Jeremiah Prummer is the CEO of KnoCommerce, which specializes in customer survey integrations for e-commerce brands. With nearly 15 years of entrepreneurial experience, he started in e-commerce building extensions for WooCommerce. Jeremiah specializes in conversion rate optimization and zero-party data.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:26] The most pressing problems associated with customer service
• [11:24] How to ask precise questions during the customer journey
• [19:12] Unlocking customer insights to identify your target audience
• [24:35] Optimizing customer insights
• [30:09] Jeremiah Prummer’s customer attribution tactics
• [38:04] The value of customer survey data
• [46:15] How Jeremiah structures his customer surveys and facilitates customer actions
• [56:12] Key lessons from customer data analytics
• [1:02:49] Attributing customer data to LTV
• [1:05:04] Why Jeremiah built KnoCommerce
• [1:21:07] How to solve problems through business innovation

In this episode…

When it comes to customer service, many brands don’t elicit sufficient feedback to improve the experience. Asking detailed questions in comprehensive surveys offers rich insights and data. How can you leverage this information to drive conversions?

Rather than relying solely on customer reviews to gather information about their experiences and service levels, data and attribution expert Jeremiah Prummer suggests integrating surveys at various points during the customer journey. For instance, you can provide post-purchase and abandoned cart surveys with multiple open-ended and specific questions, including why they made the purchase, detailed information about their experiences, and where they heard about the brand. This offers actionable data you can harness to innovate your products, attribute purchases to various metrics, and retain customers.

In this week’s episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris sits down with Jeremiah Prummer, the CEO of KnoCommerce, to discuss optimizing customer surveys to scale. Jeremiah talks about gathering customer data beyond basic demographic information, how to attribute customer data to various business metrics, and how innovation solves universal problems.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• William Harris on LinkedIn
• Elumynt
• Jeremiah Prummer on LinkedIn | X
• Jeremiah’s email: jeremiah@knocommerce.com
• KnoCommerce

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Quotable Moments

• "The biggest problem with customer service in general is that brands just aren't asking enough questions."
• "Ask as many questions as you're going to use. If you have a plan for what to do with that data, then ask the question."
• "There's actually no reliable way to connect all those data points together. So every form of data is biased."
• "Direct traffic doesn't exist. Organic traffic... at the end of the day, every single order has a discovery source."
• "The government will never come to that conclusion. It's just not the way that it's going to work."

Action Steps

1. Start asking strategic questions: By engaging with customers through surveys, brands can gather valuable feedback that goes beyond basic reviews. This approach addresses the challenge of low response rates in standard reviews and unlocks deeper insights into customer preferences and motivations.
2. Implement customer journey surveys: Deploy surveys at various touchpoints in the customer journey, such as post-purchase or during cart abandonment. This method helps brands understand the various phases of customer interaction and tailor strategies to improve customer experience and retention.
3. Leverage attribution data: Use survey data to enhance understanding of customer acquisition channels, particularly for top-of-funnel platforms like TikTok and Meta. This strategy tackles the challenge of underreported impact in traditional attribution models, enabling more informed ad spend decisions.
4. Customize questions based on brand goals: Develop survey questions that align with specific business objectives, whether for product development or improving customer loyalty. This approach allows for tailored insights that can drive innovation and address unique brand challenges.
5. Incorporate action-driven survey questions: Design surveys to end with questions that encourage further engagement, such as joining a VIP group or referring friends. This tactic gathers data and fosters deeper brand connections and customer loyalty, enhancing customer lifetime value.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:03  

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show. Hey everyone.

William Harris  0:16  

I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 100 million and beyond as you up arrow your business and your personal life. Joining me today is Jeremiah Prummer. Jeremiah is the founder and CEO of KnoCommerce, which works with some of the best brands online, including hex clad brew mate and true classic. He's been an entrepreneur since 2010 and initially got his start in e Commerce Building WooCommerce extensions. He sold a tiny in 2022 and now operates under the umbrella of a publicly a public holding company, Jeremy. It's been a long time coming. Welcome to the show.

Jeremiah Prummer  0:50  

Yeah, thanks, man. It's good to see you. And yeah, it's has been a long time. I don't even know how long we've been, you know, messaging each other on Twitter and interacting with each other's contents of but it's been years. I feel like

William Harris  1:03  

exactly I was gonna say, I was trying to think if we We met through anybody, and I don't think it was. I think we literally just started engaging on Twitter, which has become a theme for a lot of these where I'm like, we didn't meet through anybody other than just engage with each other stuff,

Jeremiah Prummer  1:16  

yeah, which is awesome. I mean, I guess it all kind of started somewhere, right? Like, I know Andrew Fox, well, I don't know. Yeah, okay, so anyway, we'll give and Andrew a little shout out here. I know, you know, at some point years ago, I was engaging with Andrew's content, and I'm sure that's probably how all of it started. So sure,

William Harris  1:32  

sure, yeah, Andrew's a good guy. Again. I've known him for years as well, and definitely worth giving him a shout out. So today we are going to be talking about going beyond demographics and how to scale profits using some next level customer insights. Before we do that, I do want to mount our sponsor real quick. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired with the largest one selling for nearly selling for nearly 800,000,001 that i pod recently. You can learn more on our website, Elumynt.com which is spelled E, l, u, m, y, N, t.com, that said, enough of that stuff. Onto the good stuff. Again, talking about beyond demographics, scaling profits using next level customer insights with Jeremy Prummer. So, Jeremy, okay, what is the biggest problem with customer service? Like, what are we what are we doing wrong?

Jeremiah Prummer  2:26  

Yeah, it's a good question. So the I would say that the biggest problem with customer service in general is that brands just aren't asking enough questions and and I think part of that comes down to the fact that there's a some, some you have to have a strategy, right? So, like, Sure, what questions do I ask? What do I do with the information once I get that information right? And I think one of the things that we see as a theme in our business is that customers want to give their feedback, and I think we see this in the context of reviews, right? But I think what the challenge with a review, and the reason why reviews actually have a much lower response rate than a survey, is that a review is going to be posted publicly, and it's also kind of a constricted format, right? You're basically being asked like, tell us on a scale of one to five, essentially, is usually the scale that we're using how we did. And I think that that that just feels a little bit more burdensome. Oftentimes it's coming in in a form where you need to click through an email, you need to go through, you need to, you know, fill out a form. Maybe you have to log in for it, like that. That format is is more challenging. And so what we see is that we survey mostly from an order confirmation screen or the other. The second most common way that somebody will deliver a survey is via an email where as soon as you click the button, you're in the survey taking process, and you're going through and answering those questions. And then we obviously have people who are just embedding a survey on their site as well, right? And so there's something about that process where, because you just instantly get into the flow of answering questions. And the questions are different than a review question. It just lends itself to more responses. So we see much higher response rates with these things. And so that's one piece of it is just like that format, I think, is different the survey format versus something like a review. And then the problem that context, though, is we see so many people just not asking enough questions. And there's kind of two different things that I think about here. One is, there's a lot of brands will go and they'll create a long form survey for their customers to try to understand. Maybe once or twice a year, they make this really long survey, and it's 20, 3040, questions long, and there's a ton of thought that goes into it. There's a ton of time spent crafting these questions. Maybe you're going to give out some sort of reward for taking that survey. Right? And that ends up being a very large project, right? Somebody's spending a lot of time on that, and it's a because it's a large project, it's also kind of daunting. So you look at this and you're like, I've got to put all this time, all this thought, all this effort, into crafting this perfect survey. And so that's kind of one end of the spectrum, and then the other end of the spectrum is somebody says, Well, I just want to know how somebody said that they found me. And so I'm gonna drop a single question survey on my order confirmation screen, and I'm just gonna collect that data. And so there's advantages and disadvantages to both, right? Like, if you're just asking that one question, the barrier to entry on that is next to nothing. Like, you don't have to put a lot of thought into it. Somebody else has already told you this is a good question to ask. You already have an idea of, like, what you can do with that information, right? It's extremely simple. And so there's, it's very easy. And then on the other side, you've got, actually, probably way more insight, way more robust and meaningful data that you're collecting if you're asking 20 questions, but if you have to put a lot of thought and effort into it, you just might not do it. And so I think there's a balance there. And so what we what we recommend to brands, is basically like, hey, get in here. Start asking some questions. You're gonna see a lot of people answering these questions. If you're let's say you're showing a survey on order confirmation screen. Typical response rates around 40% so 40% of your customers are gonna answer that survey. And so that's a really good sample size. Don't just ask one question. Ask three or five or 10 questions. We have a bunch of pre built questions we recommend, or you can even go look at what other brands are doing with this. And just don't be afraid to ask questions, because people do want to give their feedback. And that's just kind of a common trend we see among consumers, is they do like to be able to give feedback.

William Harris  6:41  

That's fair. As human beings in general, we like to give feedback. So you know, things like, what's your third favorite vegetable or seventh favorite color? Things just keep going on and on with the questions, right? No, I see the point that you're driving perfectionism on the one side, minimalism on the other side, that's not the right amount. So we need to get to more questions than what people are typically asking. How many questions are we talking? Are we talking? You know, hey, this should be 355, 100. Where do we draw the line? Yeah.

Jeremiah Prummer  7:13  

So it's all about your business goals, right? Sure. The reality is, the more questions you ask, the less likely somebody is to complete all those questions. So if you're using a kind of an old school survey solution, that is a problem. So let's say you're using, like a type form where you have a 10 question survey, somebody has to answer all 10 questions, and all of those are submitted together as a group. You're going to get a lower response rate if you ask 10 questions than if you ask two, and that means you're going to collect less data. But in the context of what we do, we collect every single question response. So if you ask 10 questions and somebody answers two of the 10, you get those two responses. If somebody else answers seven, you get those seven responses. And then, of course, if somebody answers all 10. So I think the way that I look at it is ask as many questions as you're going to use, use, so whatever, if you have a plan for what to do with that data, then ask the question, there's no, no issues with with going deep and long form. We have some brands we work with that are running 20 plus question surveys on an order confirmation screen. And actually, one of the brands we work with, they're mid, mid nine figures, great brand, and they do this really well, I feel like so they they ask their attribution questions, which is what they care about most. For new customers, they ask, how did you first hear about us? What brought you to our site today? Follow up questions based on, you know, if somebody says they saw them on TV, they're asking, What? What were you watching? If you know, just different questions like that. And then they ask, How long did you know about us before placing your first purchase? And it's basically a set of five ish questions that somebody might answer, and then they have a pause. And it's basically just a, we call them an action card, or like an HTML card in there, where you can choose to continue. And so they say, Hey, we have some more questions for you if you're willing to to answer these additional questions. And so it's literally, like a pause in the survey. You don't have to do that, but in this case, they do, and I think it's smart. And so if somebody says next, then they end up going through this flow of answering it's like 15 additional questions. It's a massive number of questions. And I think that's a really smart way of doing it. They're gathering the data that they want to upfront. They're making sure they get the most important information for them, and then after the fact they're they're collecting other information that they'll use, demographics data, understanding purchase intent data, asking their customers what types of products they what other types of products I'd like to see from them, what other brands they're shopping all of these kinds of pieces of information that are not as critical, because the most important thing to them is understanding the. The impact of their ad spend. When they're spending, I don't know how much they spend, but I'm guessing that's 100 million plus a year in ads on paid ads, and so that that's the most impactful thing for them. But all of that other data is still valuable, and there are a subset of their customers who want to answer those questions. Yeah,

William Harris  10:17  

I like that. You know who Nate bar gets? He is the comedian?

Jeremiah Prummer  10:22  

Oh, sorry I missed that.

William Harris  10:24  

No, do you know who Nate March gets? He is the comedian? Oh, no, I

Jeremiah Prummer  10:29  

don't. I don't think I do. Okay,

William Harris  10:31  

he has a bit that I appreciate, that talks about how it's like he would read more, but he's like, you know, every page, it's just like, the most words possible. And he was like, just, let me just put a few blank pages in there so I can come up for air and breathe a little bit. I feel like that's kind of like, what those cards are in the middle where it's like, yeah, it can feel that way when you just like, question, question, question, you're like, Whoa, let me breathe. Maybe I'm willing. It's worth some questions, but give me a chance to just catch up here a little bit.

Jeremiah Prummer  10:58  

Yeah, it's awesome. I think it's a really smart way of doing it. Yeah.

William Harris  11:02  

So you were talking to me before about asking questions on the customer journey, which I thought was a really good way of looking at this. So if we're saying, Okay, let's ask more questions. Well, what questions should we ask? Where should we be asking those questions? How does the customer journey like? What points in this journey are you asking, and what are the kinds of questions you'd be asking?

Jeremiah Prummer  11:24  

Yeah, it's a good question. The so it kind of depends on the size of your brand and what your objectives are, right in terms of what the best questions that is. But I'm gonna, I'll use an example of a brand that's doing, let's say, you know, five to 50 million a year in revenue, and they are really focused on scaling their business, and they're also focused on building out the the retention side of their business. So and obviously all businesses want to do that, but I think that in terms of where you put your time and attention, that's that's the size at which, like, you can actually start to look at both those things simultaneously and dedicate resources to them. So in that context, a new customer might get a survey that's focused on Discovery and attribution. You want to know how they found your brand. You want to know who they're purchasing for. You want to know why they purchased. I think that's another really valuable piece of information too, understanding the motivation and of the buyer. And is that different between somebody who found you on TikTok versus somebody who found you on Facebook? Right? And it could be, because it's probably different target audiences that you're hitting, or at least it could be, and so that's a really good starting point. Is to say, Okay, if somebody has never purchased from me before, I'm gonna ask them these questions, and it's gonna be really focused on, how do I find more people like this? And how do I know which of these people are the most valuable long term, short and long term to my business. And then if somebody has purchased before, then maybe you wanna ask them a different set of questions. So asking them questions about, what other products would you like to see from us? So kind of that product innovation side of things, maybe even getting super specific, saying, Hey, we're looking at launching, you know, one of these five items in the next quarter is our, are there any of these that you're interested in? And then if somebody says yes to I'll use a sparkling water brand, we work as an example. When somebody says yes, I want to, I want your ginger flavor. Then you tag that person in Klaviyo or whatever, ESP, you're using, and then you now have the ability to send an email to that person. So you're kind of expanding that the data that you have about that customer who's been buying from you at that point, you're also going to know where they discovered you, what motivates them to buy all these kinds of things. So you're kind of building a data set on that. Data Set on that person. So that's those are the types of questions I'd ask their site usability issues like, that's another one that's really interesting, and that could be new customer or returning customer survey. But I love asking those kinds of questions, so I think that's kind of like the simplest way to look at is breaking down those two cohorts. The other things I like to look at are things like abandoned cart surveys. So if somebody didn't finish purchasing, let's drop a survey in the abandoned cart flow. So don't make it the first email you send that first one should be focused on getting the purchase right. But if you send two or three emails and somebody's not buying, maybe switch your call to action to it. Tell us why, let them fill out a little survey. And then what you can do in that survey with I'm sure you can do this in some capacity with other solutions too, but in ours specifically, we have what we call actions. And so you can actually use basically like a depending on what somebody answers, you can give them different information. So we have a brand we work with. They sell smoke bombs and so like, It's Ha, it's a hazardous material. The shipping price is $45 or four I forget the exact amount, but something like that, $45 for shipping. There's no. No way that you can change that. There's no cheaper shipping option. That's just how it is. And so you see all these people come in and they're like, Okay, I just spent $20 on smoke bombs, but shipping is $45 and so as you can imagine, there's a lot of abandoned carts in that context, even though it's written all over their website, I think they even mentioned their ad. Sometimes their abandoned cart email, the first one they send out, mentions it, but people still miss that. And so when you can ask somebody why didn't you buy, and they say shipping price was too high, you already know that's an objection, but it gives you the ability to then tell them in that context why the shipping price is so high, remind them of that, right? If somebody says that the price of the product is too high. Maybe you want to give them a 10% discount code and get them to go straight to your site to purchase if they if the product they wanted is out of stock, maybe you want to trigger an email from Klaviyo, connect them to your customer service and find out which product they want, right? So, like, there's all kinds of things that you can do in that context as well. So I love that. So we got new customer survey, returning customer survey, abandoned cart survey, and then, just like some general life cycle, sort of surveys can be helpful. So depending on your brand, like if you're a supplement brand, maybe you want to ask a set of questions on order number one, to understand why somebody's purchasing your product, what kind of symptoms they're having, what's the level of the symptoms? I've seen this work really well with, like, menstrual cycle products. So there's a lot of inspiration products out there. And so you already know why somebody's buying your product. It's very obvious, right? So asking somebody like for what, even just a question like on a scale of one to 10, what are your symptom levels? And there's probably a better way of phrasing that, but you ask them on order number one, and then you ask them on order number three and order number six, and you see, is this changing for them over time? And then you actually have hard data to back it up that your customers say, like, hey, on average, our customers were seven out of 10 in terms of discomfort scale, and they're now a four out of 10 six months later. Like, that kind of data can be really valuable. So the so many of those things, things like a, you know, a new customer survey, return customer survey, I'd say every brand just implement that. It's really easy to do, provides a ton of value and gives you a ton of information. But there's so many other things, like a survey around the you know, a monthly cycle that is going to be very specific to a specific brand. And so in that context, like you gotta have to also think through what problems is your brand solving? What types of emotions are you hoping to elicit from your customers? And then think about how that fits into your survey process. That's obviously easier said than done, right? This is where going back to that idea of like, you know, it's really easy to shoot a single question survey versus running a 20 question survey that I have to put a lot of thought and effort into. So I'm not saying like, start with that from day one, but those are the types of things that I look at over time. There

William Harris  18:07  

are so many good things that you shared there that I didn't want to interrupt you, but I have some follow ups on some of that stuff there too that I appreciate. One is I love that you called out how learning this information can help you make sure that you're doing a better job delivering towards like higher LTV, right? It's like, who are your best customers? Because you could track that 10 too. So you can look at this and say, Okay, over the course of, you know, six months, 12 months, 24 months, it's like the people who responded this way end up becoming your best customers. Yep. With that knowledge, that information, you can do a better job of attracting those types of people? Where are those people hanging out? How can you make sure that you have ads that are doing a good job of attracting those types of responses and things like that? And because very often the lowest CAC is not your highest LTV, and we do see a lot of brands, it's very easy to optimize towards the lowest CAC, the highest bro as the highest mer and you know, there's benefits to all of that, but if you're thinking long term, you also want to say, but who's going to maybe be a little bit higher CAC, but drive two times the value over the next 24 months, or whatever

Jeremiah Prummer  19:12  

that might Yeah, and I've seen some things that are really surprising in the data, right? But like one brand we work with, they sell silicone rings, and they asked a question. They're asking competitive research questions. So what they had one question that basically was like, which of these brands have you shopped before? And then if they've shopped these brands, there was a question that basically was like, Why did you switch to us? And they had a bunch of options. And the last option was, I didn't switch. I'm still shopping from them as well. And so basically, like the what they found is that people who are buying from multiple brands for this product category were the best customers. So it's an interesting thing where it's like, okay, you're not you actually don't even have to take that customer away from. Competitor. They're just like the these people are. They just buy a lot of silicone rings, and they're just looking for ones that they care about the most, the ones that are most interesting. They're not brand loyalists, but they spend a lot of money on this product category, and so that that kind of data can be really, really interesting. And it's totally it differs so much from from brand to brand again, like this is where we have a really hard time of like, we do whatever we can. We want to dive in and help the brands that we work with to kind of unlock as much insight as possible. But at the end of the day, like, if the if the brands that we're working with aren't actively seeking out how to solve these problems, it's hard for us to proactively help with that, because we just don't know. Because we just don't know what the problems are right there. That's not always the case. Like, obviously, like, if we've worked in a specific category and we've, we've done, you know, like beauty products, for instance, like, we have a ton of brands in beauty, and so we might have some ideas in that context of how to help you unlock more information. But at the end of the day, like there, there is like a partnership here that has to happen, where the brand has to really want to seek these things out and ask us for guidance in order for us to be helpful

William Harris  21:11  

totally and any brand, anytime you're working with any vendor, whether it's agency, software, anything like, reach out, because there's almost always something that you just don't know about, how to optimize the software, what kind of questions to ask that you've learned over, you know, millions and millions of survey questions, what other types of things that they could think about. And so that's always a good call out. Um, yeah, yeah, go ahead. Well, I

Jeremiah Prummer  21:41  

was just gonna say, like, this is just a little pet peeve of mine. And to be fair, or to be clear, I don't blame anybody for this, because I do the same thing. But when you can't figure out how to do something with the software, and you think it doesn't have capabilities, like I the the worst thing for me is when I see somebody will, you know, they'll cancel their subscription with us, and then they give a reason why. And it's something we do, and we have, like, the not only do we know how to do it, but like, we do it very well, and those kinds of things bother me so much. And again, to be clear, I do it too. Like, I don't ask for help nearly as much as I should. So I'm not, I'm not judging anybody for this, but to your point, will, like, ask for help. Because, like, there's, there is, like the person on, on the service side of it, whether it's a, you know, an agency or or software provider, whatever lives and breathes this thing, like, is in it, day in and day out for years, probably, and so, like, there's just so much more information there that they have, if you're willing to take the time and engage with them.

William Harris  22:45  

Totally. Another thing that you called out that I really appreciated was along the lines of, you're gonna learn some of the objections that people had, right? So it's like, if you send this out and you can learn two, three emails in, okay, well, why didn't you buy what objections you have and the thing that I love about this the most, so we run ads. That's what we do. The thing that I love about this the most is you turning that into an ad from now on and add into my retargeting. A lot of people look at retargeting, they say, well, what's the best ad for retargeting? Well, there isn't a best ad. I like to look at this and say, What are my top three five objections? Something along those lines, do I What's my best ad for each one of those objections? How do I make sure that I'm answering each one of those? Because why one person is objecting is not why somebody else is objecting. And so if you're just looking at the one that's getting the highest row as or whatever in platform, you're missing out on all the other people who were probably incremental because you didn't have an ad that was addressing their specific objection? Yeah,

Jeremiah Prummer  23:47  

I love that. I actually have never heard anybody talk about that specifically, but I like retargeting being about objection handling essentially. But I think that's a really, really good call out, and that's something that's it makes so much sense, right? Like, the reason why you don't buy initially is, I mean, there's a few reasons, but the number one, if somebody's in market for a product, the reason you're not buying is because you have some sort of, some sort of objection. Could be price, could be timing, could be the product itself, right? But, like, there's, there's something there that's stopping you from purchasing at this moment, yeah.

William Harris  24:18  

What are some other questions that maybe are a little bit less obvious that we should ask? You know, is it beneficial to use something like chat GPT to come up with questions? Or how can you come up with those questions that are really digging into the weeds? Yeah,

Jeremiah Prummer  24:35  

the and this, again, is like, where the the challenge comes with the strategy side of things, right? Because I think that the short answer to that is you don't know until you start to collect data. So like we we all come into things, and we don't always use the more scientific terminology for this stuff, but essentially, like, we come in with a hypothesis, right? Of what's happening. And so I. Our questions, the initial questions we ask are going to be based on whatever our belief is about how things are operating, right, like we come into things. And I'll use a specific example one brand we work with. I think this is actually in a case study. So Beekman 1802, they ran a survey question that they were giving, sorry. Let me back up a little bit. They had a really nice gift set, and this, this was a beautiful gift set that they it was discounted because I had a bunch of different products on it, and it was in this really nice packaging. And essentially, they were giving this really nice gift set wrapped and packaged together every time you purchase it. But they had a suspicion that not everybody was actually using this packaging. This packaging was very expensive, so they decided to ask a question of people who are buying that product, and basically say, like, Hey, you have this you purchased this gift set. Did you? Are you actually going to gift it like this, or are you going to take it apart? And they found that most people were not actually gifting it. What they're doing is they're splitting it between somebody else and themselves, because they're getting a good discount on this item. And so they looked at that and said, Okay, well, I guess if nobody's using this, why are we a spending money on this, and B, like, basically this just going to a landfill for no reason. So then they turn that into an add on in the cart. So if you wanted to add the gift set in the cart, then you can do it from from that standpoint, or in check out, wherever that was. And so they turned this thing that was a cost to them into a revenue stream, but it was because they had a hypothesis that people weren't actually using this thing the way that they intended. And so I think, sorry, kind of going back to your your question about, like, what? What makes a good question? I think it starts with having some sort of hypothesis, and oftentimes that starts with just asking some questions to gather information. And then as you see comments from people, as you see people like, I always like to do questions that are have structured data, so like a multiple choice question, but with an other option where somebody can type in a response. Because what that gives you is, it gives you the ability to track trends over time, and it allows people to kind of bucket themselves and self select, but for that person that really wants to give you, and sorry, I point on that too, it means higher response rates because you don't have to people don't have to think about it. For that person that wants to take the time to give you more information, that data is really, really valuable, and so let them type whatever they want to in that other section. And that, to me, like analyzing those data points, is where, like the the really valuable information starts to come from, and the trends start to come in. We have another case study coming up soon, where somebody used a question about one of the questions in our like question library, we have a couple 100 questions you can just kind of browse through and look at one of the questions was basically like, what TV shows do you watch? And they just let people wanted to, and they found a ton of people were watching bridgerton. And so they, they took that data, and they did a whole bridgerton thing, and it absolutely crushed it. So just things like that, where it's like, you just got to ask questions, collect some data, and then, like, once you get some information, that gives you a hypothesis you can work from to be able to dive deeper.

William Harris  28:34  

I love that. And getting into psychographics be able to use that into your advantage. You talked about attribution being one of the big things, right? Like, if people are starting a lot of times, they'll start with the attribution questions, because you're spending $100 million a year, and so that matters to you. It is a good data point. I'll call out right now while we're talking about this. One of the biggest reasons why we as an ad agency love that. Heidi, how, right? How did you hear about us? Question is because it's another data point. If you're looking at in platform attribution, things that are top of funnel, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, they're significantly going to under report. How incremental that was towards just driving that awareness in the first place. Because there's a lot of you know more based on last click, a lot of times, even if you're using good attribution tools, and you've modeled all data, it still misses a lot of that when you actually compare what that tool says to what your actual customers say. And so it's a really good question, but here's where it gets, sometimes a little bit tricky. And I want to know what you think about this and how you solve this. Somebody says they keep it as just a very simple, single question, and somebody says, I heard about you from meta, okay, great. Meta as an influencer, meta from an ad, meta from organic, like, how do you begin to break down, you know, the different things that they have going on, and they could have several really big influencers in there. There is a company we work with where, you know, they're working with some of the. Biggest personalities you could possibly imagine. It helps to even know which personality Did you hear it from as well. But how are you guys approaching that?

Jeremiah Prummer  30:09  

Yeah, so going back to like the ask more questions thing, I think the short answer is that's the solution to this. So in the context of attribution, so we like the standard. If you go into our platform right now, we have pre built survey templates, and so if you just click on kind of the basic attribution template, it's going to have a handful of questions. So how did you first hear about us? Is the question we recommend asking first, and the reason we insert the term first is because we want to know what the customer remembers as their first touch point. And I'll be clear with us, like, I don't, I don't look at any form of data, and I'm, I'm gonna say, like attribution surveys, as well as being the absolute truth of what happened in this context, right? Like the reality is every form of data is biased. So your Google Analytics is very biased towards the last click, right? And it's literally looking at session level data, so it's has no context for what happened a month ago right in your TikTok account, right? So like that, that's a very biased data set your tick tock Ads Manager. In this context, your meta ads manager is going to be very biased towards what they can see. They also only see a picture of this. And the bias and survey data is somebody's memory, right? Sure? Like, so, like, my memory is not perfect. I'm sure yours isn't either. But I think what's really interesting with that data point, when you ask somebody, how did you first hear about us, they're going to tell you what they remember as the source. And so it may not be true, but it does tell you, uh, what source was impactful for them, right? Like, which channel actually, even, even if you're wrong. Because this is another thing I see sometimes somebody were like, well, I added Billboard, and 2% of people said that they saw me on a billboard, which is actually, I've never actually seen it, that I've seen a handful of people select billboard, like, Okay, well, if somebody said billboard, there's something about that that they think you're in you're on a billboard, so it still tells you a little bit about their behavior, even If it doesn't tell you anything about your behavior. And so like, understanding billboards are not a great example of that. But like, you know, TikTok is a good example. If you get a bunch of people saying that they found you on TikTok, but actually it was a Instagram post that had the TikTok watermark on it that still tells you that they're spending time on TikTok, where they wouldn't have said TikTok, right, right? So there's some things like that where, where I think that's really impactful. So anyway, kind of stepping out from the weeds on this a little bit, I like asking that, how did you first hear about this question? Because it's going to get at like that memory touch point. And oftentimes that touch point will go back months or years. And then I like to ask them follow up questions to that. So if they said that they found you, and this kind of gets specifically at what you're talking about, if they said that they found you on Facebook, well then let's ask questions like, who posted about us, or where on Facebook, did you see it, right? And so you can start to dive in a little bit, I like the who posted about us, because basically what that gets to is the options I like to make sure are included in there is somebody I follow, so that's kind of influencer, right? A friend or family member that's more of like the word of mouth, essentially, like, that's how I bucket these, right? Someone I follow is an influencer on Facebook, and you can even ask then a specific follow up question to that, and say who was it? And let them tell you, friend, friend or family member. Well, that's essentially just word of mouth, but it happened on social media, right? You did, or your brand did, right? Well, then that's probably a paid ad, because very few brands actually have a strong, organic presence. Usually, if somebody's seeing your brand's posts, it's a paid advertisement, and then throw an ad as an option, right? Because then some people may be like, oh, yeah, it was an ad that I saw. So I think the those are the types of things that I like to look at, and that kind of helps you, like, I like to start platform level and then drive dive specific from there, and then you can kind of break those out into saying, well, that's actually influencer, that's word of mouth that's paid ads, and that helps breakthrough that noise a little bit. So there's that. And then the other questions I like to ask too are either what brought you to our site today, so that's focused on kind of like last touch, or Where else have you seen us? I don't think you need both. One of those questions can be really valuable. So if somebody says that they saw you on they discovered you on Facebook, but they've also seen you on TV, that's a really good data point to have, because then then my last question, which is one of the other questions, I think, is critical, is how long did you know about us before placing your first purchase? And what you're going to see is that. People who find you on Google say that they buy much faster than people who found you on Facebook, or people who found you on Facebook but also saw you on TV might buy faster than people who just saw you on Facebook and didn't see you on TV as well. So understanding that just gives you, like, a really rich way of understanding the relationship between the channels, and also, like the time to conversion, because the way that you should be thinking about this, in my opinion, is that if somebody says they found you on Google, and they also say they bought in 24 hours, well, you need your ROI on Google to like you need that to happen in 24 hours, or or seven days, or whatever your window is, it should happen very quickly. But if somebody says they found you on TikTok six months ago. That tells you something about like the buying journey of your customers who are discovering you on TikTok. And maybe you don't need to see all of that return on the ad spend happen in the first seven days. If you're confident that a large percentage of impact is happening in three months, six months, 12 months, obviously you just have to take into consideration your cash flow, but that's what I like to think about, that.

William Harris  36:04  

I love that, and it reminds me too of Mean, Median and Mode. And so where I go in with this, when we talk to people a lot of times, too, is you might have some people that are saying, two years, six months, whatever that might be, that's fine. And if you take the average of that, you may end up with a number that's still not accurate. Now, should I at least get closer to what's at what's accurate. But I do like to look at mode for things like this as well, because I think that you'll start to see that that's more of the pattern. So maybe the average is five, but the mode is three. Okay. Then when I start to launch changes within an ad account, I'm expecting it within three days. Just really start to notice that there's a difference, versus waiting to pull five days for something like that, yep. The other thing to your point, that I really like that you called out, is, you know, if you're running this on something that is a little bit more considered, and maybe the average time to purchase? Well, first of all, whatever you see in GA four is not the actual average time to purchase, because, again, bias data. And I see people reference that all the time. They're like, Look, your average time to purchase is three days. Well, not when you compare that to what people said, Right? When you compare them to what they said, it's actually a lot longer than it might be, seven days, 14 days. It's usually significantly longer than whatever GA four says, because, again, bias. It's based on session data. But once you, once you've figured out what that is, and you know that, it's like, okay, I expect to see this turn around in seven days, whatever that might be, you got to look at at least whatever are those leading metrics. And so you've made some changes within your ad account or to your email or to whatever is going on. You know, are you seeing at least, the reach is the same, the traffic is the same, the you know, are you seeing an uptick in carts or things that are leading you towards Yes, this is likely the right scenario. But it's only been two days. You need to give this three more days, or whatever that might be before you before you can make a decision on whether or not something's working.

Jeremiah Prummer  37:45  

Yeah, absolutely. And I think I love this for launching new channels as well. So like a lot, literally, we're working with a brand that does, I just actually was talking to a brand that's running ads on App 11, which is kind of people attack really,

William Harris  38:02  

it's gaining a lot of popularity right now. Yeah.

Jeremiah Prummer  38:04  

So somebody was talking about that just the other day, and so, well, we looked at it, said, okay, cool, like you, you add there, because there's a question of accuracy and survey data, right? Sure. And I, I think it's way overblown that that the questioning of the accuracy of the data, but I also understand why people have this question. So I think this is a really great point here. So this, this one brand I'm I'm talking to, they went from zero to like 15, 20% of their customers saying that they found them on a mobile app game in like two weeks, like it's actually and at scale like this is pretty impressive. So I'm like, Okay, well, that's suspicious, but we filter the data to say, okay, because I, when I see stuff like that, I immediately question it as well, right? And so then we filter the data and we say, Okay, well, we're gonna filter the How long did you know about this question by people who said they found you from a mobile game and a game ad, or, I forget what the phrasing is exactly, so we filter it down to just the those people, and we see that 70% of them say that they discovered them less than a week ago? Well, that makes sense, right? And compared to the average being far longer than that, and something like it basically is flipped like 7030 flipped between less than a week and greater than a week. So that kind of thing is like that. That's why I like to look at these like even in the context of the survey, look at multiple data points, and then that gives me a lot of confidence in that channel too, because I say, Okay, well, I'm looking at this. You're already seeing this massive growth, and we know that if you filter those people out, typically, it's going to take somebody 123, months to make their first purchase. Like that's what we normally see. So I actually look. This and say, well, likely this channel is going to be even more impactful a month or three months from now than what it's showing up as today. So anyway, those are the kinds of things that I like to dive into, and that's why I think it's worth asking those extra questions. The other thing I will say too is, if you're asking kind of that set of questions, we see an average of about an 85% completion rate on that. So again, like we're gonna it's 100% for every question they answer. But in that set, we typically see, if somebody answers the first question, and you have those four or five attribution oriented questions, 85% of those people will answer all of those. So

William Harris  40:36  

nice. I'm glad that you called out just this, this whole idea of of people disregarding, sometimes customer survey data a little bit. There's a consultant that came into an account that we're working with right now for q4 and they came from a very, very big, you know, multi billion dollar company, and they're like, Yeah, I don't buy any of it. Like, literally, just completely disregard it. They're looking at last click. And, you know, for those of us who have been around we're like, I think that's to your detriment. That's that's fine, but I'm glad you called this up, because there are some people who maybe will disregard that. I think the reason why they disregard it is based on what you called out that might not be actually referencing where they truly first discovered you, yes, but it's where they remember first discovering it. And to your point, that is very, very valuable at information, because that's when it actually was impactful. That's when it stuck in their brain. And I think that can't be disregarded so easily. In fact, we found grace peach on my team did a study with some customer survey data where we found the based on the UTM data compared with the customer survey data that we saw for this particular customer over something like 35,000 orders, the attribution was off by about 81% it was massive. That's we intuitively knew this, but once we could finally show this customer that, it opened up a whole new world for them, because they had been, I don't even remember the exact numbers, significantly under investing in meta and TikTok and over investing in Google. And there's a lot to be had on Google, but they were waiting it very, very wrong. Because of this, we were able to show them scale them up massively as as a result?

Jeremiah Prummer  42:22  

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the so the attribution problem is really interesting, because it basically, like, if you're looking at click data, it's going to be biased towards the last session that somebody had essentially Right. Like, even if you're looking at, like, using something like a triple whale, or, like, you know, MTA sort of data, or the ad platform data, or, you know, obviously Google Analytics is the most bias of them. But like, and it's because, like, at the end of the day, like, there is no reliable way to track data over an extended period of time in a browser. People use different browsers. I'm using a different browser right now to record this than I normally do, because, for some reason, I can't use Riverside in my normal browser, right? And that doesn't mean like, maybe I'll go look up some other things on here right now, right? I've got my phone. I've got my my wife sends me things by text message. I look it on my phone, and then I hate buying things on my phone, so I'm gonna do it on my computer, right? Like, the whole that whole process is so convoluted, and there is actually no reliable way to connect all those data points together. And so I think, like, the click and cookie side of things is extremely challenging, and not to say it's useless, right? Like, I think what it does do a really good job of is showing you, like, which ad drove a purchase. It's actually extremely good at that. But that doesn't mean that that's the ad that actually got you interested in the product or stuck out to you the first time, right? And so that's kind of like the one side of things, and then you've got this, you've got other solutions, like an mmm, or, you know, something like a house where you're doing incrementality measurement and all of those kinds of things. And those are, actually, I think those are great solutions, but there's a couple of challenges there. One, they're very expensive, and two, you're actually only an MTA kind of has the same problem too. You're only tracking something if you know to track it, if that makes sense. And I think one of the beautiful things about a survey like this brand I was just telling you about, that's that's running on App 11, they had people telling them they were finding them from a game ad before they added that as an option to their survey. And so I think, like, that's another really important point here is that the survey is the only thing outside of like a, I mean, a Google Analytics, I guess, can kind of do this too, if you want to trust like a last click source, it's one of the only ways for people to actually tell you that they are discovering you in a place without you having. To know already that somebody is going to be coming from that place. And the reality in running a business online is that you don't know who, which random influencer with a million followers bought your product and is now talking about it on their YouTube channel, and you don't know like which person posted about you on Reddit, and now that drove 1000 purchases and all that's coming through as a Google search, right? Like, you just don't see these kinds of things. 1000 is kind of excessive, but anyway, you get my point, that kind of stuff happens a lot, right? Word of mouth, like, that's another one. In aggregate, 15 to 20% of purchases are driven by word of mouth, retail store sales is another big one, right? Like all of these kinds of things, you are not tracking those things with any of these other methodologies, except for in the context of a survey that's all tracked automatically whether you're including that in your question or not. So anyway, that's, I think, another, like, really important point about an attribution survey,

William Harris  45:57  

and to your point, whether you're asking that as a question or not. I think to your point, it's because of open ended questions. And so I did want to dig into that a little bit you had mentioned, like, the idea of, like, fill in. You know, how far do you go with the ability for people to just really go open ended versus just fill in?

Jeremiah Prummer  46:15  

Yeah, okay, so this is another really good point too, actually. So on the depends on what your objectives and goals are. So if you are a true class, like a hex class rage, like some of these bigger brands that we work with, where you're you know, nine figure brand and Jones road beauty, those kinds of brands, the trend tracking is really important. So I'm not just looking for as it's actually useless to me to get 10,000 people typing in a response. It's far more useful to get 20,000 people selecting an option where I can easily track that trend over time and see like how things are shifting on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. Um, so it depends on the scale that your business is at, and to a large extent, I think, and then it depends on the type of data you're trying to collect. I look at it and say, okay, for open ended questions, one single response can be extremely useful, because it can give you a lot of detail, like I've seen this before. One one person types in writes and then says, I had this specific issue on your website. You go, you check and something's broken on your website. That's extremely valuable. That's more valuable than getting 100 people saying that you've got a four on usability for your website, right? Because, like, you don't know what that means, so I think it's it scale matters, and then the type of data you're tracking, so to kind of like, get specific with us, if you are a brand who's just starting out, and let's say you have 100 orders a month asking how did you first hear about his question? Maybe that's valuable if you're scaling ads and you want to to know what kind of impact you're having. But reality is, if you're spending all your dollars in meta at that point, it doesn't really you just need to see, like, are you getting more dollars out than you're putting in? And maybe you asked that question for a couple of weeks just to kind of validate like, hey, people are funding me through this. But that question isn't going to move the needle a whole lot for your business. What's going to be more impactful is literally just letting somebody asking somebody, Hey, why'd you decide to buy from us today? Open in a question. Let them type whatever they want to in there, and they're going to give you whatever they feel like, telling you right? And that's going to give you ad inspiration. It's going to help you understand like, what about your messaging resonated or didn't resonate? It's going to help you understand what kind of hesitations people had the purchase process, all those kinds of things. And maybe you get 10 responses a month. But that data is going to be far more valuable than asking the How did you first hear about this question? So that's like, that's the way I like

William Harris  48:48  

that question. And I like the opposite of it. Was there anything that, like, almost prevented you from Yes, from purchasing today, right? Like, both of those really good open ended questions? Yeah,

Jeremiah Prummer  48:59  

absolutely. And one of the things that we actually this is in one of the templates we offer as well, like, I think we have a conversion rate optimization template, and there's actually a question of, how, how was your purchase experience today? So it's like, you know, very, very good, slash great, down to very poor. And then, depending on what somebody selects, you then ask them either, if it was a good experience, you say, hey, you know, thanks so much for letting us know. Like, why'd you decide to buy today? And just like, be super positive about it, and if they had a poor experience, you're taking that into consideration. You're saying, Okay, what did we do wrong? What could we have done better? What was it that almost made you not purchase today? Those kinds of questions, right? So you can actually be pretty smart too, with with that. And that's actually one of my tips for open ended questions too, is make it further down the logic chain. Don't lead with an open ended question. I mean, again, if you have 10 orders a month, sure lead with it, because, like, you're not going to get that much data, so just go for it. But if you have a, you know, 10,000 orders a month, don't like. Bury those in the logic chain and make sure you're you're actually like, getting responses to help solve a specific problem or potential problem. That's a little bit more in depth than just tracking trends on

William Harris  50:12  

something I like that, something else that you tweeted about, that I really liked and I hadn't considered before seeing you say this is Questions That drive to actions. And so the example that you had was, you know, making your last question, what you know, would you like to connect with us in any of the following ways that you listed, refer a friend, join our VIP group, follow us on social it's a brilliant way to get the question to actually get them to take action right then and there. Like, tell me a little bit more about like, how you're facilitating this and why this even, like, was a tweet that you sent out, yeah,

Jeremiah Prummer  50:44  

so obviously, like, through this chat, I'm trying not to be like, salesy with our product, sure, but at the end of the day, I think for this solution, we're the only ones that do this and have like, this kind of capability. So this is going to be a no specific thing. What we have in our platform is what we call actions, and they are essentially, I mean, you've described this, but it's, it's basically, we want to get somebody to take a specific action. And the best way to do that, there's kind of two ways that brands do it. One is they just slap it on the end of a survey as, like, the confirmation screen. And that definitely works. So like, hey, thanks so much for taking our survey. Like, one, one sort of way to go about this is, like, an appeal to the customer, right? Thanks for taking our survey. We rely heavily on people like you telling people they love about our products. Would you like to join our referrer for a program? And that's just like, everybody sees that something like that probably gets pretty good click rates, but it's not the highest possible you're just showing it to everybody. The other approach is to make it super focused and say, hey, we'd love to connect with you more. Would you like to connect with us in any of these following ways? Follow us on social, refer our friends, join our VIP group, download our app. The all of those kinds of things are extremely easy to do, and you're giving the customer control over their experience. And so we see very positive results from that. And so if you give somebody the ability to select what they want, and we usually recommend doing in a multiple choice question, and then you use conditional logic to show that thing that they've selected. So if they say, I want to download your app. I want to join your VIP group, and I want to follow you on social. You show them all three of those things. So you basically just like they're cards, they can click through. And so when they you know you've got the app download buttons right there, they can click on the app download button, download the app. You've got the refer a friend button right there. They can click that, go to the refer friend page, sign up, and then you've got your social follow buttons as well. And they can do all that in that context. And what we see is on average, and this is for both types. So basically, just like slapping it on the end of the survey and as well as like using logic to push somebody through, we see a 15% click through rate on these and and that's the the average. But we see, like for app downloads, it's like a 25% click through rate. So these are really effective ways to actually get somebody to take action, and those have downstream, massive implications on the longevity of the relationship with the customer, especially when you're talking about most of the time this is showing up in a new customer. New customer survey, right? So this is one of their first interactions with your brand, post purchase, at least. And actually, it is the first interaction post purchase for most of these people. And so being able to push them deeper into a relationship with your brand, getting them to download your app, all that kind of stuff is going to have massive impacts on on LTV. So yeah, it's a it's something that we we have not pushed enough. We're trying to push it more. But like last year in q4 we showed 1.7 it was like right at one and three quarter million actions. So I'm hoping this year it's more like three to 4 million. That's part of my push right now, is try to get more brands doing this, because it does have an impact. And we see, we have a case study with talkable three, three big brands that we work with drove anywhere from a 30 to 400% increase. And refer a friend Wow activity by doing this. So like that. That's one example. We've seen other things. We had somebody who used this with social snowball, familiar with them, but they doubled their social snowball referral rate from their order confirmation screen. And anyway, there's a bunch of examples like this, but at tapcart app downloads, we've seen a bunch of brands double their app download rate, and it's just because you're capturing somebody's attention at the right time. You're using intent, they've already opted into taking the surveys, answering these questions, and they say, Yes, I want this thing. And then you give them that thing, they're going to take action on it. And

William Harris  54:54  

I think that's the thing that I like about this, is because, you know, there is that yes ladder right where it's like, you. Already gotten them to say yes to this. They've said yes to answering this question. They've said yes. You've you've basically primed them to saying yes to everything you're asking them to do. And so ask them right then and there. They're already in the mind to say, like, well, yes, I do as well. That.

Jeremiah Prummer  55:13  

That reminds me, actually, there's the I can't this was years ago, but there was one of these internet gurus had this whole thing about, like, get somebody to say yes once, right? Like, totally yes to a small ask, and then everything else up to use, keep, yeah, the yes, the yes letter is the term you use. I don't have the same term, but basically, like, that small yes gets them to do more and more things until eventually they do the thing you want them to do. And in that context, it was, you know, buy a $500 course, or whatever the item was that was being sold. But yeah, that process of just getting somebody to say yes once makes that whole thing much easier.

William Harris  55:52  

You are running these for brands that are at the absolute forefront of DTC right now, and you've seen millions of questions and responses, and you've analyzed a lot of this data. What are some other things that you have learned from looking at the data that might surprise people?

Jeremiah Prummer  56:12  

Yeah, um, cut. So a couple of things I think were like when we that I think are oftentimes surprising. So when there's kind of a desire, when you're running ads, to be able to assign a value of every purchase to ads at least as much as possible, right? And also, kind of paired with that, there's this idea of direct traffic or organic traffic. And I think what's interesting about the data that we look at is, like, direct traffic doesn't exist. Organic traffic doesn't organic depends on how you define it. But like, at the end of the day, every single order has a discovery source. People don't just type in your domain name and buy something like that. Just doesn't happen, right? And so, like, that's like, the one sided spectrum is that, um, versus like, you know, the the other side of the spectrum is, like, trying to sign ad credit to everything. And the reality is that there's kind of this middle road where a lot of orders are being powered by word of mouth, being powered by discovery and offline sources. And so I think, to me, like, the the impact of offline, I guess, is what I'm getting at here is so massive, and I think that's really undervalued by a lot of brands that are spending money on paid ads and that are are selling products online. But the reality is, for all of us, like so, much of what we do in life happens outside of the internet, and so I think that's one thing that's that's been a little bit surprising, I would say, just like, in terms of, like, I you, we all know that that's there, but like, the the size of that impact, I think, is surprising. And then the other thing that's really interesting, too, that immediately comes to mind is, like, who people are buying for, I think is a really interesting data point. Like I would expect. I think ultimately, I would expect that more gifting is happening on it than it than is happening. The majority of purchases are bought by people for themselves. Even in the holiday season, half of people are buying for themselves. And so I think that's a really interesting finding, and and that's an aggregate, every brand is a little bit different, right? But so that that's like the one, one thing that I think is surprising, just in general. But then within that, there's some interesting stuff where it's like, okay, if you are true class again, keep going, coming back to these guys, but obviously, like, yeah, they're good, yeah, they're, you know, kind of a male focused brand, right? And so, like, I don't know exactly what their data looks like, but like, if I'm then I'm them, I'm I'm assuming there's a lot of gifting happening around Father's Day. That's a moment in the year where there's probably a lot of gift buying. And so, and I'm saying that's just because we see these kinds of things with certain brands. So a brand asks the question of, who is this purchase for? And they find you find out that there's certain moments in the year where people are buying for significant other, or people are buying for a family member or a co worker or whatever those things are. And so for individual brands, there is massive impact around certain moments of the year, even though most people, in general and and in aggregate, are still buying for themselves online. So I think, like those two, those two things are true at the same time. The other thing I will say too is the amount of money that people spend by who they're purchasing for is an interesting thing. So significant other people, this is not on a per brand basis, if that makes sense. So like, this is not necessarily saying that, like, if somebody buys from true classic for themselves versus for a significant other, that this is going to be different, but just looking at the aggregate of all sales, people who are buying for a significant other are buying more expensive things. And so, like, that's a really interesting data point. So if I'm looking at this and I say, Okay, well, I've got a I'm hex cloud, I've got a high AOV product, maybe I should be talking to to people about buying for their significant other, because that's a really people are willing to spend money on their significant other, which makes sense, right? Like I do that I'm gonna spend more money on my wife than I am my kids. That's how it goes. So, yeah, so things that, like, they're not that much of a surprise, but like they are to actually see the data and see how that plays out, I think is really powerful.

William Harris  1:00:32  

It is interesting. And because it's just good to have the data to back that up, because you might have a gut, you know, suspicion, but having data back that up is interesting. I like that you called out word of mouth and like, just the power of of offline. I do think that's something that we we miss a lot. And so one of the things I like to talk about, at least from an advertising perspective, is after somebody's purchased from you, don't let the very next thing ad they see from you be another ad to buy if you want to increase word of mouth, the next thing that they see, ad wise, from you should be romancing your customer. I talked about dating them, the idea it's like you want to show them something that makes them say, Wow, I clearly just made the best choice possible by buying this thing, like I am a hero, because that's what's going to make them want to share that and attribution you're going to see in platform to this is basically nothing. You're not going to see any attribution to this. You just have to know intuitively that you are now ingratiating your customer even more to you into the decision that they made. And because of that, they're more excited to talk about, oh, I just got this thing and I'm excited about it, versus I just got this thing, and I'm not sure about it yet.

Jeremiah Prummer  1:01:42  

Yes, absolutely. That's so so smart. And I I think what you just said to you about you're not going to see a direct impact of that, like that. I think that's a really important piece of this too. Like, there's so much, so much in the world of selling a product, online, digital marketing, all of that, where we naturally, like we want to be able to assign value to everything, but that's just not the way the world works in in reality. And so I think that's a that's a good thing for people to keep in mind too. It's just like, there's there's sometimes you just have to do something because, you know, it's the right thing to do, or because you believe that that's going to have some sort of impact. And I think that the challenge there, and this is actually something I'm curious about, how you manage this, is, how much do I actually spend on that when there is no, like, there's, it's, I don't even know how you actually tie that back to, like, an LTV, right? Like it's, it's extraordinarily hard to do that, because it's not like it's driving to any direct action. But, yeah, I am curious, like, how you think about that in that context,

William Harris  1:02:49  

there are ways to tie this back to LTV to a point, but it gets very complicated to your your point. So I'll walk through, like, a basic way of starting to get some enough data to where you can maybe model this out. Okay, let's say that you are collecting UTM data on all these different things. And while we know that that's not perfect, it's unfortunately gotten a lot worse. You ideally have some segment of data that's going to suggest which ad they came from. Yeah, if you're also collecting the good survey responses, not just on the first time somebody bought from you, but like you said, on repeat buyers as well. Like, what are different things that's going on with them as well. You can begin to associate, to some extent, a small fraction of people as having some kind of interaction with this. Now it's so, so, so, so small, but you can look at this and say, Okay, is there enough here that I can at least extrapolate something to validate what's going on? And then you can look at those people who have at least submitted that data and see what is the LTV of those people versus the LTV of the people who didn't come through those UTMs, didn't say those things in the response questions. And again, this ends up getting into the thing where it's like, you can't this is not statistically significant, but you've got a gut hunch, because this is how human brains work. You've got some data to back it up. And if you've got a smart CEO, a smart CFO, ideally, they'll look at that and say, Yeah, that makes sense. Now, how do you set how much that you put towards this? It doesn't actually have to be a lot, and the biggest reason why is because I like to run these as reach campaigns. My goal is not a conversions. I don't need to set this up as a $50 CPM. I can set this up on a $2 CPM reach campaign. I just want to make sure that they see whatever this is. And for a lot of brands, that's, you know, a couple 100 bucks, couple 1000 bucks a month. Whatever it is, it's less than 1% of your advertising budget on

Jeremiah Prummer  1:04:44  

that channel, yep, just a tiny bit to nurture those people. Yeah, super smart.

William Harris  1:04:51  

I want to start getting into the next section of the talk here, which is, who is Jeremiah Prummer, yeah. And one of the questions I want to start with is, why. Did you start KnoCommerce in the first place? What was going on that you were like, this is the thing I want to build. Yeah.

Jeremiah Prummer  1:05:04  

So I talked about this a little bit in some other context too. So if I'm repeating anything, well, somehow that's intentional, but hopefully it's not too repetitive. So I have a friend who owns an agency, Pearson crass is his name, lunar solar group is the agency, and he so he started the agency in 2018 I helped him out for a little bit, and then I was like, agency work is not for me. I was doing website builds. It was rough and and our goal had always been to build a tech company, and we had, we first got to know each other when I was building WooCommerce extensions, like 2013 he was, he owned a brand at the time, and then I went from that to my own brand. And so we'd been in the e-commerce space for, you know, 10 each of us for seven to 10 years, basically in 2018 and so we were like, Hey, we're gonna build a tech company. And kind of the agency life just took over. And so I was like, Okay, I can't do this. I'm gonna go work in tech. And then in 2020 he was like, okay, man. Like, I'm ready. Let's do this thing. So I came back to the agency, and we basically, like the we started this from like, hey, we want to build something. What are the problems that we have? Like, what are the things that we've both experienced over, you know, 10 plus years each, in in selling products online, and we kept coming back to this idea of, like, we don't know who is buying and why they're buying. And that's like, that's the very, the most simple version of this. And obviously you can see how this balloons into so many other things. But, like, there's a lot of really great tool of it to tell you which product somebody buys first. What you know, if somebody buys product A, how likely are they to buy product B in the future? Like, all that kind of stuff, right? And all of that's kind of based on behavioral data, like, trackable, easy to track behavioral data in the shopping experience, and so that there's some good tools for that, but there's not really anything. And I would say even, like, we haven't gotten there in terms of, like, the the long term vision of of how I see this playing out, uh, there's not very much good information to help you understand, like, what actually, who actually is your customer, and what motivates them to buy your products. And so a piece of that, obviously, is attribution, like, where they're discovering you, and going beyond the click data and kind of like that, again, like the easy to track behavioral data versus the actual, like, behind the scenes thing that's happening. So the attribution piece as part of that, demographics, I think is part of that as well. The other thing that we've been doing for a while now, in a beta, and ultimately we'll do more with this, is what we call our automated insight survey. And so we're asking questions around like, where you spend time online, what motivates you to buy products online? Economics, sentiment, some, some demographic data, that kind of stuff. And then we're basically grouping that together and letting brands compare their experience to that. So that was anyway, so, and then there's going to be more coming. So all of that to say, like that was the original vision. Was like, Hey, how can we build something that's going to solve this problem? And we're still very much building, we're very much in the early stages. As far as I'm concerned, lots more to come with that. And I still don't think anybody solved this. And maybe it's not solvable. There's also that element, like, at the end of the day, as consumers do even want that to be solved, I don't know. There's something nice about the Yeah, I like to buy online, in part because I don't have to walk into the store and talk to somebody and have them know everything about me and all of that. So,

William Harris  1:08:49  

yeah, yeah. And that's fair. I'd say most things have are solvable problems, though, right? Like, it's very rare that I would say something's not a solvable problem. Yeah, you, you knew that you knew that you wanted to be an entrepreneur, likely, though, from a young age, because your parents were entrepreneurs. Yes,

Jeremiah Prummer  1:09:04  

yeah. So my parents, I grew up as the child of entrepreneurs, and when I was six, so I'm the oldest of four that we had a six year old in our house, basically, 642, and a baby, and my parents, yeah, so busy. I don't know my parents said this, but they they and my dad was a propane serviceman at that time, so he literally drove, like, a propane truck around and, like, delivered propane to people's houses. And he'd previously worked at a gas station and for UPS, like he was not my parents did not have money, and they had, they'd gotten into this, like, low income house buying program. And so that happened when I was probably, like, four. And so over a couple of years, they basically got to where they had $25,000 in equity. And so they took the $25,000 in equity out of their house, and. And opened a health food store, and so that was, like, like, literally, like, putting it all on the line with four little children to start a business. So, like, it has to work, right? Like, there is no there's no backup plan. They literally, like, they had nothing. They sold, like my mom, we'd been in a car accident, and my mom gotten some insurance money for like, her bodily injury. That was, like part of the money that used to start the business, right? So it was, like, everything went into this. It was an all or nothing sort of play. And I was six, and I just kind of like grew up at that, like, I mean, my earliest memories are, I have a few memories from before that, but a lot of it was just like that business. And so we basically lived there, like after school every day we were there. Obviously my parents were like, hey, help us with these things. My first version of an allowance was doing work for them, and it was just like, hey, here's data mailer that they sent out some, you know, old school marketing. Sign up for our mailing list and we'll send you a mailer on a every month. And so like, that was how I got, I got paid. I think it was like $23 a month to to do this nice. And it was, you know, like folding, folding paper and stamping it and putting labels on it and all that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, I grew up in that. And I think, like, I one, I really just liked, like, the excitement and energy and all the things that come with with running a business, and like, everything's different every day. And I also, like, got to see, like, the behind the scenes of running a business. And as a arrogant child, I thought I could do it better than my parents always, and I had all these ideas. And like, I want to do this. Like, I want to be in charge. I want to do this, like this, I don't know. So it was kind of weird. Like, I think I kind of, I thought higher of it than I should have, in terms of, like, I don't glorifying it to an extent. I don't know how to describe that, but like, I had this idea of like, this is like, this really awesome thing, but I also kind of got to see, like, the nitty gritty of it and some of the downsides of it. And of course, again, I thought I could do it better, so I always wanted to do it on my own. And so that was I started my first business as a 19 year old in college, and I've been an entrepreneur since then. So I think I've had five different businesses at this point, some of them short, some of them a little bit longer. But

William Harris  1:12:38  

yeah, it sounds like you came into it, though, with like, a full understanding of it, because you saw it. So you, like, you said, you saw the UPS, you saw the down, yeah, which is, which is kind of good,

Jeremiah Prummer  1:12:47  

yeah, I did, yeah. I think that's, it's interesting, because now, like, you know, I'm a little bit, I'm in my 30s, I'm married, I've got kids. Some of the, some of the things my parents like, the sacrifices my parents made, are not ones that I feel like I'm willing to make at this point in my life. So there's some interesting things with that too, where it's like, okay, I saw that. I think I thought I wanted some of these things, and then you actually get into, like, building the vision of what you want for your family, and you realize that, okay, well, this is actually different now. So I do think, like, Yes, I fully understood, but I also didn't really understand the implications of what some of those things would mean, if that makes sense. So it does,

William Harris  1:13:29  

and that's fair, yeah, yeah, there's a couple of quotes that you mentioned to me before that you really like to live by. One of them was under promise and over deliver. And I think we get that one, but, like, Why? Why is that one something that just really resonates with you?

Jeremiah Prummer  1:13:44  

Yeah, I think the like, there's, and to be clear, like, I don't think I always, if I was to say, like, there's a scale of like, living up to this every single time, sure, like, I don't, but I try to, because I think, like, what the last thing that I ever want is to tell somebody, like, I'm going to, like, I don't want to sell a big vision that can't actually be delivered. And I think, like in in the startup world, in the software world in particular, there's a lot of that that happens, right? There's a lot of really big promises. Like, hey, in the agency world, there's this too, right? Like, you know, hey, sign up for our service and we're gonna triple your revenue sort of thing. And it's like, okay, well maybe, like, that's, I'm sure that's happened, but like, are you actually going to be able to deliver on that every single time? So I think again, like I don't live up to this perfectly, and I where I struggle with that, I think is like, I have things I know that I can do for somebody and want to do for that person. I just end up not having the ability to do that for some reason, the resources, things like that, that's where I kind of fall off. But I never promised something. I don't feel confident. Can be delivered, if that makes sense. And, yeah, so I think that's, that's where it is. And the struggle there, I actually there's this, I think you we, and I talked about this a little bit. We work with the brands, and we got our their rating. They had, like, a whole text back rating. And I won't get too much into it, but essentially, like, they they said, like, hey, this was a five star thing, and it's now a three star thing, still good, but not, not as good as we want it to be. It's not making the progress we want. And I think, like, that's an example of where the under promise and over deliver can hurt sometimes. But I think I still, like, am very much deep into this thing where it's like, okay, we we made promises, and now we're finding that we're having a hard time. There's a lot of things we need to change to be able to make sure that we're always delivering on that promise. There's foundational things that need to change in our business. There's all of this stuff that, all this work that has to go on behind the scenes, because we promise this thing, and we're not 100% delivering every single time, and so we're going to then take all of our time and attention and focus and make sure that we're delivering on that 100% of the time. And to be clear, like we delivered 98% of the time on these things, right? It's not like, it's like, a massive mess, but there were moments where it's like, okay, there's a bug in something that we should address, or like, hey, we could make this performance better on this thing. Or if we modify this piece of technology, it's going to operate better, it's going to be faster, more efficient, and it's going to save us money, which saves our customers money. So all of these kinds of things, I think, like that, that under promise, over deliver, really, I think, plays out in like, the way that we approach everything, and try to be very excellent at every single piece of responsibility in our business. Like you

William Harris  1:16:47  

said, we're not going to hit it on a percent of the time, but it's a very good aspirational thing to go into with everything that you do in life. Yeah, you, you've, you've told me a couple of funny stories here. I'm going to let you pick which one you tell there was either the poop castle or the buffalo carcass, whichever one you feel more excited to chat through. Uh,

Jeremiah Prummer  1:17:10  

all right, cool. Yeah. So we were talking about, you know, stories. Um, I'll set the stage with with this one. So I in college again, I kind of, I come from, like, a modest background, and so I didn't, I didn't have money to pay for college, and so one of the things I did in college was I worked as a dorm janitor, and I basically, I got free room and board, so place to place to stay and food to eat for free, in exchange for cleaning the dorms every Saturday and Sunday and then being on call one night a week to clean up any messes that were too gross, too big, whatever, to wait until the next morning. And so this this one night. So yeah, this is lots of stuff happened. This is like a little bit more of a funny experience, or a lot of far worse experiences. But I get a call from the resident director at a dorm. He's like, Hey, Jeremy, so I'm sorry to do this, but we need you to come down and clean up a poop castle. And okay, no idea what a poop Castle is, but I actually was like, it's interesting, right? Like, I was a little bit excited about, like, what is this thing? And so I called him. I called my friend who was the janitor in that dorm. He because he lived in that dorm. I was on call that night, and I was like, Hey, you should, you should come check this out. And so I walk into this dorm, it's an all boys dorm. And you know, it's, I don't know, 500 500 teenage boys live here, basically. And so I walk in, and there's all the at the front desk. There's all the Resident Assistants sitting there, and they're all kind of giggling and stuff and and so they they take me down into the basement. There's like a basement in this building, which I actually lived at this building for my freshman year for a little bit, and and so they they call it the pit, and there's 10 rooms down there. It's like a very small group. And so they take me down there, walk me into the bathroom and sitting on the floor in front of a toilet. So it's in the stall in front of the toilet is a poop castle, and it's literally somebody had pooped in a circle. So it was like a spiral, like it looked like the poop emoji, three emojis, though, like, maybe this is where the poop emoji and they pooped on the floor, and they had planted a flag in it that said poop. So they literally like, this is premeditated. So they literally made a flag, like a, you know, a stick and like a little piece of paper that said poop, Castle on it. Such a college Dora thing. Such a so. Anyway, so that was, like, that was one of those, like, it was a great story we had. You know, one of my friends at one point, she made, like, poop Castle cupcakes for my birthday. And just like, things like that were just like, there's some some fun things from that. So anyway, the lots of gross thing. I mean, that is gross still, but, like, it could have been far worse, and it's a good story that I get to remember now, so I

William Harris  1:20:27  

love it. I'm glad you shared that with us. Yeah, um, this is an interesting time for us to talk about this next question, because for those who are watching this, we'll this will post maybe a month later, but we just saw the election results here this morning. So this is November 6 that we're recording this one of the things that you and I had talked about before is a passion of yours is, how do we use business innovation to solve problems versus the government? And there's pros and cons to both of their problems that can be solved with both. But you're passionate about, like, the business side of how we use business level problems take me through, like, what and why? Yeah,

Jeremiah Prummer  1:21:07  

I man, I Chris out. I now live in, I live in a city. I'm a, you know, an urban dweller, suburban, I guess, really, I have a multiracial family. I'm, like, I would say, like, a lot of the people where I come from would describe me as liberal at this point in my life, but I wouldn't necessarily, so it's kind of an interesting like, I I've got this background. I grew up in, like, a very rural, very conservative, like, we don't trust the government sort of place, so that, like, just to set the groundwork, like that definitely frames a little bit of like, my my background, and then now I live in like, this more urban sort of context, and I think, like a lot of my views have shifted a little bit, but at the end of the day, like, I very much have this sort of, like libertarian mindset of like, as much as possible, let let people live their lives don't get in the way. And so we are looking at like, one of the things that I look at is like, well, what are ways that I can actually leverage my skills, my expertise, the things that I care about, to have an impact on people in my life? Because I don't necessarily trust that, like the the government is going to solve all these problems for us, nor do I think it should in a lot of cases. So I have a lot of I'm very passionate about things like one of one of the things that I think is really interesting is the idea of trying to address the wealth inequality in our country. And so like I, I know somebody who is a black man, who is from Denver, the house has the first house that he purchased, said on on the deed of the house do not sell to Negroes. And obviously he was able to buy this. But like, this is not like ancient history. This is like, bought a house in the, you know, neighborhood in Denver that was built in the 1910s 1920s and so, like, the reality is that in our country there's like, really, there's really, like, deep seated issues with things like property ownership. And I think that plays out a lot into like, if you look at the the wealth gap in our country, there is a demographics. There's a wealth gap in demographics, oftentimes, and there's urban versus rural and all these kinds of things. But like, the end of the day, like, literally, people were not allowed to own property, and that has a massive carry through to where we sit today. And so I like one of the the things that I am looking at is like, Okay, what would it look like for me to build a business someday where renters become property owners? And so it kind of is like reversing some of this historical gap where somebody who maybe doesn't come from a family that owned property and isn't getting an inheritance, and all of these kinds of things. Can rent a piece of property for or rent from an apartment building for 50 years, but walk away with half a million or a million dollars in equity, because they did pay into that and created value and equity, right? So things like that, I think, are like what I'm really looking at in terms of, how can I use my skills long term to benefit the broader public? So also, if anybody's in real estate and wants to do that, let me know. I'll just give you my my vision may not work, but the reality is, there's so like, it's such a big problem that I don't care if 100 people try to solve this problem, it's still gonna barely put it down to barely put a dent on it. So totally,

William Harris  1:24:44  

that's a very interesting way of solving that problem. And I like that. It would be, I hope you or somebody tries that, because I think that's a very it's, I don't know if it's been done before, but it's very interesting to your point, like, if they're paying in over. For a period of time. Yeah. Could they have fractional ownership of some sort of, yes, right? And so it's like, maybe it could be 10 different people over the course of 10 years that have rented this, but it's like, when the house sells, it's like they should be able to get a portion. I really like that concept, yeah. And

Jeremiah Prummer  1:25:15  

I mean, just to kind of dive in slightly deeper on that, I want to get to too much detail, but at the end of the day. Like, the costs of the cost to a landlord are vacancy and needing to make repairs, and the longer you keep somebody in a unit, the less those costs are. And so like, the cost of vacancy is 8% the cost of maintenance and repairs. I don't know exactly what that is. It differs for every unit, right? But like, there's a percentage there as well. So what if you could say, if you rent this property, this this unit, whatever it is house, apartment, unit doesn't really matter. For $2,000 a month, you get 5% of that in equity if you are a good renter. So you know, you you pass an inspection each year, or you get bonuses for re upping your lease. So there's no vacancy, like those kinds of things. Like, there's actually, I think there's a world in which the landlord still makes their money, but you also create wealth for the person who is staying in that unit. And maybe you actually have an impact on if there's less vacancy than me, and you know, less people moving between units, maybe there's more housing for everybody in that context, too. So there's some interesting things where it's like, the government will never come to that conclusion. It's just not the way that it's going to work. So when we talk about like, the issue of like, government versus people solving things, that will never be the solution that the government comes up with, because it just doesn't work. Like, and you can't mandate that people do that. Can't Yeah, but me as an individual, right? I can go out and I can try that, and I can try to, like, sacrifice some of my wealth potential in order for somebody else to have wealth as well. I think

William Harris  1:26:49  

that's very much the libertarian mindset to a point, right? And I actually share that with you as well. I consider myself libertarian. It's the one that I think I the most closely aligned with. Uh, although there's always going to be any affiliation, is never going to completely be what you want, for sure, but the quote that I like that goes along with what you just said, that I've always appreciated is a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion. Still, the reason why I love that is because, to your point, if you mandate that it's just not going to change somebody's mind, landlords aren't going to it. Now, you might be able to get something to happen, but they will find ways to circumvent like, like it will just create more than it is, versus gonna

Jeremiah Prummer  1:27:27  

cut corners. They're gonna like, there's gonna be things that are done where like it still is not a net benefit to the to the person who should be benefiting context,

William Harris  1:27:37  

right? And so get the government out of that and just encourage innovative, compassionate people to be able to come up with ideas like what you just did, and then have the ability for them to execute on them. I think that's huge. Yeah, for sure, Jeremy, it's been absolutely amazing talking to you. You've shared a lot of wisdom with us, funny stories, inspirational stories. Here, if we if people are listening and they want to work with you or follow you, what's the best way for them to do that? Yeah,

Jeremiah Prummer  1:28:07  

so best, best way find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. That's just @JeremiahPrummer, all one word, and then jeremiah@knocommerce.com you can email me there as well. I actually get way more emails than I get messages on social media. So those you're more likely for me to actually miss, because I, you know, hundreds a day. It happens send me a message on social media, and I will almost certainly see it. So that's

William Harris  1:28:36  

fair. Well, again, I appreciate you sharing your time and wisdom with us here today. Everyone else joining in. Thank you for listening. I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thanks.

Outro  1:28:46  

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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