Here’s what I learned this week

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These Touchpoints

I’m going to drop some mini courses around specific things like how to leverage your existing assets in ways you’ve never considered before on auto-pilot.

There’s a lot of stuff that people aren’t doing to game the algorithms that I think can pay dividends if you take the right approach.

Going to be testing lots of these in the near future.

I’m seeing a lot of my strategy make it’s way onto LinkedIn being echoed by other people

It’s a humbling feeling when people start quoting your strategy or things that you’ve been talking about for a while.

People are starting to question data, reporting, and a whole lot of other things that in the past we just took for granted.

This is as big as a shift as I’ve seen in years.

It’s coming at the right time too.

If you like what Retention.com is doing or the new B2B company that Adam Robinson launched, just be aware of what’s coming to privacy in the US.

I’m going to keep telling everyone, 3rd party cookies are going away, 1st party pixels aren’t going to be enough, as they’ve shown to be not enough so far, it’s time to normalize talking to and engaging with your customers.

This week marked 4 years of Formtoro

I feel like I’ve learned more in the past 4 years that I have in my previous 15 in the marketing space.

Data collection and insights is such a seedling field.

There aren’t a ton of people doing it yet.

I’ll give you the snap shot of our business:

Year 1: No one understands what we do

Year 2: Land some larger clients and a few aggregators, a lot of them aren’t running real businesses or businesses that are viable, we seem to be a last option for brands that have tried everything else

Year 3: There isn’t enough real talent to execute internally, data strategy is a nice to have not a need, start mentoring a few people, dive into helping Krakatoa Underwear Breakthrough to over $1m in revenue

Year 4: The SaaS switch ongoing for more than 10 months with a bit more to get right and make sure everyone gets the most out of a platform that is now more enterprise than it is more midmarket with features.

People start talking about zero party data, onboarding clients on the regular, less emphasis on the consulting side of things, split off the consulting to Ecom with Jon instead to manage those inquiries.

Year 5: Jon gets built into Formtoro in the form of AI reporting and finally get the breathing room to tackle some more longer term ecosystem things.


Which takes me to an explanation of how markets work around new and differentiated products for us at Formtoro it looks like this:

Step 1: Get people to talk about zero party data

Step 2: Get people to collect some zero party data with they existing tools

Step 3: Get people to reconsider their KPIs around popups

Step 4: Get people to want a better system to collect zero party data that includes all those KPIs built in

Step 5: Move people over to Formtoro

Step 6: Enable brands to combine zero party data collection with their customer journey touchpoints including their Facebook spend

Step 7: Empower brands to statistically know what's likely to drive results through data

Step 8: Use data to automate decision making across their marketing stack

Step 9: Combine tools to create marketing touchpoints (emails and ads) leveraging the data automatically

Step 10: Reduce the need for headcount to run an efficient ecommerce business improving operational efficiency with a combination of data and ai tools

This is the basic blueprint of launching any SaaS or product into a new market.

The future of work

Step by step wizards, then let AI take over.

It’s actually been the best way to onboard people generally for ages.

But not all onboarding experiences are good.

I know, ours at Formtoro is miles away from where I think it should be or where it’s going to be when we’re done with it.

The idea of tap tap tap = value immediately is what we’re after.

We’re already building systems that take the heavy lifting out of doing cool things.

Things are moving fast, so here’s a preview of something we’ve had live for a long time:

We’ve been using this for more than a year to handle publishing of interesting stuff within an interest. It took less than 90 seconds to publish that post.

With a large enough pool of content (wink wink) you could queue up content for an entire year from select brands then warm outreach to them that you featured them on your blog/newsletter.

Now take it a step further, this same technology can be used to create product and collection level emails that integrate any content present on those pages.

Now take it a step further and say that you know the preferences of shoppers from a Formtoro form and have created a segment in your Email Service Provider.

Now you have templates for every product on your page or every collection or category.

This is where we’re headed…

This is a shorter email just making you think about what’s coming.

It’s a short week for me this week and there’s a lot of things in flux.

Agency Shaming for the week

This is a new section but I just heard that Neil Patel’s agency charges 50% of ad spend in management for carousel Facebook ad management.

Tell me this industry doesn’t need some serious disrupting.

The Takeaway

Have a great week!

-Jon

Catch up on past posts: https://ecomwithjon.beehiiv.com/

You can learn from me: jonivanco.com