Paul Stephen: 0:00
Hello and welcome to Episode 3 of Season 2 of Shoppernomics. My name is Paul Stephen and I’m your host today of this ecommerce podcast, and today’s episode is called the Art of Acquisition for Retention building a brand that drives sales. Joining me today is Janis Thomas. Welcome, Janis, it’s great to have you. Thanks for having me, paul. So you’ve had some pretty interesting roles over your career, so there’s loads to talk about here today, but I just love if you could first perhaps introduce yourself and a little bit about your e-commerce journey.

Janis Thomas: 0:29
Sure, so I’m Janis Thomas. I’m the managing director at a direct consumer beauty brand called Look Fabulous Forever. I have been working in pure e-commerce for about eight years now. I had a long career in media and entertainment particularly. I built one of the first streaming platforms in the UK even before Netflix was doing screen streaming. So I’ve kind of been doing e-commerce adjacent stuff for longer than that, but yes, e-commerce specifically for about eight years now.

Paul Stephen: 1:06
Fantastic. So today we’re diving into sort of acquisition for retention, which, as we know, is one of the best ways to build a loyal customer base. But before we dive into that, I just want to say this is an interactive event, so, which means that any of you who listens out there can get involved with the conversation. Simply, you know, ask to speak. I think there’s a little button at the bottom of this panel and we can help you, welcome you on to the stage and get involved.

Paul Stephen: 1:31
We’ll invite questions and comments at the end too, so make sure, if you don’t want to sort of interrupt, write your notes down. So write your notes down and we will answer those after the chat. You can also make comments in the LinkedIn event as well, if you’d like to, but we encourage you to join in at the moment. So, and also, don’t forget to use those emojis throughout to let us know what you feel about the chat. Let’s get started, then, with the first question. So we called this session the art of acquisition for retention. That was me kind of paraphrasing you based on the discussion you and I had, but explain what you really kind of mean by that.

Janis Thomas: 2:05
Of course. So I think it’s very easy for us to kind of split off acquisition and retention to kind of two different, unrelated things, but actually that how you acquire customers has a huge impact on how likely they are to return. So if you just think of an example that, say you’re looking to buy a red dress and you go on a google search for red dress and you find exactly what you’re looking for and you buy it. Sometimes you can’t even tell what e-commerce site you used or what brand that product was that you bought. Compare that to. You follow a brand on Instagram. You get their emails. You’ve, you know, seen pictures of this dress, you’ve watched a video showing how to style it, all of those things. If you then go on to make the purchase from that retailer and that brand, that’s a very, very different experience and you’re much, much more likely to return in the second scenario than you are in the first one.

Paul Stephen: 3:14
Yeah, I mean they, as you say you can’t separate acquisition from retention entirely. I mean, even retention is a form of reacquisition. I suppose you’re still trying to sort of you’re always still selling, you’re still trying to sort of make them buy the next thing. So are you saying that, that sort of second route? You’ve kind of that you’ve got them in the right environment, if you like, or they found you in the right place?

Janis Thomas: 3:40
Indeed, and there are a little bit more invested, you’ve got a bit more of a relationship.

Paul Stephen: 3:44
before you make that transaction, Okay, okay, and I mean, obviously there’s where we are today in terms of the way people find you and the channels they can find you in, in terms of where they find you now, compared to maybe a few years ago, maybe in some of your previous roles. How has that changed? Or what’s actually no different, but the channels have changed, or what is now completely different to how it might have been a few years ago?

Janis Thomas: 4:18
Yeah, I mean, I think the media landscape is incredibly different to you know, kind of when I started my career, you know, digital marketing was, you know, kind of almost non-existent, whereas now that’s probably probably where I would. I’ve kind of spent most of my recent career focusing and I think for me specifically, I was really lucky that I spent a big chunk of my career in a direct marketing which was kind of the precursor to digital marketing, because you were looking at, you know response rates and and you know acquisition costs and things like that before digital became a big thing. But I think, more than more than anything, I was really lucky because I spent a lot of my career in subscription businesses, whether that was publishing or TV or streaming or movies, and that subscription discipline really made me think about this acquisition for retention that you would. So much focus was on keeping existing customers and the value of that and kind of acquiring customers for subscription businesses is comparatively expensive, so you don’t want to acquire someone who is going to stay for you know a short period of time, because that becomes it means that you’re not profitable as a business and kind of the most profitable subscription businesses retain a huge amount of their customers and their investment in acquisition is for quality acquisition.

Janis Thomas: 6:08
So because I spent so long working in subscription businesses, it really forced me to understand how do you acquire a quality subscriber? How can you tell a poor quality acquisition experience versus a good quality one? And really digging into the data was absolutely fascinating. So, for example, when I was at Birchbox when we ran a special offer say we’d run a special offer for a week the people who we acquired at the beginning of that offer stayed significantly longer than the people who acquired towards the end of that offer period. And essentially there was a difference between the people who have been thinking about the brand for a while and the offer tipped them over the over the edge into making the commitment, versus the people who were really kind of much more on the fence and just took the plunge because the offer was about to end. So, even like on paper, their acquisition journey could have been identical, but their relationship with the brand before they made their decision was very different.

Paul Stephen: 7:24
So I’m going to assume that. And then there was a level of brand awareness that happened prior to that. Like you said, those people who’ve been thinking about the brand and then sort of committed early in that campaign. And that’s again like you’ve been doing this a while and marketing used to be one of those things that was considered that you knew a bunch of it worked, but the bit was you didn’t really know which bit did work and therefore, as I know, the ability to track every click and every button, the sort of direct attribution model was kind of it wasn’t exactly born but became the sort of focus of most people’s marketers. But the the it’s not. It’s kind of missing the point, isn’t it? Is it actually? People don’t just see something straight away and then just buy it, and there’s a whole set of stuff that happens before that.

Janis Thomas: 8:13
Indeed, and I think often, particularly with the kind of historic focus we’ve had on last click, attribution has been very focused on that bottom of funnel and kind of oh, brand marketers are fluffy and you can’t measure what they do.

Janis Thomas: 8:30
But I think, particularly as we move to this kind of post cookie environment, it actually makes us look much more incrementality as a measurement and kind of how we look more holistically at that journey to purchase and how potentially those earlier touch points reflect the quality of the people you then go on to acquire and and how long that they will then stay with you.

Janis Thomas: 8:58
So, for example, in my current role, we know from talking to our very, very high value customers most of them our first interaction with them was on YouTube and they started watching our videos and found them useful because you know how you apply eyeliner when you’re 75 is completely different to what you do when you’re 25 if you want to make it look good.

Janis Thomas: 9:24
So you know you would start that journey, you would watch a video and you might still be buying your eyeliner from Superdrug at that point. But over time you come to understand the brand and how our products are different and the fact that our founder started the business when she was 65 because she faced the same issues as our customer did. And then you’re going to be much, much more invested in the brand when you go on to make a purchase. So, for example, we know that more than half of our customers come back and make a second purchase, and if they come back and make a second purchase, typically they go on to make at least seven purchases with us. So, while we might take our relationship slow to start off with and be very much about useful and helpful content, by investing in that way we then get much more loyal, valuable customers in the long run.

Paul Stephen: 10:22
Well, personally, this is some fantastic stats, your product, really, that’s a. So you’ve actually sort of segwayed me there into, into the YouTube is a video platform, but obviously that’s where maybe your initial customer is building a, building confidence in your brand. They’re sort of going oh, these guys, this looks good, this looks like it’s right for me, and then, as you say, they’ve got those repeat purchases. Now, obviously I’m conscious where you are at the moment is quite a mature audience, but so they have ford as sort of user-generated content. What other people are doing? What are they sharing? Those sort of brand ambassadors work for you in your market.

Janis Thomas: 11:04
Yeah, it’s a really interesting one because typically there aren’t many kind of big influences, particularly in the social space.

Janis Thomas: 11:14
If you think of, you know, kind of glamorous older women, chances are you think of someone like Helen Merrin, not necessarily something with someone with a big social following and kind of more broadly, the demographic that I’m targeting, which, to be really clear, is women in their 60s, 70s and 80s. They generally don’t feel comfortable sharing particularly selfies on social media that there’s, you know, kind of a lot of negative sentiment and unwelcome comments and kind of all of those those things. So what we do instead is we provide a safe environment for our customers to share that content with us and particularly we have a private space Facebook group which is incredibly supportive and if anyone posts a selfie they will just get an absolute outpouring of love and that then gives those customers confidence to share those pictures with us and let us use them in our own marketing. Even so, you know, kind of UGC isn’t necessarily for us about the traditional oh, we want to buy somebody’s, buy into somebody’s existing following. We’re actually using that much more from a content creation perspective.

Paul Stephen: 12:32
Yeah, I mean there is an influencer was meant to be originally somebody who was genuinely and sharing their enthusiasm for your product, and then people sort of liked what they had to say, so start following them. They’ve sort of turned into a sort of more an artificial thing where now everyone’s probably deeply suspicious of anybody who calls themselves an influencer is having a genuine opinion on a product. So, yeah, I mean it doesn’t do influencers exist in your market then, or you really relying on genuine customers, if you like?

Janis Thomas: 13:06
Well, to be fair, our biggest influencer is our founder, trisha, who’s become an influencer in her own right that we know. When we partner with, particularly with fashion brands, people will be like oh Trisha, I love that scarf or those earrings or that blouse, and you know, those products then sell out. So, ironically, by creating our own content, trisha has become an influencer in her own right.

Paul Stephen: 13:34
Yeah, there’s a sincerity in that. So talking about acquisition, like I say, so much of a marketer is often measured on direct attribution of things. So here we’re talking about brand awareness using your founder or other channels. So how could you express how important that is to a marketer, or what sort of emphasis they should be doing, or what sort of balance? How do you keep that balance?

Janis Thomas: 14:06
Yeah. So I think ultimately we’ve become a little bit addicted to that kind of last click, almost vanity metrics and that kind of culture, performance marketing and all about bottom of funnel. But ultimately if you’re not creating a pool of people who understand your brand, know what you sell, know why your products are different, then you can’t convert them beyond a kind of oh really, on price. So you become you know, oh, what’s the, you know what’s the cheapest red dress I like, rather than oh, I’m buying that red dress because I really love the brand and their style and you know kind of their sustainability, credentials and kind of all of those things. So I think it is thinking about that journey to purchase and you know kind of people understanding your product benefits, and that’s not just you know kind of a single product, but actually part of getting customers to come back and buy again is understanding the different benefits of different products. So for us, that’s one of the reasons that kind of that useful and helpful content is really crucial for us and I think, particularly as we move to a cooculus world, as we move away from last click, we’re much more looking at incrementality and how adding something new into the mix. What does that? What difference did that make at the end? You know, kind of crucial, more crucial metrics like revenue and profitability and growth and kind of all of those those things kind of looking at that incremental impact.

Janis Thomas: 15:44
And I think the other thing as well around content is particularly with Google, since they’ve been on this kind of helpful content focus of their algorithm updates in recent years. That means that you’re much more likely to stand out. And when we’re in an environment where it’s really easy to generate content through AI, deeply understanding your customer and what you need, what they need at each step of the journey, is where you can really really stand out from a search perspective. And then, you know, with the changes with Metasadvantages Plus shopping and Google’s performance max, it’s about providing media owners with much, much more diverse assets around. You know, it might be brand, it might be for us, it might be our USPs, or it might be a content tutorial, or it might be a product’s benefits video, or it might be an offer, and actually giving the platforms the flexibility to work out who to show which creative to which time being a content led business makes that much, much easier.

Paul Stephen: 16:55
So it sounds like you’re using a lot of data and analytics that you harvest in different ways, I imagine, and different channels and different platforms that you’re on. So it’s sort of as you were talking earlier about the age group that you’re working with and you know, as an agency we’ve worked with Sargo who’s over 50s and I know there and someone who’s in their early 50s. Now I know an early 50-year-old person is very different to someone in their 60s or 70s or 80s. Have you seen a lot of you seen that change quite a bit over the last say, even five years, 10 years, in terms of the demographics or the demographics. What’s changing? Attitude and use of more digital channels?

Janis Thomas: 17:43
I mean to be fair. I think the biggest issue there is stereotypes. I think you know kind of particularly our core audiences women in their 70s and you know, when I talk to people they presume that these women are not tech savvy. I’m sorry. Women in their 70s, the generation who were in the workplace when computerization came in and their boss was the one who didn’t want to learn how to use the computer, so she was the one who had to learn how to use all the systems and in fact, she can probably type a lot quicker than most of the people who are using computers today as well.

Paul Stephen: 18:15
That’s what my mum would tell me. They would learn PITMEN and they could never have to type rather than one finger, like that we would do now.

Janis Thomas: 18:23
Yeah. So we often hear from our customers that they’re actually the ones who are making the online purchases more necessarily than their husbands. And, you know, the stereotype of a woman in their 70s is a grey head granny in a grey cardigan. It’s like no, these women are the generation of the Beatles and Mary Quint and the miniskirt. These are, you know, vibrant women with interesting lives. Let’s not stereotype them.

Paul Stephen: 18:49
Have you seen that change over recent years, or has that always been your sort of core market? I suppose it would be.

Janis Thomas: 18:55
I wish that would change. I really, really do that. We find I had a. We find huge engagement with our content because we portray these women in an accurate way. So you know, you should see, like the comments on our ads are just I love this product, I love this brand. You know. You compare that to the comments you see on a lot of other brands ads. It’s incredibly, incredibly different and part of that is accurately representing our target customer in a way that resonates with her.

Paul Stephen: 19:36
In terms of how you sort of build the brand for that audience and maybe you sort of answer this a little bit. Is that how much of you? Is it then digital? How much of it? Where does the offline, as we used to call it, sort of fit? Where does the magazine brand, the wearing the good old school PR TV, whatever it might be? Where does that fit into brand building for you?

Janis Thomas: 20:00
So we’re 100% direct consumer brand, so we’re e-commerce only. You can’t buy us from the shops, you can’t buy us from any third party. So our focus is predominantly digital and in fact, when we first started the business, we got some amazing PR coverage. We’ve got some TV coverage. We still, you know, kind of get some great press coverage from time to time. But if you want people to interact with you in a digital environment, then focusing their journey to purchase on digital makes most sense.

Paul Stephen: 20:39
Yeah, I suppose one of the things that you’re doing well is analyzing the dates. You’ve got to really truly understand your customer and, given you’ve got a number of different channels, we’ve had success in the past sort of taking what we do know about them they’re already sort of in our database or we know how they’re interacting with the website or our products or whatever but then taking sort of other third party data sort of to color in the gaps, and different channels usually enable you to do that. So I wondered if you were able to use sort of the brand work that you do if you’re like not necessarily to give you a direct response, but you get value out of that by helping you learn more about your customers.

Janis Thomas: 21:24
Indeed, and I think you know kind of, I’m not saying those things don’t have an impact. But having someone watch a tutorial video and understand how they could apply their existing makeup differently and look better is going to be a very different experience than particularly somebody who read a magazine article about Trisha’s story. You know, yeah, it’s going to play a role in their journey to purchase, but it’s going to be very different than particularly watching video content from us.

Paul Stephen: 22:04
And we talked about sort of influence et cetera. But what are your views on where things like reviews fit in? You’ve got your sort of clients, by the sound of it, who are sort of sharing their experience of using their product. Do you think the sort of traditional reviews have a part to play?

Janis Thomas: 22:26
Oh, definitely, because I think for us because we do have this long, complex journey to purchase, where we’re building a relationship it’s about building trust, so having both kind of testimonials and kind of we use trust pilots, so there’s more kind of general service reviews.

Janis Thomas: 22:44
But then the individual product reviews are really crucial and there are some products in particular where we will test with a group of customers to get reviews before we launch them, because we know that trust and faith in the product is really important to get ahead of launch. And sometimes we’ll even do product testing with our customers that we were looking to launch an age bot cream, probably about a year or so ago, and we knew that this was a product where we had to be able to prove that this product was effective and we had to have the data to have that credibility. And I think we sampled with something like 50 customers and it was I think about four or five of them had issues where the formulation was a little bit strong and it damaged their skin and we said actually we’re not comfortable going ahead developing this product if one in 10 of our customers is going to have a problem with it. So actually in that case we decided not to go ahead and produce that product on the basis of our customer feedback.

Paul Stephen: 24:00
Nothing is great. Great sincerity. You can speak about that. One of the things you mentioned earlier was around that sort of like you know you’re doing good work there, but how much do you think your audience cares about your sort of environmental credentials? You know you be called or whatever it might be. How do you think that that fits into sort of a brand’s makeup these days? Pun intended.

Janis Thomas: 24:26
Yeah, I mean, I think I think B Corp is quite an interesting one because the kind of sustainability angle is one of it, one part of it, but the other part is around the corporate social responsibility side and I think it’s one of the things that we’ve talked about. Potentially looking at B Corp status more as our role as a brand who advocates for older women and challenges those stereotypes, that piece is probably resonates more for us as a brand. Having said that, you know the environmental side is really important to us as well. We offer the facility for our customers to recycle any items that can’t go in their domestic recycling. They can send that back to us for recycling.

Janis Thomas: 25:17
We’re in the process of developing refillable compacts. We recently asked our customers actually about refillable compacts and one of the most surprising statistics we actually phrased the question in quite a not biased way, but we were quite specific. We said would you, if it was the same price, would you want a refillable compact or would you want the existing compacts where you have to throw it away when you’re finished with it? And I was shocked at 13% of customers said no. No, we want to stick with the ones that we have at the moment and we can put them in the bin. And I was like I’m surprised anyone said yes to that question.

Paul Stephen: 25:59
Yeah, it’s interesting there. I mean, again, I would have said I obviously don’t buy makeup, but I certainly know my wife. It’s part of the buying process, isn’t it? The experience of going through the acquisition, looking forward to having a nice shiny new compact or whatever it might be, that’s all fresh and clean and whatever is obviously part of what they get out of buying the next one, rather than just the powder that’s in it, I suppose. So I’m going to change gears slightly now.

Paul Stephen: 26:31
You’ve been working in a number of different businesses play football, tv, birch, boxing, and now where you are now, a lot of those are sort of they’re not, they weren’t digital products as such when you started. So you had to take all of those kind of on a bit of a journey to go from sort of an offline not exactly offline, because I’m sure TV would definitely not consider itself offline. So what was the sort of journey you had to go on to take them from where that was? People were consuming it, you know, as they wanted to consume it to something. Now was something they subscribed to.

Janis Thomas: 27:14
I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever really gone through that kind of change project with with an organisation and that, and particularly kind of my career really in the last gosh more than 15 years, has been kind of digital first, digital only businesses. So I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily the best person to talk about kind of that transition.

Paul Stephen: 27:41
Okay, yeah, it was more really just sort of you’ve got to change a customer type, I suppose, really, and transition them from the way that they’re consuming something now and now you’re gaining on sort of subscription, then how do you keep them there? You know that sort of really talking to the how do you manage the churn? How do you sort of continue to keep them excited about the product?

Janis Thomas: 28:05
Yeah, I mean, I think subscription businesses are just really interesting in terms of how you communicate with your customer. It’s really turned on its head because so many businesses we focus on what do we want to tell customers, what do we want to email them about, what do we want to put on our social channels? You know what do we want to say, and subscription is the ultimate example of what does your customer want to hear, because if you send a subscription customer an email, that’s a reminder that they have a subscription and it’s a reminder to cancel. So you have to be really, really sure that what you’re saying is of value to your customer, and that is quite the rethink for many organisations.

Paul Stephen: 29:03
Yeah, I’ve worked with subscriptions myself and yeah, there’s something that has to be refined over time, doesn’t it? The algorithm, if you like, that is understanding somebody who’s at that early point of being customer, and how do we then get them to become a repeat customer and so on, versus someone who’s a perfectly loyal subscriber who doesn’t need to be, like I say, disturbed.

Janis Thomas: 29:28
Indeed, one of the most surprising stats at Birchbox was that people will most likely cancel their subscription on Monday. So really careful not to send emails on a Monday.

Paul Stephen: 29:41
So yeah, so one of the things that every business has is it’s really built around its people process and its tools. So I wonder if we can sort of go down each of those a little bit. So, starting with people, really, what are the sort of top skills that you would advise someone should have right now? Or, if they don’t have them, go and learn them right now.

Janis Thomas: 30:01
I mean, I think right now it’s got to be generative AI, it’s got to be the number one, that’s like. If you’re not, no matter what your role is. I think you need to understand these tools and where their strengths and weaknesses lie and you need to be experimenting with them and, particularly in a senior leadership role, you need to understand what everyone in your business is doing with these tools, because they are using them, whether you know it or not, and you should know it and you should understand it and you should be setting parameters in place. I think the other big one is personalization. That really that’s moved away from product recommendations like particularly look fabulous forever.

Janis Thomas: 30:47
We really personalize customers website experiences based on a whole host of different dimensions and I feel that that’s a skill the marketers really need to understand personalization platforms and the parameters you can. It’s like if you can change it, you can personalize it. So there are thousands of dimensions we can personalize on and I think the biggest lesson in my career is that it’s not just about technology and marketing and hard skills. Soft skills are really what are going to set you apart in your career, whether that’s communication and listening and team building skills and leadership and emotional intelligence and kind of all of those things I think. For me that’s where I spend most of my time and see the biggest return.

Paul Stephen: 31:44
Yeah, I mean, if you’re managing people, absolutely those skills never become well. You’ve never finished, I should imagine, really in terms of refining that managing people. But it goes back to some of the sort of technical skills I mean, be it AI or learning about data analytics to inform personalization. That is kind of somewhat overwhelming for people. Now, without wishing to sound sort of demeaning about that, just even I don’t know getting into the nitty gritty of how to really use GA4 correctly is overwhelming for some people, let alone sort of looking at all other sort of attribution tools that you could use and therefore you might use it in a personalized program. How do you sort of address that? Would you say that can someone be a generalist and sort of understand all of that, or do you think it’s good to specialize?

Janis Thomas: 32:40
Ultimately, I think it’s about understanding your customer and I think if you really really understand your customer, those tools help you serve them. If you start with the technology, then, yes, it can be complex and overwhelming. If you start with your customer and what they need and a deep understanding of their pain points and their challenges and the richness of their life, then I think it’s not easy. There’s a much clearer path.

Paul Stephen: 33:11
Yeah, I mean that’s going back to clear fundamentals, isn’t it being a marketer really understanding your audience and being able to then present something in front of them that resonates, and that’s sort of a common thread, I suppose, In terms of then the next question really around sort of process what are the sort of things you would say are your go-to, things that you measure on an ongoing basis, be it your KPIs or whatever sort of acronym you’d like to attach to it? What are the things that you kind of want on a monitor, weekly, monthly, to make sure you’re on track? What are the things that you’ll go to?

Janis Thomas: 33:48
Yeah, I mean, I think the first part of that process is actually forecasting those things, that it’s your weekly revenue, good or bad, well, what do you expect it to be and why? And why was it different, whether it was better or worse. So that’s kind of it’s not just metrics in isolation, but it’s making a set of assumptions and kind of articulating those assumptions and then measuring back against them and that’s, I feel, the real discipline. Is very easy for us to retrofit performance to saying, oh well, I expected this week wouldn’t have gone that well. So, like, well, why did you then execute the plan that you had for that week if you didn’t think that it would?

Janis Thomas: 34:38
go well, whereas actually really documenting your assumptions and then sitting down and saying, okay, what did we do? Whether it was better or worse and why was it different? So for me, the kind of four key KPIs I look at most are overall revenue, new customer revenue, conversion rate and profitability, and kind of, particularly, what I’m looking at in the short term tends to be what proportion of my revenue and my new customer revenue and my spending on media, instead of making like media plans that kind of six months out. We live in a landscape where you can adjust dynamically and you should be in terms of what’s working and not working, instead of looking at those last click kind of oh, this 2% of my revenue came from email and kind of all of those things. Well, how much are you spending overall and what does that look like in relation to your revenue? And keeping those two things in line with each other, I think, is really crucial.

Paul Stephen: 35:57
Yeah, I mean, for me, cost per acquisition is really what that comes down to, and that isn’t necessarily. You can’t really measure that on a single channel Equally. I often have this conversation we’ll create a campaign that is uber well personalised and all the rest of it, and you measure it based on its percentage of conversion or cost per acquisition. But then you could run the same campaign but the creative might, or the message or it might be completely different. So it wasn’t the tool or the way you segmented the audience or anything else, but the creative can far outperform another. So it’s not always that easy just to say, oh, I’ve got the recipe now. This is the way we bring our cost per acquisition down.

Janis Thomas: 36:40
Indeed, and I think particularly the way that digital platforms are changing this idea of creative as targeting, particularly in these environments where you’re giving the media platforms much less specific audiences, with cookies going away with you, you know, kind of less matching against first party data, kind of look-alikes, kind of all of that stuff. If you’ve got a really strong creative that stands out and resonates with your target audience, that’s what particularly performance max and Meta’s Advantage Plus Shopping are able to then leverage that to attract the right audience. So I think it’s not just, as you say, that creative variance, but we live in a world where creative as targeting can be the difference between success and failure of a campaign I’m conscious of time, Janis, but I’m going to ask one more question and now can it out to the audience.

Paul Stephen: 37:40
So if you would like to ask any questions, please put your hand up, give me a shout and we can ask Janis for you. So, yeah, so my last question for you that I’ve written down is you’ve used lots of different tools over the years and now you have your sort of go-to favorites. So what are your preferred channels or maybe platforms or bits of software that maybe you use or would maybe recommend for success?

Janis Thomas: 38:05
Yeah, I think it’s really about understanding your customer and understanding where they are and the platforms they use and when and what for. I mean, for example, if you’re selling me software, I don’t want to see you on my Instagram, but I do want to see you on my LinkedIn. So I think it’s understanding that that customer and for me, knowing that actually you know YouTube is really is really crucial, particularly a lot of my customers watching YouTube on TV. All of those things really kind of thinking about where is your customer and what do they want from you and then picking your channels accordingly is the kind of key thing, rather than necessarily it being a kind of one size fits all. This is this is amazing. I think it’s about your customer and what they need from you at every step of that journey to Okay, thank you.

Paul Stephen: 39:07
Have you found any particular tools that you use? I mean stuff that we all use a bit better and Google, but there are other sort of optimization tools, conversion tools, personalization tools. You come out of platforms that you find sort of getting the job done, and you also, your friend.

Janis Thomas: 39:28
Yeah, I mean I think there are a lot of things that I find really useful that we use a brilliant tool called Noibu which diagnoses issues with the customers have on our website, and that’s been really helpful and understanding where points of friction are. You know, kind of where you’ve got a very kind of niche, potentially browser and device issue that you might not picked up. So big, big fan of that. For us, personalization is really crucial, that we personalize on a number of different dimensions and we currently use fresh relevance to do that because it’s we need far more than product recommendations because you know, if you’re a first time visitor to our site, you need to know our founder Trisha’s story, why she started the brand, kind of all of those things, whereas if you’re a returning customer, you already know that you want to get into product much more quickly and kind of the products you will want to buy and the content you want to see will be very different. So, yeah, we use fresh relevance for that on our website.

Paul Stephen: 40:42
Okay. So I have one question how do you take advantage of peak seasons? So you’ve got your brand awareness work going on and you’re obviously nurturing them all the time, but when it comes to Christmas and New Year, etc. How do you take advantage of that?

Janis Thomas: 40:58
For us. We don’t see a lot of seasonality, particularly for us. We’re not big on gifting because our products are exclusively designed for older women and particularly women in their 60s, 70s and 80s. There is a danger if you’re gifting our product and you’re gifting it to somebody who’s not aware of the brand. You don’t want to cause offense. So we don’t see much in that kind of gifting space. So we tend to see much more kind of always on.

Janis Thomas: 41:27
But in terms of that kind of planning for where we do see kind of peaks in demand, kind of Black Friday and the like, it’s really about testing and learning and deep understanding and deep debriefs of like, what are we forecasting and why are we forecasting and what are we doing differently this year? Why do we think that we will do that, will do better than last year, and that we’re continuously testing and learning? That we have at Look Fabulous Forever what we call our five pillars of growth, which are conversion optimization and improving website experience, increasing customer lifetime value, acquiring new customers, developing new products and upskilling the team and the staff. The idea of those five pillars are they are things that we are always doing. Every day. We are always looking for new ways to improve. So we’re always testing and learning and evolving, and I think that’s really crucial in the current environment.

Paul Stephen: 42:33
I have another question what top tips would you recommend to your peers on this call? So are they e-commerce directors, managers. What advice would you give them?

Janis Thomas: 42:44
I think my number one tip would be to talk to your customers and survey your customers and ask your customers questions. Don’t make assumptions about what they want. Ask them. We ask our customers. We do a quarterly customer survey to everyone who’s bought in the last three months and we benchmark things like do they know that we have a very generous returns policy? Do they know what a free delivery threshold is? All of those things. But we also ask them questions like are they interested in buying our pay later services? Do they use TikTok? Rather than making assumptions about who our customers are, we ask them those questions.

Janis Thomas: 43:33
Before we launch any new product, we ask our customers are they interested in buying it? What kind of what do they need from that particular product? What kind of qualities and what results do they want to see from it? What price would they be willing to pay? What would they need to know about it before they decided to buy it? So it means, before we launch any new product, we know is there not enough demands to be worth manufacturing it? And we produce it at the sort of charger price that we can make a decent margin on it. Are we formulating it in the right way? Do we need to tweak the way that we’re developing it, and then even our content marketing plan. Our customers have told us what they need to know about it, so we can produce videos and tutorials and written content to overcome those objections. So I really feel that listening to your customers and asking them questions is really the is crucial to success, no matter what type of business you work in.

Paul Stephen: 44:43
Wonderful. So should we finish on a story Over your time working in this role. Is there a favourite campaign or a favourite project that you worked on that you really sort of warmed your heart.

Janis Thomas: 44:56
We did a piece of work about a year ago and we so Trisha, our founder. She writes a blog every Sunday and typically it’s not about the company or her role in it, it’s much more about her experience as an older woman in society and as part of one of her weekly blogs we put out a survey to just really understand our customers wider experience of society and kind of how you know why she wears makeup and kind of how it makes her feel and kind of all of those things. And there were two things that stood out to me about that exercise. One is of the people who read Trisha’s blog that week. Half of them, half of them completed that survey, which is just insane as far as I’m concerned. And one of the questions we asked was about how being a customer at Look Fabulous Forever made them feel, and 85% said being a customer of Look Fabulous Forever had a positive impact on their life. And I just thought how many brands would just love for their customers to say you’ve had a positive impact on my life.

Paul Stephen: 46:17
So, Janis, I think we’re sort of out of time now. Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you very much for coming along, thank you to our audience for joining today as well, and wanted to remind you that we have another Shoppernomics event, just like this, on Wednesday 20th of March. We’ve got a very exciting speaker really lined up there about to be. I think we’re going to promote that this week. So please go across to shoppernomicscouk, sign up, subscribe to us. That would be amazing. So to point out that now Shoppernomics is available on all your favourite podcast channels, so the Apple or Spotify or whatever you use, you should be able to find us there. So, yeah, last comment really is to say thank you very much, Janis, it’s been fantastic today.

Janis Thomas: 47:00
Thank you for having me, Paul.

Paul Stephen: 47:01
It’s been great.