Jason Anderson: Hello, and welcome to episode two of The Andzen Approach. This week, we’re joined by Pa from Nosto. Really excited to get into the conversation today. As usual, I’m your host, Jason Anderson, strategic director at ANDZEN, and I’m joined by Brendan, our founder. Gentlemen, welcome to the second episode. It’s great to see you.

Good

Brenden Rawson: to see you Pa.

Pär From: Good to see you legends. Good to be here.

Brenden Rawson: Thanks for being a part of it. I’d love it if you could tell the audience a little about yourself.

Pär From: Absolutely. I’m Per Frum as you might identify the name and the accent already. So I’m from Scandinavia Sweden to be precise.

And I’m the head of partnership here at Nosto. A little bit about myself.

Brenden Rawson: Fabulous. Fabulous. We are big Nosto fans. I have my Nosto shirt on today.

Pär From: Love it. Awesome.

Brenden Rawson: So very excited about this conversation. First of all becoming a bit of a tradition we’re having a drink while we’re chatting.

We’re doing this one remote. The lovely par is in Sydney. Jason and I are in Brisbane. So we’re all separate, but I have a classic Queensland Great Northern beer. Which I’m going to be enjoying this afternoon. What about you, Jason?

Jason Anderson: A bit fancier, probably green beacon. I think it’s, is it midnight rising?

Yeah. Midnight rising black lager. Another

Brenden Rawson: fantastic Queensland brewery. Yep.

Jason Anderson: And Pa, people might not know this about you, but you are a bit of an expert on wines.

Pär From: Yeah, I have a sommelier. Diploma actually, so I’m drinking actually a red wine from McLaren Vale. So I’m drinking Maxwell. So here it is.

Jason Anderson: Very nice.

Very nice. Have you have you had a chance to get down to Adelaide at all?

Pär From: Hundred percent. Yeah, I’ve been there once. I actually got engaged there last year, so it was a very special moment for me. Congratulations. Thank you guys. Lovely.

Jason Anderson: Yeah. I I did get lost in the hedge maze at Maxwell the last time I was there for a good 10 or 15 minutes, but I did make it out in the end.

Thankfully.

Pär From: What do you think about the wine station?

Jason Anderson: Yeah, they’re great. They actually, while the wines were nice they actually brew mead on site there as well. So we did the wine tasting and maybe it was just because we’d had a few wines. But by the time we got around to the mead tasting, I was pretty convinced that mead is a delicious drink.

And I bought several bottles, which actually did survive in my suitcase until I got home. Which was really good. Yeah, I enjoyed it. It’s great. Awesome.

Brenden Rawson: Funny story. When I lived in the UK, we went to Cornwall and we bought some Cornish mead which I had brought all the way back from the UK. Didn’t try it for far too many years and I don’t think it’s so good anymore, but we’ll see.

Anyway, back on to business Nosto Klaviyo partner, ANDZEN partner, we really want to have this conversation today because as ANDZEN is a customer journey agency doing all things email, SMS, retention marketing On site personalization is really the next step for us. And it rounds out the customer journey.

So it’s really great to have you on par. And I’m keen to get stuck into all things on site.

Pär From: I’m also excited. Thanks for having me. Yeah, shall we dive into it?

Jason Anderson: Yeah, absolutely. I think probably the good, the best place to start. And we talked about this a little bit in episode one with you is that I think there’s still a little bit of a misconception around.

The idea of personalization and what does it actually mean? What is personalization? What’s the standard? And I think it’s easy for a lot of us in the industry to sit back and look at it from the lens of where we are in e commerce, right? It’s easy for it. Us to say if I work in help desk, personalization is knowing as soon as you submit a ticket, being able to see all your customer information, your last order number, be able to really quickly respond to a customer and by having all that info at your fingertips.

And maybe for a marketer, they might be thinking personalization is making sure that the retargeting ads that you see are the products that you’ve been looking at, or, when you abandon a car, you get an email with the right products in there. But I think it’s really important. And probably a good opportunity for us to start this whole episode is to maybe Reframe it a little bit and think about it from the customer’s perspective, not from our lens and re ask that question of what is personalization, right?

Like what does personalization actually mean if you’re a consumer and you’re a shopper? And I think there’s probably no one better than you part to answer that question. So I’d love to hear from the expert himself, and then maybe Brendan and I can weigh in with our opinions

Pär From: Yeah, a hundred percent.

So we are on a mission to make every impression relevant. Basically. So we want to identify customers and by doing so, we basically track behavior and transactional data on site in real time. So we know what type of affinities you have, it could be size affinities if you have affinities towards certain colors brands So what we do is basically we build profile data on based on first party cookie data.

And as soon as we have that in place, then we can understand the customers. And that’s like the first key factor of the personalization game is to understand the traffic that is coming into your site. So I tend to use an analogy where there’s a lot of retailers out there where they are spending.

A lot of time of getting Casper into the store. So it’s basically having four bouncers outside the store shoveling in people, right? But as soon as they joined the store and comes into the store, there’s no one to take care of them. So we are more or less the person in store who guides the shoppers on their journey.

And that will result in relevancy that will increase customer engagement. And at the end of the day, it will also be beneficial from a revenue growth perspective. So that’s our view on personalization to understand people and what type of product that is relevant for them, does that make sense guys?

Brenden Rawson: That’s not too dissimilar to, I guess what we’re doing on the email front too is, we’re using the Tools like Klaviyo, we’re bringing in as many different data points and preference and personalization as possible. And we’re really tailoring and crafting and customizing that that nurture series at post purchase series, showing the customer what they’re interested, what their preference is in order to get them to click through and make that purchase.

So whilst we’re doing it on a different medium I think we’re very closely aligned in our objectives here.

Jason Anderson: Yeah, for sure. I think something that you said that’s really important there is the person side of it, right? The whole point here is to see that those people not as traffic coming to your site, but as individual people, right?

That’s the big thing. And when you talk about personalization, the person side of it is the element that I think can, Is really easy for us to miss analytics are obviously really important and all of us are looking at data all day to try and make the right decisions. But the end of the day behind those numbers is an individual.

And so if you’re thinking about 1000 impressions, 10, 000 impressions, you’ve missed kind of 10, 000 opportunities to think about at that individual level, what do they actually want or what do they need to stay more engaged on the website or Convert and if it’s the first conversion, ideally come back and keep reordering with you.

Pär From: That’s a really good point, especially the first time visitors, right? Like you’re spending a lot of time. Time and budget on acquiring those customers to your site in the first place. So making sure you get the most bang for the buck is super important. So one way of doing that is basically to showcase all of the most popular products in terms of, conversion rate, or it could be abuse.

If you want to have a bigger impact on your PNL, maybe you want to push the highest margin products, so those type of strategies are important. When. When you look at that personalization game. A hundred percent agree on your statement there, mate.

Jason Anderson: Cool. I’d love to hear a little bit more than I guess about how Nosto is actually doing that on the site.

So you mentioned it before that in terms of what you’re listening for, obviously it might be, have they navigated towards a certain brand that you stock? Is it a size? Is it a certain collection? Obvious ones that come to mind would be, have they looked at the men’s collection versus the women’s collection, maybe, or.

A certain, is it boots instead of sneakers? What is it? So in a practical sense, how is Nosto not just listening to what people are doing on the website, but then changing the website, like what does, how does that personalized experience come to life for someone?

Pär From: Oh, that’s a really good question.

So as you said, we are tracking a lot of different. Customer attributes. So as you mentioned, it could be product brands size, affinity could also be geolocation, right? So if you have a shopper in Australia versus America the shopping pattern looks a little bit different. So you need to showcase the right product in that sense.

So what Nosto does is to basically operate on the site. The whole real estate is basically like everything from the search experience, the merchandising experience, homepage checkout. So we can be pretty much be active on the whole site more or less. Yeah it could be delivery layers such as product recommendations as well pop ups.

We have a really good integration with Clavio where we can actually sync our segment data to the email flow. So they will get that holistic view of the customer. Also when they do email marketing. And that goes on for Facebook retargeting as well, if you want to find lookalikes and so forth.

It’s important to have a holistic view of the customer journey. It’s not only on this side, this, we are shopping everywhere, right? Like on the website. Mobile apps in store as well. That’s a big trend going on with unified commerce and omnichannel, right? Where you want to sync up the data that is also in store.

One problem that has been in the industry for many years is where you push a product that has already been bought. So we want to eliminate the retargeting on all report stuff, which. It’s still an issue in the industry, unfortunately.

Brenden Rawson: Yeah. And for us you spoke about it a bit with integration with Klaviyo, quite often we have this.

Potentially disjointed experience where we have this highly customized, highly personalized email journey through multiple emails and maybe a little bit of scattering of SMS as well. And then they land on site and it’s not personalized. It’s maybe it’s the branding’s a little bit off. And that’s the critical point where we’re trying to close the deal.

We’re trying to get a conversion. Love to talk about more about like when someone comes off the back of an email and then they land on the side, how we can bring through that personalization to finalize that transaction in the,

Pär From: That’s a really good question. We had client thermologic they experienced a lot of bounce rate back to your question.

Like, how can they increase the relevancy of traffic coming from Google shopping, for example? So what they had in the beginning was basically to showcase traffic. That specific product from Google shopping. But if we basically injected that product recommendation on bestsellers or most trending product that actually gave a pathway to the site and we reduced the bounce rate.

By just injecting a product recommendation on the PDP. So there are some simple strategies that you can implement in order to get more bang for the buck. So product recommendation would be one. You can also get some scarcity going using those marketing psychological tricks, where you can get also FOMO messaging and stuff like that to get some urgency going.

So hopefully that will increase the conversion rate as well.

Jason Anderson: Great. Yeah, I think the urgency piece is something that I was talking about just earlier today with a merchant is particularly as you start preparing for Black Friday, how can you create those, that urgency message in say October or even early November so that you don’t just have people holding out until Black Friday to shop, right?

You need to be able to create those experiences and then. Ensuring that flows through from whatever that outbound marketing messages to when someone lands on the website, whatever that messaging that you’ve identified specific to that customer through say a CRM or whatever you have, you’re targeting there that needs to be reflected when they land on the website.

Otherwise it’s a really disjointed experience for them.

Pär From: A hundred percent. It’s a irrelevant Customer journey or experience. We want to eliminate that. So making sure it’s one to one personalized recommendations based on your affinity. So like the first step to understand the data and understand your customers.

I would say that’s the first step. And also the second step would be to understand which product is performing best, so you have a better understand. So everything that we are doing from our end is based on data decision, more or less It’s where you, when you look into that data signals and, identify, you could, see heat maps, for example, where you have a lot of bounce rate that will give you some indication where to start.

And then we also do have some AB testing capabilities. So you would need to test your theories, right? Because it’s only theories and make sure it’s converting on that KPI. That’s important for you because there’s no secret sauce out there for every retailer. Some have issues with conversion rates.

Some might have issues with AOV or bounce rate, for example. And you have different strategies and tactics in order how to solve that, if that makes sense.

Jason Anderson: Yeah. Yeah. It’s an interesting one, right? Like I think the, we often can get really Narrow minded here on like conversion rate being, this really important figure that everyone’s trying to increase, but you make a good point there in terms of for some stores, they might have, a good conversion rate on, maybe at 3 percent conversion rates.

Does that just mean that they just stop and they’re like, okay, great. We’ve hit some magical threshold. Of course not. What if, 2 percent conversion rate, but you could inject some personalization that meant that your AOV went from a hundred dollars to 150. That might have a significantly greater impact on your revenue at the end of the month, compared to just increasing your conversion rate by 1%.

Thinking about these different metrics that could be impacted by personalization, not just narrowing it down to saying if the last time they were on the website, they looked at a women’s collection. When they come back, I’ll just make sure the homepage has photos of women on it instead of, generic images.

Sure, that might help get people through to a product page more, but what if it was more about when someone added a particular product to their cart, they had a really well thought out personalized bundling option that then appeared or, a really nicely targeted incentive to say, actually, if you can get to this spend tier, you qualify for a free express shipping or whatever it might be that’s actually a really nice, relevant hook to them.

With the personalized recommended product, where suddenly they’re thinking, Oh, great, actually, express shipping was 15. But then if I buy that shirt as well, that’s the shirts only 50. But I guess if I take the 15 off, you start doing the maths. And then all of a sudden, people.

Find ways to justify how to spend that extra bit more and get the extra product.

Pär From: You sound like a pro already, Jason. I definitely a pro

Jason Anderson: shopper. I’m definitely a pro like mental. I was talking to someone the other day about I’ve got a few different headphones around the house.

I really enjoy listening to music and I’ve got an old pair of headphones that i’ve told myself that i’m going to sell. In order to justify buying a new pair, and I’ve told myself I’ve mentally sold that same pair of headphones four or five times to justify, four or five different purchases, and yet they still sit there.

So I’m very used to doing this mental arithmetic in order to justify wasting my money on things. But I think, This is all good in theory. I’d love to dive a little bit into in practice, particularly for merchants where there might be a smaller team, they have less resource.

Obviously I imagine every merchant is probably thinking, yeah, I’d love it. If my site was really reactive and responsive to a customer’s behaviors and could just personalize all of these things, but realistically, how easy Is it to say, work with a platform like Nosto or how much heavy lifting does the individual need to do when they install an app to get these things going and how much of it is just managed by the app kind of listening and making these decisions intelligently on its own.

Pär From: That’s a really good question. So I would say it’s a mix. We tend to, try to educate our customers how to crawl before they walk and run. So you need to start somewhere. And circling back to what I said before, you need to understand What type of customers you have in, in your store, right? So I would say the first step would be to understand what type of traffic do I have?

How much do I have in terms of new visitors, returning visitors how many of my customers are loyal and coming back and then purchasing, every time or Like once a month or something like that. So step number one, understand your customers. That will for sure help you.

And then again, step number two would be to understand which products are performing best. So one strategy that we’re seeing a lot of merchants doing is to the example I mentioned earlier is that to. If you want to get more bang for the buck in terms of first time visitor, expose the best performing product to them in terms of views, conversion rate, that is basically showcasing the best products in store as well.

These are very popular. You should buy them. Yeah. So that’s the one way in order to get the the best. Like paid acquisition channel or the SEO channel to work better for you. And as you go and you will understand your customers, or maybe you already do, then you can build personas or segments.

And then you can basically start to change the whole front end experience based on their affinity. So one example would be like we have one. Client in the UK, we’re selling tools. So they found out that if you buy Makita or DeWalt, the chance of you buying another brand is very slim, right?

Because in your garage, you have all of the equipment that suit that particular brand. So what they did was to basically create, this is

Jason Anderson: absolutely

Brenden Rawson: true.

Jason Anderson: Yeah, I feel this, I feel strongly about having all DeWalt tools in my shed and only DeWalt tools. Yeah.

Brenden Rawson: Yeah, exactly.

Pär From: So what they did was to basically create a unique customer experience based on what type of persona you’re, if you’re a devolved shopper or if a Makita shopper.

So as soon as we identify that the affinity was towards that certain brand, then we changed homepage banner was devolved product recommendation, devolved, blog posts was devolved. So it’s. Again, if I have 10, 000 products, maybe 5, 000 are relevant to me. So it’s our job to identify which product is best for you.

So that’s one example you can go in terms of personalization. And yeah, it’s also super important to break data sellers. So again, Clavio is one of our. biggest and most important partner globally. So for us pushing that segment data to clear view as well as our product recommendation, enhance the whole email flow as well and make that more relevant,

Brenden Rawson: absolute perfect time. To segue into a word from our sponsor, Klaviyo. Klaviyo powers smarter digital relationships, making it easy for businesses to capture, store, analyze, and predictively use their own data to drive measurable high value outcome. Klaviyo’s modern and intuitive SaaS platform enables business users of any skill level to harness their first party data for more than 350 integrations to send the right message at the right time across email, SMS, and push notifications.

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Make sure you register there, hear about all the latest upcoming episodes. Most importantly. Let our sponsors know that you’re actually listening helps us keep making more and more episodes. But as an added incentive and then us, Jason and I have put together a free add to cart flow. So if you register for that, tick the little box.

We will clone a Klaviyo add to cart flow, highly converting, high ROI particularly getting it for free including strategy docs. Fantastic. Make sure you sign up. We were just talking about getting started with Nosto and data points. Let’s chat about hyper personalization. And dare I say, AI,

Pär From: yeah, so hyper personalization is a good one.

Hyper personalization is like delivering real time, highly tailored experience beyond basic personalization. That’s like the concept, personalization, hyper personalization. And some key characteristics would be again, real time Personalization. And when you are using multiple data sources as well, and that also combines with the AI and the machine learning integrations, right?

So if you were to do this manually, that would be impossible. So tracking people in real time, when you have maybe 1000 visitors per month, that’s a lot of manual work. So AI in that sense, help you with that data flow. It will. Sort all the data again, people and product. And you can basically automate a lot of these processes already.

So it’s more if this, then that rule. So if a first time visitor, then populate this product recommendation on homepage and show me bestsellers. That’s how you automate this different flow, which is this like machine learning and AI. And I’m just going to. Put in an extra thing here and that’s AGI.

Have you guys heard about that? Artificial General Intelligence?

Brenden Rawson: This is where the machines become sentient and the terminator reality comes real, right?

Pär From: Exactly. So in the future, you will most likely don’t need a platform where you create those campaigns manually. There will be a machine doing that for you.

But we haven’t come to that part. And it’s super important to understand all the listeners here today that you will still need to do some campaigns and some manual work. But with that being said, we do automate a lot of things for you in that sense.

Jason Anderson: Nice. Very good. Yeah. It’s an interesting one because I think we We really, I’m creating a lot of efficiencies with AI, but I think there is still an element of manual intervention more often than not required, right?

Like the AIs, these AIs aren’t getting things right all the time. Brendan and I were talking the other day giving it, Some giving a, an AI, some instructions to write something for us. And we specifically asked for a certain word count and it assured us that it’s 250 word comment was met the minimum 800 word target that we’d given it.

It’s not, we can’t fully rely on these things yet, but. It’s getting close. Yeah, it’s getting very close. And I think also. Machine learning is something that I think was very much put to the wayside as AI started really taking off, right? But a lot of the features that I see products release, they call them AI, but it’s really just machine learning algorithms, right?

Where they’re just taking in a bunch of data and they’re using a set formula and they’re spitting out the answers, which is also still really valuable. And. In experiences like this, where you’re building out these, if then, scenarios, you can still use a lot of that data to create really personalized experiences and still do it at scale.

It just requires a little bit of your intelligence at first to set up the parameters. But again, platforms like Nosto, They simplify that. You don’t have to write that in code anymore, right? The platform is the interface to say, do these two things and you can just connect them right then and there with a couple of clicks of the keyboard or clicks of your mouse and you’re away and you can start leveraging a lot of this stuff that really builds out at scale for you.

Brenden Rawson: All right, guys, we’ve spoken about what is personalization, how it integrates, how you get started, how you take the next level with the Terminator AI. Let’s bring it home. Let’s talk about ROI for the end user, the end merchant. What sort of results are they looking to get?

Pär From: That’s a good question. What’s the effect, right?

So I’m just going to take a big beast to prove my point, and that’s Amazon. Amazon. 35 percent of their revenue comes from personalization. They’ve been doing this since, yeah, a few decades. I would assume, like they, they know what they’re doing. Same with other bigger providers like Spotify Swedish one, you have your own playlist.

Like everything is very personalized in that sense. From our end we do have some happy clients. Like I mentioned before Thermalogica is a perfect example where. They saw a over 5 percent increase of click through rate when they had a relevant product recommendation and bundles. And on that bundle set, they also saw an increase of 7 percent in increase of average order value when they saw these different campaigns.

And it’s easy to AB test this as well. Make sure you get a clear receipt and also proof that it’s exactly working.

Jason Anderson: Yeah, that’s so good. That’s awesome. I think, increases like that have massive impacts at the end of the day. And yeah, I’m not surprised, obviously I shop at Amazon. I use audible as well.

So I’m constantly inundated with messages and recommendations. And you can see, or I, you can see the more that you use the platform. The more it understands you and the more that it’s trying to push recommendations into your feed that align. But also to your point earlier about once an order is placed, how quickly it can identify whether a product is something you’re more likely to purchase again, and should it resurface it, or is it from a vertical that you’re likely to purchase once, and then they stop showing you products from that vertical and go back, it goes two ways.

I think we’ve talked a little bit about conversion rate. We talked about, we mentioned AOV there but I’m keen to know, you did talk about click rate just quickly. So if I’m a merchant and I’m thinking about using a tool to create click rates. Better or more on site personalization. What are some of those key conversion or key metrics that I should be looking at?

Is it, does time on site get impacted? Should I be thinking about my bounce rate? You’ve mentioned a couple of times, if you were to give four or five stats what would be the core ones that you would say you should be looking at whether or not, if you’re trying to identify whether you have a problem that could be solved with personalization, but also once you’ve got it set up, that you should be measuring success with.

Pär From: Really good question. So conversion rate is obviously my favorite that will have a big impact at the end of the day. So we’re seeing a uplift of 10 to 15 percent of increasing the revenue by doing so. But again, it’s no, there’s no secret sauce out there. Some are looking at conversion rate, some might want to boost the AOV.

Again, bounce rate is also a big thing. If you acquire a lot of. New customers on the site, you want to make sure they’re converting, or at least they are spending some time on your site. So that could be another metrics to look into. What’s the session interaction time is could be other things like you guys are.

Clavio expert show increasing the database is a quite interesting metric as well. So maybe you can just trigger a pop up and say, okay, Hey, we can see your first time customer on this side. You actually get 10 percent off if you give us your email address and voila, then you have increased database that, that could be also a metric to look into.

But that’s pretty much a few. KPIs or

Brenden Rawson: how good. All right. Onsite personalization just as good, if not better than customer journey, email and SMS marketing. We’re going to find out, we’re going to keep doing more and more work together with Pyro from Nosto. Thank you so much for being on the ANDZEN approach, Pyro.

It’s been fabulous having you.

Pär From: Privilege was all mine legends. So thank you for having me.

Brenden Rawson: Again, go to ANDZEN. co forward slash podcast, register your details. We’ve already got our ANDZEN giveaway. Ah, anything from Nosto, anything you want to add? Finish us off.

Pär From: I know you guys are working with a lot of Clavio customers, obviously.

So I’m willing to give away a 10 percent discount if they’re using us and Clavio. Breaking that data silos is super important. So let’s start with that phase of the customer journey and the customer experience. So that will be my offer for today, lads. It’s. That’s all right.

Brenden Rawson: Huge. Yeah, absolutely huge.

All right, guys, thank you very much. Thanks again, Par. We will see you on the next one.

Jason Anderson: Thank you, everyone. Thank you.

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