A $300 Template Beat His $100,000 Shopify Store

29:23And so we had to come up with the logic for how you count that. Because then if you have iframes, like that could register another page view, right? The clients were asking for more and more dashboards. And my thesis at the time was like, the only reason why you want dashboards is to understand what people are doing. So you can interpret the data and then make a decision about what you're going to do tomorrow. Like you're not going to be looking in the review mirror forever. Like, how do you just get to the insights and recommendations? So at the time, like literally in 1997, I was experimenting with like creating these like ad lib sentences in our reporting platform where I could swap out different metrics and compare and contrast like different visitors and different things that are happening on the website by systematically looking.

30:09And if it met this criteria, then include that in your summary and plug these numbers into this sentence. So I was trying to get to the point where like reporting wasn't what was important. It was what's happening that matters. Don't make me think and just give me the answer of what I need to do to continue improving. So that's always been kind of underlying component of like what I've tried to fall for. And then, yes, this like realizing that there was not an average customer, that there's actually two or three average customers was the other thing that sort of built around. And then watching brands suffer through all this, like the technical and sort of evolution of these advertising platforms and how terrible ROAS is in terms of reporting back the efficacy of your ads to just me crazy.

30:58So I think all that kind of came together. I have two other business partners, other co-founders that helped conceptualize this as well. But those were certainly the big motivators in my history that sort of fed into how we approach what we're doing. So what does Neurograph do? Yeah, so NeuroGraph helps brands better understand their customers in its most simple form. It has become an operating system for managing persona-based marketing. So in a scenario like I described a while ago, you know, most brands are facing this issue similar to what I described. If it's not exactly the same, it's very similar where they make some assumptions about their customers.

31:39Some of it's true. Some of it, they may not just know it as deeply as like what I can uncover. they make assumptions about these customers. They lump everybody kind of together in one, you know, as one sort of persona. Maybe they even had two, but it's based on a lot of fuzzy math, not rooted in real deep data. So there's an operating system that essentially means that like, there's a point of discovery where you learn more about your customers than you thought you did. And nine and a half times out of 10, I can find a new market opportunity that they didn't know even existed already on their website, looking to buy.

32:15but we're saying the wrong things, showing the right products to them. Yeah. There's a point of inquiry and talking to, so I can create a synthetic audience based on thousands of visitors that have purchased from you, where you can interact with them through an AI tool, essentially query the data or have them collaborate with you on how to build a campaign specific to a persona. To that audience. To that audience. Then there's a component of how. Is it an app you install in your business? Shopify store or is it a separate tool? There's an app. We have to coordinate with you to start collecting the data.

32:51So there's an app that helps make the setup go a little smoothly or more smoothly, but we'll coordinate with the brand to actually ingest the data and enrich the data once we know it's coming in. So then brands get a better picture of the different types of customers. It might find that I sell shoes. I have one type of shoe, but I actually have four very distinct different types of customers, for example. What can I do with that information in Neurograph? I sort of treat this in the first layer is just better understanding so that you know who's on the site and you can start to think accordingly.

33:33Right. In fact, I've talked to some restaurant brands, large chains who like I can't. I'm not at a point yet where I integrate like a restaurant's data into our data set, but just knowing the customer, you're using it to inform menu selections, actually store placement, like where they buy real estate to build a new store based demographics that I'm feeding them about who's most engaged and who's setting these reservations. Once this identifies the segments, like I'm wondering, like, what is the tactical things as an operator? Can I run different ad campaigns, email campaigns? How is that used?

34:09just general knowledge and then the next step is yes informing top of funnel creative to better pull in your best audiences like i said nine and a half times out of ten i'm finding cohorts of people who are more valuable than the brand father icp was so if you know that and you're trying to build a profitable scalable company you would lean into that new cohort even more but you're probably going to have to change the creative because everything to date has been self-fulfilling so to inform your creative in its most simple form but we're also pushing a lot of these conversion and value signals back into Facebook to help guide their targeting you then also can for these different campaigns directed at different personas build different landing page or even collections pages specifically designed to curate the products that they're going to be most interested with the right offer, the right, you know, communicating the right detail that they're looking for.

35:16Like I mentioned a while ago, some people are looking for the specifications. Other people are looking just for a little bit more feel. If you're running an email campaign or an ad campaign to different segments, you just are sending them to the appropriate funnel on your store. Absolutely can. Absolutely can. Yes. That's usually recommended. it but i mean the same thing with you know klaviyo pushing the personas into klaviyo so it's not more there yeah based on like where they are in the purchase funnel but could you imagine if you knew that 70 of your customers that were happy to receive a discount but it's not important to them they're willing to pay for price if you if they know that you can satisfy their criteria.

36:00And I think the recipe of exactly what they're looking for without giving a discount. Would you give them a discount? We want to take care of our customers, right? But you have business to run. Marketers love to give discounts to move product, but it's not always necessary. So if you knew the 60 % right now, you don't know who the 60 % are that don't need discounts. I can tell you and could you imagine sending a whole different set of creative to those people than the ones that do need a discount. Well, this, like my mind just kind of starts expanding here into all kinds of areas because like I think about abandoned cart emails and it's, they're probably one of the things that you almost never need to actually offer a discount on an abandoned cart email.

36:42Cause my thesis on this is like, they're okay with the price. They added it to the checkout. They got to checkout. They were willing to buy that customer knows what the price, if they didn't like the price, they wouldn't have added it to the cart and got to checkout. But then they abandoned checkout and you send them a 10 % offer because they forgot something in checkout. But what they probably abandoned it for is they weren't sure how returns worked or they had a question about warranty or exchanges or shipping. They had a problem with the shipping. Maybe the shipping was too expensive. It was like anything but price is probably the reason they abandoned.

37:16But then we offer a discount but could you like i think about like if we know the customer segment we could probably even tailor the offers in the abandoned cart flows and so many other areas like how far is it up to the merchant i've got my segments now how i use it is up to me or neurograph plug into any tools and make some of this like automated in any kind of way yeah so that's for now you know still a pretty early stage with Neurograph specifically but this is where my agency Reap Commerce is pivoting is to provide services around helping getting the most valuable information out of Neurograph and then activating it either working with the agency of record that's already doing this creative and ad placement I don't necessarily don't need to necessarily take over that it is the tool is self-service and yes it can provide a lot of that information but But, you know, ultimately the execution layer, you know, involves there's a world of all this AI novelty.

38:19There's some good stuff out there and I think it'll get there at some point. It's kicking off these concepts and recommendations and prescriptions basically to go attack this market. But it's still up to you to go implement it. Right. So, yeah, that's where your agency is pivoting is just providing better consultancy around how to best leverage the data to get better results. but you know, marketers love to give discounts to move products. I said that a second ago and I don't think they realize the impact of the business. I get, I usually get, I don't get calls for a pretty website. I get calls from brands that are stuck and they can't figure out why, and they can't achieve profitable scale.

38:59And I'll look at it and they're giving discounts right and left. And this matrix that I built for my team that shows the math of if you have a, let's say you had a consumer good that ran at a 35 % gross margin. and you decide to give a 20 % discount, do marketers know how much lift that you have to get in orders to make up for the profit? Not just the revenue, the profit that is lost by discounting. Yeah, because if your margin is only 35 % and you're giving away, yeah, because you're actually giving away, Yeah, you're going from, yeah, 35. You're actually giving away 57 % of your, yeah. So it's not just a 20 % discount in the, it's a 20 % discount on the price, but it's a 57 % reduction in margin.

39:53And that's, I think, what isn't always top of mind when people are doing that, yeah. Yeah, and you think, you know, a lot of the immediate sort of mental gymnastics where you think, okay, I discounted something 20%, I got to lift the sales by 20 % to get back to break you. That is not how the math works. just to get to the same revenue you have to lift by 25 percent to make up for a 20 percent loss that then talking about profit specifically yeah so if you're running even like a 50 percent and you discount even 10 you're talking about having to lift your sales by 25 percent to make up the difference i don't you know i don't think most even business owners or founders even like truly are in tune with that before they go throwing discounts around to try to earn new customers.

40:40Well, just to say, like, you know, finding those trigger points that compel people to action is where it's at. And that's what we're all trying to do, but it's easier just to lower the price. Do you have a best practice? Like, what do you recommend if a brand's working with you? Like, what do you give them as guidance for discounts? Like, never run them, only run them for, large sales on a calendar event like July 4th and Black Friday and stuff like that. But other than that, never. It depends. And yeah, there is kind of a rubric for it. But essentially, it all goes back to their goals. If they're going to hold somebody accountable for profit at the end of the day, then that's not your answer.

41:18Discounting is not your answer. And I would say in general, the sort of the adage about like training customers to wait for a discount is absolutely true like it is hard to undo it when you've been doing it month over month for years it is hard to undo discounts you may have dug a hole for yourself but if you're early stage and you're trying to bring on new to brand customers through some sort of special offer bundling or amazon it tends to work pretty well because it increases the velocity and sends those relevancy signals into amazon saying that product is moving and that's like one of their big formulas for figuring out what products to start feeding into the SERPs.

41:58And so it kind of depends, but it starts with like getting crystal and being consistent with the goal that you're after. Are we talking about new to brand customers? Are we talking about top line revenue? Are we talking about profit? I have clients that are all different in those categories. And so that helps inform. I'm not here to say you should never discount. It's just there is a consequence that I think most brands are not fully aware of it. Yeah. So with your agency Reap Commerce, did you is this one of the biggest things you focus on right now? This is what we're really leaning into because it's so different.

42:38It's so, you know, I've worked with Brinker restaurants, you know, Chili's

42:41Brice McBeth:and Maggiama's and exactly what they spend and how they do it. But essentially they buy all this third party CDP data to enrich their CRM so they can better understand their customers. So basically buying demographic and psychographic information from third-party sources. And first of all, it's extremely expensive for that kind of data. It's usually a six-month IT endeavor to get that data ingested into their CRM. And then, you know, interpreting the data, we're back to square one while I was talking about a while ago, is interpreting it correctly to make good decisions. And so, you know, pulling that out of an enterprise-level Salesforce marketing cloud is not the easiest thing for a marketer to do so then you got to call in a consultant to do some of that work for you my point is like they don't even do it that well to me if i'm being honest if you so but this like enterprise level data that used to be only affordable to these huge companies through our platform is now available to these like small size companies which is like really exciting now there's affordable way to actually do what the big dogs do but aren't affordable mid-market.

43:54At the top of the show, I mentioned OmniSend can now talk to ChatGPT and Claude. And I want to tell you why that's even bigger than it sounds. So if you missed it, quick catch up. OmniSend is what I use for email and SMS on every Shopify store I work with, plus for this show as well. And you can now connect your AI, Claude, ChatGPT straight to your OmniSend account, your data, your campaigns, your flows, everything. You open a chat and you ask, what should I focus on this week to make more money? And it will come back with real answers about your store, which flow is underperforming, which automation needs improvement, which customers are going quiet, what's missing, everything.

44:33My favorite part though is AI segments. I used to build these by hand clicking through filters forever. Now I just type something like customers who bought twice, but ignored my last campaign and it just builds it. And anything it writes already sounds exactly like your brand because it pulls from all your previous emails, from your website, your logo, your color, your voice, everything. I've been doing this for 15 years and this is the closest I've ever felt to having a full-time marketer sitting right beside me. I have a link for you in the show notes that will give you 30 % off for your first three months or you can just use code J30 when you sign up, J-A-Y-3-0.

45:09If you're ready to migrate from Klaviyo to Omnisend like thousands of others, they will do everything for you. You just show up and all your campaigns and automations from Klaviyo will be set up and running in OmniSend, ready to go. And usually at 35 % less what you were paying Klaviyo. Listeners right now probably fall in two or three categories. I want to say category one is they have no concept of customer personas right now. They are marketing to all customers on their site the same. then you maybe have another category of customers who know what their icp is they know a little bit about their customer personas maybe they even have like a picture on the wall of like this is sarah and she's our ideal customer profile and this is who we're marketing to and talking to and our brand voice and this is who we're built around for sarah and then you've got like maybe super advanced brands that they actually have multiple personas and they've got different marketing for each one.

46:05So I'm maybe excluding that segment for now. But for segment one, who are, they're not doing anything right now. If I ask them, tell me the three persona types that are shopping on your store, they're just pulling it off the top of their head. They don't really, they don't really know. What's something they can do like this week to do better with understanding personas and then using it to drive sales? Yeah. Well, if I'm not in the equation, that I would say the number one thing, get away from your computer, stop trying to pull reports because reports will tell you, will kind of highlight what's broken, but it will not give you the answer to the riddle.

46:43I would suggest if I'm not in the mix to go do a three random guys test. Do what I did about the design of the salon equipment site, right? Like go call people, get on the phone and give them permission to give you bad news. Don't, the way you phrase the question is really important to you because I find that if you're like, okay, why did you buy somewhere else? What did you like about my, do you like my site? Like nobody will tell you that they don't. Yeah, yeah. You know, what do you like about my site? What do you not like about it? You kind of have to give them permission to give you something that you don't want to hear.

47:18So for me, the way I was very intentional about the way I worded it, the way I told you about that a while ago is I said, I realize you've moved on and I'm not here to sell you. I'm curious about how you decided to go buy from that other site. and they kind of flipped it and said, well, you're too expensive. So I gave them the permission, and I opened, I kicked open the door for them to give me bad news. And I made it in a way that they didn't have to confront me, but because I made it so easy, they were able to give me the truth. I'd say$3 million is free. It involves a couple phone calls or a couple texts to get the call scheduled or emails.

47:56But that qualitative data, instead of just trying to find quantitative, will many times give you the answer, not just the data points. I mean, I think that's something a brand should be doing on a somewhat regular basis, not just as an emergency check now, but talking to customers regularly. It's and building a way that you ask questions that like you nailed it. You have to be able to get the honest feedback out because we all want that customer complimenting you, but that's not the point. The point is to learn the honesty of what you can improve and what processes can be better. And okay, so now for the other segment of customers, merchants who they've got an ICP, they've got a little deck with their brand voice and they know they maybe even got a little custom avatar of who this person is.

48:45And they're like, this is who we're marketing to. What can they do to do better? Like this is like where a lot of brands fall. They probably have a persona, an avatar, a name. Actually, I love what you have on your website. I would encourage everyone to go. It's just reapcommerce.com, right? Yeah, reapcommerce.com. On your website, you have a persona of, is it King Charles? King Charles and Ozzy Osbourne. And Ozzy Osbourne, who are two totally different people. But then you look at the persona, they're both born in, was it 1953 or 43 or something? Demographic, the exact same person. Yeah, male, born in the same location, roughly the same income.

49:22One's King Charles, one's Ozzy Osbourne. And totally different people, but they would fall in the same demographic. And I thought that was genius. So to these brands that are like, oh, we have a persona, we have an ICP, we know who we're marketing to. It's a 40 to 50 year old stay at home mom who this is their income. This is this. What's one thing they can do to step that up a notch? That's, you know, if you're not going to make the phone calls, I'd say this is where like a Neurograph kicks in. I think there are other persona tools out there that are based solely off of your purchaser data. I would submit that the people who are visiting and not buying is probably even more important than who you're doing well with.

50:06Like is knowing who you're not doing well with. So a lot of those entry level tools through Shopify, like don't quite give you the same thing. So you got to be cautious about that a little bit because it will give you self-fulfilling, you know, data that you'll just going down the same path you're already in. But, you know, with NeuroGraph, and I promise isn't just self-fulfilling, I'm willing to make up for it with some amount of services, whatever I got to do to earn the credibility here. But we're finding that the ICPs that most brands are after is, in fact, on their website. A lot of that can be self-fulfilling prophecy.

50:43They're usually a valuable cohort, but the brand just doesn't understand that person as deep as they think that they know them. It's usually pretty like high level superficial profiling information. But NeuroGraph will get down into the why. Like what, like why did they come to the site? Like what do they think about your brand? Why did they choose to buy? Why did they choose not to buy? Like what works? Like it's amazing like how much word choice makes in decisions. We think about tests and it usually has to do with changing colors of buttons. Like, have you ever like not bought something because a button was like green instead of blue or something?

51:25Like, you know, maybe there is something there, but it's usually not something so obvious. It's like a word choice that you use. We found in one case that a particular cohort of high value people were spending a crazy amount of money on things that had this novel aspect to it. And there's a certain very specific word choice around prepping for parties. They were looking to host friends and they were willing to, they want to impress their friends. So they're willing to spend more money for the right product or combination of products. But, you know, talking about the ease of preparation for, you know, group was a really important factor with this one group.

52:07And we stitched that together by just looking all the pages that they, products that they looked at but did not buy and comparing that to the pages, the products that they did buy. Every last detail. This is stuff you can do with AI that like a data scientist would never, even a data scientist, a good one, would never go with this person looked at and bought and didn't buy. To compare every nuanced word choice that was used in the PDP to pick out which one triggered a purchase. And it turns out literally like a three word phrase that drove this cohort's decision to buy the product. So that's pretty amazing, right?

52:46It's super interesting. And it's because what you're ultimately doing is you're getting when you understand the why between what or behind why a customer buys, you can speak to the value or the pain point. or if you're selling party supplies, like in your example, and you're just talking about how much stuff comes in it or the quality of it or this, whatever, versus speaking to the ease where it's like, never stress. Party's so easy, they set up themselves. You're actually selling something different. You're selling a different value. And you're speaking exactly to their deepest need, really, or pain point.

53:26And you don't know that unless you understand the customer. but when you can nail that and there's sometimes when I'm on a brand site, like if I'm buying, you know, I don't know, some greens supplement or something, I'm not buying it because it's the healthiest greens in the world, or I don't care if it's even the best tasting or something like me. The reason why I want to be healthy is so I can enjoy a longer, better life with my kids. Right. And like knowing that if there's a segment of customers like that, speaking to that, like I'll convert like that. Right. And so really what you're doing is you're helping brands speak directly to a customer.

54:04Yep. And so you and I are the exact fit in the same boxes as King Charles and Ozzy Osbourne. We're very similar on paper. Yeah. But in that exact scenario, I think I consider myself pretty healthy too. But like my criteria is feeling good. A lot of times like my gut health, like I just feel like some supplements and things like aggravate like stomach. So looking for like stomach sensitivity and it's got to taste good because if I can't get it down, it doesn't matter. Like I'd rather take something that's less nutritious, like I should get down as opposed to something that's more nutritious, but I can't stomach the taste of it.

54:39Yeah. So imagine people to identify that with. Yeah, it's powerful. That's like having a very large weapon at your fingertips to be able to deploy. And I think if, you know, merchants running the stores understand that if you can deeply understand your customers, you have so much power and it's at your fingertips to then deploy through your advertising copy, your imagery, your product descriptions, the titles, how you name things, your email marketing. And it's like you can do serious impact on your revenue numbers when you know your customers like that. Like it's very powerful. And I've seen the effect of it.

55:16I say this every episode. The time goes fast. but I do you have, I have like four or five lightning round questions. And then I want to tell people, I think Neurograph is an amazing product and I definitely want people to take advantage of it. And actually I, you've got a special offer as well too, which I want to mention that I think listeners should definitely take advantage of. But do you have time for my five quick lightning round questions? And then we'll get into that. I'm here. I'm committed. Yeah, let's do it. Okay. What is the first number you look at when you open a Shopify store you've never seen to see if it's healthy?

55:47revenue i mean i'm not saying that's the best that's what you asked the question was what's your first metric that you look at the first time yeah that's fair see what i'm dealing with it's the most obvious metric it's the most important but i can't help myself what's one thing every merchant overvalues and one thing they undervalue besides revenue they over row ads let's get out that. Yeah. So agreed. Anybody out there still using ROAS, let's have a conversation. The other question was undervalued. What are they undervalued? What's something they undervalued? Yeah, probably MERR. Like the, just the ratio of their total spend to their total outcome.

56:27And you know, everybody's looking for, you know, the internet's so marvelous and measurable. Everybody's looking for a direct line between I spent a dollar and I got a$10. It doesn't really work. We all know that it doesn't really work that way anymore. Or, you know, Mr. Wrigley used to just say, like, I don't know, but when I advertise gum, I sell more gum. So you can't be like that. I heard one of your other sort of podcasts where the guy from Henry was talking about, like, what's the value of a clean bathroom at a restaurant? Like that's that you do have some of these investments that way. and I think I find that the probably the central determinant on like whether the e-com business as a whole is healthy or not is the ratio of spend to revenue and I measure that in three three ways one is just the global across all other channels then one is for their marketplaces and then one is for d2c so not broken down by like you know different ad channels what goes together that's omnichannel but that gives you an indication of how healthy each platform is and then the econ business is all.

57:34Prettiest store you've seen that probably converts terribly. We're naming names because I get calls from these people. Throw them under the bus. Come on. I'll say okay so I'll take one I'll pick on one that calls me three that has called me three or four times in the last couple years and hasn't done much. Actually I would say last time I checked on it it did really well with it but Cooper Ree was notorious there for a while about over designing the site but I would also say their blogs are super creative and funny and engaging. They would get a million, no exaggeration, at least a million organic visitors a month to their blog straight from like Google or some other third-party link.

58:09They're all organic, unpaid. And care to guess what the conversion of, I'll say of sites like this, because they're not, it's not unique to them. Their conversion rate or people like them is 0.00%. So there's a few fatal flaws that they were not taking care of. And it looks like last time I looked at the site, they actually did a good job of finally addressing it. Finally changing it. Wow, interesting. Fastest way to learn something true about your customers for free. I think I know the answer to this. Pick up the phone and call them. Call me, then call 15 of them. Yeah. Last one. Finish this sentence.

58:46Most Shopify brands would grow faster if they just stopped. Oh my gosh. I could have so many ways to fill in this. But I'm going to say using averages. Like it's very misleading. Beta doesn't lie, but it can gaslight you, especially if you're using averages. It's the whole yellow plus blue does not equal green. There's no$900 average purchaser. They're two different. So get out of using big global metrics and averages and get into specific segments that you're trying to try. I love it. Okay, now tell me about Neurograph. You've got an offer you're willing to extend to our listeners. Tell me about Neurograph and where people can go to find about it offer.

59:25Yeah. So any way you reach out to me, either through LinkedIn or through reapcommerce.com, which is my services-based business, more of a sort of consultancy than we are an agency. Neurograph is the technology that empowers the persona stuff that we talked about. What I can do is I'm trying to get the word out there. I'm trying to build more like use cases, more success stories, try to get more referrals. So in exchange for that, But for any brand that comes in through the podcast and reaches out to me, I can do a complimentary persona diagnostic. And you're guaranteed to discover something about your ICP that you didn't know before.

1:00:04And you're likely, I can almost guarantee you, you're going to find a new market opportunity that you knew nothing about. It happens almost every single time. Amazing. What does someone have to do to get that? Probably the best thing to do is to go to readcommerce.com. So that's my services company. And there's several links to schedule a consultation or to request a diagnostic. So you can follow any of those to schedule some time directly on my calendar. And that's the best way to get it going. Awesome. Happy to also connect on LinkedIn or any other way that you can find it to reach out to me.

1:00:35Awesome. Bryce, this has been absolutely amazing. I've learned a lot. I know our listeners did too. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on today. Dude, thanks for having me.

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