Tackling retention & BFCM strategy with Every Man Jack

Welcome back to Hit Subscribe, where we chat with key leaders in the e-commerce space to discuss the present and future state of commerce optimization. I'm your host, Kat, content marketing strategist at ReCharge. On today's episode, we chat with Troy Petronoff, who handles all things retention at EverymanJack. We dive into BFCM strategy and how things may or may not look a little different this year as a result of all the changes happening in the economy.

So I'm here with Troy Petronoff from EverymanJack. And Troy, why don't you tell me a bit about what you do at your company and what your brand is all about? Awesome. Yeah.

Hey, Kat. So I work at EverymanJack. We are in the men's grooming space. We're one of the first kind of naturally derived grooming brands for men.

We started in 2007. And we're very much a retail-first company. So we're in stores like Target and Whole Foods and CVS and things like that. But I work specifically on our e-commerce side.

So we migrated to Shopify early last year. We were on Magento prior. It's been a fun over a year of just really immersing myself in the Shopify ecosystem. And I lead retention.

So I'm our senior retention marketing manager. So I handle all things, email, SMS, subscription. We have a brand new rewards program that I just clicked publish on two hours ago. And I also manage our customer support team as well.

You do everything around there, right? Yeah, it's a fun project. The company, it's been around since 2007, like I said, but it's still a small company. And then the e-commerce side of the business and my team, it feels and runs kind of like a startup within the overall company.

So it's kind of one of those, you have a lot on your plate, but a lot to learn. And it's a fun gig. Can't complain. Yeah.

And I feel like for that size of a company with retention efforts, having your hand in every cookie jar is actually probably a bit of a benefit for you. Because then you can kind of see from the customer service side, you're interacting directly with customers and interfacing with them directly. So you get to hear them face to face with their experiences. But then you're also working on the e-commerce side.

So like SMS and the strategy there. Does that play out in your day to day? How are you handling everything? Yeah, no, that's a very true statement about having visibility within just customer interactions and customer support.

That became a natural fit for me to take on that team, which happened at the beginning of this year. And I think that's an overall trend, I would say, within e-commerce or at least brands or the community that I'm aware of, where retention works hand in hand or sometimes not quite part of the same team. But there's a lot of overlap and connection between retention teams and customer support teams because, and this was true at previous roles and companies, I always had a very strong relationship with our support team.

And even if it was just like, oh, hey, guys, I created a promo code for our Labor Day sale. Here's all the details. Can you help me test it out? to things much further.

And now I spend a lot of time in Gorgias and work on setting up chat campaigns and automations. And I think there's a huge kind of overlap with those roles. And obviously, one of the strongest components or factors in a brand's retention is just those customer experiences and making sure that you're communicating shipping times, pre-communicating any issues that might arise if there's like shipping issues and just a million other things. I think it is the customer's experience and their interactions that they have them with the support team.

That's probably much more of a factor in their retention long term than potentially a promo code that they were offered two months after purchase. Oh, yeah, for sure. And especially from the side of the consumer as well, it actually does play a really big role in whether I stick with a particular brand, which I think is important for D2C specifically, because for brands that are bigger and kind of exist everywhere, like the relationship between the customer is a little bit harder to create like a close knit relationship.

But for GDC brands like EverymanJack, that relationship is really important. You said that the company has been around since 2007. How long have you been with the company? Yeah, so I joined about two and a half years ago.

So I joined kind of deep COVID. The company is pretty much, I think, almost more than doubled since then. I'm still remote, but we now have an office. The company is based out of the Bay Area.

I'm in Los Angeles. Just speaking of e-commerce, I came in when the e-commerce boom was happening. We were selling hand soap, hand sanitizer, which are not our core categories. Everything was booming at that point in the e-commerce space.

is kind of a nice time to come in. Yeah, that's the perfect time. And I mean, I guess I'm curious because it's been quite a bit of time now. I would say, have you found that the consumer behavior has changed a lot in the recent year or so or has more or less stayed the same?

I would say it has changed a lot. And for us, again, we're in most retail stores that you would buy a body wash for a guy. So even if our e-commerce numbers have leveled out compared to previous years. It doesn't mean our customers aren't purchasing us at Target when they're there or CVS.

So it's not a huge cause for concern for us. People are buying in stores again. And I think if you look at inflation and all these different economic factors, I think there is a lot of focus now more on deals, saving money as opposed to brand loyalty. that's not a general rule but luckily we are an affordably priced just men's grooming brands our prices on e-commerce set by our retail stores basically we can't sell body wash for 25 dollars if it 10 in walmart we are seeing a shift kind of back towards retail shopping or amazon i mean amazon is massive for us as well But e is still holding strong But I think especially just like looking at you know or talking with operators at other brands, I think everyone's kind of seeing like a tapering off.

But there's a lot you can do to keep things healthy, luckily. Yeah. So has that changed then your strategy with your e-commerce side? What does that balance kind of look like now between e-commerce and in-person?

Yeah, for sure. So I think, especially when I came on, again, my team was brand new. The e-commerce side of the business was, I think, a year old when I came in. And it was run by our creative team managing our website.

I came in when they started hiring e-commerce experts, if you will. So at the time, again, I mentioned we were our own little startup within the company. We were working almost in a bit of a silo where it was like, we have our goals, Like, let's not even think about the retail side or the Amazon side. That's definitely shifted.

So now we really focus on... One of our big focuses is adding a lot more educational content to our website because we realized, and this is how I shop personally, if I'm in a target, I'm someone that is kind of an obsessive researcher. So I will pull out my phone and read reviews of the product that I'm buying. Yeah, a lot of people do that.

So we were like, you know, we should also optimize our website for those people and not only, you know, treat this as a DTC business because it's not solely a DTC business. So, you know, we did a big website redesign recently. Our product pages were fully redesigned about two months ago, I think. So ensuring that we have reviews displayed prominently, we have video.

So we use video wise to embed TikTok style content, video content, our PDPs. So if you're looking at a beard product, there's going to be short form videos. How do you use beard oil versus beard balm? And what is an optimal beard routine and all of that?

So shifting our mindset to answer your question, we moved and shifted our mindset away from pretending like we're a DTC business to also considering how can we optimize the site for people browsing but are going to transact on retail? Or how can we also promote Amazon as well? We experimented with the Buy With Prime feature that they launched, I think, earlier this year. So thinking more cross-channel, omni-channel has definitely been kind of a shift.

Yeah, I love that. And I think that's definitely come up a lot with a lot of brands, just multi-channel, omni-channel, like everywhere you can get in front of your customers, wherever they shop and encourage them in whatever which way to buy your specific brand, whether it is through educational content or customer testimonials. It sounds like a lot of brands are doing that more nowadays. So that definitely tracks and it's really cool.

Do you think that that has had any effect on your strategy for the upcoming holidays? I know you mentioned like a lot of people are looking at deals and whatnot, but how's that kind of looking for you guys? So our deal strategy is not too dissimilar from what it was in years past. We do a mix of discounts and free gifts.

I think we're leaning more into free gifts this year. It's a really, We found it to be a really useful way to introduce guys to skincare, beard care, which are two categories of focus for us. I should mention our body wash, shampoo, and deodorant are and have always been our biggest categories and products. But we have beard care.

We have SPF. We have skincare. Those are really helpful. I think once anyone finds a face wash that works for them or beard care products, those are products in categories that are more prone towards loyalty and retention.

So really trying to kind of boost those and using them as a free gift has proved valuable for introducing guys to products. There is a big component of education specifically for guys, men, and personal care. one of the i think trends from covid was the whole self-care thing and i came in again during that time but like it's so obvious just looking at the explosion of men's grooming brands in the past few years that i think guys now care more about what products they're using on their face and beard care i think it's like it's booming right now there's huge growth in that category I think people just used to use the hair.

I don't have a beard, but the hair shampoo and conditioner, if anything. And now, I mean, there's tons of products, beard oil, butter, balm, and a million other to kind of help just beard, facial hair growth. So education is big. But another kind of trend we've noticed is in years past, the gender split during holiday time was it would skew.

I mean, the female purchaser rate would explode for obvious reasons like gifting. We have a partnership with Marvel and that's kind of our play towards getting younger consumers in. It's like, hey, we have a Black Panther body wash and we have this collector's box that's huge during the holiday. And oftentimes it's moms purchasing for the kids.

But we've noticed that the split has been kind of evening now and actually like the male side has been growing. So making sure that our holiday offers are not only geared towards gift shoppers, but also just towards our everyday male shoppers that just want to take advantage of the deal. I think my first year, one of our wasn't a huge mistake, but like our messaging around our holiday offers was all around like, hey, you know, here's a deal on gifts for your male loved ones. It was just like after the fact we like I was kind of dumb We probably like should have segmented better or spoken directly towards guys that just want to deal It not only gift shoppers purchasing at this time So that one specific kind of switch up in our strategy is becoming just more and more aware that we need to speak to those two different audiences more efficiently I'm sorry, did you say you have a partnership with Marvel?

Yes. That's crazy. So that happened before I came in. So the technicalities of how that was set up, I am not privy to.

But it's, yeah, it's long running. And we have, we sell individual products branded around four of the main superheroes. So we have a Walmart exclusive with Thor. You can only get that one in Walmart.

But on our website, we have Iron Man, Captain America, Black Panther, and Spider-Man. And then we have a collector's box. And that is huge, especially on the paid social side. Our Marvel ads kill it.

The Marvel collector's box is our product that sells out probably four or five times a year. and it's huge at the holidays and we also have something new on the marvel and launching during this holiday season that i can't spoil but it will be exciting it's a really fun product and it really is great for i think parents are always trying to figure out ways to get young kids to like use deodorant and have healthy hygiene habits and throwing a marvel character on there has seemed to work.

If you look at the review, his parents are very appreciative. For getting people to actually participate in their hygiene. But yeah, there was something that you mentioned that I wanted to just touch on, which is you changed your strategy a bit to move away from just the gifting to your male loved one to something more for people who are just like looking for a good deal. I feel like that's actually so spot on because a lot of my guy friends and people that I talk to are waiting for BFCM to buy things that they are going to buy anyways, knowing that they'll probably go on sale and buy in bulk or buy technology and device knowing that they're going to go on sale.

So I feel like that is important, especially today. I'm sure you've seen the economy and the way that it is. People are a lot more cognizant of their spending. You already spoke to it a bit, but is there anything additional that I think you might have on how that's changed, what your holidays are going to look like, and then post-holiday as well, how you're going to be looking at retaining those customers?

Yeah, for sure. So I mean, again, we have never really on the e-commerce side shied away from offers during holiday. I know a lot of brands in the past, e-commerce brands would shy away or just never, I think away, like never ran promos. but these days with the economy and the place that it is i think away i can't remember it was last year but i remember seeing tweets and stuff around like away is running promos clear sign of economic struggle so i think that aversion to running offers during the holiday periods is kind of thrown out the window but yeah i mean one play that we're still locking down our plans But one push that I am encouraging is a gift card strategy, a physical gift card strategy that will throw in, I don't know, maybe $10 gift card with an expiration date.

That's one test I want to run is like the retention. If we add an expiration date to that gift card or not, it's a highly giftable item or you can just use it for yourself. And that is kind of one of the tests or plays that I have in mind this year to try and retain those gift shoppers or just any shopper during that period. To your point, people just are trained now and they know like even Prime Day, if you're not even running Amazon Prime offers, like a lot of brands run sales during that time.

So we all have our content calendars with the big sale moments and customers are aware. Customers are smart and know basically the sale calendar for the year. I personally have a bunch of things in my Amazon cart and I'm waiting for Prime Day in October to purchase those. So we want to make our offers look appealing.

Again, one of the things... It's not... If you look at the company as a whole, it's not a bad thing. But for the e-commerce side of the business, which again, is my focus, we almost do compete with...

It's just easier to buy if you're only out of body wash. You might as well just pick it up the next time you're at Whole Foods. But I want our customers to come to our website and place an order of $50 or more. So we have to have offers and free gifts and things that make it attractive.

We just want to provide it very easy and automated as much as possible experience for our customers to get the products they want and need and love with very little work. That's so important. I think if you are trying to encourage customers to go from in person to online, like reducing any barriers or friction to converting is so important. And so you talked a lot about the holidays and how you're going to be approaching that.

And even after the holidays, it sounds like you're implementing some gift cards. Is there anything else kind of on your radar, speaking from the retention perspective, that's going to be a focus of yours entering 2024? It sounds like you're looking at rewards. You just implemented that.

What's the focus? I would say soft launch rewards this morning. It's always a little daunting. There's so much technicality and just there's a lot of rigging behind the scenes in the back end for a rewards program.

So my soft launch strategy is to set it live and not send out any marketing emails for probably a week just so we can kind of see any issues or anything coming into our CS team and tackle those before we announce to hundreds of thousands of people. But subscription is big for us for the new year. We are on recharge. We, I think, made the mistake of going a little too custom with our setup.

So one of my big focuses is kind of simplifying and moving towards out-of-the-box recharge customer portal and just going as simple as we can because it makes it easier on the customer side, but also just on the subscription management side that I have to deal with and our web team has to deal with So really leaning into subscription and marketing it more and just making more people aware of it for 2024 is my big focus Rewards was kind of the focus of 2023. There was a million other focuses, but that was kind of one of the bigger projects.

So subscription is my big project for 2024. Nice. And then for simplicity, are you talking about simplicity for the customer or for you guys? Both.

Okay. Yeah. When we moved to Shopify, it was actually my first time outside of small projects with friends. It was my first time really working in the Shopify ecosystem and the first time for most of my coworkers as well.

So there was a lot of learnings. And I think one of our now looking back things that I would have done differently is we came to our dev agency with like, you know, here's our vision. This is what we want our subscription program, for example, to look like and how we want it to function. and we kind of temporarily forgot that the whole appeal of Shopify is there's all these apps that just kind of do everything you need functionality-wise out of the box.

So we over-designed, I would say, our subscription program and had to spend a few months kind of untangling things and we have a few more months to go on that. The goal is to obviously make it easier for our customers to build a subscription box or subscription order, but also by going very custom on the subscription customer portal, we run into technical bugs here and there where our CSTM is, their hands are tied behind their back and they can't really help a customer. And we have to turn to our dev agency and file a ticket and wait two weeks and stuff like that.

So untangling that web is a focus for sure. Honestly, yeah. I feel like a lot of brands are also running into that just because everyone's kind of strapped for resources, whether it's financial or time or actual people. Simplifying everything is honestly just the way to go.

It sounds like right now, I think a lot of brands, when they get the resources at the time to complicate things, but make things a bit more advanced and customized, they really hop on that. But then you realize that there's maintenance after. And so, yeah, I think a lot of people are moving towards simplification. So that's really that tracks.

I mean, the theme and the lesson to take away, I think, is we thought we knew what the optimal experience would be and what the customer would want. And built that right away where we probably should have just started simple and learned what the limitations were, what our customers wanted, and then added that on after we determined the need. So I think that probably applies to everything or could apply to everything, not just a subscription program. So that was definitely one of my big lessons learned.

Yeah, a key learning. I feel like we covered a lot of really good stuff for the retention side. I think a lot of brands listening are probably going to be taking away some of the stuff you mentioned with gift cards. I feel like that's quite innovative.

And then probably looking into rewards and things like that. As we round out this episode, I'm curious on the less professional technological software side. I normally ask my guests something a bit more personal. So I'm just curious for you, is there anything that you've been listening to, whether it's an audio book or a podcast or a particular person that you're really listening to and getting a lot from that you would recommend to people in the same space as you, like with retention, working in e-commerce?

Oh boy, that is a good question. Um, let's see. I have waves. I've always been a big podcast guy, rapidly pulling up my Spotify as I ramble.

Um, but I totally have waves where I go like full on business podcast mode for a couple months. And then I swing towards, I'm a big like movie, I don't know, media fan. So my phase the last few months has been like movie podcasts, which I totally recommend. That is so fine.

This might be cheesy and like, I don't know, but I like health podcast too. I think that especially anyone, I probably, I won't recommend specific ones, but I work remotely. I sit at my desk all day. I think it is smart to learn about just how to be healthy because especially e-commerce stressful lately.

It's probably a broad statement that rings true for most people. So my general recommendation there would be just like learn about and listen as my learning method to experts that teach you how to eat healthy. Sleep has been huge for me and learning how to sleep better. I've never been a good sleeper.

So yeah, my general, I don't want to be like a Huberman bro, but like, Oh my God. And you have been alongside with, you know, movies, like the fun stuff has been, been listening to lately. And I haven't been listening to a ton of business stuff, honestly, but you know, black Friday podcasts will start coming out sooner. I'm pretty sure I'll go down that rabbit hole too.

Yeah. And honestly, that is so fair. As soon as you started talking about health and sleep instantly in my head, I was like, this man listens to Huberman Labs. Not every episode.

I'm not like, I have a few different ones. My podcast queue is, hey, get a little ADD and just subscribe to a million. That's so relatable. But I did listen to an episode yesterday.

So it comes to mind. I literally listened to an episode this morning. I don't know. I'm on that wave right now.

Yeah. I think it's a healthy one to be on, you know. Could be worse. Anyways.

Yeah, it definitely could be worse. There's a lot of podcasts out there that are very interesting, but I digress. We want to thank Troy once more for joining us, and you can find EverymanJack at everymanjack.com.

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