Why My First Team Member Quit and What I learned From It

The TL;DR:

• Let’s Chat D2C: Owning the Post-Purchase Experience.

• What I’m Thinking about this Week: My First Team Member that Quit and What I Learned.

• The D2Z Podcast: A special one-year anniversary episode with Alissa Taggart, VP of Electriq!!!

• App Highlights: Octane AI’s AI quizzes, Recharge Multicurrency Support, and Benchmarks by Loop.

• Upcoming Events: I’ll be at Shoptalk in Vegas next Sunday until Thursday morning! Let me know if you’re attending and want to connect. I’m also speaking at ChargeX in D.C. from 4/26-4/28 and have discounted brand tickets if anyone wants them. More details to come around the keynote, some of the events, etc., so stay tuned!

Random tip: Spend on experiences more than things.

Let's Chat D2C: Owning the Post-Purchase Experience

If you’re still leveraging Shopify or your ecommerce platform's standard transactional emails and texts, you’re missing out on maximizing the most valuable touchpoints you have with your customers. Move them out of Shopify into Klaviyo, leveraging a solution like Malomo, so you can create a branded and personalized experience for your customers that improves retention and increases LTV.

The Stats

On average, customers will check their order tracking 4.6 times per order. Transactional emails and texts have significantly higher open and click-through rates than marketing messages and are sent to all customers regardless of their opt-in status.

 If you’re still not certain, check out how we increased ROI by 54X through personalizing Soylent’s transactional experience.

 The Basics

 At a minimum, your transactional communications need to include the following:

• Order number, expected delivery date, and tracking number

• The customer’s name

• Images of the product(s) purchased

• Payment summary and payment method

• Upsells and cross-sells

• Mobile friendly

• Customer service options

• Social channels

The Order Tracking Page

Next is the order tracking page. Since you’re not using the standard Shopify order tracking pages, you now have the ability to create custom order tracking page experiences that drive additional brand awareness, product education, and cross-sells! This is valuable real estate. For some clients, 15-20% of their website traffic goes to these pages!

 Take it to the Next Level

 At Electriq, we like to create separate one-shot and subscription transactional experiences. We add a conditional split that checks whether or not that customer is an active subscription customer, then branch them down the right path.

For subscription customers, on the order tracking page, we reinforce the value they’re getting by being a subscriber, promote the referral program, and highlight relevant cross-sells. For one-shot customers, we promote the subscription program pretty heavily.

But you don’t have to stop there. Since the transactional messages are coming out of Klaviyo, we now have the same segmentation available to us that we do for marketing messages. You could have unique transactional experiences for every type of customer!

What I’m Thinking About This Week: My First Team Member that Quit and What I Learned

Hiring in the early days of Electriq was a learning and growing experience, to put it lightly. In fact, my third-ever team member quit in three days…

 Why?

Because it was too dark.

We were trapped in the back corner of a crappy but endearing coworking spot in Chinatown, Los Angeles (now closed), so who could blame her?

 Though part of me still finds it slightly amusing that she was expecting something better from a 2-person marketing agency with no money.

So, What Did I Learn From This?

 To get a nicer office with natural light…

Ok, all jokes aside, I learned two key things from this experience, and I’m glad I did early on, as it helped shape the way I went about hiring the next 25 team members at Electriq.

#1 - If It’s Not Working, Don’t Be Afraid to Pull the Plug Quickly

Hiring and re-hiring sucks, but if it’s obviously not working, don’t talk yourself into thinking that it can get better. Sure, you’ve already invested the time in hiring that team member, but you could waste weeks or months trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

#2 - Have Open and Honest Conversations

I could tell pretty much from the moment she started that something was wrong. On day 3, we sat down for a 1:1 meeting and just had an open and honest discussion about where she was at. This allowed her to open up to me and let me know that this role and job weren’t exactly what she was expecting and that she wanted to explore other opportunities.

It was as simple as that. She packed up that day with no hard feelings, and I reached out to some of the other candidates that had applied for her role.

If we didn’t have that conversation, who knows how long she would’ve stuck it out in a position that wasn’t a great fit for her and something she wasn’t truly passionate about.

Being Transparent

Above all, my biggest takeaway from this experience is transparency's importance. If you’re transparent as an employer, your team will reward you by being open and honest. And you’ll both be better off for it.

This Week’s The D2Z Podcast

#52 – Agency Life, Building Effective Teams, and the D2Z One Year Anniversary with Alissa Taggart, VP of Electriq

🎧 Listen Now 🎧

In this week’s special one-year anniversary episode of the D2Z Podcast, I sat down with Alissa Taggart, VP of Electriq. Specifically, we explored the following:

💰 The experience of joining the team right before our acquisition by DRINKS

📲 How to build a strong and effective team as an agency

😎 Being a real human and embracing work/life balance while prioritizing business success

🚀 Being authentic and having your team's best interests at heart

App Highlight - Octane AI’s AI quizzes, Recharge Multicurrency Support, and Benchmarks by Loop.

Octane AI’s AI Quizzes

Quiz AI enables you to create quizzes without having to manually set the quiz logic and the results that are shown. Now, you can just put the quiz questions/answers, and the AI will handle the results and recommendations page.

I’m really excited to test this because the process for creating a quiz for clients like Florence by Mills requires creating crazy spreadsheets that take hours to document all of the logic for results pages. Now we’ll be able to generate the same performance without all of the headaches.

Recharge Multicurrency Support

Recharge is rolling out multicurrency support updates with Shopify Markets, including a better merchant experience that allows you to auto-sync all currencies enabled in Shopify Markets, use price lists within Shopify Markets for checkout and recurring orders, and include customer currency in data exports. For customers, they can now see currency pricing within their customer portal as well as have subscriptions in multiple currencies with the option to update the currency with new addresses.

Benchmarks by Loop

A free app for Shopify merchants that shows return data such as refund rate and top refunded products in an intuitive analytics dashboard. Then, you can compare to benchmarks aggregated from the data of over 1,800+ Shopify merchants.

Upcoming Events

Shoptalk & ChargeX

I’ll be at Shoptalk in Vegas next Sunday until Thursday morning! Let me know if you’re attending and want to connect. I’m also speaking atChargeXin D.C. from 4/26-4/28 and have discounted brand tickets if anyone wants them. More details to come around the keynote, some of the events, etc., so stay tuned! 

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