How to Grow Profits in 2026

Speaker A: The most kind of fundamental thing is this kind of experimental mindset. Don't just do things and hope they work. Measure them, make sure they work. Roll back if they don't. Give yourself a standing chance. Most large brands I've seen understood that experimentation is the right thing to do.

Speaker B: It's the E Commerce Master Plan podcast

Speaker C: here to help you solve your marketing

Speaker B: problems and grow your e commerce business.

Speaker D: Cutting through the hype to bring you

Speaker B: inspir and advice from the e commerce sector and beyond. Here's your host, Chloe Thomas.

Speaker D: Hello and welcome. It's great to have you here. Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our episodes. Earlier this year we bought you an episode all about how to grow in 2026, taken from a webinar. Uh, I got to host for E Commerce Tech. Well, we did another one all about profits in 2026, so I thought you'd appreciate me sharing that with you here too. In it, I' joined by three experts, each with a very different take on how to grow and how to increase your profits. This year we've got Dan Bond from Rev Lifter, who's all about intelligent offers and gives us a rundown of what that really means. To kick things off, we've got Sandeep Shah from webtrends, who brings the CRO and personalization angle to it all. And we have Jamie Lee, a consultant who's all about bringing fast growth to both Amazon and D2C brands. The four of us had a fascinating time discussing the big stories and answering the live audience's questions. So I know you'll get a ton out of this. We're kicking off with the guests introducing themselves. Grainger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, filters ready to clog H Vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and, uh, 24. 7 support, call 1-800-grainger click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

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Speaker D: Hello panel. Let's create a bit of space for you up here. Very cool to have you all here. Um, we'll start with Sandeep and then work our way around clockwise. So Sandeep, please let the audience know more about you, uh, more about webtrend Optimize.

Speaker A: Sure. Thanks Chloe. And hi everyone. Uh, so I'm Sandeep, uh, head of product and co founder at WebTrends Optimize. I've been with the company now almost, you know, 14 years, give or take. And over that time, you know, principal focus has been on what we call a B testing or experimentation. Very important part of the kind of umbrella of CRO. So you know, I've helped brands like, you know, Microsoft, Odeon, Cinemas Group, hsbc, Airlines, you know, supermarkets, all sorts, um, basically get more out of the website, get more people buying and not just turning up, browsing and walking away, uh, which is the important thing.

Speaker D: An endlessly fascinating area to be involved in. Like I always think, you know, we must have mastered CRO by now. No, there are new things and new customer behaviors and more tech lots for us to get into with you later. So thank you so much for being here, Sandy. Jamie, please let us know what you're up to at the moment.

Speaker C: Hi Chloe, thanks for having me. I'm M. Jamie Lee. I um, am the founder and principal of JME Labs. So what I do is I consult, advise, provide fractional leadership in all things E commerce, um, for a variety of VCs, venture studios, early stage starter brands, all the way to nine figure brands, really helping them sharpen what that next chapter of growth looks like. So that's what we'll be diving into today. And I bring experience from a variety of smaller scale and larger scale brands as well. So worked at Everlane and Vital Proteins, all US based brands and then the likes of Walmart, Nike, um, and Sony as well. So very excited to be here, happy to chat through anything from any stage of E commerce growth with you all today.

Speaker D: Awesome to have you here Jamie. Now Dan, please give us a little intro to you and Rev lifter.

Speaker B: Sure. So, and by the way, if anybody wants to make comments. So I recently put some ads up on Meta that have got me in them. I'm in the videos and a lot of people commenting on my hair. So if you want to comment on my hair. Feel free, I don't mind I've got thick skin. Say what you like on my hair, say it's great, say it's terrible. I don't mind. If that's something you want to talk about, that's absolutely fine. Uh, so my name is Dan Bond. I work for a company called Rev Lifter and we are sponsoring this. Uh, you're welcome everyone. And uh, so what we do is that very old tactic for growth that drives growth in e. Uh, commerce. Brands, promotions, discounts and offers. We're all about using those but using them more intelligently to avoid damaging margins and brand. Uh, and that's what I'm going to talk a bit more about today's session.

Speaker D: Excellent. Well, Dan, given, um. No. What, what are they saying about your hair? Sorry, I have to ask.

Speaker B: There were both positive and negative comments. That's all I'm going to say. Well, actually no, there were no positive comments. It was entirely neg.

Speaker D: It is mad what comes up when you put something up.

Speaker B: The Internet is a weird place, Chloe.

Speaker A: That's the.

Speaker D: It is a, It's a very weird place. Right, um, Dan, we are going to leave you to uh, to give us a fantastic introduction to a key part of profit and growth which so many brands fail to capitalize on. So I really love the fact you're going to be taking us through this. So Dan, the floor is yours.

Speaker B: Thank you very much, Chloe. Yes, hello everyone. So, yeah, we're going to talk about uh, intelligent offers and this is all about understanding how to use them. As I say, it's offers, discounts, promotions, they're all basically mean the same thing but using them in a slightly different way perhaps to the way they've always been used traditionally. Uh, the concept of discounts, offers and promotions has been around for a really long time. It's about 150 years. They were first used in retail and originally it was little hard metal tokens that people could give in to get a discount or a free gift or whatever as part of the promotion. And then over time that mechanism changed so we moved to uh, cutting out vouchers out of, out of the newspaper or magazines if people remember that. If you're old enough. Uh, and now of course we use, you know, you get codes on your phone, you get codes in email, you get codes that get auto applied. So those mechanisms for applying discounts and promotions have changed but the basic way they're used by brands hasn't really changed in that time. It's all about clearing out stock. So Getting rid of things in a, in a sale or it's all about we're going to miss a target so let's stick a discount on to make sure we hit that, um, hit that target. And the reason offers work, basically the way offers work is you have a selling price and you have a minimum price you can sell something for before you start losing money on it. And you've got all these people who are willing to pay a certain price for the product you're selling. And by using an offer to reduce that price you essentially get more people into that area of acceptability that, that is a price they're willing to pay for the product. Uh, you're offering the perceived value in their minds they consider that to be worth it. But you also got uh, at both ends you've got people who uh, would be willing to pay what you're charging or potentially more and also people who are never going to pay enough to actually make it worth your while. Um, we actually did some research uh, a couple of years ago now we did some research with IMRG with UK E Commerce association. And what they do is they have a panel of retailers and so they surveyed this panel. So this is actually their data, this isn't survey data. They dived into their data to look at how many ah, what share of revenue, items, transactions was actually generated by uh, discounted uh, products. And you can see it's around 50%, just over 54% of revenue, 49% of items and 52% of transactions. So discounts really do drive a lot of sales uh, for retailers and they do work in terms of, if you look at the average selling price for discounted items over all items sold is about £14 higher. So promotions work and that's why retailers use them and they use them a lot. But there is a big downside to promotions and discounts and that's the damage they do to both your margins in the short term. So they reduce the amount of money you make but also the damage they do to your brand in the long term. You set people up with the expectation that you're always going to be a discounting seller and they can come and, and buy things from you. And there's some research uh, on the slide there about uh, uh, proper research has been done that shows that's the case. They were setting expectations. So you've got these groups at either end of this. If we return to this diagram where it's the case of there's people who would actually be willing to pay more, there's people who are not willing to pay. So when you launch an offer across your site, that's 20% off for everyone, for everything. You're including in that all the people who would have paid more, you're including all the people who would never buy anyway. So the two questions you start to ask is, what is the right offer to give people and who is the right people to receive that offer? Uh, and that's the sort of problem we're trying to solve at Revlifter. And that's all to do with understanding data, understanding more about the people who are coming to your site. What's their likely level of intent, how likely are they to buy and what's the minimum offer you could potentially give them, what m might get them to buy if they weren't going to buy or buy more or buy again if they're a repeat customer. Site intelligence, we talk about intelligent offers. That intelligence comes in two key areas in targeting, so who sees the offer and in what context, and in optimization. So what's the right offer? Uh, uh, in that classic CRO way, can we test, can we optimize every offer on our site? So in terms of targeting, what we're talking about is any of these sort of data points we can collect about someone coming to your site. Where did they come from? Is it the first time they've come? Have they come before? Where are they in that funnel? Are they just browsing? Have they got things in their basket? What products have they looked at, what brands, what categories, where are they? So using GeoIP, we can tell quite a bit about location, where they are in country or state, um, and the basket value and the products they've got in their basket, how long have they had that basket? Is it high value, low value, Are they expensive items, cheap items and all these things? If we understand all this data, we process it and we try and understand as much as possible about what people have done before, like how likely were they to buy before or not likely to buy. We can understand more about who needs to see an offer and doesn't. And this gives you this idea of calculating level of intent. So here goes, uh, an example of that. So say you only wanted to target people who were very low in intent and show them an offer to try and get them to buy. So that's how you could sky off that sort of segment at the bottom to target that offer to them. And this is typically what a conversion rate looks like on a website most people don't buy. Only 2% of people generally convert on an E commerce site. So in most cases you've got a large number of people who are low intent, a very broad range of mid intent and then a small number of high intent. So if you can break that up and start to use those as segments and target different offers at them to try and get them to do different things, that could be very, very powerful at the other end. I mentioned testing and optimization and this is the kind of thing we're talking about. This is exactly the kind of test we run with some of our customers. Uh, so 5, 10 or 15% off on an email signup. No prizes for guessing which gets the best result. 15%. The bigger the discount you offer, the higher your numbers go. But the question is, beneath that metric, what else is going on? How many email signups is it driving? Yes, but how many are then converting? How many are buying? What's your offer? Redemption rate? What's the aov? Are they spending more, are they spending less because they're getting a promotion? Are they driving actual incremental revenue rather than just you're serving a sign, uh up offer to people who are going to buy anyway and all they've done is use that discount so you can start to dive into these things and actually optimize. And in the case where we did this with an actual customer, 10% off was, uh, the winning variant because it was about the balance. We call this offer sensitivity testing. So testing how much people respond to a different level of discount or promotional price testing in terms of, you know, if you've got an item for sale, how much do you need to drop the price by in order to drive a level of demand that's going to make sure that that item doesn't sit in your warehouse. Um, as a very simple, I think this is a fun way. Chloe's got a shop. I don't know if you know this. Chloe's got a shop. It's called Chloe's Fun Store. Uh, it's down there in Cornwall. If you're ever in the, uh, Truro area, I believe it's around there. And if you can imagine you've got, you know, someone goes into a store to buy something, they could one on one haggle with a shopkeeper and say, you know, this is the thing I want to buy. Let's talk about price. But if you've got lots and lots of people coming to your site, hundreds of people, thousands of people a day, it's all about scale essentially and how you do this on a broad scale, very, very fast, in real time, so understanding whether people are coming to your site because they were looking, just looking for a bargain, they've got plenty of money, they want to spend, they want a specific thing, they're just browsing, they want to buy right away. If you could understand that thing and break people into these different segments, then you could serve different offers to them and that's more likely to get what you want from your site. And yeah, I'm looking forward to visiting Chloe's unstore.

Speaker D: Um, yeah, open 9 to 5 Monday to Friday. Um, thanks so much for that Dan. I think it's, I love what you talk about with the intelligent offers because it's something which is a fundamental part of human behavior. I remember back when I started my career in the world of mail order, we'd talk about the sales buyers and so on, but we didn't have the technology to properly do it. It was very blunt what we were doing and it's so cool to see that now is possible for everybody. Jamie, Sandeep, is this something you get involved with? Any thoughts to add to that offer construction side of things? Um, Jamie, I'm guessing probably more your wheel has than Sandee. So I'll come to you first but then we'll go to Sandeep.

Speaker C: Yes, I'd um, say Dan, with a lot of the clients that I'm working with, we're assessing partners like a rev lifter to think of. Okay. With current technology, say that you're on Shopify or Amazon, there are things that you can do or say klaviyo for email where it's like, hey, from a retargeting perspective, here's a specific segment we want to um, leverage to ensure that hey, someone who's lapsed gets a 10% off offer or on Amazon there's something called brand tailored promotions where you can target based on cohort, high intent, hasn't shopped in a while or just high potential consumers. But we know there is a ceiling with that. However, Chloe, to your question, we are leveraging all the tools that are natively available across platforms to make sure the audiences that are warm but have not yet come back are coming back appropriately. I think the biggest question though that we're always trying to answer the million dollar question is how profitable are these customers long term? If we already need this level of push to get them back, are they the right customers to bring them back? Hence why we're looking at tools like a rev lifter.

Speaker D: Yeah, it's like, like Dan's example with the email signups, it's not just about the volume of email sign up, it's about who signs up and how, how good they are for you over the longer term. Sandeep, your take on, on intelligent offers.

Speaker A: I find the principle quite interesting because it's exactly how we talk about experience on a website, pretty much with anything you do. This idea of just show, uh, everyone the same thing and hope they respond in the same way is a very natural thing to do. If you're building a website, you're building a page and everyone will go to that template no matter how it looks. But for all these kind of cohort segments of people who are coming to the site, the more kind of boxes you get to put around them. Um, whether it's experience on our world or offers and promos on yours, Dan, it's this kind of idea of think about what they actually need and be a bit intelligent with what you're doing, which sounds very straightforward. But yeah, it's kind of immediately the same as how we think about experience.

Speaker D: Yeah, it's all about that, uh, personalization, isn't it? But before I take you down, a personalization standpoint, a little reminder to the audience, if you've got questions, please add them into the comments. I know it's working. Tim proved it was working. Um, and regular attendees will know that I like to kick off these webinars with a few, rather than questions, a few statements, or complete the sentences for, for our uh, panel to really kind of try and get as much as many ideas into the mix as possible before we go too far off on tangents or go drill into one area. So the first thing I would like, um, our uh, panel to answer or to complete is of kind of all the stuff you've been chatting with brands and merchants about recently. What's the advice you've been giving most often to them to help them improve profits? And you're welcome to put some sales growth into the answer as well. Jamie, can I come to you first? Then I'll come to Sandeep and then we'll come back around to Dan.

Speaker C: Jamie, so I'd say there's two things, um, that I tend to tell brands. One is to ensure that you're separating demand capture from demand creation. And what I mean by this is a lot of brands are saying, hey, if I scale spend, this equals more revenue without thinking of how do I want to do this. So for example, if we take Google or Amazon, a lot of folks might over index or work with agencies or partners that might do this and spend More on branded search. However, I tell them we want to make sure we have the right guardrails so we're truly spending on incremental growth. If someone's already searching for your brand, there's a level of brand defense you want to play. But let's not spend 80% of our budget on keywords that would have likely converted organically. So being smart at looking at what is truly more incremental versus what could be cannibalizing already organic sales. That's how we also want to think about channel diversity through marketing. Like how do we want to mix Google and meta together since each of those channels have a different purpose. Google for more demand capture and Meta for more demand creation. And then the other piece too. Um, most of my clients have shifted to really nailing down retention before they start thinking about scale and growth through more top of funnel more traffic and new customers. As I say there, if you have a leaky bucket and 50% of your folks are dropping off from your first to second shop, that's a big problem to solve. We don't want to keep filling that bucket if there's a lot of opportunity there. So we're really focusing in on how do we make sure we get that first customer to come back a second time, then the third or fourth, a fifth and really hitting what that quote magic shop is to make them a VIP customer for life.

Speaker D: I love your first point. I love both your points obviously, Jamie, but I love your first point in particular because I think this is the year where e commerce brands and merchants are going to have to get to grips with demand capture versus demand creation. Because over the last 20 years we've been able to be pretty lazy, 90% of stores and just go after Captcha and just capture that demand with our advertising strategies, with our uh, email strategies, with everything we're doing. But actually if we want to cut through the noise, we now have to do the creation part as well. Well, and I think it's um, you know, having more than one line for Facebook ads in a P and L is a bit of a mind blowing one for people. So I love you've brought that up. Sandeep, how would you complete this sentence?

Speaker A: Um, it would probably be to experiment and you know, both in that kind of traditional sense of the word in just try things. Um, you know, brands are very obsessed with the next campaign that they need to run. You know, if you look at Odeon Cinemas Group, they have the next blockbuster film to promote and there will be a endless cycle of those Forever. You know, most fashion sites will have the next season and the next holiday and the next event worth of, uh, you know, new products to promote. And if you're very obsessed with the campaigns, you almost forget this idea of, hey, we should be trying things, not just putting stuff out there, but actually trying and testing and playing with things along the way. So both that kind of mindset of we should experiment, but then in the more stricter sense and in, in my world, around things like a B testing, where it's, you know, run controlled trials, find genuine data on the other end where, you know, this works better than that and therefore we should steer, uh, any given bit of an experience, or the entire experience as a whole, uh, in a particular direction. You know, Jamie mentioned this idea of a leaky bucket, and I think acquisition is becoming more and more difficult. You know, it's, uh, it's very hard to, you know, kind of win people, especially the longer tail. And so conversion is kind of your saving grace. You know, a whole bunch of people are coming to the site. If you let them leave without having even tried to retain them, um, that's crazy. So, yeah, experiment.

Speaker D: Yeah. And it's so easy, as, you know, as you're saying, just to get caught up in the new campaign. New campaign, new campaign, but actually not learning anything, actually not fixing any of that leaky bucket, which clearly we're all going to be using that analogy for the rest of this webinar. Ah, but you don't make those improvements because you're constantly focused on the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah that's going on. Um, Dan, how would you complete this sentence? I think we might already know, but are you going to curveball us?

Speaker B: Um, I'm going to take it slightly, slightly different. So what I'd say is this is advice I've been giving out a lot recently. In general is having a position or a stance or an approach to something that's very clear you stand by. What's interesting when we speak to brands about their discounts is it's clear they don't have a clearly stated, like, it's fine to say we never discount, or we are a discount brand and we discount everything, uh, or somewhere in the middle. But so many brands we speak to don't really have a clear idea of where they sit. And this creates, uh, problems. Actually, I'll use two different stories which contrast this. So we work with Radley Lovely. Uh, Radley Lovely premium handbags, accessories, purses, that kind of thing. Um, when we started working with them, their Specific challenge was we know we use discounts too much, we know we over discount and we're supposed to be this premium brand. We know in the short term and the long term this is damaging. So we work with them. Um, and really in the early days it was mostly about deciding when not to use a discount, when not to use a promotion to start saying, well, let's stop using them so much. Let's figure out where we can start to pull back a little bit with that's not going to cause you damage in the, you know, to your conversion rate. In aov I've met brands who said we tried going cold turkey and our conversion rate absolutely tanks. And it's like, yeah, that's not the best way of doing it. We can sort of withdraw a bit more slowly. Um, so then you're starting to think, you know, how exactly do we use discounts and how are we going to implement that in a way that actually allows us to meet the goals we need to meet? And then conversely, I met a brand actually just very recently, an event, a really interesting brand. I'm m not going to name them because I don't have the permission but they're very successful brand who've grown a lot in the last sort of 10 years and they said they've never run a promotion. However, they were aware that with ambitious growth targets, ambitious plans for the future, at some point they were probably going to need to start doing it. But I was like, that's a great position to be in. So you've got this position where you've never done it. Now you get to really think carefully about how to implement it and you could start by just implementing it in a few key places where it really solves a particular challenge that your customers, your prospects might be having. So you know, in either case it's about, start thinking more deeply about, you know, if you do use whatever tactic you use, but in particular discounts, how do you use them? What makes sense in terms of you as a brand? How are you going to implement that to make sure that you can achieve growth in the, in the short, medium and long term? And yeah, I think, I think just having a think about that and coming up with an answer is a good start.

Speaker D: I love that point. I was um, I'm going to name drop now. Yesterday I was interviewing Gymshark's uh, excellent CMO who took them through that massive growth spurt and we were talking about what it takes to grow an E commerce store from eight figures upwards. And one of the key Things he was saying is you have to have a clear strategy. You know, you have to. This is our approach to promotions, this is our approach to what markets we're going to focus on, which channels we're going to focus on, which products we're going to focus on. And if you're not making those decisions, you are not giving yourself the best chance of success. And it is that kind of like, what do we stand for? Who are we and what do we do? So love that one. We have had a question come in from our most frequent, uh, attendee, Edward Scott Finnegan, our webinar connoisseur, which I usually managed to forget that phrase. But anyway, random joke panel, don't worry about it. Um, he's got a great question, which I think we should go straight to now because it's a big one and it kind of fits in with what we've just been talking about. How does each of the panels suggest retail? I like that instruction there, Edward. I'm not allowed to ask only one of them. I have to ask all three of you this question. Each of the panel. How does each of the panels suggest retailers and brands measure success? Is the age of conversion rate over? That's a big one. I haven't heard that one being dead yet, but we'll go with it. And if so, what success factors should we be focusing on? Um, Sandeep, dare I come to you first on this one for that is the age of conversion rate over part? I think I have to, don't I?

Speaker A: Definitely not. Uh, in my opinion, I guess. And the reason for it is that it's just a metric, you know, it's not this idea of. It's not a destination, you know, it's not like a. Once I've hit my 2%, I'm done, mission accomplished. For me, I think the, the thing to measure is growth. You know, how much better are you doing than where you were? Uh, if you're not improving, you are probably declining at some point because new brands will pop up every day. Other people are trying to grow. And so unless you are a monopoly and congrats, I guess, if you are somehow. But if you're not, competition will be taking money away from you in some shape or form. So growth is definitely the right one. And then the question is, how do you measure growth? And at least on properties that myself, uh, and webtrends touch, like conversion rate on websites, this is how we measure growth. Is there an incremental nudge or leap, uh, in conversion rate, be it for a Group or just everyone as a whole? Uh, and if there is, then that's successful.

Speaker D: So are you, um, a fan of ignoring benchmarks and measuring against yourself? And are you. I'm going to add another one of my pet things in here. Are you also a fan of not looking at the global conversion rate, but rather looking at conversion rate from email, conversion rate from ads, conversion rate from organic as a better way of looking

Speaker A: at things ignoring benchmarks 100%. I'm not sure how anyone could look at a benchmark for fashion, which includes, I don't know, Louis Vuitton, uh, and one of the many fast fashion brands, and expect the two to have any parity or resemblance despite being in the same vertical, uh, as each other. This idea of considered purchase, maybe there is something in there, um, which is closer to think about, but even that, you know, if you're buying an expensive bag versus a car, you know, both could be a considered purchase, but the journeys are entirely different. So, yeah, definitely on that side.

Speaker D: Uh, Granger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, filters ready to clog H Vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 24. 7 support. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

Speaker A: You know, I would ignore and have ignored, uh, pretty much every benchmark I've ever seen. Segmentation, for me, is a massive thing. Uh, and it's, you know, people are coming to your site, they are in groups. There is, uh, an average of, you know, the site or the app as a whole. Great. Uh, but that's formed from a whole bunch of segments that you've glued together and taken an average of, but where they differ from each other. You know, if you find one of them to be struggling a lot where it doesn't really make sense that they should, that's clearly a gap. And that's a reason to go run experiments, come up with a program, try and tackle a problem somewhere. Segmentation. 100% in benchmarks. 100% there.

Speaker D: I'm glad we're halfway glad we're of one mind there, Sandeep. I knew there was a reason we invited you onto this, because we think alike. Um, Jamie, you're dealing with this with brands big and Small all the time. How do you go about measuring success and defining those KPIs?

Speaker C: So there's always the hero KPIs of revenue and profit. So once we double click beyond that, the two metrics I always recommend are uh, tacos. So total average cost of sale, that's essentially your advertising spend divided by total revenue. And the reason we do this is we don't want to look at just advertising as a cost of purely what that ad spend brings in terms of revenue. Say $20 of ad spend brings $60 of ad revenue. But if it's bringing $100 of all revenue, we want to see how much are we spending from a marketing perspective. How efficient are we in and how does that compare to how much overall sales we're bringing? So that's one core metric we like to use. And then LTV to cac, especially for high frequency businesses. So that's uh, your lifetime value, um, divided by your customer acquisition costs you and that gives us a sense of long term profitability, uh, growth for the company. Are we acquiring high quality customers from an LTV perspective and how much does it cost us to acquire them?

Speaker D: I always get myself in knots when I start thinking about LTV and customer lifetime value or lifetime value, whichever three letter thingy you want to go with. Because I'm like, but there's time involved, you know, so it's like I can't, I can't look at today's LTV to, to optimize my Google Ads because it, there's time involved. So how do, what's the time bands on that LTV vs. CAC? Are you looking at January's recruited, you know, the January recruited cohort and what their LTV CAC was or you how does time factor in?

Speaker C: Great question. I'd say these are brands that have existed for at least a year. So we have annually at least one year of data. And then at that point we look at the blended average. And then also by month, when I say blended average, it's looking at, hey, in 20, say you launched January of 2025. In all of 2025, what was our LTV to CAC ratio? And then by cohort, how are we starting to measure that in 2026? So in January there's, it's a little hard to say what the real LTV is going to look like. But we have some tools that we use that say what their predicted LTV looks like. So okay, based on their predicted LTV and their cac, do we think this is going to be a valuable cohort for us.

Speaker D: Nice.

Speaker C: But typically in January a good window, we like to wait at least six months. So in June, July, we're then looking at January of that same year to see what the true LTV to CAC ratio looks like.

Speaker D: Got you. That was a brilliant explanation. Thank you. Um, Dan, your take on Ed's question.

Speaker B: Well, my fellow panelists are very smart people and they have listed a lot of very good metrics to look at. Profit, ltv, cac. These are all very good things to look at. Well, the way I like, I always like uh, to look at it and like to explain it to E commerce marketers and marketers in general. I think sometimes we are a bit guilty of over complicating things and making them sound a bit more technically challenging than they are. If you're a retailer, you basically have three things you're trying to do. You're trying to sell more things to more people more often. That's basically the framing for what you're trying to do. And then within that there's lots of metrics and lots of things, ways of measuring those things and achieving that success. But if you keep that at the top of your mind that that's the main goal is to try and tell more things to more people more often. You can't go far wrong.

Speaker D: Like it. Nice little summary there, Dan. You're doing my job for me and better than me, which is always appreciated I have to say.

Speaker B: I don't think that's true, Chloe. No one's going to watch this if I did it every morning.

Speaker D: There comes a point in one's career when you realize it's completely fine when other people are doing it better than you. Um, okay, so I'm going to jump to probably a statement that our uh, panel are ah, not expecting because this was not the next one on the list. But I think it fits in with a few kind of subplots that have been going on in our discussion so far today which is that that meeting between conversion rate optimization in which I would include the promotion, incentive optimization, personalization and all those kind of things. All those things that increase likelihood of actually buying and then the marketing and traffic driving side of things and I've so often been in a scenario where they're not playing together and actually I always think that the CRO improvement if I'm the marketer driving the traffic, bring me some conversion rate optimization improvements. I um, am all for that. You're going to make my roas better. You're going to make My CAC better. You're going to make my volume of acquisition better. Are CRO improvements the only way to improve all your marketing performance? Is it a key part of the strategy? Anyone can jump in on this. I'll let you give it a go.

Speaker B: I mean, I'll just say I've got a fairly quick thing which is, yeah, I'm in, in a way I agree. Um, so I've been a marketer for something like 20 years. It's a very long time. I'm very old. I'm much older than I look. Thanks for asking. And um, I would say that generally, yes, that my approach, whenever anyone says to me, you know, what is your general approach to marketing? Like all of marketing and all of trying to grow a business is a continual test and learn program. Right? You're always trying things and if they work, you do them again and you do them more and you keep improving them and optimizing them. If they don't work, you stop doing them, you pull back from them. And so if you think about that, that's what CRO is. At the end of the day, it's all about taking these elements of your, of, uh, your funnel of your, of your, your growth of your, of your system for getting more customers and get to buy more stuff and working out how to make it better and work more efficiently and get more people through. So if you think about that, then yes, that is absolutely the way you can test and learn ways to improve your brand. You can test and learn ways to improve your website, you can test and learn ways to improve your email, your use of promotions. Everything can be, can be, you can be optimized and can be tested and learned. So from that perspective, yes, it's true. Whether you call it CRO or whatever you want to call it, yeah, you should be optimizing everything as much as you can because that is missed opportunities if you don't.

Speaker D: I'm currently swatting up for a webinar I'm doing with worldpay next week. And um, the stats it's possible to get in terms of revenue improvement by improving your credit card failure rate is insane. Mean. I mean it just is not something we often think about. Jamie, do you, when you're working with brands, do you find on the growth side you're bringing the marketing and the CRO together hand in hand?

Speaker C: Yes. So while I think CRO improvements are really critical, I always think, you know, that lower funnel, CRO retention, marketing, a big part of it is also bringing the high quality traffic. Chloe as you mentioned, you got to bring me some good customers. Otherwise CRO can only do so much. So observing what is your workhorse channel or most efficient channel that brings you the most valuable consumers and or what is the right blend of channels given that most people are using MTA multi touch attribution. Maybe it's a combination of I'm making this up meta first, Google Next, um, email or SMS as that third touch point to get them through what is the right sequencing or combination of top of funnel or performance marketing uh touch points to bring the most valuable consumers then making CRO super um, easy. The one other piece I want to call out that I'm working with brands is also brand and product marketing tends to get left out of these conversations. And what I always say is we can only do so much to sell a bad product. So if your product is getting 1 star reviews across the board, whether it's D2C, Amazon or other retailers, we have fundamentally need to fix that as partners versus putting E commerce on the hook for selling a product that's not resonating with customers.

Speaker D: That's such a good point. And as we kind of, as we move into the world of um, the demand capture and the demand generation side of things, or demand m creation side of things, I think that whole, the branding, the creative, the quality of the product, the UGC that comes into it becomes such an important part of the piece. So love that you're bringing that up. Jamie, um, Sandeep, your perspective on this. Do you love it when the marketing team are banging on your door going help me with my cat?

Speaker A: That would be great and I wish people would do it more. Um, I think on the question itself the word all kind, um of muddies the waters a fraction in principle. For a lot of most people's marketing the idea is to serve them something digital, measurable, get more people to then go and click on the thing that you're trying to get them to click on or buy or convert or browse or shop around or you know, whatever the goal is in, in the moment for that particular project. There are forms of marketing which you can't measure immediately. At um, my local train station on the platform, you know I saw some signs for Community Fiber. You're a customer of ours and like how, how do you measure the, the effectiveness of a sign on a trained platform? Um, or optimize the conversion of that? You could probably move it around a bit and see if more people look at the sign. But beyond that, you know, there's only so Far you can go. So if it is things like email efforts and social and getting people to convert from ads as they come to the site, absolutely. You know conversion can help make all of those things better. But you know, if you're running the super bowl advert, I'm not sure how uh, conversion would help with those kind of more brand related things as opposed to messaging based marketing.

Speaker D: And uh, given we're talking brands. Sandeep, do you find that as E commerce has evolved you're now spending more time running tests that are to do with how the branding appears and how the creative appears rather than should the button be on the right or the left? So those kind of softer tests we've

Speaker A: definitely got away from button testing, uh, good 10 years ago, uh, thankfully, uh, we, we milked that in in 2012. That was every single company you can imagine really wanted their buttons to be amazing. Proposition matters a lot more now. You know, there are a lot of good reasons to buy from most retailers. Uh, very often they do a terrible job of picking the right things for the right people to make them aware of. Be it that they are, you know, UK based as opposed to giant global conglomerate or you know, they have free returns or they have good ratings or they have a good support network. You know, there's only so many pixels on a page, so there's only so much you can really put in front of people. But what is the right message and is it the same thing for everyone? Probably not. So a lot of people are kind of steering more in that direction. But there is a lot of focus still on very fundamental things like we have 100,000 products and people can't find what they're looking for. Can we just fix navigation and recommendation engines and all these kind of. Yeah, kind of core UX problems as well still.

Speaker D: Nice. Yeah, sorry, the button is just, it's just too obvious an example for old school CRO, isn't it? But thanks for. Thank goodness we've moved past that. Okay, I want to go back to another one of the statements now. Um, you guys, can you grow profits and sales at the same time? I think sometimes we think that you have to. If you want growth, you can't also be profitable. If you want profits, you have to cut back and you know, reduce costs and do clever things in your experiences. Is it possible to go to increase your profit percentage and increase your overall sales at the same time? Um, Dan, you're unmuted. So I'm going to come to you first because I know you're unmuted but then we'll work our way through everybody.

Speaker B: I will always be unmuted for you, Chloe. I want you to know that. Um, yes, so, yes, you can. I would say so. When we're trying to help a brand grow, obviously. Yes. I remember my early days at Rev Lifter. A guy said to me, like, if I wanted to get people to buy lots more stuff on my site, I could just stick 50% off, uh, across the whole site and everyone will buy more. So, um, you've got people who are coming to your site. Some of them want to buy, some of them don't. Um, some of them are sitting on the fence. And generally when we're talking about who to target with promotions, we're talking about that sort of that middle clump of people. So you've got people who definitely don't want to buy. So you don't want to show them anything. You've got people who definitely do want to buy. And, uh, you don't want to show them anything because they're willing to pay a full price. And then you've got this big clump in the middle who are on the fence, might, might buy with the right offer, might not. And it's understanding as many of those people as possible, like, which ones can you get over the line? But you've got a big chunk of people there who would buy at full price. And we've actually had some retailers we've spoken to who, um, when they've explained, when we had a look at their data and we've seen what they sell a lot of, they've got some hero products that they sell lots and lots of. And we've actually even advised you could probably put the price up on these products. They sell lots and lots. If you're selling lots and lots and you haven't thought about a price increase and there's, uh, probably room there, uh, to make even more money on those products. But you've also got this big batch of other products which you're not selling, which are just sat in your warehouse and they're just costing you money. And those are the kind of things you should be running price promotions on to try and clear. We're trying to really understand the user. So the people who come to your site as much as possible, how likely they are to buy, what their intentions are and whether they should receive an offer. You've got the other side of the data, which is your product data, what you've got to sell, what the margins are on those products or the demand is like, and you're trying to sort of balance those two things. You've got the classic, I don't want to go all economics, but you've got the classic two sides, supply and demand. And if you can try and make those two things marry up, you can make sure that you're selling everything for the maximum amount of money you can sell it for. And that way you can maximize profit, but you can also maximize your sales. So it's definitely possible to do both if you understand as much as possible of the two sides, supply and demand. Uh, and that's what we're trying to have, trying to help, um, retailers do.

Speaker D: Essentially, it does feel like it's a lot easier now. We have the, um, algorithms that can crunch the data and take all these inputs to therefore extrapolate and guess at what is actually going to convert the right person at the right price. It feels a lot more possible than it was 10, 15 years ago. Jamie, um, you're obviously all about growth. Do your clients also want to be growing profits at the same time or is that an unrealistic expectation?

Speaker C: Yes, I feel like that unicorn desire of growing at the same time, um, is very present. I'd say branching out a little bit from the focus on just digital marketing and CRO is thinking about channel differentiation. A lot of them are in retail, on retailer.com, on digital marketplaces and dot com. So understanding what is the purpose of each channel. So if.com is your channel for profit but not for growth, focusing it in to say, okay, if it's for profit, and we want maybe our second, third time most loyal customers to shop there, we want a great retention ecosystem to support that. But we know that Amazon, for example, is more, hey, we're capturing demand of people that are already searching your brand. You're going to get high volume here, but we're going to trade off your full company P L with knowing that you have a more profitable channel like D2C. So I think coming to an understanding with the leadership team to understand what is the purpose for each channel can fundamentally change the structure of the profit versus revenue growth. But thinking about it more holistically and accepting the role of each channel in that objective.

Speaker D: Yeah, I think we all know that to expect the same ROI on a marketplace sale that we get, being very blanket about it, that we get via our own channel is crazy. But if we haven't actually strategically gone, actually we're happy to run the marketplace business at, uh, this ROI and we'll run our D2C business at this ROI, then it must save so much boardroom time, you know, of going, oh, but should it be here? Should it not be here?

Speaker C: Precisely, yes.

Speaker D: Just clarity as well as success. And, uh, I think clarity is such an important point when we're trying to do all this. So, um, Sandeep, profits, sales growth, all at the same time. From a CRO perspective, what do you reckon?

Speaker A: I think if you were to make a little matrix of, you know, those four possibilities, you have, uh, we have hurt sales and profit. We have helped sales, but hurt profit, we have improved profit and, uh, hurt sales whichever way around. I've lost track now. Or we've made sales better, and we've made profit better, and I've seen activity in each four of those, you know, quadrants. If you were to look at profitability, which I know Dan mentioned, you know, every product has different margins. If you were to show people something they still want to buy that is cheaper, um, but higher profit, you know, if you think about, uh, own brand versus, you know, kind of name branded products, for example, you know, you're probably making more of a margin on your own branded products. If people still buy, great, you know, profitability has gone up, but sales may have gone down. But if you fix problems, that would stop people from buying at the same time as getting more sales, so more people buying things, uh, you may well also get people who are on the brink of buying a second product as part of that basket and tip them into, you know, buying two or three or four things because you've solved a genuine problem for them. The fashion example is a very good one. You know, people don't know what size they are, especially if it's a new brand that you've not, you know, repeatedly bought things from. If you were to give them some reassurance, you know, you can ship things back, which I know is painful to handle, uh, but you can return things if you need to. And if, you know, you are a Ted Baker size, whatever at Marks and Spencer, here is the equivalent of, you know, size for you. That may well give people enough of a reassurance to go and buy more than they're expecting to. So I think on, on every direction of possibility of what could happen, both with sales and profit. You know, everything is possible. I don't think anything's off the table. It's just, how committed are you to finding, uh, the problem and the reason why, uh, people aren't buying more, spending more at the same time, you know, all those things.

Speaker D: I love that answer. Thank you, Sandeep. And I'm now resisting the urge to get into the, uh, profitability or non profitability of fashion returns. But let's not go there. Uh, right. We've had some fascinating things discussed. I still feel like we've barely scratched the surface of the topic we're here to discuss because it's so huge. But we've gotten some really excellent stuff which I know is going to help our viewers, um, live and on the replay and on YouTube and. But what I'd love to ask you each before we say goodbye to the audience is, of all the stuff we've talked about, of all the stuff we could have talked about, what would be your key takeaway for someone listening who wants to go about growing the sales and profits within their business? Where in 2026 would you be focusing? What would be your key takeaway for them? And you can bring up anything we've discussed and repeat it, or you can throw something new into the mix. I don't mind. Um, Sandeep, I'm going to come to you first and then we'll go anticlockwise back around to Dash.

Speaker A: I think the first one for me, and the most kind of fundamental thing is this kind of experimental mindset. Not just because that's what we do, but I genuinely believe in it as well. And it's, don't just do things and hope they work. Measure them, make sure they work, roll back if they don't. Give yourself a standing chance. Most large brands I've seen, you know, already have some flavor of this, that kind of understood that experimentation is the right thing to do. And if that's the case, personalization is probably something I've seen most people not do very well, which is just treat people like people. You know, individuals, different needs, different goals, different fears and requirements and all this kind of stuff. Just treat them like humans.

Speaker D: Yeah, I had someone on the podcast, ah, a couple of years ago. I cannot remember what Brandon is. Sorry, everybody. And they were talking about how they had reduced their number of promotional campaigns a year from like 12 to 10 or something. And that had given them the breathing space to actually iterate and learn, whereas before it was just get it out, get out Valentine's Day, get out Mother's Day, get out Easter. And they. Because they reduced it, they'd actually managed to increase overall sales and increase profits because they were actually taking the lessons from each campaign and they had the time to take those lessons and to build those experiments in and to take it forward. So huge, huge potential there. So you look like you wanted to add something, go for it.

Speaker A: Yeah. I just want to say on iterations, it's a subject I've spoken at length about. And even if you are in that kind of experimentation world, so many people will commit to the next three months worth of work and regardless of whether or not they find a winner, they're onto the next thing. And this idea of, hey, we stumbled onto something helpful, let's go drill in and iterate. It's just a massive thing. People do not do it enough and just had to push people to do it whenever I can.

Speaker D: You found a good avenue, go down it, everybody. Don't just carry on with plan A. Yeah, totally, totally get where you're coming from there. Jamie, what's your final thought for the uh, audience please?

Speaker C: Given that most of the audience are sitting in some sort of digital seat, so to speak, uh, with their role, I'd say the one thing for 20, 26 and one big thing I learned last year is, is really staying connected to your product team. And when I say product, not digital product, but your physical product, if you are selling that or if you're selling a SaaS product. Because reinforcing what I said earlier, you can't sell a one star product in the same way you can sell a five star product. So the way I've, the tactical way I found it most beneficial is being able to share consumer insights to say, hey, digital is a really valuable space where you get very specific consumer reviews. We can aggregate it in Claude in chat just to summarize some learnings with privacy pieces in place and let's um, aggregate a lot of these insights to then feed into product development, R and D and creation, um, to ensure that you as an E commerce leader or marketer have the right product to sell to the consumers. So I'd say sometimes that foundation or fundamental step is lost and then you're just trying to pull all these tactics to drive growth. But without that fundamental piece, you're not going to be able to. So stay connected, be friends, but not best friends with your product. Um, partners, let that be friends but

Speaker D: not best friends with the product team. That's very cool. I think I might have to adopt that as my way of saying break down the silos. No, be friends but not best friends. I think that puts it on the head. Love that, Jamie. Thank you. Um, Dan, your takeaway for the audience please.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I would say the goal of any promotion, the goal of basically any kind of activity you do, any bit of messaging, know email campaign, you send to people, an SMS campaign, a pop up, whatever it is, is to try and change behavior, right? You're trying to get someone, if an advert or something, you're trying to get someone who wasn't going to buy something to come and buy it or put more in their basket or buy something again, whatever it is, everything you do, is it changing that behavior or are you just, is this behavior that was going to happen anyway and all you've done is, is jump on board, reward it, flow along with it. So the key thing is whenever you're doing anything, whenever you, you know, whether it's introducing a new promotion, sending a new starting new campaign, sending you messaging out, introducing a new payment option, whatever it is, is it actually incrementally improving things, Are you getting more customers? Are you selling more, are you, uh, whatever it is. So making sure that every time you do that, keep that in mind, high impact changes are definitely more valuable. So what are you doing that is actually going to make a really big difference and change things and if you focus on those things, you're more likely to be successful. You're more likely going to have the time to focus on it and not get distracted by other things that are less important. There are a few small things that are really important if you're a retailer. What you sell, what kind of brand you are, what you stand for, these are the kind of things you want to spend a lot of time on because they're going to, things are going to make a big difference. So yeah, always think about anything you're doing. Is it really going to change behavior? Is it going to have an impact? How do you measure that? How do you prove that's the case and that will guide you in the right direction most of the time.

Speaker D: Excellent words. Thank you all of the panel for being so excellent. Um, you have done a brilliant job of giving our audience loads of great nugget, so thank you all. I'm going to let you all go and relax in the green room now whilst I finish off with everybody.

Speaker B: E Commerce master plan is supported by some of the greatest companies in the E commerce sector. Here's a reminder of who they are.

Speaker D: Well, I hope you found that fascinating. As fascinating as I did recording it. Now, to get your hands on our notes from this episode, head to ecommercemasterplan.com you can use our direct episode short links. That's ecmp.info the number of this episode and that will take you straight to the right webpage and when you get to the website Please get yourself on our email list so you don't miss out on any of the other things we share to help you improve your business. And if you liked this episode, then I reckon you're going to enjoy episode 586 where we have the brilliant Rich Chappell, ex CMO of Gymshark, sharing his playbook for getting from eight to nine figures. It's one of our what would you do WWYD episodes and you can find all of them@, uh, ecmp.info wwyd. Thank you for tuning in to this and every episode of the Ecommerce Master Plan Podcast that you join us for. We bring you a new interview every week because we want to inspire and help you to succeed and thrive with your business. So if you know someone this show can help. Please tell them to listen to the Ecommerce Master Plan podcast. I uh, hope you have a great week and don't forget to keep optimizing.

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