Learnings from Over $500M in Upsells

Learnings from Over $500M in Upsells Speaker 1: I don't know if like lifting AOV and acquiring new customers have to be mutually exclusive. This is why I think the ROKT product is really interesting or the ROKT Thanks product. It's like you can lift AOV with upsells. You land on your confirmation page, you're probably not going to be able to get a crazy AOV lift there, but if I can get you another $100,000 a month off of This ROKT Thanks product, go and take that $100,000 and invest it into customer acquisition, which now you're just building this flywheel purely from your transaction. How many more incremental customers does $100K buy you? And you did it off of, not by increasing AOV, just by monetizing your confirmation page real estate. Speaker 2: Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. Today's a special episode brought to you by Aftersell. And today we have the incredible founders of Aftersell, who recently got acquired by ROKT. And we're going to be discussing not just their journey in building Aftersell, but what this incredible tool has done for thousands of brands and how they've brought millions of dollars back to the merchants' pockets. So before we jump into all of that, Ron and Dhruv, I'd love for you guys, for a few people who maybe don't know you guys, maybe a little bit of intro on you guys and a little bit of background of what you guys have been building with Aftersell. Speaker 1: Why don't you go first? Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. So we started Aftersell around four and a half years ago. And the idea is really to be the best upselling platform on Shopify. Our goal from day one has been to maximize revenue for our customers. We started on the thank you page. We started offers post-purchase. We now do checkout, we now do in-cart, and also we do something called ROKT Thanks or network offers with a broader network of third-party partners too. Speaker 1: It's incredible. Yeah, it's super interesting. We started at the end of the funnel and then we've kind of found that moving upper and upper funnel, kind of trying to power more and more of the transaction tends to allow us to deliver more and more value. We learn more about the customer throughout the process. It's really helpful. Speaker 2: It's really cool. I think it'd be really awesome to like, obviously you guys when you started this four or four and a half years ago, there was a problem you wanted to solve, right? And, you know, adding more revenue aside, what was the problem you guys saw that people are facing, whether it's from, you know, placements and the ability to upsell in different places versus also just some of the problems you guys have solved today with. Speaker 1: The problem we were trying to solve was actually our third co-founder, Armand, who was running a dropshipping store back in the day, selling lunchboxes. He would try and set up these upsell campaigns. We actually initially wanted to solve the problem for an e-commerce person or a marketer to be able to go and set up really, really robust upselling flows as opposed to needing a developer or an agency to do that. As we started getting into the weeds of it, we started to learn about all the different pain points that people had. Like, you know, it was like, even if we were able to get that to happen, like, the upsell flows that people were setting up weren't the most effective. So then we started learning about What all the different upselling techniques and stuff were and obviously having Armand's experience from an e-commerce perspective was really helpful in understanding that. But as we went to market, we started to learn a lot more about going beyond just what's the tech and getting more and more into what's the strategy and then building a tool around those strategies as opposed to building a tool just to solve a UX problem for people. Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the broader theme is that the CAC is so expensive as we all know and like you really want to make the most of each customer and this is one of the easiest ways to do that. Speaker 2: Yeah, I touch on like when we like initially even considered Aftersell, I think it'd be cool to kind of, I think we were kind of hacking away our way to try and figure it out until we were like, all right, this is actually a tool. Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, we've always, like you said, you, CACs are rising and so the brands that can obviously afford the highest cost of acquisition are the ones that are gonna succeed and, you know, AOV, you can only do so much on your front-end landing page without, you know, pissing off potential customers, right? And so, the biggest thing that we've We were focusing on was growing AOV through the cart, the checkout, and then post-purchase. Cart, the checkout, like those are things that we just would never touch, right? You never wanted to hurt conversion rate. You just wanted to get that customer down to the thank you page without throwing anything their way, right? Or throwing a wrench into anything. And so the post-checkout experience was probably the space that not a lot of apps did well. And so when we saw Aftersell had the ability to, one, add items to an order without having to enter details again, but also on top of that, have something that's fully customizable, that I think is very important. Because I believe the solutions that were out there before, very cookie-cutter, Not a lot of like customization and especially for a brand that is selling supplements, which requires a lot of education. We had no chance in hell at trying to cross sell without educating somebody to begin with. So being able to do that, I think changed the strategy a lot because I think anybody who's running upsells, their first tip is going to be, well, sell more of what you already sold somebody. But you can only do so much of that, right? So being able to cross-sell, being able to educate, I think that's probably one of the biggest things that we leverage. Speaker 1: And one of the things that's interesting is like when you cross-sell, you're also now opening up kind of future sales opportunities for when people do come back to your brands and buy a different product line, which is always like you don't want to be super concentrated in one product line. And so people have actually launched like new product lines with Aftersell where they like will only have the product show on the upsell page and be like we're introducing this new product line which is fascinating and those were some of the use cases that we didn't realize were even possible and then we started to get you know that's why we started building more customizable templates and things like that. It's cool. Speaker 2: Before we get started, here's a quick thank you to today's sponsor, Aftersell. At Obvi, we recently broke $100 million in sales, and I'm going to share one of the mindset shifts that helped us get there. We call it focusing on the transaction moment. It's that point when your customer has their wallet and is ready to buy. Most brands stop right there, but that's actually where the real opportunity begins. We learned this lesson with Aftersell. Since adding their app to To our site, we've transformed our checkout experience into a true revenue engine, all while giving customers a more personalized experience they actually appreciate. If you're feeling the squeeze of rising ad costs and customer price sensitivity, Aftersell is the only answer. Now, let's get back to the episode. You know, I'd love to even jump into, going off the theme of hesitation, right? I don't think it's as large of a population, but there are still brands I'll talk to and they're just like, oh no, we're not touching that experience. We're not doing that. And like, you guys have now talked to thousands and thousands of brands. I'd love to understand both sides of the coin, right? Like, why are people hesitant still? And what is like that way that you're kind of creating the sense of like, hey, here's how some of these debunking some of these myths or talking through some of these hesitations that people put up. What's the reason and how do you break through those? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I have a very strong opinion on this over the years that I've formed is I think a lot of people are always thinking about the risk of doing something and I think a lot of really smart people have talked a lot about what's the risk of not doing something. And I think this applies here with, yeah, you'll probably continue to build your business, you'll maintain your margin or whatever, but you're probably going to get beat out by your competitors if they're going to start using Aftersell or they're going to start doing post-purchase upsells or whatever that is. Now, this isn't meant to be fear-mongering, but the question I think that I always ask people is, Your checkout is currently a cost center. You're paying a per-transaction fee. This entire piece of real estate, the best brands in the world have gone out and turned it into a profit center. Most e-commerce companies outside of direct-to-consumer have 10% margins on their core business. They make 90% of their profit on ancillary revenue streams. When a low-cost airline sells a ticket, You know, they lose $20 on every ticket sale. They make it up with upsells and cross-sells. This is how the greatest businesses in the world are operating. And so when people are risk-averse on this, I always get very confused because it's like you're continuing to just accept the status quo of it's a cost center. But I actually think the more interesting kind of high-risk, Up-to-date businesses, and you look at the largest players in the world, they're going full risk on, like, let's figure out how to turn this cost center into profit center. You find vendors, hopefully like us, that are able to help you de-risk some of that, use some of the insights across our brands. But I think ultimately the big thing is, like, Turning a cost center into a profit center is a huge one. Speaker 3: Yeah. And I think back in the day, there was a similar concern around SMS marketing, but obviously that's universal today. It's a standard. And over the years, that's happened for us as well. In the beginning, there were a lot more objections around hesitancy, but as we just get more and more customers to do this, it's like, okay, this is standard. Why not do this? And I think the biggest point around that is just Our primary offers happen post-purchase. So you're not jeopardizing anything in terms of the existing purchase. That's always been like a very key unlock for people when they realize that they're like, okay, like, this makes total sense. Speaker 4: One thing you mentioned about the airlines, there's a brand that we typically look at for inspiration. I'm not going to mention the name, but an offer they just recently started to run was get the product for free, pay for shipping, and then their entire checkout process is just upsells. So it's like, oh, you want to try this? Add this. You want to try that? Add that. Okay, don't add any of that. Get through the checkout. More upsells on the back end, right? So you're enticing the consumer to just like make that purchase because it's a no-brainer, right? At the end of the day, you're paying $5 for shipping and you're getting a product, right? Granted, you get put into a subscription, but being able to at least entice somebody with an insane offer, then at least make back some of your money that you can kind of reinvest back into marketing. That just seems like a no-brainer because especially when you're talking about supplements or products that are more commoditized, everybody is more or less selling the same product. But it really just comes down to the offer. And for those who have the best offer are going to win. And the ones that can survive a higher CAC are also going to win. But being able to earn the revenue on the back end I think is super important. So I thought that was really interesting. Not something that we could test because I feel like that'd be very tough. But I'm curious what offers or things that you've seen other brands that you guys have worked with do that's been interesting. Speaker 1: There's a lot. I mean, like, we now work with, like, 40,000 brands, and so it's, like, ridiculous some of the stuff we're able to see. You mentioned this earlier of, like, buy more of the same thing. That actually works really well, but we went a step further, which was kind of cool, where we decided, buy more than what you just, like, it's not just, like, buy another box of chocolates. It's, like, buy three more boxes of chocolates. And we just started, like, pushing the bar on, like, how many more boxes of chocolate can you sell when someone's just bought one? You'd be surprised where if you get the right offer, you could probably get them to buy four more boxes or five more boxes of that chocolate. And the downstream impact of when you're able to sell more units per transaction of something ends up being really, really fascinating because now you've got, if you think about, if you model out what the retention on people that have X number of boxes of chocolate is, it's actually super cool to, maybe the curve hits peak at three boxes of chocolate. And the faster you're able to get them to three boxes of chocolate, the better. And so you might actually end up, on an exclusive piece of real estate like a post-purchase upsell, you might actually end up doing a higher percent off or a higher discount because you can tap into trying to get to that three boxes of chocolate. That was a super mind-blowing thing for me when I started to understand how brands started to think about Units per transaction and retention and there's actually really interesting inventory constraints that you can play with to start designing your offers around. I think it's cool. The others that I really like are when you're going from someone buying a one-time item to a subscription, if you can replace the one-time item to a subscription post-purchase. Custom-built functionality in Aftersell to do that, which I don't think any other post-purchase upsell tool can support. The reason we did that was because we just thought it was such an insane value driver for when someone is able to take someone who's a static purchase into You know, high LTV customer, and if they're actually able to convert into a subscription, it's like game-changing for most of these brands when we're able to do that. Yeah, those are two. Speaker 3: Yeah, I think if you zoom out, one thing you realize is that, like, yes, you know, the best offer, it depends so much on the brand, the discount, the copy, everything. This is all, like, very, very specific to, you know, what's happening with that store. But there is a pattern across many stores, and that's like, The best stores in terms of performance are the ones that iterate and A-B test and keep improving. It's more about the mindset where you actually are trying to consistently improve your offers and improve performance. That's a common thread that I've seen across our best performing stores. Speaker 1: What's interesting there too is like, I don't know if we've released this yet. I think we're going to release this soon. The variables that people test on are nuts. Like, you can get, like, yeah, you're testing discounts, then you're testing, like, timer lengths. It's, like, what works two and a half minutes, five minutes. You're testing shipping thresholds. You're testing, like, trust badges and showing reviews, not showing reviews. What we found is, like, If you start teasing this apart, A-B testing is like a thing of the past. We're now in this whole era of ML and experimentation and stuff. We're about to release this concept of multivariate testing, so you can just run a full multivariate testing campaign and test across all of these variables all at once. Sample sizes are important to figure out there to get to statistical significance, but you can go so far beyond A-B testing, and you can test anything in Aftersell now. How fast can you get someone to optimal offers and then how consistently optimal is it? And that question is like a super interesting stats question that we got to play around with. But we have the advantage of seeing the data across so many transactions. It's like, it's eye-opening. Speaker 4: There was one thing I actually read a few weeks ago on Twitter. It's actually a really good point because when we talk about all this, we're talking about it from the perspective of the marketer, right? And it's like, okay, well, how do we increase AOV contribution margin? perspective when you're, when you're suggesting things like, oh, well, I just bought one box of chocolate. Now you're offering me one more at a cheaper discount, or you're offering me three more at a cheaper discount. Um, can that lead to issues with like customer service and, and, you know, consumers thinking, well, why didn't I get this discount to begin with? Right. So curious if you guys have seen this become an issue across the board or, you know, maybe not. Speaker 1: I think it's very rare. I'm sure there's brands where it's happened before. This is Tim Burton's point, really. Testing is everything. So it's really important to test. And we try and get to a point with our brands where when we do run a test, we're across customer support and incoming queries and things like that. But ultimately, I think it's about tapping into the mindset in the post-purchase page. The post-purchase page almost becomes a rewards page for making a purchase, for actually transacting with that brand. And so if the offer is exclusive, it's exclusive because you made the initial purchasing committed to this brand. And so it's not the brand saying, we're giving you a discount for nothing. It's the brand saying, we're giving you a discount because we value you as a customer. And then it comes down to the copy that you have on that page and how the layout works and things like that. But when the brands get it right and the messaging is tuned in and we try and make our defaults this, When the brands get it right, I don't think we tend to see many concerns on that. Speaker 2: For you guys, it was probably like the Zipify's of the world. You had Reconvert. You had a few different options some people would build in natively. But I think the one piece that's been really interesting about you guys, once you entered the market to even where you are now with the acquisition with ROKT, I think there's just some really cool factors from that. One is the fact that The access to data and learning for you guys is immense. But I think what would be really cool for at least for our viewers and listeners is like, if you guys can break down just from like the point of where you guys can first show up to now, you know, with ROKT, literally up until the last point of, you know, an experience, maybe you can just break down all of those entry points. Because I feel like sometimes people don't even realize where upsells and More revenue can even be. So I think from that first point to literally ROKT Thanks, I'd be love to break that down. Speaker 3: Our vision is to be across the entire transaction moment. So we're currently developing PDP upsells on the product page. So there's that. Then we have our slide cart for UpCart. Check out, of course, the one-click post-purchase page that comes up afterwards. And then lastly, on the order confirmation page is primarily where we show the ROKT Thanks offers. Speaker 1: And honestly, to add to this too, any extension of the transaction is really interesting to us as well, right? So for a lot of brands, we're now testing optimizing their order tracking page to see if we can turn that into a revenue center. Subscription portals, can we turn that into a revenue center? There's a lot of experimentation we're doing to see what can you do here where you can show the most relevant offers to the customer and actually get engagement up. In a lot of cases, we'll actually just choose to show nothing. And that's one of the most important things when we're thinking about building out all of these ML algorithms. It's very important to understand where not to show up. For example, if we're playing in people's checkouts, we take that very seriously and so we take the cart conversion rate into account every single time we show an offer. We've never heard cart conversion rate because it's literally an input into our models to make sure that we're thinking about it. Speaker 3: Yeah, that way we're very aligned with our merchants. We want our customers to be with us for the long haul and that means we have to consider all these factors too. Speaker 4: I think that's probably the biggest concern, right? Even in the beginning where making any changes throughout the process pre-checkout, right? So like adding the cart on the cart you said and even in the checkout. Have you guys seen any brands do a good job at Doing both, increasing conversion rate and increasing AOV? Speaker 1: All the time, yeah. 100%. Ultimately what we call this metric is value per transaction and we try and measure for value. Value can come in many forms, AOV lift, conversion rate being two of many options. Speaker 3: One example I can give you is like, if you think about the free shipping bar that we have, that not only increases AOV by accepting another item to complete it, but it also increases conversion rate because now you get free shipping. Speaker 1: Yeah, and then eventually with things like ROKT Thanks or we have a product called ROKT Pay Plus where we're now able to show third-party things throughout that transaction as well. One of the interesting things we're now thinking about doing is, can you do gift with purchase? Imagine a credit card provider wants to show up and be like, hey, check out with Amex or whatever it is. And Amex is going to give you $50 for completing the checkout. Imagine what that does to your card conversion rate. And you get paid for showing Amex on that real estate. So it ends up being kind of a double. Speaker 3: Amazon does this right now, and it's huge for them. Speaker 2: They're showing payment providers or preferred payment providers. Speaker 3: So when you're checking on Amazon, sometimes they have offers where they'll give you $50 off of your purchase if you go with their co-branded credit card. Speaker 2: Oh yes, I've seen that. Speaker 3: It's the same vision here. Speaker 2: They'll even show you the math, like $120 off your order. Speaker 3: Same idea here. Speaker 2: I've almost clicked on that many times. Speaker 3: I have. Speaker 1: Yeah, but being able to do things like that is like, yes, we're adding to your bottom line profit or adding to your AOV, but then we're also increasing your conversion rate because when we give, like, we're just paying customers $50 for shopping on your site, which is great. Speaker 2: It'd be interesting to break down the way brands are taking in traffic right now, right? You have Meta, which has always been around. You have Google. Now you've seen the explosion of TikTok Shop. You have AppLovin. You have multiple channels. Have you guys been able to start to parse out segments of traffic and where it's coming from and how people are going to behave through some of these experiences? Like, is a TikTok shop relevant at this point? But like, I think when you're looking at some of these different channels, are you seeing different behaviors coming from these different cohorts? Speaker 3: Yeah, like we've seen some merchants actually target based on where people are coming from so we have a UTM parameter trigger in our targeting so lots of brands actually do use that and even based on like which specific ad campaign from Facebook you can show different offers. Speaker 2: So if someone came from a Facebook ad, show them this offer. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1: Or like from this campaign ID in particular. Speaker 3: Yeah. So definitely, I think the more sophisticated operators are taking that into account for sure. Yeah. Speaker 2: One question, just to understand, because you guys, again, 40,000 brands, you probably see a lot of different types of stacks of teams and stuff. What's an ideal, like, if you look at some of the e-commerce brands that are utilizing Aftersell correctly, right? And you look at them like, damn, that's a model student, right? What does their internal team look like? Because the other thing I see a lot is like, I'm on AfterSilver, I'll get to it. It's there, Monday you talk about it, but then it's Thursday now and you haven't gotten to it. What is a really ideal way to configure this? Speaker 1: I won't name the client, but this client is tapped into every single thing they do. We do Slack channels with our top clients, you guys and others. This one client, this Slack channel is extremely active where there's a daily report. There's a person that's dedicated to running tests on Aftersell. They work with our Merchant Success Manager to collaborate on what the tests should be. They run the test and report on it every single day using the Aftersell analytics. They'll run customer reports against all of their other metrics. They have a goal where they're optimizing towards it. They define it. We do meetings on a bi-weekly basis with them. There's a very clear cut. It's like systematized. And when you look at then, they're like curve of what we call RPT or like revenue per transaction or value per transaction. It's up. It's designed. Speaker 3: They've been able to have a 40% uplift in their revenue, which for them, of their scale, is millions of dollars in additional revenue. Speaker 1: And it's just via optimization. And this is where the testing thing just becomes so valuable. And we literally ended up building this whole multivariate testing feature because we were like, we could probably just deliver another few million bucks in revenue just for these guys if we're able to do this multivariate thing. Speaker 2: I think these numbers you guys are saying are like mind-blowing and I think this is another piece if you can just call out again you don't have to mention the brand but like Sometimes we put this to the side because we don't think the small incremental values that's gonna come from it is gonna add up to a lot, but like, how much money have you made for some of these brands? And like, you know, sometimes you think about it and it's like, why aren't we dedicating a, you know, $80,000 salary towards just managing this? Because can you make millions from that? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's in the billions, but what's more interesting, like we've literally made in the billions of dollars for our brands in GMB, but What's more interesting is the actual economics of businesses. You will not drive more than 10-15% of your total profitability outside of the transaction. That's the way I kind of think about it. I think a lot of e-commerce businesses should be decked. Most e-commerce businesses make 90% of their profitability in the transaction by optimizing these four or five screens of real estate. That's where every major e-commerce player is making all their money. And so it's interesting because you have all these like teams set up for different parts of the thing to get people to this transaction, which is really important. And then you drop the ball on the transaction, which is where you're actually going to make all your money. It's very important to get people to the transaction, which again requires the people, but I guarantee having someone that you're paying $80,000 a year. To optimize this, well ROI 2-3x. It has never been the case where we have someone that's thinking about this transaction moment and we're not delivering a severe amount of value for them. It just has never happened because there's so much to be had there and the bar is so low. The baseline that most brands come to us with is very, very low. Speaker 2: Quick break to say thank you to today's sponsor, Aftersell. Let's talk about control in e-commerce because here's the truth. We spend countless hours mastering marketing platforms we don't own or control. One algorithm change or one policy update and everything gets turned upside down. That's why we started to focus on something we actually have control over and that's our checkout experience. With Aftersell, we've built a conversion engine That's immune to platform changes. We're capturing more value from every visitor regardless of what's happening with Meta or Google. Our average order value went up by 15%. On top of that, with optimized post-purchase offers, we're earning even an extra 50 cents per order with ROKT Thanks. And on top of all of this, we're seeing better conversion rates. Even with higher cart values. Let that sink in. Stop pouring all your energy into external platforms and start maximizing what you actually own. Try Aftersell free for 60 days. It's time to take control of your growth. Now, let's get back to the episode. Speaker 4: What's the ideal, I guess, testing structure, right? If somebody signed up today, what would be like, is there like a checklist of things that you would go through to say, all right, well, first test this, then this, and then move it to this? Speaker 3: You have to be very systematic and experimental with it. Change one variable at a time, for example. Don't change multiple variables. That's just confounding. I would first test discount. That's probably one of the most moving things for conversion rates. I would test copy as well. That's probably the second thing. A lot of this is just like, look at other great copy. I think we have some examples as well of the copy that performs the best. But there's really so many variables, as he was saying. We have multivariate testing for this reason because we're realizing that, hey, we actually want brands to test across all these variables at scale. Because there is some decent amount of effort that goes into doing this. But yeah, I would say discount. Copy, offer timer as well if you have that, that's good. Just like the layout of the page, like we have multiple layout options from single product to multi-product. And even within that, like you can structure the page differently. Speaker 1: We have like a testing playbook, which is like, you know, when you have a Merchant Success Manager, they'll kind of walk through like, and it's different based on the brands, but there's a few based on verticals that we'll kind of run through. Ultimately what we want to do is just productize it. So this whole multivariate testing thing is just trying to get to building a testing wizard that you can just like click a button and it works. Speaker 3: Yeah, just like how every operator is not like a developer. We don't want every operator to have to be a statistician as well. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the goal. Speaker 4: When you have brands that are just starting, Typically, you might have, you know, margins not as great as you would have if you're at scale. Then you have brands that are like, well, we don't discount at all, right? And then you have people in between. What are some other ways to kind of incentivize these upsells without even having to maybe even discount in the first place? Speaker 1: It comes down to positioning. One of the things I've become a very strong believer in is offer positioning is like the holy grail of upselling. So even if you don't have a discount, but you did have a free shipping threshold, then position your offer post-purchase to actually communicate that. There's other things like literally in the copy you can write like, we know this is expensive, but this is good for you if you're a health and wellness brand. A lot of customer education things, offer positioning things that people tend not to think too much about actually ends up being really good. Same with timers. It's pretty good. It's like, we know you rushed through checkout, but here's another 10 minutes to add this product to your cart. Or have you tried X? We've just launched a new product line. Sorry, I'm just spitballing all the different offers that I've seen. All of those things are just positioning, and the positioning ends up being just as important as the actual discount value you're giving up. Speaker 4: I think one thing we haven't tested is probably like gift with upsells. So it's like, oh, like if you try out this product, we'll give you this for free, things like that. Anybody doing that really well with you guys? Speaker 1: Tons, yeah. Just in the checkout in particular, gift with purchase is huge. We have tiered rewards bars. So like tier one, you get free shipping. Tier two, you get a free gift or whatever. Those are very common. Everyone kind of does those. Speaker 2: When you have the ups and downs of like really good times versus like rougher times versus like the ebbs and flows of obviously acquisition, one of the things that I think, I forget which founder it was, but had mentioned was like, I'm not going to focus on trying to make my acquisition funnel work better. I'm just going to focus on making people buy more. I'm going to get my AOV. If I have to spend an extra $40 to acquire a customer, I'm going to make them spend an extra $40. What do you guys think of that philosophy? Have you guys seen a lot of brands apply that type of thing, especially in rising acquisition costs? Do you believe big swings like that are possible? I think the other thing that people see in upsells sometimes, again, Bringing out some of these myths or some of these common theories like, oh, well, you know, it's really just gonna add a couple of bucks or it's really just gonna add, you know, small incremental values that people sometimes they don't understand how aggregation works and, you know, they just kind of stop there. And again, that becomes a result of the effort they put in. So curious, like, are bigger swings possible? And have you seen that across the thousands of brands you've worked with? Speaker 3: Yeah, we've seen AOV lifts that are like 30-40%. It's just all about how much you actually are creative about what you can do and how much you care. Like you said, I think most people... Speaker 2: On those bigger lifts, was there anything unusual that you saw that they did or was it just, hey, they just tested a bunch to get to the one that cracked? Speaker 3: I would say their offers had a very deep understanding of their customer psychology. They knew exactly what would be the perfect thing to say at this moment and what would be the most relevant thing for that customer. You have to be a really good marketer. You have to have a really high EQ and deeply understand. A lot of that. But yeah, like you said, I think most people will just focus on getting the customers to your store, but there's no reason why the other part isn't as important. Speaker 1: The other thing I'll say is I don't know if lifting AOV and acquiring new customers have to be mutually exclusive. This is why I think the ROKT product is really interesting, or the ROKT Thanks product. It's like, okay, you can lift AOV with upsells, which is great, You land on your confirmation page, you're probably not going to be able to get a crazy AOV lift there, but if I can get you another $100,000 a month off of this ROKT Thanks product, go and take that $100,000 and invest it into customer acquisition, which now you're just building this flywheel purely from your transaction. How many more incremental customers does $100K buy you? And you did it off of, not by increasing AOV, just by monetizing your confirmation page real estate. Speaker 4: For those who don't understand what that concept is, the ROKT Thanks, just explain that. Speaker 1: On the confirmation page, we show a third-party offer for our network, and they're very premium offers. We might show something from Hulu or Disney Plus or something on the confirmation page. Highly relevant to the customer. It's a performance marketing channel for these brands. We've got a ton of data. We know that this customer might have engaged with Disney Plus on another channel, whatever that is. And we show a highly relevant offer. Usually, it's a pretty rewarding offer as part of the network. When a customer engages with that offer, the brand gets paid by Disney or whatever. It usually works out between $0.30 and $0.50 a transaction. The thing is, $0.30 to $0.50 transaction doesn't sound like a lot, but it's in pure profit. This just gets wired to you every single month. As opposed to like, sure, you generate $3 of transaction on an upsell and then you take out all your cost of goods. It ends up being similar from a profitability perspective. I don't think people realize this until you actually look at your P&L and then you go like, what am I left with every month? But when you then, when you look at your P&L and you look at, I'm able to add $100K to that, it's like, actually, it's going to be a pretty significant addition to your bottom line and allows you to buy customers. Speaker 3: The other thing about that is that it's also very, very good from a impact to effort perspective. This takes 10 minutes and it'll do what Odi is saying versus actually having to invest and do so many other things to otherwise get that uplift. Speaker 2: I know we've talked about this, even one of what's called network offers before. I think it'd be awesome to talk about the hesitations there because I think we've talked about literally brands and what their hesitations were. First of all, I think even when we were hesitant about it, I was like, I don't want to show something else from another brand on my brand's thank you page. And then you kind of showed, wait, wait, this doesn't even take up much real estate. When you're looking at it from a phone perspective, it's less than a quarter inch of real estate and you're getting so much back. I think that's one piece. And then the second piece, which you guys have tailored really well, is the fact that it's premium offers. You're not showing some random brand's Products, which I am curious if you guys had other hesitations that you guys were able to tackle through? Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, like, everything hinges on the quality of the offer, right? Like, you don't get the world's largest brands using this feature. Like, ROKT has worked across the years to, we power these experiences on some of the, like, most interesting brands in the world, whether it's, like, Amazee's, for example, runs these offers, right? They're not going to run these offers if it's not relevant to their customer. That's probably the most important thing for us. Having the brands is very important on the offer side. The network actually has to be very high quality. Second piece is, whenever I get these hesitations, my question usually ends up being, It's usually around brand impact. So my question usually ends up being, how would you define brand impact? Usually you'll get responses like, I think retention is a key metric for how I would define brand impact. Then you can kind of just say, okay, let's test 10% of your transactions and see what the hit to retention is over the next 60 days. And you actually end up seeing either constant retention and in some cases higher retention. I think the statistical significance there, I don't know. What's interesting is like, I don't think it's actually negative brand impact when you show the right offer. It can be negative brand impact if you show the wrong offer. But that's what our job is, is to make sure that we're very careful of what we show and then we give you the fine-tuned controls to say don't show offers from this vertical because my brand is not aligned with that vertical or whatever that is. You get to control all of that and you get to control the UI and experience of it. So ultimately, you're using your real estate, you're monetizing it, but you don't want to impact the brand. We don't win if we impact the brand as well. It's interesting because our incentives have to be very aligned here because we don't have then a network or two sides of the network to play with. Speaker 4: There's some brands that would, and this is where I fell on the side of adding the network offers or ROKT Thanks, was that we always run post-purchase surveys. And to me that's like super invaluable. I don't care how much we're collecting. Upsell, revenue, whatever. I'm curious, like, do you have brands that are like, you know, we found a balance between getting the qualitative data that we need from our customers, but also picking up the revenue on the back end? Speaker 3: Yeah. So the offers can be embedded on the order confirmation page. So it can be right beside the survey. And the other question there is like, how many survey responses do you actually need for StatSig? Like, you know, let's say like maybe you only need 20% of your normal survey responses for StatSig, then on the other 80% of orders you can just show the network offers ROKT Thanks product instead. Speaker 4: Do you ever think about it? I mean, not everybody's going to answer the survey anyways. Yeah, that's the point. We might as well make some money. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just like 100% of your traffic dedicated to surveys is usually not going to be useful. You probably know on Obvi how many, like you guys run both surveys on the ROKT Thanks product, so you could probably tell, like, am I still getting the survey response that I need? And you can always toggle it up and down. It's like, hey, I would love to get more survey responses this month. Let's toggle the ROKT Thanks product down. Profitability is very important. I need more money for customer acquisition. Let's talk about backup. You control your destiny there. I think statistical significance is really important in this. Speaker 2: So you guys have obviously thousands of brands you're working with. I have especially post the ROKT acquisition. So I think that the exciting part is first for many of our viewers who are already using Aftersell and some who are maybe considering it, what's in the pipeline? What are you guys working on that's next? I think the one thing that you guys have been doing for the last year and a half is just coming out with stuff that's actually putting money back into our pockets and so I think selfishly we're really excited to see what's next too, but give us a little bit of insight into that. Speaker 1: I think we alluded to a little bit of it with the multivariate testing and things like that, like how do you get people to experiment better. I think the one I'm really excited about, I think you should talk about it because you're spearheading it, is, and I think this is maybe the first time we're going to talk about it this publicly, but it's we're going to try and bring the ROKT Adds product to direct-to-consumer brands, which basically means allowing you to now show up on real estate like Macy's and take master in things. And what I think is really fascinating is direct-to-consumer brands end up being really, really strong from a premium offers perspective. Like when I'm talking about the premiumness of the network, like we love direct-to-consumer brands because they're very premium. They appeal to the most premium of shoppers as well. What we're really excited about is can we deliver in a world where CAC is very, very high on Facebook, you're not able to deliver efficiencies that scale. Can we come in and help you do that? Can we come in and deliver 2X ROAS on Facebook? Um, you know, at that scale, like on a million dollars a month of spend, like if we can become the channel for that for you, um, we, we, we see that as like a massive unlock for, um, the future of DTC. The other piece is then you can take a lot of the monetization that we do and reinvest it into, um, our advertising or performance marketing channel. That should realistically become a crazy flywheel for your business, where you're able to both participate as a ROKT Thanks client and a ROKT Ads client, and we can incentivize and make that a really, really good fit. You probably get 20% to 30% ROAS efficiencies when you're on both sides of the network. And as we get more DTC brands on both sides of the network, we start to see that ROAS outcome improve. It just becomes this self-fulfilling flywheel. We've started to see really good results. For some brands, we're delivering 4X ROAS at scale. This real estate is very valuable, and it's really valuable in particular for DTC brands. I think we're at the We're at the early stages of it, but we're out on beta with some clients, and it's working. Speaker 3: Yeah, no, absolutely. This has always been something that we wanted to do, and I think what's happening now is we're getting the right product investments within our product to make the targeting better, to make the offers and layouts more DTC-native, and just do all these things that'll actually make it perform at scale consistently. Speaker 1: We have six and a half billion transactions that we're powering, The credit card is out when you're on this confirmation page. Can we go and get another purchase? It's like a no-brainer question to me from a product perspective. Now we're playing in very hard machine learning territories. This is all the audiences I'm targeting that Meta and Google and AppLovin have been working on for a long time. But we're able to do it, which is kind of nuts. So early stages, but I think that's probably the most exciting thing we're building right now. Speaker 4: In terms of the actual real estate, because right now through ROKT Thanks you have Essentially, copy, there's an offer, and then you have the advertiser. It's like, oh, you want to get this offer? Claim now, or no thanks. Are you guys adjusting this for DTC brands, or potentially use some of our assets that we've already created for Meta, TikTok, etc.? Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. We think that the offers that are going to work best for DTC brands are going to be different than the ones that work for the Hulus and Disney Pluses of the world. We definitely know that, and we want to You know, just like it is for our post-purchase offers, we want to maximize conversions here, too. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's all about experimentation. We've got like 10 to 15 different layouts and formats that we're always testing, whether it's more image-based or whether it's more text-based or whatever that is. Obviously, there are different constraints, so because we're in a checkout environment, we're on a confirmation page of another brand. That presents, you know, there's a balancing act right on ROKT Thanks. We have to make sure that we preserve the customer experience. And on the ROKT Ads side, we want to make sure that we are building out really great, like a really great and efficient marketing channel. But ultimately, there's a lot of flexibility in the layouts and formats that we're able to deploy. So we've got, I think, 10 or 15 experiments going on in any given quarter. And we've got DTC specific ones as well that we're testing. Speaker 4: This might be slightly off-topic. I mean, from our perspective, the marketers' perspective, you guys give us all the data and the analytics on, okay, this is working really well, this could be better, you know, A-B testing results. How do you guys, as like a SaaS company, assess like, okay, well, we're going to test this template for brands, we're going to do this, like, how do you guys optimize to make things better for the consumer? Speaker 1: Yeah, this is great. This is not off-topic at all. If we're trying to build really great experimentation software, we have to make sure that we're also using that psychology and mentality internally. For example, we have an experimentation team. That experimentation team every quarter will come up with like a A set of really, really high-quality experiments define the metrics for success. All those things get defined very, very clearly. And then when we go and deploy, we have analysts that are literally like looking at, and the beauty is statistical significance is easy for us because we have the ability to go and look at things across a very large set, and we've got clients that have opted into our experimentation program. And so we're able to then go to these clients that have opted in and say, hey, just approve this new layout or whatever once they check off. The 10 to 15 different experiments running across with analysts analyzing things every day, making adjustments whenever we get to StatSig, all those things are live. We have Tableau dashboards and Datadog dashboards that we're looking at all the time to make sure that we're really on point from an experimentation perspective. This is another reason why I think people don't see a lot of this work in the background. This is another reason why we're able to deliver Way higher AOB lift. It's like, yeah, it's a one-click upsell. It looks the same as everything else. The ROKT Thanks product is just a little overlay on top of your confirmation page, but the amount of work that has gone into optimizing every little piece of that, people don't realize how much is there. Speaker 4: So if your upsell app isn't testing themselves, you're on the wrong one. Speaker 2: How did yours? Speaker 4: So we talked a lot about optimizing AOV conversion rates through, you know, different upsells that, you know, Aftersell can support, right? Checkout, post-purchase, you know, in the cart, etc, etc. Would love from both of you just one thing that brands can implement today besides installing Aftersell. One thing that they can implement to better their business. What's that one thing you would like them to chew on? Speaker 1: I'll repeat the experimentation piece is like definitely one thing that people should really think about is like whether that's post-purchase upsells or not even upsells just like that's on your site like you're probably not at probably not at optimum like it's very hard to believe that any brand is ever at optimum and optimum changes when When the world changes. The other, maybe this one, because I've repeated experimentation so much in this conversation, I'll say maybe a shift to thinking about profitability is one. The metrics you look at define the way you operate your business, and so when you look at Metrics like top-line revenue, you're probably going to miss the mark on some of these bottom-line profitability things, and vice versa. If you're only looking at profitability, you're probably missing the mark on some of these other metrics. I get very deep into this with our business, into what are the exact North Star metrics we're tracking across every team. There's a huge, huge push for me into our team and trying to do that. I think it's really important for e-commerce businesses to think about this in the same way. I think a lot of businesses over-index on top-line revenue or AOV or conversion rate and don't really go down to the bottom line on their P&L and look at, what am I taking home each month? And then thinking about that as a lever they could pull up, like, how do I actually change the profitability dynamics of my business? Like, how do I add another 2% into my contribution margin? That's a huge lever for businesses that most people miss. Speaker 3: Yeah, that's really good. I think for me like I would say a broader theme for businesses in general that we've tried to adopt as well as just to try to push the envelope like just Try every new innovative thing. This is what the best clients of ours do. Every new feature we launch, they try it. Every new thing, they're just super engaged, super into it. I think in e-commerce especially, there's so many interesting things happening all the time. I think the hesitancy around trying X, Y, Z, I get it, but I think it's more about just testing and iterating. At the end of the day, if you have a slight miss this week, that's fine. You still learned and then you'll find something else next week that'll drive a lot more profitability and revenue for you. Speaker 1: Are you guys surprised neither of us didn't say AI? Speaker 2: Actually, yeah. You said ML, which was enough, but... Speaker 4: I assumed it. Speaker 2: Oh, man. That was awesome. For those of you who have watched this entire episode, we have some great news. We're turning this into a series where we're going to be breaking down brands and what they could be doing better, not only with Aftersell, but for their entire experience. To make more money from each customer that they bring in. So stay tuned for more right in our channel here. We'll create an entirely new playlist where you can watch the entire series episode after episode. Speaker 4: If you want more from us, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, follow us on TikTok, and check out the website ChewOnThis.io.