#111. Why Zero-Party Data is Your Greatest Advantage in eCommerce Marketing | Podcast

Vira: 0:41

Hello. Hello everyone and welcome back to Email Einstein by Flowium. I’m an email marketeer at an agency called called Flowium. And here at Flowium we are very, very passionate about email marketing. And because we love what we do, we want to share our insights with you. We focus on delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment. That’s what we are all about here at Flowium. And I’m actually really, really excited about today’s guest because he knows a thing or two about delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment. So please welcome Gen Furukawa. Gen is a co founder of Pre Hook, a leading quiz plat shopify merchants. Jen has been in E commerce for like gosh, 10 plus years and the last seven years has been in e commerce SaaS. And prior to a Pre Hook, Jen was part of a founding team at Jungle Scout, the leading software for Amazon sellers. Gen, we’re really, really excited to have you here on our podcast. Say hi.

Gen: 1:41

Hi Vira. Thank you so much. I’m excited and honored to be here.

Vira: 1:44

Oh yeah, I have like a gazillion juicy questions to you. But before we go there, let’s do like a this or that, like a blitz Q and A just to get to know you better. Okay?

Gen: 1:57

Let’s do it.

Vira: 1:57

Let’s do this. Cake or pie?

Gen: 1:59

Cake. With coffee.

Vira: 2:02

Hundred percent. Okay. Shopify or Woocommerce?

Gen: 2:05

Shopify.

Vira: 2:06

IPhone or Android?

Gen: 2:08

Newly converted iPhone.

Vira: 2:09

Okay, that’s interesting. Usually it happens the other way around. It’s all about the FaceTime.

Gen: 2:15

Yeah.

Vira: 2:15

Cool. Shopping online or shopping offline?

Gen: 2:19

I prefer offline.

Vira: 2:20

Okay. Okay, that’s, that’s unique. Actually I was kind of thinking you would say the online because like you are in the industry. But that’s interesting. That’s like a fresh, fresh perspective.

Gen: 2:30

Yeah. You know, so I grew up in New York City and that was like, you know, downtown. And that was what I did for fun was like walk around the city downtown. People watch, shop a lot. Not, not always buying but just shopping for fun. So always kind of like a cathartic activity for me.

Vira: 2:45

Okay. The next question would be interesting for me to hear. East coast or West Coast?

Gen: 2:49

West Coast.

Vira: 2:50

Yay. West coast team. I’m the same, that’s for sure. Okay, cool. The last question, it’s not this or that, but still really curious to hear your answer. If you had like a theme, theme song playing like every time you entered the room, what would it be?

Gen: 3:05

First thing that popped into my mind is DJ Khaled. All I do is win. Because, you know, I don’t know if you know that song. It’s just such a hyped up song. And it’s like I think there are a few baseball players that use it as their entry song. And every time I hear it I’m like, ah, this is awesome. So that gets the energy going for me.

Vira: 3:23

That’s the one. That’s awesome. Okay, cool. Well, let’s go and discuss all of the juicy stuff. I have a gazillion questions about zero party data, all of the fun quizzes and stuff like that. But before we go there, do you have anything to add about yourself? Like briefly introduce yourself who you are, what you’re doing and what excites you the most right now?

Gen: 3:47

Yeah, for sure. So yeah, like you mentioned, I am a co founder of Pre Hook, which is a quiz platform for Shopify merchants. Started building it in 2020, kind of like right as the pandemic was laying, keeping us all in inside. And I was working with two of, two of the people on the original founding team at Jungle Scout. They’re now my co founders as in Diedrich, and they’re kind of running the product and development. We wanted to do something on our own, focus on the e commerce space, but shift slightly from Amazon to Shopify. And so yeah, you’re an Amazon seller, you work with a lot of Shopify brands, so you can see the difference yourself very up close and personal. But we noticed that an Amazon listing is very focused on a particular search query. So Amazon is obviously a huge search engine and the first stop for many people to buy their products. So you’re optimizing your Amazon listing for specific search queries where you know what you’re trying to, your customers are looking for or what, how you’re trying to position your product. Shopify is slightly different because by and large people have a variety of people coming to their store and don’t necessarily know what they are looking for. But with a few questions, understanding what your shoppers are looking for, what product you can merchandise appropriately, you can do a lot more in terms of gathering a lead, improving a conversion rate, and maybe most importantly these days, capturing the customer data, capturing the zero party data. So we did some research, spoke with merchants, realized that this was indeed a challenge. There were other platforms that were being used, kind of like retrofitted for the use case of a quiz type form, namely. But there was, there was a need for it. And this was kind of even before the iOS 14 updates, which basically made it harder for brand advertisers to target and reach their end consumers based on Apple’s data privacy changes. So yeah, we, we started in, we launched it in early 2021 and now, you know, we’re here and we’re growing quickly and it’s a very different landscape than what we initially started in terms of like the other opportunities and then just kind of like how digital marketer for an E commerce brand has thought about how they might capture data, how they might work on their personalization programs and ultimately how they’re forming that customer experience.

Vira: 6:07

Right, right. And that’s what I like about platforms like yours is that like on Amazon, when you’re selling Amazon, you’re like not owning that data. Right. You’re not like owning your customer and you cannot even like talk directly to them. And with all of those like iOS changes, it kind of got more and more important that we can talk to our customers directly and don’t rely so much on like third party data and first party data. But yeah, but can you briefly explain to all of those who are listening, what is zero party data? Why is it important? But first of all, what is the biggest difference between first party data and second party data and zero party data. Loaded question.

Gen: 6:53

Yeah, thank you for, for taking me a step back because in some ways might be like, oh, another marketing jargon, another term, but there is a fundament and important difference between zero party data, first party data and so on. So zero party data as defined by Salesforce is basically data that a customer proactively and willingly shares with you the brand. Where you contrast that with first party data, which is data that you’re capturing from the customer, but it’s not them saying, hey, this is what I want or this is what I’m looking for. It’s more passively collected. So this could be things like transaction history, so what products they purchased, how much they’ve spent. Maybe from that you’re extracting where they live based on the shipping address. It could be engagement with your site. So actions like add to cart, abandoned cart, product pages visited or tracking email engagement, that all falls under first party data and you can get a lot from it. However, it does Require that there are assumptions being made where if, for example, you know, you see Gann is looking for this particular shampoo, you might assume that Gann has this particular hair condition or whatever. Zero party data, you know, explicitly the customer is telling you what they’re looking for. So the zero party data highlights the intent of what the customer is looking for, which can dramatically change how you’re communicating and how you’re merchandising the product. And then if we go down the line, second party data is basically when an organization is collecting the data and then selling it to another company, let’s say Facebook and third party data is that, but it’s kind of aggregated in large, in scale. And the difference there, the challenge is in terms of data quality, where is this data source from, when is it sourced source from? And so these are, these are kind of like mixed together where it’s polluted data, so to speak. So the accuracy of, hey, I want to target this person who’s looking for wedding venues in the Bahamas. Well, you don’t know when that was. And maybe you’ve been on the receiving end of remarketing ads or ads that are a little bit off target. And that’s the reason is, or that could be the reason is that it’s old data or it’s kind of like polluted data that the advertiser is creating their campaigns around.

Vira: 9:01

Right, right. And honestly, when first, when they released that like iOS 15 update, I remember how like everyone was like panicking, you know, like people didn’t know what to do. But now when I look at it, it kind of is like a blessing in disguise, you know, because it forced us to talk to our customers directly. And that kind of helped like a lot of brands that I work with to remove that guesswork and assumptions about the consumers. And we changed so much just based on those direct questions that we asked our customers. We learned sometimes that if this person is shopping, just like you said, for this shampoo, it doesn’t mean that he has this condition, but maybe he’s shopping for his kids and then we can market it differently or maybe, I don’t know, maybe they are using it for like different purposes or stuff like that. It actually helped us to better tailor to the needs of our customers. Right. So I think that first party data and like zero party data is like so, so powerful when it comes to that personalization of the entire experience.

Gen: 10:10

Yeah, absolutely. And then when you talk about, and you’re, you’re talking on behalf of brands kind of like specifically for Email or sms. And that’s where you know, we directly integrate with Klaviyo Attentive Omn send in postscript right now, expanding that list now. But the real value of the zero party data is how you’re communicating with your customers and when you’re communicating, what messages you send. And that’s what you mentioned in your intro. Sending the right message to the right person at the right time. And it’s especially critical when you consider for example like SMS where it’s an extremely high open rate. But the downside is it’s also extremely like delicate in terms of, you know, getting the customer to unsubscribe. And so that’s where we’re seeing a lot of value that we’re able to add is to once a merchant gathers the data then how they use that in terms of creating tighter segments or dynamically personalizing the emails or doing conditional splits in Klaviyo flow. And this is stuff that we discuss, happy to discuss it more. But the data as it’s used in guiding what communications you send out is really critical.

Vira: 11:20

That’s awesome. Yeah. So basically you said that you have a direct integration with Klaviyo. So once someone say answer the quiz about I don’t know the type of the skin or the type of the hair or their preferences or whatever, where is that information stored? Again on the backend of Klaviyo. How does it work?

Gen: 11:39

Yeah, so all of our quiz data goes directly to Klaviyo. Once somebody completes a quiz it goes to Klaviyo as a custom property and as a metric. So this means that you can, you know, kind of dynamically personalized, you can build out one email template or you can build out one flow and then it can change depending on what quiz responses they gave. So for example, if you completed a quiz and your, your recommended product at the end was you know, product X and minus product Y I would get a post quiz email say hey again your yours is product Y and vary yours is product X. But basically that, that it’s, it’s a placeholder. It allows for emails to be built with placeholders. And then depending recommended product is, you can insert it dynamically and then from there also you’re, you’re able to lay out far more specific flows and educational content sharing different parts of the brand which might be relevant based on what the customer is looking for, the challenges they’re facing. So yeah, it’s really all about the getting a better understanding of what customers are looking for so that you can Ramp up the relevance and therefore the engagement.

Vira: 12:49

Right, right. And obviously that capturing of zero party data can happen at different points of their journey. It can happen at the top of the funnel, at the bottom of the funnel, middle of the funnel. Let’s talk a bit more about that. So first of all like water interactive quizzes and let’s start from the top of the funnel. How are they can be used at the very best beginning of customers journey with the brand.

Gen: 13:19

Yeah so an interactive quiz is basically the equivalent of a conversation you might have with a sales associate at a brick and mortar store. So you know, you’ve walked into any retail store even like a coffee shop or wine bar. Hey Vira, what type of what are you looking for here? What brings you in here? And of course it can be an open ended question. The quiz is great because you kind of like build it out with the different customer paths in mind already a way to quickly and in a fun manner ideally get the customer from point A, you know where they are, they know that they have a problem to solve to point B, the solution, their goal, their ideal end state. And once you understand what it is those point a and point Bs by asking the right questions, you’re far more able to direct them there with the, with the appropriate rationale and reasoning the sizzle behind why they should care about your brand and why your product can get them there. So yeah, that’s what an interactive quiz is. And generally it would include asking for a contact information optional of course, but an email or SMS and then it would be some kind of recommendation or, or categorization whether it’s a, you know, personality quiz or helping somebody to learn more about themselves. And this is really where the crux of a quiz, the success of it lies on how you can create this intrigue or this curiosity gap. Vira, do you know, you know what the right skincare routine is? Because you live in Vancouver and you have this particular lifestyle and so you’d be interested to learn more and that’s really placed our human interests, our natural tendency to want to learn more about ourselves. So for top of Funnel that’s really great. Whether it’s for a paid ad, whether it’s on Facebook or a YouTube pre roll or whatever it is. A paid landing page as a quiz is quite effective as a lead gen tool. You can also get use it as a top of funnel for somebody who’s landing on your site, kind of an organic visitor or direct visitor to your site. A quiz is a great place to start the customer journey. Because you are capturing a lead and then you’re learning more about that lead in the quiz and as we play towards the customer experience element of it, you know, if you put your conversion rate optimization hat on. The whole goal of conversion rate optimization is to simplify the buying process to directly address any objections or questions or concerns that you might have and address them directly, proactively. And a quiz allows you to do that once you’re able to understand what those objections are, what those questions are.

Vira: 16:09

That’s really interesting because like as a brand owner or as a marketer, I always looked at those quizzes as the way for us to collect data. The data, you know. But that’s interesting that you mentioned that you can kind of like establish yourself as an authority and like in that field and educate your customers well. So the top of the funnel is like a great place for like building awareness, obviously drawing users to your website, but also like educating them. Right. And establishing that like educational authority and like even building the credibility at some point. Because people do appreciate when you’re like educating them, when you are making their journey with the brand easier and when you like eliminate that like gap between them and the brand. Right?

Gen: 16:53

Yeah, absolutely. That’s you know, Robert Cialdini’s influence. That was one of the key pillars of influence is authority to establish authority. And you establish authority through expertise and educating your customer establishes expertise in the most trustworthy and quick way. And so one, you know that that could explain both the on site experience. So one example that comes to mind is trade coffee. They’re kind of like a subscription coffee brand. They’ll ask, you know, like, how do you like to prepare your coffee? How do you, what do you add to your coffee? Caffeinated or not, whatever, all these different questions. But then based on, you know, as you’re going through it, there’s a little bit of some hints on why they’re asking this or why this matters or how it can impact your coffee experience. And yeah, that’s even post quiz it plays into their communications. So yeah, the education part is huge in the middle of funnel and then it kind of amplifies more as you get towards the bottom of funnel. In this example, I think Helix Sleep, a mattress brand is a great example. Mattresses especially because it’s$1,000 plus to buy a mattress. So it’s not going to be a quick impulse purchase on site. It’s going to be a heavily researched and thought through purchase. And so Helix has a great homepage or on throughout their website and the Data that they’re gathering based on your sleep position, based on the pains that you’re experiencing in your sleep, based on how many people are buying it and the size of mattress that you’re looking for. All these factors to allow them to package their, their email, their SMS campaigns more strategically based on my specific needs that I, you know, the zero party data that I share.

Vira: 19:04

That’s interesting. And like what, what type of questions do you usually recommend brands to ask? Where to start with the questions? How do I know what to ask my customers?

Gen: 19:16

Yeah, it’s a great question and there’s no right answer because of course it depends. But the way I recommend to start thinking about it is what data would be most helpful to you, the brand, what do you currently use to create segments on your backend and what data would be most helpful, specific to your niche or your industry or brand. And then from there you can build out the questions. So at a high level it might revolve around what the challenges that this person is experiencing, what their idea of success looks like, what their goal is, maybe what habits they have, what preferences they have. So this could vary dramatically whether it’s, you know, a wine brand that’s using a quiz, identify the perfect bottle of wine, or it’s a clothing brand like Stitch Fix or Rockets of awesome. That’s kind of on a request recurring basis, sending out boxes and that’s where the size of course is critical, but then also the style preferences and what would ultimately be like, you know, ideal with my wardrobe. So questions of what to ask I think are very specific to the type of brand that you have. But my overarching recommendation is basically just try and keep it as short as possible while gathering value with each question and then ensuring that each question is engaging and doesn’t get overbearing for the customer. Because whether you’re sending, you know, putting paid money behind it, paid traffic behind it, you really don’t want to have a person drop out of the quiz because it’s an opportunity loss to capture a lead and then recommend the right product.

Vira: 20:51

Yeah, but I like how you mentioned that you don’t necessarily have to ask the questions about the product itself, but also about like the lifestyle of your customers. Right. Because sometimes the customers can tell you much more about how they use your products like than you might know about. I like if week ago or like 2 weeks ago I went to this like really a fun meetup in Vancouver with a brand called Vessi. It’s like a waterproof shoe.

Gen: 21:16

Oh yeah, the water, waterproof shoes?

Vira: 21:17

Yeah, the waterproof shoes. They’re like super, super famous here in Vancouver. And Michaela, the founder of the brand, she was actually telling a lot of fun things about this, like zero party data, how they collect it and stuff like that. And one of the questions that she said they asked their focus group was like this like super random question. How many pairs of shoes do you usually have by the door? And like, what are those shoes? Shoes? And it kind of helped them to understand like how often people wear these shoes are this. They are like main shoes that they wear every day. If they wear it every day, how often the shoes will be like repurchased and stuff like that. So sometimes you don’t have to necessarily ask the questions about the product itself, but more about the lifestyle to learn like how the product will be used. Right. That was interesting. That was interesting.

Gen: 22:06

I mean, a similar example was Heidi zak, founder of ThirdLove. ThirdLove is a women’s lingerie brand direct to consumer bras, basically. And they use a quiz to simplify the process of finding the right fit. And the beauty of a quiz is that it’s all structured data, which means that it’s easy to. It’s all kind of uniform, so it’s easy to manipulate, easy to withdraw insights from it as opposed to say support tickets or sales calls where you kind of have very qualitative. And so there are good insights there, but it’s not going to be at scale and so it’s going to be harder to draw the insights from it. But Heidi Zach was running these quizzes to millions of people, got tens of millions of data points, one of which was that sizing is still an issue which unearth the opportunity that half sizes are a market opportunity. So that’s how they kind of stumbled into product innovation by running these quizzes at scale and seeing from the data exactly like the Vessi founder, that there’s this opportunity based on this data and therefore we can move towards that. So the customer insights can be tremendous and a quiz can solve that at a high level at the same time as the conversion element of it.

Vira: 23:23

I mean, yeah. Another story that she told was like, about the Persona, how they thought that, that the brand Persona is like a one person. And then based on that like zero party data that they collected, they realized that the biggest sort of like people group that is buying their shoes are actually nurses like Vancouver or like Seattle nurses. People who like stand a lot, people who use the shoes all the time, they’re always on their feet and that was like interesting to learn apparently because they kind of changed the way Vessi markets their shoes completely. So that zero party data, man, it’s, it’s powerful.

Gen: 24:02

Yeah, really interesting, that’s for sure.

Vira: 24:04

Yeah. And let’s briefly discuss the bottom of the funnel too because one thing I didn’t realize and still I until I started going through your blogs is that you can actually collect zero party data at the bottom of the funnel as well. So what are they? And like how do you do that?

Gen: 24:20

Yeah, in that, you know, the bottom of funnel is basically like all right, we’re moving towards a purchase and so I think a quiz is particularly helpful for recurring subscription brands. And so that could be like a stitch fix or Scentbird which is fragrance or Rockets of Awesome which is kids clothes. And it’s because you know they, they have recurring shipments that they send out and the customer experience is critical and the revenue relies on the customer keeping and buying the purchase the products that were sent. And so that’s where a quiz at the bottom of the funnel really comes into play to hone in on specifically what products Vira wants to see in our box that’s sent out on a monthly basis or what type of coffee Gen wants in his monthly coffee box from trade coffee. And so a quiz is basically an onboarding step there where you’re filling out forms. It could even be as clinical on the more like customer qualification and if you think of like a Hims or Romans which are more medically focused. But yeah, at the bottom of funnel it could act as a lead qualification or as an onboarding form. These are the things that I want to see sent to me on a regular basis.

Vira: 25:35

That’s interesting. That’s interesting. Okay, you’ve collected the data, what happens next? How can you like use that data, that zero party data to personalize your customers experience across all of your channels and especially across email.

Gen: 25:49

Yeah. So for email and sms, probably the quickest win might be segmentation. So like I was saying earlier that the data comes through as a custom property. And so if it’s, you know, as an easy example skincare brand, are you, is your skin type dry, normal, oily? And so those are, those are some simple things. Or it could be, you know, what are your challenges in is it acne, blackheads, rosacea, whatever. And as you layer on more custom properties or as you learn more about what the customer’s challenges are or where they’re coming from their point A, then that can really change the, the types of educational content or the customer testimonials that you’re sending but it, it will help you categorize what’s relevant and important to this type of person. So that’s on the segmentation end. You can also personalize with how you are inserting the products. Like you know, it’s very similar to an abandoned cart where you know that they were this close to purchasing but they didn’t end up purchasing. And you know if you are able to send you know 1-257-emails Post abandoned cart you will with each email get you know, an incremental lift in revenue of those who convert to actually purchase. And the same can be said of a post quiz experience because you know that this is a recommended product, you know why that product is recommended as in like you know the customer’s quiz responses. Now can you build flows around that and it doesn’t need to be an individual flow for each quiz permutation but it could be at a high level, you know some that you’re building in blocks based on you know, if this then that in terms of quiz responses will include this type of content and so it’s, it’s amplifying the relevance as well as improving the likelihood of purchase.

Vira: 27:37

That’s really, really interesting. And yeah definitely from our experience it all comes down to well segmentation but obviously to delivering the value, to delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment. It all comes down to that always. That’s so cool. Well thank you so much for sharing those examples with us. Again where people can learn more about about your brand or about your, your pre hook where people can learn more about you and if they have any answer questions how do they can reach you?

Gen: 28:10

Yeah so my website or the website is pre hook P R E h o o k.com and of course you know, check that out or feel free to email me directly gen G E N@pre hook.com and then we also have a great resource on the website. I’ve been spending you know like past few years going through quizzes where we have about 125 of the best email quizzes or E commerce quizzes available. And I believe it’s preoc.com best e commerce quizzes. I can send it to you and then maybe add it to the show notes but there’s no opt in required. But it’s just a nice easy way to see how versatile quizzes are, how different brands are using them kind of like on the customer experience end and then also from the merchant end to improve their marketing.

Vira: 28:59

Thank you so much, Ken. I personally had like, so many good insights. I’ve never personally used that. The quizzes, I use them as a user. I’m like a huge fan of the those like BuzzFeed, you know, quizzes or like different brand quizzes or whatever. I’ve done them all. But like, as a brand, it’s like really, really interesting how much insights you can get from your customers directly. That’s so cool.

Gen: 29:25

Totally, totally. Well, Vira, yeah, thank you so much for, for the opportunity to chat with you and share.

Vira: 29:30

Awesome. It was fun to have you Gen. Guys, thank you so much for, for listening. As always. All of the notes, all of the links that we mentioned in this episode will be in the description box to this podcast. So scroll down, connect with us, connect with Gen. And as always, don’t forget to subscribe and share this podcast with your friends. And if you leave us a review and reviews are really important for us to grow this to grow this podcast. If you leave us a review and send us your screenshot at flowium.com/ask we’re gonna send you your very own pair of like branded Flowium socks. And they are amazing. They’re super comfy and believe me, you want to have them. Thank you so much for listening as always. And yeah, we hope to see you here next, next week. Bye, guys. Take care again. Bye.

Gen: 30:16

Thank you. Bye.