Turning tracked orders into signed-in shoppers

TRANSCRIPT

This transcript was completed by an automated system, please forgive any grammatical errors.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

customer, brands, signed, order, tracking, account, people, shopify, retention, status, merchants, experience, log, product, great, build, started, shopping, personalization, returns

SPEAKERS

Joe Vancena, Maier Bianchi, Yaw Aning

Yaw Aning 00:00

All right, well, let's let's get rolling. We got a lot of people in now. So welcome everybody. My name is Yao inning, and excited to be hosting a pretty awesome webinar today a couple of housekeeping things. As we get going, please engage in chat. So we're, as we're going if you've got questions, or insights to share, please drop them into. We'll be monitoring that and weave those questions into the conversation. Today's topic is all about how to turn, turn tract orders into signed in shoppers, how to unlock unlock different like new experiences once you've got people signed in. And then using those experiences really personalize the entire shopping experience. I am very pumped to be joined by Joe, CEO and co founder at status in Meyer, founder of the world class agency for Meyer. And so I'll let these two introduce themselves. And then we'll get started Joe, why don't you go first?

Joe Vancena 01:08

Sweet. Hi joven Sana, one of three co founders here at status with Dustin Tevis and Chris pinch shot. I'm in Columbus, Ohio. Happily married to Martina who's also an E commerce you guys may have met her Martina Cronin. Let's see I got my career in E commerce started with Luke returns. I was early employee their lead growth and sales from 2017 to 20. Oh gosh, I don't know plus four years 2021. And yeah, I fell in love with Shopify. I am very thankful for Shopify, think free com we get paid to help people buy clothes every day. And that's like my pinch me moment every day at work. So excited to be here. Thanks for hosting. Yeah.

Maier Bianchi 01:48

And thanks, Joe Amir Bianchi, founder of B Meyer, where a Shopify Magento Adobe commerce, big commerce agency founded in Brooklyn, New York, Long Term work, you know, have worked in the e Commerce Industry over the long term, the last two decades, and the brand side the agency side more as a founder, and then you know, previously done development, and now more focused on solutions myself. And in general, just enjoy trying to understand the challenges facing different stakeholders in E commerce and, you know, in helping people solve their problems, that's what I get, you know, that's what I enjoy out of this is the adding enthusiasm for people to conquer their own challenges.

Yaw Aning 02:29

Awesome. Well, welcome both of you to the session, migrant background, co founder and CEO at Malomo. Based in Indianapolis, and we really helped merchants manage the customer experience after they after a customer buys serve under the kind of high growth merchants on the shop by ecosystem, also married with with three kids and a lovely French Bulldog. And that is that is me. So okay, we're gonna dive right in, we got a lot to cover. So we're going to try to move really quickly through all this stuff, we're going to, we're going to bounce around on a couple of different topics, we've got quick demo of this, this new integration that that we've launched, and some cool use cases that we'll talk through. But to kick things off, I thought it'd be good to get some perspective on the current environment. So seems like, you know, I'm talking to more and more merchants every day that are shifting more of their resources and their focus from acquisition towards retention initiatives. And so I'm curious to hear from you. Mir, what are you hearing from merchants about retention? Like, why do you think there's this growing emphasis or movement around around this?

Maier Bianchi 03:49

Well, you know, one thing is that the market is changing. Times are hard for everyone, you know, expenses have gone up tremendously. So obviously, people are looking for ways to, you know, continuously build revenue. And as you know, there's like a threat of a recession, or we're in a recession, or there's a lot of, you know, debate about that. And then, you know, a lot of brands saw like skyrocketing growth in 2020 and 2021. And then in 2022, the trend came back down to more what the normal projected curve for ecommerce was. And in 2023, there's still a lot of room to grow. But brands really need to get smarter and invest in their community. So, you know, the landscape around customer acquisition is keep settling, like in terms of iOS, and those changes and how that related to privacy and like paid paid acquisition. And so you know, customer acquisition is as expensive as it's ever been with, with less opportunities. So brands really need to do more with the customers they've already acquired. And as you know, it's more profitable to have a repeat customer than to keep paying for new customers. And so, you know, there's a lot of like loyalty programs which are good but they're not enough of their on their own. So we're seeing also the growth of memberships and subscriptions style ecommerce. But in order to really create affinity and keep people coming back, you need to have a really amazing experience end to end. And so that's where we're focused is on trying to do that more.

Yaw Aning 05:18

Love that, like, how were you when you're working with your merchants? I'm curious to hear, you know how, how you think of retention? Like what is it? What does it actually mean to drive that within within a merchants business? And I know you mentioned a couple of things there that you're helping your merchants focus on, what is there like how do you how do you guys think about that?

Maier Bianchi 05:40

Well, at the Meijer, one thing of always trying to enlighten people is like your storefront is essentially what your store would be in the physical realm, right. So find, like, just like if you were going to shop in your local community, which is what like, you know, depending on the size of your brand, you see yourself as right, like you're, we are the go to store for this product, or this type of product. And so you know, you want to find ways to talk to your customers and show that attention and dedication that you would in the physical space to your loyal and returning customers. So, you know, the trend is to really focus on personalization, getting more creative with incentives and rewards programs, having a fast and beautiful website fast more than anything, right? Because people are, are, you know, mobile focused and expect to have a not have their time wasted. So that's something that's always a big thing is like performance killing, like fixing performance issues on their Shopify sites. And then beyond that, build the community, right, like find a way to talk to your customer, either brands are experimenting a lot with live stream and shoppable. video, or you know, you do more targeted outreach, where you actually call your customers or, you know, meet them where they are on social, just having an engaging community goes a long way to keeping people coming back. And then on top of that, outstanding customer service, and that whole side of the experience, like someone wants someone has made a purchase, being treated like you care, and that you're not just like, another number goes a long way. Like I know me personally, when shopping, independent brands, that's what leaves a memorable experience is like how you were treated throughout the process.

Yaw Aning 07:20

Yeah, love that love that. I'm curious to hear to like, are there? Are there metrics that you're finding, like, you guys track your merchants are using to track whether retention is improving, or? Or not? Yeah, and if you've got any insights there? Yeah,

Maier Bianchi 07:42

I mean, there's stuff around like lifetime value. And you know, like, I would say, starting with keeping it simple, right? Focusing on, hey, if you're not getting more than one order out of this percent of your customers, you're not doing something, right. So it's like, do something to cater to those people. So starting with that basic figure, right? How many of your customers are returning customers, and knowing who they are. And then on top of that, looking at the average order value of those customers are looking at, you know how you can keep raising that because then you're getting more return on the initial marketing used to acquire them?

Joe Vancena 08:16

We started I started asking that question to brands very specifically, because you said it where it's like orders, regular orders, one orders greater than one like China track how many orders a customer has given segment has, we've started asking at the beginning of calls like, which of these three segments are most important to you, as you solve this crazy market orders greater than one orders equal one, or orders equals zero. And it just started to create these really good conversations where people are like, Oh, my gosh, orders greater than one, I almost don't care about them, because my job there is done. And that was a big realization for us where it's like, we thought retention was going to be the big thing. And customers with orders greater than one or two, or three or four, we're going to be still important. And most brands we talked about are really focused on orders equal one and trying to get them to orders greater than one. And that's like the very specific spot they're investing in. So it's been like a wasn't expecting to hear that from the market in this time.

Yaw Aning 09:06

That's interesting, Joe. So like, when you're talking with merchants, when you pose that question, it's like if they've gotten a customer to buy TWICE, Like that is not where they're focusing a lot of the resources because they've almost kind of like determined, we've already figured out how to get somebody from one to two, and likely they'll go from two to three and three to four. It's more of that. How do we go from one? One to two, right? Is that that I'm hearing?

Joe Vancena 09:31

Yeah, totally. And like, I'll be totally honest with it. We're a new product. So we're like creating a line item for a lot of brands. And when we were trying to create a new product line item in a budget and selling it at orders greater than one for customer, we're like, Hey, we're going to nurture your best customers. But we're not spending a dime on our best customers. We're spending on first time customers and make them best customers like okay, less than a lot of willingness to pay a solve orders equal to three four problems.

Yaw Aning 09:59

Yeah, That's really interesting. That's very, very interesting. When we so at the agency I ran before we started Malomo. And we were working with merchants, one of the things that they they would often measure is not even like because it's, I think it's really like LTV, we talked about this yesterday, LTV as a, as a concept makes sense to everybody, in practice, incredibly hard to actually measure. And do that at scale, because you've got different things like cohorts happening, and all of those cohorts are experiencing different journeys and different products. And so a lot of the brands that we were working with, they just focused on percentage of customers each month, that bought once versus the percentage of customers that bought more than once. So it's like, all of our customer base orders that came in this month. 60%, were first time and 40% were were repeat. And we just want to move that number from more than the repeat more in the first time bucket to the repeat bucket. That was the only two things that were they're focusing on. So that was really, I think, near you kind of said this, like just keeping it simple, right? They just focus on that one metric of getting what people that had bought wants to to in Joe kind of reinforcing that. So that's great. So I think that's I think that's that's a good context as to like, Okay, well, how are our merchants thinking about retention? It feels like such a nebulous concept. But like, what does that actually mean in practice? It think it'd be, it'd be interesting to sort of like narrow in a little bit. So like, what is signed in shopping? Joe? Like, what? I feel like I've heard this, I feel like this, this term has been tossed around. But I'd be curious to hear from you. Like, what does that actually mean? What is it

Joe Vancena 11:48

started out as logged in commerce morphed into signed in shopping? It's basically this idea of how ecommerce can change if, if an individual was signed into your website? And can we start to get everyone looking at that world? And what kind of experiences would we create if that existed, and so like, there's a part of status, of course, where we like want to be, we want to be thought of when you think of signage shopping, but honestly, you could think of signage shopping, absence of status, just like through your own website with your with an account today, anything you used to sign somebody in. So a couple of observations we saw in like building the company and getting things started, cookies are going away, consumer data is getting harder to get, everyone we know is solving personalization by scraping data from you, right? Like you visit a site and that you've never given your email address to before and then all of a sudden, they send you an abandoned car email, you're like, what's going on here? That's probably wrong. And the world is waking up to that. And so how do we solve personalization in a world where you can't scrape my data from me. And that's the whole world of signing and shopping, if you can just convince someone to sign it, you know exactly where they are, they probably tell you more about who they are, because they wanted to sign in. And now you can start to adapt a site to them. So that's kind of the big the big idea. And again, absence of status. Like we always say that customer accounts and status can help unlock sign and shopping, but agencies are the ones who create the world. It's like, because the site gets built, and these awesome innovative ideas get built on top of cider. So that's the loose, loose direction of where we're headed with that.

Yaw Aning 13:15

Okay, got it. Me or like, what do you are merchants talking about this with you? Like? Are they talking about like this concept of signing shopping? Do they care about it? Like what Yeah, what do you what do you see in?

Maier Bianchi 13:26

Yeah, I would say definitely, like, we've implemented this in some places. And it just always appeals because of the there's also the whole aspect of how long someone signed in for. So like, we've evolved from a world of like, hey, there's different on ramps to get to sign in. And I think specifically on Shopify, like that's one of the selling points is that people are used to similar experiences. So if we can create that culture of people expecting it and using it more, it means like your you can avoid neglecting it. And so I think status as a product gives a great way for people to address that. Because otherwise, you get dead ended at the traditional Oh, create a user and password or use social login, which is common people are kind of tired of that. So there has to be something new. And there's always like, you know, in the app world, more password lists, magic links, well, then, we need people to make that more easy for E commerce because then brands might adopt it. It's if it's within reach, right? Versus Hey, this is a very lengthy integration are very expensive, people are not interested. So that's why like, I'm excited about this movement, because it gives you another surface to address which is often out of the reach of a lot of people.

Yaw Aning 14:40

Yeah, yeah, I know. I should probably shouldn't say this on a recorded webinar, but I know like my wife, she uses like this one or two or three passwords for like every single site Susan, like she doesn't want to remember them. Like I'm religious about a password manager. So like every single flat out Like I go to get a different password, and there's no way I'm remembering that. And so I imagine like getting even just getting people to sign in creates a ton of friction. Joe, I'd love maybe I'll pass it to you to maybe like walk us through, like, how do we go from, you know, signed in shopping actually drives retention. But I know you maybe had a couple of visuals you wanted to kind of walk us through? But yeah,

Joe Vancena 15:26

yeah, we'll gladly I think we're all kind of leave us with the sign and shopping thought is, is usually just a question that I asked brands or a question that I asked agencies to sort of paint the picture of signage shopping be like, beyond anything status covered? Do it's like, how would a website change if 100% of visitors were signed in? How would your web development strategy change if you knew every single person who's coming to your site, like, we would have different experiences, and that's, that's like the world we want to create? And the more we spend thinking about that question, how we solve it, the better e commerce is gonna be? So yeah, let me kind of dive in and start to introduce some of this. And,

Maier Bianchi 16:03

and it's also with data that people have given you, right? Like it's different in the in the outside world facial recognition, and what the world we're heading towards where you're walking down the street and the billboards, no, it's you, that's more intrusive, but in this case, the power is in the hands of the user to help give that better experience. Yeah.

Yaw Aning 16:23

Oh, go ahead. Yeah, I'm sorry. I was gonna say like, yeah, that's a great point. I mean, you're like they've given you like the, the permission to write personalized for them, right. They they've said, I want to be identified, I want to log into this store. So

Maier Bianchi 16:41

if you think about that, as part of the social contract, now, what are you giving them back? Right? Like they've given you personal information and their money and invested in buying, you know, using their disposable income or not disposable income in your brand. So it's like, what can you give them back in terms of a great experience is another way to think of that exchange? Yeah, I

Joe Vancena 17:00

love that. You. So we've kind of abandoned this in our story. But back when we were fundraising a year ago, we used to talk about that a lot like this idea of a social contract. And we used to say like, what is status actually doing? Fundamentally, it's just giving you way more value in exchange for email address, because that's where we saw the biggest flaw in E commerce was a customer would give you your email just before you buy and everyone knows what happens. Next. spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, 50% off again, this week, too, is 50% off last week, let me guess it's gonna be 15% off next week, too. And like, it's just that gets in the way of us wanting to give brands more data. So it is like the social contract piece, let's just give you way more value when you give us your email. And let's see how much more information you'd be willing to give if it's fair. But I digress, this is great. Let me let me segue us into the retention story, I think. So we'll kind of tie together a few of these themes. Mayor, you really kind of nailed at the beginning, retention is more important than ever, I don't need to belabor this point. All I really say is a big, but every brand would agree everyone on this call would agree. Retention is very important. We've heard it on every webinar. But your most valuable customers get the same experience as everyone else. This is like the first thing I always call to brands, when we're talking about signage, shopping, or status, or even just thinking about e commerce differently. You claim to love your best customers, but you show them the same exact experience as a brand new visitor, if every single one of us right now went to your store, if you're a brand, we've all seen the same thing. Like this is one of the fundamental problems in E commerce that we still haven't solved.

Maier Bianchi 18:32

And that actually hurts your you know, hurts, your conversion rate hurts your average order value, because when you're returning customer, you're like, oh, I don't see anything different or nothing has really changed other than maybe this picture here or there. Like it's a missed opportunity for selling more. I

Yaw Aning 18:49

think it's pretty crazy to that, like, this problem still exists. Like I know, like a lot of merchants are like thinking about how do we personalize and there's a ton of like, there are, there's software out there, but it uses like some convoluted ways in which like you might, might be like you mentioned you're a little bit like, I'm gonna be scraping their data and they don't even know it like you're trying to get information that they didn't provide you in order to enable that personalization. It's pretty complex to put into motion. So I'm like, I'm amazed it's like it's 2023 and like we're still fumbling around how to do this really easily for merchants.

Maier Bianchi 19:26

Yeah. Or it's very like algorithm driven Right? Like yeah, it does behavior x then this happens to why that's a customer to merchants that can feel like a black box you know, like it's not easy, you're not in control. Or you are but you have to go through really complex training expensive solutions like you said.

Joe Vancena 19:43

Like I'm ashamed a bit to admit a bit but when I was at loop we had all birds I thought that was like the coolest thing ever that we service all birds at the time. So I had like five pairs of all birds in the store. I always told us I'd go back to all birds for like the seventh time and I would have to click men's waters, my style and I to click my size, my color, and then it would tell me it's out of stock. And I'm like, what just happened? I've given you almost $1,000. And I'm still going through eight clicks to figure out that my size is out of stock. Like, there's just some, yeah, obvious things that we could improve.

Yaw Aning 20:16

That's pretty good. I mean, that's not great. But

Maier Bianchi 20:20

yeah. And one thing to add is like, not everyone wants to engage on email and SMS, right? Like, there's that people are tired of being spoken to the same way. So maybe if you know, your website is changing or morphing around them, that'll get someone's attention, because they haven't seen that is frequently.

Joe Vancena 20:38

Yeah. attention span economy where our attention span lasts a second. And yet we show someone the same website seven times in a row over the span of three weeks, it's like, pretty obvious. Well, this is step one, big problem. We see in retention today that people aren't able to solve that. Well, yeah. And then the second one, in addition to generic is, is fragmented. And this has really blossomed in the last like, just few years where brands are installing more and more apps. And I'm like, listen, we're adding to the problem to hear status install just another app. But what we realized in bringing accounts in is we, you know, when we started to think about someone interacting with any part of the site, that interaction, the social contract, so to speak, like, that's what you're getting here, contract from the customer to give you a password, that should be spoken to everyone that's plugged into the website, not just the rewards program, or not just in my experience with loot, not just the returns platform. So this fragmentation is hurting retention to.

Yaw Aning 21:38

Yeah, I'm like, I look at this. And I'm like, Okay, if I want to check my rewards points at the log into the Rewards App. And then if I click to go and like, look at my like order history, or my, my membership status, I have to re log in, right to completely different app. To get that same information. Like here, obviously, on the right, we're showing and track your order, I'd have to like, then go enter in my details like that is all friction to me. And I think like As consumers, we all probably like we can't touch and feel the products before we buy them. And so like we have to use other signals in order to determine whether this product is a quality product, or the brand cares a lot about, like me as a customer. And so we look for other clue that feel like during the buying experience, and friction is like the thing that will degrade the confidence before that customer even makes that purchase decision. And then set the perception for your brand in their minds, right? It's like every little nick, that happens along that customer journey just degrades your brand. You're like the bank that you've been able to build with that customer. So like, this is pretty. This is pretty. Like looking at it in this way. It's like pretty obviously. But I think like when you're in the day to day, you don't really think about those things like oh, gosh, yeah, I'm making my customers log in into like, 14 different apps in order to get the information they need. Yeah,

Maier Bianchi 23:09

and I would say like that just speaks to that people need better ways to log in, or, you know, like how Shopify makes it easier at checkout, right? Like you shop at one site, it recognizes your email or your phone number, and then hey, it returns you to shop pay, which has its own problems, but it's like, at least they're making it easier to shop on the network. So by being on Shopify, plus, you're gaining that effect. But that's the checkout thing. Like it's not across the board, even if you're getting an account generated automatically, your cost, how do you make your customers use it more. And that's really the problem. Because you know, you have all these like, captures and other things that are standing in your way, the whole time. And they just make it more frustrating to be a customer like, Hey, I know I'm me. You don't believe me? Like it just creates more of that weird dynamic where like the lack of trust on the web impacts everyone?

Joe Vancena 24:05

For sure. I think this is where we tee up what we're here to solve together with satis Malomo. And honestly, what's like I've how, what kind of accounts product they're tracking product do together. And I think when we look at all the things that account unlock biggest the most important is we can help solve this generic shopping experience, and then help tighten the entire tech stack. So this is where we're headed. I bet you no one on here has really thought about customer accounts before maybe because I've called emailed you and you've ignored me and be like No, that was weird. Probably the only time all parts IPO without a customer account. And so you know, there's a lot of there's a gap in how we could use this tool to benefit our growth. And so that's we want to talk about today. So with a customer account, what starts to happen well, the first thing is the customer account ends up being everything about me and it lives in my account. It's like really fundamental concepts. If we're gonna make a good My Account page, what should be in it? Everything about me. And that's like a first step you are low customer, we have my points, my subscriptions, my orders, my clicks my carts, my wishlist. And when I tell brands is like if you have any other feature requests that you could put my in front of, we probably build it. And that's what should be here inside my car now as we keep moving through this, you're gonna see orders and orders is the tie in between all of us between Malomo between loop for returns. And with this account, you can now create a single sign experience for your entire tech stack. And this is really, we're going to pick up and cover on what your house team and our team has accomplished together. But now, when you go to earn points, or you go to track an order, you go through one signing experience, there's many ways to sign up, which we can cover later. But more importantly is, you know, your team alone can now get a sign in through the rewards program. And that's never happened.

Yaw Aning 26:07

Yeah, I mean that like, to me, that's pretty phenomenal. Like, it's great for our merchants, because now anytime a customer checks rewards, like George said, right, they're automatically signed into Malomo to track their order status. If they care to do that, like with one click, they can, they can get access to all that. Like that, that removes that that like instantly that friction that we talked about having to like, login to something else, or look up your order number tracking number.

Maier Bianchi 26:34

And there's a few things that get me really excited about this is that there's new surfaces. So like often, when you want to add wishlist to Shopify, you have to go through another third party app, and do all these things. But like status adds more services like a wish list, as a bonus to getting the product. And that's one of the things that really excites me is that and then also this unified login. You know, like, that's why we have standards, right, like USB or common standards among like, consumer products. So the more that you have apps playing well together, and integrating makes it easier as a customer and a system integrator, right as a brand. Now, you can be assured that your tech products work well together. And so that's the other thing that has to be really excited about it both what customers get and what brands get.

Joe Vancena 27:27

I'm totally stealing a unified standard, like USP bowls. I love that. I mean that. Yeah, I think like we're all that's really the main the main idea that we want to solve here, it's like creating more surfaces to get someone signed in and getting signed in like, you start to look at it, you don't look at an account like this order management tool, don't you think about that, you'll never be interested to install customer account accounts or not an order management tool. Accounts are a unified adopted tech, like a USP that everyone should use. And if you look at all your tech stack, that's your network. It's like the shop pay has a shopping network, right? And it's great. And we all benefit from it. When you look at your store and your retention strategy, you've got this network moving to and all you got to do is tie it all together. And that's the account can unlock for you. So now we have all these different services getting people signed in the big question then is like, Okay, well, I kind of get points and tracking. But what all happens when someone signs in. And I think this is like the aha moment that I usually have with brands when I when I meet with them, because it's like, oh, I you know, I really just thought of accounts as signing in as a way to view my order history. And the reality is just so much stronger than that. The moment someone signs in through status, you're signed into Malomo on every single order, you could have 50 orders and placed them all one after another. They're all arriving on different days in the next month and trackable. You're, you're automatically signed into your recharge rights loop, any tech connected to your tech stack. And there's all this other fun stuff we'll talk about too. But just if you're a marketer out here, like these are things you care about everything I've clicked everything I've put in my cart, I now have a wishlist that's activated. And literally this seems like a lot, but it's just by tracking an order all of this happens. And that's like the magic of what Malomo and status are doing together.

Yaw Aning 29:12

I mean, I love this because like the more signings that happen like I think what what status does really well is like it gives you multiple entry points along your your entire storefront to get people signed in, in order to give them an immense amount of value. I think I saw somebody who describes that as a master key for for your E commerce stack. It just does a really good job of like tying all of these systems together. And in a way that like you can control the entire experience right so that's why I'm really excited about this integration and generally what what what you guys are doing

Maier Bianchi 29:53

Yeah, and also like what are some first time entry points like even before someone purchases Right, so they can get to this great tracking experience. Like, what are some ways you're encouraging brands Joe to like, get more people to sign in, after the visitor website, because as you know, once you have that, that builds more stickiness.

Joe Vancena 30:17

So what you're seeing now is really our first time customer story. This is the way that we capture first time customers or disable one that segment. When we ask for him is the most valuable segment or is greater than one, or is equal one, or is equal zero, which is the most valuable segment, the answer was actually orders equals zero. Because they spend most of their budget, getting people to their site, they spend all of their budget building a website that cost them a lot needs to convert. And then they you know, the third one, they don't capture in an order on their first visit, they spend the rest of their budget on email and SMS to bring them back. So like, that's really the big question. I don't have anything to show you today. But I can tell you that next month, we're going to have a visitors of visitors release. We're thinking about welcome popups totally different welcome popups. And that first interaction, you get your email address to a brand. Why aren't you just creating an account right then in there and being assigned Malomo? Before you place an order?

Maier Bianchi 31:10

Yeah, that's, that would keep people even more engaged, because then you can start building that personalization, more, more confidently.

Joe Vancena 31:20

That's the Holy Grail. If you can convince a visitor to sign nobody. Yeah, that's totally wrong. Yeah, all right.

Maier Bianchi 31:29

Oh, no, I was gonna comment on on just about Malomo In general, but like, we haven't keep going to something more visual for that.

Joe Vancena 31:38

Yeah. All right, let's do. Well, that's what brought us here. That's why we're all here today. So we kind of get this idea of why signage operated matters. And now it's really meets, finding where these two stories meet, we can get someone signed in through all different entry points, but then one of the primary reasons they come into an account is to track an order. So here we are, we're gonna walk through this quickly the demo, and I can actually see some of the product live in action. But fundamentally, like, we're going to focus on the orders page, where there are many things that customer wants to do with an order. But I'll tell you what the most frequent thing a first time customer does is track a purchase. And that's where the story really takes off together, you're going to see how we can drive retention by using our order page, and connect you to a logged in Malomo tracking page. Great stuff. And again, it is the most used, it is the most used integration inside of our customer portal today. Second, only two returns, or sorry, second is returns, sees post person interactions are valuable.

Maier Bianchi 32:38

And I was gonna say just like, what I like about Malomo is it lets you deliver more beautiful and customized landing pages for status tracking, like order status tracking. And you know how like if a lot of brands are using tools like ShipStation, or basic things like that, and they under invest in it. So Malomo gives you a great way to do that. Because at the end of the day, you are competing for eyeballs, the 10 minutes, five minutes someone takes the check their order is five minutes, they could be scrolling on Instagram or doing something else. So if once again, you're rewarding them with a better experience, that's just going to leave a beacon in their mind that, hey, this brand made this mundane task of checking my order, a more pleasant experience, which, like you mentioned before this bank have good good faith that you give brands. Hey, that adds a penny back in. And that adds up.

Yaw Aning 33:28

Yep. Yeah. You said that earlier. My mayor, like we're making deposits, right, we're making currency deposits in their, in their account for getting goodwill. And eventually we'll ask for those deposits back right with an ask and try to drive them to another purchase. But

Joe Vancena 33:50

we'll have a look already, we'll show this in action. I'm gonna focus on first is a way to get through to Malomo, we're just gonna start to show the way that you have this like dance with all of your tools on a website now and how all paths can lead back to Malomo. And I think that's what like our brands, when I'm making referrals to one of the benefits of this product is we get to make referrals a lot. So we look good as partner. But when we talk about this, it's like they see this path where now I can track an order and that customer becomes a rewards member. It's like that's the stuff that just gets people excited to like I need to tracking it now. And so we'll start to just highlight some of this dance that happens with all of your tools. When everything's plugged into one place. First thing I'll do I think reward retention immediately makes people think of rewards and loyalty. So let's start with that as like an entry point, this idea of someone wanting to view the rewards, and everyone's investing rewards for retention. And what I'm gonna show you is how I can track an order after checking my points. And this is one of those things that was never possible before. So I'm enticed to join the rewards program. I can earn points by entering my email or signing in with Google. Sign in with Google. And I'm now signed into everything and so you don't really see this As a first time user, but you started watch as this all loads, and you've got points, subscriptions, orders, clicks carts. And so now I get my points. I can click through to awards pages and I'm already signed into Yacht Club. I click through to my order history. Here it is the moment of truth track my shipment and I'm cents signed into Malomo. No friction, no order number, no email, nothing. And as many orders as I want to track I can. And what's great is now it becomes this entry point, right? Like your rewards entry point gets you in. My wife's calling. She knows I'm in the middle of a webinar. I told her this all morning.

Maier Bianchi 35:38

Probably the same. You're doing great. Keep going.

Joe Vancena 35:42

It was. Anyway, so you grew awards your order? And I don't know, it's I Martina threw me off. Thanks for that. But you I think. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't know if you want to add anything? Because well, yeah, like the quick.

Yaw Aning 36:03

Yeah. So I think the like what I love about this is like, Okay, we there was one path of entry, right? Like we started with the mindset of the consumer was I needed check my rewards balancer, I'm going in to do one thing. And while I'm here after check something else, and it's frictionless. Same thing is like, if the customer comes to your site, right, just looking to look up their order and see what's going on, like, that's entry point for them to like, all of these things are just entry points into getting them into that, that logged in state. So I think, yeah, you got I think, Joe, you had like a link on that on that first page to where they could track their order, or they could start a return or exchange that in the footer, right. All of them drive you back into into that logged in state. What once they I think like, what else wanted to quickly highlight too is red, this this is real estate that your brand can use, like as soon as they track their package from from alomost perspective. There's some there's some interesting things that can get unlocked now with the with the status and mobile integration. So as we as we scroll down, and we might show our bestsellers on the page, we now have a wishlist for those those items as well, right, they can instantly just say, Hey, this is something fun, I actually we want to buy in the future. Curious to learn a little bit more about they can they can do that right from the tracking experience. So that's one of the things I'm super excited about. I think it it just unlocks a lot of new opportunities. And then I think like to take it to more of an advanced stage like almost wonder if we should talk about how we could how we could use these entry points to drive personalization. And so maybe I'd ask you like, yeah, what like, what does this now enable, if I'm a logged in shopper, what does it now enable? For better customer experience personalization perspective?

Maier Bianchi 38:04

Yeah, so for those of you watching now, and those who are going to watch this after the fact, I want you to think about Shopify as a platform, and like what it's like being logged in, allows you to do. So as you know, there's customer tags, there's many fields. So think about zero party data, right? And like what you know about your customer. And now think about if you actually had a higher percentage of them logging in, what could you do to make your experience more differentiated, and that's where your mind can be exploding with possibilities, right. So if, say, for example, I'm logged in, I'm Joe, I'm on this website. Now, the whole website knows I'm here. So then why not personalize different areas of it based on that data, so for example, your normal PDP can now have a slight shift to be a more VIP experience, knowing you've ordered before or knowing Hey, maybe you'll like this, and it doesn't have to talk to you the same way. So if you think about your website as something that's more that's less generic, and more able to be molded, I think you'll discover that there's a lot more you can do with your experience, such as customizing the logo, customizing the menu, like all these little micro customizations might really get someone's attention. And then the more personal data you have, based that you're collecting around there, they're visiting patterns or shopping patterns, then you can even slip in more things. And so, you know, that's just like a conceptual level and then per brand, knowing your brand and how you talk to your customer, you can take that so much further. And so, you know, instead of more indirect algorithm based things like we spoke before, this can be more deliberate and more focused on actual behavior or tags, right like if the customer is tagged as a VIP, do something and and it gives you more surfaces. I keep using that word services, but it gives you more places to talk to your customer.

Yaw Aning 40:09

Joe, would you as you guys were talking, it made me think of this, would you let me share my screen really quick?

Maier Bianchi 40:16

An example you mentioned earlier would be yes,

Yaw Aning 40:17

keying off what Yeah, Mayor just said and, and some of these some of these concepts that we're talking about. Like one, one idea, right is if Joe mentioned this, right, he shops with all birds. And yeah, so go through a series of clicks in order to get to his ideal state. Right, if if, if Oliver just knew he was, he was a male, he typically looks at this collection when we want to show him those things up front to reduce the friction. So like, as an example, you could do something like this where like Jackson, they say, Hey, we know that we tagged this customer as a male. And we're going to show them a tracking experience that shows them all of our products, or calls to action, targeted at that type of customer. If I was a female, right, I'd show a different image with targeted product. And call to action for that customer like that is that is the holy grail that we're talking about. And we can do that once we get that customer signed in and we start to track their browsing behavior and history. And then we start to use that data to segment and personalize the entire experience. I think this is just like incredible. What what we can as merchants now, operators we can accomplish with this purpose. Yeah. And

Maier Bianchi 41:37

I love that example. Because it's also not that hard. Right? It seems Yeah, one extra thing. But once you build this into your process, you get your team to start thinking this way. It's the possibilities are endless. And so this is just a great example of just hate catering to someone's, you know, like, what how they identify, for example,

Joe Vancena 41:56

yeah, like not to lose the like bury the lead, like people will spend more when products they like are closer to them. If you have things that are more relevant to me, I'll buy more. And like that's one of our early insights with clicks and carts. It's like things I've clicked I like more than things I haven't clicked, you know, things that fit my style. I like more than things that don't fit my style. And like that's all we're really trying to do here is bring that more visible more in front of every touchpoint in the customer journey. And tracking just happens to be one of the most valuable ones. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't think you've shared it. What's the number you said on like, frequency of tracking the page? Yeah, like a couple stats? Like, like we haven't touched? Yeah,

Yaw Aning 42:34

yeah. So I mean, when you look at like engagement across across the order tracking experience in general, right, and why this is like a really good like gateway or entry into the signed in state 20% of your overall storefront tracking traffic will hit the tracking experience, that that tracking page typically gets four to five pageviews per customer. So it's like, information people want. Um, so it creates a good, just, yeah, good entry point to get people engaged. The other thing that we've seen is that people when they go to track your package, the number one click link across every single, like Malomo tracking page is the count. Like, think about that. Like millions of 10s of millions of pageviews that we see, number one click link is accounts. People want to log in. We want to give them easy ways in which to do that. Once we do that, how do we leverage that in creative ways to build your brand and drive better attention?

Joe Vancena 43:39

That's, that's still crazy to me. Yeah. Because one of the things we learned is like no one clicks the economy icon outside of these interactions, right? Like, if you're not tracking or not returning or not managing an order, you're not clicking accounts. So it's really cool to see that like, have a little flywheel effect, we can

Maier Bianchi 43:54

feed each Yeah. Yeah. And also, like, no, like, one thing I wanted to mention to make sure to mention about status that I like, and got me really interested in the product was the six month login. Yeah, being able to keep people logged in for longer. Taking that back to tracking means less time wasted, means you're respecting your customers time and, you know, then now they can track easier and come back and the website stays personalized, which I don't think we think about it enough. But that's huge.

Joe Vancena 44:28

Because that's something we talk about a lot. And I think most people immediately say, I don't believe it, or how the hell does that happen? Or what's that actually mean in this extended login window for up to six months? So I always like to explain it and I also love Shopify, because it feels like the more in depth you go with brands, the more they like love it. It's like a very educationally focused community that like tells me all the grimy tech details like there's much there's a lot of an interest to go technical. Let me explain this just very briefly. So when you're signing in through Shopify, you may Have your class counsel on, it'll log you out every 24 hours. When you sign in with status, we're powered by Google's authentication. So Google has an authentication layer. And it's very similar, if not identical to what you use to sign in to Gmail, if you use this, right, so you're like at signing in here. Now, that doesn't mean you need a Gmail to sign into your account. But that's the same underlying tech. So when we say sign in for up to six months, that's the max window, Google is going to give a user and what ends up happening, we can all recognize this, at some point between now and the next six months, Google's gonna sign you out of your inbox, and you have no idea why Google has their own authentication, their own tracking, and they know when the right and safe time to log you out is. And so that's the same thing powering your new accounts. It's an extended window of time until Google says it would be most safe to ask them to log back in, then your account resets. So glad we got to that point, because we've been saying that and I think most people look at a cyanide, but that's actually how it works.

Maier Bianchi 45:55

And then, and then, what about the part about the magic link, right, like how you're also giving people those easier, one click Sign ends, like just another surface, that's not really customized a lot of those Shopify transactional emails, or people delegate that to clay, VO and, you know, to other platforms. And so, once again, if clicking on anything in the email logs you in, now all of a sudden, you can ensure a personalized journey. So keep those gears turning, because that's what you can do with this.

Joe Vancena 46:26

Let me since you brought up links in a different way, let me show you this kind of shows you what happens when you get a platform like this together. And honestly, with Malomo, we'll just, we'll use as an example with Malomo. So I'm going to do, I'm going to show you like the craziest way that you could ever get signed into Malomo. I'm just going to sign into my account, this brand like lowercase letters. And we have custom CSS, thanks for the plug, Mayor. But anyway, so what I'm gonna show you here is just a way you can start to use links, right, it's like magic links, ball use, this is just a different way to use a link to bring someone into an account. So what I've simulated here is I'm a brand owner, and I want to help get people signed in to my entire tech stack. Through my latest drop, I dropped a new spring collection, and no one's seen these products yet. So I should copy this link. And what's great now is you can use this in all of your marketing campaigns. So now it's like, I'm going to sign out and pretend that I'm a customer that just received an SMS, like a text, or an email from a brand. Alright, so I just received a text, I click this link, it says like, hey, our new collection just dropped sign in to save it, get it before it's gone. Insert marketing speak. And you now send this link, I click the link in my phone, and boom, sign into say this collection, I'm not saving this collection and signing into every single or on the loan, signing into every single one, boom, just because I really liked these products. And so links are really like the sweet spot. When you unlock sign in shopping. You use links for everything just to bring people back and make it way more engaging.

Yaw Aning 47:57

That's pretty good. That's a very clever. So you can like you can use Yeah, yeah, I think he just said this, like you can use these links in any marketing channel that you might be promoting different things and right on SMS and email on social. Okay.

Joe Vancena 48:17

Yeah, we really want to do is like use any page as a reason to get someone signed in our job, really, we have a clear responsibility in this position as accounts and sign in to have everyone's best interests at heart and really make sure that like we're serving all the tools that we're helping sign in equally, like we can't be a returns account, you know, like we couldn't be an account built for returns, it just violates the whole the whole idea. And so links become so important there because every page is its own link. And every page is a way to get someone signed in. So now brands can use recently viewed to get people signed into Malomo. Brands, can you save items as a link that then brings people back and gets them signed in? So links or links are everything once you're in your like, second or third month live with us? You're really breaking the account apart? Putting it out through all your channels.

Maier Bianchi 49:05

Yeah, and, and also, just from a UI perspective, like think about what it takes to get some feature like this, if you're building it yourself. That's another value add of the product. You know, both like for example, if you tried to build a customized status tracking landing page yourself, well, now you don't need to because you got Malomo. And the same thing here if you wanted to build a more slide out customer bar. Now you don't have to. And what's funny is like I had envisioned something like this for a different b2b project we're working on because I was like, Wouldn't it be great if all your information was at your fingertips without leaving the page? And this kind of answers that too. So I don't think that should be overlooked either. Because that's the other reason why people don't like logged in, or don't promote it on their website is because it takes you away from the collection page and takes you away from the product page. Well, that's one great thing about this is it doesn't and so that to me is also one of the unique aspects of status.

Joe Vancena 50:04

It's my favorite piece of our mutual demo is when your beautiful tracking page and our account can share one space. It's like we're not competing cycles, one cohesive experience. Yeah.

Yaw Aning 50:15

And it all looks on brand, right, the

Maier Bianchi 50:19

more exactly is making more app like, which, when you don't have a native app, this is the next best thing.

Yaw Aning 50:26

Yeah, that's great. Um, so I, I know, we're kind of running out of time here. And I'm not sure if folks have any questions that they want to ask if I have time for one or two. So let me think, yeah, let me pull up our q&a. So someone asked bfcm is right around the corner, the bfcm next month feels like it. Tire you're prepping for bfcm. So, yeah, this person asked some question around, like tracking volume increases, engagement increases, what's the expectation we've seen at least around or even like, I'd be curious to hear what you guys see around engagement to around bfcm. From the tracking perspective, we've seen tracking page visits increase about three to 5x, over bfcm, obviously, people are very concerned about whether their order will arrive before the big day, or whether it will arrive at all. And so I know that that becomes a really important season for folks to just get really good, transparent tracking place. It's always also now a wonderful time to drive those consumers into his side and say, grab some data around them, right, that you might be able to then use that data later on post holidays to retarget them. Yeah, Mayor, what do you see in from a, like an order volume increase perspective that you maybe see across your, the merchants that you work with?

Maier Bianchi 52:02

I mean, just that definitely prepare now, right? Like, you're gonna get more business, it's the time where you don't want to think of it as an afterthought. So just, you know, like, one thing I see is that people maybe don't aren't prepared to capitalize on that new volume of customers and how to keep them past the holidays. So given that we started this with the theme of retention, that's the biggest thing is like, well, you're going to acquire a lot of new customers, how do you keep them past the holiday shopping fatigue into the next year, so that you can really keep those people engaged past the fact that they're attracted by the sale or something like that? So I mean, we can just anticipate that it'll go up. But

Joe Vancena 52:45

yeah, yeah. I'm I don't, I don't know what was going to be like the posts gonna be a blog post and what have you dooms there, but I think this Black Friday, Cyber Monday is going to be uniquely difficult because student loan payments pick up again in July and August, it's something like $90 billion a year of student loan payments are going to be due every single year. Shopify has total GMV is 60 billion. So you have you have more student loan payments due every year, that Shopify transaction on the platform as a whole, it's going to be interesting, and they haven't been paid in three years. All this growth that we've seen starts up again, right before this Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So it really is Oh,

Yaw Aning 53:21

wow. Okay, that's good to know. It's very good. For now,

Maier Bianchi 53:24

on top of whatever October surprises are coming as well. Yeah.

Yaw Aning 53:29

Wildfires. No. Yikes. Well, yeah, really quickly, before we wrap up. I think we've got a couple of offers for folks who might be interested in taking any of this first and yeah, Joe.

Joe Vancena 53:48

Take a screenshot you run out of time. And if you have a three o'clock meeting, we all working together to make your life easier, we'll get status Malomo. And if you want any custom dev work, Walmart's gonna make your life easier. Here's the way that's all I gotta say he was gonna add anything else?

Yaw Aning 54:02

No, that's great. Yeah, go ahead.

Maier Bianchi 54:05

You can go ahead. Yeah, I was just gonna, I mean, I was just gonna say, yeah, like, as an agency, obviously, you get hit up a lot if you have a brand. But we're always down to talk and go over your goals for the, you know, for the last two quarters of the year. And specifically, like website performance assessments. Always happy to talk and give some value for time.

Yaw Aning 54:26

Love it. Yeah. So yeah, please, we'll follow up with all these offers to be email afterwards and recording to this. So you'd got it. Feel free to reach out to any of us if you want to sort of like take this for a test drive and see how could impact your brand. But thank you all for joining us. Hopefully, you got a lot of value. Had a lot of fun with you both Marin and Joe. Appreciate you guys. And thanks a ton for tuning in. We'll catch you at the next next webinar. Yeah, thanks.

Maier Bianchi 54:59

You're having a great experience thanks guys see ya and everybody stay out of the dust stay out of the storm take care see ya