The #1 Thing I Did to Rapidly Scale Electriq to Success

The TL;DR:

• Let’s Chat D2C: The Shop Ecosystem & Its Network Effects

• What I’m Thinking about this Week: How do you generate buy-in from your team? Your company will only be successful if your team members are bought into the vision and mission behind what you’re all working towards.

• The D2Z Podcast: Lifetime Value, Post-Purchase Journey, and the Perfect Shopify Techstack with Malomo’s Noah Rahimzadeh.

• App Highlight: Klaviyo February Product Updates and Gorgias’ Whatsapp Integration.

• Upcoming Events: I’m speaking at Vinexpo America alongside Peter Jones, Head of Wine & Spirits at Shopify, in a panel session tackling the challenge of how to stay ahead of alcohol’s ecommerce complexities. I’ll be in NYC from 3/7-3/13 and then in Boston from 3/13-3/19 to hang out with Klaviyo. Let me know if you’re around and want to connect!

Random tip: Build a backlog of to-do’s that aren’t urgent but you need to tackle that you can pick up and work on when you have free time during the day.

Let's Chat D2C: The Shop Ecosystem & Its Network Effects

Shopify continues to invest in its Shop offerings. What makes things interesting is how these products become more valuable to merchants and customers as the number of merchants and customers using them increases.

These products make it more enticing for merchants to migrate to Shopify and make it harder for them to leave.

The more merchants integrate into the Shop suite of products, the stickier Shopify is, and the less likely they’ll ever leave.

Shop Pay

One-tap checkout with BNPL baked in. Shop Pay has over 100M+ registered users and has seen a 2x increase in audience growth since 2020. Shop Pay boosts conversion 1.91x higher on mobile by prefilling customers’ information. The more merchants that use Shop Pay means more registered users, which means more customers that can leverage the one-tap checkout with a higher conversion rate.

Signed-in Shopping with Shop

Identify Shop users immediately upon site entry for password-less sign-in, faster checkout, and higher conversion rates. Automatically pass their credentials to your favorite CRM tool, like Klaviyo, to send your welcome series.

One of the main selling points I lean into with merchants when pitching migrating to Shopify is Shop. Conversion rates increase significantly for first-time site visitors when they don’t have to create an account, fill out their checkout information, etc. Almost 80% of my BFCM purchases were from brands I had never shopped from before, but I never had to log in because I’m a Shop user. Checkout was frictionless!

Signed-in shopping with Shop will give stores a significant conversion rate increase by identifying Shop users immediately upon site entry for password-less sign-in. If you just think about it, of course, you’ll be more likely to buy from a new brand if your payment information is already stored on their site.

And the more merchants that use Shop, the more customers there will be on Shop, ultimately increasing the number of first-time visitors to your Shopify store that can leverage signed-in shopping with Shop.

Shop Passkeys

Customers can now sign in with little to no friction by leveraging Shop passkeys (i.e., “Face ID” verification).

Shop App Customization & Shop Minis

All of this leads to the Shop App, where customers who track with Shop have a 9% higher repurchase rate. Now, merchants can create a custom Shop App experience with Shop Minis. Use pre-built components like search, product pages, and a cart to make an incredible mobile shopping experience.

Shop Cash Rewards

Shop Cash is a rewards program that can only be used towards purchases made in the Shop app. The more customers shop with Shop stores, the more they get rewarded. Even better, the cash expires every 90 days, incentivizing repeat purchasing at a higher frequency.

Shop Cash Campaigns

And now you can acquire New Customers with Shop Cash Campaigns! Shopify Plus brands can run pay-per-sale acquisition campaigns that increase the Shop Cash customers earn on their Shop Pay purchases from you. Test running a Shop Cash campaign and see how it compares to your current CPAs. These customers should be high converting and have higher LTV given the granular targeting Shopify can provide and these customers’ adoptions of Shop.

Shopify Audiences

Shopify Audiences helps merchants combat one of the biggest challenges post-iOS 14, finding relevant new audiences for customer acquisition. Now you can harness the insights of all opted-in Shopify Plus stores orders and customer data to push audiences into your advertising platform of choice.

Shopify continues to expand the platforms that Shopify Audiences supports. You can automatically create, export, and refresh store-specific audiences on Google and Pinterest in addition to Meta.

The more merchants opt in, the larger the audience pool from which Shopify can match high-intent buyers to your storefront.

What’s Next?

I expect Shopify to continue to invest in building out its products and services that benefit significantly from its scale.

What I’m Thinking About This Week: How Do You Generate Buy-in From Your Team? 

Your company will only be as successful as your team members make it. It’s your job as an entrepreneur, business owner, manager, or team leader to align and orient your team around shared goals that drive the business forward and reward them. Your entire team needs to be bought into what you’re trying to accomplish. Buy-in for the mission and vision is critical to the long-term success of your company.

Autonomy (with Accountability)

I was shocked. Was it really this easy? Did all of our team members just want to feel like they were trusted and truly had ownership over what they were doing?

One of the biggest unlocks to Electriq’s rapid growth was unhinging myself from many of the day-to-day business functions, entrusting the team to own their responsibilities fully and evolve them to support our company far better than I would have ever been able to.

I hired an expert in Email/SMS marketing and web design and development, gave them the framework and guidelines around our overarching goal, and handed them the keys to grow and scale their departments as they envisioned, providing support where necessary.

It Trickles Down to the Rest of the Organization

I speak to each new Electriq team member for 30 minutes, no matter what. My #1 objective is to ensure they understand that their opinion is not only valued but expected. We are not here to hire robots. We hired you to bring significant value to the table, and part of the value is in your ability to improve the company and help shape it. Every team member at Electriq, in some way, shape, or form, no matter how long they’ve been with us, has played an active role in defining who we are and what we do. Whether it’s a brand new team member fresh out of college making suggestions to me about how we could improve our onboarding process or a senior team member who sees a better way for us to organize our account management team for client success, it doesn’t matter your age, gender, or experience level. Your opinion is valued and implemented.

My #1 Tip for Generating Team Member Buy-in, Improving your Business, and Overall just Creating a Kickass Company

One of the best things I ever did at Electriq was implementing a quarterly process where each team member was required to submit three things that “We should be doing, but we’re not.” We had close to 150 ideas to review each quarter by the end.

It’s one thing to ask for it. It’s another to recognize it and act on it. So, I took every idea, threw it into a slide deck, and scheduled a 90-minute All-hands meeting to walk through every idea, opening up the floor to the entire team for discussion. I’d highlight how we were already addressing some of these things, how we were addressing them in different ways, or how we couldn’t handle them yet. And everyone didn’t have to agree on everything either. The most important thing is that EVERY team member, regardless of age, gender, or experience level, was being HEARD.

And it’s not like we were just doing this to garner goodwill. This shit worked. So many of our processes and the primary drivers of our rapid growth came from team members bringing their ideas to the table at these meetings.

Especially as your organization grows larger and larger, you can’t keep your thumb on the pulse of the minutia of your business. You must empower your team members to speak up and bring their ideas to light. Not only did this process get buy-in from the team and reinforce that they were genuinely building this business along with myself, but it gave me invaluable insight into the day-to-day of our team members, from upper-level management all the way down to the interns.

Below is just one slide from hundreds over the course of 3 years we reviewed during these all-hands meetings.

Without a doubt, this exercise was the #1 contributing factor behind our growth from 12 to 45 team members in less than 18 months. 

This Week’s The D2Z Podcast

#50 – Lifetime Value, Post-Purchase Journey, and the Perfect Shopify Techstack with Malomo’s Noah Rahimzadeh

🎧 Listen Now 🎧

In this week’s episode, I sat down with Noah Rahimzadeh, Head of Partnerships at Malomo, a platform specializing in post-purchase order tracking and personalized customer journey solutions. Specifically, we explored the following:

💰 Improving the order tracking experience to enhance customer lifetime value and retention

📲 The significance of improving the customer experience in increasing customer loyalty

😎 The importance of strategic partnerships in business and how to leverage tech solutions as an agency to differentiate yourself

🚀 How to navigate the Shopify ecosystem, choose the right apps and make the most of integrations

App Highlight - Klaviyo February Product Releases & Gorgias’ Whatsapp Integration

Klaviyo Updates

Like always, Klaviyo released a bunch of new product releases in February that you need to know about.

A/B Testing in Recipient’s Local Timezone

If you’re like me, you’ve gone into Klaviyo to run an A/B test, selected send in the recipient’s local timezone, and were greeted with a big YOU CAN NOT DO THIS message. Well, now you can get the best of both worlds! Send in your recipient’s local timezone and still A/B test!!!

Profiles Page Redesign

Sort through profiles and learn more about your customers with Klaviyo’s redesign profiles page. You can now search for profiles, sort in new ways, and access the segment builder and suppressions page in a more streamlined fashion.

Teasers and Close Button

You can now add a close button to your form teaser that allows shoppers to close it if they’re not interested.

Search Bar Quick Actions

Create a campaign, flow, signup form, list, or segment from the search bar.

Centra Integration Launch

Our international brands love this new integration! The Centra integration lets brands use Klaviyo to manage multiple stores, languages, currencies, and warehouses from one Klaviyo account.

Gorgias Updates

WhatsApp Integration

The recently launched integration allows you to manage Whatsapp messages as tickets, see and respond to them directly in Gorgias, and link customer profiles for personalized support.

WhatsApp already has a dominant market share in quite a few international markets. Still, it’s one to watch in the US and experiment with how your brand can leverage it for a better customer experience and potentially even as a marketing channel (though WhatsApp’s APIs are limiting when it comes to this).

Upcoming Events

I’m speaking at Vinexpo America alongside Peter Jones, Head of Wine & Spirits at Shopify, in a panel session tackling the challenge of how to stay ahead of alcohol’s ecommerce complexities.

I’ll be in NYC from 3/7-3/13 and then in Boston from 3/13-3/19 to hang out with Klaviyo. Let me know if you’re around and want to connect!

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