Two 2027 DTC Shifts: AI Retention Marketing & TikTok Creator Burnout

You've only got Connor Rollin and I today, Cody, had to bail on us for the brand new,

very exciting recording of operators build in the launch of Wynx. I was teasing him this morning that he's found a younger, hotter podcast to hang out with and we're feeling a little on the outs. We're excited to see the episode, but we're going to miss him today a little bit. We were all in person this week for the post-script summit, where they sort of debrief us on

“the current state of the business. We talk about the future. I think it's a great jumping off point”

to discuss maybe some of the things that we learned this week as well as how that might affect each of our retention strategies moving forward. It all starts with profile enrichment is kind of what I took away as the foundation of what they're building. I think they're building a very robust, it's more or less a CDP, where they're pulling in all of these data points from post-purchase surveys and two-way conversations with

customers and a bunch of other data sources to basically pull all this into their profile.

So you can understand as many, I don't want to say features, but as many like characteristics or preferences or life events, et cetera, for all of your customers, and then they're basically funneling that into their AI messaging, which is what they're calling shopper, which I think is largely replacing like SMS sales, which we've used a lot in the past and now we're migrating into shopper, and then shopper is basically using all these data points to just create hyper-personalized

messages. So if I'm buying from rich because I just got married and someone else is buying a ring from rich because they just want to have a wedding band to wear when they exercise, post-cribes

“taking all that information, it's creating what I think they're calling memories internally,”

and then they're just their whole future, super hyper-personalized messaging based on all these memories coming into all these different data sources from a variety of places. So I think that's very cool. I think like for us at Hacks Cloud, as we've expanded categories, we're trying to think through how do we segment and push people into the right products and the right messages at the right time, and to me this seems like a really awesome step in that direction compared to what we're

currently doing, which is just like a lot of a water falling of messages, and it's working like we're growing these categories, and we get really good engagement on these lifecycle marketing flows, which to me tells me we are showing relevant messages to relevant audiences, but like could it be even more relevant, if instead of waterfall in these messages, we were utilizing the memories and the data segmentation that post-cribes building out to say, hey, we just had 100,000

people buy in the last 60 days, now instead of waterfalling those people through our lifecycle marketing, we can actually build more intelligent segmentation and say, hey, we're going to put this 3,000 into a nice flow, we're going to put this 1,000 to do an aprons flow at the same time instead of waterfalling people across. So that's that's like one of the use cases I'm the most excited about, but yeah, I mean, really cool stuff from post-cribes, I'm just amazed at how they're building

“and how they run that company. My biggest takeaway, and what I think is like going to be”

undersold a little bit, the AI messaging, the personalization, super, super exciting. This shift to post-cribes 2.0 and like the profile piece of it, you said at CDP light or CDP like those hex code uses CDP currently? Yeah, we use a CDP, we've had one for, I mean, we've been using

the same one for like four years, I think ultimately the goal is to like have a robust enough data

warehouse and ability to query that data warehouse that you no longer needed, but we do still use a CDP because our data warehouse isn't quite there to the point that we've been able to sunset it. So we're really using our CDP for, well, one indexing across like large data sets of consumers and our CDP partners with like, I forget, you know, like Nielsen and there's a handful of other that have massive consumer data sets so you can kind of take your Shopify list and say,

hey, where does our list over under index for certain interest and stuff like that? And then we're using, we're still using our CDP for a lot of our like cohort based analytic segmentation, market basket analysis, stuff like that. So we still do use our CDP quite a bit, I'm in there every week, they were really nice LOM over late on top of it that makes clearing it really easy. So yes, we are, we are still using one. My understanding of CDP is that they really

unify, they make a profile independent of a given channel and that's like, you guys can integrate Clevio and you can integrate Shopify and you can integrate, you know, wherever else you might be collecting any sort of consumer profile and then appending that with additional data so that when you say you can enrich it with Nielsen data and get better insights into those customers, it's happening because it's independent of any given channel. The flip side of this is Clevio,

you cannot have a Clevio profile, I mean, I'm being a little bit simplistic here, but it was this

And that's like a big limiting factor where and you've basically fractured the way that you can speak to customers, CDPs have unified that over time. It also goes down to like my

deep disappointment with Clevio because I think that they have always been the closest thing

the brands have to CDPs. They did eventually roll one out last year. It's very expensive. I don't think it's very good. I don't think it's going to get adoption from like the, you know, mid eight figures to nine figure brands. They've been so close to being the central source of truth for all of our customers and I never think they like really embraced being that. And that's like

“I think it kind of a key part of what Postcript trying to do moving forward is to say, hey,”

we've always been an SMS platform profiles on Postcript to voice required to have a phone number attached to it. What 2.0 is is a move upstream of that where we say we're going to have unified profiles independent of SMS. And then now we can append all sorts of different tags and identifyers across all these different channels so that they could do SMS as they announced on sort of unofficially announced on Twitter recently. They're going to be doing email in the future. You could be

ingesting Shopify profile IDs. You could be ingesting, you know, in the future it'll be postpilot IDs or whatever else that like they are going to be the central platform for dealing with our customers independent of channel. And I think that will be very empowering as we sort of push strategies downstream and a more unified thoughtful way. And that's what I'm super excited about. A lot of those shifts independent of AI like there's no their ability to make this shift was

dependent on AI but the platform itself is not necessarily like AI native and then moving forward

“we'll be able to just leverage all that information a little bit better. And that's what I'm”

super excited about. That was kind of step one for me one question I have on that. It was like because like the to the extent that poster was becoming a CDP is is in the sense that they're they're like just tracking so many customer attributes and that's super cool right they looked at that that bars boost boost brand and they were showing us how this comes to life. I'm curious because the way that I use our CDP a lot today is really for like cohort based like LTV

market basket analysis style of of querying and I am curious if if posterpool like again it's all

like customer attributes right now which is amazing and that's super valuable but I still there's

still the need for me to go in and be like you know hey we just launched these egg pan ads in the last 60 days in our AOV is way higher than than just this single egg pan or single rice pot like I want you to tell me what are other people buying and that's super valuable because now I can go and be like doing more like custom upsells crosssealed bundling based on that and like that is one of the biggest use cases of the CDP that that I'm using today I'm also using it to understand like

are we are we effectively growing our like 12 24 month LTV and in all our yearly cohorts and like again super valuable information to understand if our product roadmap strategy is working if our attention marketing strategies are working but more like a quantitative perspective on life cycle and LTV and market basket analysis and again I'm still using it for some of the more just like customer attribute stuff which is what postcripts building towards but I am curious

if they're going to ultimately go all the way in that direction where I can go right in a postcript

as well and say like hey cohort everyone that acquired in you know July of 2025 and show me how they've been maturing and the reorder rates and where we're seeing like the biggest bump in LTV like I'm curious if they're going to be able to like cross the the chasm and be that like quantitative value provider for that that like CDPs are currently servicing right now as well. Everyone is talking about AI but few operators are actually using it to speed up their marketing

and make better decisions at ridge we use runeth it's an AI brain for the whole marketing team it watches every creative you've ever run knows what's inside of each one and connected to it actually drove revenue you can plug it into your clay vio Shopify north beam your whole google drive it reads all of it. So instead of asking what work last quarter anyone on your team can ask for 10 evergreen concepts worth testing before Q4 and get them back within minutes we use it

hex cloud use it Jones road uses it it's the best AI brain for e-com brands on the planet if you don't use it you're going to fall behind go to runeth.com and book a strategy session mentioned marketing operator sent you and you'll get a thousand dollars in free credits. I mean to be clear we're both speaking in a very unofficial capacity right there's some speculation going on around around uh around what post groups going to be doing we did get some good information this

“week um i will say i think there are going to be a number a handful of platforms position to”

unify customer data or just like data generally and get value from that. Sayers analytics being a great one i've talked about it a number of times on the pod where it's like just brands investing in

post group doing it they seem to have more of a channel focus where it's like hey let's start with these unified profiles and let's let's power great one-to-one messaging across email and SMS

and RCS and in the future it's what's up and whatever else and they'll integrate with third

parties potentially like a post pilot um that seems to be more of their focus but i could also see it on a long enough time frame these platforms converging and maybe post group does have a great analytics tool or at the very least some sort of mcp that you can tap into and begin sort of querying the data more granularly um the the big takeaway and like we've talked about this in many different instances is i think a lot of ddc brands their data has been extremely

fragmented. If you look at the this might big qualm with like retention as like a practice in our industry is that klaveo post-cript you know you were using amps popups for a while you have revo is your customer counts they're all very disparate and unifying that data is extremely difficult in cumbersome and this just felt like an example of maybe a smoothing towards the world where that gets a little bit more um aggregated and therefore we can be a little bit more strategic

“about how we're speaking to people across channels. Yeah and i think that's why people like that's why”

we use a cdp today because we can we can query it in cohort at based on you know acquisition like orders from a certain channel or someone that has had a touch point with with direct mail like it does create a sense of connection between all these different marketing touch points that a brand has and i think that's why that's why a cdp is still very valuable um so but yeah and i think like on the other the other thing i love that post-cripts doing and they've always done this and they

continually and it is they're always validating on a on a holdout basis looking at incremental revenue incremental return on ad spend and you know we're we're using shopper now um testing it in a lot of our lifecycle marketing and SMS and we're running holdouts against all of it you know shopper versus like the static messages that we were going to send and then we're measuring the lift and we're being very systematic about it to make sure that when we are rolling out shopper it's it's incremental

in and every individual instance that we're that we're rolling it out and now we're moving into like

“I think we're in the campaigns beta so we're starting to do some more testing there but um you”

know I always appreciate these these sass companies that that are you know incrementality first

even if you're not like a house you know post pilots another or yeah post pilots another great example of a like retention life cycle based company that also really leans into to user level holdout test which I really appreciate well that's the you're describing the incrementality alliance the unofficial yes alliance it's forming between post corrupt house post pilot we mentioned maybe we put intelligence in that group everybody thing about incrementality making our lives a

little bit easier yep yep so um on this point so we talked about uh this platform shift that I'm super excited about this idea of unified profiles I think is good you already touched on this a little bit but post groups having they're in a very interesting position also what was really cool is I've been hearing this message for three years and it's sort of really coming to fruition now that them being with SMS they are like their core competency is a text based channel which is

from an AI perspective like gonna benefit the most right like like AI knows exactly how to deal with natural language it is that is it's bread and butter um so they want to be having all of these one-to-one conversations um inferring these attribute and details about a customer saving that down to this unified profile um which is what you were describing uh as something that you're excited about these like memories where they had an example of a woman who um was shopping in her

like daughter-in-law was celiac so you that's a very important memory and if I'm gonna sell her food in the future like that's that's something that I should really consider and that is something that is like harvested by this one-to-one conversation saved into the profile super super interesting um I'm I'm I'm really curious you mentioned A.B. testing some of the campaigns and

“flows now I think this is also a really interesting conceptual shift in retention maybe you could just”

describe what those look like everybody listings not gonna be necessarily actively testing shopper so what's the difference between using shopper within a flow versus um what we traditionally think of as flows yeah I mean traditional is just like static static flows right like you have you have some sort of life cycle marketing set up that's based on a trigger and when someone hits that trigger they go and they get pushed into a series of flows it could be pre-purchase

abandoned cart it could be post-purchased like like a like a cross-out upsell so we are just basically

testing pushing people into those static flows versus pushing them into shopper where they're getting dynamic living breathing messages that are two way back and forth and then we're measuring the lift between the two cohorts and then when chopper wins were we're pushing all that traffic into shopper versus the static flows and you know that's what I'm really excited about I think

out is brands are going to start to get really really really incentivized to to get as much memory and context on each individual person that comes into their their brands world as possible so

like where I start to think is well what if instead of putting someone into a what we always

call like our general cross-sale flow which is like the first place that anyone that purchases goes in terms of like you know product marketing you know we obviously have a lot of like transactional using care stuff like in terms of product focus product pushes we're putting people into these general cross-sale flows to start to build more awareness around all of our our categories after

“they bought our hero products where I could see this going and I think what brands are going to”

be incentivized to do is to try to have as many two-way conversations with each individual as possible as soon as they possibly can because that's where you're really extracting a lot of the memories and the context on each person so maybe now instead of doing the static you know cross-sale like category education flow that we have which is like a six email flow it's very robust it really gives a ton of awareness of everything that hex cut offers I could see as saying hey you know

right after someone purchases right after their products delivered let's actually get them into a a two-way messaging automation with shopper so we can start to extract information from that person by trying to understand like hey what are you going to be most interested in next in why and that's where I can start to be more thoughtful about putting someone into like a nice flow versus like specialty cookware flow so yeah that's where I could see our our program going

“is we're just trying to get people into these and I'm not saying we'll totally sunset static life”

cycle because we have very especially an email right we very thoughtfully message didn't design flows that really explain these categories in a way that I just think sometimes SMS can

never do simply because of the medium doesn't lend itself as well to like longer form

or like designs content but I could see it's like adding steps upstream to get those conversations going so we can start to like extract more memories earlier on and then again not waterfall people but actually put them into the right flow at the right time based on the conversations that we're having and in the info that that we're being delivered through this this two-way messaging stream totally yeah it's funny I mean this is all shopper today and like this AI agent that is that is

having conversations on your behalf with customers is all a descendant of their SMS sales tool from like four years ago five years ago we love that tool by the way we did a lot of

“testing into that as well but now we're replacing it with shopper well totally the original SMS sales”

tool from post group was a group of people that they'd hired in like a big corporate office building in Phoenix Arizona to manually have conversations with with customers over time and then they and then chat to be too came out or whatever and they were like oh hey there's a path to actually automating this all the way and having an agent do do this on your behalf so one way to think about this is just a literal sales agent speaking to customers identifying what information is relevant

and then naturally cross-selling them into other products and categories and what's just so crazy about that is thinking about you know if you think about some of these at Clevio profiles and the amount of like splitting um I don't know the the proper terminology but like if you look at some of these flows within Clevio someone's manually going through and building all this logic in order to get like this hyper personalized email so that you can get 5% of your list down to

this like very specific message there's this scenario where all of that goes away and an agent is just discussing with someone figuring that information out for themselves inferring where they should use that information where to send you next and then your flow has no logic in it it's just a sort of like nebulous box and the agents guiding them towards their like the best product and the beauty of it is you can literally just AB test that so it's like you can you can trust whether it's

good or not um but that is a very very weird interesting future I would say every growth team defaults are the same metric acquisition not because it's the best answer but because retention data is the one number nobody trusts enough to act on so budgets keep going to new customers while your highest LTV customer sit unmeasured that is the gap that tears IQ closes

brands like momentous went from days to minute to month end fairity uncovered 1.1 million

hiding in their customer data posh peanut turn one customer segment into a six-ex return and ridge and hexclad run on the same foundation. Serves IQ is the only tool in the industry that certifies data accuracy before an answer ever reaches you not certain it says so which means when you finally look at true retention and LTV you're not guessing you're deciding with numbers you can trust starting in 1999 a month live in a matter of days. If I had to start over in scale then I

think you're today Serves IQ would be a non-negotiable and at this price it's a steel go to Serves analytics.com that's Serves S-A-R-A-S analytics.com and book your walk through now.

you know category and and like the way that they get in there is from all these different

“data sources you know I think it I want to I want to mention like the old way we used to do this because”

it's so different now compared to what like postures build in towards so our old way used to

basically be we would before we just waterfall everyone through all these we would basically say

if someone's bought and they've done any of these actions on our website which was mainly like have they visited one of the one of the knives product pages or collection pages or have they done anything on our website that has shown intent towards this category we're going to put them in that product categories cross style up cell flow versus a different one. What we found is that the segments were just simply too small like we were we were being way too segmented and we

weren't getting enough volume through those cross cell flows and that's when we moved back to just more like hey let's remove the web filters and let's just like do this kind of waterfall waterfall approach so you compare that which was like only web data now to shopper and like

the memories in the context that post that post groups using and it's like sure the web data but

if the post purchase survey data is the two-way conversation data it's the reviews data like I'm probably only hitting on half of the different data sources that they mentioned this week in terms of what they can use to pull into provide context so it's giving brands that power again to create just segments that are high intent towards the right thing and it's just been very hard I mean hexcods like we have huge volume and even us just based on the web analytics filtering

the the segments weren't large enough so I don't think most brands probably were able to create the large enough segments only off of web data so it's cool that post post groups giving people the opportunity to like bring in more data sources more context and and do the hyper personalized

“marketing that we've all been trying to do for for years with I think varying levels of success”

okay little bit of attention here and then I want to ask if the information we got this week or anything else how you're thinking about retention going to 2027 have you ever been a member of equinox the gym I have not I'm familiar with it but I have not been a member but and I've been on like guest passes of course yeah equinox you know the coastal elite sort of gym it's like $300

a month the equipment's basically the equivalent of like a 24 hour fitness but they have extremely

nice bathrooms and you get like Malin and you get like free Malin and gets like moisturizer in the bathroom that's like that's the pitch for those unfamiliar but there I'd call it retention marketing they might call it sales they might call it customer service I don't quite know it is extremely well done it's obviously productized it's obviously automated it's largely done via plain text and they're like you know when you're onboarding they're asking you for questions

they're pushing you into new um for for new classes they're telling you about the gym you can respond right there and a real person will reply back to you but it is a extremely white glove experience for something that is like technically not that expensive 200 bucks a month it's like

“not a lot I think it's extremely well done I've always felt D to C retention looks more like that”

in the future and it feels like shopper is like of that same ilk albeit completely automated and like way more AI native but just this idea of like offering a truly white glove one to one experience which I think is very very cool and it didn't feel you know some of these like automated bots whether they're AI or not they feel it and there's a level of like impersonalization that I just think is generally not a good like human to brand touch point you know what we were reading these

messages from shopper they felt very I don't know they didn't feel very body or AI you know they they kind of felt personal and it just felt different than how some of these these messages from non-humans have felt in the past so I think I thought that was very cool has rich done I wanted like ask you the same question you asked me like what what has rich been doing with shopper if anything and like how have you guys been thinking about like the implementation roadmap of shopper at

rich I heard it was a meet from rich panel him and I had a conversation a couple months ago and I love this sort of framing but he talked about the difference between code and intelligence and code in this case would be like what are the what are the aspects of this strategy that are codified static SMS flows would just be an example of code these are this is the text this is how we send it we do it in this order every couple days intelligent on the other side would be purely shopper

like we are just we are having a conversation with you we are inferring information we are developing this strategy as we go there given the context that we have um I do think there's this interesting sort of discussion to be had around like what percentage of your program should be code versus intelligence some of that comes down to maybe your objectives as a brand maybe you want very certain messages sent we have brand slogans we have founder stories that like maybe I don't want an AI

we have other ones where I'm fine with it being a more free form inferred experience using AI

“so I say all that because what we've tested so there's also a cost component to it is the point”

that I was going to make anything AI especially right now is like going to come with some additional cost so we just want to be thoughtful of like the way that we're implementing it um we've tested shopper so far which I liked conceptually but I can also see becoming obsolete really really quickly is a coded um flow like hey we know what messages we want to send them one two three the fourth message was an open prompt that's like what else do you need from us like how can we

help and that that then triggers a completely intelligent based experience for the subscribers and we've found lift with that and that makes sense it makes a lot of sense to me actually that

this approach of um we know they just want the you know whatever it is 10% discount in the first message

we know that they just want to hear the 99 reviews in the second one let's like just get the really important stuff out of the way as cost effectively as possible and then push them into an intelligent space experience so it become extremely one to one extremely bespoke and I was like I said we found

“a lift on that that's good so that's what we've gotten so it's a yes hand approach not a not an”

all-statt of her all shopper intelligence it's like let's merge the two and a thoughtful way here this would be an example of a hybrid approach like I said that's where we started like I see more and more examples in data where I'm like this could this might just be super dumb we should just completely embrace AI that this sort of hybrid approach will be extremely obsolete in six months so we're dealing with that now and we're currently testing a full

shopper based flow we're just like basically from the jump you're receiving intelligence based messages

so that's what we're right now but what's interesting and what's great and actually at them the one of the co-founders opposed to stress this a lot is that the new platform their number one priority is flexibility that like they want to be giving brands the ability to pick and choose where they want to utilize certain features so having that flexibility super key we have it now and we can just be you know experimental in the different touch points that we can

use chopper and AI messages for all right this ad is technically a job posting for neon pixel but but stay with me here neon pixel is hiring performance marketers people who actually get in mentality they understand hold out the understand triangulation and really that's the entire pitch because when you sign with neon pixel these are the marketers that are running your CTV strategy we've been with neon pixel at hexclif for three years now and they really do work like an extension

of our team live on real living room TV in days helping with creative strategy same day end card swabs and measurement read in our stack not just some black box dashboard that we don't really understand have insights into and that's ultimately what a managed service looks like when it's staff by real operators and real marketers so whether you want to work on the sharpest CTV accounts in DTC or you want that team running yours go to neonpixel.co/careers to apply

“a few other I think key features that are really awesome one is the is the”

merging of profiles you know one thing that's that kind of happens right now in CTV is you'll have the same person they might have you know five different profiles because they have signed up with different emails or you know and maybe they're they could be doing that for a variety of reasons maybe it's just like on accident maybe they're trying to game you and get your discount code

three different times so you often end up in CLEVIO you might if you have a million profiles you know

only eight hundred fifty thousand of those might be actual actual unique profiles and obviously CLEVIO charges on a you know profile volume basis so that's one thing that post script is building is like what I'm calling the deduplication of of profiles and I was talking to Adam he's like yeah I would bet like a brand of hex cut size like you might be able to reduce your profile count by like five to 15 percent which is huge I mean that has huge implications on cost savings on our ESP

so I thought that was cool I thought their figma integration was really badass like the ability to just take your designs from figma and port them right into your post script account was like liquidy split very easy and then the third thing that I thought was super cool was the the ability to like take your life cycle marketing like as is and when I say as is I mean with all the logic set up and then all the emails and all the logic down the emails and just like

port it right over you do not need to rebuild like if you have a 15 email welcome flow with all this different logic and branching and and it's really complicated and that probably took you know many many hours and iterations to build you don't have to go and like have your you know your OG account on one side of your screen and your new one and like build it bit for bit you can actually just like port it over really easily and not have to rebuild all

the logic and really anything so that was also very cool I think they're making they're definitely

you know you hear about quote unquote tech debt and they're trying to make it so there is no

tech debt when you want to try to switch over to post script which is pretty cool with the conversations that you've had this week does it change your approach to any sort of retention tactics like going into Q4 or 2027 I want to get these two way conversations happening earlier in our life cycle marketing journey because I think the earlier we can start those the better we can segment people

“because we have more context and more memory on people I think that's the the key thing here and”

you know we're finding wins with shopper and a lot of our life cycle marketing which is great but how do we how do we just get more context from more people earlier on I think it's just starting those like pushing people into those two way conversations earlier in their journey like right

after some like our hero sets the 12 piece set right and it and it always has been for a very

long time so like right when someone buys that 12 piece set or maybe shortly after I should probably be trying to get a two way conversation going to understand why they bought it what they're interested in next if their next order is more relevant for like them as a personal user or a gift like the sooner I can get those conversations going the more context I'm memories I have on these people and then I can be more thoughtful and more segmented and more personalized in the

messages that we push them into whether that's shopper or whether that's static or whether that's a combination of the two so I think that's the big one that I'm like going to dig deep in with our retention team is like what is what is the strategies to do that and I think there's probably a variety of ways we can we can get that going but I'm I'm just so excited about that because I think I think the more memories in context you unlock about an individual earlier on in their journey

“that's just the more opportunity you have to give them hyper personalized messaging where's”

if you wait too long you know now it's like oh it's nine and 12 months in and now we're having a conversation what's like that previous nine months you probably missed an opportunity to like send them a personalized message so that's the big one that that's in my head right now and then also like I just think the ability to do more cross-selling on all of our categories in SMS specifically which obviously I know there's like RCS which is great but still probably less ability to

be as rich in how you explain a product versus email really excited about the ability just to like continue to promote our our other product categories through shopper messages that aren't relying on like highly designed experiences like email is where are you guys at with that we're not using it that much I think we could probably be using it more but it's not a huge part of our our SMS strategy right now okay so so we are in the midst of an AB test for rolling out RCS so we've taken

like 30% of our list we've just moved them to RCS and RCS rich content send just gives us way more functionality the experience on iOS is way different it's more branded we have the ability to do more rich like content cards and carousels all sorts of cool functionality happening within RCS I forget this is months ago I got off a call and just realized RCS I think is totally the future it's another one where everything's more expensive about it which is total pain in the

ass the carriers are earning like almost MMS like fees I shouldn't speak out of turn I don't know

“if that's what you both both text-based messages and anything with functionality are more expensive”

than they would be in an SMS experience but you get all these additional benefits of it being a different experience that added functionality etc etc so we're testing that now and I also think we have some great results I think there's like an early mover advantage here where if you are one of

the first I'm only getting I'm only getting RCS messages from one other brand right now and I think

being one of those brands just has outsized impact in the short term I think eventually everybody will will move to RCS and this sort of novelty will wear off and you won't get the benefits from it but we're running a current AB test and we're seeing a 46% lift in revenue per message being on RCS most brands treat customer support as a cost but with AI every support conversation is now a chance to increase retention recover revenue and grow your LTV rich panel doesn't just use AI to answer

tickets they allow operators to run revenue experiments inside your support you can test different windback offers on refund requests subscription save offers during cancellations and product recommendations that turn chats into sales plus they guarantee you're going to save money 50% of your support volume automated in 30 days or your money back that's pretty good offer if you ask me so at a rich panel dot com slash demo they'll build an AI support team live for your business

and show you how it can drive incremental revenue for you what's the main difference between the normal like SMS your sending versus the RCS message like is it you said it's more branded are you using like media and it like what is the what's the actual creative difference or early

flows completely to utilize all the like images and carousels and functionality it's really just this like so you benefit a little bit from that like just the links are better their cleaner their better CTAs technically but really it's just like dedicated experience we have the branded logo up top they already know what our brand name is is saved at the top instead of it just being a number in case I hadn't saved our short code so it's really mostly just those we're seeing an increase

in clicks per message that's up 25% so we're seeing a 25% increase in clicks per message that's click the rate and then an increase in conversion rate as well so just overall much stronger

“experience I am of the mind that RCS is inevitable and I think there's short term advantages”

to moving there now so something to think about interesting what what what are some of the big things that you know we you're what tour two three days out now from the from the event so we've both had have had time to think about things like turning the same question you asked me to you

like what are what are some of the big things that you like where you're going to be moving first

based on all the new information that we just got from post grip like I said we're going to be trying to probably try to do more two-way messaging with shopper early on in the flow or in the in the consumer journey to attract more context and memories to inform better segmentation and better more personalized messages like what's what are you guys thinking about our rich? Yeah so just like generally speaking RCS is a big focus of ours I'd like to verify that that's

the right approach and ramp up going into Q4. I think we'll continue down the same path that we've been on as far as testing into shopper that seems like a no-brainer I think it'll only get better over time. One recent example that's related to the unified profiles of post grip 2.0 is we are and I don't know if you guys have experience doing this or if you have any advice for me but we'd like to

AB test our customer offer that we run for Q4. So during Q4 basically the whole site gets marked down

for customers they get for the sake of simplicity they get in additional 10% off during this period. We highlight that in dynamic elements across email we talk about an SMS they log onto the site. If they're logged in revow will personalize the top banner they can see some additional little complimentary messaging reminding them that they're getting an additional 10% off. It's a really great unified experience that is exclusive to existing customers.

“We'd like to run a holdout on that. That's super hard right now like you have to super hard”

it's what I said earlier it's cumbersome it's like okay we've got to find some sort of source of truth and say okay maybe we're going to tag all these customers and Shopify so that we can build so that we can properly hold out the segments across clavio post grip and revow. It's just a little bit odd to do so again one of my takeaways is like I love the idea of having a platform and a tool available to us it has unified profiles so that we have a better

single source of truth for like where we want to think about our customers and when we think about activating them in different ways in this case with the customer offer we could sort of build it from a place that's first unified instead of what we're doing right now we're going to try to like stitch it all together to make sure that we can get a 10% holdout for a couple of months and that's just a little bit silly so my goal for 2027 more thorough implementation of things like

customer offers to post grip 2.0 should help that with unified profiles because we ideally have a little bit better of a of a source of truth whether that's true or not or how quickly that becomes true is still TVD but like directionally it very much aligns with how I'd like to be

thinking about some of our retention practices yeah that makes sense people are the most important

“part of your business and finding real a players is hard and incredibly time-consuming that's why”

I want to tell you about propel propel is honestly the best recruitment agency that I have personally work with they are marketing and operations specialist they source talent from U.S. LADM and beyond for topic on brands like Jones Road like many others that you know and love at Jones Road we've hired over 12 people through them we've hired video editors graphic designers we have multiple retention managers creative strategists from them what I love is not only they easy to work with their

quick but they work on performance so you only pay a one-offie only once you hire somebody you don't have to pay you know any retainer no-on going fees plus every hire comes with a three month guarantee so I highly recommend them they've worked really great for us we've a really great team that they've helped us source I had to link in the show notes and submit the form to get 10% off your first hire you were talking about some success you guys have been having on TikTok shop

I had a tweet recently so I'd love to jam on like how we're reconfiguring our community of creators but why don't you give us quick rundown of how TikTok's working for X club over the last couple months yeah you know we've been we've been ramping up aggressively I think you know the the the past like call it nine months really since like halfway through last year

our TikTok shop as a marketplace was set up in the right way with all the right products

and all the very merchandising we started getting products in hands of affiliates and getting them to sell we've we've done like probably fifty or so like TikTok live shops or shopping experiences in that time period as well and and it's worked like we've we've been able to successfully get a ton of content coming a bunch of GMV Max you know we're like a seven-figure brand on TikTok shop now so now we're moving into this like all right great the foundations are there let's scale it

“so we've on board with with with T bar which I think we've talked about a few times now and”

so the the discourse now in place we're pulling a lot of people in our discord getting people really excited we have that one-to-one communication with them now we are recruiting a ton of affiliate

it's now through this competition that is coming and as a result of it our GMV Max like organic revenue

is or so I just GMV TikTok shop revenue from affiliates is growing like gangbusters right now we're getting way higher volume of content which is then actually allowing us to spend as much as we ever had on GMV Max as well at as good of efficiency as we've ever had so we're really scaling up the entire channel as a result of just sourcing a lot more organic TikTok shop affiliate content we're also now I think we just found like our number one performing TikTok shop affiliate

creator recently which was not a result of of the gamification competition that we're doing but like we've we've had our best unlock in meta with a TikTok shop affiliate it's content this like single creator really works head and shoulders above everyone else and now we're getting

“ready to pull all the content I think we've gotten like a hundred pieces of content now through the”

the competition that we're running which we get rights to right so now we're getting all that downloaded put into a Google sheet so we can start to get that live in the ad account as well so this just like this entire ecosystem is really starting to to pick up and the the piece I want to pause on is like

our our our level of spend in GMV Max ads like again we've never we're scaling us aggressively

right now you know we'll spend well into the six figures on paid ads behind GMV Max this month more than we ever have and it really all comes down to like the volume of content that we are getting that's allowing us to to put spend behind it and it's it's just great to see that like I think no matter where you're at in an early ad account it's always about volume of creative like really good at working and getting it scaled and it's different for us in meta now but like

TikTok shop GMV Max ads are probably where meta was for us and like 2021 and it was like volume of content is what allowed us to scale those channels then and volume of content is what's allowing us to scale scale this this GMV Max channel now so it's exciting to see that and just how the vault you know this this huge flywheel happening in in TikTok shop for hackspattery now it's really exciting um the products that you're promoting via GMV Max how are they different from what you typically

promote on something like meta it's very different um generally speaking on meta where we're promoting sets very aggressively and that's what really works for us in meta our TikTok shop is all about individual products now that the caveat here is like our six piece pan set still does really well

“on in TikTok shop and that also does well in meta I think that's why the biggest area of overlap”

but it's a lot of individual product individual frying pans our high-sided pans work really well in TikTok shop those are like our deep saute pans are like griddles and walks all do really well so it's a lot of our core cutware still but it's the individual products which are still like relatively expensive in the context of TikTok shop I mean there's still like 150 to $200 products but it's a lot of those that were getting the best performance out of versus are like

12p set that really drives our business on Shopify so certainly a distinction and like the products that people are going for what would you say is this um I know Amazon also has more single pan options but is this the most you've spent promoting single single items before I mean hex glad is historically been like almost exclusively like six and 12p's bundles yeah and even with Amazon I would say that like a lot of that performance on those individuals

is simply halo from the marketing that we're doing on dot com which again is promoting set so like we're promoting a 12p set and then someone that sees that meta add they're like ah I want about I want to go buy on Amazon some a prime member and then they're picking up one pan so yes this is you know by far the most we've ever like specifically promoted in our marketing these individual products without a doubt you're getting all these creators producing content

around single pan items how relevant is that actually gonna be to your meta add account are you going to begin promoting single pans on meta or you're going to use them to try to drive set sales yeah we are we're actually excited about the opportunity to promote some of these individual products on meta because we think that there are some like audience unlocks by doing so like

best new funnels we've launched this year is our egg pan in rice pot funnel and those are individual

product funnels now we see that the AOV on those ads are actually in the like 250 to 300 range in those products cost like 130 bucks each so a lot of people are coming in and buying both of them a lot of people are buying you know one of them plus other products so people are seeing this individual product push and then they're coming in and they're building much larger cards than just that individual product but that's been one of our best most efficient most scalable

“new funnels this year so I'm actually excited because I think that we're gonna be able to reach”

new audiences by promoting let's say a deep saute pan that we're probably not hitting right now because we're not promoting it and I also think that much like the Japanese products people are

gonna see that deep saute pan we're gonna come to say and I think the AOV is gonna ultimately

be much higher than just the price of that deep saute pan so I think there's a lot of like newness in sense of like new products being promoted in our ad account that I think there's a lot of there's a lot of audience unlocks to be had so I'm actually excited to get a lot of this like walk griddle high-sided pan you know double burner griddle content and see how it performs in meta before Q4 hits the smartest e-commerce operators aren't just asking how do we spend more

they're asking how do we make every visitor more profitable that is where after self comes in after self helps e-commerce brands increase revenue per visitor contribution margin and incremental profit by optimizing the highest intent moments cart check out post purchase and even the thank you page brands like hexclad ridge and pillar increasing their AOV across every cohort using these zero risk upsels we've tested and they have no negative impact on conversion

it's just more free money in your pocket and with rocked thanks you can offset your after self subscription no redesigns no risky funnels just better economics want to see how much money you can make with after self go to after sell dot com slash rocket revenue forecast put in your numbers and see how much more profit your funnel will make before BFCM starts we've talked about

“this a bit in the past also because I think an underappreciated aspect of tick-tock shop success”

is a change in merchandising strategy for rich like our hero product on tick-tock shop is a $29 tracker card our most popular ads like don't feature a ridge wall at all it's like a tracker card in a standard leather wallet and that's put us in the headspace of yet of is there is there you know is there the opportunity to build sort of an acquisition funnel around this

product in a way that we we never have in the past and sort of with like identifying that it was

an opportunity on tick-tock so I generally really like this idea I've heard of them a number of other brands also I think the absolute best brands are then leaning into that further and actually developing products for you know the visual nature or the price point that's really going to work on tick-tock shop and like that forcing function basically of like hey we're going to make you rethink what products are able to be promoted on this platform and that's going to sort of shift

your strategy here as well as maybe elsewhere is is really really impactful can I ask you a question about that yes so you're said your tracker card which is like a $30 product is your hero product on tick-tock shop but I also know that we've talked about how a large percent of your meta budget is going against creatives that have come from tick-tock shop affiliate so what's what does that look like in meta then like is it that that hero product or is it

still the wallet ads that are the tick-tock shop content that's performing and scaling a meta yeah so I'll break it down for you because this is like a nice segue into my tweet um 30% of it was our EDC budget at the time and that was the vast majority of that was tracker card ads been what we haven't and that's because tracker cards work on tick-tock okay great we get that winning content we move it over to meta it was it's been working there really well as well

and like that's that's the connection and that's because they buy in the tracker card or they buy the tracker card I mean the the tracker card's $29 and the but there's a two pack there's a three pack the average order value was like 80 bucks or something I think we looked at it we used and I love doing this the product analytics within Northman um I think it was like 60-65% of total revenue attributed to tracker card ads on meta came from tracker cards themselves so people were buying

other stuff we did get to an $80 AOV that's still 30-40% less than what we would typically see for the category and then we can sort of you know further corroborate that by by looking at the product analytics data and saying okay yeah the vast majority of this revenue is actually

“coming from the tracker card itself so it's become an independent funnel that's how we got”

to that 30% of EDC's been coming from affiliate content the problem and the reason I was asking is because the wallets are simply not that good for tick-tock shop and like I'm sure we can get better at them and we've got a number of things that we're going to try but if the

and for wallets it currently isn't um and what I mean by that is like we can in order to get

“great ad content a creator needs to be able to produce a piece of content get it into the GMB Max”

campaign and earn dollars doing that there's some sort of expected value anytime they sit down to create a video there's there's an expected value they're going to get if wallets aren't really working on tick-tock shop then they're not really incentivized to create good wallet content or so that that's one piece of it and I actually put that there is like if you're not getting volume on tick-tock shop and the main way that you're incentivizing your affiliate creators is

through commission on those sales then they're simply not incentivized to create uh content around

that product the second way that we were producing content is around these contests where we would say hey

create 30, 40, 50, 100 videos if you hit our GMB criteria and hit this amount of videos then we'll pay like $5,000 so there's an expected value there and if someone's going to create 60 videos they'll create some wallet videos at some point um the issue with that though is that again if it's not quite working and they're not hitting the GMB criteria there is uncertainty as to whether they will actually get the $5,000 if they produce the 100 videos um so what ends up happening is

people don't spend that much time producing great content they're all of a sudden saying the expected value for me creating this video is not that high I'm just going to create a 100 videos in an afternoon and a half and kind of spam this hint of tick-tock I technically qualify if one of these happens to lands then I'll make $5,000 but if not I won't have spent that much time on it and that's a really sort of misaligned incentive to have and that is that that stems

from the product that they're promoting itself not quite working on tick-tock so there's a couple of paths there one we're going to try to get it to work on tick-tock that would be ideal scenarios if we can find the right positioning and product in price and design for wallets you work on tick-tock but what we're doing now is we're just going to more directly align the creator incentives with where we're creating value which is winning ads on meta we want to say hey

independent of whether you can actually sell this thing on tick-tock and whether it can get delivery in GMV Max at the target that we want if you give us great content and we can spend on it on meta we're going to just pay you a percentage of ad attributable revenue there and that's the that's sort of the evolution of the program that I'm excited about for our hero products for the short term we're still going to be a far more meta dependent business than GMV Max so let me just

better connect the dots between ourselves and creators make sure we're getting the best possible content there and that they're getting rewarded for that so that's the shift and that was the sort of soap box I was on on x this week because I was explaining the decoupling of creator

communities from tick-tock shop so basically what you're saying is wallets wallet ads don't perform

as well in tick-tock shop but they still do perform head and shoulders better than anything else in meta and what you're saying is like that there's a disconnect there because if it's not performing in tick-tock shop then these creators are de-inscentivized to make it and then all of a sudden you're not getting the ads that you want to scale up in meta so the question is well how do you motivate people to build the winning meta ads and you say hey pay them a percent of attributable revenue

“in meta and then and then they'll be more incentivized question on that because I think one”

of the one of the big values of tick-tock shop is like how streamlined everything is right like a creator can can post today and in real time see how much tick-tock shop revenue they're driving and then they'll know what their commission is and sandwiched in VMAX so they can see in real time how much revenue their ads are driving and then see you know what their kickback is how are you creating that like that sense of real time feedback knowing that you're taking the content you're

bringing it into meta and they probably don't have as quick a feedback on like hey this ad you just made produce $20,000 a revenue in the first three days that's really good for you like what's your do you have a solve for that and how you're like well creating that loop yeah so that that's the new sort of like SaaS providers in the stack the tribes the refunnels the yookas of the world are the ones that are gonna they're connecting the dots here where like literally tribe has a little widget that

shows the daily earnings of a creator so I can just I can just produce content I actually never

even need to post it I'm just sending it to hexclad you guys are approving it it's getting auto uploaded your meta account if it's a great ad it's getting spanned and I am understanding immediately whether I'm earning dollars or not and and this is just a great example of like again TikTok shop has been synonymous with like activating creators at scale because they've had the best native tools but

“I think over the next six months we just see a bunch of other tools come in and allow brands to”

align incentives with creators in ways independent of TikTok with all the same real time feedback and that there's ultimately gonna be a ton of value to create there you know the difference

can get really really noisy there's so much noise you got platform data you got blended data

mm mm all the acronyms mta experiments all of it all pointing in different directions the

“more you're spending the fast you move the more the bad signal can cost you that's why we use”

house and we've been using it for years that's why the other marketing operators do as well they're the best tool on planet earth for measuring what we call incrementality which we talk about a lot on a podcast what is the true impact of your advertising dollars on your business we have causal mm mm for channel level budget calls causal attribution down to the ad level and architect their AI agent tells you exactly where your next dollar should go and the results speak for themselves

stock excel 41% lift in iros using house and you're not stuck with a help desk you get an embedded measurement strategy to actual help strategic better decisions their whole team is great we've

worked with a lot of them they are world class there go to house.io slash operators h a u s dot i o slash

operators and start backing your budget calls with real causal data are you finding that these affiliates are already in tribe are you often having to say hey go to tribe because that's where we're going to use we're going to be in tribe for meta and like you should be there or are they not in tribe are you finding that there's like a distinction between the tiktok shop affiliates and the

“creators in tribe no and i think i also think this is a thing that like rapidly accelerate is”

creators will realize they can make more i think creators will understand that revenue might be more dependable if it's based on you know meta ad attributed revenue or meta ad spend versus tiktok we signed up for tribe they have their own creator discovery so we immediately had tribe native creators applying which was great and i there's one of the reasons i i wanted to try it was because

i just can't help but think those are going to be some of the savviest sort of creative strategists

if you're already exploring like you're not even posting you don't even you don't feel like a creator really in many ways you're just like producing content and getting it right into some other brands ad account like i just think you're going to more often the not be a stronger creator than the like cold outreach we're doing on tiktok um as soon as we signed up we had people in our discord that we'd only have worked with via tiktok saying oh ridges on tribe now that's

awesome i'm going to sign up so i think we're going to see like this very large and growing community of affiliates like almost demand it or at least be excited about it and there really won't be the switching costs are super low it's super easy to understand at the end of the day like great content's great content so i think that um the community itself really picks up the other thing that i'll say and this is very anecdotal we have a big um creator community we just rolled out

tribe the sense that we've gotten is that tiktok affiliates are tired of tiktok it is i think it's really hard to drive predictable performance um there are all sorts of platforms shifts that are out of their control as i mentioned like in my tweet there's there's just difficulties from the brand perspective too brands needing to do fulfilled by tiktok to be going live for you you know 15 plus hours per week just the barrier of entry is seems like it's getting higher and

higher and there's more hoops to jump through i think brands are maybe jaded by it and i think creators as a byproduct of that are less rewarded so i think they're all looking for more dependable um you know incentive aligned ways to work with brands yeah you know historically we haven't used tribe because we just have like an army of creators that will that will go to certain people for certain for certain things but you're making me rethink if we should get on there based on

on the conversation so um it's good it's a it's a healthy rethinking of whether or not we should be leaning into tribe a little bit i do think this does not you know you have the you have the question in our talk here like how does this work alongside product seating and influencer i think this just creates more distinct lands right you have your tiktok shop and your tribe creators creating true ads and then used you still have your like product seating influencer just creating

“very organic native content i think both are very important i think uh i mean i know we've we've”

done this and in like the early years at hex cloud where we've tried to like kind of square peg round hole with our product seating influencer and and trying to like make that content work as ads and i think over time we realize that we actually don't want like our product seating creators making ads because we wanted to feel super native and authentic and just kind of have that like subconscious awareness of our product being everywhere and i think there's a ton of value in that and you

don't necessarily want that content to be like super addy and direct response and then you have this new emergence of tiktok shop affiliates and tribe and these other platforms where you're just going to be able to streamline the actual creation of ads i think that if anything this just like creates more distinct swim swim lands between the types of content you're trying to get from these different sources and in reality it should make each one more robust like your organic

feeling native content from seating should hit much harder and your ads from these like DR creators should also hit much harder you know from the product seating so i think if anything

really good for instead of trying to seed someone and overly brief them and they're not really

“someone that makes ads it's just like it doesn't work out that well so i think these like”

there's these distinct swim lands and how to use influencers and creators and organic versus paid happening and i think it's uh it's streamlining the process for brands and it's allowing them to connect with the right creator for the right initiative in your business like i don't want

someone that's gonna drive 50 million organic impressions for me with super engaging organic content

to necessarily go and try to make me an ad because that's not really the bread and butter that's not really what that's not really the the value they're serving our business insane for like a TikTok shop affiliate right like they might only have 5,000 followers they might not be a ton of value and them doing like super natively product placement style content i want them to go and make an ad that i can scale in g and b max and meta so i think these like these distinct

“swim lands are emerging and i think that's a really good thing for for both brands and creators”

is it not only streamlines the process for brands it also makes it really easy for creators to understand what the brand wants and and it just makes everyone on the same page right away is there like an ideal type of content that you like to see from your product seating program and it may be even not ideal in terms of like it's the objective but is there a consistent type of inclusion that a creator will have of hexclad product that you just like top down shot of pan and then the

creators creating whatever meal or whatever style of content is natively is native to them so like there's this guy on on instagram his name's Kyle is took i think we see him a ton and he makes this like super fun engaging content and he's just using our pans in it and they're they're like what i don't like is when it's very quick shots of our pan you don't get like a very good look at it so like Kyle for example he'll do very like fast cutting like meal content and our

pan like when he's using doing something like a frying pan it's it's always the first thing

sitting there right it's like the pan is there and then you start to see like ingredients getting popped down on it and like that's the perfect product seating activation because our product is front and center and it's ultimately positioned as the tool that's being used to produce this outcome that Kyle's working on so it's stuff like that that is you know the ideal the ideal setup for us because our product design is so recognizable and I think that's all I

really want is to get that like subconscious exposure it makes total sense yeah because I was thinking about it because I'm like for rich I was like now I want the product seaters like basically making ads but there's I think there's such a difference between our products because hexclad can be a part of

“cooking content and that's what you want you just want the ambient presence yeah exactly and yeah”

totally I think our our product especially really lends itself to that like ambient presence goal like if you go look at Kyle it took like you'll you'll see what I'm talking about it's very he's not talking about the product at all but it's like it's it's it's right there it's literally taking up three four so the frame because he does this like close-up shots of the food and it's so perfect

yeah and 18 million followers oh disguised as a story sorry what one point eight million followers

one point eight million yeah one point eight million but like this guy gets like like four four point eight million nine point two million two point two million these are all those are all impressions on his last four pieces of content so his distribution is like insane it's like sometimes orders a magnitude you know five acts or 10x what he's what is follower account is you know what we should do though we should shout out Keegan oh yeah shout out

Keegan takes Keegan sent me Connor and and Cody an earmarked package of David ice cream it's been a while since we've talked about David it was very good I like the I like the cookie dough the best I don't know what your favorite flavor was really yeah I just you know whenever I want to wake up I like to eat like 500 calorie breakfast not too little not too heavy so I just wake up now and I have like three pints of David ice cream on there yeah I was joking

I was joking the future so bright dude we got we got self-driving cars we got the cars driving us around we're gonna have ice cream every day we're just gonna load up a bunch of content into GMV Max and and print a bunch of money I mean that's that's ideal time to be alive what is time to be alive