Where Did All Your Shopify Traffic Go??

Jay Myers: Welcome to another episode of Shopify 1%. I'm excited today because I have someone with me who is at the forefront of commerce, and he's working with some of the biggest brands on Shopify, and here's why I'm excited. We're at a really interesting time right now. E-commerce is changing right before our eyes.

It's actually being rewritten, not just tariffs and duties and all of that, and the volatility around logistics, and, margins are being compressed faster than they ever have for brands, and at the same time. AI is exploding and it's changing the way commerce is done. Literally, it's changing it. I read a stat that 84% of e-commerce brands right now are integrating AI in some capacity.

So if you're not, if you don't fall in that 84% get in there, it should be a hundred percent in my opinion. And AI shopping is also changing the way customers are buying everything from acquisition to retention to every stage of the customer journey. So my guest today, hir, he's one of the. Directors and partners at Roswell Studio in New York, and he works with, is it, I think, 70 of the largest Shopify Plus brands.

And I just found out, I should have known this before, but I just found out before that they were a winner of a People's Choice Webby, which is, I think, in my opinion, one of the best ones to win. And we'll talk about that a little bit. This guy knows his stuff. He knows what's working he's at, he's got his finger on the pulse of trends.

And so listen closely. 'cause I know that there's gonna be a lot of insight here for a lot of our listeners. So Hir, thank you so much for joining the show today.

Nihar Kulkarni: Appreciate it. Jay. Thank you very much for having me on. I've been a big fan of Bold for years. Yeah, we have 70 plus brands at at Roswell, and many of them are, have been using the Bold products over the years. You've been an inspiration to the

entire industry for the last decade and beyond.

And

The, a cornerstone of this of our ecosystem. And so thank you for having me

on.

Jay Myers: Thank you. You means a lot to me especially coming from you can, I'm gonna give you like 60 seconds. Brag, brag about yourself a little bit, what you do, your company. This is you, the way, the way your mom would brag about you.

Nihar Kulkarni: You got it. Yeah, you got it. All right. All right. My name is Nihar Cole Carney, managing director, partner of Roswell, NYC. We're a full service 360 degree e-commerce agency, a Shopify Platinum partner since 2016. A Klaviyo

platinum partner, an attentive signature partner. The list goes on and on. And the reason I say that. Jay is that we've built Roswell on the Bedrock and Foundation of partnerships.

Bold has been an incredible partner for us over the years, and the only way we can service the 70 plus brands that we have at Roswell is if we have those strong partnerships. We're not emailing support@xyz.com to get

things done, and our brands expect us to have bat lines that go straight to the top of the food chain. We have three divisions at Roswell Creative. Engineering and growth. And when I say full service, it's not just a name only. We do this effectively for all of our brands. On the creative side, we're doing branding, logos, ui, ux design,

3D, art, photography, videography, and more. On the engineering side, it's basically systems integrations, custom Shopify development integrations with.

Multiple disparate platforms. Basically fitting square pegs in round holes. Our philosophy at Roswell is the only limitation is your imagination. If you can think it, we're gonna build it. And then rounding that out, I we're known in the Shopify ecosystem as the agency. That doesn't really shy away from a challenge.

We don't say why. We say, why

That's the type of user experience you're looking to create, let's figure it out. And then finally

On the growth marketing side, it's full funnel lifecycle marketing. Everything from performance marketing Google Meta, Pinterest, TikTok, app Loving, CTV and more.

SEO. Now, a EOI know we're gonna talk a little bit about that in the near

future on this podcast as well as affiliate marketing and then retention marketing. We were. One of Klaviyo's original partners back in 2016 when they were 25 people.

And we built that practice at Roswell because we were integrating Klaviyo.

And I said, it why not just integrate it? Why don't we actually execute the flows, the automations, the segmentation and whatnot? And that's how we built it. We were a team of five when I came aboard in 2014. We're a team of 50 now. And I'm proud of the work that my team has done, but as they say in our industry, we're just getting started.

Jay Myers: I believe it. That's wild. So 2000, I think we were in the same cohort of Shopify Plus partners in 2016 when they launched the program.

Nihar Kulkarni: Funny, funny fact, I was in the partner accelerator program in 2016 in New York. They had one in New York, Toronto, London, I think Austin. They chose four individuals from teams or agencies or firms to be a part of this. And in New York, there were hundreds of applicants. And. Roswell was chosen.

We were chosen. And the prize, Jay, believe it or not, was that you were going to be a Shopify expert. And I was like, okay, this is gonna change the game for us. We went through the

whole program and everything, and it was I think it was November or December of that year. And the the team over at Shopify came up to me and said, Hey, Nihar got some good news and some bad news for you.

What do you want? First? I was like, gimme the bad news. And they said you're not gonna be a Shopify expert. And I was like, I. I thought I had crushed this. I thought I had, what happened? And they said the good news is you're gonna be a Shopify Plus partner. And I was like no.

I came here to be a Shopify expert. And they're like, no, you want to be a Shopify Plus partner. And then that's how the the whole journey began with Shopify Plus, believe it or not.

Jay Myers: Wild. And at that time, I remember Shopify was really trying to get people to be plus partners and convince them that trust me, this is gonna be good. Now they have wait lists and applications. I don't even know what the percentage is. So do you know, 'cause you're a plus platinum partner, it's something like, less than 1% of partners

Nihar Kulkarni: It's actually

Jay Myers: a platinum partner.

Right.

Nihar Kulkarni: So there's about 4,200 plus partners across the world.

75 of them are platinum and only about 30 are in north America, and about nine of them are in New York. So that

kind of. Gives you the stratification of where we're at and you know what they're not just given platinum accreditations out Shopify puts you through the ringer to in a good way to be able to say that, okay, you're a platinum partner for a reason.

And that's very, it's a sense of pride for us at Roswell. It.

Jay Myers: Yeah, I remember we went, so we're on the app side and we went through this for years where there was one app store and you could be a hundred million dollars plus brand or someone just starting the store and you're shopping the same app store and you don't know if an app is a guy in his basement or if an app is a couple hundred team that can support you 24 7 that has all the security standards you need and uptime and you just couldn't tell.

And I remember for years saying, Shopify, we need some way for a plus merchant to know that an app is. That a plus merchant can trust it. Credible, right? And some requirements do, some code reviews, some security le like levels have to be met, just like standard stuff. And so the, a few years ago they launched the plus app, certified plus app program.

And we were the first ones in that as well too. So it's, we're, so we're on the outside. You're on the agency side. This should be a good conversation. I, one of the things that you, I, from the outside, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like what you do a little bit, I, there's other agencies that I think do this, but you really care about the growth and the business itself.

Not just redo my website, let's do a makeover. You seem to take a more of a holistic approach. What does that mean?

Nihar Kulkarni: Yeah. I appreciate that, Jay. And thank you for recognizing that. Roswell, our motto is that we're in the business of building businesses. We take that very seriously. We approach every opportunity as a land and expand scenario, not just for our own profit motives and our own growth motives, but because we know we can help a brand really drive and achieve those KPIs and the revenue levels that they're looking to accomplish.

You can't look at it in a siloed sense.

The The full service approach really works when brands understand that they can work with us in a few capacities, one capacity, or all capacities.

The reason it works is that if there is an issue with a retargeting script and we're not doing paid ads with the brand we have that understanding on how we can go in and remediate that tracking script so you're not having double attribution on a meta ad spend or something of that nature. And brands appreciate that because. We're not asking questions to their third party agency that's handling performance marketing or SEO on how to handle certain things in terms of schema markup or other aspects that are critical for page speed and so on. We know what to do. We have a team internally that we can consult with and we can get it done. And that's really the advantage. And we're an agency that when we engage with somebody, we're not coming to the first meeting with an invoice and putting our feet up and saying, Hey, what do you want us to do? We're coming there with a plan, a roadmap, and saying, this is what we're gonna do for the next three months.

And then in Q3 we're gonna do this in Q4, black Friday, cyber Monday.

And we have brands that we encourage all of our brands start thinking about it in April or May. It's, everyone says you start thinking about Black Friday, December 15th, but that's. Come on, that's a little too much.

But I think April may, you started planning out your strategies and whatnot. And I think that holistic approach, understanding that you can't have performance marketing without retention, because then it's like pouring water into a sieve. You're never gonna boil any water 'cause it's all gonna flow through. You plug up

all those holes using retention marketing strategies, you've got water to boil and you can retarget and retarget on a more cheaper level. A lot of brands don't realize that when your CAC is as high as it is right now with the duopoly of Google and meta, and your, that's your only focus is just acquisition. You're never going to be profitable because you're just having to pay for the same set of eyes over

Again. And that really eats into your margin. And so our approach is very holistic. You can't have one without the other. We work with brands. We let 'em know that if you you may not wanna work with us Growth marketing, you have your own agency, totally fine. But we advise them that if you're doing X and not y there's only so much that Z on our end can do.

And so we try to advise brands on a holistic.

Jay Myers: Yeah. And it's interesting. I feel like that's evolved a little bit. And it used to be that when you would go to an agency's website and if they had everything across the top, like everything from email, marketing, copy, website, dev, SEO, product photographer, like we do it all. The sense was like what do you specialize in?

You can't do it all. What's your this? But there's actually data that shows that when you use an agency that has multiple components there's actually higher return because they, there's, sorry, higher conversion, like it the optimization's better because. This group know is talking to this group and there's better communication.

They work together. The dev and the creative is connected. So like I think that viewpoint that I want an SEO specialist, I want a email marketing specialist, I want a growth marketing specialist isn't necessarily true.

Nihar Kulkarni: No, not

anymore. We're seeing a lot of brands now Jay, that are, that just don't wanna be able to have to juggle between.

Disparate teams. You have one team for performance and one team for retention. One team for SEO, one team for

affiliate, another team for design and another team. That's insane how many people you have to coordinate with.

Jay Myers: just you'd have a full-time person like

Nihar Kulkarni: it's ridiculous. And I

think a stat that I read that was that brands using integrative, creative and engineering and media see up to a 20% lift in conversion rate versus silo teams. And that's something that's really important that we talk to our brands about is that, we're coming to the table with a holistic strategy on how we're going to grow your brand.

And we have about,

out of the 70 brands that we're working with, we have about a dozen or so that are working with us in multiple capacities at Roswell. And they found it incredibly effective. And the brands that are going, up market and into the large account and enterprise realm they're really understanding and embracing the full service approach for an e-commerce agency.

Because we're all coming into our own. We started out. Purely Dev that we moved into design, then we moved into retention and

more recently full funnel lifecycle marketing and I think it's been very effective. Jay.

Jay Myers: So what's at the top of everyone's mind right now? What are the agencies like? Stressed about what are they, what, excited what? What is the main conversations you're having with brands right now?

Nihar Kulkarni: I think whether you're a design dev, e-commerce Shopify agency, or whether you're a retention agency I think that, in 2016 when we first became a Shopify plus partner, now platinum partner it was, I wouldn't say it's the Wild West, but it was the beginnings of the modern day

e-commerce agency. There were you, you go and look at a number of brands and you target them and whatnot, chances are they weren't on Shopify in 2016 and there was opportunities for migration and for a number of platform expansions and whatnot. Chances are, they weren't on Klaviyo. Chances are, they weren't doing subscription in the right way. And so the opportunity for migration and integrations was so much more. Now, fast forward nine years later. We'll be 10 very very shortly. The the brands that we're approaching right now, nine out of 10 times, they're already on Shopify, nine out

10 times.

They're already on Klaviyo, nine outta 10 times. They're using Yappo, they're using Recharge, they're using Attentive, they're using all the standard tech stuff. They're using all the bulk commerce apps and but the, and so the challenge that we're talking about with agencies is that. How do you present value to a brand that isn't related to a migration or to a tech stack overhaul or things of that nature? You gotta look at their business and understand where are the the knobs that I can tune to really ratchet up a OV ratchet up LTV, increase frequency of purchase, bring customers back to the site.

How can I leverage AI tools to be able to squeeze every dollar of of possible out of a cohort? And so on. And I think that's really what is on the mind of a lot of agencies, is that along with AI disruption I think the concept that we're trying to implement at Roswell is that we're billing for our brains, not for our hands anymore. And that's really important. I think there's a small window of opportunity within the next two years that agencies can do that because once the AI tools become ubiquitous and best practice and standard it's gonna drive the price down with all the freelancers all over the world. And brands are gonna say, i'm not paying that amount for this type of service because I can get it elsewhere and it's gonna depress the price but not the value. And so within the next two years. Agencies that really embrace ai, optimize their delivery processes and sales processes and value processes are really gonna be successful because you can do three x, four x, maybe even 10 x the volume of work you can do with the same person. Lastly, I'll just leave this with

you. Is that AI is here. AI isn't going anywhere, and it's it's the new internet, it's the new utility. Either you get on the train or you're gonna get run over or you're getting left behind. And that's

AI is not gonna take jobs away from people that use ai. It's gonna take jobs away from people who don't use ai.

Jay Myers: Yep. Agreed. So what are some of the ways that you're seeing brands? I guess two questions use AI for e-commerce and also the second question I wanna ask is like the, I think it's the number one question I get asked is like, optimizing for ai, like it's SEO is will always be SEO, but. More and more people are going to AI to ask, what is I need a new coffee maker.

What's the best one that looks good? And take a picture of my kitchen. Literally so that's very pressing on a lot of merchant's minds. And then also they, I get this question a lot. I know I should be using AI for my store. I know I should be using things like AI to turn my images into video and things like that, and I just, I don't have time to explore it.

I need to book off a week and play with AI to figure out the things. But maybe we could fast track some of that. What are some ways that you see some of the top brands using AI to, to run and improve their business? And then let's talk about getting found through ai.

Nihar Kulkarni: Yeah, for sure. Great questions there Jay. And getting started. Just, you have to understand the market, the openness to using AI shopping assistance. Now it, you have boomers, gen Xers, millennials and Gen Zs in the market and soon to be gen Alphas, right? It's interesting, I read this the other day amongst the AI channels, 65%. Gen Zs are open to using AI shopping assistant and 64% of millennials, 40% of Gen Xers, and only 18% of baby boomers. In terms of a

OV, you have a plus 30% a OV on orders attributed to AI searches versus traditional channels. And so for brands in terms of embracing ai, what's important is not just understanding how it can be an enhancement or augmentation tool for delivering your own assets on the site.

That's obvious. You can

use AI for copy. You can use AI for images. You can use AI to even code if you want, if you wanna do some basic things on the front end of your site. But what AI is really gonna do to drive revenue is going to be is increasing that conversion rate on site using AI sales agents like gorgeous has a fantastic one.

When you walk into a store in a brick and mortar location, someone looks at me and they'll say, oh, you're a size 32 waist, 34 long, right? I can tell, and here's some jeans that you might like, and here's some tops that go with it. And I'm like, ah, I don't really like that type of color.

Okay, what about this? And so on and so forth. This AI sales agent is allowing you to do that at scale.

It's so critical on the growth marketing front. Obviously everything with performance marketing is gonna be AI driven in terms of optimization in the near future when it comes to retention email and SMS, if you're still doing batch and blast brands you're not doing it right.

You have the ability with AI right now to create these AI powered segments that are precise in terms of what the interests of that group are, that you can go in and say, hi, Jay. I noticed that you really like white hats and black T-shirts. What do you think about what do you think about this brand or what do you think about that and or this styling of trousers or pants that might go with it and so on. And the important thing to note is that the subject lines, the content inside of the message that you're creating, the actual imagery and all that needs to be personalized ai. If you're doing it right with, as a brand, it's for personalization. It's

creating a one-to-one bond with that customer at scale.

And that's really how brands are going to be able to embrace and really drive revenue amongst their competitors that aren't using ai because you're talking to a customer on a level that is meaningful to them. And AI shopping isn't going anywhere. It's, a year from now, a year ago it wasn't even a thing.

Now you

have Shop Day integrated with perplexity, which had GPT. It's gonna be everywhere. The other day. Also, I was having lunch with a, somebody from the C-Suite over at Gorg which is one of my favorite platforms out there. And, he was, it was the first cold day in New York, and he was shopping for what seemed like gloves on his phone. While we were make, while we were just ordering food. And I said, are you in chat GPT ordering gloves? And he was like, yeah. And I said, that is insane and

Jay Myers: Did he complete the order in chat, GPT or he was using it for research?

Nihar Kulkarni: completely, and. It just dawned on me that the way people go to Amazon is just buy basics. Toilet paper, gloves, just things that sunglasses, just basic things that you need, but it doesn't require a lot of thought, but you wanna make sure you're getting the right product,

right? You're not gonna buy. A $4,000 iron door on chat GPT, you're not gonna buy a, $15,000 necklace. Anything over, two, 300 bucks, you're probably gonna wanna actually go to the site. So it was important to be found in AI search results, and that's really important for brands to understand when they're embracing ai, but also understand that the opportunity for commerce within the AI chatbots is. Is going to get larger and larger, especially as the Gen Zs and the millennials start moving more so into the positions of power with discretionary income that they can spend.

And when that happens, you're gonna see a massive explosion of individuals really buying through that.

Buying through the chatbots and then under and looking at products that they really want that are more high price point, more high average order values and going to the sites to do further research. But the quality of traffic that you're getting from the AI search bots is far greater than the SEO elements.

Rounding that out. If you're a brand and you're seeing traffic drop in SEO, you're not alone.

It's across the board.

People aren't clicking on search results as much as they used to. They're actually going into the AI search results. That's not to say that SEO is important, it's all a part of AI search, S-E-O-A-E-O and GEO.

But being found in those a EO results are critical. Your content being used in the GEO results, critical and still being in the top five, top 10 on Google, also critical 'cause they all come together to really drive your brand from an AI standpoint.

Jay Myers: Have you played around with Sienna ai?

Nihar Kulkarni: I haven't yet, but I, it's on my list.

Jay Myers: Okay. They're in New York as well too. Actually, I had her on the show Lisa. And it's, it, it works with Gorg. So Sienna is not a support platform, it's just an agent. So you could use Zendesk, you could use Gorg, you could use Intercom, whatever tool you use.

SNA is it's like a person, like you create an agent and. A persona. So like I could create a nihar, and that's my person, and he has a personality, but I train him on all the products. And it actually, it sometimes takes weeks to train your agent. It starts with going through all your docs, but it's, it does.

Really what you're saying, and it doesn't just support people on the website. It recommends if you have a subscription and someone's buying something, it'll say, oh, do you want me just to add that to your next month subscription going out? It can manage, it can track, it does everything. It's mind blowing.

And then it operates within gorgeous. So if you have a gorgeous account, your agent can answer tickets, it can interact through the chat, like whatever a human would use. It's literally that. And then the one anyways, look into it.

Nihar Kulkarni: Fuel for the car. It's like you have, you bought a car and now it's providing the fuel in the driver.

Jay Myers: yeah, and if you switch cars, you take that driver with you. So if you switch from Zendesk to gorgeous, you keep your agent, you keep all of the knowledge and everything and it's, it goes with you. So it's like that driver knows you, knows your routes, knows your whatever. You get a new car, same driver.

That's Sienna.

Nihar Kulkarni: I see. That's awesome. I'm gonna check that out because as I mentioned earlier,

It's AI is not going anywhere and it's our duty to our 70 plus brands, hopefully a hundred next year to be able to advise them on the strategies that are gonna make them profitable and stand out from the fray and the evolving e-commerce ecosystem as it applies to ai.

Jay Myers: yeah, it's gonna be I always find when I have these conversations, it's hard to not. Let your mind wander and go a little bit further because as you're talking about personalizing email and how important that is, my mind goes to in a year, am I even gonna be reading those emails or is my agent gonna be reading them?

And is a store going to be sending and is my agent gonna digest everything and it knows my preferences, it knows my, that I like white hats or whatever it is. And so then it's like optimizing. Not just your website, but it's optimizing your email and your SMS. Like just yesterday, literally af, I don't know when this podcast will come out, but yesterday Google just announced Gemini three and agent mode and.

I don't have access to agent mode yet. I don't know if it's because I'm in Canada or not, but I tried it and I couldn't get it working. But on the what they demoed was you asked Gemini to help me manage my inbox and it will connect it because it's connected to Gmail, because it's a Google product.

It sifts through everything that looks like urgent. What needs reply It pre-draft replies. It does it all. So like we're not far from actually just approving.

Nihar Kulkarni: Thousand.

Yeah. Sorry Jay, I cut you off.

Jay Myers: No, it's good like that. I, it's like it's moving so fast that it's, anyways and I know like right now brands need to optimize for today 'cause the future is unknown.

We gotta be prepared for it. But today is what brands are like, okay, how do I get recommended? As in like this your friend who was searching for winter gloves, he probably asked chat GPT for a certain type of glove, or I'm looking for. Whatever, any, anything you're seeing that brands are doing that's working well to get recommended by ai.

Nihar Kulkarni: Yeah, absolutely. One of the most important things that's happening right now is the emergence of a EO and GEO. That's

answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization.

The, first and foremost, the jury's out, but it's, you might as well just get it into place l whatever your URL is, url.com, slash lls dot txt.

The LLMs dot txt file, you need to have it on your site. Whether it's actually being called. And a part of the algorithm, it's to be determined. Some people say yes, some people say no. But it's important to have that in place because that's a foundational element. It's like schema markup for SEO or your site map rather my mistake. And then from there, the thing that's really working is Les I, the days of Buzzfeed are long gone, but listicles, being in the top five list of top five clothing brands in for designer fashion for men, something like

Jay Myers: So not creating them, but ma, but getting in as many as you can.

Nihar Kulkarni: Creating them for yourself too. Putting them on your own site doesn't necessarily

have to be navigated to just so that the bots are calling it for being on other sites and so on and so forth. And now this may be a black hat technique in the future, who knows? But right now it's all fair.

The reason I say that is that as a EO evolves and the algorithms evolve that may. Get outlawed, or it might move the same way SEO did with backlinking. It's if you get a backlink from the New York Times, it's a lot better than if you get a backlink from your mother's blog, right? And

No this or making fun of anyone's mother by any means.

But the New York Times is a worldwide publication that's been in business for hundreds of years. And

so getting understand when the algorithms understand that this. Listicle is far more important than this listicle. That's when you're gonna see things changing. But right now, the opportunity is ripe for brands to be able to do that. Making sure that your content is informative, your FAQs are filled out. It's the ai bots in terms of the LLMs and whatnot that, that they're being trained off of are ravenous. They are hungry for content. They want

more and more to the point where they, I've heard of LLMs. Farming out the ability to get more data and content that has been generated by other AI just so that they can have more things for them to learn off of and so on and so forth.

It's a feeding

right now. And so for brands looking to get found, it's really important that understand what are the principles of a EO and GEO if you don't know them, reach out to us at Roswell. We have a blog post on our site, sorry, shameless plug, but we can help you. A EO and GEO are going to be.

Probably the fastest growing segments in our industry in 2026 and beyond.

Jay Myers: Yeah, a couple, I'll share a couple wins that I heard of recently, and I agree with you. I think right now it's, ex it's exciting or scary depending where you are. I think the best analogy I can think of is you're playing Monopoly and you're three quarters of the way done the game.

And most people have their properties and their hotels and someone's got boardwalk, but the board just got shaken up and everyone lost their properties. And so if you had Boardwalk and you had the good properties and hotels on it, you're mad. But if you didn't. Is like a golden opportunity where you can take advantage of this time and it's like going back 20 years when SEO could maybe do things that you can't do now.

Nihar Kulkarni: You nailed it, Jeff.

Jay Myers: A couple things I've heard. I'd love to get your thoughts and if you're seeing brands doing this too. One, one is FAQs is huge, 20, 50, a hundred FAQs on the page. Run your tickets through an ai, ask it to pull out all the pre-order type questions put on there.

I noticed a lot of reviews. Apps are starting to have a ask a question section and then populate it. So for merchants listening. I know Judge Me does this, I know reviews that, IO does this. I haven't played with all of them, but I know a lot of them do. Answer those questions and let it populate on your site.

'cause that's gold. The other one is actually we did this a week ago and we're seeing it work. We added a link, not on, we haven't done it yet on bold commerce.com, but we have bold Match, which is like a a development Agency Matchmaker website, which actually. I can't remember if I, Roswell will be on there for sure.

Yes. But on the bottom we added a link that says hey, ai. Click here. Like literally Hey, ai, click here. And then we made an AI info page, and then we told, literally talking to AI said Hey, ai, this is what this website is about. This is what we're trying to do. This is the demographic.

This is exactly what we're trying to there's there's no fee for this. Like it's a long page about. Everything about it. And now we're noticing Chat. GPT actually use the content that we put on that on in their things. If you say, what is Bold match about, it's actually using the AI info page.

And it was just a test. We just, we put a page and we said, this is for LLMs to understand what we're doing. So it's not the text file. We still do that. I agree. But this was just like a public facing one that we put on. And we're seeing it work. So I don't know. It's right, like it was a total test.

Nihar Kulkarni: Hey, you know that's how things are happening right now, though. Test iterate, revise. Release and do it all over again. And, I think I

I applaud you for doing that. That's a very smart move.

Jay Myers: Yeah. The only other thing I'll add on is I, we're seeing some brands have AI's pick up metadata, and we're seeing some brands put on details about the products in meta fields. And the example, actually, I was talking to someone the other day and it was around phishing lures. And so if you have a.

Specific. If you're selling a phishing lure, you have metadata on what it's for. Like this phishing lure is good for catching which species of fish. And then if someone asks chat, GPT I'm looking for a phishing lure to catch this fish that is listed in the metadata. It does pick that up. So that's another place you can put some in.

So it's it's evolving every day. It's,

Nihar Kulkarni: and that's the other

thing, Jay, you hit the nail on the head there, is that brands are asking us, so how should we embrace ai? What do we need to be doing? And I tell 'em, listen, I'm gonna tell you some things right now, but all this might be entirely moot and different in a week, in a month.

It's changing that fast. So you just got to keep up using the train analogy. You gotta be on the train. You gotta be paying attention. 'cause if you're not on the train, you are absolutely gonna be left behind.

Jay Myers: Yeah, we're right in the middle of Black Friday season. Right now we're recording this middle-ish of November. Any neat Black Friday trends or ways that brands are promoting or running Black Friday

sales this year that you're seeing.

Nihar Kulkarni: For sure. I think what they're realizing is that every year CAC has gone through the roof higher and higher for Black Friday, cyber Monday, you

absolutely

Jay Myers: is noisier and,

Nihar Kulkarni: yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the, what the brands are really focusing on right now and what we're advising 'em is that it's important for you to have that have, it's important for you to engage in, in performance marketing, all the channels throughout the throughout Black Friday, cyber Monday.

But it's highly critical for you to, in have a. Very fine tuned retention marketing strategy that's going to be able to retarget customers effectively. One of the biggest flaws that we've seen with brands that have that they've implemented is not removing or suppressing profiles of customers from a drip campaign during Black Friday, cyber Monday after they've purchased.

And that is

a. Huge issue that we let our brands know if someone

blis eyes on Black Friday, right? And you're doing a 20% off sale and it's a progressive 30% off on Saturday, 40% off on Sunday on select products and Cyber Monday, the last dash. 50% off of select products or whatnot. How mad would you be as a consumer if you're getting those emails on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday after you just bought what you wanted at 20% off Furious. And so I think it's important what we're seeing with brands is that you need to focus on performance marketing, for sure.

Bringing that traffic in. But the retargeting elements need to be hyper tuned and making sure that you're using AI to. Keep your communications as personalized as possible. Cross-sell is critical during this time period, having proper personalization and cross-sell elements onsite, as well as post-purchase upsell opportunities so you can really drive every drop of revenue you can during this important time of the year.

Do you know why they call it Black Friday, by the way?

Jay Myers: Wasn't it because it was the first time of the year when you were, your profits were in the black?

Nihar Kulkarni: Exactly. A lot

Jay Myers: that, oh.

Nihar Kulkarni: that's 100%. Because back in the day, brick and mortar stores were in the red up until Thanksgiving and the day after Thanksgiving was the biggest shopping day of the year, and they finally went into the black.

So yeah, it's

Jay Myers: crazy to think that you operate that much of a year in the red and like only the last six weeks makes you month profit. It still blows my mind.

Nihar Kulkarni: Hundred percent. A hundred percent. That's in the brick and mortar world. If you're

operating like that in the digital world, you're not doing it right.

Jay Myers: Yeah. You've, what's the craziest Black Friday story you've seen in your days?

Nihar Kulkarni: Oh my God. We had a brand that came to us and one of our philosophies at Roswell is don't tell us what to do. Tell us what you want to accomplish, and we'll find the most

effective way of doing

Jay Myers: I like that. I like that.

Nihar Kulkarni: A brand came to us, this was nearly eight years ago, I think it was. And said we're gonna do this for Black Friday, cyber Monday.

It's Thanksgiving. We're gonna sh we wanna gate our sights so that customers can't shop for the Thursday of Thanksgiving through the end of day Monday of Black Friday, cyber Monday. We wanna throw caution to the win and basically respect the fact that it's holiday time and over capitalization and consumerism isn't what we're about. And I said to them, I was like. Are, you know what Black Friday means, right? And number two, you know that this is the biggest shopping week of the year for a reason. And they said we get that, but we'll be fine.

And they had to escape the site. And we gave them every word of caution. We told them This is a horrible idea, so on and so forth.

We did it because they asked us to do it, and, but we gave them every disclaimer saying, this is a horrible idea. Needless to say, a year or two later, they're out of business.

Jay Myers: Oh, that's wild. But it's hard. That's hard to say. To know. 'cause Patagonia is famous for their New York Times ad that said, don't buy this jacket and. What's that photography company? They're in New York. Their website is actually turned off every, on Sundays.

Nihar Kulkarni: Oh yeah. Yeah, that's true. It's true.

Jay Myers: Shoot, I'm drawing a blank on their name, but they're very like religious and traditional, but they're the one of the biggest BH photo Ah,

Nihar Kulkarni: Oh, BH. Yeah. BH. Yes.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

BNH. Yeah. They, I don't know if they still do it or not, but they, their website was closed on Sundays the same way that. Brick and mortar stores closed on Sundays and so it's hard to know, like sometimes those things could play in your favor or they could be a total backfire. I,

Nihar Kulkarni: I it's a branding thing. Patagonia is Patagonia. It's a legendary brand. This brand in particular wasn't and not to say that it didn't have the potential to be, but it wasn't at the time.

And I think that in the digital ecosystem of e-commerce if somebody wants to buy, let 'em buy. It's not

causing you more overhead. You're not having someone to actually be there on Thanksgiving or Black Friday, Cyber Monday, dealing with that particular customer at that moment of time, at 11:59 PM or three in the afternoon or whatever the case may be. Let 'em buy if that's what they want.

Let 'em buy right at the end of the day, selling out just means you need to put more on the shelf, and that's a good thing for our brand.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Agreed. Okay. Before we get on time here, I want to talk about this website.

Nihar Kulkarni: Absolutely

Jay Myers: Let me throw it up here real quick. Okay. For.

Nihar Kulkarni: Gonzalvez over at Diane von Furstenberg. She's absolutely fantastic. Head of e-commerce there. She crushes it and gave us the opportunity to redesign this site and put her faith in us. And I think we delivered with that web award.

Jay Myers: So for those listening right now on the audio version of this podcast, you'll have to jump over to YouTube to see, 'cause we're screen sharing the website, which, but you can go to it. It's dvf.com and this is the one that won the People's Choice. Webby warden there's a lot about it that I love as I scroll it.

What are you most proud about with this? What is if there's something that you could say that you love about this site that you might tell others this is something that we love and that you would encourage others to maybe do as well.

Nihar Kulkarni: Absolutely. So we were tasked in November, December, about a year ago actually to date to be able to take their current legacy site and transform it digitally into a high performing conversion rate optimization site that was had all the big sorry, had all the, had all of the best practices baked in with a number of integrations with different platforms.

That all made sense. The challenging part, and we do that all the time. But the challenging part is that this needed to be done by February. So

that's not a long a long period of time in, in development world. So what I'm really proud about is that the team came together. We knew what we had to do, what we knew, what we had to accomplish, and we had to create a world-class site through our creative team, through our engineering team, through our systems integrations team that really drove. Not just revenue and conversion rate, but maintain the brand essence. DVF is a legendary brand.

And the namesake Diane von Furstenberg, I mean she's a legend in all over the world, all over the fashion industry.

And under Claudia's leadership over there and our collaboration with her, we were able to deliver on that.

And that's what I'm most proud about is the fact that we had a crunch of a of a timeline we had. An enormous task in front of us to be able to maintain the brand essence, but bring it digitally into the current state of where it needed to be from a digital transformation standpoint with applying all the, and adhering all the best practices, and then delivering all of that in a very short period of time. And in doing so we were able to create what you see right now, but on top of that, win a Webby award. And that

was something that I think was really powerful.

Jay Myers: it's a beautiful site. It's clean, it's elegant, gr great photography, but loads like super lightning fast. Huge congrats. I know how hard webby awards are to win, and it looks beautiful. I would encourage anyone listening, just go to dvf.com and check it out. Click around, go to the pages.

Yeah, I actually went on it. I something I loved. They did I don't know if it'll come, it did, is I don't usually sign up for emails when I go on a site, but this actually really incurred I was tempted to because for an extra 30% off. So

Nihar Kulkarni: Yep.

Jay Myers: this is very, to your point. Relevant. It's to the page I'm on, it's an extra 30%.

It's not just the generic one that's on the homepage. Like I thought this was awesome, and I bet you they're gonna get huge opt-in from this on the Black Friday page like

Nihar Kulkarni: Little tidbit for those that are listening is that if you're trying to reverse engineer your retention marketing strategy, if you're not. If you're not yielding 30% plus of your revenue from email and SMS, you're leaving a lot of money on the table.

If you're, if the amount of customers returning to your site returning users rather you returning users, returning customers, two different thing.

If you're returning users aren't at least 20%, you're leaving money on the table. The way you can reverse engineer the type of revenue you can get from email marketing is look at your current. Stats in terms of sessions. Look at your percentage of customers that are returning and then understand what the conversion rate is for all customers and what would it be if you increased your returning users to 20%.

And typically if your retention marketing strategy is on point, your conversion rate for returning users should be double the conversion rate for overall users using that math.

You can understand how much money you're leaving on the table with the welcome series. You should be earning anywhere, sorry.

You should be increasing your list growth from between three and 5% of your unique users on a monthly basis, and they should

be converting it around four to 6%. Of after entering in the welcome series campaign and at your average order value, you do all that math, you can understand how much money you're leaving on the

Jay Myers: Yeah that's super good benchmarking to know because I think a lot of people are flying blind thinking they're doing good when they're Maybe lots of opportunities still so amazing. This has been great. I know we're at time here. You're a busy man. You gotta run. Thank you so much.

I really. Oh my, my a hundred percent pleasure. Where can people find you? What social media platforms are you active on and where would you like to send

Nihar Kulkarni: Yeah, absolutely. So check us out at Roswell nyc. Super simple. Roswell nyc. You can reach out to us at Build My Business. Roswell studios.com. Again, that's build my business@roswellstudios.com. Reach out to me on

LinkedIn, check us out check out Roswell on LinkedIn. Those are the main spaces we're at.

And check out our IG page. Check out our blog. We're doing lots of cool things. Brands love us, not just because we're able to deliver results, but because we come to the, we come to the table with a plan. We're proactive. And we're we live up to our model that we're in the business of building.

Jay Myers: Amazing. I'll put that all in the show notes as well. Thank you so much.

Nihar Kulkarni: Thank you, Jay. Appreciate your time and we'll see you soon and we're gonna have you on the orbit at Roswell soon.

Jay Myers: Amazing.

Nihar Kulkarni: Cheers.