Scaling Your Brand With First-Party Data with Cary Lawrence

Speaker A: Today I, uh, sit down with Kerry Lawrence, who is the CEO and founder of Desile, which is a customer data enrichment platform helping you get the most out of your current first party data for e commerce brands. I'm Nikita from aspectagency.com and let's get into the podcast. Carrie, it's a pleasure to have you on the Scaling ecommerce podcast. As soon as I came across Desile, I really wanted to get you on and I'm glad that you were able to join us today.

Speaker B: Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to chat more.

Speaker A: Perfect. And when I came across how you guys specifically have a unique SaaS solution, you know, you guys help brands grow profitably and we'll get a little bit more into that and what the platform entails, but it's such a niche section of the SaaS market that I really want to get your input on like how you even landed on this, being the CEO and founder of the brand.

Speaker B: Sure, yeah. And I'm happy to give a little bit of overview on our, on our history, um, and just, just high level. So Decile is a customer data and analytics platform where really we're trying to help brands leverage what we think is their most valuable marketing asset, which is that first party data. So um, and this is, this is relevant to our history because we definitely saw sort of the shift happening towards more identity based marketing. And so that was a big impetus for the initial development of Desktop. But our history is I was actually a co founder of another company called Social Code back in um, 2010 and that was more of a digital performance agency. We had our roots in kind of social, social marketing and advertising. Um, but it evolved over time and so part of the company was functioning more like an agency. So there was a media and a creative and an audio arm. And then we were this kind of business unit focused on sort of software and kind of very quickly starting to gain some traction particularly with like mid market merchants, uh, and marketers. And so we're wholly owned by a company called Graham holdings company and so collectively we decided, um, just kind of height of pandemic July 2020, that it was coming to a point where it made sense to split the two companies into two separate companies. So that was kind of the spinoff of what became Decile as a separate legal entity. So we're still owned by the Graham Holdings Company which was formerly the Washington Post company. Um, some fact that people don't always recognize. Um, and then you know, as I said like our goal has really been to respond to some trends that we saw happening in the marketing ecosystem. So for instance, obviously like we work with a lot of E commerce and direct to consumer brands and you know, back, you know, 15 years ago or so it was, you know, there were a lot of kind of entrants coming into this space. And it was great because you didn't have to pay all those high overhead costs for having the storefront. You could just acquire customers through digital platforms and seemingly a great model. But what started to happen over time is the space got very crowded, right. So a lot of different brands entering into the space and simultaneously the customer acquisition costs from platforms like Facebook and Google got very expensive. So what used to be just kind of this race to grow as many customers as possible, grow that top line revenue with no sort of mindfulness to the bottom line. It became increasingly important that if these companies were going to continue to exist and you know, ultimately eventually get profitable, they needed to find those high value customers. The people who were going to be repeat purchasers, who were going to act like subscribers even if they didn't have a subscription offering. And what's interesting to see is like even some of the big names like the Uber and the doordashes of the world, these were also kind of caught in that world of just grabbing as many customers as possible. And now I think you see a shift in the whole ecosystem where people are wanting to make sure that they're finding those right customers and growing profitably. And so a big part of what we do, as I said, is helping those brands to leverage their first party customer data to the fullest. So that might mean building and retaining a more loyal customer base. Again, finding those high value ones, it might be informing product optimization strategies. So helping them to understand, for instance, you know, if you buy this product, what kind of, you know, what kind of customer does that, you know, appeal to? Is this going to bring in a high value customer or is this going to be just a one and done? And so thinking, you know, or what is that product sequencing. So you know, Nikita, if you buy, you know, a shirt first, then you're going to buy jeans, then you're going to buy shoes, like what is that right kind of sequencing, um, and ultimately, just as I said, like helping them to leverage those first party, uh, data metrics and analytics to really be smart about driving business outcomes.

Speaker A: Absolutely. I think you hit the nail on the head, uh, when you explained, you know, everyone at the height of the pandemic was trying to do the Uber model or the Amazon model of Grow at any cost. You know, we need to acquire as many customers as possible. It doesn't matter if we're going in the negative for every acquisition. And then I think tides began to shift around mid last year to now this year at this point, retention becoming such a huge part of a lot of these e commerce brands ecosystems. They maybe not, they maybe were thinking of email marketing or SEO or any of these other channels that were on the back foot instead of Facebook, Google, TikTok, um, they may have thought of those channels but they weren't specifically investing in those channels. And as an email agency, uh, ourselves we're now looking more at customers being interested in the email aspect or the retention aspect, uh, of growing their business. And I think that's very important. I'm glad that you guys have come in as a great solution at this perfect time, perfect place. Uh, and one thing I think for most people that don't understand, I appreciate the high level overview, but for people that don't understand are more, I guess less, um, abstract and they're trying to figure out how does this actually plug into their ecosystem. Like how does this, how does decile actually work with your tech stack? Do you like plug it into Shopify and your klaviyo, your Facebook, how does that work?

Speaker B: Great question because as you and I both know, like if you can't kind of play nicely in someone's existing workflows, you're never going to get that adoption or attraction. So high level, um, quickest answer is like, yes, we are part of the Shopify ecosystem. So we're an app in the Shopify app store. So you can easily download the application straight from there and that's going to automate. All the kind of sales and transaction data will get pulled into our system. But you don't have to be on Shopify really. We're doing all of that kind of data ingestion and hygiene and also something called data enrichment where this is um, important to kind of add additional demographics, psychographic behavioral attributes to your first party data to provide a fuller picture of who these people are. Because as you know, like with all the app tracking transparency changes, when Apple rolled out iOS 14, a lot of the platforms started to lose that signal. Um, so it's helpful to have that additional kind of data appended to your data. But specifically to your question about, okay, how else are we integrated? Well, we have, you know, automated integrations with all the main acquisition, uh, platforms. So your Facebook, you know, Google, Amazon, et cetera. And then anyone who accepts basically individual Customer level data and then also on the remarketing side. So we do have direct integrations also with Klaviyo, um, from the ESP side as well. As attentive SMS marketing has become, you know, increasingly important part of a marketer's playbook. Um, but really we can both ingest data from any source. All we would need is what we would call a match key. So we are pulling it. We need an email address or a, um, home address or a phone number associated with every one of those customers. So you know that this is a known person. So all that data obviously gets anonymized. We have the highest data security systems in place. Um, but again, we want to be able to pull in that data. So my advice to marketers is like, make sure you're collecting that first party data. As I said, this is your most valuable asset and you don't want to have to rely on other platforms to give you kind of that key information about your, your leads and your customers. Um, and then we also make it really easy to activate the data. So if you think about data coming, you know, getting enriched within our system, a lot of out of the box analytics, but then also, okay, well now we can onboard some of these audiences or Personas, um, into those key, um, acquisition and remarketing platforms.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And I'd like to, I like the point that you made about having to actually add on to that first party data. Because you know, for me all I see is whenever we're looking through a client's Shopify or their Klaviyo, we see, you know, first name, last name, phone number, email and their address and it's like, okay, cool. I can tell, you know, this is a Jenna that's a female, she bought something, she bought like this dog toy for her dog or it's a gift, you know, you can tell that. But how do you actually, how do you access those specific data points about this? You know, let's say Jenna, you have her phone, you have her email. Like what kind of catalogs do you guys like scrape from or how does that work internally?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's not scraping, but it's a great question. So basically Axiom is our third party enrichment partner. So they're very well known trusted data provider. So we're licensing their full consumer file. So our teams are doing all that kind of identity resolution and data integration in house. So if we take, you know, Jenna, your example, we have her email and then, you know, we also have some information about Jenna because, you know, Axiom has information about, you know, she likes to buy, you know, high end beauty products or she likes to, you know, she's interested in the arts or maybe she lives in, you know, the Northeast. Like all these additional data points and those all get appended and again we're not looking at. Marketers aren't, we're not looking at like Jenna specifically. All that data gets enriched and combined and then it moves into our analytics environment. So it's anonymized at that point. But we do know that if you want to create an audience, you know, it's helpful to know one. You know, I always say like better inputs, better outputs if you can, if you can immediately segment. So we have segmentation and comparative analytics built within the platform as well. So I can say, okay, let's say I'm looking at my bag of almonds, but let's say you're, you know, in an almonds provider, then you can go ahead and you know, cut your audience into the top 10% people who are going to buy almonds like every single week or those highest value folks. Um, and then you uh, know, you want to know again additional kind of behaviors and information about those folks. You might also want to discover new things that you didn't know about them. So, you know, everyone's talking about AI and the power of AI today. Well, we've been using AI in our platform since, you know, since inauguration, since, since we officially launched. So basically the way that we use it and we think for a practical application is we develop Personas because everyone wants to be more personalized in their marketing. So we're going to take those first party attributes. So things like, okay, what's the average order value, what you know, what was the last time they purchased, et cetera. But also those, those softer, more demographic and psychographic attributes. And then our, you know, our algorithms and leveraging, you know, our data science team which leverages AI, it's going to spit out a couple of Personas. So if you're thinking about who's buying almonds, they're not all the same. It might be some like moms with small children like me. It might be some like, you know, urban cool people like you. It might be totally different. Um, you know, people may be a whole health nut. People are really into like exercise and health science. And so being able to understand those nuances is important. Not only from, you know, how do you think about tailoring your creative messages, but, and I alluded to this earlier, if you think about some of the, the channels that marketers are engaging with their customers now like SMS or texting. That's, that's very intimate and personal. Like I don't want people just blasting my phone with irrelevant messages.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: I want to know that they're sending. If it's a clothing brand, I like, I don't want them just to say hey, we have a site wide sale that's 15% off. I want them to say Carrie, you know that dress that you tend to like and buy that is now on sale. And in fact like you know, we know that you probably need to replenish your wardrobe but you know like I want it to be highly personal personalized for me. So I would say like big trends that we're seeing and that we're focused on again identity based marketing, enhanced personalization and really just helping to kind of understand how to get more of those high value customers.

Speaker A: I really like that, that whole entire side of what you guys offer, specifically being able to consolidate all those different data points that you have about the customer and put that into a psychographic of like this is this buyer, this is what they typically look out for. This is the typical areas that they live in. Here's their lifestyle in a nutshell essentially. And you can tell based off like because I know this, my, my girlfriend does branding for a living and she spends a lot of time looking over, going through Google Analytics, going through all the customer data, the purchase history and you know, setting up those personalizations. And I think just utilizing this would save you know, a boatload of time. Instead of manually auditing everything, you can have all of that data already pre populate through you know, your partner Axiom and create those um, those avatar Personas.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean you said something, you kind of reminded um me that, that something that's so important which is you know, just democratizing access to this data. So we would often like just, just put ourselves in context would say we're, we're like a CDP but custom built for marketers. And what we hear a lot is it's not that marketers don't always have access to their data but maybe it lives with like the CRM team or the business intelligence team. And it's really siloed. They're only getting like refreshes every quarter. It's not really easy to act on. So we hear over and over again from our clients that oh my gosh, like decile has helped us, our whole company to be analytics minded and just the ability to as ah, you said, look at cohorting by any Dimension. So not just the month that this customer group was acquired, but like, what's the difference between, you know, a male versus female buyer? What's the difference between someone who buys overalls versus sweaters? Like, so, you know, having that access to these, you know, business critical insights is really, can be challenging sometimes. So we try to make that an easier process for folks.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And I. That's a really good point of like siloing off data because the amount of times I joined like a marketing team or being a part of like, um, the marketing department of a brand and you know, we handle the email side of the, of things for them and it would be like, hey, can we get this list of all the buyers you've had over the last year so we can import it, create the segment, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, yeah, hold on, let me get to this guy to get this list. And it's like, it's such a shit show trying to get.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's like two months later, then you get the one thing that you needed.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Which kind of segues into a really good point, or at least a good question that I had about what you guys do and is obviously you can have all these different segments that you can set up based off of different customer data points, but is it easy to export those data points or does it have to live in platform? Cause my first thought is like, okay, cool. You know, I have this customer list of everyone that is high, is likely to be, you know, 80 to 100k earner. We'd want to target those audiences. We can build. Can we build those look likes off of Facebook or maybe retarget them through Klaviyo? Like, how does that work?

Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's. It's a great question. And so we've built API integrations between, uh, you know, decile and all these platforms. So literally you're creating that audience within decile. And then we've already connected all those ad accounts, whether it's through, you know, Facebook, Google, Klaviyo, kind of, et cetera. And then you simply, you know, select the audience and you say send it to this platform. And you know, it's. It sends those IDs over. And so then you have the ability to go ahead and, you know, up, um, you know, activate them on the platforms. The nice thing too is every time we get a new file, it's not only is it refreshing the full file with a decile, but any segments that you created also get refreshed as well as Any ad sets on those platforms. So like you're. Yeah, it's dynamic so you don't have to go back in and re update it. It's automatically getting refreshed. So I think that you know, being able to constantly, you know, pull in those additional transaction records and customer records is just, it's just so important.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, absolutely. Like for me it's just uh, like it's one thing having that data, but it's another thing being able to actually use that data in the tech stack that we have or the marketing stack that we have because it's like, okay, cool, we have this customer list, we know their psychographics, we know their interest, but like what do we do with this? And I think that's a lot of problem. That's the biggest problem that um, the software solution that you guys created that customers might have of like, okay, we have this, but how do we utilize it? Is there a specific, I guess a better question would be what is the biggest use case that you see like your customers using with decile?

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think um, primarily it's one. The first is just learning more about who these people are. The nice thing about having those additional third party attributes is they can use those for insights and analytics, but also to create better audiences. So I would say the segmentation piece and like sort of the ability to leverage these additional data points, um, it just creates for you know, better marketing and then tracking as well. So we have a whole out of the box E commerce reporting suite. So you can also see, but again by any dimension. So I could say, okay, nice. This marketing channel is driving a higher LTR customer than this marketing channel or this campaign is bringing in a higher level customer than others. So it's not just like that initial surfacing of insights, but tracking them over time and starting to see, see. Okay, so now we know this is the Persona we really want to go after. Um, let's you know, find more of those people, activate them. But then let's also see um, every new customer that we're acquiring, which, which percentage do they get mapped to? Are we increasing our high value customers, uh, over time or not? So I think that's a piece that a lot of folks miss too is like you need to be able to like track how things are changing over time.

Speaker A: Right, right. And you guys are also responsible if I'm just to make sure that I'm hearing things correctly. You guys also do third party tracking, like triple whale hiros, all of those. Or is that.

Speaker B: No, that's Pixel based tracking. Remember we're the identity based world, so everything we do is first party database measurement. So basically every time someone then converts if they've activated an audience, you know, from desktop and then we, we pull that conversion data back in and so then we actually have known information versus just a pending pixels which as you know, those, you know, there's a question like are they still going to be around, you know, 10 years from now when everyone starts to kind of wipe those, those cookies?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I just wanted to make sure because you mentioned like re feeding that data back in, I'm like, okay, that sounds something like what Triple Whale does, but I don't want to, you know, mess things up here. But I'm glad you clarified that because that makes a lot more sense. You'd rather go off of data that actually exists rather than, you know, maybe someone, a random user clicking on your website five times and you count that as five different users. So, so that, you know, first party data always wins in that regard. Now obviously there's a lot that goes into setting this up and making sure that everything works correctly. You know, you have to integrate all these different tech stacks, you have to go through the workflow and you know, essentially what I'm trying to see here is like how much, how intensive is that onboarding process? Because I know every tech stack is different and obviously the easier it is, the less friction there is. But also sometimes there's things you gotta do there.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's a great question. I mean obviously like being integrated within the Shopify Commerce platform makes everything very easy. So literally depending on how much data the marketer has, you can click the button within five minutes, install the app and you know, usually within about 24 hours we have all of the data integration, the identity resolution, all that has already happened. And then it's a matter of, you know, we do have a really strong customer success team that's not just for troubleshooting, um, but also, but also for helping to, you know, curate those key metrics and dashboards and surface those insights. But um, it's, we, we try to make it very seamless and that is why we have a lot of those automated connections too. So it's just a matter of saying, okay, let's hook up your account in here and then from then on, you know, we're, we're off and running. So I would say for the most part within a week we have everything up and running. Um, now obviously we have some of the larger clients who have, you know, more complicated More sophisticated data integration needs. They might have multiple sources and it's a matter of making sure everything is mapping so that it also syncs with like what their current view. And the nice thing too is we sit on Snowflake as our is our data warehouse is built into our system and that's also what a lot of our clients are on. So it does make the sinking pretty easily. But um, it's a great question because it can't, it can be complicated if you don't have the right platform and technology infrastructure.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I was just looking through like all the brands that you guys have worked with. I'm like, yeah, these are pretty big brands so I'm sure they have like dedicated marketing teams that are like dedicated marketing analysts that look through all the data and go through this and actually have the time to set all this up versus you know, a brand that's doing maybe like 100k a month that may not be as qualified or maybe they're not getting as much throughput on uh, the customer side so maybe they won't find the best use case for them. I guess in your, in your, in your opinion and like in your experience, like what has been like the most ideal customer? Is there a specific ARR that they have to hit or any specific number of customers that they have to hit?

Speaker B: Another great question. Yeah, so our kind of typical, like our icp, if you will, our ideal client profile, it tends to be um, more mid market. So think brands with annual revenue of about 10 to 200 million. So kind of in that range, we tend to work well with people who have faster moving data, meaning quicker purchase cycles, um, in multiple products. So the categories that we work a lot with, fashion and apparel, health and beauty, home goods, consumables, those are all really great categories for us. Um, so you know, that's typically. We're also the reason we like kind of that mid market space is it's really an underserved population. If you think about like we're providing a lot of these capabilities that traditionally they didn't have access to at an affordable price point. It used to be like, okay, well you have to, you know, hiring a live ramp for onboarding. Then you need, you know, if you were to try to contract with the third party data provider separately, that would be cost prohibitive. If you then want to try to like connect to all the platforms that

Speaker A: would be building house, you know.

Speaker B: Yeah, so it's, we've tried to really kind of make sure that what we're Building helps to really drive the business and that it is at an affordable price point. And the nice thing about you know, the way that Shopify set up is, is it is month to month if you want so you know there's not a huge 24 month contract needed.

Speaker A: Yeah, that definitely makes it a lot easier. And it's one of those solutions where I didn't realize that a lot of that mid market actually needs because a lot of the brands that we work with is sub 10 million a year. There are, there's a few that are doing like 30, 50 a year but it's not for the most part like it wouldn't make sense for anything below that and I can definitely see why because there's just not enough volume going on within those brands.

Speaker B: Yeah, you kind of need at least, I mean it's not, we can like we've worked as kind of like starter to help some growth brands, but you kind of need about 10,000 customer records at least to uh, kind of really extract the full value.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: So again, no matter what size you are, same advice, start collecting that first party data.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Now, anything else that I may have missed about Decile that you'd want to cover?

Speaker B: No, no, I think again as I said, as we've discussed, in addition to how great the platform is, the customer success team is top notch to five star reviews. So we're excited and like continuing to grow and we feel like it's an exciting space to be in because as I said like I think personalization um, is only going to become more important and being able to kind of leverage a lot of the predictive analytics that we have built in to our platform, those are only going to get more exciting with all the advances in AI.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I can't, I can't agree with you enough there. Um, now with that said, where's the best place to find you or to find Decile?

Speaker B: Yeah, well people can email me directly. It's Carrie c a r yesile.com so always happy uh, to connect with folks there. Um, for Decile obviously. Um, you can email me there. I'll connect you to the right people or you can find us on the Shopify app store.

Speaker A: Fantastic. Thanks again for coming on Carrie and uh, it was a pleasure having you on.

Speaker B: Thanks so much. So great to chat with you.

Speaker A: Thanks again for joining us on the Scaling E Commerce podcast. If you enjoyed it or learned something new, remember to like subscribe and leave a review. It really helps out with the algorithm. If you want email marketing tip delivered straight to your inbox on a weekly basis from yours truly. Then check out the link below or in the Show Notes to subscribe and join my newsletter. If you're a DTC brand with at least 10,000 email subscribers and interested in starting a conversation to work together, then go to aspect and agency.com and we'd love to chat with you. And if you want to stay up to date with anything email and sms, just follow me on Twitter Nikita Vakhrushev or check the Show Notes for the link. With that said, I'm Nikita and I'll see you in the next one.