RETENTION GURU, Jimmy Kim "How to Turn Your Shopify List Into a Profit Machine"

Jay Myers: it's such a pleasure to have the legend who the podcasting legend himself from the awesome pod are you the official host of the Awesome Pod?

Jimmy Kim: I am the official host and moderator. At least I call myself that.

Jay Myers: you're the guy that keeps the other three, like in check, right? Like it's, if it wasn't for you, that show I don't think would happen.

Jimmy Kim: Yeah, I do everything on the show notes to developing the shows to post-production. So yeah, I would say I'm in charge of the organization there.

Jay Myers: We won't throw throw 'em under the bus, but like we, we all know

Jimmy Kim: this they'd be willing to admit this. Don't worry.

Jay Myers: Brian does the wraps, you know, like John's got the zingers and Yeah. No, it's such a fun, fun podcast. So for those of you who don't know, we're going to obviously get into some good stuff right away here, but Jimmy is host of the awesome pod.

And it is a fantastic podcast. It's probably one of my favorite podcasts for related to e-commerce. It's kind of one of the only ones that I would say is like, you know what? It reminds me of? I don't know if this is what you're going for or not. So it's, dunno, you'll take this, but do you listen to the all in pod?

Jimmy Kim: Of course.

Jay Myers: Yeah. So I feel

Jimmy Kim: exactly the initial idea around it. And then we kind of, you know, took our spin on the thing. An idea.

Jay Myers: All in but for e-commerce, is that the Yeah. I love it. So anyways, check it out for all those listening. But you are more than just a host of a podcast. , You have such a incredible history in the e-commerce space, which is why I wanted to reach out to you to bring you on. 'cause I, I think there's a ton of value that I think you'll bring to the listeners.

And you know, even just from things I see you post on LinkedIn and always sharing stuff, you speak at events. Actually, let's do a quick intro 'cause I only before we into it, gimme your background, kind of where you came from and how you got to where you are today in a nutshell.

Jimmy Kim: it's a long background. I've been on the internet for quite some time. I guess like, I'll kind of start from the beginning, right? I, I'll first age myself because people will realize I've been, I'm like a dinosaur in this space when it comes to how long I've been around. But I started my first career, my first life in the car business, believe it or not.

That's where I started all the way back to 2000. So, I did a lot of things in the car business. At my peak pinnacle. I was a general manager for three Saturn stores. If you even remember what Saturn is, it's

Jay Myers: The one that you could, the one that you could dent your leg into and it would pop back out,

Jimmy Kim: the one you could kick

Jay Myers: yeah.

Jimmy Kim: you could kick, and part of our demo is to kick a car,

Jay Myers: Yeah. They did. I went to a dealership once and that was the first thing that the guy did is he stuck his knee into the door and he goes, watch this, popped it in and it popped right back out.

Jimmy Kim: Yep, that's it. So that's where I started. And then I fell in love with the internet in around 2008, right at that recession bubble, the last big one that we had. And I turned online, and that's where I started my internet career. So my journey started off working for someone, learning about the internet, learning about marketing, and, ended up leading into my first, very first company. And my very first company was in affiliate marketing. Actually, I fell in love with the idea that, well, you could be a middleman and make money by promoting other people's products. And so that was how I started and it kind of drove me into this content creator space where I started teaching people other stuff.

And that led me into my first brand, actually. That's how I ended up in a brand. So I was I was an owner and my, my story goes like this. I had a friend who had a men's streetwear clothing retail boutique store, right? He was selling other people's stuff. It was a storefront, all that stuff. He came to me one day because he needed money.

He had created his own line of clothes, a cut and soak men's wear clothing line, and he needed 50 K from me. So I gave him the 50 K and he went and produced it, and then he sold out of it over whatever term. And I remember going back into his store and saying like, you know, let's go figure out how to make my terms and I'll get my money back out of it.

And I said, Hey, how did you do? And he is like, well, we did it well in retail. We did some wholesale, yada, yada, yada. And I said, well, how'd you do online? He was like, we don't have it online. And I was like, this is 2013. And I'm like, this is opportunity. And that's all I hear. Right? So we spun up the first Shopify store with him, right?

So 2013 I said, let me become a partner and let's go do this. So over the next four years, it was kind of an incredible journey. We went from expanding our storefront to shrinking our storefront and creating this huge warehouse, and we went almost fully direct to consumer. We stopped carrying third party clothing and we were selling our own clothing.

We're doing all cut and sell manufacturing, and I learned a lot during that time. And so. That was probably my second like, journey into building and scaling something really fun. We scaled to about, about a $10 million business at that point. And it was pretty good back in 2013 when, you know, direct to consumers quite early still at that point.

And that led me to where I, you know, where I went next, which was Sendlane. So the story of Sendlane was one of those fun stories. Back in 2013 when I was a content creator, I was an affiliate marketer and I had this clothing store, myself and two other people, we all had this problem. We loved email.

We couldn't find products that did what we wanted it to do. So we thought we were super smart and that we would just go invest money and we'd go build this product. And we did somehow and it was really bad, but it worked and it did what we needed to do and it helped us make money. In 2017 I had a, you know, an acquisition offer on my company.

I wanted to exit my partnership in the clothing store 'cause it was really tough and we were just having some creative challenges between myself and the partner. And I looked around and I said, what do I wanna go start next? So I started the company called Sendlane. And Sendlane was the idea that I wanted to create a marketing automation platform.

You know, focused on what I believed that we needed in e-commerce. And of course Klaviyo was on its up and early rise at that point. And I knew that I wanted to go build something that I thought ba being a practitioner and someone who had been in e-commerce, that I can go build something similar. And of course that took a lot of heck of a lot longer and a lot of more work than I ever imagined.

But that was a really. Interesting experience. I, I went all in on it and spent the next seven, eight years on it, working on it. Essentially we went off and raised a ton of capital. I think I raised like $35 million in VC funding over the time that I was there. And then in 2023, I realized that I was quite bored of everything I was doing there as an entrepreneur, someone who wanted to go off.

So we ended up going out and finding a CEO to replace myself and I stepped out of the company in early 2024. So, that led me to where I am today and today when people ask me what I do, man, I do a lot of stuff, right? I do this, I do the podcast. This podcast, I actually have two podcasts, believe it or not, as crazy as that is, right?

I have a second podcast with Chase Diamond called Send It. It's a retention marketing focus podcast. So I do that and then I do the awesome pod, which is the whole agency SaaS operator and marketer pod, which is more of a show perspective. But how I actually make money, 'cause those don't actually make me any money.

These are these freebie things that we do in the market. I do three things. First, I consider myself a media company. We have newsletters, we have uh, we have community, we have courses. We have certifications all around email and retention marketing, right? That's the first thing I do. The second thing I do, I actually own an event now.

This event, it's called Commerce Roundtable. It's a direct to consumer, community driven event. And what's interesting about the event always, I always tell people, is it's not a money maker. It's very much a thought leader, networking. It's a place where I get to meet a lot of great people like yourself and other people in the market.

And we put together a really good event around that, and that's something that we do. And then third thing I do is we run kind of a B2B growth service where we're selling a lot of our media assets into the market, like a podcast sponsorship or a newsletter, sponsorship and different things. And that's how I end, ultimately end up making money.

A lot of myself, I'm fortunate that I made a lot of money when I was younger and a, I live off a lot of that stuff and you know, some of the exits that I had in the past helped me do that. So that's kind of what I do. In a nutshell, man, I, I've been a little bit of everywhere. I've been doing this thing online for about 17 years now, and I love the internet.

The internet is a great, amazing place and I don't imagine what it would've been like to do something else ultimately.

Jay Myers: What a wild ride. And multiple times I just thought, you know, the world needs more people like you, man. the stars kind of aligned that you know, you're able to. Give back to the community, like things like Commerce Roundtable that you didn't even mention. Did you mention, or maybe you did, I missed it, but you, your newsletter with Chase the multiple podcasts, like you, you're making this commerce space better and some of it, you know, I'm glad you're making some money a little bit, but it sounds 'cause it's funny, I was gonna joke when you got on the podcast, I was gonna say which hat is he gonna be wearing? Because you got, you must have like a different hat, commerce roundtable hat you got for whichever one you're on. Right. So, that's awesome. You nailed it, man. I wake up every day I come to my desk and I just, I think. My timeline is similar to you. We're probably, I'm 45.

How old are you? Are we sim We're okay? Yeah, we're pretty close because I, I started selling online in 98. I got a sense that we were similar based by your moved one of the stores onto Shopify in 2009. Started bold in 2012. So our, our paths are s similar and I think, like, I'm so fortunate to be alive the time I am, and I know every time has different things, but like the amount of I just get excited, like the amount of opportunity and excitement and it's like I have a million ideas for every one that I can do, that I can actually have time to do.

And it's no shortage of exciting things, especially now with. You know, I feel like there's another wave around the corner with AI for sure that will be looking back on that in 10 years going, wow, I can't believe we were around in 2024 and 2025 at the beginning of ai and here we are. Right.

Jimmy Kim: Yeah, no, I have some cool projects coming up online in the next couple months that are all AI and focused around just the, where the world is heading. I think a lot of things have kind of like light bulb moment along the way, and part of my moving on from Send Lane and kind of doing the things I'm doing today are just because I see future opportunity and I want to be a part of it.

And you know, I was a part of the.com stuff and I look at it and say, this is the next version of.com, right? This is the next version of the evolution. And I think being entrepreneur, it makes you really just want to dive in and be a forefront of it because you don't want be behind in these things.

You wanna be ahead of the curve. And every time I always feel like I'm ahead behind and this time I wanted to be ahead.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Well, I mean, I was on a podcast earlier and it's so hard now. It was like during the pandemic, it was so hard for the conversation not to go to the pandemic. I feel like every conversation right now, it's so hard for it not to go to ai, but it's so, it's, it encompasses everything.

It's so relevant. But I mean, before I get into some of it what are, what do you think, I mean, so much stuff is happening right now and with Chat, GPT and potentially like, well, this was like last week. It seems like every week it's new. I remember actually at, at Shop Talk, standing in front of the TikTok booth and talking to someone and I, and they actually, it was.

It was kind of like an on the spot podcast someone did, and they said like, well, what do you think is, is coming up in Jordan West? Jordan West. Yeah. Yeah. And he is like, what do you think's gonna be like the future of, of commerce? And I said, well, I think it's gonna be centered around like agents, like shopping agents.

And at the time, this was only like a month and a half ago, he is like, oh, interesting. Wow. That's, that's an interesting thought. And then I remember posting on LinkedIn the next right after Shop Talk. I thought, well, one of the big things that seemed I to be coming up was like a agentic commerce, like, you know, and all the comments on it were like, ah, that's, that's light years away.

This someone like, this is a clickbaity post. This will never happen. Like, and then literally the next week Amazon came out with an announcement that they're, they now have a, an AI shopping agent. And it seems like, and I actually had not joking, I think I had. 15 different people and I had some demo calls.

People DM me and say, I'm I'm so, I was so intrigued by your post. I wanna show you what I'm working on. And they're working on some AI agent stuff, and they're like, some of them are looking for investors. Some of them are just looking to show it to someone to get feedback. But like, there's people this is happening.

This isn't the metaverse shopping. What was the buzz in 2001? Like, all the commerce was gonna be on the metaverse and you know, this is happening. So where do you, but like, where do you see it going in the next few years?

Jimmy Kim: You know what's interesting? The way I've been kind of approaching AI is that it's not, you know, there's a lot of fun, exciting things that it can do and all the things that it can do. But the biggest thing I look at it is it's really changing the way that like companies can grow and become something in this market, right?

What I mean by that is the ability that it's giving people the 10 x ability, I call it, right? Like the ability that you can take a person, a single human that you would admit maybe needed three, four, or five people to do, and now that job becomes a single person entity, for example, right? So you still need the strategy, you still need to know how, you still need the brain to kind of power it.

But there's a lot of those menial tests. There's entry level tasks that you don't need to go into as much because of that stuff. So like that's where I see a lot of this, and I see the future as. More and more smaller teams that are doing bigger output, right? Just like when you're building bold, right?

You look back at the amount of engineers you needed, the amount of all these people and this thing and that thing, chat bot, everything you needed to do. You are starting to consolidate that, which is just gonna give more people opportunity, right? At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. And I say this the right way, but like it doesn't matter what tools are out in the market, it still comes down to the human to drive that element out of it.

And I think that what's exciting about the future is everyone's trying to continuously push the market forward with solving different thoughts. And they're using AI because it's helping them accelerate and do things faster. Like coding, for example, design. All of these things still important. I still think it takes the per right people to do it, but now you don't need as many people and you can take a person who might have been mid-level and take 'em into the next level because they're able to accelerate the skill sets.

And I think that's what makes AI runs interesting. And to your point, what we talk about today, man, in the next six months is gonna be different again and different again. We haven't plateaued yet and I think until we plateau, we're going to continue to find new evolution. And I don't think Plateau is too far away because just like everything else, and it all has to kind of.

Get big, bubble a little bit, implode a little bit, restart a little bit. That's part of everything. Crypto, any of this other stuff is all had the same cycles. And I believe that cycles are part of good future evolution of things that happen. And we're going through our unique cycle right now. But the reality is you gotta learn.

You gotta keep learning these things. You gotta keep pushing forward. And some will work, some won't work, right. But the reality is that's where we need to be heading right now. And I think anyone listening to this pod, especially if you're not investing your time in it and learning about it, even if you're not executing or using it, you should at least go learn about it because it's important to learn what's going on in this world.

Jay Myers: Oh, a hundred percent. It's I was just talking about this with Rita earlier, was the analogy I like to think about is you're chopping down trees and you can chop and chop and chop, but you gotta take an hour sometimes and sharpen the axe and chop 10 times faster, right? And so, like, just literally book off a day.

And if you don't know I, who's, I talk, I was talking to someone the other day and you know, if you don't know what to do with it, ask it. Tell them your job. Ask chat GPT, what can I run this store, I use Shopify, I use these apps. Or what can I, what can, how can I leverage AI to improve my systems and let it come up with the ideas?

You don't even have, you don't even have to have the ideas, right? So,

Jimmy Kim: Yeah. It's a, it's an interesting cycle. I mean, even if you look back two years ago, some of the things that people were building no longer relevant anymore because they've already solved it and they progress faster than that. Right. I think that's gonna happen a lot. There's a lot of that will happen and look, nothing worth.

Building ever comes easy, you know that. And the reality is, if it was that easy to build right now, it's probably gonna become obsolete just as quick. And the reality is, the builders that I think are doing great things right now are really thinking about the future and thinking about the unknowns and trying to pioneer things.

And that's where I think AI is really helping people do it faster than ever. And it's an exciting time.

Jay Myers: It totally is. It totally is. Yeah. Okay. I sometimes when I think of you think of, you know, how, you know, certain people own concepts like, so, like I was just talking to someone the other day, like, Gordon Ramsey owns the concept of like, debt, debt file. Right. I feel like you are kind of like the retention guy a little bit.

Like you're, I don't know if you're, if you try to do that or not, but like you definitely put out content on retention. You seem you're passionate about it. You talk a little about it a lot. So why is retention so important and why do you why do you care about it so much?

I guess first of all.

Jimmy Kim: Yeah, so you know I'll kind of start with a story. So in 2009 when I like first really got on the internet and I was working for this guy and he had this big company and this big email list and all this stuff going on, he put me in charge of email one day and he was like, Hey, go learn this thing.

Go write these newsletters and send out an email. And I was so fascinated by the fact that I could write an email with some links in there, right? And I could send it out and in, in a matter of moments that people would be taking an action. Then they would make a purchase behind it. And that idea just simply blew my mind.

And suddenly I started to really start leading into email. And then of course, I decided to go building an ESP, which made me go learn every little faucet of everything with email. You know, I always look at the love of retentions, both, both a blessing and a curse, because it's a blessing, because I think that it's a really powerful thing.

And no matter what business or anything I build, it's always gonna be a core of it. But it's also a curse because there's a lot of more exciting things in this world. Retention is the most boring of him. But it's also the most important in my opinion, because as you know, and this is the thing I learned at the brand side, is that your first purchase is never the dollar maker.

It's never gonna make you money. Most of the time you're spending on everything from ads to inventory, the purchase, everything that comes into place. But retention is when you actually make money. Yet it's the most unsexy of the topics because, well, who wants a, who want what? Do you want a new customer?

Or do you want someone who's already bought from you? And the reality. People want new customers because it feels good on the top line. So, you know, I don't intentionally do it, but I think after 17 years, it just flows in my mind all the time. And it's just something I realize and every day I talk about it, it feels like everybody's learning still constantly.

And I realize that lack of education that's in this market. And so for me, I like to talk about it because I believe that I'm helping the people realize that it's really important. And, you know, when we go through our rough patches, like we've been over the last maybe 60 days with everything going on in this world, you know, I believe that people leaned into retention real fast because they immediately said, well, what do I do?

I need to go tap into my normal customers. And they always come back to it because they realize that it's important and that's when it becomes even more popular. And then of course, the good times will roll, meta will open up, meet people will start using things and they'll go back over to acquisition.

But. To me I just have a big love for everything that comes into email from the way that psychologically it's written, the copywriting around it, the design, the way the cadence is, every little piece of it. There's an art and a science behind it. And I would say that just when you go do it for so long and you've made so much money with email, you realize the power behind it.

And when you can understand and really embrace it, it becomes a part of you. And so I kind of sit there and I know a lot of other stuff Jay, but like I end up being pigeonholed in that and I'm not upset about that. I think that it's a good thing to think about it like that. And, you know, we all have to have our expertise in life.

And I'm a good generalist in a lot of things, but I'll say in retention, that's where my expertise lies.

Jay Myers: Yeah, I am with you a hundred percent, man. I I did a, I think it was 22. Were you at some summit in Orlando?

Jimmy Kim: No, I was not.

Jay Myers: That one. Okay. Anyways, I had a, a talk called the subscription Death Curve. And like one, one of the things we notice, like with almost, we have a subscription app and one almost every brand, like, it's like over 90%.

I don't know the exact, it's like 93% of them, they grow, they grow, and then they eventually flatline. They get to a point where they're acquiring as many new customers as they're churning every month. And that might happen at a hundred customers, that might happen at 10,000. But eventually you get to a point where you know, if you can, you can only pay meta.

So for so many new customers a month and, and a thousand customers a month, well, if you have 10% churn at a hundred thousand customers, you're, you're gonna flatline. It might, it, it always happens no matter what. And the only way, so to we, like we looked at some stores that. Didn't flatline, and the only ones that truly broke out of it were ones that had this well, a viral coefficient essentially of greater than one where existing customers referred on average more than one.

So like some might refer four, some might refer zero, but on average more than one. Right? And that starts at retention. That starts at the retention practices that you do. And, you know, there's these data points that after a customer. Reorders from you once they're 26% more likely to reorder from you again after they reorder from a third time.

I think it's like 39. And then the fourth, the third reorder. So the fourth order, it goes up to 48%. So each time they reorder, they actually, it's not just a reorder, they're actually increasing their likelihood of reordering again. And then they become more likely to refer friends as well too. So it's like the heart of this healthy business that I bet you 90% of brands just hardly, I mean, look at it this way, like if you look at I don't know the exact numbers, but it was roughly we at the time when I did this talk, I looked at marketing spend and it was roughly 80% of companies, roughly 80% of their money spent resources, cost advertising was all on acquisition.

Jimmy Kim: Yep.

Jay Myers: And about 15% or 15 to 18% was spent on retention. So, you know, some companies actually had a cell phone company you go to call to cancel your cell phone plan and they'll try to retain you. They actually have a retention team, but it's side thought almost. Nobody had a a referral team, like a what their whole budget just focused on like getting existing customers to understand our products and become ambassadors.

But then we looked at the impact of, well, what actually moves the needle the most? It's actually should be flipped. So it's, I just like, I think it's awesome that you are preaching this because it's so relevant. We should be spending 80% of our time, money, and resources on retention and like maybe 15 on acquisition.

Yeah, it's, I don't want to, I.

Jimmy Kim: No, and I think what you're driving home is often brands are reactive to this, not proactive. I mean, that's really what it comes down to when they think about acquisition to retention. And what's really interesting is that, and you're kind of nailing it to the point, like so many brands sit and focus on the acquisition side before they've perfected their retention side.

And that retention side can be anything from just simple as email, SMS, it could be at the product level, whatever it really is. I think the problem that we all have, and you and I probably have the same problem too, is we want new customers, new numbers, big top line growth. But the reality is if you can't.

Understand how to keep your customer, then why are you acquiring new customers? Because it's just wasting and burning and churning the people that are coming in that door, right? And so to me, a lot of the thought process around retention has always been, and you know, even today as I start new companies, new things that I'm working on, I am focused more on the retention side.

When I think about how do we make sure your customers are happy, how do they go spread the word of mouth and so forth. And you think about the business model and where I do see failure in, you know, not just subscription companies, but any e-commerce companies. This, I always say this, right? The whole idea of paid.

Advertising. It's it's almost an accelerant. It's basically, instead of going off and working on the organic side and working on the word of mouth and all that stuff you use paid to offset and accelerate your growth, right? Get more customers. And if you do a good job and have a good product and a great experience, those customers will stay eventually.

It kind of xs right reten your page should go up and then they should start coming down while your retention and your word of mouth and your loyalty and your organic growth takes off allowing you to spend less money to earn more money. But a lot of brands don't realize that until it's too late, until they look back in the rear view mirror or they think back and they say, man, I really should have spent more time on the product.

Right? And especially at subscription boxes, right? Or like boxes or like just subscription products, you are almost earning your keep. Every month when you're selling that. And often it's not from your emails, your SMS, it's actually at your product level. Is your product good enough? Is it still serving the problem?

Is it still feeling the person? Wow. Do they feel benefit and value out of it? And that is something that I think a lot of brands miss out on because again, they're focused all their energy, 85% of their energy focused on the acquisition side. How do we get a new customer? How do we create new creative? How do I do this?

How do I do this sale? How do I do that? But the problem is they're not keeping the people that have already said, Hey, I like your product. Hey, I've made a purchase. Hey, I've spent money with you. Let me spend more money with you. And people seem to ignore that, and that's just been a problem. And I don't think this is just e-commerce.

I think this is an all business. You see this problem happen, and the best businesses in this world do really focus on retention. They realize how important it is, and they spend a lot of time and money on it. And they spend less time working on the acquisition, which leads to slower growth, slower exp ance, but they also become great businesses over time.

Right over the next 10, 15 years versus three, four years.

Jay Myers: So what is healthy? When you say retention, I think that can mean different things. As a software company, when we think of retention, it's how long you have our app installed. But for a online store who sells a physical product, what is retention?

Jimmy Kim: So to me, retention is keeping the customer in whatever format it is, right? Keeping 'em on the software, keeping 'em on the subscription, getting them to repurchase or rebuy, right? So if I'm a subscription company, retention is very much centered around churn. Very clear, right? Doesn't matter if you're software or physical product, how many people are you losing every month and how long does that l longevity?

'cause that's gonna give you that LTV or that user, right? And then you've got the other side where you're looking at a normal company, right? Like a company that sells a one-time product, it's a repeat purchase rate. That's your retention number. That's the only thing that matters because if you bring in a hundred customers and you can get 30 customers to come back and buy a second time, and that again is your profit center, that's the money maker, that a hundred cost you all the dollars and you might've made a sliver of dollars on it.

But the reality is, if you put time, effort, everything else in you didn't make money. So if you ask me the question, what's healthy? Well if I look at. If I look at it on the repeat rate, right? I always tell people, you wanna see north of 25 to about 35% of a repeat rate. If you see that repeat rate means you're doing a good job, you have a good product, and the retention's good.

If it's lower than that, you have a bad product, or your retention program is really bad, right? And then if you look at the churn side of things and you go over to subscription, right? On a product, again, it really depends on where you're working, right? In consumer, it's different than software, right? In consumer, I always tell people, I think the golden standard in consumer somewhere are like five, 6% and monthly churn.

If you're higher than that, then you've probably got too much leaking out of the bucket, but that's very rare to see that, right? There aren't that many businesses that are running low retention numbers. A lot of companies, when I talk to 'em in the subscription space, and you probably know this data better than I do, but they're probably somewhere north of 15 to 18 to 20%, right?

And if you look at a 20% churn on a consumer good, that essentially means in five months. You are churning out your entire customer base, which means your entire acquisition funnel is broken because you are literally playing for five months of re revenue. What's the point of having a subscription company at that point?

There is none. Which is why software is so exciting for people because you have a two, three, 4% churn rate monthly or even less, it's suddenly becomes a lot bigger because you can see the long tail LTV when a customer's staying for 24, 36, 48 months in a business, right? And that's what you really want. And so that's what you have to start thinking about because I don't think there's a perfect number.

It all depends on your business. It's all, it depends kind of thing, right? It depends on what you're serving. If you're serving in like the wedding space, well when they hit their wedding, they're probably no longer gonna be a customer. Just as much as if you sell in the baby space, you are only gonna be a baby for so long, right?

So it really depends where you're serving. But to me it's very simple. It's two things. It's either churn if you're subscription or it's just repeat rate. If you are just a onetime product sale and that's all you should be aiming for.

Jay Myers: I had you know, Jeremy Horowitz,

Jimmy Kim: Of course

Jay Myers: Was on last week or the week before. And he's investing in and acquiring

Jimmy Kim: brands or software companies, right. Or something like

Jay Myers: well, both actually. So software companies, but also e-commerce brands. He's been in the e-commerce space and he mentioned that reorder rate is one of the number one metrics that he looks at.

Like, it's interesting, 'cause like you said, it, everyone's worried about acquisition and new customers, but he's a smart guy and he is acquiring e-commerce brands. He's looking at reorder rate. How healthy are they coming back? Are they, you know, so.

Jimmy Kim: You know, you can have the worst email program or SMS program in the world, but if you have a great product, your reorder rate will still be great. And it's crazy when you see that. Right. And you just know there's optimization. But then on the flip side, you can have the best email and SMS program and have a bad product and your reorder rate will still never be good.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Jimmy Kim: It's the truth of that. Yeah.

Jay Myers: so what are some of the mistakes that brands make with email and SMS Let's talk about for to not optimize their reorders or, or, or in general, like any maybe not just on reorders, but in general.

Jimmy Kim: I, I have a couple talking points around this because I think there's a lot that goes onto this market, right? So to start, I'll kind of go with the basics. I think there's a lack of education in this space, and there's a lack of knowhow, right? A lot of times when I talk to people and brands, right?

Hey, how did you learn email? Well, I started my brand in 2016 and someone told me to install MailChimp, so I installed it and I just started sending emails. Great. Somewhere along the way, I heard someone to do something around segmentation, and I started. Building little buckets of active emails.

Great. That is like the level of 50 to 75% of the brands in the market. So if you're listening to this and you hear that, and that's me, and you go, oh, that's me. The reality is there's nothing wrong with it. It's just what you've been taught. And that's what's been educated. Because again, to your point, they don't care.

They're focused on acquisition where they'll be meta wizards, by the way, there'll be wizards or Google or Meta or whatever they're spending their dollars on. They'll be excellent on there, but they don't think about it. So the first thing starts with the very simplest core, it's audience management.

You know, I was on stage recently and we're, I was giving a talk and I said, how many people here know what R FM is? People kind of stared at me blankly and it was like two people in this crowd of 200 raised their hand. And I, to me, when I think back to how I learned email, I learned through RFM, which is recency frequency monetization.

It's the core of what segmentation is essentially. Right? When did they buy, how long have they been on your list? You know, when's the last time they purchased? What's the repeat purchase? All of these data points are right there. And the tools these days are so much easier than before. In 2009, I would download the list.

I would cut it up with Excel, do a bunch of pivot charts, go build those things and upload 'em back, and then send an email, right? Dude, it used to take me hours and hours to build segments and send email today with tools that are out there Omnis send or Klaviyo, any of these. Dude, there's seconds,

Jay Myers: Yeah. And they're, A lot of them are prebuilt. You

Jimmy Kim: They're already prebuilt. You click a button and they're gonna do 'em for you. And then secondly, the second thing that really comes into place is then they take their bucket of people. And again, this will speak to most of the people that are listening to this. They'll take a bucket of people and they'll just say, well, you've been engaged for 90 days.

Let's just send you the same email. Well, there's a problem there too, because, well, the facts are simple. You got your prospect bucket and you got your customer bucket. 80% of your sales and your repeat sales happen outta your customer bucket.

Your prospects. If you think about it, and you know this Jay, like they come to your list, they opt in.

Why? Oh, there's a coupon that they wanna get, right? There's not, that's not high intent. That's a low intent value action. They go in there and do it, and then if they don't make that purchase, because most D two C products are impulse purchases, the longer it takes beyond that, the less chance they're ever gonna make a purchase.

Yet we focus on that list because that's your big list size. You may have a hundred thousand people on the prospect and only 10,000 on the customers. So you imagine you smush 'em together, you send them the same email. So to me, the second part of this is part of the RFM theory, but it's always saying, Hey, split your list up.

Take those people and understand, my customers need to be treated different than my prospects. The only job you have, your, with your prospects is one thing to either get them to buy or get off your list, because that's what they're worth. They've never sent. And anytime you send an email, it's literally costing you money to continue sending 'em.

Yet marketers sit here and they boast their big list, and they focus on this big prospect list that's never driving them dollars in revenue out of their pockets. And then you can go way deeper than that. And that's like the core of like the basics of what I see in the market. You get into the next level of segmentation, understanding value, like there's so many things, you know, from copywriting to design, there's a lot of ways that people can optimize it in a smooth running machine takes a lot, right?

It's not just a single person. It's literally impossible to run a great retention program with a single person. I understand that Most brands can't have it. So that's where I try to get people educated on just getting something done to continue to improve. It's like just like it better be better. 1% work on your retention program, 1% a time, 1% a day.

Do one little action, learn the habit, continue to get better at it, and you'll quickly realize how fast you can move the needle. And if you can just save 1% more customers to repeat. 1% less deterred. That is a significant amount of money over a 12 month period that brands, they struggle to see that an operator struggle to see this.

And that's really what I tell people. Like, you've gotta start with the core. Learn to education, get out there and learn from people. There's so much free education. You can get paid education. There's communities, there's so many things you can go out there to do. But again, it's an unsexy topic. Who wants to work extra hard for the next 30 days to improve?

1% Where I could just go dump more money on meta, I get it. But the reality is to have a long, sustainable business with a great customer, and to your point, a loyal base that has great word of mouth, organic repeat, purchasing, all that stuff to happen, you gotta work on retention, right? So that's where I go with that.

Jay Myers: So good. What of probably a whole bunch of questions coming to listeners' minds are, and I what's how much emailing is too much. What are the best times of the day to send, should I. What was the term I heard one time? Blow out. Blow out my 20%. Like the 20% of the people that will never open.

Do I just like not worry about them and email every day? Or do I like, gimme some thoughts around some of those like best practices, if you wanna

Jimmy Kim: sure. One, one of the things that I kind of coined in this market over the last couple years that people always joke to me about is I always tell people, send more emails. Okay, now, yeah, I, I would definitely wear a t-shirt. It's kind of like my motto in this space. And the reason why I say that it's not to tell people to go spam.

There's, that's not what I mean

What I often see is two things that come into place, right? Number one, people think that they can over email in the space. Jay, how many emails do you get a day these days? Probably like 300, 400 emails probably. You have no

Jay Myers: I don't even know. Yeah.

Jimmy Kim: if I ask you the second question, when's the last time, blah, blah, blah, emailed you, you'd be like, I don't know.

You really don't. The world has changed. And the reason why I tell people, send more emails. You're either in the noise or you're not even seen, and it's a very simple thing. And when your brand, it doesn't matter. If they don't see you, they probably don't even remember you.

And so there is no such thing as emailing too much on a given day.

Obviously if you email six times a day, that's a problem. But if you're emailing them every day, so when people ask this question to me, it goes down like this. Again, if you're a prospect and you've never purchased, I'm emailing you every single day until you either buy or get off my list go opt into any of the biggest brands in the world.

They all do that. The true classics, the Hex, clads, all these, if you're a prospect and you never purchase, they will email you and hammer you until you buy or you get off their list. Right? When they become a customer, that's when you slow down because you're trying to build a relationship with him. You're trying to show him things.

You have meaningfulness behind that and there's intention behind a lot of those things. But even then, you can still keep the value emails up and you should be emailing often, right? And that leads to a lot of things, right? That helps you with your natural scrubbing of your list. How do people offset and go away?

You want them to unsubscribe. Take that action and tell you, I am no longer interested in your email. You don't be precious about it. You really wanna understand that they don't wanna make a purchase of your product. And that they do. They'll come back and they'll make a purchase later on if they really want to.

And then the second thing to that is, when do you send, well let your customers tell you when they want you to send. I always tell people the data that we have today as email marketers or market retention marketers is so explo so much better than we've ever had in our lives. And you literally, from your ESP or your analytics or your data or anything, you can tell when people are on your thing.

You can go to your social media and look at your little chart and it says, oh, I get the most interactions at 11:00 AM. I should be in front of him at 11:00 AM I should be at a 2:00 PM, 5:00 PM whatever it might be, right? There's a lot of data that shows a lot of the things that people mess up and oh, I see more opens at 9:00 AM but I see more purchases at 8:00 PM It happens all the time.

And the reason why that happens is at 9:00 AM what are you doing? You're getting on work, you're looking online, you're checking your

Jay Myers: Plowing through

Jimmy Kim: not buying, you are opening, you're engaged. But at night, what are you doing? You're sitting on your couch, you're watching tv, and you're like, Hey man, I should go look at that product.

And the people who don't, no big deal, they'll get it later, right? So there's a lot of that comes into place, which comes into, it all depends, and you've gotta go learn and understand your data around it. So data is more relevant than ever these days, and it's more off in front of you than ever these days.

You just gotta use it and people just don't use it.

Jay Myers: I heard a great tip. The day. Get your thoughts on it. I can't remember his name. He has he owns it's called Sub, I think it's called subject line.com. But it's a, it's a website to like test subject line and stuff. But anyways, he was saying when you email. If you have different types of emails, if there's like announcements or product information or sales or whatever it is in your brand name put.

So say your name is figs, whatever, and then in brackets put announcement or figs and brackets product updates. So same, same email, but he said put different different as if it's from a different department almost. So then the recipients feel that they're not, it's not as bombarding as getting it from the same.

They see a different, it's, you know, they said that, he said the most underused area of an email is actually the from name we all, we think about the subject line, we think about the preview text, but the from name is actually very powerful offer. So like if you send out an offer once a month, having bracket offers put in there.

And then there was one other, oh shoot, what was it? There was one on the tip of my tongue. Another tip he had. It'll come back to me. Oh, there was that. And and I, and then I think a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to not end up in the promotions tab and they try to like word their email a certain way to not use the word like sale or offer or free or something like that.

'cause it gets flagged as promotional. And he was saying that they actually see better conversion from emails and promo. Like we think we, we think like, oh I don't wanna be in the promotions tab 'cause no one uses it. But first of all, less than, I can't remember what it was

Jimmy Kim: less. Less than half. Yeah.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Of of Gmail users.

And now Apple has a promotions tab, actually have it enabled. But the ones that do have it enabled, they actually use it to find promotions. And so it's actually not a bad thing to be in promotions tab. They actually saw higher conversion when it's a promotions in a promotions tab. So.

Jimmy Kim: And on the technical side, it's awesome too. Actually, by putting it in the promotion side, you don't trigger MPP. You don't trigger some of the things that happen with the false opens and the bot stuff. That happens more in the primary side. So there's like little things that are beneficial, and I'm with you, I've seen this data all the time.

Promotional tab is not a bad thing. You are selling something. You should be in the promotional tab and it's okay. Just sell better. Don't make a blame. I think this is one of those things people blame because they think that there's an optimization point here when they should be working on their copy, their designed, their segmentation, their timing, there's so many other things to blame and worry about.

Tabbing is natural. It's designed for the user experience and the user experience. There's no hack or secret trick to go around it. You send enough emails and it's enough promotional emails, no matter how trick you're, whatever you get, you're gonna end up in promotion. But again, that's okay. That's what it's meant there for.

Jay Myers: Yeah, exactly. And I personally don't open every promotional email, but I see the way my wife uses email and she opens everyone from every brand she shops with. And so we have to remember that there's a segment of people that that's how they, that's how they interact with brands and that's, you know, so, okay.

So you talked about retention automations. I think there's a lot to unpack there, but maybe can you highlight a few key automations that maybe every Shopify store that that must haves, that must, should be running?

Jimmy Kim: Yeah, man, look, there's only so many that really matter there. There's a million you can go produce, but there's only like a handful. There's probably about five of them I can think of, right? So your first one is your welcome email, which is your popup follow up, right? That's supporting acquisition, not retention, but it's still helping your list, right?

You're using email to support acquisition, right? You got your you've got your post-purchase, right? So they make a purchase. You want to welcome them, thank him. You've got your

Jay Myers: Educate them on the product and,

Jimmy Kim: Tell 'em about your brand. This is when you start building trust with them. Not before the sale, but after the sale.

There's no need to build trust with them before because they're either gonna buy or they're not For most brands, right? You're selling a couple thousand dollars product online. Then maybe there's a need and warranted

Then you've got your typical abandoned check. I'm gonna segment together, abandoned checkout, abandoned cart, and browse abandonment, right?

These are browse and abandoned segments. These are people you've identified that have you, you have information on them and you're just trying to get them to come back, right? It's pretty easy. Then you've got your like shipping notifications and all your other notification kind of things that you wanna do.

Very important, because these are the things that get the highest opens and the highest engagements, and people care about him and so forth, right? And that's, I mean, outside of that, it's like, you know, you can do the wind backs, you can do the sunsets, you can do the upsell running, you can do all these other things, but these are the things that make you money.

These other things are small auxiliary things that can help optimize, but they're not gonna drive much revenue outside of it. Right now, you can get more critical, and I would say don't spend time building all these other flows that don't really generate you dollars, right? I'm generating dollars by focusing on my post purchase, and I'm thinking deeper about my post purchase.

Is it their first purchase? Is it a second purchase? Is it a third purchase? And I'm gonna curate them with different messages. Same thing with an abandoned cart. Is it a new abandoned cart or is it someone who's purchased before and they're coming back and checking out your product? Different intents, different people.

And that's where you should be spending your time in dollars right now. And that's where the needle actually moves for people and people spend too much time. Again, I have one single post-purchase, no matter how many times I buy, I get the same emails every time, but I've got 90 flows running across all these different things That is inefficiency, and I see that all the time.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Okay. So Kat, when you talk about flows are, I use the word automations,

Jimmy Kim: Yeah, automations, flows, funnels, whatever the campaign. I mean, everyone names 'em differently, but same thing. Yeah, we're

Jay Myers: So, so between flows and campaigns where should merchants spend the majority of their time?

Jimmy Kim: So, you know, I know you had Omnis send on, so there was a really cool report that Omnis send distributed at the end of last year, at the end of this year, or the beginning of this year, I guess, and they said that one in three clicks and automations drove a sale.

And yet we all spend our time in campaigns.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Jimmy Kim: I think that there, this is the two hot takes I'll take here. Number one, if you're not spending every 30 days and your automations or your flows and you're not checking in and optimizing and updating, you're probably leaving money on the table. Right. That's pretty simple. And I think that people aren't doing that.

Most people start their business in 2017 and then they forget about it, and they're like, yeah, it kind of runs on its own. That's not how it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be constantly optimized and updated. Right? And then the second thing comes back to your campaigns, right? Your campaigns are important, but the way that people run their campaigns is broken because they're just sporadically sending emails, whatever.

And I think a lot of people don't apply a good marketing strategy around their campaigns, and that campaign needs to tie to your rester website and all the things that you're doing. So those are probably the two things I think about what's more important. I think they're equally important, but automations don't get the love that they need to have.

Jay Myers: Another Omnis send stat from that report was and it was that. I was talking to Rita, who's the CEO of Omnis send, and he said that roughly 2% of the emails that go out through the Omnis send platform are automations, but they account for 40% of the revenue generated through Omnis send. Like it's insane, but everyone just uses it like they used MailChimp back in the day.

Just create a campaign. Promote my sale. Promote my sale, black Friday sale. That's what everyone's using it for, but it's a 20 x

Jimmy Kim: Yeah. I mean, if you work backwards on that data, it's one in three people are making purchases, a 33% conversion, where if you send a campaign, you get a thousand clicks, you get a 2% conversion on that, right?

Jay Myers: right.

Jimmy Kim: It's flipped, and so people don't spend enough time on it. And so my message has been constantly, and I tell people this all the time, if you're not in your automations constantly updating, working on it, changing your bestsellers, testing different things, trying to optimize it, you are just leaving dollars and dollars on the table.

Yet again, campaigns are the pretty images that you get to go send out, and people care about those way too much.

Jay Myers: So what about SMS? What's working right now with SMS? I know it's gotten more expensive over the last few years to send how should brands be thinking about their SMS strategy and email and how they work

Jimmy Kim: Yeah, so SMS in 2019 was great because it was kind of like a, it wasn't new, but it was new to this space, and it was new and fresh. And then we hit the pandemic, as you said, and everyone was home so you could hit 'em on an email or SMS, and they were bored. And then the world opened up and then they, people started screaming, why isn't SMS working?

Well, here's the thing about SMS, right? Here's two really interesting things about SMS one. If you ever look at the data point of SMS, all things SMS happened within the first about two hours, right? That means if you send within the first two hours, you're gonna either get that action or you're gonna get ignored.

Okay? Number two. The second thing about SMS, it's really unique, is that it is really a now in times tool. Basically it's about a movement or an action that you're doing less campaigns. So things like a sale is closing or you're shipping notification or you left something in your cart. These are actions because they're reactive to the actions that you're doing versus campaigns which are like typically treating it like an email per se, but it doesn't get treated or handled by user the same way.

But the same thing with the caveat to all this is it's also generational. The older the generation, the less. Effective SMS tends to be, so when you think about how email and SMS work, they should be working supportive off of each other. If I've got a flow, for example, I'm gonna send my email out as soon as they opt in, maybe a half an hour, I'm gonna probably welcome them with my SMS.

But then the SMS starts becoming a tool to help to close, not to introduce, not to increase prospecting, but to help close, right? And then with costs. The biggest thing against cost is, again, and I'll say this again, for 20 years, we've learned how email works. SMS is no different, but yet somehow the principles are not applied across both email and SMS think about it, right?

90 Day active, for example, is a perfect example of an email characteristic. Why don't we do that on SMS? No one knows. But this is really things that people don't understand. So they need to be treated the same because it's often the same consumer on the other end, right? And it's part of their journey. I can't treat you like two different channels, Jay.

I can't be like. SMS over here treating you on one sale and email on this side, treating you on the sale when you're the same single or human. But a lot of brands treat it that way, and I think that's a mistake in this market. I think you should be using it to support each other.

Jay Myers: It's interesting that you mentioned the I in my, I can't remember what you said in my head. I heard transactional messages, but you said something else, but like not

Jimmy Kim: now in the moment. It's now in the

Jay Myers: In the moment. Now. In the moment, yeah. And I think back on the last few SMSs that I've clicked through, like I don't often click through them, but when I do, it's, Hey, this is back in stock.

Or something that's very transactional, not big springs, big spring sa say, sale is on now. Like, I don't, I don't engage with SMS that way. But if it's a transactional one where this, I don't know, this just in goes pairs with what you just bought or something like more of a transactional

Jimmy Kim: you're shipping updates or like any of that, or the things that people care about. And that's where that channel is used and effective. We get way already, way too many SMSs, just like we get too many emails now. Nobody wants to click on it because it's not like you can sit there and I know there's tools and different things you're gonna have conversations and different things with, but the reality is like you're still gonna click, you're still gonna go somewhere.

You're still gonna have to go browse the site and you're still gonna have to go buy, like it's not different. An email is actually more convenient because it's your mailbox and you are expecting that. And in SMS it feels disruptive unless you're feeling help helped or helpful, right? So that's where I see that change.

And so SMS continues to evolve. I think it's a important channel. It's here to stay, but it also, a lot of brands waste a lot of money because they don't think about it in this, in the channel that it's actually useful for.

Jay Myers: Totally. And I'll just give a plug to Omnis send here, who's they're one of the sponsor of the show, but it's so easy to do that. I use it and it's, you can, it's one of the benefits of having everything in one platform is the intelligence of not overlapping and conflicting and. You don't wanna send things at different times, but really does make it easy.

So, you co-founded Commerce Table. Did we talk about that on air? Did we talk about that before the

Jimmy Kim: I don't remember. Maybe before the show, I think.

Jay Myers: The that's the problem when, you know, anyways, but, so, so you're the co-founder, first of all tell me about Commerce Roundtable and then I wanna dig into it a little bit.

Jimmy Kim: Sure. So Commerce Roundtable started as an internal event at Sendlane, and I acquired it out of the company about a year ago now, at this point, when I left we started it because I felt that there was not a good centralized event that was really focused on the content and education in this space, and it was never focused on community.

So what has been interesting about that journey has been, we've been congregating and we've been building this thing for now three years, right? And so we started back in 2023, I guess now at this point, and we put this little event together, super boutique, very focused on content education, getting some of the greatest people in the market to come hang out and learn and talk to each other.

And it's been evolving since then. We're on our third year now and we continue to grow. The unique thing about Commerce Roundtable is none of us, I always joke about this, none of us in the Commerce Roundtable except for the, the Our Event director. We don't actually make any money, like it's not designed for that.

What it is designed for is it keeps us in the know-how. It keeps us fresh, it keeps us in a network. It allows us to be thought leaders in the space and allows us to do something we love doing, which is to serve the community. So Commerce Roundtable, it happens now twice a year. We did a Miami event recently.

We'll be doing a San Diego one on September 22nd and 23rd, but it's. Unlike the typical events you've been to, it's not a stuffy con a corporate conference. We don't have multiple tracks running. We don't have the traditional booth setups that you may expect. It's very black and white. You got two rooms.

You're either in the Speaks or you're in the networking area, which does have sponsors of course, because someone's gotta pay for it. But we've got these two rooms, and when you're at the conversation level, it's not Nike preaching you high level things about what you would do it as a billion dollar company.

It's real brands, real people who are on the ground floor talking about actionable things that they're doing today. And so we really focus on that side of things. And yeah, it's been an interesting journey and we'll continue to build it and you know, we're excited about what we're doing with it just because again, it's the, the biggest unique thing about our event is that.

We're not here to make money off of it. Making money would be nice, but it's not really the focus. It's not how we make money. What we wanna do is serve the community and continue to learn. And it actually empowers us. Man, you just like you go to conferences, Jay, like we go because we wanna learn, not because we want to go off and sell things or do anything.

We're here to learn. And we've found a way to learn for ourselves.

Jay Myers: Yeah, I love it, man. It's I Good for you for doing that. I hope it continues to grow because it's, you know, there's these large events like Shop Talk is great, but at the same time you nailed it. Like the, all the talks are by this, the CFO of Walmart and you know this and it's just, ah, you could maybe say it's somewhat inspirational, but it's not really practical.

And then the other talks in the other track rooms are all sponsored talks by, to be honest it's vendors like us who would, who sponsor a talk and they get 10 minutes or 15 minutes to a talk and it's, there's, they're often good, but they're very, they're promotional. So like to just have good content to, to help brands grow I think is amazing.

Jimmy Kim: Yeah. And we've cut out a lot of that stuff too, like the tech talks and all that stuff. Like I love tech companies and they're important for everything, but we found ways around it so that they're not leading the stage and ruining, not ruining, but they're slowing down the vibe of the experience of a conference.

We really, people come, and especially at a brand side, when you're coming to these events, you are spending time and money to be there. And the thing you're there for is so you can do something and take it away from my business. Learning about a tool is not the way you're gonna go build your business. A tool does not, and this is always the thing I always say, I don't care what tools you used, the strategy is what matters, not the tool.

The tool is just a vehicle to implore your strategy. Right. And that's where people should be thinking about.

Jay Myers: So you've been in a lot of conversations with a lot of really smart people, really like founders at these events. What's one trend or insight that you're seeing in marketing, retention, marketing that like maybe no one's talking about right now,

Jimmy Kim: Wow. No one's talking about, you know, one thing that, you know, at our

Jay Myers: maybe it doesn't have to be that no one's talking about, but what's a Yeah.

Jimmy Kim: I think the continuous, as you, we've just kind of mentioned about diversification of channels, right? Of email and SMS retention's starting to continue to expand out, right? Push notifications are pretty freaking cool and there's a lot of value behind it.

WhatsApp is becoming more and more popular these days, like more and more channels are becoming more relevant. And I think when you think omnichannel cross channel, whatever channel, whatever you name, you want to call, fancy channel, you wanna name, I think the biggest trend that's occurring right now is.

You have to be where the customer is regardless of what your preference is, yourself personally.

Creating a lot more work for a lot of more retention things. But you gotta be on Instagram, you gotta be on TikTok, you gotta be on, you know, WhatsApp, you gotta be on Facebook Messenger. Like you gotta be where your customers ultimately.

So to me, that's probably the biggest changes that is happening. Retention where in the past everyone was okay with a single focus, right? Oh, focus on one thing. But now it's becoming, you gotta chase your customers around because if you're not doing it, someone else is doing it.

Jay Myers: Yep. I heard a term that I love the other day. We often refer to it as the marketing funnel, the customer funnel, and I think we've gotta stop using the word funnel and start using customer lifecycle. It's not about top of funnel, moving them in, moving them down, getting 'em to buy. It's getting them to buy again and again, and then refer and buy.

And it's like the marketing lifecycle is, you know, so,

Jimmy Kim: There's another one I heard before a the new one is a tornado. Think about like a tornado. It's just everywhere. There's no, there's the sporadicness, right? But they're trying to keep them inside of this thing that is going to tap in. If you think about a tornado, it's spinning and they're irritating.

Different channels, different markets. They're on Amazon, they're on TikTok, they're whatever. That is where the world is heading and well, we gotta adapt. As marketers, that's all we can do. We can't change their mind. We must conform to what they wanna do.

Jay Myers: Yep, yep. And tornadoes pull everything in, right?

Jimmy Kim: pull it all into the center, which is to get them to buy.

Jay Myers: Oh, Jimmy, this is we could talk for hours, man. This is fun. I wanna do our lightning round

Jimmy Kim: sure. Let's do it.

Jay Myers: like we're over time already, but I don't care. That's fine. And I'm gonna add a question in because you inspired me to add a question that I'm going to ask you and then ask from now on, too.

So I'm gonna, I'm gonna start with the question that's not even on the list. The question is, what's your favorite AI use that you're using right now in your life that you like the most important thing you use AI for?

Jimmy Kim: The mo, I mean, it's content still to this day, it's just helping me. It's literally my, my va my assistant to just talk to, right? Like I used to ha I like, I'm a conversational person and I like to talk it out, and I find that AI is a great way to just talk it out with different

I do a lot of things with ai, but that's probably where I use it the most right now.

So Hey, I'm gonna go design a podcast. It's not that it's gonna write the podcast for me, but it's gonna allow me to bounce ideas and give me ideas, and it allows me to have that conversation. And instead of going off and talking to all my hosts about it, for example, it allows me to kind of conform.

So that's my favorite use right now.

Jay Myers: I like it. What's one book you'd recommend every e-commerce or founder read?

Jimmy Kim: Man, I, you've probably heard this a thousand times, but it's the lean Startup man. I mean, that's just a simple book that really explains how you gotta think about business when you start.

Jay Myers: and it's a good one. Like you can't rec I, yeah, a hundred percent. There's a one I just wanna throw in here too for listeners there. Do you follow Pat Flynn at all?

Jimmy Kim: Yes. I do know Pat Flynn.

Jay Myers: So he's got a book called Lean, lean Learning, I think it is, essentially. So it's kind of a, not, it's not a spinoff, it's inspired by, but the premise is.

Similar to Lean Startup, but in how you consume, learning, how you grow personally. And anyways, I'll you, I just thought of that when you said that, so I'll throw that too. What's a sacred cow in e-commerce? You think merchants need to shoot

Jimmy Kim: Oh God a sacred cow that I didn't even see that question before. What do they need to shoot, take out?

Jay Myers: a se sacred cow that they need to rethink something that brands are doing

Jimmy Kim: I'm gonna say the thing that people are gonna say, branding.

I really think that people overemphasize their branding and design.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I, yeah, I can see it.

Jimmy Kim: Yeah.

Jay Myers: What separates are you, this, I'm interested on your take on this one. What do you think separate separates, like a onetime buyer brand from ones that create lifelong customers? What separates them?

Jimmy Kim: It's just a great product, man.

Jay Myers: It's a great pro. Yeah. It's interesting. The la the last one I had was.

Exact same thing. The, they said quality product.

Jimmy Kim: it's a great product experience. Unboxing like it's just product.

Jay Myers: Yep. What's one underrated Shopify app you think more merchants should be using?

Jimmy Kim: Man. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go off into a side, since we're talking about retention. There's an app called rayon.io. I don't know if you know who the, what that

Jay Myers: No, I don't.

Jimmy Kim: Okay, so rayon.io is AI segmentation, RFM. Basically taking all that stuff I talked about automating it because they have figured out data and all this stuff that happens with the data.

So big bullish on them. I like what they're doing. Nathan is the founder over there and he comes off a $7 billion IPO and now he's building this new product and I'm bullish on what they're doing over there. So that's probably the most underrated tool that me people aren't talking about today.

Jay Myers: Awesome. I love that. I'm gonna check it out. RAL. Okay. Awesome. Thank you. That's a great one. If a merchant has one hour per week to spend on their business, we're all busy. Where should they spend it?

Jimmy Kim: Probably on your product. I'd still go back to the product thing. I think that not enough brands work on their product and building their differentiation and building their star, and I mean, everything that centers around it. I mean, I think, again, if you build a great product and you spend enough time on it, you'll eventually get the right customers to it.

Yep.

Jay Myers: Yeah. And I, you know, I don't, I think I was reading this somewhere today. They, someone was, you know, everyone's got their AI predictions, but as AI becomes everyone's copywriter and everyone's video creator and everyone's website creator, the real differentiator is gonna be, the product like that is gonna be more and more important than ever.

Everyone's gonna have beautiful websites, everyone's gonna have great AI influencers, and it's, the product is actually gonna be more important than it's probably ever

Jimmy Kim: Correct. I've always believed that, but it's becoming more, yeah, to your point, like you can't, you know, obviously there's drop shipping days where you can just go white label something. There's not saying it's a gone, but it's continuously being challenged. And the reason is if you just have a great product, man, word of mouth, happiness, everything comes along with a great product and people just don't spend enough time on their product.

They think that it's good enough and you can't be good enough. You have to be great now, in order to be successful as a direct to consumer brand.

Jay Myers: yeah. Totally. Last one, what is one E-commerce metric? More brands should obsess over, but they don't.

Jimmy Kim: It's probably their cac, their CLTV to CAC ratio. Just knowing your data points. I mean, actually, I always say that if you wanna get more broad, just know your freaking finances. That's something that you just see a lack in this market. But if you're gonna drill down to a single element, it's your CAC and lifetime value, basically.

What's your CAC lifetime value to your CAC ratio?

Jay Myers: Yeah. And okay. Customer lifetime value to customer

Jimmy Kim: Yeah. Yeah. You gotta know your number because you need to know if you can afford the customer you're doing or you're just spending money and burning it into thin air. Too many companies are burning it into thin air. Unfortunately.

Jay Myers: And when you say cac, all in cac, like marketing spend not specifically like

Jimmy Kim: No, you

Jay Myers: channel, but all in

Jimmy Kim: you gotta look at it all in. What does it cost? Every little piece of it and realize it, because when I look back at my brand and where we failed in a lot of things is why we couldn't make money Is. We couldn't create we couldn't balance that metric, basically, and we couldn't outrun the fact that we weren't selling the product for enough and we weren't creating enough lifetime value for the amount of dollars we're spending.

And we're running on a treadmill. And you can run on that treadmill for a long time, but eventually that treadmill ends.

Jay Myers: And growth hides problems. Sometimes you can be growing, you can have unhealthy numbers, your CAC and your, but you can outgrow it, but you can't do that forever. Right. So.

Jimmy Kim: That's correct.

Jay Myers: Jimmy, this has been a ton of fun. Thank you so much. Where, okay, so you're all over the place. I was gonna say, where do I send people?

Jimmy Kim: You know, look, I, I, I spend most of my time in two places, either on x. At Yo Jimmy Kim, or on LinkedIn at Jimmy Kim. Right. So those are the two places that you can find me. I as Jay you mentioned already. I post a lot, I share a lot of information. It's all free. You, that's where you find me. And then from there you can find all my resources from all my pods to my community to my courses, whatever you wanna get into.

But that's where you'll find me, Maine at every day.

Jay Myers: awesome. I'll make sure to include that. Thank you so much, Jimmy. I'm looking forward to seeing you. I don't know exactly when this will air,

Jimmy Kim: Summit. Right.

Jay Myers: sub I'll be at subs

Jimmy Kim: Okay. Yeah. I'll be there too.

Jay Myers: I think this might come out before then, but might be listening to this after. But really looking forward to seeing you in about a week and a half here.

And no, I guess two weeks. I don't even know what day? Two weeks. Two weeks officially. Two weeks, yeah.

Jimmy Kim: Time

Jay Myers: going to Shopify editions? No. 'cause

Jimmy Kim: No, that's literally right. A right at the same time or a day after or something? Yeah. There's no chance I'm going up to

Jay Myers: Yeah. It's tough. It's too bad at the same time.

Jimmy Kim: Yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on at the same

Jay Myers: it's, yeah. Spring's busy. Alright man, well thank you so much. I'll see you soon.

Jimmy Kim: All right. Thanks man.