E95: Valentin Radu

Richard Hill:
Hi there, I'm Richard Hill, the host of eComOne, welcome to our 95th episode. In this episode I speak with Valentin Radu, CEO and founder Omniconvert. He heads up a team of nearly 50 working with store owners to optimize their customer journey with data-driven decisions. Whether that's through A/B split testing or bank segmentation, personalization, surveys, to name a few things. We talk about zero party data and where we need to focus, customer retention and quickfire ways to improve loyalty and so much more.

Richard Hill:
If you enjoy this episode, hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you are listening to this podcast so you're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Now let's head over to this fantastic episode. This episode is brought to you by eComOne, eCommerce marketing agency. eComOne works purely with eCommerce stores, scaling their Google shopping, SEO, Google Search and Facebook ads through a proven performance driven approach. Go to ecomone.com/resources for a host of amazing resources to grow your paid or organic channels. How are you doing Valentin?

Valentin Radu:
Hey Richard, all going well just here.

Richard Hill:
Good, good, good. We haven't got a crazy timeline difference, have we? We're having a little chat beforehand where I've got a couple of hours. You're in the beautiful Bucharest, I believe. Bucharest

Valentin Radu:
Yeah, yeah.

Richard Hill:
And I'm here in sunny Lincolnshire in the UK. Not so sunny to be fair, but it's a lovely day. So you've got a pretty interesting career journey, I think you've had a pretty interesting career journey looking at your past. So it'd be good to give us an update on where you are with what you're doing now, obviously how you got there in terms of what you've been up to over the last maybe 10 years.

Valentin Radu:
Yeah. So I've been, in a nutshell I'm a former poor kid from Bucharest, Romania. I've been struggling to get out of poverty, and then I haven't stopped. Once I got out of it I said, okay let's see how it's to thrive, not only to survive. So mainly I've been building companies since 2001. The first one was an internet service provider, I was playing StarCraft all day long and I wanted to get rid of the dial up. If you remember those modes with [inaudible 00:02:12], with that sound.

Richard Hill:
Yeah I remember. I can remember it with Command and Conquer about 20 years ago.

Valentin Radu:
Yeah. So after that I've sold that company, built another one, failed miserably in the B2B space with an agency. Then co-founded what turned out to be the largest online car insurance player in Romania. I was sneak peaking on the Google AdWords campaigns, and on Google trends at that moment and I've seen that gocompare.co.uk was our reference and confused.com. And after that I sold that company as well after learning a ton about conversion rate optimization, Google AdWords, Facebook ads, and so on.

Valentin Radu:
And after that I founded Omniconvert based on the learnings over there, and based on the technology that I've been using, the current technology had some ancestors which were being used by myself to tweak out the website in order to convert more. So pretty much that's how I've started and now Omniconvert is an established company. We are almost nine years old. We're serving hundreds of eCommerce companies that are looking to use their data in order to become more customer centric, improve their conversion rate and their customer lifetime value.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, brilliant. Well thank you for that. That was brilliant. So data then, let's to get into it. So I think there's a lot of chatter about a lot of different things over this last year, but I think zero party data. Now what is it? I think a lot of listeners will be like, still probably haven't got clarity on some of the newer things that people are talking about, what is zero party data?

Valentin Radu:
Yeah. Zero party data it's what the visitors, the customers, the users are explicitly sharing. So intentional shared data from customers or visitors, that's zero party data. And that's ... has a lot of usage, use cases. So you can use zero party data to improve customer journey, you can use it to acquire customers more easier because now the third party cookies are deprecated and the internet giants are not serving us any cookies right now. So mainly that's what zero party data is.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah. So how eCommerce stores are listening in then at the moment they think, okay, it's obviously getting a little bit harder, obviously we'll discuss that but ultimately, what can brands do to try and get more data and be able to target customers, or do whatever the ... we'll get into that. But what can brands do and store owners, marketing managers, day to day on their stores to incentivize to be able to get better data and to be able to work with better data from their customers?

Valentin Radu:
So I think the first thing they should be, let's say, cleaning out their data. I've seen that maybe eight out of 10 companies which are using Google analytics, or whatever type of analytics, they don't have clean data. And it's that good old principle, garbage in, garbage out. So you can't do too much if you don't have the hygiene checkbox done. So that's the first step, to have the data hygiene. Once you have the data hygiene, there are a lot of things to do with the data.

Valentin Radu:
What I've noticed in the last years is that many companies are focusing on zero and first party data rather than on third party data, because these are not reliable too much anymore. So in terms of using zero party data, I think one of the best use cases is to understand what the customers really want. Because it's ... I think there is this gap between the customer journey and the company journey. So if you look at the goals, the customers are having their struggles, they have their pains, they have their needs or desires, and they don't pretty much care too much about brands even though we have this narrative around brands which are having their customers love them, and so on.

Valentin Radu:
At the end of the day love is a ... it's a commercial transaction. Of course we do have brand ambassadors, we do have [inaudible 00:06:42] and so on. So, mainly that's one thing that can be done with the zero party data, to understand who their customers are and then to be able to leverage that data so that they can fulfil needs of their customers. And on the other hand the company journey has their agenda. Thriving, making more money, having growing and whatever. Whatever the game of the eCommerce owner is.

Valentin Radu:
If you want to sell the company, then the company is the product that you have as an eCommerce owner. If you want to get an investment and to, I don't know, get public, or if you want to leave it to your nephews to be let's say directed in the future, that's another story. So these two journeys are separate. And with the zero party data you can understand, and not only understand but also leverage this kind of data. Let me give you an example.

Valentin Radu:
You have a pet shop and you have your first time visitors, they are not on the product page, but you attracted them with some blog post, or SEO, or whatever. And instead of letting the serve themselves with the content and go through the menu, you get interactive and you find out some simple things like, do you have a cat or a dog?

Richard Hill:
So this is like a popup, a bit of a, what would I call it? Like a Q&A funnel type thing? A, B move, A, B step through. Like a ask funnel I think it referred. Well different people call it different things, but yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Valentin Radu:
Yeah. So collecting this type of data it allows you to guide the customers, the visitors much more properly. One, one thing it has this, it's a benefit of actually realizing, hey, 82% of our visitors are cat owners. Or dog lovers, we don't know that. So once you get that you can ask other things like what breed you have, or how old is that dog? And based on this type of intentional shared data, you can make the life of that visitor much more easier.

Valentin Radu:
Because you're guiding them exactly like in a conversation. At the end of the day the most important step is the choice reduction in any commercial endeavour. If you're buying shoes and they are not your size, you're not going to buy them and before buying-

Richard Hill:
That's a ... yeah. It's an interesting topic, I love it because that happened to me. I think I was on, I forget the brand now, but it was a well known brand. I've forgotten but it was a big brand. I think it was maybe Ralph, no it was ... God I can't remember the brand. But I went and looked, I'm size 12 so I went and looked at some size 12 shoes, but then the only thing I saw after that when I went and looked at shoes was size 12s that they had in stock, size 12, as opposed to all shoes that maybe they didn't have size 12.

Richard Hill:
So it's obviously slightly different to what you're saying. But ultimately I'm seeing the products, there's no point in seeing a load of nice shoes that are size 10 because they won't fit me and I won't buy them, all I'm seeing. So that experience was like, all these shoes fit me so I can buy any of them and not have to go size, oh can't have them. Can't have them, wasting time, frustration, and the same with your dog example. We've got a lot of clients in the pet niche in the UK, a lot of ... we've got a very, very, very large client with 300 different veterinary practices.

Richard Hill:
And it's very similar to some of the email marketing we've been discussing, we've looked at over the years and when they sign up with their pet name, so it's like a personalization with the pet name so the emails aren't going to the owner they're going to the pet. It's going to Rufus. But it's really interesting that you're actually then seeing, those products that you're seeing are very much, rather than that 100% they're that 5% of things that you came there for that you're interested in and therefore you're more likely to purchase, more likely to recommend, stick around, everything that obviously helps retention and sales and return visits, yeah, yeah, love it.

Richard Hill:
Okay so cookie list, what's going to happen there do you think? What's going to happen? Where's that going to go? I think a lot of advertisers have ... any big changes, there's always a lot of noise out there, isn't there? And there's quite a lot of people abandoned or very negative reactions to things. But I think that then creates opportunity for those that commit to the space and look at different ways. Where do you think cookie list is going to ... is it going to negatively affect advertising or, are there opportunities there?

Valentin Radu:
Yeah. There are tons of opportunities for the brands and for the eCommerce companies which are aware about the importance of the relationship they have, and they establish with their customers. So if we look back last year, we've seen some incredible drops from nine times ROAS to two times ROAS. So the customer acquisition costs are going through the roof. This is also amplified by the fact that almost half of the eCommerce companies which are live right now have been launched post pandemic, so mainly the addressable market is the same while we have more players, more options to choose from, and we as consumers we are having more power than ever.

Valentin Radu:
So we can, I don't know, we can do an [inaudible 00:12:31], we can swipe right and there we go. We've abandoned the good old brand that established a relationship with us. So another thing which is happening, I've seen this going over and over again is that, companies are switching agencies like socks thinking that that's the problem, the agency. I'm not saying that there might not be problems with the agency, what I'm stating is that, that's a natural consequence which leads to agencies wanting ... needing to over deliver to their customers.

Valentin Radu:
Because eCommerce companies have now problems with their business models. So this is a fundamental problem that they're facing right now, it's not a problem of let's tweak this or that, it's not a problem of optimizing or doing advanced things. They have to do advanced things in order to survive not only to thrive. Which leads to the need to differentiate as an eCommerce towards the consumers and to be way more customer centric than anywhere. And the need to differentiate as an agency, which means even though the eCommerce companies are getting to agencies with a brief like, sort out our PPC game or our email marketing game, what is really in the brief is help me save my company or help me fix what's broken, not only on the email side of things.

Valentin Radu:
And that requires a multidisciplinary approach that forces the agencies to be way more data driven than they ever been, because it's not about tweaking some flows anymore. So-

Richard Hill:
I would say, stop the podcast, rewind the last four, five minutes because so many things resonate with me there Valentin. I think obviously the minimum, that bar in agency deliverable and quality is massively raised in terms of what you can do and what you need to do, to do a very, very good job. And it is way, way more than it was 12 months ago. The amount of inquiries we've had, our agency since Christmas, it's only a few weeks ago, I've never seen anything like it of agency, sorry, clients coming to us, potential clients coming to us because of their disillusionment with their agencies.

Richard Hill:
So I think any agency's listening in, you can't do what you used to do, you just can't. Or you've got to be always, you're taking your nine times ROAS to two times ROAS, a lot of people then abandon, they abandon the agency and they abandon obviously even doing Facebook ads or whatever it may be. But the reality is, things have changed considerably. Things that worked don't work potentially now, so it's the agencies that you're working with, I think come, yeah, you've got to make ensure they are moving with the times. Things have moved so quick this last 12 months, especially Facebook ads, yeah I think that's great, really good.

Valentin Radu:
Yeah. And another consequence which is natural, Richard, is that, we will see that the principle of under promise over delivery is going to be respected, is going to be placed ... because this is a fundamental thing and as a brand you can't afford to miss any opportunity for your customers to place the second order. Which means the shift is going to come from the acquisition marketing towards the conversion and more of it towards the retention, because these are the free pillars of eCommerce growth. To acquire customers, to acquire traffic, to transform it into conversions and then to have long term customers.

Richard Hill:
Yeah I think that retention piece, just so much focus on winning an order, and getting that ROAS at the front end. But that retention piece is just, it's almost like an afterthought, I think. Especially for the guys that are maybe sub 10 mill, it's like the retention. It's like hang on no, we just need to find the business wherever we can. But hang on a minute, you've already got X amount of million pounds worth or dollars of clients that have come through the store that are very happy with the service, what are we doing?

Richard Hill:
So, what does retention mean to you? What things are you, when we say retention, have you got any specific areas that you would say that our listeners should focus on?

Valentin Radu:
Yeah so I've been hypnotized about retention since I got that online car insurance brand, because there it's always about customer retention. In the meantime I've learned a lot, I've worked with a few brands to nail down their customer retention as well, and we actually nailed a methodology which is called customer value optimization methodology, CVO. I'm a strong believer that agencies, we need to become literate in terms of how eCommerce grows.

Valentin Radu:
We need to understand things like customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost. Customer acquisition cost, not CPA, right, not customer per acquisition. Things like payback period, right? How many months or weeks or days will pass for a brand to make up for the investment to acquire a customer? And this methodology has some steps, I'm going to quickly go over it. So it all starts with the pillars of customer value optimization. So you have what the company saying, which is the marketing.

Valentin Radu:
Marketing by onboarding email, what kind of messaging, what kind of creatives you are using, and that's going to affect the customer lifetime value for sure. If you're not sending emails or if, on the contrary, if you're sending too many emails. If you're sending the wrong emails, bombarding them with, just come, buy, buy, buy, even though your dog has not finished their food. Because we do know that it's a large breed and you've just bought, I don't know, how many pounds of food.

Valentin Radu:
So that's marketing, that's the first thing. The second one is what the company does. Which means how you are behaving, right? How you are treating the customers post-purchase, pre-purchase. What kind of services, what kind of delays do you have? Is the package there or not? Have you sent the wrong goods or whatever? And have you, let's say, fulfilled the expectations of the customers? Because it's not too much about what you sell, but how they feel about it, what you sell.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, experience.

Valentin Radu:
Yeah. And yes, that's the customer experience. And last but not the least, which is actually vital, it's the product assortment, what the company sells. So you can sell other things and you'll be surprised to see what's the purchase frequency afterwards, and what's the customer retention. So mainly these are the pillars of growth and it's vital to emphasize another thing. We've been doing this for years now so we have a consulting arm within our company, besides the technology, which is helping companies to convert better, to improve customer lifetime value.

Valentin Radu:
We do have a consulting arm that works with pretty large brands and we've been seeing that it's not a solo game. So it's not like having someone on the retention side of things and this is going to work. Because if you acquire the wrong customers with the wrong messaging, or if your email marketing silo is not doing their job well, you can't retain anyone. So it's-

Richard Hill:
It's more about the brand, isn't it, when we say about a company it's the brand ... when you walk in if you're coming to my business, or a business, and you walk through the door, if that's a bad experience but you might buy something, you're very unlikely to buy something again. So it's that whole experience which is your brand from start to finish. You might make a purchase but in reality you might have done a rush job because you need that thing but you think, it wasn't great, I've gone to the website, isn't it, it might be a poor website. Might be crappy design and this, that and the other, but I need the thing.

Richard Hill:
But will you go back there? Probably not sort of thing. It threads through everything that you do, doesn't it, brand as does retention the way you've made them feel throughout the whole process.

Valentin Radu:
Yeah. And here's the thing which you is puzzling me right now. How come so many companies are neglecting how their customers are feeling? We are seeing that they are jeopardized about the competition, about the cookies, about the ad cost, but they are not activating some stupid post purchase survey to us, have you feel all right? Is your product okay? Do you feel good about your purchase? NPS, I'm a huge fan of NPS so, how come so many companies are neglecting that?

Valentin Radu:
Because the leverage of getting this-

Richard Hill:
Feedback.

Valentin Radu:
... know how it's fantastic, it's like, thanks to the NPS implementation, is like debugging your customer journey, the whole customer journey, because you can find out a lot of things about the pre-purchase and about the post purchase. You'll be able to see where are the bugs in your systems and instead of adding TikTok ads or switching the whatever, maybe it's time to actually put the customer where he belongs, at the table, at the board of advisors, right?

Richard Hill:
100%. So our listeners, they're going to pause this episode in a minute, and they're going to go away, or they're going to think about three things that they need to have, or three things that they need to implement, have they got to do with retention. Now I think you maybe mentioned one about sending out a survey, let's go three more. What three things to help retention do they need to have in their business?

Valentin Radu:
Yeah. If it's a large, if it's a mid to large company I think they can't go on without RFM segmentation. Because RFM segmentation is emphasizing who are your best customers? So RFM stands for recency, frequency and monetary value. You'll be in a position to understand which are your ideal customers, the ICP, the golden goose. Because they are giving you golden eggs every time. So if you do the profile, if you understand who are your best customers, why they buy, why they almost stopped buying from you, and what makes them coming back over and over again, then there you go, that's your target. And then-

Richard Hill:
It's like the 80/20, isn't it? The 80/20 principle. A lot of big marketers talk about, we talk about a lot focusing on the area, which is the customers that are spending the most, potentially visiting the most.

Valentin Radu:
Yeah. And it's not about, let's say doing something so sophisticated. So maybe I'm biased because we are a vendor that helps a lot of companies to do that, but you can do it with your own database. You can have a smart guy. The problem with RFM is that once you do it, you'll never stop doing it. So you want something dynamic because you want to treat customers according to what kind of relationship they have with your brand.

Valentin Radu:
So you will want to activate email onboarding sequences. Let me give you an example of a fantastic RFM segment, we call them the new passions. So these are customers that have the highest recency, so they've just bought, let's say in the last three weeks. They have the lowest frequency score, so they've just placed their first order, but they have the highest monetary value. So even though they place their first order, they are among the best customers that you have in terms of how much revenue they've generated. And you don't [crosstalk 00:24:39] want to treat them the same.

Richard Hill:
Like a top 10% of revenue type thing? Or have you got a number for that? Obviously it'll vary, but is it like, if your average order car is like $100 would it be like the people that spend over $200 or?

Valentin Radu:
The RFM settings are being made based on each of those customer data. So mainly RFM, at the beginning it comes all back from the '70s when it was being used for the direct mailing companies to save money on not sending envelopes to customers which weren't engaged in the last whatever months. But the RFM works if you do it, if you apply it based on your scale. So if you're using a scale from one to three, the highest score will be the top third of your customers that placed an order in the last, whatever days.

Valentin Radu:
If you're using a scale from one to five, that would be the top 20% of your customer because you divide the whole customer based on how recently, how frequently, and what's their monetary value. So, you don't want to treat those customers the same as the other ones. You don't want to miss out on how you treat them, how fast you ship to them, how fast you respond to their tickets, and what kind of offer you are sending to them. So clustering these customers in this manner, then coming up with the customer journey that's, I think now we need to shift our perspective and to work more like movie directors.

Valentin Radu:
So to do these type of scenarios, okay, if we have such a good customer and he or she bought in the last three weeks, let's think about how to make their life better. What kind of scenario? What kind of packages? What kind emails are we going to sell to the customers that have the highest chances to become, like we call them, the soulmates, right? The ones that are having highest recency, highest frequency and highest monetary value. What can we do to delight them so they can stick around? So that's the second thing that I would suggest-

Richard Hill:
Like a super fan, isn't it? A super fan of the company-

Valentin Radu:
Yeah Superconsumers. It's a great book called by Eddie Yoon, the age of super consumers, the age of customers that they would pay money just to have access to your products. I mean look at Apple or look at other brands.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, yeah. Price is irrelevant quite often, yeah. yeah that's great. Okay.

Valentin Radu:
So that would be the second thing. And the first thing is customer research. So once you have these segments find out who they are. Go deep into ... because you can't afford to advertise to the wrong people, the wrong products. So in order to advertise correctly and to have the holy trinity of acquisition, of paid acquisition would be creative target and the offer. So you can't do much anything about the offer unless you are, I don't know, building your private label products, which is another conversation.

Valentin Radu:
But if you have the same products and you want to sell them better, then you need to focus on the target and you need to focus on the creative, but it all starts with the customer. Because if you are obsessed about understanding the customer needs, the customer struggles, then you'll be in a great position to deliver on them. Let me give you an example. From this morning I'm still doing this type of, let's say calls, with various brands, which are using our product just to understand how they're using it.

Valentin Radu:
And there's one brand from Australia they are selling kits to paint at home. So in the pandemic that exploded, it was very easy, you get the brushes, you get the painting and you have the canvas with their numbers. And it's really easy to paint. But after they realized that their main struggle, based on the Jobs-to-be-Done, interviews that they made on their best RFM segments they realized that the main struggle is, in order to retain them, the customers need to, guess what, actually-

Richard Hill:
Paint.

Valentin Radu:
... do those paintings. They need to paint and to look at their pictures. I made it, it's my canvas, I done it. So mainly the onboarding is not about get this because we're going to give you a discount because nobody wants-

Richard Hill:
Getting them to do it, getting them to use it. Yeah?

Valentin Radu:
Exactly. And then the shift was, in the mentality of the brand owners, which are very smart guys and they really iterate very fast the shift was, "Hey, we are not selling cameras. We are helping people to make progress in their lives, feel better about themselves, because I made it." Look at this painting, I made it. So, their onboarding is not about buy more from us, how's your painting doing? In how many weeks do you propose to yourself to paint it? Because they know that once they've done it, they will want another one. They will want to paint a dolphin not a mountain.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. That's a, Valentin that's a great example, isn't it, a really good example. I think you bought the thing in that instance, I think, yeah, probably half, maybe not half the planet but a lot of people bought a lot of things like that over the last 18 months of new hobbies and things to do. I think we've all got things, we've all got boxes of stuff that we've bought this last 18 months that we've not done but obviously it's almost creating a course or a series of trainings to get them to consume.

Richard Hill:
It's a bit like information products overload, obviously we're in digital marketing space, we spent hundreds of thousands over the years on digital marketing courses and this, that, and the other, and my bookshelf is covered in it. You'll probably see Russell Brunson and all this jazz. And I think obviously you've got to use, if you're using the thing and you're getting a value from the thing, if that's a physical thing or a course, obviously you're more likely to getting people to consume your content, consume the training, to use the thing-

Valentin Radu:
Consume it, yeah. Consume it and then see the value, and how they articulate the value about it. And pretty much that's what Jobs-to-be-Done, interviews are doing, that's how customer research works. And it's, I think the agencies are of the future will not be siloed anymore. They will take care about the customer research because, if a brand comes to you as an email marketing agency, chances are that you are asking them what's their margin, how much do you want to spend? How many emails do you want to send? What's your CPA and whatever?

Valentin Radu:
But now you it's about what are you selling? What the customers are buying. Because if you know what the customers are buying, you know what kind of email marketing campaigns to run. And you have to do it as an email marketing agency because otherwise you'll be obsolete. Let me give you another example. On the same narrative, there's a company in the UK they sell turmeric shots. And the Jobs-to-be-Done initially before doing customer research, they thought that their buyer persona, their best customers were people which are kind of young, between 25 to 40, that's their initial perspective which were doing sport.

Valentin Radu:
They wanted to do have more energy, to feel better about training. After doing Jobs-to-be-Done they realized that there are actually four types of Jobs-to-be-Done by their product. And that there were people which were in pain, they had the inflammation and turmeric helped with that. There were people which were looking for immunity so it wasn't about energy, but it was more for immunity and there were indeed people which were very sporty. They wanted to, I don't know, train for two hours without any back pain or without any ankle pain.

Valentin Radu:
So based on these Jobs-to-be-Done research, the insights were okay but, what if we will see how much of the recurring revenue is coming from each of these particular jobs. And then that was the aha moment. Because that job that they thought is the main one wasn't the main one. And these kind of insights are shifting the acquisition game, the narrative of the brand, the email marketing game and everything can be, let's say, improved based on such an aha moment. And that's how impactful it is.

Richard Hill:
That must have been huge because obviously that's potentially a subscription style business where a quarter of their business is, yeah that must have been a complete game changer when they did that. So I think obviously listening to this episode, I think obviously you're all doing different products, different markets, but in terms of some of the takeaways there, I think obviously the key one for me is obviously, ultimately we've all got various types of customers that obviously ultimately we want to retain, but it's not that broad stroke of trying to retain everybody.

Richard Hill:
Obviously that will be fantastic, but what are the segments within our existing customer database that we can really focused on retaining? And I think that was a great example with the turmeric, we work with a couple of turmeric brands here in the UK, and that's something I'm actually going to physically have a conversation with my ad team tomorrow about that because that's a real good takeaway for me because I think, we are running ads for a couple of clients in the turmeric space and various vitamins and pharma clients and so on.

Richard Hill:
And obviously there are different uses, the different pain points. Some are quick hits, they want something solving right now and that's maybe it. Some are more long term, maybe they have a subscription need to them and obviously if you've not got subscription on your site, I know subscription potentially is a different conversation for some of our listeners but ultimately, where could you add a subscription business within your existing business?

Richard Hill:
Because I think it's a slight tangent, but it is also, I think, if you've got subscription revenue, obviously my cell phone balance team both run subscription businesses, our models are very much monthly fees, something that I've had a subscription business for 13 years. I think you are probably about up there with me as well, they are the best type of businesses to own in my mind, 100% where you've got that subscription coming in.

Valentin Radu:
Yeah you have this recurring revenue. So mainly I think this type of endeavour is crucial for any business and it needs to be tailored to your products. You need to understand that even if you think you are at the product market fit face, I've seen companies improving their customer retention by 30, by 40% after this type of endeavour. One of the first companies that we work with, a shoe retailer, they thought that, again, their ideal customers were young ladies in their 40s.

Valentin Radu:
After the RFM segmentation, after the research, guess what, they weren't that young anymore and they weren't from the main cities, they were from smaller cities because they haven't got shopping malls there and they were an eCommerce retailer. So this type of things are happening and those can be transformative to businesses. And the companies of the future will be paying more attention to their customers.

Richard Hill:
Brilliant. So some exciting takeaways there, I think there was quite a few pause moments there guys, but so Valentin, what would you say the future of data looks like? What have we got to look out for, our Listeners thinking about getting in front of the trends and what's happening with the changes in data and just using that data better, what does the future look like? What are some of the things that the listeners need to be thinking about?

Valentin Radu:
Yeah. I think at this moment we can't rely too much on external providers so this type of relying on third party providers is not going to work too much. So, I'm a strong believer in, let's say blending zero with the first party data. I'm a strong believer in capturing, as soon as possible, data about your visitors and about your customers. This flow where you get zero party data, then you do the website experience based on this tailor made party data, and then remarketing goes, I don't know, if you have a large breed dog and it's over 10 years old, then these are the products for them.

Valentin Radu:
And then you build landing pages and the remarketing is highly relevant to their needs. Then the whole onboarding journey is based on this type of data. So I think the audiences will be more granular in the future, this will become automated, hopefully we're going to get there as well in this space where, on one end we have the data, but making sense of the data is very important. So, because the data can be manipulated, it was that saying that if you force data can confess anything.

Valentin Radu:
So the idea is that, in the future this type of automated approach are going to become standard. And another thing is that the data should be transported for within the company. This silo, the approach, even if you look at the org chart of some eCommerce brands they have the social team, they have the email team, they have their performance teams, and they have their customer service team. And by the way customer lifetime value and retention is a company wide measure of success.

Valentin Radu:
It's not like marketing should fix that because that's the metric of the marketing. It's not that. If the customer experience is crappy, you can't expect for people to come back, no matter how beautiful the creatives are to incentivize them to come back. Or if are not selling the right products, don't expect marketing to fix a broken product instalment.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, no. So I guess it sounds like you're working on a lot of that with Omniconvert so maybe tell us a bit more about Omniconvert and how that's going to bridge that gap, and what you are working on at the moment. That would be good to find out a bit more about your software tool, SaaS specifically.

Valentin Radu:
Yeah. So we have a couple of business lines. We have a business line which is the software development teams, we are having ... we've started as a CRO tool so we had the AB testing website personalization surveys, and popups overlays. Then we realized that we need to level up our game thanks to the blessing in disguise of Google optimize becoming available and for free. And so mainly we needed to level up our own unique value proposition, and that was a good moment for us because we built this new technology in the sense of having an eCommerce growth suite.

Valentin Radu:
And part of it is this Omniconvert segmentation tool called Reveal, it's on the Shopify app. And we empower companies to do RFM segments, to do NPS, do this predelivery and post delivery because there's the expectation gap and you need to know what should be fixed. And then we push this kind of data to email marketing tools like Klayvio, to SMS provider like Attentive Post Script, or whatever, to customer support teams like Gorgeous, customer support software like Gorgeous or Zendesk.

Valentin Radu:
Where you get Soulmate, which is an RFM segment, which is pissed off, it's a detractor, and you push this as a ticket so that your customer service it's alive, is proactive, it's not only reactive. So you proactively prevent churn by getting in touch with the customers that are staying ... that their customer experience was suboptimal. So mainly that's what the software is doing. And on the other end we realized, again, that we need to educate the space around customer value optimization and what we are doing, and we have built an academy, it's called, I don't know if you've seen, CVO academy.

Valentin Radu:
So we've teamed up with the eCommerce experts and authors and practitioners like Bob Moesta, which is the pioneer in the Jobs-to-be-Done methodology. Like Dennis Yu on the Facebook at space. Like Chase Demand, like Carl Gilles, whatever, a lot of good names, and we built an educational program. So that's another component of what we're doing at Omniconvert, we train people, we deliver new courses every month from now onwards.

Valentin Radu:
And another thing is that we are training agencies towards the CVO methodologies. I'm personally assisting the smart agencies of the future to this type of CVO services, no matter what they do. So even though they are doing only email, it's only going to level up their game to do email marketing with the customer lifetime value in their minds. So mainly that's what we do and that's how we help the-

Richard Hill:
I think what strikes me, listeners, is that the quality of Valentin's ... just listening to you there, that's been a fantastic episode, genuinely been a very, very good episode. And I think just obviously the research I've done prior to getting you on the podcast and just looking at what you've been doing, and the quality of the training, and the quality of the site and the offer that's on your site, I think a bit of a hat tip to you. I think what you do is quality, I really do, so thank you.

Richard Hill:
Thank you for coming on, thank you for being a guest, and thank you for sparing an hour for us. So, thank you so much, really appreciate it. So I like to finish every episode or we, the book recommendation, what would you recommend to our listeners? It doesn't have to be eCommerce, it can be, maybe not about dogs. You seem to have a dog theme today. But-

Valentin Radu:
Actually I can do this for you.

Richard Hill:
Black box thinking. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Valentin Radu:
From Matthew Syed, it was the best book I've read last year. I think it's going to help any kind of professional, no matter if you're an entrepreneur, a professional, or if you're working in the marketing or in other parts of the digital landscape, that book was transformative for me.

Richard Hill:
Brilliant. Well, thank you. I will get that ordered myself because that's not one I've got. Well thank you for being on the show. For the listeners that want to find out more about you, reach out to you directly and to Omniconvert, what's the best way to do that?

Valentin Radu:
I'm writing, I'm stubborn and I'm writing the company's newsletter every week, and it's a hard endeavour now that we are growing in size being a CEO and also writing, it's kind of challenging. So you can find me on our blog, you can sign up to our newsletter. And on the other end I'm a LinkedIn person so I'm there talking all day long. I'm drying my mouth talking about how to grow an eCommerce on LinkedIn.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. No. Well thank you. Thank you. We'll link all that up so obviously sign up for Valentin's newsletter. And well, thank you for being on the show, I look forward to catching up with you again.

Valentin Radu:
Excellent. Thanks a lot Richard and thanks everyone for listening.

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