E70: Derric Haynie

Richard Hill:
Hi there, I'm Richard Hill, the host of eCom@One. Welcome to our 70th episode. In this episode, I speak with Derric Haynie. Derric is the Chief eCommerce Technologist at eCommerceTech.io. When it comes to eCommerce stores and the in first tech stack, Derric is the go-to guy. Whether it's choosing which email integration is right for your store and your growth aspirations, through to those more intricate decisions around which tools and technology to integrate, Derric and his team can solve some of the biggest and brightest minds in eCommerce. In this episode, we talk tech stack of course, where to start and where to scale, the different growth stages and where to go depending on your growth trajectory, influence the marketing and how to use your own customer base and how to get in the minds of your customers and how to use the data to build better. If you enjoy this episode, please make sure you subscribe so you're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Now, let's head over to this fantastic episode.

Richard Hill:
How are you doing Derric?

Derric Haynie:
Hey, great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Richard Hill:
Thanks for being on the show. Absolute pleasure to have you on. Now, I think it would be good to kick off with, I think it's always good. It's a bit of an intro. Give us a bit of a feel for... I see you on LinkedIn. Literally, I can't log into LinkedIn without seeing what you guys are up to, what you're up to, but I think it'd be good for the listeners to understand a bit about what you guys do and what you do.

Derric Haynie:
Yeah. eCommerce Tech founded under the idea that the landscape of technology is just so confusing for merchants and no merchant's day job should be trying to sort this out. So we knew right away that there is a large emerging problem. And I kind of naturally sit on the intersection of eCommerce and technology, having worked very closely in eCommerce and running an agency, also being in-house in eCommerce and then having worked in eCommerce technology, selling to merchants, I kind of got a really good feel for how sometimes the technology company really just wants to sell a solution. Other times the merchant is sitting in a demo going, "I still don't get what you do and we're 20 minutes in a demo." So I just started seeing all of these problems bubble to the surface, and I said, "There's got to be a better way. We're going to create a solution that helps streamline the process of researching, discovering, and purchasing the right technology products, so that merchants never have to wonder if they're leaving money on the table when it comes to their tech stack."

Richard Hill:
Yeah, I think that's fantastic. I think absolutely. People we speak to, they go, "Well, I bought this and I was under the impression it did X, Y, Z, but actually it doesn't. So then I bought that, but then it doesn't do that. So now we've got three things [crosstalk 00:02:37] that we thought the one thing. So now we're paying [inaudible 00:02:41] instead of the $300 we intended." So yeah, that's-

Derric Haynie:
I've seen people with three email service providers. I'm like, what are they doing?

Richard Hill:
Yeah. I mean, I have to say I'm probably guilty back in the day. Absolutely. I've gone from everything and everybody's dog in effect fusion stuff. That I was something we were-

Derric Haynie:
I also [crosstalk 00:03:04]-

Richard Hill:
Huge on fairly chunky investment at the time, probably about eight, nine years ago. Active campaign and so forth. And obviously a lot of other options when it comes to specific Magento stores. So-

Derric Haynie:
It sounds like we made the same mistakes, actually. That was one of the other things that drove me towards this. I started an Infusionsoft six month contract talking to the sales team. They were like, "Well, usually people have like 10,000, 20,000 on their email list before they signed a contract like this." And I was like, "Well, I've got zero, but I'm on my way up." So I signed the contract, three months in, I've got all the training done and I'm starting to understand the tool. We've got great is going out to our 10 20, newsletter subscribers, whatever it is. And I'm realizing, "Wow, I just threw $1,800 in the trash. I probably should have done a better job."

Richard Hill:
Because obviously with the more, I feel like enterprise and higher end stuff, you've got onboarding fees. It's not just a straight can be, quite an investment. And obviously getting that right the first time is absolutely key. So obviously as a company then... So if I'm a eCom store, listening to this episode, I'm running a Magento store or a Shopify store. They seem to be the two most popular with a lot of our listeners. How specifically can you help them? And what sort of advice would you give to those type of stores?

Derric Haynie:
Well, the generic advice is really taking the time to think about your tool stack and how the tools are going to change as your business grows and scales out. What we're working on building right now is our core technology, is the algorithm to do this, but you can kind of do it internally in your own head, which is like, "Okay, I'm at 100,000 in annual revenue. These are the small tools that work really well to get me to the next step." At one million dollars in revenue, you've unlocked certain potential for new tools to help you grow and scale. You're 5 million in revenue, all of a sudden things like headless commerce and a lot more AI personalization become way more valuable to you than ever before. Checkout optimization starts to become really important.

Derric Haynie:
Post-purchase retention, all these things really start lifting the business up. You're at 20 million, right? And again, you're unlocking more enterprise solutions as you go up and up. And so the tools that you start with in the early days, the faster you're scaling, the more you need scalable tools early, which means you need to invest a little faster. And then as you go on, just don't forget that you're, you're hitting these milestones of growth and you need to be investing back into the tools that empower that. Because there's big... 20% conversion rate optimization, 50%, 100%. You can double average order value with some tool. There are just a lot of tools that have functionality that improve the store and they just kind of work holistically. Some need to be tested. Others are just like kind of no brainer things, like personalization pretty much works at scale. Which personalization tools should I use? Not should I use a personalization tool once you're at certain key elements? So that's like the generic advice we can get even into the process of vetting and all that stuff, if you want.

Richard Hill:
So, I mean, let's say, I know a lot of our listeners are sort of at that maybe two or 3 million a year, trying to get to that five or 10 million. Obviously there's a lot of ground in there, but that two, three mil, you're trying to get to the five to 10. So maybe two, three mil but looking to double, triple their conversion. Well, their conversion value and that businesses. So in terms of, some key tech stack decisions and key... Can't get the words out, key tech stack steps. What are some of the big things that I think... You touched on a lot of people, maybe, what tools work for that, getting you to a million, 2 million and not going to get you obviously to that 10 million. So it's obviously working into your budgets, certain budgets.

Richard Hill:
So you can... Once you're in that movement from spending, whether it's five grand a month on tools or tech, to 10 20. I mean, we've had a similar scenario very recently. We've had very rapid growth in our agency and we've probably spending about another four grand a month ourselves in the last six months on tools. Now, if we didn't do that, we're going to be stuck. We're going to be stuck [crosstalk 00:07:09] be getting that, the data that we need to do certain research, we wouldn't be able to do certain levels of automation that we want to do in our agencies. And obviously it's the same for eCom store. So what would be a couple of key areas to look at, would you say?

Derric Haynie:
So, one of the things that I see with stores that have had this really awesome product market fit growth, maybe the founder is just... I've seen mothers that created baby mats and they're doing amazing things with their product and the growth of the company they've been featured in Ellen and stuff like that. But they don't... So they're not necessarily the most business savvy, but they are doing very well. So I think some people forget that, I'd say right around the million dollar mark is when you have to have great analytics. So you need a business intelligence tool. This is where it all starts because it's going to show you where the weaknesses are in the business. So this is one of the health check things that we have to be doing, right?

Derric Haynie:
So there's a whole slew of them, Peel Insights, Glew segments, Daasity, these are great ones they plug right in and they give you like out of the box dashboard stuff where you don't have to know any coding, but you can start to really see insights into your business. Right? And once you can see those insights, I think the most important thing to focus on, you've got an established business proven that people will buy your product and like it, it's got to be on retention. We've got to make retention and referral. We need to get the most out of our existing customers, because this is often where most people are neglecting at the million and 2 million, because they were so focused on new customer acquisition that they... The pendulum always swings one way or the other. It's like, where do I focus today?

Derric Haynie:
Sometimes there's even a stage, in between called activation where we're trying to get the customers that have purchased our product to enjoy our product, use it more. And by using it more, we assume loyalty and retention will follow. But once they're using the product and having a great time with it, can we get them to buy it again? Can we get them to buy alternative products, complimentary products, reusable products, subscription-based products? And then of course, can we get them to refer a friend? And tracking those metrics is really important. So loyalty tool, there's two key metrics. You're looking at loyalty points accrued, loyalty points used and sometimes you also want to see a number of customers using my loyalty program also kind of helpful, right? And so you want to actually track those metrics. In the loyalty tool or business intelligence platform, and then you want to think of leavers on how you can increase loyalty points used and... Used, by the way, we actually want people to use points, which costs us money like on the company side, but we believe that that will increase retention and loyalty.

Derric Haynie:
So studying that, analyzing it, tweaking it, testing things like, should we give 10% off their next purchase or $10 off? Small things like can we give a free gift instead of a monetary value? Can we do early drops, sneak peaks and stuff like that to incentivize more retention? So there's a whole bunch of things that can be done and tested there, but once we've got retention moving forward and engaging, then flipping back to the site because conversion rate optimization and average order value are going to be things there. So, just did a podcast with a company called Doofinder. They're talking about how people that search in the search bar, are often hitting a zero results page. We never want them to hit a zero results page, but most importantly, if they're searching for something that you don't sell yet, and you're getting thousands of those searches, go get that product.

Derric Haynie:
Right? So things like that, where you can add complimentary products and then put them in little upsell widgets on the product detail page, cart page, and check out if your Shopify plus or Magento. These are basic optimizations. I'm also an advisor for two companies that I'll briefly drop on. The strategies are, are important. You don't have to use these companies, but Phoenix commerce gives you a little landed delivery date. So it's like, "Order by this time, get it by such and such date and time." They use predictive analytics to predict and understand your whole warehouse logistics to say, "Okay, the product will arrive in five days at their house." By showing that information solidifying the date of being landed, it increases conversion rate practically universally by about 15%. Boom! That's just more money in the pocket. There are other ways to do it.

Derric Haynie:
Then there's another tool that everyone completely forgets. Now this is maybe around 1 million, a little early two to 5 million. This is can be game-changer. It depends on what kind of company you are. If you're reselling other products versus have created your own product and have leverage on pricing. So it's all about pricing and price testing. Almost no one is doing this. So this is another emerging category that really needs to be well thought out. And so by understanding that the laws of supply and demand, which are basic economic principles, if we increase, typically we sell fewer units. But is that elastic or inelastic? Meaning, does it decrease linearly or exponentially as we increase our price? And typically people have never optimized their prices. They probably haven't thought about how changing the price of the add-on product might get more add to carts for that or changing the price of the core offer might in fact change how many add-on products you get. All right. So there's a whole bunch of tinkering that can be done there that can significantly increase revenue and especially profit is what we're looking for.

Richard Hill:
What about showing different prices for different users? Is that something that you're aware of?

Derric Haynie:
So that's called dynamic split testing, which you shouldn't do in typical price testing. This is one of the limitations of price testing. There are a few tools that kind of will do dynamic price testing. I believe that you can show prices dynamically based on regionality, seasonality, even time of day. So I think that prices can change minute by minute, but they shouldn't change person to person. Now, discount codes, however, could be used in a different way. So if you can see somebody browse 400 pages of your site and then abandoned versus the person that browse five pages of your site and then abandoned, the 400 page user actually needs less of a discount typically. So we can give them... We just need to nudge them back. They're ready to buy. We might want to talk to them in order to answer their questions, but almost no discount is needed. The person that browse five pages is less interested in the product. And maybe a little bit of urgency with a three-day sensitive discount code is going to convert them.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. So I think there's an absolute machine gun intro there, a lot of stuff. And I think a lot of amazing stuff, I think loyalty points and loyalty schemes. There are a lot of people that are going, I think for these two to five or this two to 10, I think there's a bit of a sweet spot there where I don't see that a lot of the times implanted. What would be a good start point to get that up and running and get that work in our loyalty scheme?

Derric Haynie:
Well, the first thing you want to do is every business is different. So think about how loyalty and retention exists without the program. And then use the program to build structure around that. So if people are coming back and buying the same product over and over again, can the loyalty program give them points for buying it from you instead of from a competitor? Also think about what those alternatives and competitors are and what you're actually incentivizing, which is purchasing through you versus them. Is it an alternative competitor versus a direct competitor? So if they could just buy someplace else for cheaper and it's the exact same product. Loyalty is tougher and actually more important. And so that brand essence needs to be kind of built into it. So you want them to feel the brand. It's not about... You're already losing on pricing essentially. So you have to own something else, right?

Derric Haynie:
But if it is a... You're an alternative because you have a unique process or unique product that really isn't being well copied in the market or something. Then building on top of that in order to show the differentiation in your loyalty program is important. But at the end of the day, the first steps, find the tool, you onboard as many customers that are interested, you figure out the five to 10 things that they should be rewarded for and how you want to structure it. You could even... Some people are launching memberships or sometimes the membership is included with your first purchase and last a year, some things like that to get them into a form of exclusivity. This is very common. Sephora is one of the big ones that we have. At BoxyCharm, I was responsible for implementing this when I was in-house for eCommerce. It is practically universal. Not everybody will join it, but your best customers are going to be there. And those are the people you want to empower to share on social, to follow on social, to buy again and again.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. I love it. Love it. So I think we've touched on it, but obviously it's very important to understand your customers, I think is the bottom line so we can then decide on, "Right. Okay. People are doing this or they could be doing that." So, what are some of the... What else would you say about how to understand the customers? What else can... You're doing $2 million a year, 2 million pounds a year, $3 million, 2 million pounds. What else can we do? What else can they do to understand the customers more?

Derric Haynie:
Yeah. Customer development should never, ever stop because once you've figured it out for one thing, then it's okay, we're going to be expanding product lines. We have to start understanding their needs and how they're changing. Plus, just the nature of people changing over time. I always say that a merchant should be talking to their customers on the phone or in person three times a week. So, and this is just goes on in perpetuity. You can schedule these calls. You can ask them for calls. You can now... People are right now, mostly doing it through live chat and customer service. But we actually want to talk to customers that aren't coming in for customer service inquiries as well. So you need to actually proactively be talking to people on a regular basis. But the alternative to that, the three big points for customer development.

Derric Haynie:
I already mentioned onsite search and seeing how people are searching, browsing, navigating the site, live chat, actually having conversations with people in real time before sale, pre-sales live chat most specifically. So having that chat widget on your product, detail pages, collection pages, whatever it is to make sure they're going through the process. These things lead to changes in your product line, changes in your homepage layout. And then I have a friend who launched a company called Scout I want to say, I'm definitely messing it up. Callback Request is what it's actually called there. And then there's another one, but-

Richard Hill:
I've seen that one. Yeah.

Derric Haynie:
Yeah. It's just a little button that says, "Hey, request a call from me." And so that ends up being great customer development. You understand people like, "Oh, I didn't want to buy this because I didn't know it did X. Oh, it does X. Oh, then I'll buy it."

Derric Haynie:
It's like, "Oh, I need to show that better on my site." Right. It's my fault for not explaining it to you properly. And then post-purchase surveys, also really important for customer development. There of course is the pre-purchase survey is very popular right now. That's more about understanding certain demographic or psychographic components of the customer profile, but it's not actual customer development. So if you need, in order to give them the right beauty product, you need skin tone, eye color, things like that is your hair curly or straight. Sometimes you need those things to better sell products, but that's not the same as customer development, which is understanding their intrinsic wants and needs and desires and then building your product to fit those.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. So I think if you listen to this episode, are you talking to your customers? Are you picking up the phone once, twice, three, four times a week? Just back to basics, isn't it? We know that doesn't a matter what business you're in. If you speak to people that are interested in your service and may be not crossing the line, not making that purchase just a simple conversation normally resolves or will help answer a question or resolve a potential issue in that customer's mind, which is not an issue really. Just that your product pages probably just missing some things. Just talking to customers that on-site search feature, and looking at the data behind that. I think obviously there's a lot of tech stacks behind each of these and these options. And obviously you've got the resources on your site and we'll talk about that more towards the end. LiveChat, I think is one that... I remember installing LiveChat probably about 17 years ago when I had stores and it was like, "Wow,"-

Derric Haynie:
It was just livechat.com. I think at the time. That was the big site back then.

Richard Hill:
I think it was actually that. Yeah. Yeah. And just like sitting there and like, "Ping! Oh, hello!" Chatted away. Just a simple, "Oh, have you got that in blue?" "Oh yeah, of course we have." Yeah. Bang! [inaudible 00:19:35] Somebody manning and manning certain hours and out of hours. And having that manned that I think is a simple one, but if you've not got a live chat on your store, it's quite a straightforward one. And then those pre and post survey sort of questionnaires, or depending on how you want to do it. What's a good way... What would you say about surveys a bit more? That's not something I'm that familiar with.

Derric Haynie:
So the first one is how did you hear about us? Very common one to help with attribution. There's a tool called EnquireLabs. It does only that. That's the only thing it does, is help you better attribute because there is sometimes a black box of attribution. So, if you can get a little bit more granular in what they said was attributes. So sometimes they'll say an influencer and they'll even tell you which one, when it came in as direct traffic or Instagram, right. Or something like that. So it can help in a lot of ways to assign some of those data points.

Derric Haynie:
The second one is why did you purchase from us today? And of course, pre event, your pre sales, you could also do, why didn't you purchase from us today? And then that should have a long form box answer. And then you ignore all of these short answers like, "I like the product." You just ignore that. You wait until you find an answer over like a hundred, 200 characters and somebody is like pouring their soul out. And then you listen to the exact words and phrases they use. And you turn that into your copywriting for the product detail edge.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Love it. Love it. That's brilliant. Brilliant. So you're getting the reasons why they didn't do X, Y, Z, and then you're taking that and adding it to say product pages, FAQ stat information pages where we didn't buy, because we don't deliver to, in our instance, Scotland. Well, of course we do. We just didn't say it in the FAQ's on delivery or the delivery page so you add that in. And then the next time somebody's got that query, it's already there in black and white, or whether it's a shipping issue or whatever it may be. Okay. So I think there's a lot of things, a lot of sort of options and resources and different tools in the stack there. That would be good for you to run through, I think, a very specific project maybe that you've worked on. So tell us about a project that you've worked on, specific store, if you can name names great. You can't, that's not the end of the world. But exactly where you went with the implementing different things in the different areas and what the results were.

Derric Haynie:
I think one of the... We've had a few successes, funny enough, what I do today is I just tell merchants what to do. And then I get out, which I love this. So I just tell you, I advise on the tools they use, and then I watch them execute. And then I see the results without having to do it. But when I was in-house at a beauty box subscription called BoxyCharm, one of our most successful things, which was the idea that I led, we were going to do a refer-a-friend program, and I'm with the executive team in the room. I'm kind of like the leading marketer in the room while the CEO is very marketing centric, but they, all they know is that they want the customers to refer a friend.

Derric Haynie:
They're actually giving... So believe it or not, they gave me permission to email our customers, which they didn't do prior. So there's a lot of easy wins, basically is what I'm saying. But in this case, like refer a friend and get a $10 offer your next box or something like that. It's a beauty box subscription. It's $21 a month. I said, "No, no, no, no. We want to refer a friend. We want to have a product. We want to give you an extra product in the box." Because products for us are well cheaper than $10. And if we can fit it into a box of five products, we can fit a six product in their shipping is essentially free. It does change a little bit, but it's essentially free. And so we just have to figure out, okay, what's the size of this box and can we fit a six product in it?

Derric Haynie:
And if so, what is that product? And we've got all these products that we didn't sell last month and the month before just sitting there. So we'll figure that out. And then I said, "Furthermore, no one wants to get... Like referring a friend doesn't get me... I don't just want to get a product to be selfish about it. The friend needs something as well." So we call the double referral program. So refer a friend, they'll get something in their first box and you'll get something in your next box. The beauty of this is that you have to stay subscribed after you refer the friend in order to get the special gift.

Derric Haynie:
So it naturally increases retention by referring a friend and telling them that they're going to get something for free. All of their friends that were on this outer layer of about to buy, or maybe even they've gone on and off, they go reaching out to their friend who they know still has a subscription because there's a lot of product sharing in this space and they go, "Hey, refer me so that we can both get this free product." Which is so it inflates that referral number in a way, because they might've come in direct, but in such a good way that we don't even care because it's increasing retention and everyone's talking about it.

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Derric Haynie:
All those things. So we were getting tens of thousands of referrals every month off of our user base. And it became a huge success and a very low cost of acquisition costs-

Richard Hill:
And existing customers buying more as well. Yeah.

Derric Haynie:
Yeah. Well, the thing is because it's a beauty box subscription, not a lot of additional... That was the only thing they sold. There was a store that was going to launch an upsell product, but essentially $21 a month was the only thing they offered for a long time. Now, I think it's changed, but retention, very important that we increase retention. Good for investors company ended up merging with Ipsy, their direct competitor, and are now valued over a billion dollars. So.

Richard Hill:
Wow. Wow. I love it. I love it. I think there's a lot of insights there that I think I know a lot of our listeners will be thinking. Right. Okay. , there's a lot of things. They are specifically that refer a friend or the double. So they in effect a double, double deal. I like it. I like it a lot. Yeah.

Derric Haynie:
Well, what people are doing now with this, I think subscriptions have gotten a little more sophisticated. You can do this in your Shopify backend. You can earn from the... In the loyalty program, you refer a friend, it gets tracked in the loyalty program. And then you earn the right to add a product to your box. Now this can be done one of two ways. It could be a mystery product that adds onto your subscription, or they could log into a dashboard and choose from these three or five options that you've laid out for them. Now, remember, it's not just like good for the customer that they're getting this for free. It's a merchandising play by you. You're choosing the products that you want to sell out of inventory. So you can clean out the warehouse. Right. And they're choosing the ones that are cost-effective for you as well.

Richard Hill:
I think everybody listening is going to have a box full of stuff that has been sat there. That's obviously got a value, but you can use it, utilize it to build the client base.

Derric Haynie:
Yeah. Instead of paying Facebook more money, just take that inventory and turn it into new customers.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. So let's talk, you have touched on it, but let's talk about influencer marketing. Where do you see that going with the eCommerce space?

Derric Haynie:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:26:11] determined we were doing 300,000 a month in influencer marketing. And I was overseeing... I was working closely with the influencer team and overseeing the advertising side of things. And, I mean, honestly in advertising, I had to prove my cost of acquisition every day, or I would get fired. Right? And influencer marketing, it was spaghetti on the wall. Like you could just pay anybody any amount of money. It was like, "You want some money? You want some money? You want some money?" Just throwing it out there I swear. It really did feel like that. So where did we start with that? We start with better tracking. We need to really understand the attribution from our influencer campaigns. And the truth is people get nervous when you want to track something like this, because a lot of it is untrackable, but the more you track, the more closer you get to accurate, the better it is.

Derric Haynie:
You don't have to be 100% accurate. You could be only 20% accurate and still be better off than not tracking it all. So don't think about making sure that everybody is tracked. Just try and get more tracking from influencers. So whether that's a custom link for them, a custom discount code, or most importantly, the metrics that are the way that everything is going today. Most influencer marketing platforms are now plugged into the influencers accounts and you can see the metrics of your posts. So this is where just looking at views and engagements, maybe it's clicks or comments or something like that. You want to have the actual metrics from the influencer, whether it's after one day, seven days, 30 days, depending on the kind of the arrangement or the situation. You want to actually have a look back report on who got you the most views and all those things.

Derric Haynie:
And then of course we don't just care about raw, like impression numbers. I mean, Coca-Cola, and a couple of big players really do just care about those things. Honda, but most D to C brands care about the actual results from them. So we want to really be careful on the demographics of our audience. At BoxyCharm we learned very quickly that the very attractive supermodels and swimsuit models have a 90% male following. They wear makeup, but they do not sell products. Right? And so you have to learn very quickly that $10,000 selling makeup to their audience is a total, total waste of money. You're better off a micro-influencer or something like that and all that. So understanding who their audience is and why that audience would want to buy after seeing it on the influencers page. That's one of the most important things.

Derric Haynie:
The second most important thing is the rights to the content so that you can rip it off the influencers page and advertise with it. This is what made us a massive improvement in cost per acquisition. When Cardi B did an unboxing video for us, and I was able to... I put maybe half a million behind this one, really crummy looking ad where Cardi B was like, "oh my God, I got my BoxyCharm." And it just performed our cost of acquisition went way down. It lasted for months on end. It became a very much evergreen sort of video that we got millions and millions of views off of and lots in sales.

Derric Haynie:
So finding the gold in the influencer content and then advertising it. And sometimes you can white label advertise, which means advertising on the influencers account but driving traffic back to your own site. There's some testing that can be done there, but if you've got a good partnership... Oh, by the way, so the future of influencer marketing is definitely in partnerships, which includes co-branded products, the influencers are launching more product lines. And so longterm relationships with influencers. Okay. That was a lot.

Richard Hill:
No, that's great. And while we're there, I think also your customers, obviously customers that are buying your products, what are your thoughts on that? About the stores reaching out to their existing customers, using data from maybe, I know, for example, reviews the IO, for example. There's that functionality there to look at, obviously the follower accounts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera of your existing customers. And then you got blooming out. I didn't realize it such and such bought X,Y,Z offers reach out to them personally. What are your thoughts on customers?

Derric Haynie:
Another tool that does that is Carro, C-A-R-R-O is another, it's a free Shopify plug in that'll tell you the social followings of your existing customers and email database. And so this is definitely there. So like we think about what influencer marketing is. It's really... There's a lot of circle overlap between influencer marketing, partner marketing, affiliate marketing, and what we might call a referral marketing, right? And these four circles sometimes merge all together. So typically when it's an existing customer, what you're looking for is to surprise and delight them if they have a medium to large social following, so that they'll naturally want to share and tell others about you. Now, you can also reach out and turn that into a true influencer relationship where they're either getting products for free in exchange for promoting you. And usually there's either a written contract or at least an agreement, like a document that it kind of says, "You're going to do this. I'm going to do that. Memorandum."

Derric Haynie:
And so you can turn it all the way to that. Or you can keep it as a surprise and delight. It depends on the stage and the relationship and all of those things, but that's just uncovering money in your data is what that is. It's like, look at the customers, figure out who these people are when you're selling a million a year. You can't know all of your customers. Right? So trying to get to know as many as you can on that customer development side of things, and then empowering them to tell others, it's always going to be a good thing.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. No, I love it. I think free money is always good.

Derric Haynie:
They're at a million to 5 million in revenue is when you start to have a lot of money in your data. Before that the money is out there in the world, and you're trying to bring it in. But once you hit those points, because optimizing off of a thousand visitors is really tough because it takes a long time and understanding after a thousand purchases, these are the questions that people asked still, not a lot of data. But at 10,000, 50,000 customers, now you have segments. You can have personas. You can change your categories around and all these things that kind of unlock.

Richard Hill:
Same as paid ads. When you would look at somebody scale, we're doing it, we're spending a million a year on Google ads, but we don't do Facebook. What? I know obviously you've then got that maybe a million visitors that you're not remarketing to on Facebook, with dynamic product ads, it's free money. It's as simple as that. That's exactly what we say. It's free money, completely free money. You've got a customer database there that can be re-marketed to with very specific products that they looked at or show an interest in. And obviously all variants and variations.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Great. Okay. Well thanks Derric. I think I'm going to have to pause this at the end and have a re-listen. Because there's so many little nuggets in there to digest and I would suggest anybody that's listening should do the same. There's so many little nuggets in there. So many different areas I think that get overlooked, especially when we sort of trying to go from these two to five or these three or four to 10 mil. And just layering in and stacking of 5%, 5%, 10%, 5% before we know it can make a real big difference. So thank you so much for being on the show Derric. I always like to finish every episode with a book recommendation. What book would you recommend to our listeners Derric?

Derric Haynie:
Wow. There's a lot of great books out there. My favourite book, which is not even necessarily for eCommerce, but it can be kind of merged in that way. It's a book by Marcus Sheridan. I've bought over like 20 copies of this for other people. It's called They Ask You Answer. This book explains why talking about your competition, your industry, the problems in your space, your pricing, just as an example if you've charged $79 for your product, the question is like, why is this $79? And if you say to people, "Look, it costs $25 to get the product. It costs $25 to get the customer and it costs $10 to ship the product. And we make $15 off of this every time we sell one, they'll be like, oh, it makes sense that they're trying to make $15 every product. Okay. That's a good breakdown."

Derric Haynie:
So most people try and black box, a lot of things in their business. They try to be not as transparent. But I believe that by providing as much transparency as possible, you overcome more objections. You become a sort of thought leader and market leader, and it becomes a differentiation factor. Of course my entire business is based on providing transparency in the eCommerce technology landscape. So I'm a little bias here, but I swear to you, transparency in any business, in any competing market can be really good for you.

Derric Haynie:
So They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan lays out a lot of the processes for talking about that, especially from a content marketing side, which gets you ranking in Google. I followed these principles when I was a brand new agency in San Diego, I ranked number one for San Diego digital marketing agency. There was Internet Marketing Inc. 140 employees, outranked them for first because we were able to follow the principles in this book and we've done it over and over again. They just work really well. And it's not just about content [inaudible 00:35:21]. it's about a philosophy and how you want to treat your business in your industry.

Richard Hill:
That's great. Well, thank you. We'll link that up and I'll be ordering a copy in about five minutes time. That sounds right up my street, to be honest. Yeah. We're a massive believer in that sort of strategy really in terms of giving everything when customers are ready. I think that they'll appreciate that transparency and choose somebody like that to work with. Well, thanks so much Derric for being on the show. I look forward to probably catching up with you again, I think in maybe six, eight months, see how things are changed and see how that sort of tech stack has changed. But yeah. Thanks for being on the show. We look forward to speaking again.

Derric Haynie:
Perfect. Thanks for having me.

Richard Hill:
Thank you. Thank you for listening to the eCom@One eCommerce podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please hit subscribe and don't forget to sign up to our eCommerce newsletter leave us a review on iTunes. This podcast has been brought to you by our team here at eComOne, the eCommerce marketing agency.