NM Live: Turn Retention into Your Most Profitable Channel with Zak Cassady-Dorion, CEO of ECD Digital Strategy

Drew Sanocki

I'd love to just start with your backstory. mean, you, you look like you're, you're of my vintage. So I'm always curious about people, you know, how to, how do guys like us get into e-commerce, you know.

Zak Cassady-Dorion

So I spent the majority of my 20s traveling overseas. So really all over the world. For a while I had an import export business. I was importing textiles from Thailand Nepal, so that I'm in the US And then near the end of my 20s. I went to business school when I got my MBA and then I moved out to San Francisco. This was in 2010 and I was working for a couple of tech startups while I was out there and this is during 2010 the financial recession. And me and two colleagues were looking to raise money for a business that we wanted to start. But if you remember during the recession in 2010, banks weren't giving money away. VCs weren't giving or investing in companies. And if you really weren't in New York, San Francisco or Boston, you couldn't even get in front of a VC. So during this whole time, we were giving money away on Kickstarter to like art related projects. And so we said to ourselves, well, this is kind of ridiculous. If you can give money away on Kickstarter, why can't you raise debt or equity through crowdfunding? Found out why you couldn't do it really quickly. And we just thought it didn't make any sense to us. So we found the law. wrote a framework that would legalize it based on the law. Then we flew to DC, started knocking on the doors in Congress, literally just walking through Congress knocking on doors. And we got Congressman Patrick McHenry to jump on board and we legalized equity and debt-based crowdfunding. 

Drew Sanocki

That's crazy. Wow.

Zak Cassady-Dorion

that wrote the first two books ever on equity and debt-based crowdfunding, crowdfunding investing for dummies and that's what.

Drew Sanocki

So this was like pre AngelList.

Zak Cassady-Dorion

No, it's post angel list, you so like you couldn't before you couldn't do equity or debt-based crowdfunding because you couldn't raise money from more than 35 on accredited investors and you couldn't post about a security on social media either. So those were a couple of the reasons. So AngelList was, I think, like you had to be an accredited investor inside of Angel's List. Get into that's how they were getting away with it.

Drew Sanocki

Got it. And so you started that and then did you, did you ever want to come up with a crowdfunding platform?

Zak Cassady-Dorion

Yeah, we did. So the law got passed. And then the government gave the SEC nine months to implement the regulations to be able to let it, you know, let it go essentially. And the writing was on the wall early on that the SEC did not want this. So they dragged their feet. And it ended up taking like three and a half years for them to finally like, let you know, open the gates so people can start doing it. And yeah, nuts. And so I needed an income. So I flew back to upstate New York where I'm from and an opportunity came up. Yeah, yeah, you needed it. Yeah, so it was like this awesome thing. So there's a lot of people making money on it now. It's like, you're welcome. But yeah, I moved on and I opened up a chain of gourmet food retail stores. So essentially a chain of retail stores.

Drew Sanocki

It's funny how that works. Yeah. So that was a hard pivot. Might've been one of the hardest from equity crowdfunding to, what did you say? Fast casual? Gourmet food retail. Up in upstate New York.

Zak Cassady-Dorion

Yeah, yeah. And no, no, I closed those down. So I ran those for about five years. And so this is what got me into e-commerce. I hated the retail portion of the business, but I loved, you know, I hated the retail portion and I hated the logistics, hated being in the retail stores. It just wasn't, it wasn't a fit for me and my skill set. But I loved the e-commerce side of things.

Drew Sanocki

Is it still there?

Zak Cassady-Dorion

But I never had enough time to spend on the e-commerce. So was hiring agencies to do all the stuff that we do now. And I never had great experiences with any of the agencies. So when I closed that business down, I took what I loved from it and I left behind all the stuff that I didn't like and I started ECD Digital Strategy. That was about eight years ago.

Drew Sanocki

And so who is E?

Zak Cassady-Dorion

So ECD, e-commerce. If you go to the website, you know, ECD, you see somewhere on their e-commerce conversion demand. But what it really stands for is my wife's initials, Aaron, Cassidy, Dorian and the first initial of my three kids, Stella, Cicily and Dakota. I named it after them to make sure, you know, I remembered what you know, why I'm doing it all.

Drew Sanocki 

Nice. And so what year was that when ECD started?

Zak Cassady-Dorion

2016.

Drew Sanocki

And what would you say makes it different from other marketing agencies out there? So the special, you specialize on ecom.

Zak Cassady-Dorion

Yeah, I think a few things. We specialize on eComm, but more so than that, we focus on revenue producing activities only. When we start working with a new client, we put in a new prospect. We put them through, it's called our blueprint to the optimized e-commerce ecosystem. And essentially what it is, it's an audit and it's a revenue audit. And so we're looking for the low-hanging fruit, like the money that's being left on the table, the levers that aren't being pulled. And then we create our proposal and we tend to sign the more conservative side. So like I'll lay out all the different things that we found that could drive more revenue and then I'll recommend the things that are gonna have the highest impact and say hey Let's start with these things start driving more more revenue and then the additional revenue that we drive with these activities Then you can reinvest to do to do the other things.

Drew Sanocki 

And that's across, that's not just email specific, that's paid, you know, email, maybe direct mail, whatever.

Zak Cassady-Dorion

Yeah exactly so the three main areas are website design and development so everything from full website rebuilds migrations to Shopify or Anything that's going to increase the average order value or increase the conversion rate. And then we do paid ads management on all the major platforms. And then the main area where we drive the most amount of revenue for our clients is with retention. So the first step in our retention strategy is building out a full Klaviyo account with all of the flows and optimizations based on the specific client. And then once we have that launched, then we layer in direct mail with PostPilot amplifies Klaviyo, Klaviyo amplifies direct mail. It's a great fit.

Drew Sanocki 

Nice. And so what would you say like, if you look back at all the audits you've run? Well, maybe before that, what's a typical customer?

Zak Cassady-Dorion

Typical customer so I guess like its revenue size 1 to 20 million It's all direct-to-consumer products. There's just there's three main niches that we work in just because it's just You know how it how it happens. The biggest one is the home and garden So we do work with a lot of plant companies plant and gardening companies And then gourmet food specialty food. And then clothing and apparel is another big one that we work in.

Drew Sanocki 

And then so that you get this $10 million apparel brand or something like what would you say is are your typical insights from that audit? You know, what are most of these one to $20 million brands doing wrong? I don't say doing wrong, but like, are they missing? Where are they leaving the most money on the table?

Zak Cassady-Dorion

An under optimized retention strategy is one of the main main areas it's I think we've we've audited hundreds of accounts and we've only seen a handful of clay vo accounts that were like spot-on, a small portion of our clients are are you or a small portion of the people who were auditing are using direct mail? That's another huge I mean it's I love seeing these big pools of money that are being left on the table because it's just you know, awesome opportunity. Another big one is overspending on advertising and not really understanding the metrics. I don't like seeing customers that are, you know, clients that are doing great, but they're just spending too much money, not getting a big enough ROAS, whether it's on a meta or on Google or wherever it is. And then a website, websites that don't have really good opt-in forms and pop-ups on their website for email list growth. That's huge. Navigations that are really confusing and don't make sense.

Drew Sanocki

I mean, I used to do audits like 10 years ago or 15 years ago and you'd, you'd see these big brands and it was, you'd have to scroll to the bottom of the page in the footer where it's like sign up for an email, you know, and you click and you go to like the newsletter page. Just, guys, put a pop up on there.

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Zak Cassady-Dorion

Yeah, yeah. So we do a series of six pop-ups depending on where you are in the buying journey and if you're on Bloomberg desktop. But it's fun seeing a successful brand that has all these holes in their ecosystem. Because it just means it's like you can make so much money.

Drew Sanocki 

Yeah, I think it sounds like you approach it like I always love to, which is I start with retention first because it's the lowest hanging fruit. They've already acquired the customer. There's just, you know, there's lifetime value there that you can optimize around and then go up to conversion. You know, you already get the traffic coming in. If you can convert it better, hire better customers, like there's money to be made there. And acquisition, usually the last thing I would turn to just because it's so expensive and you know, you've already built this net behind you. You've got a great retention net conversion, you know, a conversion machine. So now when you turn to driving more traffic, it's really going to have a better return.

Zak Cassady-Dorion

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so like if you, you can spend all the money, you can send all the traffic you want to a website, but if it's not optimized to convert and if your retention strategies aren't in place, you're just gonna be wasting tons of money. So we have an optimized website that's gonna make your acquisition efforts better. Same thing with retention.

Drew Sanocki 

So email has always been like a great place to start too, because I mean, within retention, it's typically starting with email. And I find as an agency, it's because changes to the site take time. Whereas you can crack open Klaviyo or OpenSend or something and start just hacking away at flows, right? Almost immediately.

Zak Cassady-Dorion

Yeah, that flows and also most companies aren't sending near enough emails. And so that's usually like the first area where you can just really crank up the revenue.

Drew Sanocki 

So you had a post recently on LinkedIn. You put out great stuff on LinkedIn. If you're looking to optimize an email program, a lot of good email stuff there. had one about if you had 30 days to optimize a business, is it 30 days to optimize a business? 30 minutes. I think it was 30 days. what, yeah, like starting with that, what would you do? I mean, you've got 30 days to optimize within email specifically, what comes to mind?

Zak Cassady-Dorion

Pop-ups, optimize the pop-ups. So we do a series of six different pop-ups depending on where people are and their buying cycle. Make sure you have a really good offer, whatever that offer is, make sure it's good, it's enticing. And then building out those flows while the flows are beat. And so the flows, you have like your standard flows, but then every company, so we have a series of seven standard flows that we do for all companies, but then usually there'll be a couple of extra flows in there depending on the products that they're selling. Sometimes there's really, really cool, unique cross sells and upsells that you can do. analyzing what customers are currently buying and then creating email flows around that. And then creating a promo and sales calendar for the ongoing campaigns. Do really good segmentation. You don't we send to the full email list for our clients for most clients like four or five times a year tops We see a lot of companies that that's just what they're doing is like send all or they only send to like 180 day engage or 90 day engage I'm always challenging my team to get more creative with their segmentation Because it's all about like getting the right message the right person at the right time and find the little nest eggs there.

Drew Sanocki 

Love it. No, it's music to my ears. So I'm guessing like one of those core seven campaigns is probably some version of like a win back, right? Like, how do you think about the, when you go to build, you call it a win back or an anti churn campaign or like what comes to mind when you start digging in on a win back?

Zak Cassady-Dorion

So yeah, we call call win backs We look at the product life cycle first so if we're looking for timing so like we have this one one client they're a their welding company and the

It's very seasonal. So like during the summer months they buy, know one one prop one main series of products and then in the winter months They buy another series of main products. So we'll look at what they bought Like what product line that they're buying from and then look at what the buying cycle is for that and then hit them up with win back email around that time

Drew Sanocki 

So what, you know, when you're, when all work is done in Klaviyo, you're, you're talking about seven course flows, but I got to think there's like iterations of each one.

Zak Cassady-Dorion

Yeah, and they're all, I mean, it's not the same setup for everybody. It's like the same seven core flows, but they're different depending on every customer or every client. Yeah.

Drew Sanocki 

So we just did a big, I mean, we did a big case study with you, which I think is live on the site now. But if we were sort of, there's two areas that you kind of talk about using, you know, in our case, it's direct mail, but I imagine like it's a lot of the same camp. They're just sort of reinforcing a lot of this email stuff. Right. So one, we talked about a lot of automations. Abandoned carts, a birthday, win back, cross cell VIP, right? Like these are campaigns that you just kind of lock and load, set them up once. Theoretically they run forever. Right. And then I also want to talk about the other, there's other area of campaigns like you've been playing around with. I think you had a black Friday example where you sent out that catalog, which is sort of a large format piece. Right. Was that more of like a demand gen effort?

Zak Cassady-Dorion

No, that was more so the Cardalog that we did, it was for a client there. They do a lot of holiday gifts. And so it was, you know, win back for customers that have purchased in the holiday period, you know, over the last like five years. I think that's who we send it to. We see before you're talking about win back. My favorite win back strategy is actually not even inside of Klaviyo. So yeah, sure, we will build out the Klaviyo flows and that does well. But one of my favorites is with PostPilot and how I set it up is, we send a lot of emails for our clients. We send 20 to 30 to 40 emails per month. And so it's a lot of emails and we do great segmentation, regardless and regardless of how many emails you're sending, there's going to be churn, even from your good customers. You people are having a bad day and they or you just send too many emails or they just got they got bored or whatever But they could still be great customers. So one of my favorite winbacks is looking at But but you can't if once they suppress you can't You can't email them anymore So I love looking at suppressed lists that have 2x or 3, know 3 plus Purchases in their lifetime and then hitting them with a postcard to win them back. Those were great

Drew Sanocki

I love it. Get tactical. So you specifically build a segment in Klaviyo off of they've suppressed list three or four purchases in that you find that audience is receptive to direct mail because you're not allowed to, know, you can't email Klaviyo won't let you email them because they've unsubscribed.

Zak Cassady-Dorion

Right and and they love your product. They've proved they've proven that because they because they continually place orders But they just don't want at one point they decided they don't want your emails But then we also bake in post pilot into our flow into all or not all our flows But into our band of cards better checkouts and then browse abandonment flows. We bake it into So like if the car to ban him in is seven days and they still don't purchase then a day ten We send him a postcard. I'm trying to convert that way

Drew Sanocki

That's kind of the classic use case that we recommend. mean, it's start with email. You know, obviously if somebody abandons a cart, you're going to hit recency matters. You're going to hit them almost immediately with some sort of reminder. Maybe a day goes by, a couple of days go by, you give them an offer. Three, four days go by and they still haven't replied to email. You're saying trigger the postcard at that point.

Zak Cassady-Dorion

Yeah, exactly.

Drew Sanocki

Yeah, because I think most marketers, you know, they're they're still like, I don't want to say they're penny pinchers, but they're just kind of like they don't want to spend the money on a postcard. And I get it. It's a it's a very effective channel and you get better response rates than you get with email, but it costs more to send, obviously send a postcard than it does to fire off an email. So this strategy is a great one too, that we see a lot of Klaviyo users employing, know, it's like email, email, email. If, if they've run the gamut and they have not responded to any of those offers, fire off the postcard and you surprisingly often get a response off the postcard where the email didn't get one.

Zak Cassady-Dorion

Yeah, you know and it's true it is more money and a lot of clients a lot of our clients are really hesitant of it and Before we came across post but I think our first launch was like in 22. But before posting that, I've always been really negative on any print advertising in general. And it's not because it doesn't work, but it does work. But the reason why I've stayed away from it is what I said in the beginning of what makes us unique is we focus on trackable revenue. And one of our promises is that the money to our clients, the money that you spend with us more than pays for itself with increased trackable revenue. And when I found a post I'm like, man, this is awesome, now, so we can do direct mail and we can track it. So I'm talking to clients now, I'll often get pushback and I'll just let them know. Hey, let's start with a small budget. Let's start with you know, thousand two thousand three thousand dollars a month on your postcards. And then if the ROI is there then we can increase it. The ROI has always been there.

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Drew Sanocki

Yeah, it's, know, especially on retention. It's like, it always works. It will always, you know, it's like email will always, you know, if you build that segment right or that target, right. And retention is where I feel, we all feel comfortable sort of guaranteeing an ROI there. We see that's where the brands have the highest returns. so that's interesting. And I think when you talk about how you, you figure out attribution, I mean, first for the brand in particular, they shouldn't care whether the message is going out via email, via postcard, via like a billboard. Like as long as there's an ROI on it, who cares what medium it goes through, right? But how do you think about attribution? Like how are you, when you get pushback on whether direct mail works or not, how are you showing them the attribution?

Zak Cassady-Dorion

Showing them the numbers. In the data, the numbers are there. You know, the data's there. It's, you know, it's, sent postcards to these people, these people purchased, these people use the promo code. The only place that this promo code existed was in the postcards that we sent out. You know, try and show that very clearly. 

Drew Sanocki 

We find a lot of brands, they try to get really sort of granular on that. They, they'll either focusing on QR code scans or coupon redemptions is another one. But those really, I think they undersell the channel. You know, from what we've seen, maybe 5 % of people scan the QR. But it, so it doesn't really capture the full impact of the promo. Like if I see the card and I load up the website and I didn't scan the QR, I still respond to the promo, you know? And the same, amazingly, the same thing happens with coupon codes. can put the coupon code on your homepage and at that the header of every page. And you'll still have people who check out, not redeem it, you know? So it's like, you can't really focus on that either.

Zak Cassady-Dorion

Yeah, you know, like the whole the old marketing adage was you have to see a brand seven times before you make a purchase and You know when I talk with clients about attribution one of the one of the things that I talk about just in attribution for ecommerce in general is You have to understand that there's it's not crystal clear where sales are coming from. Like meeting you can all the platforms are going to be trying to claim credit for each sale. But in actuality every platform that touched them had something to do with the sale So here's a really great example that happened to me. Yeah a few months ago, so I was in. They had to do with PostPilot. So I was shopping. I was going away with my wife to Colombia for a few days and I was shopping for a pair of new bathing suit. And I went on this website. I was looking at the products, and didn't add them to the cart, but I was browsing. I purchased that from there before and I said, you know, I got busy or whatever it was and I just left. A couple of days later a postcard showed up at my house. I was like, oh, this is awesome. I know how they did this so I still didn't purchase it but I just saw the postcard I left on the kitchen counter. My birthday was coming up. I didn't say anything to my wife about it was I left it on the kitchen counter because I was gonna buy. I was gonna you know at some point I was gonna make the purchase. I just didn't have time. Then my birthday right before I went to Columbia. I realized I didn't. I didn't have time to order the shorts or I forgot to order the shorts. But then I got three pairs of the shorts that my wife ordered from the postcard that I left on the kitchen counter. Like that attribution, right? Like that's, she purchased with her email address. So, you know, none of that attribution got back to the postcard, but it was 100 % because of the postcard that that purchase was made. Great wife.

Drew Sanocki 

Also great wife, right? I mean, yeah, there you go. I think it's like, I'm just, you can, if you can imagine that the nightmare we have of trying to sort out attribution and that's cause initially we would see, well, the first thing we'd see is like, we'd send a postcard to a house, a household, you know, or an address and we'd see orders come in off that postcard. We'd use unique coupon codes orders being redeemed for someone that we didn't know was in the household, right? Like just your wife, for example, off of your promo code. So that started happening. We had to account for that in the attribution model. And then there's, you know, there's New York City and there's like weird apartment numbers and things come, you know, like the address, you know, like would come in with different apartment buildings and things at the same address. And then the last part was the attribution window for direct mail is really long. It's, you know, it's not like an email where you send it out in 48 hours later. You know, you've kind of seen the traffic trickle off. No, it's it's it's months, you know, like people will put the catalog in the bathroom, you know, and people read it in there and then they order it in 90 days, now, 108 days after you've sent it out. So that's always another different, you know, unique thing for the channel is like, you see these really long attribution windows.

Zak Cassady-Dorion

You know, and if you think about it, it makes sense. Like you get an email, most people aren't saving emails in their inbox, so they're not going back to those emails, you know, after a week or two weeks. But the postcards, I mean, you just leave them around, right? You don't get a ton of postcards, period. Not like it used to happen 20 years ago. And if it's a postcard from a brand that you like, they're highlighting really nice products, like it just gets left around. And then you're constantly looking every time I walk through the kitchen. I was thinking about that brand.

Drew Sanocki 

Yeah, you know, we put them on the fridge. I've got them on my desk here, obviously, because I work at PostPilot. I've got a zillion. But, you know, one thing that we just say is like, at the end of the day, if they're, if the brand is sending enough volume, there's no better test than like a holdout group, you know, where you can, I don't know if you've used this functionality, but you can say, if you've got an audience of one time buyers who haven't purchased in 90 days, you know, you can, you can say like, let's carve out 20 % of that and they're not going to get the campaign. the other 80 % will get the campaign and you compare the two groups. both see your meta ads, both get your emails, both see your Superbowl ad, whatever. The only thing you can attribute the lift to is the direct mail campaign. So that's something we, you know, if you've got a skeptical brand, we always recommend like, know, you got it. need enough volume to actually carve out a whole dad group. I probably wouldn't do it if you're sending 10 cards out, but, yeah.

Zak Cassady-Dorion

I love that. That's great. Yeah, because there's the only difference right here is these guys received the postcards and these guys did not.

Drew Sanocki 

Right. And that's how you get an incrementality. It's really something that any marketing software should, I wish as a marketer that anybody and then everybody did it. I wish that you could dial it in and in meta, you know, and do control group testing. But I think to your earlier point, everybody, you know, tries to take as much credit as possible for their channel. So, I don't know, direct mail kind of gets held to a higher standard just because. I think I feel like that's where control group testing kind of started in marketing and it's easy to implement, but yeah, worth a try.

Zak Cassady-Dorion

I like it. Yeah, I'm going to try that with a couple clients.

Drew Sanocki 

Cool. Well, Zak, how can people get a hold of you?

Zak Cassady-Dorion

They can go to hold me at our website, ecdigitalstrategy.com and I’m really active on LinkedIn. Reach out to me on LinkedIn and in my email, Zak at ecdigitalstrategy.com.

Drew Sanocki

That's great. And you know, you do put out some of the best content, especially around email and personalization and stuff on LinkedIn. So I would encourage everybody to follow you there. It's great stuff.

Zak Cassady-Dorion

Awesome. Drew, it's great chatting with you today.

Drew Sanocki 

Great chatting with you, man. I really appreciate you taking the time.

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