Welcome to the eCommerce Podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmundson.
This is a show all about helping you to deliver eCommerce wow.
And to do just that, to help us along, I'm chatting with my very
special guest, Neil Hoyne, the Chief Strategist from Google and author of
the fantastic book, Converted, which is all about the data driven way,
to win customers hearts.
And it's actually a great book.
I've enjoyed reading it, uh, but we'll get more into that in just a second.
So before we get into the conversation, let me just take a moment to let you know
that this podcast is brought to you by eCommerce Cohort, the eCommerce membership
group, which you should definitely be a part of if you're involved in eCommerce.
And one of the benefits, as well as all the expert workshops and usual stuff you
get is you get to come along and listen to the live recording of this podcast so
when we have amazing guests like Neil you can be watching it before it goes live.
You can write all your questions in the comments and if we get
chance, we'll definitely ask them.
So do check it out at ecommercecohort.
com I also want to give a bit of a shout out to SubSummit, which
is where I first came across Neil.
We were just chatting about that before we hit the record button.
Uh, a great show and I know they're doing SubSummit 2024.
I will be there again more than likely.
They've asked me back again.
I don't know why I don't, but apparently I'm going.
So come join us.
Now let's talk about today's guest, Neil.
Uh, Neil Hoyne reigns as the Chief Strategist at Google
and has penned the bestseller, Converted, the data driven way.
To win customers hearts.
With a senior fellowship in Artificial Intelligence at the Wharton School.
And a board seat at Purdue University Global, he's quite
the scholarly strategist, oh yes.
Now beyond the boardroom, he is a patented innovator in marketing,
a published contributor to the Harvard Business Review, no less.
Uh, and sought after speaker who has dazzled audiences
in over two dozen countries.
Uh, Neil, welcome to the show, man.
It's great to have you.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Hey, the pleasure's all mine, Matt.
Thanks for having me.
Oh, no, it's great that you're here.
I've been looking forward to this one for a few weeks.
Uh, and in full anticipation of our conversation, I've,
uh, read the book Converted.
Uh, so let's just start by asking you the question I like to ask all authors, what
on earth possessed you to write a book?
Boredom.
It's
March 2020 now.
That enabled it.
Who goes to that?
Look, the first time you're writing a book, you get to bask in the ignorance
of not knowing the process, right?
You think of the end result.
I'm going to have a book.
And you're like, well, what does it take to write a book?
You, you write a lot.
You write, I think in this book, 36 -37, 000 words, which I was told
fairly light for a business text.
I heard they're typically 50 to 60.
So maybe I took the easy way out, but it was a little bit larger than
that as well, which was a Genesis where, you know, somebody mentioned
to me at the beginning of COVID.
Uh, where things were in a dire state and also an uncertain
state versus what we know today.
Yeah.
Where they said, wouldn't it be strange if, if all your knowledge died with you?
Now, this wasn't a comment meant to me.
I could take it as such, and that'd be a nice, Oh yes.
I have a lot of knowledge.
It's valuable.
But to anybody.
You go through life with these stories and with these experiences and the
unfortunate fact is that we often discount the value that those stories
and experiences have to other people.
We think about them as commonplace because they may be common
to us, but unique to others.
And so where it became was really just me writing some of these stories and
then actually sent some of them out to university students who looked and said,
Hey, I wish I knew that when I graduated.
Small business owners, some entrepreneurs who said, I didn't know
that information that to be honest with you, I took as trivial at the time.
I thought, I thought these lessons were common.
I didn't think there was anything new there.
And so to be honest with you, the only reason the book project
happened was because it was never designed to be a book, right?
It was originally started just to be, look, I'll put together a
collection of stories and lessons that if they're helpful to people.
So be it.
But there wasn't any pressure to say it needs to be published, it needs to
go international, which has been great.
It was designed to be a PDF that if somebody reached out to me and
said, hey, could I, could I pick your brain about some stories?
What would you do if you were me?
That I could say, here, here's, here's a couple hours of my time.
Enjoy it.
And as it turned out, a good friend of mine who wrote a New
York Times best selling book called How Google Works, Alan Eagle.
He also wrote The Trillion Dollar Coach about a very successful
VC out here in the Valley.
He looked at this, this PDF, and he said, no, no, no.
He's like, you're not putting this on the Kindle store or something else.
He said, why don't you send it over to some people I know
in the publishing industry.
Let them take a look at it and see Do they think that there is a market?
Yeah, because I clearly had no perspective sitting behind my little
desks thinking there is and 72 hours later we had a contract back from Penguin.
Oh, right.
To put it into the book that you see before you.
But it was very much the spirit that it went into, it's, uh, all the money
from the book is donated, uh, to various food pantries around the U.
S., there's not a profit motive, it's just kind of a sharing motive to say, I've
learned so much from so many other people.
Yeah.
This is just one channel for getting that information back out to others.
Fantastic.
And I saw on your website there's like a part two coming.
There is, there is.
I don't think it's going to be a full book because I can't put
myself back through that yet.
There will be another book.
But instead where it's going is a lot of people have said, hey, you started
writing the book in 2020 and while it was designed not to be a flavor of
the month style approach, saying it's only relevant for a year or two years,
something that's, as a publishing industry calls it, an evergreen title
for years where the content is relevant.
People have said, Hey, I want to go a little bit deeper into the data.
Yeah.
I want to go a little bit deeper into how I apply this specifically to my business.
Give me the step by step guide, things that wouldn't have been
appropriate for the book so we left them out, but they're saying, I'm
interested in a little bit more.
And so actually as recently as last night, uh, I, the microphone's back,
the editing is back and we're actually.
You know, working together with a small group to piece together even more
content for those people that are really curious and say, the book is not enough.
Can I get more of this?
And that's going to be kind of a choose your own adventure approach through
online learning, audio versions and all that coming a little bit later this year.
Fantastic.
Well, I look forward to it.
I genuinely look forward to it.
It's, um, and hats off to you, sir, for writing a book.
I mean, I've mentioned this before on the show.
Listeners will know this.
I've been approached a couple of times.
I've been in a few conversations about writing a book and it just fills me with
dread, uh, the whole, which is why I do a podcast because it's a lot easier.
Sure, if it doesn't, there's something wrong with you.
Everybody with dread.
It's like public speaking, except amplified for years.
Yeah.
You can never get away with it.
So.
You wrote the book 2020.
You're obviously doing this upgrade and you know, the world of digital seems to
move forward at a massive rates of knots.
Um, although I mean your book fundamentally, I mean you, you deal
with data, but you're, you talk a lot about customer relationships.
You talk a lot about dealing with people.
People aren't linear people.
Do you know what I mean?
Understand the data, understand your best customers.
And we'll get into a whole bunch of that.
I've no doubt.
So what's changed between the time you wrote the book and now?
Um, you know, sort of what are some of the key things that have changed or
indeed has anything really changed to the print, the principles, the underlying
principles, they're still the same.
You know, in going back to the COVID time, there were a lot of assumptions
about how things would change.
Work from home would become permanent for everybody.
Yeah.
This would be the way that we would interact.
People would move away from big cities.
In some cases they have, but that that would be a permanent
shift, at least here in Americana.
Uh, questions about what industries would survive versus which ones would
fall, what restaurants would look like, delivery services being the new preferred
channel for interacting with commerce.
And what we really see is the more things change, the more things stay the same.
There are some things that we've observed that are different.
But by and large, when we look at consumer patterns, when we look at
how people are working, there are some remaining parts of COVID that, that
will change and will continue to change, but still there's those fundamental
human behaviors that are the same.
And actually, it was a good test to go through and to say, for these
predictions we made pre COVID, let's take a look at airline.
What happened with lifetime value?
What happened to those relationships?
And what you find generally is there was some value destroyed.
People weren't traveling for a span of a couple of years and
that money will not be recovered.
But in most cases, your best customers pre COVID are still
your best customers post COVID.
The marketing interactions, if you're focusing on your great customers and
ignoring some of the poor quality ones, those actions would have been the same.
And so some differences within the data around how much exactly money we
should make off these people, but by and large, what you should do remains
the same, which gives you confidence today, even with something so disruptive.
The principles still apply.
But if you take a step back and have more of the macro lens, what
you find is companies, I would say, are more uncertain than ever.
I used to have a playbook and my time I've spent, uh, someone looked
at my calendar and added it all up.
I've spent over the past decade, more than 9, 000 hours meeting
with sea levels and boards.
And I can tell you that a large portion of those meetings were companies that said,
our strategy is to do exactly what we did last year, assuming it's all working.
Except let's just grow two or three or five percent or whatever the industry
or Wall Street says we have to grow.
Let's just do that.
And of course there were some waves.
Oh, well, we want to transform digitally or now we want AI.
Yeah.
But companies generally just fixate on saying, let's just
keep doing what we were doing.
We want to keep up with things.
We want to modernize things, but we're not going to undercut the
foundation by which we were built.
And then they come out of COVID and those predictions no longer apply.
They're not sure which direction the market is going.
They don't, consumers are feeling more pressure on prices.
Do they raise their prices?
Do they lower their prices?
Are their customers still there?
What do their customers expect from them?
And there's more openness towards thinking about different ways to engage with them.
And so what I really see is more general willingness from companies to consider
their business models in different ways.
To almost use this as a moment to say, with all this uncertainty,
let's stop planning for what we're doing over the next week or the
next month, and let's take a step back and look at the big picture.
How do we want to approach these changes as a business?
And I would think, my hypothesis here is that it's driven by the fact that
Companies don't believe things are going to return entirely to normal
for their customer base and that this isn't something that they can wait out.
Before it was an idea, let's just wait out this inflation and everything
will be back to the way it was.
But that's not the case.
Their customers are still there.
Their high value customers are still around.
But they're trying to think about how they communicate with them.
What that relationship looks like and how they drive value.
For some, it's a risk.
We want to be as conservative as possible, save as much cash as
possible, and still wait it out.
Others say, while the competition is doing that, now is my chance to
excel and do something different.
The world is unsettled.
Some companies will rise, some will fall.
Every organization has to figure out where they want to be in that spectrum.
Super powerful and it's fascinating and I mean in life generally without getting
too philosophical you know there are definite seasons aren't there there are
definite things that you know there are ups and there are downs and the economy
is in you know the downturn it's sort of down season um and you can you can
do things that cause you to rise And, and emerge stronger from this, you know,
because I think a lot of people are being uber conservative at the moment, um,
especially with their cash, especially with interest rates being the way they
are, the cost of money is in effect gone up, um, it's, it's not as, it's not as
easy to go and get people to just say, oh, I'll give you, you know, a million
bucks to go and do customer acquisition as it was, because, well, hang on a minute,
there's a little, there's a, you know, I've got a little bit of hesitation.
You may need that million at some point.
You want to spend a million or if revenues drop and marketing's always been.
This ties it all together with the book.
Marketing generally for a lot of large companies is a percentage of revenue.
We can only spend 8 or 10 percent.
Anything more, that explains why we're doing great in
sales and we can't have that.
This is how they benchmark themselves, for better or worse.
And then they come back and they say, well, wait a minute, we need
to cut budgets because maybe revenue growth is slowing a little bit.
And they'll just cut and they'll say, well, marketing has to be cut.
By 10%.
Yeah.
And what's odd to me about it is that they cut that 10 percent from
their best customers as well as they do their worst customers.
Yeah.
So wait a minute.
So you're going to market less to the people that are going to drive
60, 70, 80 percent of your revenue.
Why would that make sense?
Why would you not market less?
To the customers, you know, aren't going to buy that are going
to be hard cases to win over.
And this is where it all comes together.
Companies say, because I don't know the difference.
I know how many times somebody bought from me, but I haven't put that together
into, into a model or a prediction that says that this relationship will last
and that I need these people and that I need to continue to message these people.
And so, I just go across the board because everybody looks the same to me.
And that was really what the core of the book was, just determining
who are your best relationships.
Who should you spend a little bit less time on?
And now those lessons are even more relevant than ever.
Yeah, I they are.
And it's, it's an interesting one, isn't it?
I, again, like you say, this was the core message of the book or one of the
core messages that came through to me.
Now hopefully this is what you intended.
'cause I'm not, you know, I'm, I, I'm not always right.
I appreciate that.
But for me, I mean,
no right or wrong answers.
That's part of the fun of the book is that it's
Yeah.
Everyone gets to view it through their lens
Absolutely.
And through their business.
And so for me, one of the things that came out, um, was.
Uh, what did you call it at that sub summit, the romantic persona, the belief
that, uh, we can make all customers like us, um, and that all customers
are the same, just given enough time and energy, uh, and again, in the book,
it's very much a case of, and it's an obvious statement to make, I think,
Neil, you know, it's, this is, and no disrespect, it's not rocket science.
It's not like this is some new revelation.
Not all customers are equal, you know.
Um, and you, you give a, you sort of break customers down in the book, don't
you, into sort of the percentiles, the sort of the five percentiles.
And so the premise is treat your best customers with a little bit
more, you know, and think about those and don't worry too much about the
customers at the, at the other end.
But so often in eCommerce, especially, we treat every customer the same.
We send them all the same email, uh, the advertising.
We spend across the board is exactly that.
It's across the board.
So why do you think we do that?
Because of where eCommerce metrics came from.
I mean, if you go back, and this is really going back 15, 20 years, it's
in the early analytics platforms.
Urchin was the one that eventually became Google Analytics through an acquisition.
They captured data that they had.
Not data that told a story.
We can measure how many seconds somebody's on a web page.
We will surface that metric.
How many times somebody clicks on this button, we will give them that.
How many times somebody orders, we will give them that.
It didn't start from a business lens.
Let's figure out how many customers they have and how valuable they are.
It simply said we have this data and it left this nascent industry to
kind of figure out, well, what does it mean and how do we craft a story?
And they did the best they could at that time, but unfortunately it didn't become
something that continued to evolve.
It became something that became gospel.
This is the way we will look at the world.
And those habits are hard to change through industries and
companies that built their entire business on those metrics because
that's what they've grown to love.
But then they struggle when they see entrepreneurial companies.
Who can look at it from a fresh lens?
Let's say I'm not going to target the number, a total number
of orders like my competitor.
I'm going to target the best customers and all of a sudden the best customers
in that industry I'm thinking about Amazon here feel that love that they
didn't feel when they were treated like a commodity product by the competitors.
Yeah, and then they gravitate towards that direction and that's
what moves industries over.
Now, to give a little bit of a sense of calm for, for everybody that's
listening to this, you mentioned before something that's interesting.
You said, well, this isn't rocket science and, and it reminds me of a story.
This wasn't included in the book, but, um, there was a, a, a
person I met in, inside Google.
We have a whole bunch of interesting people with interesting backgrounds
and some of our technical services team reached out one time and he
wanted just to have, um, he wanted just to have lunch with me and you
go into LinkedIn profiles cause you want to see who this person came from.
And this person came, uh, with a PhD in physics.
So he's reading through his paper, literal rocket scientist, and now
he's at Google doing data integration.
So when I sat down with him, I had to ask the obvious question, maybe this wasn't
the most elegant way to frame it, but I said, look, you're a rocket scientist
that now gets people to click on pictures.
Explain this to me.
What's the story?
And he actually commented, and I think he was right on this, where
he said, Advertising is harder.
Wow.
There's constants in rocket science, right?
And you'll teach us at a hundred level university course.
Gravity is a constant.
Mass is hopefully a constant.
You can figure those two out and say, look, you tell me how high
you need something in orbit.
And I can tell you how much energy you need to push.
You get to those fundamentals, but try to say, well, how many
clicks do you need someone to make until they're ready to buy?
And is that a constant?
No, it's going to change every day with every message,
product, price, and promotion.
And the interesting part, from an outside lens, was somebody looking at it to say, I
don't know why marketers feel embarrassed that they don't have this answer.
Now they come in and a CFO pushes them and says, you don't know
exactly how much this is worth.
Yeah.
And you kind of look at it, and it's like, nobody knows this.
And marketers are like, oh, sorry, we'll try harder.
And he almost has this lens, which is to be like, no, you get
in there and be like, do you know how difficult my job actually is?
And this is grounded by the way, not just on speculation, but a research
paper that came out earlier this year that looked at to say, well,
why for some companies do CEOs have a difficult time investing in marketing?
Is it that they look at marketing as an expense?
And no, the the actual answer was they looked at marketing
as being easier than it was.
They didn't know how difficult it was to build a brand and
to connect with customers.
They thought it was, you flip a switch, turn on the switch, we reach more
customers, turn it off, we reach fewer.
Build a brand?
Well, you spend on brand, and the brand appears.
They didn't think about all how those accumulated actions,
building those customer relationships, compound over time.
And for the companies and the people that can master those
interactions, that can be great.
Let's call them digital people persons, alright?
I can interact with these people and build these relationships,
how valuable those traits are.
And so in their mind, marketing was simple because marketers try to make it simple.
And so for anyone listening here that thinks, wow, this is really complicated.
No, nobody has an answer for this.
Nobody has a perfect formula.
And for those small business owners, what they have is something
very special and very valuable.
You have the ability to take a step back and really reflect
on who their customers are.
They're not buried inside a large organization where they'll never
talk to these people, where they have millions of people that
they can treat like a commodity.
Oftentimes, small business owners will be directly into the numbers, will
be contacting customers themselves.
Sometimes they get postcards handwritten by owners because they take that pride.
So, in effect, for all the money and resources large organizations
have, It just separates them further and further from the thing that
matters most, their customers.
And I would take that small business angle any day of the week because they're
starting from that point of goodness.
Just, I always worry when they aspire to be like a large corporation, be like,
I'm going to grind through all this data and have thousands of metrics.
No, take a step back and stay as close as you can to those people.
Yeah, that's super powerful advice.
I think it's interesting, uh, the small business advantage isn't it, is, um,
the analogy I've always been given is small businesses like riding in a
speedboat, whereas the log Corp, large corporates is like a big cruise liner.
You know, the speedboat can, you know, is much more nimble and can
adapt and et cetera, et cetera.
No, the analogy falls down.
I appreciate that if you push it too far.
But the, the advantage.
The, the small, like the small eCommerce business.
Um, I often get asked, how do I compete with Amazon?
Right.
So I'm, I'm, I'm here.
I've got, you know, I'm turning over a couple of hundred grand a year, and then
there's Amazon doing whatever Amazon, everything just sort of gets lumped
under the Amazon name, doesn't it?
How do I compete with Amazon?
And I think.
The relationship with your customer and understanding your customer in a
unique way and sort of understanding their story strikes me as still
perhaps the biggest and best way to compete for want of a better
expression with the likes of Amazon.
Would that be right?
Absolutely.
In fact, I'll give you one of my favorite personal case studies and this goes
back several years ago but there was a website and they're still around today.
They're a great e commerce retailer.
You could probably imagine what they do, although I don't think they ship abroad.
They're, they're very popular here domestically.
bodybuilding.com.
Okay.
I love this company.
You can probably take a guess as to what they do in the eCommerce space.
They sell nutritional supplements, proteins, amino acids, vitamins, all that.
And back in the day, the way that I would summarize their business
model was very straightforward.
They sold the same products at Amazon, as Amazon, but cost
more and took longer to ship.
It's not a great way to win, but yeah.
You're thinking about that in that question.
How, to your point earlier, how do they possibly compete with Amazon?
Now let's look at it from a customer lens.
Let's get away from all the data that Amazon has and all the money Amazon has.
They have their own planes to deliver stuff.
We may only have FedEx to rely on.
But if you think about the Amazon customer experience and you go to
their website and you type in protein powders, you get 50, 000 plus results.
Every product claiming to be better than every other product, having thousands
of reviews, all four stars or higher.
And as a consumer how do you make a decision?
When you're overwhelmed by so much choice, now they probably realize the same thing,
but I talked to that team and I said, well, how did you sort through this?
And they said, it was actually a little bit serendipitous.
One of our, one of our vendors came to us and said, I have a new
product coming into the market.
Can I educate consumers?
All right, so they said they gave him a couple bucks and they hired somebody to
write a bunch of content, not to sell the product, but to educate consumers
about how to make a better decision.
Filling in that gap that Amazon doesn't provide.
Amazon is great if you know what you want to buy.
But if you really are looking even for a TV, here are a million TVs.
What is important to me?
Most likely you're not going to Amazon to make that determination.
You go to Amazon when you're ready to buy and you have that price.
You will go to Consumer Reports, maybe the New York Times and
say, what do you recommend?
Because Amazon's not going to tell me.
That was a niche that bodybuilding.com filled was that from that one article,
I heard they had as many as 80 people at one time writing content, not designed to
push people for sale, but to say how we're going to build this relationship with you.
It's by building a community first, by educating you, by doing what
our competitors don't do, which is treating you like a person, helping
you learn about the product and the space, knowing that when it comes time
to purchase, we're pretty confident that you're going to stay in this
community and give us your business.
Because we're working towards it, and that's how they built it.
They built a community, and when you saw their customer journey,
typically in eCommerce, you see three or four interactions.
Get somebody in, somebody buys.
Not only was their journey a lot longer, which meant that they had five, ten times
more interactions with their customers.
But they also were coming through organically.
They were searching for content.
They weren't searching for the name.
They didn't have that brand yet.
But they had unique content that other people didn't have.
And oddly enough, after that transaction was completed, where we would walk away,
you know that thank you page on Amazon.
Alright, here, you gave us your money.
Here's a confirmation number you won't write down.
Off you go.
They actually found that their customers were willing to continue
to engage with them to continue learning more even between orders.
So instead of having this weird sporadic thing where every six months they
see their customers, their customers were coming back every day to engage
with their brand and their community.
And all it took was a differing point of view to say, yeah, we see value in this.
Even if customers aren't buying right away, we want
to connect with these people.
We want to build their trust.
We want to earn their business.
And that's how we're going to compete against Amazon.
Simple as that.
Fantastic.
I love the story.
And I'll check out bodybuilding.com because I've not, full disclosure,
I've not shopped on that website.
Uh, as you can probably tell from the video, if you're watching, uh, but, um,
yeah, that it makes sense, doesn't it?
This is how you do it.
This is how you compete well.
You know your customer, you educate them, you form a
community relationship with them.
I guess if I'm starting out an eCommerce, or if I'm sort of a young
eCommerce business where I feel like I'm rushing around, we have
this expression in England, I'm rushing around like a blue arse fly.
Just basically means I'm, you know, I'm just, I'm all over the place.
How do I approach this idea then of building the relationship,
building this community?
Um, because I, I, I, just from various conversations I have with
people, it feels like overwhelm.
It's just another thing to do.
Do you know what I mean?
And so
it's a lot, it's a lot.
And as a small business owner, you're wearing multiple hats.
Marketing is one thing that you have to do through the course of the day.
Here's, I would give two pieces of advice.
One is, remember the goal is to be better, not to be perfect.
Now in a marketing area that I live in, we live in auctions where
people are not rewarded with the top position in the auction because
they have the best information.
They're rewarded because they have better information than everybody else.
And so the goal is always just to be incrementally better than the other small
businesses that you're competing with.
To be better to your customers.
And that's a gradual process, but I always look at it as a term
goes, 1 percent improvement every day is better than sitting around
for a year, two years, trying to figure out how to get to a hundred.
I don't think anybody can get to a hundred.
So sometimes I always follow that rule to say, is it better for my business?
Did I change my business for the better today?
And that's enough for me.
The second is when we think about, you know, businesses as a whole,
here's something interesting that, um, I think Silicon Valley
honestly has lost over the years.
Uh, one of the more popular.
Uh, terms around here, especially with business models is all about scale, right?
How do you take this and scale it out to a billion people?
It's a great idea.
And often lost in there is, is because of a great compromise, which is, well,
we can't write individual content for a billion products, so we won't
write individual content and we can't service customers one to one, so we'll
introduce chatbots, which are miserable.
But, but then we can reach a billion people.
And there's this great compromise to say, in order to reach everybody, these
are all the things we can and can't do.
And I was talking to a restaurant owner in New York City.
And I was like, what does scale mean to you?
And he said, here's what scale means.
And this is where we find success.
And he's been very successful over the course of his career.
He says, I look at what an experience could be if I was
the only person working in that restaurant and one customer came in.
And they were the only customer I was going to see that day and how great I
could make that experience for them.
I could learn who they were, what they wanted.
I could prepare food for them.
And then a second customer comes in.
Now how do I make sure that both customers receive the same great experience,
the best I can possibly deliver?
And then how do I do that for five or for 10 or for 50?
And effectively it's letting your values of what great looks like
of the business you want to build.
Drive more than the technology.
It's not saying, Oh, I can build a chat bot.
I don't need to talk to my customers.
I can give them a QR code.
I don't need to print menus.
It's saying really what's the experience you want to deliver
and being uncompromising in getting that to your customers.
Whereas other companies are simply saying, what's the cheapest way
to service millions of people.
Because customers feel that way, and that's a unique advantage
of small businesses, is that they can look at that lens.
Whereas other businesses, you realize how you feel.
I'm a number, right?
I'm a CRM ID.
I'm a loyalty program number.
They have no idea who I am or what I want.
Once a company is able to do that, and just to give them a little bit more
attention and learn who they are and what their interests are, to personalize
to their needs, it's a lot better.
Yeah.
So I love one of the companies out here, Chewy.
They send handwritten cards to their, their customers.
And at first I got this and I thought this exact question
from a Silicon Valley mindset.
I'm like, how the hell does this scale?
I'm like, you can't possibly do it.
And you start thinking from a technology lens, you're like, they must be printing
all these cards and handwriting, right?
So you're holding it up to the light.
You're like, do I think somebody actually read it and wrote this card?
And then you, you start Googling it and people have all these conspiracy theories.
They're like, and someone actually pointed out, you know, here's a machine that holds
a real pen and will draw on handwriting.
And so I reached out, I reached out to Chewy and I said, you have to
explain to me, how does this work?
And they said, here's how it works.
Everybody in the organization, all the way up to the CEO has a certain
amount of time every week where they write cards to our customers.
I was like, how do you prove the ROI?
They're like, we don't know.
We just know that our customers love it and it connects with our customers.
Right?
Sometimes art comes before the science.
Eventually we'll prove the ROI of these interactions but what we know
is there are thousands of threads online where customers are posting
pictures of the cards they received.
And we don't go back and say, well this is worth exactly 15 cents.
We say, with this is the relationship we want to have with our customers.
And the same thing carries forward.
If you have an automatic subscription.
And you cancel it because, unfortunately, maybe your pet died.
They could say, oh, customer churned, off they go.
They take a step back and they say, look, the customer's gone, there's
no more revenue from this customer.
We're still going to write a card with our condolences.
We're going to spend the time to do that because we want that type of relationship.
Just the same.
If you had an individual mom and pop pet shop on any business street, and you
knew something happened to one of the customers that came in every day, that
may be the same way you approach it.
And small business owners, whenever I talk to them, they feel reinvigorated.
This is the passion that brought them into the business that they
felt was lost in technology.
The real message is to keep that passion and force technology to find ways to
deliver that to your customers or not.
I remember as you talked, One, in the early days of one of our
beauty businesses, uh, which I sold a couple of years ago, but we had
this, this beauty business and we did all the email marketing internally.
We had our own email server, which we will just, and so we got all the bounce backs,
which you don't get if you use like Aweber and Klavio and all of those kind of guys.
You get the, you try to reply to a message and you get the no reply ad.
It's like, how hard is this to go to somebody's inbox?
You send something to mine.
I can't respond back.
Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it?
But we would get all the bounce backs.
And the thing that we got that we noticed was, um, because we
were a beauty brand, we would get quite a few emails from customers.
Um, you know, the sort of the out of office emails going,
I'm on maternity leave.
And we were like, After a while, it took a little while for the light bulb to come
on Neil, I'm not gonna lie, but after a while the light bulb came on, and so
all we did was we sent out a free care package to anybody, because we knew their
address, and we put in there some like, you know, beauty products and stretch
cream, and we even had little baby grows, you know, sort of little designs.
We put it in a box, it cost like a few pounds, you know, like
less than five bucks to make each box, and we sent those boxes out
with no agenda, just sent it out.
Um, all because technology at that time could tell me if
they were on maternity leave.
Well, I can't begin to tell you how much good will that That
one act gave us, you know, yeah,
it's, it's what, it's, it's what we talk about.
It's taking those hints from customers, what they're sharing with you and
thinking about in a personal context, what you would do if a customer comes
into your store, a good customer says, Hey, I'm not going to be around.
I'm having a baby.
Wouldn't it be bizarre?
You get that information, you get that hint, just as you did that auto
reply and you're like, Hey, Okay.
You just walked away.
No, congratulations.
No, that's wonderful.
I'm not trying to engage him on that subject, but just thinking
about yourself, oh, all right.
Uh, I guess we'll suspend your account for 90 days.
Yeah.
Is that cool?
You automatically resumed.
That, that is, and here's, I want to be clear because it's not to say
for some companies that have been successful, some companies have been
successful with this very mass market Efficiency driven approach and for the
companies that decide to pursue it.
So be it really.
I think the revelation, this ties back to those early comments is that.
Now that we're in this very different economic condition and things are
uncertain, a lot of companies are saying, I need a strategy that's different
than my competitors to be successful.
I can't fight over pennies and clicks.
I want something where I find customers that ideally will stick with me
through this difficult time, that will pay more money for my products,
that I will have better relationships for, that I don't need to, and I'll
be honest even as a marketer, that I don't need to continue marketing to.
In order for them to come back or that no matter how much my competitors send
the messages, they say, I don't care going back against that bodybuilding.
com example.
I'm happy to pay a higher price.
I'm happy to wait longer for shipping.
Because I feel connected with this company.
Yeah.
And to think that's the foundation by which you want to build your business on.
Yeah.
Fantastic.
So how would you, uh, and I, I mean, I kind of know the answer.
I've read the book.
I've, um, and I, I enjoyed the, some of the, one of the things you said at Sub
Summit, but let's, how would you build relationships with your customers using.
You know, in an eCommerce setting, specifically, I guess, this is a
bit of a loaded question, Neil, so let me just get straight to it.
The thank you page, one of the things you said at SubSummit was, uh, and you,
you alluded to it earlier, on the Amazon thank you page, you're given a number
which you never write down and that's it.
Um, what can we do there specifically, I'm just thinking of a simple tactic here,
Neil, you know, what can we do there which helps us to start build relationships?
Well, I mean, one of the cornerstones of relationships is being able to
exchange information and thoughts.
If you and I were talking here, and you were asking questions, and I
wasn't responding That wouldn't be a great conversation and and oftentimes
that's what happens with e commerce players because there's that well worn
understanding That is if we ask a lot of questions, they're not going to buy
our product Mm hmm people know if I add additional questions on to my checkout
flow, they may not buy and that's really what my thing is At the moment.
Let's keep them focused.
No distractions at all for future value.
Keep them focused at the task at hand And so what we have to find are
where are there other ways where we can carve out time to understand more
about our customers and their needs that aren't going to directly compete
with maybe the short term goals that we need to keep the lights on.
Yeah.
And so that's where the thank you page is actually an interesting area because
at least for eCommerce, the height of trust is relatively speaking for any
transaction is after they give you money.
I really hope you deliver the product I just purchased and
I hope it's what I expected.
Because there it goes.
I just handed it over.
I handed over my money to you.
And what does that do?
At the end of that, this is where it becomes really short sighted.
It was like, I got exactly what I needed.
Off you go.
Like imagine just how bizarre that might be.
You meet somebody, can I have your phone number?
Sure.
Here it is.
Okay.
Bye.
And then they walk over and start talking to someone else.
It's like, no, we had a great conversation going on.
You got what you wanted and then off you went.
And so what I encourage eCommerce companies to do is, first of
all, never turn away a customer.
I don't care where they are in that process.
If they just spent money with you, it doesn't mean the
transaction or that moment is over.
And so you have that thank you page, which is where the basic place to start,
which is to say, all right, you just got captured a whole bunch of money.
What next?
Do you let them go until next time they need to buy?
For some companies, they use it to say, I'm gonna use this time to share
more about what's going to happen.
Domino's Pizza does this great, where they say, all right, you just
placed your order for your pizza.
Here's who has the order.
Here's the steps it's going through.
They'll tell you every step of the way, the person who has your order.
eCommerce companies will sometimes say, You just ordered a sweater.
Let me give you the process of how that sweater is going from a sheep
all the way to your front door.
We're going to show you pictures of the factory, that process.
Why?
Because it turns out that when people understand what's going
on behind the scenes, they value the quality of that product.
They value that company higher and are more likely to return.
Others use it as a moment to deepen the conversation.
They say, instead of giving you that blank page, can I ask
you three or four more things?
How did you find us?
Who else do you buy from?
Again, you just, you completed the conversion.
So you're not going to worry about them going someplace else.
The worst that can happen is they go back to what you've been doing all the
time, which is they close the window, but you're surprised as to how many people
actually want to respond and provide data.
What can we do better as a company to service you?
What did you like the most?
That's the best time to ask for more information because it's
just otherwise the alternative is you're sending them away.
The only thing that I offer to people is sometimes people
become very procedural about it.
They'll put net promoter score on a zero to ten scale, how likely are
you to recommend this to a friend?
All right.
And that's all they ask.
Yeah.
Can you write a review on Trustpilot for us before?
You actually get our product, you just got our money, you
haven't seen our product, but tell everybody we're a five star company.
Keep that area fluid.
Ask questions, not so that you can get a nice chart that benchmarks
it, but ask questions that inspire and develop your curiosity.
What else could we do?
Hey, what do you think about this creative we're thinking about running?
Hey, here's a product we haven't released yet.
Change those questions up.
Because you want the answers not to be used for more methodology,
but to inspire what you say next to that customer in that relationship.
Imagine if you're launching a new product or thinking about a product.
Hey, what would you think about this?
And now having a signal to say, I can go back to this customer in the future
because I've already indicated interest in something that I was building.
That's what you want to do.
Again, bringing it back to the physical store metaphor.
Somebody comes in, Hey, do you want to see something we're working on?
What do you think?
Do you think we should bring these types of products in?
Would you be interested in that?
Yeah.
Then you get to give them a call later on to say, hey, we took your
advice and we're bringing in it.
How great that must be.
And even in the, in most rudimentary sense, it's still better than
saying, thank you for your money.
Off you go.
Yeah.
And so sometimes it's just directing us to say there's opportunities to
engage these customers at parts of the funnel that we didn't think about.
So if you bring that awareness, if the only change you make today is you go to
your thank you page and you ask a survey question that you change every week.
And you look at the results just as an owner to say, how
can I improve this business?
And that's enough value to start because so few companies do it.
Yeah, it's, I've, when I heard you talk about this at Subsummit, I'm
like, why have, we've, we've tried various things on the thank you page.
Um, uh, educational stuff.
We do videos and we, we do seasonal videos and they're quite, um, Quite unpolished.
It's me holding my iPhone, you know, in quite a selfie format or
whatever and they're good and we get good interaction with them.
But then this idea of taking the conversation further, asking a few
questions, I thought was super powerful.
And, um, so thank you for that.
That was my, uh, one of my key takeaways from, uh, Subsummit, uh, that we
implemented in, uh, the business.
Um, listen, Neil, I'm aware of time.
I'm aware you're a very busy man.
If people want to reach out to you, if they want to connect with
you, if they want to find out more, what's the best way to do that?
I mean, you can put my name into Google and one of the first
results are going to be either my LinkedIn profile, which is fine.
I certainly answer messages there to the best of my ability.
It also allows you to access just Random content I have nothing to sell
or promote, but that seems to be, that is the mass market approach.
But also if, if you, there's a message, you know, the message
function, or if you want to send me an email, it's just hello at neilhoyne.
com.
I'm happy to answer those messages.
Only thing that I generally tell people is that in answers, if it's something
valuable, I always try to figure out a way to bring it out to the community.
And so oftentimes those messages, and I always get permission first, but I like
to have those conversations say, How do we all learn from each other together?
I learn as much from the people that reach out to me as people say they
may learn from me in my lectures or my books or what have you.
And so it's always part of that conversation.
I always invite people that are listening to this one to continue it on other
mediums wherever it's helpful to them.
Fantastic.
Well, listen, Neil, I really appreciate you taking the
time to come on the show, man.
And, uh, Oh, it's been great.
Loved, loved, loved the conversation.
And again, Neil, I have copious amounts of notes here on my,
uh, on my note taking device.
Uh, it's been, it's been fantastic.
So thank you so much for coming on.
Well, that's it.
That's another fantastic conversation finished up.
A huge thanks to Neil again for joining me today.
Also, a big shout out to today's show sponsor, the eCommerce Cohort.
Remember to check them out at eCommerceCohort.com and be sure to follow
the eCommerce Podcast wherever you get your podcasts from because we've got yet
more great conversations lined up and I don't want you to miss any of them.
Oh, no, I don't.
Now If no one has told you yet today, let me be the first person to tell you,
you are awesome, yes you are, created awesome, it's just a burden you have to
bear, I've got to bear it, Neil's got to bear it, you've got to bear it as well.
Now the eCommerce Podcast is produced by Aurion Media, you can find our
entire archive of episodes Episodes on your favorite podcast app.
The team that makes this show possible is Sadaf Beynon and
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And our theme song was written by Josh Edmondson.
And as I mentioned, if you would like to read the show notes and
transcripts, she can find all of that, all the links, everything on the
website at www.ecommerce podcast.net
. That's it from me.
That's it from Neil.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Have a fantastic week wherever you are in the world.
I'll see you next time.
Bye for
now.