Ep.136/ REMARKABLE AI
Using AI for Growth Marketing and Retention in Ecommerce with Aneto Okonkwo, Co-Founder & CEO of Remarkable AI
Mariah Parsons, Host of Retention Chronicles and Head of Marketing at Malomo hosts Aneto Okonkwo, Co-Founder & CEO of Remarkable AI, an AI growth marketer for consumer brands. Aneto discusses the importance of marketing, particularly in scaling new companies, and shares insights on customer retention strategies. He highlights the effectiveness of personalized email campaigns, which can yield 50-100 times return on investment per recipient. Aneto also emphasizes the value of engaging with customers on social media and leveraging influencer marketing. Additionally, he stresses the significance of addressing customer issues promptly to enhance brand loyalty and retention.
Episode Timestamps:
3:06 Challenges of Starting a New Company
3:55 Importance of Marketing and Customer Engagement
6:18 Remarkable AI's Services and Customer Engagement
7:14 Data Analysis and Customer Insights
10:25 Social Media and Community Engagement
14:39 Influencer Marketing and Product Seeding
18:34 Email Marketing and Retention Strategies
20:17 Expanding LTV and Cross-Selling
20:43 Seasonal Strategies and Customer Support
Ep.136
Aneto Okonkwo
TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was completed by an automated system, please forgive any grammatical errors.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
e-commerce enlightenment, AI growth marketer, customer experience, marketing importance, product distribution, customer engagement, social media strategy, influencer marketing, email marketing, customer retention, personalized emails, customer support, Black Friday strategies, customer feedback, LTV expansion
SPEAKERS
Mariah Parsons, Aneto Okonkwo
Mariah Parsons 00:05
Greetings and welcome to retention. Chronicles, the podcast with learnings from expert e commerce brands and partners. I'm your host. Mariah Parsons, if you're here, you're either on a quest for E commerce enlightenment or you accidentally click the wrong link. Either way, I am thrilled you stumbled into our corner of the internet, and I hope you'll stick around. We've got pearls of wisdom for everyone, whether you're running a multi million dollar business or simply just starting out on your entrepreneurial journey. Before we unleash the brilliance of today's guests, let's give a shout out to our podcast sponsor, Malomo. Malomo is so much more than just another Shopify app, their post purchase wizards, making beautiful and branded order tracking smoother than a jazz solo. So our amazing founders, like our guests, can keep their customers happy and up to date while they track their orders. So hit that subscribe button like it'll increase your LTV overnight and go listen to our other episodes at Go malomo.com that's G O M, a, l o m, o.com Get ready for insights, chuckles and perhaps a profound realization or Two with this newest episode of retention Chronicles. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to retention Chronicles. I am so excited for today's episode. It's always the highlight of my day, and we were talking about this before. I think this is the quickest that I've ever had someone come on the show. I think we had like, a 24 hour turnaround rate for this one. So if that doesn't show you the excitement, then I don't know what will Anita, thank you so much for being here today to join me. It is a pleasure to have you on I'm going to ask you to say hi to our audience and give a quick intro of yourself.
Aneto Okonkwo 01:50
Hi, Mariah, thanks for the opportunity. I'm Aneto from remarkable AI. We are an AI growth marketer for consumer brands. We work with over 1000 amazing consumer brands, and we talk about retention with them all the time. It's the thing I've been working on feverishly for the last year. So excited to share what we've learned and some best practices from the brands we work with. Love
Mariah Parsons 02:14
it. Love it. So much. Okay, so give us a little bit of background. Why have you been working on remarkable AI for the last year. So what has really brought you up until this point, like what sparked the inspiration to start your own tech company? Yeah,
Aneto Okonkwo 02:28
certainly. So I was at Google for many years. I worked on voice search and the Google Assistant, and saw an opportunity to leverage AI to help brands grow. At the same time, saw an opportunity to use AI to actually create jobs. So our mission as a company is actually to solve customer experience and create jobs. And to start off that mission, we just started talking to hundreds of companies to understand the pain points that they have for growth and for driving revenue, and how we could use AI and human experts actually combined to help solve those problems.
Mariah Parsons 03:01
Love it. Okay, so coming from Google and then starting your own tech company, I would imagine there's a little bit of difference just with the size of how you're approaching problems, and you know, you're working at one company, versus trying to start a brand new one. So I always like to ask founders this, and we're going off script a little bit, um, what was one, I guess, unforeseeable thing that you didn't expect to run into when you were starting?
Aneto Okonkwo 03:35
Yeah, you know, I'm a very product focused person and very engineering focused person. I just really didn't understand the importance of marketing and the power of marketing. When you start at a big company like Google, every time you launch a product, everyone knows about it, so you don't actually have to market it that much. But when you're at a new company and no one knows what you're doing, you actually have to do marketing. And for many a long time, I was going to ignorant to that, and it hit me in the face. And once we really started investing in marketing, we started to see a lot of success. I know that seems obvious. All the marketers were from our product or engineering focused person. Your point is like, hey, if I build an awesome product, people are just going to love it, right? But if you have to know about it, so distribution is so much more important than than product, and it's a hard unless I had to learn the hard way.
Mariah Parsons 04:24
Yep, makes sense? No, I laugh, because it's also just exactly what we're doing here today, right? Like, marketing is so so important. And I think that because we're so surrounded by marketing, you kind of it's easy to forget about right? Like, there's just marketing and everything. So I find myself, before I was an industry marketer, not even realizing the influence that it, that it plays on your life. And then you kind of learn the lesson of, like, Oh no, it really takes a lot of effort to be able to get something out there that doesn't already have this. Like buying power. They're sticking power, like something like Google. So I think it's, it's a fun reminder for everyone that it definitely does take a little bit of a heart awakening to like, oh, whoa. I really have to invest time here. And it isn't just as easy as, you know, a click of a button or something like that, to generate something and then get people to engage
Aneto Okonkwo 05:22
on to that. Like, when I meet new entrepreneurs and new founders and they're talking about that product, I'm like, Stop, you know, just focus on marketing. You know, yeah, because you got amazing product, and no one knows about it, but if you have an amazing marketing strategy, you can build a product. Most products can be built. That's not, usually not the reason why businesses don't grow. It's really because no one knows about it.
Mariah Parsons 05:44
Yep, I love that take and we, we don't, we don't really hear that a ton on here, because usually we dive right into the product in the marketing strategy. But like the lessons learned that you have to kind of focus, or that you should maybe focus on marketing before getting a good product and seeing if there is, if there's something that you can tap into that really gets people talking about your product, and then you can felt like, I've seen more and more like pre sales, especially on the brand side. Pre sales happening a lot more where it's just like, can you get the message out there? Can you get the image of the product out there, even if it isn't in the hands of consumers yet? But we are getting far ahead of ourselves, so let's backtrack a little bit um, tell me a little bit more about remarkable AI, and then we'll go into, I'm curious to hear where you invested marketing first, but give us, give us the background first.
Aneto Okonkwo 06:33
Yeah, so remarkable. AI, we are, uh, AI, growth marketer for consumer brands. We work with everything from beauty products to fashion clothing to food to even pet supplies, and our focus is really around helping brands deliver that one to one customer engagement and that could look like helping them chat with people on social media to acquire new customers that could look like helping them answer a lot of customer support if they have a lot of customer support messages, or it could be helping them win back customers who have not shopped in a long time, and drive revenue from that existing customer base. Okay,
Mariah Parsons 07:17
lovely. So kind of expanding the whole customer experience, right? So question for you around data, because I write AI is so inherent on data and how the software understands, you know, historical data, but then also the data that is coming in from each individual interact, interaction. So I'm curious, because I feel like AI is one of those things that everyone is super tapped into right now. And do you find that with the customers that you're working with, are they trying to see patterns from, you know, even if it's just general patterns of everyone who works with you, all of like, Oh, are they seeing this uptick in, I don't know, like, complaints on social media or customer support issues around Black Friday. Like, are you looking at the comprehensive data of everyone that you're working with and then kind of telling, like, through reports, or something like that, to the rest of your consumers? Of like, oh, this is maybe, quote, unquote, normal for your category or your industry or your vertical, are you? Are you trying to, like, analyze and splice slice and dice? Is that the saying, slice and dice, slice and dice, the data that way? Yeah,
Aneto Okonkwo 08:33
we do that. We actually have a free tool that we offer that does that nice, that offers automatic customer insights. You can plug in your help desk, your social platforms, your reviews, your surveys, and can automatically analyze it for you. But just being very frank, most of our clients don't have time to look at this stuff. They just want to answer, and I think that's what you're asking as well. Is Hey, what is happening with my customers and our other companies seeing the same thing, and they just wanted to know the answer to that, and what's working and what's not working. So I can answer that for you. Like at this point in time, many brands are struggling with the cost of acquisition, you know, the traditional meta or other performance marketing approaches just aren't as effective they used to be, probably not used to you or to the listeners. Some brands are seeing success, but most are kind of struggling and also on the market automation side for email marketing, just people feel that customers are a bit jaded and things just aren't worth working as well as they used to. So most brand marketers are looking for new ways to get above the noise and attract consumers and get customers to come back and on the customer side like how customers are feeling. I think coming out of the pandemic, a lot of customers were really getting very aggravated and really. Being very annoyed with brands, I think more so than usual. And I think that has continued, like, the expectation that people have in like an Amazon world is very high. They expect a very high level of service. They expect, like, instant refunds, free shipping. Like the expectations are super high, and that's just tough for emerging brands to really measure up to, because that's not as cost efficient, Yep, yeah, for sure.
Mariah Parsons 10:25
Yeah. I feel like this is one of the things that, obviously I see a lot, just as a consumer of like, noticing, oh, this brand is like, going down this route and really maybe trying to acquire through meta ads on Instagram or through Tiktok, and just seeing like, oh, this this brand is choosing to be really founder facing, versus this brand is choosing not to. And so I feel like there's a lot of, obviously, a lot of nuance, and I'd love to hear and go further down this rabbit hole of I feel like social media right now is what is tying a lot of my attention as a consumer, and I think it's something a lot of brands are trying to figure out, just because it's quote, unquote new. Were then say something like email, email marketing. And so with AI, remarkable. AI, are you seeing that your approach is different on social media platforms like given I call it, I guess, the more chaotic nature of something like Tiktok versus something like Facebook, that is a little bit of a more traditional marketing approach, or more Traditional audience of like you're probably going to have, you know, millennials on that platform versus Gen Z on Tiktok? Yeah,
Aneto Okonkwo 11:49
certainly. So we work across the full customer life cycle. We help with acquisition, we help with customer support, and we also help with retention. Talking about the acquisition side, we've definitely seen success from our clients focusing on newer platforms like Tiktok and also YouTube. Of course, people know like the general ways. You can acquire customers from social you can run ads, you can partner with influencers, and you can create your own content, and all of those have some costs and some scaling challenges associated with them. And just by listening to our customers, we actually uncovered a new way that many brands are already doing today, but we figured out a way to scale it. So that way is, you know, building community around your brand, but in a very light touch way, just engaging in communities that are relevant for your brand. So I'll give you an example, like, we work with several beauty brands. One example would be like a shea moisture, which is like a hair care brand, yep. And anytime someone talks about curly hair or natural hair, Shea Moisture will actually engage on that person's content, basically, like commenting on their content with, like, a personalized comment. And it's not salesy, it's just positive, like, Hey, you look great. Or like your curls are popping, you know, like, whatever is the brand appropriate way to respond, and customers love that. Like, wow, this brand noticed me. So they like, they reply, they follow. It's more like a top of funnel and shame moisture uses our platform to scale that. Because obviously you could do that yourself. You could hire an intern or hire an agency to do that. But if you want to do like, 1000s of these comments per month and then track it, make sure it's on brand and continue to improve that like, that's something you can do through our platform. But I would encourage every founder just starting out, just like, get your name out there, to go engage in all these communities. There's so many things to do as a founder of a brand or as a marketing leader, but if you can figure out we like staff, this is way more cost efficient than ads or partner influencer marketing and so on.
Mariah Parsons 13:46
Yeah, okay, I love this. So because I would have probably, before talking to you, I probably would have put like, engaging or community in like a separate bucket, just because my mind when I think of community goes to like Slack communities, Facebook communities, like something that you're starting on your own. And I've always seen that as another thing, I guess, like pull attention or like just another thing to do, not necessarily going in tandem, tandem with social media growth. So I like that we're looking at it through this lens of building the community in social media, but not necessarily like creating your own group, like, kind of, what's the word like ricochet, or kind of bouncing off of the engagement of maybe like an influencer or someone posting, or just, you know, micro or macro influencer or someone posting, and you just being tuned into the audience enough and using a tool that can help you, you know, find that conversation at the right time, at the right place, say the right thing, all all that. And some of the
Aneto Okonkwo 14:53
brands of workers have taken this further, like one company work with called hyper skin, they actually use this to, first of all, I. Identify the influencers are relevant for them, seed them with product. So they send product. We had a new product, but they were launching, and we use this platform to send product to those influencers, and then we tracked which of those influencers actually posted. So it's a full circle where those influencers are basically creating content and sharing it into their community about this particular product, which is the most exciting thing, and it wasn't paid. It was just we engage with them and then we send them product, and then they posted. So that can be tough to scale, but that's, I think, something that all brands should do in this current age, particularly on social work platforms, where, like beauty products, clothing products, really can catch fire and a huge lift for your business.
Mariah Parsons 15:42
Yeah, okay, so yes, this is also something. So I recently went to a like, founder retreat. I guess you would call it, or founder boot camp is a better word, and this is one of the topics that came up, is like, how to basically understand influencer marketing and like, where to put your money, because there's obviously the debate between, like, do you go with a bigger audience, with an influencer, rather than a smaller audience that's maybe really engaged? Like, where do you, kind of, I guess, decide or judge, or where do you do you put all your eggs in one basket with one influencer and really go like, all in on that, or do you have a couple other influencers that are like, chiming in, you know? So, oh, there's a lot of things that you can, I guess, untwine or try and try and sift through, when you're looking at influencer marketing. And I feel like, if you send a product as a brand, you are saying, like, Oh, we don't, you know, we don't expect anything of you. We're just sending this to you because we like your content. And if someone makes a post about it, then that's that's huge, and it's genuine, and you you can kind of suss out maybe later down the line, of like, oh, this person, when we sent them free product, they made that video, and it worked really well with their consumers. So let's, like, dive in and do a full partnership and, like, pay for XYZ, add or content with that brand partner. So I always I can also see that play as being like a way to AB test of like, Where does your product really resonate without fully committing to like, a contractor and NDA or, you know, like something that is, I guess I'll use the word like legally binding or financially binding, where you would you you commit to something that you're not sure of. Maybe it'll even resonate with someone's audience. What do you think about that? Like, have you seen or thought about trying to use that strategy of sending free product and seeing who posts about it, whose audience really resonates with it to kind of AB test, like a longer term relationship with an influencer.
Aneto Okonkwo 17:48
Yeah, I think you covered all of it. I think the only thing I would add, maybe two things, is that that's why the like, the selection of who are the right people to engage is very important. And with our platform, we use AI to help with that, because you want to choose people like you said, who this is authentic for them, because that's actually what's going to move the needle the most. If consumers are smart, like, if they can tell that this person is just pitching product, it's not going to work. But if they're like, wow, this person genuinely loves this product and is really doing it just because they love it, that's what's going to create those long term connections with their community. And so I think founders know that, they know that they should intuitively go for influencers who are going to love it. And this is just natural, and it fits whether they're big, whether they're small, like, that's who you want, and that's like, the long term partners, which you want to make with these people. Yeah. But I do want to switch gears and talk about retention, because I know probably, like, a lot of your listeners are like, Hey, this is all social media. I read my mind. Yeah. And we get back to email, and even though you said email is, hey, email has been around, a lot of our clients have actually figured out new ways to drive a lot of revenue through email. And I know, let me just talk about like broadly, like we're seeing 50 to 100 times improvement in revenue per recipient from some of the, like, the techniques that our clients are using. So that's awesome. If you think your listeners are interested in, like, increasing by 5,000%
Mariah Parsons 19:06
you know they are.
Aneto Okonkwo 19:09
I would love to share some of the learnings we're seeing there, because I think it's yeah, I even surprised me. So can I tell you what I was surprised about?
Mariah Parsons 19:16
Please, please. I would love to hear it. You know, I
Aneto Okonkwo 19:18
do. Yeah. So many of your listeners probably know a lot more about me this topic, but, like, I've only been looking at it for like, the last year, like I said, but when I came into this world of email marketing, I said, like, Hey, I'm sure this, like, win back stuff has been solved already, right? How could this be unsolved? But I was shocked, right? So much of marketing automation is on the welcome series, which is, like, those pop ups you see on the website where you put in your email, your phone number, and then you get an email, and then the second is, like on the abandon cart, and the third maybe is on like the Browse abandon. And this is where the majority of the money is made in market innovation across all the clients I've looked at. Would you? Would you disagree with that? What do you think about it? Yeah,
Mariah Parsons 19:56
oh, for sure, especially just with Malomo, too. Of it is. Uh, kind of crazy sometimes to see the uphill battle, or, like, how much resources are dedicated to the acquisition side and not the retention side. Of like, whoa, this isn't even thought about in some for some grants. So we can go
Aneto Okonkwo 20:14
into the market animation accounts of our customers. And we love all these partners. It's not a fault of the platform, like, either they didn't have a win back strategy at all, or it was very underdeveloped, it hadn't been updated in a long time, and these companies were sitting on 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of customers because they've been around for many years, and they've acquired a lot of customers who've shopped with them but haven't shopped recently. And so that was like the first insight is that most brands are actually sitting on a gold mine of customers who have loved their products and just forgot about it and just faded away. And so just put some effort into women back, and you will make more money. You know, that's step one. You know. Step two, we uncovered, is that everyone's kind of receiving the same emails like, you can imagine what it looks like. It's like a grid of product with some visual flare and like the logo of the company, and then there's like a button that says, you know, click here, come back. And so on. And customers, I think you know me, are a bit jaded by that, because it all kind of looks the same. And so the tactic that we took is taking a conversational approach, which is like, Hey, this is a message to you from an actual person, and if you reply to it, an actual person is going to respond, right? And so if you're a smaller brand that's not unscalable, like you can respond if people want have a question, and so address people like a human, like, write them an email, because it's going into their email inbox. And some brands are doing that, but most of them are still going with, like, the grid of products, kind of template approach, which does work, but I'm saying layer on this, like personalized strategy as well. What do you think about that?
Mariah Parsons 21:45
Yeah, so I feel like this is, I mean, it's right at the alley of what I have had my experience in with E Comm, of if you go that extra mile with your consumers and letting them know who is behind the brand, or it doesn't even have to be like, right the face of the founder, but just someone is there. It really does make a difference. And personalization can go so such a long way for the customer relationship, but also the business relationship of being able to get their business back and earn it back, because it's not just like any brand knows. It's not just a guarantee that you get a customer once they're ever going to shop with you, you have to keep iterating on that process and on that relationship. Yes, yes, you're
Aneto Okonkwo 22:27
exactly right. And the brands we work with, they see, let's say, five to $10 revenue per recipient or more from this kind of like personalized one to one win back. The element that we add is like looking at the conversation history that the customers had with the brand. So let's say using a help desk platform like Gorgias or Zendesk or Salesforce, or gladly, you know, all the platforms like, that's actually another gold mine. Like, there's so much information that customers have shared with you about their preferences. Why they stop shopping with you, the issues they have with the delivery and when you reference that in the follow up, like, Hey, I know you had an issue with the sizing last time. Hey, I know that the promo code didn't work last time. Like, I know what happened, and I'm trying to address it. People come back and shop again. Like, big surprise there, right? You know? So these things are kind of obvious, and just know, like, people are so busy and you're like, sending out campaign after campaign. Like, hey, it's Black Friday. We gotta send out campaign. It's July 4. We gotta send out campaign like, you're so focused on the campaigns that you kind of the actual customer attention of that one to one connection gets lost. And it's just something that happens as brands grow. That's part of what we provide with our platform, is like, we help you scale this through AI, but I think anyone can do this today already, if you're especially for a smaller brand,
Mariah Parsons 23:41
okay, yeah, that's, that's a great recommendation. So I was going to ask, because a lot of the times it could be, I guess I'll use the word scary to build out a tech stack when you're a smaller brand, because you're worried of, you know, the onboarding cost is another thing to monitor. It's another platform to make sure that you're on top of, or that you're personalizing and paying the bills for so I was going to ask like that. I guess that that way of thinking of you want to prioritize, at scale, personalizing and understanding each consumer and making them feel like they are truly understood by your brand. But then there's obviously you need, you know, tech software, to be able to do that, like remarkable AI, or any of the support desk softwares that you just listed off. And so how do you kind of think about that? Or, I guess, ease those nerves, maybe of the brands that you're working with, like, No, I promise you, this will pay off in dividends, in retention, just because retention is, I guess, where less focus is a lot of the time for for founders.
Aneto Okonkwo 24:50
Yeah, I hear you. I think these platforms do cost, and they get more and more expensive it seems. Yeah. So. Most brands say, hey, just start off with your regular email. You know, you don't need all these tools. I think once you decide that retention is a priority, you probably need a tool like malomo and other like market automation tools that important, and then you'd maybe layer on something rock play like what we're doing is not for every brand, that's for sure, but we still want to provide, like best practices and strategies. So I'm not saying, hey, go all in on these tools, because they can definitely overspend you or you're not utilizing them. I think that's another sad thing I see. Is when we go into these helpdesk platforms or into these market innovation tools, people are not using most of the features just because of time, and they're complicated. There's a lot to do in there, so it can definitely help you utilize them more. But I wouldn't rush into using the tools until, like, you feel like your business is up a scale where you can support it. I'm just saying like the general strategies are sending a personalized message to people paying attention to what they said, what they ordered, what they browse, because that information, like, isn't there, it's in Shopify, and people really resonate with that, and people will come back and shop with you again, because every brand is not doing is not doing that right. And if you go that extra mile in that area, you'll get them back to shop again, like people know the stats, right? It's easy to get a customer's purchase with you before to purchase again. Everyone knows that. You know, yeah,
Mariah Parsons 26:12
they're already familiar with your brand. You know they're Yeah, they already, they already shopped with you for a reason. So either it was a specific problem that your product was solving, or they really liked what your brand was doing. And so it's, it's one of the one of the two angle I
Aneto Okonkwo 26:29
haven't talked about, which is, once brands get a foothold, the next step is LTV expansion. Like, how do I how do I grow that customer? And usually they end up launching like, secondary products or upsell products. Let's say your company, like in the apparel space, you know, one of our customers, they sell hats, right? But then they started selling T shirts and jackets and sweatshirts. And obviously that's higher AOV. But how do you get a customer who's used to buying hats from you to switch over to that other product line? And this is also where that personalization comes in. We can say, hey, like, I know you have that particular product, like one of our customers, they sell pajamas, but they also sell robes. So can you get a customer who bought a pajama to buy the robe, or someone got the robe to buy the pajama? Like, it all makes sense, right? And so again, you layer on that personalization aspect. You can then use it to expand your LTV and get customers to buy other products from your assortment.
Mariah Parsons 27:20
Okay, awesome. So I love that play. So with, you know, cross sells and upsells, are you ever looking at? Are you ever trying to use like customer data to inform what product development should be of like if you're really trying to expand LTV or AOV of an order? Are you, are you guys at all looking at, you know, trying to understand your consumers, of, like, people saying, you know, I wish you had XYZ product, and I would really like to buy that during, you know, like a product feedback survey or something like that.
Aneto Okonkwo 27:54
Yeah, certainly, I think that's not our area of specialization, like we have the tool that provides all those insights and all that data, but just because the customer is like, requesting a particular product doesn't mean they're going to buy it, and doesn't mean that it makes sense for your business either. I think founders have a much better perception of the market and like what products are appropriate and like what direction they want to go. So when we start with a client, we're actually trying to understand their strategy, like, I'll give an example. Like, a lot of the subscription brands we work with actually are now offering one time purchase, right? So let's bring it back to retention. Originally, your retention goal is, hey, people who unsubscribe or cancel the subscription, let's try and get them back in a subscription, right? But people who unsubscribed, maybe we should get them into a one time purchase, yeah, right. And then people who came in for a one time purchase, let's get them into a subscription, and it's okay for people to, like, move between these journeys, like, would you rather that someone comes back for one time purchase, or comes back at all? Because sometimes people just don't want subscriptions. I'll take an example of a campaign we're running at the moment. First, we tested people canceled their subscriptions trying to get them back into subscription. We got some results, but it wasn't amazing. Then we tested denim to come back for a one time purchase. Some of those people actually came back for a subscription. Interesting, not not pitching them so hard about coming back to a subscription, they actually come back more for a subscription. So just being open and like meeting people where they are in their journey, I know you have your business goals, like, Hey, I'm a subscription business. I'm trying to get everyone's subscriptions one time purchase also working. I think more and more brands are basically offering both strategies to get the maximum set of consumers.
Mariah Parsons 29:28
Yeah, yeah. It's so funny, like, just the human humanness to it right? Of a little bit of paradox, where it's like you can try so hard to get someone on subscription and they're not going to do it just because they feel like they're not the one in the driver's seat, and then you just say, Okay, but what about one time purchase? And they're like, Okay, I'm actually just gonna do subscription instead because it's a better deal. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's just, it's one of those funny things that you know makes you kind of zip out of the business side and just like, and these, yep, we're all human. We're all just, we're all just guessing at,
Aneto Okonkwo 30:03
yeah, you know when, like, when you do this one to one interaction, you can uncover what you're getting at, like, what is holding you back? Like, what is your challenge? I think one of our brands has been very successful. A lot of times it's pricing, like, hey, it's not in my budget. I can't afford it, particularly for subscription. And the response might be, hey, like, we have split payments. We have like Klarna afterpay, you know, all the different providers, right? And that's sometimes you want to offer every customer, depending on how like affects your margin. But in that one on one interaction, like, it's okay, it's more discreet, people feel more comfortable sharing, hey, it's just on my budget that's unreasonable. This is other way for you to get what you want, and you can explore that. So when you do these one to one interactions, you can uncover some of those needs that you decide, and you can decide whether you can solve them, whether it's a payment issue or something else. That's
Mariah Parsons 30:49
awesome. I love that, that application of it, of just seeing the response and the challenges with subscription so you get a little bit more customer customer Intel. And I actually, this morning, saw a LinkedIn post from one of my favorite founders, Mackenzie Bauer, at thread wallets, and she was saying she their whole company reached out to 20 customers like the unknown. Never had a relationship with both before, just to have a conversation throughout the month. And she had written about just the renewed sense of, I should really be doing this monthly, and like checking in with people, just seeing how they're responding to products or what they want, or, you know, like different struggles that they're having and that, you know, give or take, some would say that's not doable for certain founders or stage of business that you're at, and could use a tool like remarkable AI to help You get in front of those issues and still be scalable and an attainable goal. So I love the thought process of trying to use, you know, like, if you're not seeing results in this specific campaign that you're running, questioning why you're not, and then trying to get, like, the
Aneto Okonkwo 31:58
simple thing, like, like any person who's working today, like, they don't have to use market emission, they could use Klaviyo. They could use Shopify. Shopify as a free email marketing right? Just a simple question, like the subject line can be quick question, and it says, like, Hey, I'm Mariah. I'm the founder of XYZ company. I'm a real person. Yeah, I noticed you hadn't checked out one to two sentences. Could you tell me why? Yeah, most people won't respond to this, but the people who respond, it's actually very high intent. And if you answer their question and solve their challenge, they will purchase and we've seen like, 40% conversion rates from this type of strategy for some of the brands you work with. Yeah. So again, very simple thing you can do for free if you're using Shopify, because they have the email marketing, instead of sending the regular abandoned cart template, which is having XYZ conversion rate, actually ask people why they're abandoning their cart. And this might surprise you. Yep,
Mariah Parsons 32:50
I love it. So would you say your retention recommendations would shift given different seasonality, like we're going to generalize just because we're heading into Black Friday, Cyber Monday, exciting time in E commerce and just in retail in general. So would you say that your recommendations of trying to, like, personalize your email marketing, or just your overall strat customer retention strategy would shift with the holidays? Or is it just bigger at scale? Because you're probably like, hopefully you're getting more and more shoppers during this time.
Aneto Okonkwo 33:28
I think that you should offer personalization as an additional strategy to the people that matter, right? I'm not saying you should go and like, let's say you have 10,000 customers like, email each individual person, personally, that'd be amazing. But you know those people who really matter, maybe people who haven't shopped with you in nine months, you know, three months or six months, depending on the cadence of your business, and those of you who want to offer that extra attention, to give them that extra push, so that they really consider your brand highly, like during this season, yeah. So that's what I would say, because it's overwhelming. There's so much to do for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Most companies don't have the resources to go and do all these things and do the personalization. Of course, we can help with that. But if you want to do this on your own, just like, hey, who am I going to really prioritize? And who do I want to show that extra attention? We do with our clients too. We send our clients gifts for the holidays, right? And we try to prioritize people who have the longest relationship with us, who are the most invested, because we really want to thank them for their partnership.
Mariah Parsons 34:27
Yeah. Okay. Love it, yeah. And I love the it's always nobody will ever fight a gift for the most part, right? It makes it makes evil people feel special. We're going to wrap up in a little bit. But I wanted to ask first, if we've been talking about a lot of like use cases, a lot of case studies, just a lot of like, different ways that you're working with brands to innovate in their to innovate in their tech stack and to really personalize their experience and understand their cost. Customers. So are there any other like memorable strategies or memorable collaborations or campaigns that you think would be valuable for our audience to hear that we haven't already discussed?
Aneto Okonkwo 35:13
Yeah, so we've talked about chatting with people on social media to acquire customers. We've talked about giving this like one to one personalized connections to win back customers. I think the area we haven't talked about much is the customer support side, because what happens every Black Friday is you do these promotions and you send out these emails, and then people order, and then they have all these issues where, like, order status and delivery delays, a lot of is out of your hands, and then post that. Then there's like, hey, I want to return. I want to refund. And I think those are also places where you can have a magic moment by giving that extra touch and personalization and really thinking through that customer journey. So turning a shipping issue into a magical moment, turning a refund into actually an upsell or in like a replacement and a magical moment. We've really seen some of our customers, like go above and beyond, and that's really just with their policies, to really build a relationship, like someone came into you because you spent all this money. It's shocking, right? People spend so much money on meta, tik, Tok, Google, whatever, to acquire, and now they have the person, and then they let them go so easily with such like, a negative experience, you know? So an example might be like, Hey, you paid for extra shipping, and it didn't get shipped on time. The grip didn't arrive on time. Like, everyone can imagine this scenario, and then you're still sticking to your policy. Instead of like, Hey, I'm shipping one myself, personally, I'm going to walk over the post office and do it right now, like, there's some in our office. Like we're going to go do it right now. Like people get it and they're aggravated, but they appreciate that you're going above me on in that moment. So I think just just thinking about your contingencies, of course, you can use a partner like us to help you, like, scale your customer support efficiently to solve like that, take a backlog and respond to customers quickly. Like, that's the first piece. But just thinking through how you're going to create magic moments when those issues do occur, I think is another strategy that a lot of brands miss, and then they end up creating a bad perception from what should be like a very positive experience.
Mariah Parsons 37:10
Yeah, this is something we see all the time, and there's this stat. I'm forgetting who originally published it, but the stat is 84% of people, if they have one bad shipping experience, won't shop with your brand again. And so that has always stuck with me, because obviously, we're in Malomo, we're in the shipping and order tracking space. We're not actually the like fulfillment side, but we are the communicative side of that brand's or that customer's experience with a brand. And so we see time and time again that no matter how much you try, you will not be able to like a brand, will not be able to predict every single thing. There will be shipments that are delayed or lost or XYZ withheld or whatever else, right? Um. And so trying to think through how, even if it's not at scale, how you can address like those one off personalized or those, those one off interactions with people where it's like, okay, maybe at scale you couldn't have, you know, founder or brand company send something directly. But how can you mitigate so that this customer that is, you know, putting in the effort to email you about something and really cares and is really frustrated, how can you help mitigate some of that, and then at a scalable way you can, you know, put things like banners on your tracking page or website or social media or whatever else. It's like. If you've ordered with us. We know there are delays. We're aware of it, just so that you also protect your customer support team from getting inbound questions around, where's my order? Because as I'm sure you all see with customer support, it is there's a huge influx of just issues that come your way. So anything that you can do to mitigate that is welcomed by many Okay, so after talking about Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I know that this episode is going to be released like right in the midst of it, so I think it'll be really exciting right before kind of November, which it seems like is the most chaotic time for brands. But while we're finishing up this Convo, I always like to ask our guests, are there any promotions or launches or anything that you're really looking forward to that you can kind of give us, like a sneak peek of, or by the time that this episode is airing, we'll be live. It's okay. If the answer is no, it's just always fun to see what people say.
Aneto Okonkwo 39:37
Well, remarkable. AI is actually a new name for our company, which we just launched this month, October. So exactly just to talk about how we serve brands across the full customer life cycle, we started our journey in customer support. But as we talked to more brands, they really needed help with retention, with acquisition, and I think specifically retention has been. I've been focused this year, and brands are just making, like I said, 50 to 100 times what they're used to making in terms of revenue per recipient. So I would encourage all brands to go to beremarkable.ai. If they want to increase their revenue from retention.
Mariah Parsons 40:14
Okay, love it. Thank you so much, anato, it's been a pleasure to have you here today.
Aneto Okonkwo 40:18
Awesome. Thanks so much.
