My #1 Takeaway from Presenting at ChargeX

The TL;DR:

• Let’s Chat D2C: Migrate to GA4 Now!!!

• What I’m Thinking about this Week: My Top ChargeX Takeaways

• The D2Z Podcast: In this week’s episode, I sat down with Lindsey Rosenberg, Founder of Dryft Sleep and a Fractional CMO.

• App Updates: Gorgias Ticket Fields, PostPilot SiteMatch, and Klaviyo April Releases.

• Upcoming Events: I’ll be in LA this week, followed by Arizona and then Chicago, so let me know if you’re in the area and want to connect!

Random tip: Build out a tactical 3-month plan, and then every three months, reflect on what you accomplished in that plan while building out the next one.

Let's Chat D2C: Migrate to GA4 Now!!!

Did you know the current Google Analytics platform will stop working in July 2023? (2024 for paid GA 360)

This impacts all of your digital marketing, tracking, and reporting.

To continue running Google ad campaigns based on conversion data or retargeting, you must set up new GA4 conversion tracking and audiences.

You must also switch to GA4 if you use Google Analytics for tracking traffic, website engagement, performance, and attribution from all other paid and organic channels.

Additionally, Google is ending "similar audiences" in August 2023. If your campaigns target "similar audiences,” you will need more conversion data to feed the “audience expansion" algorithm that replaces "similar audiences."

GA4 Benefits

GA4 is a completely new analytics platform that has several advantages.

Web analytics are now the same platform as iPhone and Android app analytics. Build retargeting audiences and track conversions across your website and app.

Create targetable audiences based on sequences of events within specific time periods. (i.e., people who add to their cart within 5 minutes of watching a video)

New reporting features. Funnels (measure how many people got to specific steps) and customer journey pathing (flowcharts of user actions while on your website) are now available to free GA users.

The cookieless tracking option is GDPR compliant.

GA4 Disadvantages

But these advantages also come with some disadvantages…

Free GA users will lose access to historical data in Universal Analytics in 2024. You must export and store any pre-July 2023 data you want for future reference. Migrate to GA4 as early as possible to maximize the data you have accessible for future reporting.

GA4 uses different properties that are not exactly equivalent to the old data. You’ll need to analyze both data sets to define a baseline for the new GA4 metrics.

Data retention time periods are much shorter than before.

GA4 has fewer prebuilt reports. You need to set up new reports.

Changes to property filters, user access, and permission levels require business decisions about how to structure the new analytics accounts. It's not possible to copy all your settings over as is.

Get Support with the Migration

I’ve partnered with the team at TargetClose to help brands and marketers implement the latest technology for ads and analytics. While Shopify and other ecommerce platforms provide some automated setup of the GA4 tags and tracking, there are several steps in a full GA4 migration that are not automated, including

• Exporting Universal Analytics historical data to Bigquery

• Setting up event tracking in Google Tag Manager

• Recreating the reports you use in GA4

• Troubleshooting data that doesn't match the old analytics

• Setting up cookieless GDPR-compliant tracking

• Setting up audiences, conversions, custom dimensions, and custom metrics

• Modifying the account setup if you previously used different "views" and subdomain filters

You can contact David Bruno at [email protected] or click this link to learn more!

What I’m Thinking About This Week: My Top ChargeX Takeaways

I had a blast speaking to Recharge Partners about retention marketing this past week at ChargeX, and there are a few takeaways I want to highlight from other talks I attended, as well as some of my conversations at the conference! And a big shout out to the entire Electriq team for winning Recharge Partner of the Year!!! :)

Product Bundling

Every merchant and tech partner I spoke with said the same thing. For merchants, they’re focused on reducing their overall costs, specifically in their tech stack. One of the avenues they see to help achieve that is switching to tech platforms that offer multiple solutions under one roof. On the tech partner side, they are eyeing point solutions in adjacent categories to theirs that they can build a better version of into their existing product. Product bundling provides merchants with cost savings while providing tech partners with pricing flexibility. It’s not an uncommon message I’ve heard from merchants “We moved over to Yotpo because they threw in their review products for free” or “We’re using Rebuy now instead of Carthook now because Rebuy offers so much in addition to the post-purchase offers.”

Recharge is Building for the Future with Recharge Components

Being a subscription app is not enough, and Recharge knows it has to evolve to meet the market's demands and, most importantly, its customers. At ChargeX, they announced their 8 central components:

1. Subscription Management

2. Rewards

3. Bundles

4. Workflows

5. Advanced API and SDKs

6. Memberships

7. Cross-sell and Upsell

8. Recommendations

#1 is their bread n’ butter, but their 7 additional components are all extremely relevant and complement one another in supporting merchants in creating best-in-class customer experiences. All 7 additional components increase the conversion rate for subscriptions, improve retention, or increase the LTV of existing subscription customers.

And if you’re paying close attention here, you’ll notice that a lot of these components are actually being serviced right now by existing tech partners (i.e., rewards or memberships). I see Recharge being able to coexist with its existing tech partners just like how Shopify can. For example, Shopify has an email product, but most merchants choose to use more advanced solutions like Klaviyo. However, there are certain components that simply just make more sense to have baked into one platform, and merchants will not opt for alternative solutions, so it will be interesting to see how the tech partnership landscape shakes out over the next couple of years.

Recession or No Recession?

Last year wasn’t great for agencies. Most fellow founders I spoke with had to reduce their headcount and focus on their core offerings. That being said, 2023 has agencies feeling a lot more optimistic. The fear of a recession in 2022 and the panic around iOS14 has given way to merchants accepting the new reality and leaning into more strategic engagements with agencies. 

ChatGPT

If you’re a business owner and you’re NOT thinking about incorporating ChatGPT and AI into your workflows to improve efficiency and performance, you will be left behind. Whether using ChatGPT to augment copywriting and development or to help with ideating on new product ideas, the most successful businesses and individuals will learn how to work WITH AI, not against it.

This Week’s The D2Z Podcast

#58 – Fractional CMO, Branding, and Start-up Marketing

🎧 Listen Now 🎧

In this week’s episode, I sat down with Lindsey Rosenberg, Founder of Dryft Sleep and a Fractional CMO. Specifically, we explored the following:

💰 The importance of branding in differentiating a company in today’s market

📲 The effectiveness of ads and why authentic brand engagement is important

😎 What does “brand” actually mean?

🚀Putting the right amount of effort into the right marketing activities.

App Highlight - Gorgias Ticket Fields, PostPilot SiteMatch, and Klaviyo April Releases

Gorgias Ticket Fields

Ticket fields will allow brands to create customizable ticket properties, such as a multi-level dropdown select, that is required to close a ticket. Some of the things you’ll be able to report on and address with ticket fields are the main reasons customers are contacting you, what product they’re contacting you about, etc.

For example, you could create a ticket field for “reason contacted” that has options such as product damaged, the product doesn’t work, etc., etc. Then, you could create a report to see what % of your tickets fall into that group.

P.s. if you want to spice things up with your on-site chat, you can now choose from a large selection of fonts as well as customize the agent avatar.

PostPilot SiteMatch

PostPilot is Electriq’s preferred partner for direct mail, and now we can automatically target anonymous website browsers with direct mail campaigns via PostPilot’s SiteMatch. All you have to do is add a pixel to your website and decide what criteria you want to trigger it.

PostPilot will then identify a physical address for the IP address when someone meets the criteria set and uses a proprietary filtering process to sift out bots and irrelevant traffic and does not target an existing customer or lead.

Within one business day, PostPilot will trigger a postcard send.

Learn more and test it here!

Klaviyo Updates

Campaign Deliverability Performance

Klaviyo’s new Campaign Deliverability Tab allows you to see key deliverability metrics at a glance while allowing you to dig into domain-specific performance as well. You can also view data by device and country.

Still, to really dig into email deliverability, you’ll want to leverage a solution like GlockApps.

New Inbox Provider Data

First off, what’s the difference between email domains and inbox providers? Email domains are the registered name that emails come from - the part of an email address that appears after the @ symbol. Inbox providers are where it gets tricky. For example, someone could have @me.com and @icloud.com email addresses, both of which are powered by Apple (the inbox provider).

With inbox provider data, you can now go deeper with analyzing your deliverability performance.

A/B Testing in Recipient’s Local Timezone

Now, you don’t have to choose between a/b testing or sending an email in the recipient’s local time zone. You can do both!

Redesigned Channel Consent Box in Profiles

Now, in one view, you can see a profile’s consent records by channel, such as email, SMS, and push

Mobile Push Notifications Available for Android and iOS

You can seamlessly integrate mobile push messages into your existing email and SMS marketing flows. All you need is an iOS or Android app, install the Klaviyo SDK, and will get access to sending push campaigns, deep links that send shoppers to specific pages within the app, and more.

Criteo Integration with Klaviyo

Criteo allows you to place ads across the internet. Now with the Criteo + Klaviyo integration, you can push auto-updating audiences from Klaviyo into Criteo just like you can with Meta and Google Ads. Some of the most popular use cases for this integration include:

• Retargeting select segments with personalized ads (i.e., cart abandoners, lapsed customers)

• Excluding segments from future campaigns (i.e., active subscription customers)

• Creating lookalike audiences in Criteo based on your VIP customers in Klaviyo
  

SMS Subscribe Links

SMS subscribe links allow you to grow your SMS marketing list outside of sign-up forms. You can experiment with new forms of SMS list growth, such as directing Instagram followers to sign up with a link in stories or turning your subscribe link into a QR code and displaying it on the packaging or in your store.

Once someone goes to your link, whether on desktop or mobile, Klaviyo will show them the best way to sign up for texts.

Omnichannel Campaign Calendar

Yes!!! Finally, you can view your upcoming Klaviyo campaigns across email, SMS, and push in a campaign calendar that breaks each campaign down by status:

• Grey: Draft

• Blue: Scheduled

• Green: Sent

• Red: Canceled
  

Developer Hub

A new home in the Klaviyo app for developers that organizes API-key management, platform status updates, guides and resources, and eventually, API analytics.

SMS Disclosure Language in Sign-up Forms

TL;DR You can now drag n drop SMS disclosure language into sign-up forms.

Redesigned Flows Page

Get a high-level view of flow performance at a glance for the metric of your choice.

Recharge Dynamic Bundles

I am super excited about this one! Merchants using the Affinity customer portal theme can now dynamically set the price for the bundle based on the SKUs selected by the customer. This has been a frequent request from wineries and alcohol merchants looking to migrate to Shopify.

Historically, you had to predefine the cost of the bundle. Now, the bundle can cost whatever the individual items within that bundle add up to. For example, instead of forcing the bundle to cost $60, it could now cost anywhere from $40-$100, depending on the SKUs selected by the customer.

Rebuy Smart Cart Update

You can now create up to 9 shopping carts on your website, toggling different carts on and off at any time to personalize the customer experience. For example, you can set up specific carts for holiday periods, promotional campaigns, etc. 

Upcoming Events

I’ll be in LA this week, followed by Arizona and then Chicago, so let me know if you’re in the area and want to connect!

Follow Along and Share with a Friend!

 Looking for daily insights like this? Follow me on Linkedin.

If you're finding value in this newsletter, share it with a friend, and they can sign up here!