lot of apps. So are there any like other Shopify apps that you can like recommend to the brands to use after the holidays, like to improve the overall customer experience?

Harry: 23:16

Definitely, yeah. So my first recommendation there would be Gorgeous the help desk solution. Gorgeous are the number one help desk and for D2C brands and Shopify brands they’re a fantastic solution. And they’re multiple channel so your customers could reach out to you via sms, through email, it could be Instagram, dm, all of those channels where customers want to get hold of you. Especially if you’ve got a lot of first time customers after a key moment in the calendar Like Black Friday, Cyber Monday. You might have people coming back to you with a query about something that wasn’t clear or a particular delivery issue. You want to make sure people can reach you in the best possible way on their preferred channel. And Gorgeous is great for that. Another great thing about Gorgeous is they have a really strong Klaviyo integration. So everybody who is opening up a customer services ticket with you, maybe about a particular product perhaps that forms a segment that you could then use in Klaviyo for some remarketing or for some focus groups if you’re planning another particular product launch, for example. So there’s a lot that can be done there in conjunction with Klaviyo. So that’s, that’s always one that I recommend and that’s a very close partner of ours at Relo as well. Secondly, I would say Loyalty lion would definitely be a good, a good platform to, to keep on your radar if you’re, especially if you’re a CPG brand. Just like the kind of brands that we focus on at Relo, they’re the gold standard when it comes to loyalty programs. So if you want to include, yeah, kind of point system with your brand where people can generate points that can then be redeemed towards future purchases and go up through tiers of loyalty, I think a loyalty program through loyalty line is a great move there. And they also do a lot around educating merchants. So. So, yeah, and agencies alike as well. So it’s a. They’re very good, good company in that sense to get involved with. My final recommendation would be probably Penny Black. Penny Black are doing some UK at the moment, spreading over to the US as well, and they offer really amazing unboxing experiences. So you might have a flyer that goes inside your, inside your shipping. Inside that flyer you might open it up and it has a QR code. You could then scan it into a particular customer experience. Now the really exciting part there is how that then relates to Klaviyo. They have a really strong Klaviyo integration. I was actually at the Klaviyo Partner Summit the other day and Penny Black were one of the featured tools on the screen up there with their kind of unboxing use case because you can build some amazing customer segments and kind of flows off the back of that unboxing experience so you can keep the customer engaged long after then they’ve just received their particular shipment. So yeah, those are three. I could end up talking about our partners for hours and I regularly do. But those would be my three, top of Mind ones which are pretty essential to check out if you’re a scaling CPG brand especially.

Vira: 26:12

All solid recommendations, Harry. And guys, we will link all of the resources that we mentioned in this podcast. We will link them in the description box. So just like scroll down and you can get all of the links to those tools. So Harry, if you could like summarize maybe from your previous experience, maybe you have some like case studies or something, if you could basically give like the main piece of advice to DTC brands who want to improve their customer retention, especially after the holidays, what would it be?

Harry: 26:42

Yeah, I think for. Okay, so we specialize in CPG brands specifically and I think for CPG brands typically there’s two. Well, there’s obviously Shopify plus is usually the E commerce platform of choice, but then typically these brands are also using Klaviyo and Recharge. So I’d say it’s just really important to make sure you’re getting the most out of those platforms. So that means using various different third parties to kind of specialize them. One of those of course is relo. But there are a host of other tools which will also help with getting the most out of those platforms, just like some of the other ones I mentioned there. But generally there are some key metrics that we work on at Relo, which I think are really strong metrics to just keep an eye on if you’re looking for the health of your kind of retention. And that is reorder rate, reorder frequency and minimizing subscription churn as well if you do offer a recharge subscription. So those would be three elements that I’d kind of really recommend keeping a close eye on underneath that lifetime value figure. And especially true across the holiday period when you get that huge spike in first time business as well.

Vira: 27:49

Right, right. And huge spike in return of the products as well. And basically like a bunch of people who are holiday shoppers who will come to your website once and maybe the next time they will purchase something from you would be around November, December next year. Yeah, that’s all of the problems that DTC brands and especially like CPG brands have to deal with around the holidays. And I feel like this year it might even be. The situation might even be slightly worse because I don’t know about the Europe, but here in the States and in Canada we can already feel the results of the recession. So we are in the recession right now. And with a lot of my brands I’ve noticed that the sales are a bit like slower this year. People are more careful with where they will spend their dollar on. That’s why probably like the communication that you’re having with the customer, it has to be more relevant than ever. One size fits all doesn’t work anymore, especially during that holiday time where you’re competing for the attention of your customer because they will be bombarded with emails from gazillion of different brands. So like being relevant being like delivering the right message to the right person is more valuable than ever. But what would be your piece of advice if you could give it to CPG brand who want to basically thrive in the recession? What would it be for the DTC brand to survive and thrive in this time?

Harry: 29:31

It’s five times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain a customer. So although around Black Friday side Monday, typically the narrative around that time of the year for so long has been acquiring new customers through whether that’s paid channels, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook ads, all of that kind of stuff. But if those customers are then not returning, it’s a huge lost opportunity. So I think yeah, some kind of acquisition across that stage is great, but having a good retention stack to back that up is essential. And I mean the most easy win there is just getting your klaviyo replenishment flow, firing on all cylinders to make sure that in those months following your huge spike in first time sales, you have a machine in place which is just going to gently nudge people at exactly the right time. And of course you’re never going to be able to target somebody at the perfect time to be able to know exactly when they’ve taken that last scoop of coffee out of that container, for example. But the closer you can get to that moment, as you said, the more relevant the messaging will be. And that just means generally the conversion is going to be better. And with that better conversion, you in turn have more budget to spend on, on acquisition. So it kind of feeds back into that, that side of the loop as the year goes on as well.

Vira: 31:01

Yeah, it’s this number, we hear it all the time, right? Five times more expensive to acquire than to give the customer. But it, it’s oldie but goody, you know, like we just like keeps forgetting how, how important it is to retain your customers and how much more expensive it is to get the customers than to keep having it. And that’s a really good message I think, I think that’s a really good message to wrap up this podcast with. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Harry. If people have more questions and if they want to find you or talk to you or someone on your team, how would they find you guys?

Harry: 31:48

So we are at. I’m on LinkedIn. You can search Harry Willis. Harry Willis at and I’m@relloandblueprint obviously our website is reloapp Co. If you would like to drop me an email. I’m on harrylueprint Store. This is the old domain from our previous company which I’m yet to update. But yeah, harrylueprint Store and drop me an email. More than happy to give you also a 30 day free trial as friends of Flowium as well. So yeah, drop me a message. Say hello and more than happy to help with any kind of retention needs generally.

Vira: 32:27

Thank you so much Harry. It was so much fun having you on this podcast. We definitely would like to have you back someday because I have a lot of unanswered questions to you yet. I still have a bunch of questions that I want to ask you but unfortunately we are running out of time. But it was really, really interesting to have you on this podcast to learn more about customer retention, about all of this like klaviyo integration, about how Rello can actually help you with your overall customization. So thank you so much for coming Harry.

Harry: 33:00

Thank you very much Vira. Thoroughly enjoyed it and yeah, speak to you soon.

Vira: 33:04

Speak to you soon. Bye. Take care.

Harry: 33:05

Bye bye.