Bonus: How Instant Turns Anonymous Traffic into 21× ROI for DTC Brands

0:0098 % of the people that are landing on your website, you have absolutely no idea who they are. You then have no way of bringing them back to purchase, whereas Instant will increase your identification rate of your website to 40%. The more shoppers you're emailing to bring them back to purchase, the more who are going to come back to purchase and the more revenue you're going to make. Say something like Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Let's just say a shopper shops on your website in February. They give you their information. Ordinarily, your website has short-term memory loss and forgets who they are after a week.

0:30Then they come back at the end of the year. But when they come back, you have absolutely no idea who they are. You have no way to stand out from the crowd by emailing them and you lose another sale. Instant is an unlock to helping you stand out from the crowd and emailing these shoppers as soon as they land on your website.

0:52Liam Millward:Liam, welcome back to the D2C podcast. I've been following your whirlwind journey over the past year, the past 12 months since we've last podcasted. Maybe you can just catch me up on how it's been. Seems pretty crazy. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. I mean, for the second time now, it's great to be on again. I think that, you know, over the past 12 months, right? Since we last spoke. Yeah. We've onboarded so many new brands. We opened a new office in New York recently as well, which is really exciting. It's a really fresh space in Flatiron where we've hosted most of the team now. We hired a couple of people in LA remote.

1:33I'm moving over to the US fairly soon from Australia. That's exciting. And then we've also launched a couple of new products.

1:41Liam Millward:Start us off for those who aren't familiar with your first podcast. What is the mission behind Instant? Yeah. So we started, my co-founder and I, Will, we started the company probably three years ago now. I was 17, Will was 20, and I guess the instant, we've always been very focused on using consumer data or the ability to remember your shoppers to drive revenue for your brand. Our first product was actually a one-click checkout, which kind of taught us the ability to remember a shopper every single time they came back to your website, giving them a one-click or an immediate checkout experience without them ever needing to fill out their information.

2:22and I remember after kind of that first year of building we're like whoa what if we use the ability to remember these shoppers every single time they land on your website and help a brand in the marketing world not just the checkout world and start triggering email flows and email campaigns to bring their lost shoppers back to convert when they ordinarily wouldn't have been able to so I mean to directly answer your question we help a brand supercharge their revenue by bringing their lost shoppers back to convert. And we do that by identifying the anonymous shoppers who are landing on their website.

2:53Liam Millward:And so you have the holy grail everyone's looking for, which is incrementality. You have pretty easy ways to prove that this revenue wouldn't have been generated otherwise, probably. Yeah. I mean, I always say this to the team and even our customers. I think in Instance case, we are so focused on the dollar sign. I think so many platforms and tech companies, you speak to them and it's saving time and saving you know it's it's almost like a nice to have so many products whereas for us and why customers i think brands really love us and why we back our product is because it's all just revenue you install instant it goes live super quickly you start to see revenue and that's all that we care about so yeah about how long how long until you start seeing incremental revenue from this well majority of brands will go from first conversation with instant to live and generating revenue in maximum three days.

3:47So it's very, very quick. When a brand actually just sits down and sets it up, it generally takes about 25 minutes, 30 minutes, and then you're live. You don't need any engineers. You don't need to... Onboarding used to be, Eric, it used to be like 90 days and now it's three. So we've put a lot of investment into just like making it simple. So it's just a no brainer,

4:10Liam Millward:I guess. So we just released a big survey, just where we surveyed 600 brands and sort of talked about how they were thinking about Q4 this year amid, you know, market uncertainty, tariffs, all of these things coming up. There was definitely in the data, a lot of people feeling trepidatious about Q4 this year. What are you seeing kind of in the marketplace among your clients? And what do you recommend brands be thinking about in Q3 now for making sure that they don't miss having another great Q4 this year? Yeah, I think any business in general, the biggest thing in my mind is just getting back to basics in so many occasions.

4:48I think that you take a step back sometimes or you're lying in bed and you're going, whoa, I just filled another day of stuff and I don't really know what I did to move the needle on the business. And I think so many brands are trying to find new growth strategies that just don't exist or they're trying to do things that just don't exist rather than getting back to the basics of, is my conversion rate great? Am I driving people to my website? Are they converting? If they're not converting, how am I bringing them back to purchase? If they are purchasing, how am I making sure they have a great experience?

5:24They come back again. And so I think coming back to the basics of growth in Q3, Q4 is really critical. I think Q1, Q2 is like a great time to experiment, but Q3, Q4, it should just be, all right, whatever's working, we need to double down on. I also think that a lot of brands we're seeing now aren't just focused on revenue. They're really focused on profit as well. How are we actually driving profit for the business and not just growing a revenue number, but actually growing the profit for the business and turning into an exceptionally better business year on year. And I guess practically how they're doing that is, I mean, just as I said, getting back to the basics of things like obviously meta of course but that's an expensive channel so things like email i think is you know a huge unlock it's cheap if you set it up right it's very lucrative and you know your most loyal shoppers are very receptive to it and it's it's an easy channel to

6:19Liam Millward:to drive a hell of a lot of growth one of the things we talk about on the podcast a lot is stocking the pond uh so making sure like customers that are feeling trepidatious now or brands that or trepidation maybe pulling back a little bit. When it comes time for Q4, the brands probably that stayed the course and had their ducks in a row otherwise will be reaping the benefits of brands that maybe aren't investing as much now. And that really plays out on the retention side of things where every purchase that you're able to drive in Q4 becomes an email that you can be reaching back out to in Q3 that you can be reaching back out to in Q4.

6:53Liam Millward:How do you see brands sort of thinking about budgeting kind of heading into this year? Yeah, I think that, I mean, budgeting is of course a tough question because every brand is incredibly different in my case. And maybe to set a little bit of a little bit more context on the product or the problem in general to maybe shape our conversation today. You know, if we just get back to basics, 98 % of the people that are landing on your website, you have absolutely no idea who they are. You then have no way of bringing them back to purchase. And so when I think about budgeting, I think about, okay, well, if we're spending this money already, how do we at least just get more ROI on what we're already spending?

7:31Before we think about spending more, spending less, how do we just make more from what we're already doing? And when you're spending such significant volumes in meta ads to get these people or these shoppers to your website in the first place, I don't actually think you should necessarily pull back on that. You should just figure out how to convert more of these people that are landing on your website in the first place. And if they don't convert, bring them back. And I think so many brands, you know, start to try and move the needle through things like budget optimization rather than just making and figuring out how to turn those people that are landing on their website in the first place into something.

8:09It's already a hard challenge to get these people to your website or these shoppers to your website in the first place and expensive, right? I think that's the biggest thing. And so the best brands are just obsessed with turning more of these website visitors into paying customers. And so looking at it as a funnel, I think, Eric, have we solved the top of the funnel? Yes. We've got shoppers to land on our website. Have we figured out the conversion piece? Maybe not yet. Have we figured out the returning shopper piece? Maybe not yet. But figure it out in kind of a funnel, I think, is always the way to do it.

8:46Liam Millward:You've got a number of really impressive brands that are kind of using the tool, have currently using it, have used it in the past. Maybe just walk me through a couple examples that you can talk about. And I'm also just curious, like what separates the brands that do extremely well with it versus ones that just do okay with it? So Instant, I mean, helps a brand, you know, identify the anonymous shoppers that are landing on their website. And by doing that, we unlock an email address where we can then trigger your flows in Klaviyo to bring these shoppers back to convert. And if you think about it, out of 100 shoppers that are generally landing on your website, you're normally able to email two of them, whereas Instant will increase your identification rate of your website to 40%.

9:31And so now all of a sudden you're able to email 40 of those shoppers that are landing on your website rather than two. And it's just simple maths that the more shoppers you're emailing to bring them back to purchase, the more who are going to come back to purchase them, the more revenue you're going to make. And because of that, you know, some of our biggest brands in the US, you know, Liquid IV, Truly Beauty, Third Love, Heaven Mayhem, like some of these brands have seen incredible revenue, revenue growth with Instant. I think one that particularly stands out is Karen Kane. They're a great store in the US and they signed up with us self-service on our website.

10:09they got started, you know, completely self-service without ever needing to speak to us. And 45 days in there, we've increased their revenue by$700 ,000. And so it just shows like how quickly it is to one, get started to start seeing value, but three, just how much revenue they've been able to unlock through shoppers that are already landing on their website that they

10:33Liam Millward:were ordinarily missing out on. So obviously like cart abandonment is a big part of this. What are the other triggers that are being leveraged? Because I guess the further someone is down the funnel, the more effective instance going to be at bringing them back to it, I guess, right? But are people using it just as simply as just like site visitors, even if they haven't engaged beyond that? And like, what are the various trigger points that are the most successful with the product? Yeah, I think we always look for a very high intent shopper. So we don't buy data. And we also don't share data of shoppers that are not opted in.

11:08They must be opted in. So they're expecting to receive an email from you. That's really important. Whether it's instant or any identification tool that you look at in the market, that is the most important thing to make sure, like baseline to make sure that you actually see results. And if you work with a company that buys data or sends emails to non-opted in shoppers, your spam rate goes up, everything goes up, and you don't see good results. In our case, we think that obviously abandoned checkout is a very prime flow to generate insane results. Ordinarily, so many shoppers add items to their cart and they never give you their information or your website forgets the information about that shopper and so you're not able to email them.

11:54That's a really healthy flow. But then also things like collection viewed flows where a shopper is browsing around on your website, they're viewing multiple items. Maybe they show us explicit interest in a certain item. That's, you know, that generates a hell of a lot of revenue. It's very hard to pinpoint kind of particular flows because it's very different for so many brands. So I just think you should have it all set up from day one. And we help you do that as well with Instant AI. We help you set up all of your flows in a click of a button

12:25Liam Millward:and you never need to do it yourself either. I'm looking at your example here from the College & Co., which is like a story of compounding revenue where they started in generating 150K in incremental revenue. And then by, you know, I actually don't know the time period up to 750K. So how does a brand, what, what does that scale journey look like? Is it applying instant to more of the traffic? Is it improving the flows? Like how does, how does one scale up with the product? So in College & Co's case, yeah, they started in the first month that we were live with them. As you said, we generated an additional$150 ,000 in revenue with Instant.

13:05And now today, I think this is about 14 months later, we now generate them about$750 ,000 a month in incremental revenue. This is because, as an identification tool, we need time to learn who these shoppers are. And so the longer you're live as a brand, it's just like consistent steps of value. Every single month you get more and more value out of instant because we're starting to remember more and more and more and more shoppers that land on your website. And so that's really powerful. On the incrementality side of things and kind of compounding effect, it's very rare to see something like this in a product.

13:44Say a product like Afterpay is great, but the compound effect doesn't really exist. It's pretty just consistently the same kind of revenue for your business. Whereas for instant, it just grows and grows and grows. And so many brands, they're turning email from being like 10 or 15 % of their business to 20, 25, 30 % of their business 12 months after launching instant. And I think that the biggest unlock throughout the year from a compounding perspective is say something like Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Let's just say a shopper shops on your website in February. They give you their information. Ordinarily, your website has short term memory loss and forgets who they are after, you know, maximum a week.

14:28Then they come back at the end of the year, this loyal and repeat shopper. You spend so much time, you know, as a brand saying you care most about your returning shoppers and et cetera. But when they come back any other time throughout the year, but particularly at a high sales period, like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you have absolutely no idea who they are. You have no way to stand out from the crowd by emailing them and you lose another sale. But this shopper is expecting to hear from you and Instant is, an unlock to helping you stand out from the crowd and, you know, emailing these shoppers as soon as they land on your website.

14:59Liam Millward:This may be a silly question. Are there any, are there any downsides? It doesn't, it doesn't sound like there are any downsides to Instant as a product. Are there any brands that Instant is not really a fit for? Ooh, um, I don't know if I've had that question before, actually. Downsides are if you don't put the initial investment in to, to set it up properly. I think that we do all the hard work in terms of generating your revenue, you know, building the whole identification layer. And, you know, we even go the extra mile these days and use Instant AI to build all of your email flows for you. So you don't need to mess around in Klaviyo and do it yourself.

15:38We do it all for you. But I think if you don't do the work initially to set things up like your pixel and that type of stuff onto your website through kind of the self-serve flow, you know, then it's like a few hiccups initially, but no, I mean, almost every brand sees incredible ROI with

15:56Liam Millward:instant. And when you calculate ROI, that's basically against your cost, like the cost of instant versus the incremental revenue it generates. Exactly. You know, average ROI is like 21 times across our merchant base. And if you think that's weighted, like the medium ROI is 11.8 times. So that's all based on the cost of instant versus how much revenue we're generating for you. And it's again, that's going to be likely a piece of someone's regular retention driven revenue. But it's because it's so potent, because it's so ROI rich, it's going to raise the profile of your ROI across your entire retention system, I guess.

16:31Of course, 100%. It even makes things like your meta return on ad spend improve as well. Because now all of a sudden, you're converting more shoppers who are landing on your website through the cash that you're spending in the first place to get them there. So, you know, there's so many metrics that are so hard for us to track, but it, you know, it's, it's kind of a game changer because I think the number one thing is converting your shopper. Like let's just get back to basics. The number one thing is converting the shoppers that land on your website. If they don't convert, how are you bringing them back to purchase?

17:01Instant ticks that box and you see the results because of it.

17:04Liam Millward:And you've got a lot of AB testing functioning into this. So you really can prove incrementality as well. Talk, talk about how the best users are using the AB testing functionality. Yeah. Sometimes we do internal tests to just prove that our own value of our own product. I was speaking to a brand here in Australia, Nutrition Warehouse. They're a really big brand here, one of our flagship brands. And the reason why they signed up to Instant was just how confident we were in our own results. We never kind of fight back or go or try and justify our product performance to you as a brand. We simply just go like, look, it's so easy to get it set up and started.

17:44Why don't you just try it out for yourself? And if you don't like the results, switch it off. But no one's ever done that. So, you know, just try it out for yourself. And I guess another side of that is A-B testing with brands that we already have live today, particularly like flagship brands or larger brands, maybe a new decision maker comes in and, or it's like budget season or whatever it may be. And they just kind of want a bit of a check-in or a bit of a pulse check on instance performance. And we did this with, um, with July luggage, for example, they were, you know, every brand, every very sophisticated brand is, is always like laser focused on attribution.

18:23Where did this sale actually come from? And they, they want it proven to them and we're happy to prove it. So we did this AB test with July luggage and showed a 21 % lift in revenue and showed that out of every shopper that we could identify that was landing on their website, we split them into two buckets. Bucket A, we wouldn't send an email to and we would just pretend they didn't exist. And bucket two, we would send an email to because instance identified them and we'll see if that cohort of customers converts more. In July luggage case, that was, you know, a 21 % uplift in revenue from cohort B, which is incredible.

19:00Liam Millward:Did you also just casually drop that you have close to a hundred percent retention rate with your customers? I mean, yeah, of course. That's pretty wild in the SaaS space, I feel like. It's huge. Yeah. And I think there's a couple of reasons for this. I mean, we see a lot of brands that if they do leave, they quickly reactivate us. It's a topic that we have in our all hands, our internal all hands every week. It's like, these are all the brands that reactivated this week, which is actually most exciting because that proves the results like no other. And so almost every brand comes back to instant.

19:34And then honestly, the most amount of customers that we lose are just because they go out of business in general. And that's not really something we can help with.

19:43Liam Millward:You can't change the fundamentals of the funnel, right? You can... Of course. Any funnel that's working well, you can incrementally, massively improve. Exactly. 100%. We just help you as a brand, supercharge your revenue. And that's all we care about most. Yeah. And we're heading into this period where ad clicks are getting more and more expensive. There's margin pressures from tariffs. There's, you know, there's a lot of things working, you say, maybe against DTC founders. So you kind of need every ace in the hole you can get. 100%. Yep, definitely. So you're, how old are you now? I'm 21 now.

20:17Liam Millward:You're 21 now. How big is the company? How many people? We're about 60 people now. You mentioned a couple of products that you rolled out this year. Are they features within the main product? Or like, how do you guys think about products and developing new things for what you're building? Yeah, instance products work best together, but are powerful on their own as well. So we have three products now, obviously instant audiences, which as we've been speaking about, helps you identify your anonymous traffic on your website. But we also have our second biggest product, which is called instant AI.

20:49And basically what Instant AI does is build all of your email flows automatically without you ever needing to lift a finger. We're like a marketing manager's best friend and we completely automate retention marketing for you as a business. So you simply go into your Instant dashboard, you enter the URL of your website, we pull all of your brand colors, images, logos, copy, and we put all of that and craft it into a highly converting email. and then let's say you do like a site-wide sale and you do 20 % off and you change all the colors on your website, we automatically consistently checking your website and we'll automatically pull that into an email as soon as it's launched on your website.

21:31So you never need to go through and update your emails ever again. We do it all automatically. So retention marketing is basically just a turnkey solution.

21:41Liam Millward:Marketers always like to fiddle with things. They like to be testing. They like to be pulling, you know and we haven't quite reached the era of a set it and forget it solution what are the people that are getting the most out of instant what are their touch points like on a weekly basis with the tool i mean it really kind of ramps up over time i feel like it's a compound effect where when a brand first goes live with with instant they they might log in once a week and then just as they become more and more obsessed with one the results but to the functionality it starts to become into daily use.