Relevancy in Ecommerce

How relevancy during the Transaction Moment can help improve the customer experience and increase revenue

Mar 9, 2022 12:00 PM1:00 PM EST

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Key Discussion Takeaways

Targeted advertising is one of the most critical revenue drivers for eCommerce businesses. eCommerce brands use targeted advertising in many different ways, from sponsored posts on social media to banners and footers on third-party websites. Post-order advertising is one way that eCommerce sites can maximize revenue, attract new customers, and build LTV in their customer base.

This targeted advertising strategy ties directly into personalization, which is another main factor that drives sales and improves the customer experience. For many successful brands, personalization isn’t just about including a customer’s first name — it’s about creating a relevant experience that’s customized to the user. In order to craft a great personalization strategy, you should use technology and tools specific to your company’s goals that drive relevancy for both you and your customers.

In this virtual event, Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson talks with Ashley Firmstone, SVP of Customer Success at Rokt; Mike Griffin, SVP of Business Development at Rokt; and Kim Burghart, manager of Strategic Partnerships at Marquee Brands. Together, they talk about how relevancy is changing the post-order experience for consumers and eCommerce brands alike, the importance of a seamless customer experience, how to seize the purchase moment, and much more.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

 

  • What is relevancy in eCommerce?
  • The challenges brands face when building customer LTV
  • How personalization can impact transaction relevancy and the initiatives taken to maximize its impact
  • Using data to personalize the what and how in relevant advertising
  • Mike Griffin talks about seizing the purchase moment excitement to show engaging content to customers
  • Kim Burghart explains the importance of controlling both what is and is not shown to customers
  • Ashley Firmstone discusses flexibility and using evolving KPIs to stay relevant to changing customer needs
  • How does Rokt stay on top of customer relevancy while respecting and protecting consumer privacy?
  • How Rokt interfaces seamlessly with eCommerce sites to create a positive customer post-order experience
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Event Partners

Rokt

Rokt is the global leader in ecommerce technology, helping companies like Live Nation, Groupon, Staples, Lands' End, Fanatics, UrbanStems, GoDaddy, Vistaprint and HelloFresh seize the full potential of every transaction moment to grow revenue and acquire new customers at scale.

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Guest Speakers

Mike Griffin

Mike Griffin

SVP, Business Development at Rokt

Mike Griffin is the SVP of Business Development at Rokt. He holds a Bachelor of Science in economics and Spanish from Georgetown University and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurship from the University of Southern California. He has worked in the business development field for over 25 years with several industry leaders, including MGM and Bank of America.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson LinkedIn

Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson is a Digital Strategist at BWG Connect, a network and knowledge sharing group of thousands of brands who collectively grow their digital knowledge base and collaborate on partner selection. With over 13 years of experience in the digital space, she has built a strong reputation for driving growth, innovation, and customer engagement across a variety of online platforms. She is passionate about keeping up with the latest industry trends and emerging technologies by speaking with hundreds of brands a year thru the BWG Network. 

Ashley Firmstone

Ashley Firmstone

SVP, Customer Success at Rokt

Ashley Firmstone is the SVP of Customer Success at Rokt, an eCommerce tool, leading the globe by helping brands and businesses maximize the transaction moment, grow revenue, and acquire new customers. She holds a Bachelor of Science in business and marketing from the University of South Florida and has over 20 years of experience in the marketing industry.

Kim Burghart

Manager, Strategic Partnerships at Marquee Brands

Kim Burghart is the manager of Strategic Partnerships at Marquee Brands. She holds a Bachelor of Science in media communications. She brings over 20 years in digital marketing to the table, working with numerous brands, such as Motherhood Maternity® and A Pea in the Pod®.

Event Moderator

Mike Griffin

Mike Griffin

SVP, Business Development at Rokt

Mike Griffin is the SVP of Business Development at Rokt. He holds a Bachelor of Science in economics and Spanish from Georgetown University and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurship from the University of Southern California. He has worked in the business development field for over 25 years with several industry leaders, including MGM and Bank of America.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson LinkedIn

Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson is a Digital Strategist at BWG Connect, a network and knowledge sharing group of thousands of brands who collectively grow their digital knowledge base and collaborate on partner selection. With over 13 years of experience in the digital space, she has built a strong reputation for driving growth, innovation, and customer engagement across a variety of online platforms. She is passionate about keeping up with the latest industry trends and emerging technologies by speaking with hundreds of brands a year thru the BWG Network. 

Ashley Firmstone

Ashley Firmstone

SVP, Customer Success at Rokt

Ashley Firmstone is the SVP of Customer Success at Rokt, an eCommerce tool, leading the globe by helping brands and businesses maximize the transaction moment, grow revenue, and acquire new customers. She holds a Bachelor of Science in business and marketing from the University of South Florida and has over 20 years of experience in the marketing industry.

Kim Burghart

Manager, Strategic Partnerships at Marquee Brands

Kim Burghart is the manager of Strategic Partnerships at Marquee Brands. She holds a Bachelor of Science in media communications. She brings over 20 years in digital marketing to the table, working with numerous brands, such as Motherhood Maternity® and A Pea in the Pod®.

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Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson

Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect


BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution.

Senior Digital Strategist Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson runs the group & connects with dozens of brand executives every week, always for free.


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Discussion Transcription

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  0:18

Welcome everyone. My name is Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson. I am a digital strategist here at BWG Connect, and we are a network and knowledge sharing group. That is what we do, we stay on top of the latest trends challenges, whatever it is that is facing the digital landscape. We're on track to do at least 500 of these virtual events this year due to the increase in demand to better understand everything digital, and we're also on track to do at least 100 in person small format dinners. So if you happen to be in a tier one city, feel free to send us an email, and we'd be happy to send you an invite, these dinners are typically 15 to 20 people having a specific discussion around a specific digital topic, it's always a good time. We spend the majority of our time here at BWG Connect, talking to brands and learning about the latest trends within the market. I'd love to have a chat with you. So feel free to send me an email at Tiffany@BWGConnect.com, and we can put some time on the calendar. It's from these conversations where we generate topic ideas for future events. And it's also where we gain our resident experts, such as Rokt who's here today, welcome. Anybody that we asked to teach the collective community has come highly recommended from multiple brands within our network. So if you're ever in need of any recommendations within the digital space, do not we have a short list of the best of the best service providers that we would be happy to provide to you. And we also know a lot of people are hiring right now. We do have a talent agency BWG Talent that we'd be happy to put you in contact with as well. So a few housekeeping items, we started about five minutes after the hour. So rest assured, we will wrap up at least five minutes before the end of the hour to give you ample time to get to your next meeting. And we really want this to be conversational and educational as possible. So we will be dropping in questions within the chat. Definitely feel free to engage you can send me an email if you feel more comfortable in that respect that Tiffany@BWGconnect you can be anonymous. You can send away and we are going to get to the questions and dig into this very exciting topic. So with that, let's rock and roll with Rokt. I've been waiting to say that all morning. Personalization impacts customer experience and revenue so important. The team at Rokt have been great friends and partners in the network. Ashley, Kim, Mike if you take a moment to introduce yourself, that would be great. And we can jump into the topics.

Ashley Firmstone  2:47

Sure I can kick off. I'm Ashley Firmstone SVP of customer success at Rokt I've been with the company for seven plus years. So quite a journey with us. And I I've been witness to some of the growth and milestones we've been able to hit with a lot of our partners, so excited to speak with everyone today.

Mike Griffin  3:05

And Hi, I'm Mike Griffin, I run our global business development organization and a bit Rokt a little over a year. But I've been witness to us launching some amazing great partners and advertisers and what we would also call providers, so getting to kind of watch us help help our partners on this personalization journey and really understand kind of what we call the transaction moment and help them drive relevancy through that is the kind of things that we talk about every day. So it's nice to see this as a subject for today.

Kim Burghart  3:38

Kim Burghart, the director of strategic partnerships, for Marquee Brands, the marketing partnerships team and I manage all marketing related partnerships for Marquee across the entire portfolio, which includes brands from luxury goods to outdoor and active apparel and even food.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  4:02

Awesome, thank you. So we are going to kick it off with the idea of Wow, the moment has come. It's the moment we've all been waiting for. No matter what business industry you're in, you have the transaction moment, you're seizing the opportunity with the transaction and you need to maximize that opportunity. So this will be a great conversation to talk about. How do you do that? How do you do more of that? And how does a solution like Rokt play into that? We will be talking about topics. But we also put in in questions for the attendees. So the first question we have for the audience members is what specific initiatives have you found to be most effective in meeting customer needs via personalization? And if you're willing to share what has been your outcomes, while you're thinking on that people are typing in we are going to talk about let's talk about the challenges because why not, you know off the bat So what challenges do you see brands are facing building customer lifetime value, and improving that overall customer experience?

Ashley Firmstone  5:13

I can start over my seven years of what I've heard a litany of challenges, of course, and every business is a little bit different. But a lot of what I hear is how do you manage the different trade offs of things that you're trying to do with your customers on site? Right, there's obviously driving that core purchase, there's driving additional ancillary revenue. And then there's driving LTV initiatives, the app, you know, the loyalty program, how do you serve all these messages to a customer? And get it right? I think a lot of times we see companies trying to just throw everything at their audience. And I think they're, the challenge is how do you manage that appropriately, with different stakeholders in your business? Kim, I'd love to hear, you know, what were some of the challenges that you faced when you came to Rokt? And, you know, we started our conversations early on, what were you facing?

Kim Burghart  6:14

So our approach to the customer is a little bit different than some of the other use cases that I know that Rokt has, and also, what some of the other businesses in the world are doing with marketing, we leverage on top of our existing marketing, to really expand the use of our database, to do more to provide more not just for the customer, but also for our company. So you know, what can what can we do to create a greater experience, internally, as well as the external use. So something like a Rokt or a similar technology that can create an experience that benefits both sides of the line is just a really great thing for us to have inside of our portfolio of tools. The challenge, however, is making sure that it does align with the brand ethos that the package makes sense that it fits our consumers journey, that it's not like a weird outlier, that it's seamless, that the integration is seamless, that it makes sense, and that it fits in. And it's likeable by our audience.

Mike Griffin  7:42

Yeah, that's one of the things that we as we progress in the in our journey with our partners that we experience sometimes too, and something where it's not tension, but it's kind of good tension in a way that will talk to partners, like you know, Kim has been an amazing partner for us. And they'll have an instinct about, you know, I've seen your advertiser list Rokt, I'm not so sure that these four are a good fit for us. And we say, Okay, can we try it on 10% of the data, or 10% of your post transaction journeys, and then you they are very often surprised by the types of offers or the types of brands that their consumers will interact with, right. So I think on our end, that's kind of the magic of having a billion transactions and growing that we can feed off of and try and learn from is help identify partnerships or help identify things about the consumer, your consumers, that maybe you're not going to otherwise have exposure to. And plus, to build a nice walled garden, like we have a couple of 100 advertisers would take a team, right. And it would still not be as efficient because you're not going to be across network network wide learnings and things like that. And so what happens in the real world is then two bad things happen. One is that we were just talking to Golf now, right, which has 32 million people booking tee time, reservations every year. And they're showing the same ad to everyone, right. So that's not great, because that doesn't appeal. And maybe it's a good it's a really good, I won't say the advertiser, but it's a really good fit for what you would think someone making a Golf tee time is, but to say that's going to appeal to 32 million people, especially if they're repeating. It's just not logical. The other side of that is we all have our Chase, or Bank of America apps or something like that. And there's 1000 offers on there. That's not relevant to me either. Right? So it's not so much about the what, but how you can kind of put that in front of someone and to do it efficiently, let sort of the market and the algorithm and the intelligence decide what's the right offer for that consumer. And so that's why, you know, we felt we've built a nice partnership with Marquee and with Kim, because we're putting things that the data is telling us is relevant. We're not saying it's relevant, right, which is much more important.

Ashley Firmstone  9:41

Yeah. Like I think that's all exactly it. And I think like also, what Kim mentioned is, you know, making sure that that comes across to the customer in a likable way. It's the journey is also an important part of it. So how do you do all of that? When you have one transaction moment to capitalize on Right, that's a pretty tough decision for any business.

Kim Burghart  10:04

Actually, you know, how do you do that? Honestly, like we've, we've been able to do it kind of somewhat easily with we have been able to, like Mike had mentioned, we have been able to learn a lot about our audience as well through, you know, the interaction with the offers, make you invention, the different categories, finance, I'm looking at a report right now, some of the categories and verticals that we have learned about, that our audiences interacted with, it's, it's been phenomenal, how we've been able to leverage the knowledge that we were very tepid about, we're like, Okay, well, you know, let's test it. And the test turned into, you know, extremely great learnings that we've been able to roll out and apply, across, you know, our entire suite of marketing. So it's been, it's been really great.

Ashley Firmstone  11:03

Yeah, it's interesting, you know, I think people typically come in with a lot of assumptions around what their customers want, and who their customer is. Especially in retail, obviously, there's very strong brand affinity to keep in mind, but Relevancy is interesting, when you think about not just, you know, I purchased this, so I might need that. It becomes more interesting when you think about the individual customer, and what is their cohort? And what stage of life are they in? And where do they live? And what other products might make sense for that individual user?

Kim Burghart  11:39

Can, I'm so sorry, I'm just I got really excited, especially in the moment in which they are interacting in that particular transaction, we've done studies of, you know, in store transaction, what it's like for them to purchase, you know, additional products, what, you know, if they're buying leggings, are they also going to buy a bra? You know, if they're buying, you know, a party dress, you know, are they going to buy shoes, as well? Or, you know, how are all of the other partner type of assets going to be in the mix? When a particular type of product is purchased? It's different when you're on eCommerce, and you are in this other transaction moment. What are the other types of products that are being purchased online, versus in a store? What are the other types of products that are being purchased at any particular moment, based off of a need? What is you know, the catalyst for even going online to make the purchase? These are all the different types of things that you can slice and dice your data and take a look at and you can pretty much find information by coupling your Google Analytics with the reporting that comes out of you know, whatever tool you're using for your personalization.

Ashley Firmstone  12:54

Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing that's interesting, there's a lot of differences between the in store interaction, the Ecom experience, but one thing I think that we have found interesting and why customers engage so much in that moment is because you still have that like elated feeling of I just purchased something, right? Every time you walk out of a store, at least I know, I am, like, super excited. And I've got that high that yes, I just made my purchase, like what's next? Right? So I think what Rokt helps do is introduce, you know, brands at that moment, and people are very receptive. At that point in time, it's very interesting. If you can create a relevant experience in something is, you know, customized to that user, then they're very open in that moment. And that mindset is very different than other channels where you might just be browsing on social media, and you know, not half paying attention to the show that you're watching, right. When you're purchasing, you're very engaged in that moment, because you're excited by it, you're ready to get, you know, get your item and get it as quickly as possible.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  14:05

Definitely, I think, too, when you're having that moment where you purchase something from a brand you love, there's that relationship trust also with that brand. And to know like, wow, that brand knows me. So well that recommending this, this is a great thing. You know, this is a really curated experience. And it's a special moment, and in the consumers eyes, because you're really taking that extra step. I mean, in the olden days, when I was doing eCommerce, which was only 24 months ago, the personalization, like, Aha was, oh my gosh, we can send emails and people's birthdays, and we can put the name into the email and this is like big leagues like pop the champagne. Let's go. And now look at like how far we've come in 24 months. I mean, unbelievable how fast this is moving and the tools that are available for brands to you know, keep leveling up when it comes to personalization.

Mike Griffin  14:58

Yeah, and I think that that's a really entry point around the evolution of it right. And I think everybody's instincts are wrong, right? Because you sort of think about, oh, I'm going to do exactly what people do in brick and mortar, right? You can see this everywhere, right? Retail media comes up. And retail media is really just a manifestation of what people, if you go to the grocery market, somebody's paying to be on the end of the aisle. So when you're walked by, you get act, you get extra action, you get extra traffic, you get extra purchase, and someone's paying for the right to be at the end of that aisle, right? Just like someone is now paying to be a sponsored listing, or someone who's paying to be bubbled up on, you know, on the top of the category page on a website or something like that, right. And I don't want to be dismissive of those things. But those are sort of obvious choices, right? If someone has put in a search for socks, then a sponsored listing for a pair of socks is the right idea, right? But after they've purchased is a very different subset of experience to to Ashley's great points around sort of a little bit of the euphoria, or what we call the happiest moment in retail, and also that they're focused. But also, you have to face reality, they just bought something, they're probably not immediately going to want to buy something else. Right. So what are the right things to put in front of those consumers? Right? And it could be what we call a first party offer, right? It could be something where maybe you're doing refer a friend, or it's an app download, or it's an adoption for a newsletter, but depending on who the consumer is, and are they repeat, or are they new, there's also ample opportunity and great time to introduce them to a new partner, that yes, of course, can help you on a monetization path and can help you drive some more revenue and value. But you're also learning about that consumer learning what partnerships are interesting to them. And at the end of the day, you're putting something in front of them that's engaging, right, I tell everybody, you want to go make, you know, three cents extra in order, you could put a Google ad up in 10 seconds, and very few people will click on it, and you're going to dilute your brand, right, but putting relevant things in front of them that's born out of the data, which means people engage with it. You can't deny that you're providing value there. And when you have control over that experience, you can sleep well at night.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  16:57

Okay, cool. Yeah, talking more about the personalization. Topic is can you share a customer study case study experience, you see, you know, where you have been able to, you know, meet the customer needs be a personalization?

Ashley Firmstone  17:13

I think there's a lot of examples of that. And I think, you know, the way that we tend to think about personalization isn't the typical way like they using the first name, or its personalization is relevancy to us, like, how do we select the right journey for each customer that Mike mentioned? Right, is that getting someone to sign up for the app? Um, I don't know if I can say this name. But um, so particularly for certain companies will work with them on determining, you know, if they show their app download campaign to everybody, right? I know that I an example of this is just like an airline, right, you go on and you have that app I've purchased on the app a bunch of times, I'm actually getting that right of like understanding that I actually have purchased on an app and like, then determining, you know, what, I'm not going to show that I'm actually going to show an offer for HelloFresh. Because maybe I want you know, I'm traveling this week, and I don't want to go do a whole grocery haul and I want to order my dinners, right? That's where you get it right, for a brand. That's where you help improve that. Not only the relevancy for the customer, but then the ultimate, you know, take rate of the app download or adding additional revenue that you could have missed out on. Right, so having that third party revenue, that's bottom line profit that you're generating for your business that you wouldn't have had otherwise. So, right there is generating, you know, value to that company. So those are just like some of the things that we look to kind of solve for and really, like make those trade offs in real time by determining who that customer is, and what would be the best path for them.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  18:53

Yeah, it really is a personalization 2.0, potentially 3.0 at this point. So if you are a retailer, who is looking to embark on this 2.0 personalization journey, what are the first steps? Yeah, first, like is I'm assuming the objectives could be different based on what you want? And what what are some examples of those?

Ashley Firmstone  19:17

Yeah, absolutely. And Mike feel free to jump into I think, you know, that's where we start, right? Because our technology is can be deployed in so many different ways. So we really want to understand what are the goals for your business, and that could be, we just want to drive revenue, right? We want to drive an additional 30 cents per transaction that we see on our site. Great, we can do that. You know, you can tap into this stream of advertisers. Or it could be I want to improve the customer experience. I'm starving, you know, several ads on the confirmation page and it's not really generating a lot. How do we create a better user flow and experience or it could be Supporting partnerships, we work with companies that want to upsell their American Express credit card, how can we use our technology to power that and make that more customized for user? So I think it's definitely understanding those goals. And then we go down this path of okay, here's our suggested approach. And then you kind of work back and forth there. Kim, I know, for example, you work with a portfolio of brands, right? So we had to do this on a brand by brand basis with Kim and her team of understanding, okay, what's each brands goal? What's important to them? Um, you know, for motherhood.com, there was specific advertisers that they didn't want to show, right, we're not gonna show good wines on on that purchase. So that's fine. We want to give you those controls. So I think we first understand the goals from a higher level, and then break that down into how do we then create a customized experience give Kim and her brands the control that they need? To really drive the best outcome?

Kim Burghart  21:06

Get to Ashley's point, that was one of the most important things to us, when we were evaluating craft as a partner, you know, can we control the offers that are shown and what level of control do we have? Wine, we don't want to show why an offer to our audience which is pregnant, didn't really feel it was appropriate. Knowing that we could be so granular and choose, you know, the advertiser was, was really great. And across, again, across the portfolio, you know, we do have some competitors that we don't want to show. And we can be very granular with that. And it's really fantastic. B also can personalize and as Mike had mentioned, you know, have something inserted in here for ourselves, you know, if we, you know, we promote a loyalty program, we can collect additional information that can help us with the segmentation of our file, which lends to greater personalization across our entire marketing initiatives. So it's really powerful for us to be able to leverage this and have the control.

Mike Griffin  22:19

Yeah, ultimately, it's about two things, right? It's about relevancy and outcomes, right. And so you can drive that relevancy, you can point kind of our, our relevancy engine, or our, our capabilities that whatever outcome you're thinking about, right, so and then my mind, it becomes a math problem, right, it becomes an app problem of, if you're, if your game and you've got Marquee, and you've got a portfolio of brands, are there slices of the circle atop audience that you'd want to point towards motherhood and vice versa? Great. That's the outcome you're driving. That's where we can point our relevancy engine, if the outcome is drive more profit out of every order. That's where we drive that engine. And we set the bar and we set the guidelines around it, right. But regardless of the outcome, we're going to sort of point our relevancy engine, add it, and let it to it, let it let it, let it do its thing.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  23:08

And can you also utilize it for gaining more reviews for your products cross selling your own products?

Mike Griffin  23:13

Yeah, specific to the Shopify audience, which I know a lot of the audience that's here is on it, we have an upsell tool, that's part of it. I mean, the whole entire Shopify or WooCommerce, big commerce experience, just as no is really via an app download. You know, our integration is, I say, for our enterprise company, customers, it's very light for this, it's extremely light, right? It's all via an app, and then you get access to our platform on the back end, where you can make any change, whether that's percent of traffic, internal versus third party offers the advertiser blocklists that Kim was mentioning, all those kinds of things are all via the back end once the app is installed. But yeah, it's driving that relevancy and figuring out ways to do those experiments starting to run those first party experiments for whether it's an app download or refer a friend. Our basic stance is, you know, you, we don't want to tell you not to run a survey that's going to measure satisfaction of your consumers, because we recognize that's important for your NPS results. And for you to stay in touch with your consumer, do you need it on 100% of your post transaction audience for a multi repeat customer? Probably not right? Can you still get that statistical significance out of X percent of your population while driving other outcomes with y percent of your population. And that's really what we're all about is not being a static tool, but being a dynamic tool.

Ashley Firmstone  24:28

And on that, like dynamic, these two, I think, we built the tech to manage these changing priorities, right? And my team sees that a lot because a business may come in with you know, a particular goal in mind. And then as we work with them over years, their business changes their strategies change but what that one integration that they've now done, we can unlock these other initiatives as they come up, right, we can unlock you know, you've signed an explicit partnership with this brand and you want to serve that offer in a specific placement. We can help support that So I think having that flexibility is key for our business to be able to trade those in to test different things, as Mike said, experiment on which audiences, you want to serve different experiences to.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  25:14

Awesome, and then going down that same road of you're starting this journey, who are the stakeholders that should be in the room at the beginning of this initiative to make sure it's successful? And and what are the KPIs? What should you be tracking? And how do you track to prove success?

Mike Griffin  25:31

Yeah, I mean, the first KPI, you know, look, a lot of our partners work with us, because they want to sort of drive some, they're gonna, they're going to use our relevancy engine to help drive some financial outcome, right? So that when you can figure out in a day, right, which is how much additional revenue ancillary profit, you're driving out of our out of our relationship, if you're choosing to go down that third party ad, right, it's pretty obvious, you can start to see those results, our algorithm learns very fast and optimizes a client pretty quickly. So will typically give a range of outcomes. But you can start to see I've never not seen it take more than a week to sort of really see okay, this can be sort of a predictable financial outcome based on my based on my order volume. So that's not gonna lie. That's usually KPI. Number one is are they? Are they getting the results that we said that they would from the financial piece of it, but the others that are super important to figure out and understand are? Depends. What were you doing before? Right before you installed Rokt? And before you were using Rokt? Was that empty real estate? Probably not, you're probably doing something right. So some of it can be that bucket I talked about before, where can you still get the survey results? Or still you can you still get the responses? Can you still drive newsletter adoption or app download adoption or refer a friend kind of adoption at the scale you want? And sometimes that's tools and levers, right? You want to still expose those things to certain audiences, while maybe potentially driving revenue out of other audiences, and you start to play with those levers and start to understand, candidly, we usually see a pretty quick path towards the revenue side of things because it's very compelling. It just is right the numbers start to get 30 cents an order doesn't sound like a lot until you start processing 1000 orders and then you go wait a minute, that's $3,000 a day. That's a million dollars a year. That's not bad, right. So there's kind of that piece of it. But then the other one, which I encourage everyone to measure, and it is not at all abnormal for us to work with our partners on the marketing side or someone else to measure, repeat re ARV things like that really repeat rate is the biggest one, right? Because it's one thing to see really nice double digit engagement with whatever offers are getting put there. But that's still even if you have 15% engagement, which would not be uncommon for us, you're still gonna have 85% Not necessarily positively engaging, they might look at the offer, but they might not engage with it is that leaving a bad taste in their mouth? We think no, but we encourage our partners to go look at that yourself, make sure you're measuring repeat rate, make sure there's no drop, we haven't seen any, make sure there's no change in NPS and things like that, right. And so we we know, that's coming, and we welcome it, because we've we've never, we've never seen negative results against those things. Because we do our partners frame it very much as an unlock or things that they're making available to their consumers. So no real rational reason, once you understand what we're doing for for that to, to not continue to delight somebody but you know, proofs in the pudding. So that's where I think we get more marketing and customer, customer success, customer service, customer relations, sort of folks on the on the partner side, just to make sure that they're testing what they want to what they want to test. Because the financial results are obvious, we just want to make sure that they know that they're not trading something off for it.

Ashley Firmstone  28:35

Yeah, I think definitely that revenue piece, and whoever manages them is a key stakeholder. But we also like love to just meet every team that's involved. We love to understand the challenges because as we said in the beginning, there's a lot of different stakeholders involved with managing all the things that you want to accomplish on site. Can Kim who from your team, because obviously there was different brands involved as well as product? Like Who else did you bring into the conversation that you felt like was important?

Kim Burghart  29:06

One of the the most important teams to bring in for us was the team that isn't responsible for the user experience on the website, to ensure that they felt that the experience that the customer was given what felt seamless, it felt tied into the brand, that it wasn't odd that it wasn't quirky, that everything felt right that the look and feel match everything else that we were doing with the brand. And then from there, you know, like, I actually like you covered the whole, you know, does that financially make sense? Does it you know, is it going to lend itself to helping the company reach our goals? Um, and then of course, you know, if the lift is the lift, make sense, you know, do we have resources, you know, on the, to do the back end, which was, again, it's an app it's minimal, though. Yeah,

Ashley Firmstone  30:03

yeah, I think it's it, we encourage you to bring in whoever you feel like is needed, make those decisions and get everyone really comfortable with the tech and how it works. So we're, you know, very open to working with all of those departments to make sure it's the right fit. And then I think once they see those results, that's when the proof comes in, and they get really excited. And then they want to start working on additional things and that evolves on that's usually how we see those relationships play out.

Kim Burghart  30:33

That's where we are now. Everyone wants to know, what's next one, I'm just gonna tap

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  30:39

or play No. Because so what platforms do you work with? And what does the implementation time look like?

Mike Griffin  30:50

Yeah, I mean, we're, we're agnostic, right, we work across a ton. We have hundreds of partners, the plug in play, you know, same day, off you go is Shopify, whoo, whoo, WordPress, sort of that that ecosystem and big commerce, those are all my most exciting moments at Rokt even not close, but bigger deals, most exciting moments that Rokt or when I've been on a call, and they've actually downloaded the app and started generating revenue while we're on the phone. Right? So with those apps, you can genuinely download the app and get rolling, and everything is there in terms of customization of look and feel, and all that sort of thing. But typically, it's it's kind of a even for our enterprise clients. It's not about the tech, it's not about hands on keyboard, not about fingers, on, on, on, on on keystrokes, right? That's very light. It's a web SDK JavaScript snippet. It can live within Tag Manager, it can live as as code there. But that's genuinely, you know, less than an hour of work kind of thing. But the integration takes longer. Because we work with big enterprise clients, they need to make it part of their release cycle, they need to do QA on it, they want to set up a test schedule, most of those things can be set up on the Rokt platform side, but they just want to confirm the integration. And the integration discussion is usually where we spend some time, which is what elements of our platform, excuse me of their platform, do they want to integrate with us, which ultimately drives the relevancy engine? Right. So it's about making sure that they know that the results can vary wildly, widely, I should say, depending on the elements of integration that they that we work with, together, right? 10 elements drive better results than then two elements, right? And so it's, it's helping them understand what those elements are. So it's more around discussion and alleviating any privacy or security kind of questions they have and much less about hands on keyboard integration, which is super light.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  32:47

So question about data. In privacy, it's a hot topic. Can you elaborate on that? Who owns the data? What type of data?

Mike Griffin  32:59

Yeah, partner owns the data, we do not sell or share anything with our advertisers. Those are just points of fact, right? So any sort of CCPA GDPR reviews or anything like that we're ISO 27, double Oh, one certified all of those things, very happy to obviously elaborate with anyone on a on a one off basis. But, you know, I think that the bottom line is we don't sell or share any advertisers to partner owns their data. We are a technology layer that is helping them optimize that data to surface relevant offers. But ultimately, we're no different than any other technology or software tool that you might use on your site, whether that's personalization, or an email, send program or anything else like that, to really optimize your data to make relevant offers to your consumers.

Ashley Firmstone  33:45

Yeah, well said, Mike, I think just think of us as like the extension of your business, right, we're here to operate for you. Um, and I think it's important to that's why we spend a lot of time the most time in those conversations stages around. What do you want to accomplish? What's important to you in the integration, because there's a lot of different levers you can pull. And we're there to help you understand what that means as far as outcomes for your business, but ultimately, it's your site and we're looking to drive that experience for your customers.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  34:20

Awesome. Kim, do you have any advice to the group?

Mike Griffin  34:25

personal or professional Kim from your your awesome experience? Should we make our beds when we get up in the morning

Kim Burghart  34:37

to try to limit to four cups of coffee a day. That's what I'm trying to do. Here, honestly, my technology is not hard. I people tend to overcomplicate pieces of technology. Take a breath, think about it, and evaluate what it can do for you. Your business technology should simplify things for you, it should make your life easier. If it's positioned where he or something that you have is, is making your life complicated. It might not be the right tool. If it sounds hard to take a step back, it probably isn't. Things should be very simple. Technology should be very simple. There's a lot of buzzwords, again, please just take a breath. It really shouldn't be hard. That's it?

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  35:38

Did you have to have a lot of different departments involved from the get go when you launched this initiative?

Kim Burghart  35:43

For Rokt No, no, it was honestly, I mean, I'm really not here to be like a Rokt fan-girl, I'm not. I've worked I worked in digital marketing for 20 plus years. I and this is probably the the easiest technology integration I've ever done. I've worked in house, I've worked in agencies, we've developed custom CMS systems ourselves. We've built ERPs, and companies that I've worked with. We've basically done data transfers, but it's like, a heart transplant. And then we've also just done things like, you know, dropping an analytics tag into a website that has just been mind blowingly complicated. This is not at all hard. It was so amazing. The team over at Rokt had done, you know, all of the design for pop ups, or you know, the embedded, however you decide to go there options. And you showed it to our different brands. And they're like, Oh, my God, that looks great. How did they get our colors? Right? Again, not hard. And it just it worked. And we had like a little Rokt party, we got all the groups together, it was a half hour meeting, the Cohens were dropped into the state it worked, you know, or the app was installed. And it worked. The key is that it worked. Everybody plugged in what they had to do. And and here we are a year later, it's actually actually it's our year anniversary.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  37:25

Today, wow, be popping champagne.

Kim Burghart  37:29

I know, it's a party. Um, you know, it just, it's really great to find a partner and a tool like this that can be seamless, can month over month, show results and be easy to work with have teams that are just knowledgeable and provide consultative recommendations on how to grow and use the tool better. keep you aware of what is new in their space, what's coming up, we are going to be rolling out some new features as Rokt is developing them. So you know, it's a growing partnership. And you know, we're really happy that we found each other. And just looking forward to you know, what's next, if I could replicate this with additional partners. That's a goal that we have, like, hear from leadership, go find another Rokt. They have to be out there. For the tech stack. Let's get more companies like that more that are, you know, great to work with. That can really help drive the bottom line is where we didn't feed kids. No. Mainland free. Well.

Mike Griffin  38:44

That was amazing, Kim, thank you. I wish it was 5057. I say let's go everybody. That's it. Yeah. No, but I would say I mean, first of all, Ashley's team is very solid in terms of working with customers, we're not just a launch and see you later, they work really hard. But I think candidly, the way the partnership works is the interests are aligned, right? We're here to optimize your engagement and optimize the revenue that gets driven out of the system. So 100%, you know, brings a tear to my eye, everything you just said, but a lot of like the interests or the interests are genuinely aligned, right, we're gonna do better. It's not like we're charging you as as fee and hope that you can justify it on the back end, right. We're our interests are aligned and helping you to drive revenue and drive good and drive good results and stay with us, you know?

Ashley Firmstone  39:27

Yeah, I think, like, just to hit on one key point, I think that I often hear when we're working with direct teams is, you know, it should be easy. And a lot of times it is something that companies want to build themselves or, or own themselves, right to improve that customer experience. And like, we want to support you on that path, but it's probably going to take a lot longer for that to happen internally, right to build up that technology and not learning so why not flip that on? Quickly. And we'll be your partner in that and when What you should build and what your customers do actually like or enjoy or engaging with, and you can then go replicate that right. But we're here to help make it easy. And I think that's where a lot of our partners get surprised with how easy that is to accomplish something that you've been trying to build internally for a few years now, but haven't gotten over the line. So I think that that's, we hear that quite often from our our customers.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  40:26

Very cool. And just to confirm, as we're wrapping up here, any final questions, comments? Anybody has definitely put in the chat. I do have one that came through via email is where does the offer actually live?

Mike Griffin  40:40

Ah, it's on the it's on the edge. It Yeah. Nevermind, it's just there. It's on the it. Great question. And sorry, we should have somewhere somewhere cover that. But it's on the checkout confirmation, kind of what I would call the the thank you page, right. So it lives we're not at all getting in the way of conversion. It lives typically would say, you know, thank you, Ashley for your order, and then exists as either an overlay or pop up as you might call it or embedded on that page. Both options are available as part of Shopify, or any any experience candidly, but yeah, lose on that. Thank you, page

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  41:18

BFL. So that is a important note is it's post transactions done, the thank you has happened. And now look at this. So there's no opportunity for a distraction midstream during the transaction process. So that's Yep.

Mike Griffin  41:33

And a picture says 1000 words and happy to follow up with anyone with either a demo of their experience or a demo of one of our other partners experience, both of which are very easy for us to do. So happy to happy to do that. But you're not also losing visibility to what's behind it. Right. So typically, we are bringing in elements of the integration, right? So we'll get an order number or a first name or something like that, that lets them know like, Okay, this isn't some weird thing that's come in from outside this is from the partner it's a thank you it's it's a reward that's being availed to them, and of significant majority of our ads so to speak are offers right? It's typically not you just bought a pair of pants, hey, come by about right now, it's, you just bought some Disney pajamas. How about a free month of Disney plus, right, it's very much often offers based, first X days free $50 off your first order from HelloFresh, things like that. So it's very much offers based. So that kind of fits in with sort of coming from the partner that you're working with, and are our campaigns are then going to, again, it's going to show up as an overlay or an embed, so you're going to still see anything relevant, you would need, like shipping times are tracking number but often we're bringing in the order number on the header for that overlay, they can easily X out they have to opt into anything with a very affirmative yes, please or okay. And that would bring them to a new tab, new new window within that sorry, not a new window, a new tab within that experience. So they're not going to in any way, shape or form lose visibility to the site, they're on.

Kim Burghart  43:04

Go back to talking about the stakeholders and the buy in, I had mentioned our UX teams, we knew that when we were bringing to the table a partner who would be you know, in the cart, or in checkout that we really had to come in, and we had to show the demo, to show them that we were not interfering with the transaction, you know, we were going to get in the way of you know, the the customer completing a sale, that this experience, you know, inside of checkout was after the transaction moment that it would complement the purchase that it will complement the experience that it would, you know, be able to be personalized, like Mike had said that we would be able to tie in with, you know, the the customer journey that was that had already taken place. So that was it was a very powerful thing to be able to have that visual. And to tell the story, just by looking at it rather than just saying, oh, yeah, it's just going to be something that will happen after you know, the sales. So that was it was very helpful.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  44:12

Yeah, definitely important to note. Awesome. Well, any closing comments or advice that you have for the audience, as they embark on personalization 4.0.

Kim Burghart  44:22

Just her us for Marquee, we do have very unique audiences Starla Tom, and Martha Stewart, our motherhood audiences again, we have them for a very short period of time while they're pregnant. And, you know, they're looking for very specific things and we want to provide that very specific shopping experience to them, which is why we're always looking for different ways to provide the relevancy you know, we've said it a few times. It's not just about you know, dynamically inserting their first name, or, you know, things like that. It's about really customizing that journey. making them aware without like the query marketing, like, Oh, you just looked at these shoes. And that's not fun. But you know what is on her mind, it's about knowing her through these different marketplace types of

Ashley Firmstone  45:16

mine would be used data and use the data that you have on your site around your customers to really listen to them and what they want. And using that to drive decisions. I think companies get into trouble when they start to make assumptions about the best experience or what's relevant. So definitely use what you have available around your customers to make it, you know, more personalized for them and customers are actually looking for that, right. They're looking for a personalized experience, they know that their data is out there. But if you use it in an intelligent way to create a more custom experience for that person, you can really you know, improve that lifetime value of that customer.

Mike Griffin  46:00

Beautiful. Yeah, I'll just say push yourself on relevance, right? Ask yourself why you think what you're doing is going to drive relevance. You know, I think table stakes you have to be relevant to your consumer. And I think I would push yourself into asking I know it's the title of today, but I really do genuinely believe it. You know, ask yourself if what your if what you're thinking about doing for your consumers? How do I know what's relevant to them?

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  46:00

Fantastic. Ashley, Kim, Mike, thank you so much for the information today was awesome, compelling and a huge thing to Rokt for being an awesome partner and supporter in the network. We definitely encourage anybody on the call to a follow up conversation with the Rokt team, it will definitely be worth your time. And we will make introductions POST call today. And we'd like to have a conversation with you as well. That's how we get the topics for future conversations. So feel free to drop me a line at Tiffany@BWGConnect.com And we can put some time on the calendar. So with that when I wrap it up happy anniversary, Kim, Ashley and Mike.

Mike Griffin  47:05

guys at the after party Yeah. Thank you Kim Good seeing you guys, thanks

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