[00:00:56] Andrew Michael: Hey, Suzanne, welcome to the show. 

[00:00:58] Susan Keplinger: Hi, thanks for having me.

[00:01:00 Andrew Michael: It's great to have you. For the listeners, Susan is the CEO of Force of Nature, a boutique performance marketing shop. She's also an advisor to companies like Ring and Oofos. And so my first question for you today is when it comes to performance marketing, what do the best brands understand that the rest don't? 

[00:01:18] Susan Keplinger: Yeah. So I think in today's world, which has evolved a lot in the last, you know, 20, 30 years as the internet has come into existence, the most important thing to think about as a marketer in performance, in brand, et cetera, is that you have to be incredibly systematic about your marketing. You don't want to be reactive. You really want to have the bull by the horns and be able to know where you're going to steer that ship. 

[00:01:45] Susan Keplinger: And the most important thing to remember today is you're steering the ship not just for your customers, not just for your consumers and the story you're trying to tell the world, but you're steering that ship for the robots and the AI and how that is telling the story of your brand and telling the story of who you are. And so it's really, really important that you're extremely systematic around what you're trying to say and who you're trying to say it to so that you can tell that story in a way that everyone's hearing the message and understanding the message the same way and the right way.

[00:02:14] Andrew Michael: Yeah. We're going to definitely double click into that. I'm also looking a little bit to understand how you're actually working with Oofos at the moment. Like I mentioned to you, I'm actually wearing a pair of them at the moment. They're probably the most comfortable like… pitched… I think it's like recovery sandals or flip-flops, but they are amazing. And so how are you working with Oofos at the moment? 

[00:02:33] Susan Keplinger: We're rolling with all day comfort because at the end of the day, that's what Oofos is and Oofos represents. So Oofos is such a great story to talk about Force of Nature and really the growth signal system that we deploy and how we partnered with Liz, their CMO, in working with them. We started working with Liz when Liz was just looking at them and looking at potentially becoming their CMO and said, Hey, I got an opportunity to talk to this company. It's interesting what's there. And we were able to aggregate for Liz all of the external data about Liz and see, whoa, look at this exploding market. This is definitely a really incredible opportunity. 

[00:03:09] Susan Keplinger: At the core of Liz's journey as the CMO of UFOs has been her partnership with Force of Nature and using the data to determine first, wow, this is an incredible opportunity. Next, where should I shine the spotlight to make and enact the most change? And lastly, how do I deploy time, capital and resources to grow as much as we can? And so right now at Force of Nature, we actually are helping them run a lot of their programs, a lot of their media. And it's been pretty fun to break their logistics and really see what's possible with growth in a category when they go in and fix the underlying campaign structures, the underlying campaign management, et cetera, and really start to identify not just to our consumers and who's buying our product, but who are our most valuable consumers.

[00:03:51] Susan Keplinger: And who are our most valuable customers that are going to not only come back and continue to buy, which obviously means continue to grow their LTV, but they're going to be the ones that tell their friends. They're going to be the ones that tell their neighbors. And how do we start to really have a conversation with those people and how do we deploy time, money and resources accordingly? Money is really straightforward. Capital allocation into things like ads, but how you spend your time, how you orient your team is something that often is overlooked and under looked. And Oofos is really doing a great job thinking about that whole picture. So it's not just about buying ads. 

[00:04:25] Andrew Michael: So I'd like to double click into that a little bit, because I think obviously what you mentioned now has like a direct correlation to retention, to LTV. It's about understanding like who are the right customers you should be going after. And looking at the sites as well, I think… you mentioned something around the lines of like doing the analysis that PE firms typically do when making acquisitions or when trying to scale businesses. And I'm keen to understand like, what does your process look like a little bit when it comes to actually like, first of all, identifying those underlying signals that are leading to telling you who's the best fit customer, who's more likely to do repurchases and to retain. What does your process typically look like then from that perspective, when working with the customer getting started? 

[00:05:08] Susan Keplinger: Yeah, so at Force of Nature, our number one goal is to really help companies move from something that might feel really chaotic and uncertain and you're not confident into really orchestrated growth. And we at Force of Nature call this the growth signal system. It has three stages. We do what's called growth signal, which is when we can look at external data to look for external signal. The next is kind of the pulse. Are we doing it right? Where are we? Are we alive? And the last is the analysis, which is the strategic. What should we do and how should we do it? 

[00:05:41] Susan Keplinger: And the thing that's fascinating and really the thing that once you see it, can't unsee it is the data can guide that answer. So the data about how many people are searching for your product, how are they searching for your product, who's searching for your product, how are they buying, when are they buying? All of that data unified together is, in a really systematic way, tells the story of how you're gonna grow. And I think that's been the most incredible thing. 

[00:06:07] Susan Keplinger: It started really with Ring. I got a call, I just sold my ad tech startup, Triggit. And I got a call from Jamie Siminoff and he said, he's a CEO at Ring. He said, I need help. And I was like, dude, I know this one thing about how to programmatically buy ads. I do not know how to come in and be a consulting fractional CMO of anything. He said, I don't care. I need help. And what was interesting is, is we did this exact thing. We said, well, what if we just trust the data? What if we believe in the data and what if we structure it so that we can ask questions against it? 

[00:06:38] Susan Keplinger: And so myself with an incredibly smart young man named [inaudible] came in and built really the infrastructure of a performance driven system at Ring. And Jamie is a marketer CEO, right? He has that CMO marketer's brain. And so he was able to make the big bold marketer plays like hiring Shaq and using the structured systematic approach, looking at the data, we were able to determine that it turns out Shaq was an incredibly effective tool for not only acquisition, but also retention because Ring is really predicated on buying the first doorbell and then buying the security system and then paying for all of the licenses to make sure you have access to the cameras on your app for all of those things. 

[00:07:19] Susan Keplinger: And so it was really predicated on this idea of how do we get in the door using acquisition and then how to retain and grow our customers and build a brand that people are proud to be part of. And so I was like, well, that worked really well. That was easy. Tried it a few more times. It wasn't quite as easy, but I think now at this point, we've really been able to build this system that when deployed well works really well. And I think what we're doing with Oofos is a testament to that. 

[00:07:45] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And so, I mean, you mentioned a couple of things and the one is like, let's take the example now of Shaq being a good campaign and leading to good retention. What are some of the signals you're looking at? So assuming in this case, like you're just looking at people who are the first touch or last touch, whatever, somehow attributed to that Shaq campaign and converting. Are there any other signals that you're looking at from a maybe firmographic or demographic perspective? 

[00:08:10] Andrew Michael: And in this case, I think probably mostly firmographic because you're dealing with B2C clients, but are there any other signals that you… like clarifying and qualifying customers by when you say, okay, these are good fit customers and are they like the typical like age, gender location, or are there any other signals that you're typically pulling out and looking at to say, okay, this makes a good fit customer for X brand? Or when you're doing your analysis where are you looking to try and paint that picture of who you should be acquiring? 

[00:08:38] Susan Keplinger: Yeah. And I mean, I think this is the tricky part. Brand, turns out, is often a little bit of a shiny unicorn to some extent. And you're trying to figure out what is the signal that matters for that brand. I think there's… you'll find a lot of commonality amongst a lot of brands, but you are looking for like, what is the thing that matters most? For Ring, what Jamie really learned was Ring was built on the back of TV, which was a pretty incredible story of growth that he was able to… and really I think it was sort of the last wisps of linear in so many ways. 

[00:09:10] Susan Keplinger: I don't know that he'd be able to do what he did with linear TV and remnant media today that he did then. But he was able to build it on the back of TV. And so the only thing that mattered to Ring and Jamie was the cost per new visitor to the website. So when they would do a spot, be it on the NBA Finals or be it on QVC or be it on whatever channel, they were just looking at what is the aggregate cost per new visitor to the website. From that point, we can then calculate how many downstream sales we think we're gonna get. 

[00:09:39] Susan Keplinger: For Ashley Stewart, who's kind of a story of them not really paying attention to this really important information, they were like, oh, no. All that matters is just acquiring new customers. All customers are the same. And we know that is a complete fallacy, right? All customers are not the same. But what was interesting with Ashley was when we actually dug into their data, we found that seasonally, customers did have a lot of similarities. And so if they were acquiring a customer during certain seasonal periods, and it was not Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It was typically, you know, in February and March when people were resetting their wardrobes, those consumers across the board would have the highest LTV of their portfolio. And so really they needed to be investing their money and inventory into those places. 

[00:10:22] Susan Keplinger: So as a brand, I think the key is to understand who your customers are and where you're acquiring the LTV and what your goals are. And from that point, you can come up with what those North Star metrics might look like based on that sort of aggregate signal you're seeing. I think really every company is a little bit different. Every company is a little bit of a unicorn, but typically you can look in the similar types of places, seasonality, cohorts, some sort of geo, et cetera, to look at who your consumers are and who you should be targeting. 

[00:10:51] Andrew Michael: Another thing you mentioned earlier as well is that currently – today, obviously like the things are being disrupted, like the entire marketing stack is being revisited and AI is definitely disrupting acquisition in a lot of different places. But one of the things you mentioned as well is like the best brands, they're programmatic, they have systems in place, they understand, they're analytical. What do you think's changing now with this new paradigm? You mentioned geo a couple of times now. How are some of like the brands that you're working with trying to adapt to this new mode of working now with gen AI and whatnots? What are some of the interesting patterns you're seeing across the customers that you work with? 

[00:11:27] Susan Keplinger: So I think the most important thing that every marketer needs to remember is – and this paradigm is of course shifting and changing. And so I don't want to make like a stake in the ground type statement, but Google and Meta still dominate the ad tech ecosystem, like full stop. Google and Meta dominate. And so if you focus on those two areas first, sure, there's TikTok and connected and all of these places. I mean, arguably, certain brands really need to rely on TV, but for so many brands, specifically the brands that we're talking about here, Google and Meta are at the core of that. 

[00:11:59] Susan Keplinger: And so what does that mean? It means pay attention to the things that they care about, that their robots care about, and you'll probably be in service to everything else as well. So that means you need to make sure that your site is structured correctly, that it's structured fast, and that you're telling the story effectively to the robots that you want to be telling. So stop stressing about keywords and start thinking about am I getting the visibility into the types of audiences that I want to be talking about? Right? This isn't about driving traffic to your site. It's about driving the right traffic to your site at the right price to convert in the right way. 

[00:12:34] Susan Keplinger: And so you really want to make sure that you know who am I trying to talk to and how much are they worth and how much am I willing to pay to retain them and how much am I willing to pay to acquire them, et cetera. And if you can do that, then you can structure everything very systematically so that the AI, the robots can go and understand who that is. And they're becoming increasingly good at connecting those people with you, right? 

[00:13:02] Susan Keplinger: So this is no longer about going onto Facebook and hacking the right audiences. This is about showing up to the world in a way that is your best self, structuring it and engineering it correctly, quickly, so everything's fast, it's structured, following best practice of, know, sort of media and campaign operations. And if you do those things, if you follow the best practices of the last, let’s say, five years, then you're going to show up. But if you don't, if you're chaotic, if it doesn't really make sense, if you're all over the place, if you're trying to talk to too many people in too many ways, in the same way that a human would get confused, the robots are gonna get confused too. And they're gonna be like, I have no idea what this brand is trying to do. Therefore, we're not gonna cue them up.

[00:13:46] Andrew Michael: So I have to play that back to you as well. Then it's like, I think really when it comes around to positioning, I think you need to have real clarity. And I assume you're saying not only on your website, but across all channels so that it becomes clear and consistent wherever an agent or an LLM is interacting with your brand, it has a consistent messaging. It understands what you stand for, what you're about and is able to get through to. I think– 

[00:14:08] Susan Keplinger: Technically – making sure that it's technically instrumented correctly is fundamental. You have to make sure that your stuff is structured cleanly and that it is structured following best practices of sort of media campaign, website ops, so that the algorithms and the robots know how to read it. 

[00:14:28] Andrew Michael: And so when you say that today, like specifically, what are you talking about? So you're talking about like MD files and being able to make it easy to access and crawl, or is there something else you're speaking about when it comes to how you structure? 

[00:14:39] Susan Keplinger: Yeah. You got to make sure that everything's… Google and Meta, if we assume these are like the two major ad tech players that really define much of what happens today, they want your website to be fast. It needs to be compliant against all the places it's supposed to be compliant against. You need to make sure that, yeah, all of the underlying structure is up to snuff, right? All of that matters. It historically mattered, and now it matters a lot. 

[00:15:05] Susan Keplinger: If your mobile load speed is slow, then Google's gonna be like, that's a bad website experience. I don't care what they're trying to sell or who they're trying to sell it to. It's not a good experience for the consumer. And therefore I'm not gonna rank it nearly as high. And so the fundamentals are even more important than ever, right? Making sure that the fundamentals are clean and that you have a very clear, concise sort of cue up to the world of here's who I am and here's what I'm trying to say. My message isn't muddled and I know the value that I'm willing to play and place on these things and these people. 

[00:15:40] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I used to, like about 10 years ago probably now, had an ad tech company as well, trying to help optimize Facebook ads. And I remember at one point going to one of the Facebook connect events, whatever they were called at the time. And the speaker on stage basically said, it's almost futile for you to try and help optimize your customers ads. You're far better off just giving us as much signal as possible, ensuring – like you're saying now – that your site is correctly formatted, that you're adhering to best practices, that you're paid load speed. And that's really what's going to help you increase conversions, not you trying to like make micro optimizations on copy and changes. Cause at this stage, like, and this was 10 years ago, I think.

[00:16:16] Susan Keplinger: That was 10 years ago. 

[00:16:18] Andrew Michael: That was 10 years ago. At this point, I think it is like they've become so good, these channels, in terms of like matching the right message with the right audience and even like rewriting your copy and presenting it in a better way to meet people. But then you do get penalized as you say, if you don't have good load times, things like cookie banners and privacy notices and all of these things really start to like make a difference on that side. 

[00:16:41] Susan Keplinger: And you have to remember, you want to show up not just to acquire your new customers, which we know is sort of fundamental, but the real opportunity here is to make sure you're also showing up to your existing customers, right, in the most efficient way possible so that when something queues up that they're going to be interested in, the algorithms are like, Oh, look, this was a new product launch. This cohort of people love new product launches.” And they're gonna make sure they're showing those products to the right people. 

[00:17:09] Susan Keplinger: And this matters in how we think about programmatic email, how we think about programmatic ads, how we think about programmatic everything, right? And that's where it really comes back to this core idea, programmatic has really been going on for 15 years. And so the landscape is changing in terms of how we're programming the robots, what the LLMs are, et cetera. But fundamentally, it's algorithms and computers making decisions on behalf of your brand and on behalf of you. And so you wanna make sure that you're having a conversation, not just with your consumer, but with the robots who's gonna help find and talk to your consumer. 

[00:17:40] Andrew Michael: I think it's also interesting. I think things are changing rapidly. I saw yesterday or the day before somebody shared on LinkedIn that now 50% of content online is generated by gen AI and 50% by humans. I think it's crossed over the point where now there's more content online generated by AI versus content generated by humans. And I think at some point, like you start to wonder like, what does the future of the internet look like? And at some point we have this… a friend of mine, like he talks about the dead internet theory quite a bit in the sense where almost nobody will be searching online anymore. And it's just going to be robots like agents interacting with content that agents have generated. 

[00:18:18] Andrew Michael: And how do you see brands stand out from this and not get sucked into this? I think there's a lot of slop that gets created today. There's a lot of like noise being created at this stage. And like some feel almost reluctant to dive in, to create more noise as well, to be a part of it. Cause otherwise they may miss out. But how do you see things and like, what's your opinion on the future when it comes to generating content and making sure you just don't get lost in all the noise that's out there. 

[00:18:46] Susan Keplinger: Totally. So I'm going to speak specifically to what we're seeing inside of these core platforms. And I guess in this instance, we'd be really referring to… I'm just going to put connected TV in a separate bucket, but anything sort of digitally. And I'll really highlight kind of three core things that we want to think about with creative in particular, if we're focusing on creative. Creative is really the new targeting. It's super, super important that you get it right and that you think about it. But what's interesting is, first of all, it's about portfolio over precision. 

[00:19:16] Susan Keplinger: So the game now is not about finding the winning creative. It's not about dumping hundreds of creatives in and saying, I'm going to find like the best creative. Instead, it's about maintaining a really diverse portfolio of really distinct, high performing concepts across different personas and different angles. Because if you have these sort of call it 5 to 10 genuinely different creative directions per campaign and whatnot, then you're giving the algorithms an opportunity to connect, right, the right person with the right creative. And so it's just different than saying like, oh, I'm going to put these 100, you these 10 different creatives out there and I'm going to change the headline and I'm going to change the color, but I'm trying to effectively say the same thing over and over again. 

[00:19:59] Susan Keplinger: Instead, what we're saying is no, let's create a diverse portfolio of creatives that all represent your brand, but that speak to different personas and that speak to different consumers. And then the algorithms can connect the right creative with the right consumer. And you'll start to see just a lot higher success across the board from a portfolio perspective, which is just a little bit of a different play.

[00:20:20] Susan Keplinger: The other reality is that particularly on Meta, Meta actually penalizes creative similarity. And so if you just iterate on a concept and it looks too much like a past performer, particularly if it's a poor performer, then it's going to actually be suppressed by the algorithm. Right? And so you've really got to be… I'd you've got to be careful that you think you're just going to take some thing and iterate, iterate, iterate until eventually you break free. Because the algorithms are smart too. They see what's happening, right? And they want to create genuinely good positive experiences for their consumers on Facebook, on Instagram, on all the Meta-platforms. 

[00:20:56] Susan Keplinger: And they don't want to dilute their customers with crappy ads that don't speak to their needs, that don't tell a great story. And so I think that's the other thing to remember is like generative AI will likely be suppressed in so many ways before it's really amplified. What's going to win is the ability to have a broad portfolio that tell your story so that you're meeting your consumers and your customers where they are even if that's in different places. 

[00:21:20] Andrew Michael: And so I think as well to play that back a little bit is that the algorithms have got so good now at matching the right message with the right audience. And previously, like they weren't as sophisticated and as great at doing that. So you try to optimize the best campaign and iterate on that because you didn't have such great targeting and great optimization on the AI front. Now it's got really, really good at matching that. So you're much better off like diversifying the types of messaging that you're putting out there and positioning and reaching different audiences.

[00:21:48] Andrew Michael: And it actually reminds me actually of… at Hotjar, I remember back in the day we had like this one specific ad I think it was probably created within the first six months of the company launch and it managed to outlast and be the best performing campaign for like the first like seven or eight years. And it was like really just this ugly crappy photo taken of some guy with his desk with wires everywhere, like really unpolished. And like the performance team, we like always tried to like beat that specific ad and just… it outlived [inaudible]. 

[00:22:17] Susan Keplinger: Oh my God. I was like, [inaudible], the CEO did a TedTalk, but it wasn't actually a Ted Talk. It was a TedX Talk. It was three minutes long and he insisted that we use it as an ad. And we were like, bro. Like, well, you can't cut TedTalks. Like they won't let you shorten them or, you know, alter it. So he's like, no, you have to run it as an ad. And for the life of us, we could not outperform that.

[00:22:42] Andrew Michael: It always ends up being like the worst, least polished sort of things. But I think it speaks to, as well, about like what you're saying is changing now is that… that one really like stood out and resonates and it was hitting the right audience that we were servicing at that point. But like now, you have the opportunity just to diversify even further and meet people. I think it's also that people like to consume media in different ways. And some people are more visual, some people are audio, some people prefer watching a video and stuff. And so like now you have the opportunity to meet people where they want to be met and allow them to consume content how they want to consume. 

[00:23:14] Susan Keplinger: I think, like I said, the thing that's so fascinating is that if you really unify what we're seeing on a platform like Meta across the whole range of – and we can think about this in both acquisition and retention, right? We know that retargeting works great to have conversations with your existing customers and consumers and bring them back to the brand, bring them back to the site. It's super interesting because what we're seeing is that targeting is now structural. It's not manual. And that fewer campaigns plus really clean data and really clean direction is going to lead to better optimization. 

[00:23:48] Susan Keplinger: And we're simultaneously seeing that we really only want to put 5 to 10 different creative directions in each campaign. And so what this means is this is pretty limiting. We want to have fewer campaigns and we want to have a diverse portfolio of ads within each campaign, but we can't actually have that many campaigns. And so generative AI can produce endless amount of content but what we're really seeing from a structural perspective inside of platforms like Meta is it's not going to help you very much, right? 

[00:24:14] Susan Keplinger: What's going to help you is to be able to show your brand in, like I said, a diverse way, talking to different personas. And you really are probably only going to have the opportunity to do that in, you know, call it 25 to 50 ads, which means sure, gen AI could be helpful in making you build those ads faster, keeping them fresher, et cetera. But it's not that many ads relative to what it could do when you're thinking about pumping thousands of ads into the system. You will be penalized if you do that, because it's just not structurally how the system is built. 

[00:24:44] Andrew Michael: A lot's changing. I think one thing that always surprises me is that… talking in the content like B2B SaaS now, that retargeting is such a powerful tool, I think, when it comes to acquisition, and especially for increasing lifetime value on the B2C front. But I very rarely do I ever see performance teams using paid to bring back customers from a B2B perspective. And I think we use email to try to win them back through our onboarding sequence and activation campaigns. But I haven't seen many brands actually use paid for like to increase activation and increase retention onboarding. Have you ever worked with any companies that have like really deployed and used ads effectively to retain customers and to keep bringing them back? 

[00:25:29] Susan Keplinger: Yes. So I think the question is, again, if we think about B2B is a big space. And MileIQ is such a great example… because MileIQ is a mileage tracking company, right? Their goal is to get drivers, people that either act as contractors or drive professionally to download the app and use the app. So what happens, right? You run some ads, get the person to download the app, and then they never open the app. They never come back. They never engage. They kind of forget that they did it. 

[00:26:04] Susan Keplinger: And so I think leveraging, you think about how the goal is, how do you get them to take… how do you get the user to participate in the behavior that you'd like to see? And so for MileIQ, this was happening where the acquisition was going quite well. We were getting people to acquire the app, to sign up, but they were not opening the app. And so the question was, how do we remind people that they have this great app installed and here's how they should be using it? And so it was measured. And again, this is just connecting the right data pipes together where the success of the campaigns, the success of the retargeting was about activation less than it was about acquisition. 

[00:26:46] Susan Keplinger: And that's just another data pipe, right? How many people are opening the app, how many people are using the app and how much is that worth it? How much is that worth to us as a brand? And so I think as any company just needs to say, what's the behavior I'm trying to enlist? And can I either use, again, time or money to activate that behavior? Emails may be free, but you still have to build them. You still have to target them. And you know that at the end of the day– 

[00:27:11] Andrew Michael: People have to read them. 

[00:27:13] Susan Keplinger: Yeah, someone has to read them, right? They're finite. You can't just blast them, people with them every single day, right? And so they're very much a finite resource. But getting in front of somebody and having a conversation with them using an ad is another way to activate that behavior. And it's pretty inexpensive because you probably don't have that many users that you're trying to get in front of. And so when you're thinking about things on sort of a non-scaled retargeting, this could just be an always on effort that might cost you a few hundred dollars a month, like not that much money to remind people of the behavior you'd like to see them engage in. 

[00:27:42] Susan Keplinger: And again, you want to measure the outcome that you're trying to achieve. I want them to open the app. Okay, how many people who saw this ad opened the app or how many existing users opened the app? And then that's how you can really measure the success. And again, this comes back to that system. And so I think the real opportunity here is to understand what you're trying to achieve, right? This is like the premise of what we keep talking about, understand of what you're trying to achieve and the value of that achievement. And if you can map those two things, then you can start to deploy time and money against that. 

‍

[00:28:10] Andrew Michael: Very interesting. Yeah, I think it's always one thing that I felt is like a very big missed opportunity because I think, you said, like email is essentially in quotes, like free. But it comes with the cost and it's finite. It's like, you can't just keep blasting it. You use it as you mentioned, but like ads, I think are great. When a lot of times I think like people may have started using your product and they stopped because you didn't have a specific feature or something wasn't quite right within the product. And you send out these emails to say what's updated, but you don't like push these messages out. And you do these launch campaigns to say that they're… but you have this really targeted audience is already like showing interest in the product.

[00:28:48] Andrew Michael: And we always talk about it's much easier, it's much cheaper to retain customers and to acquire new ones or whatever it is. But we don't do a good job of trying to do that with all the channels that we have available to us. I think performance is like one of those channels where we could be doing a lot more. 

[00:29:02] Susan Keplinger: This is like such a good example of where things like generative AI creative could actually be really useful, right? It suddenly becomes a lot easier and a lot quicker to spin up little videos, little ads, et cetera, that maybe wouldn't have as big of a footprint historically. And therefore you weren't as excited to invest in that. But now, okay, I can spin up this ad, my growth guy can spin up a little creative ad and I can use it for retargeting. It didn't cost much time to produce it and I'm not putting that much money behind it. But hey, if it converts a handful of existing customers into the behaviors that I'd like to see, then it's worth that effort. And it's just faster than it historically was. So that just amplifies your team. So I think things like this that historically were neglected come back out into the open again.

[00:29:48] Andrew Michael: Yeah, very interesting. I see we're running up on time, so I wanna make sure I ask you a couple of questions, ask every guest that joins the show. First question is, what's one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career? 

[00:30:01] Susan Keplinger: That it matters. That you can acquire customers all day long, but if you don't keep them and you don't keep them happy, nothing matters. It's fascinating, Habit was a great nutrition company. Raised, gosh, over $50 million from Campbell Soup Company to personalize medicine, right? To personalize your experience with food. And we acquired customers all day long and we kept dumping money into acquiring customers. And then on the other side of that world, we would tell them to like eat salmon and go for walks. And the product just didn't deliver any value. And what we should have done is we should have stopped all acquisition, probably should have fired me and the whole marketing team completely and said, How are we actually going to create a product that people want to stick around for so that we can make sure we retain our customers? And once we have customers that are retaining, then it's going to be easy to throw money at the acquisition problem. 

[00:30:54] Susan Keplinger: And I think some people think that if they just… 10 people did one action and they think, oh, but the 11th is going to be different. If 10 people did the same thing, the 11th is not going to be different. So go figure out what you need to change from a retention, from a customer satisfaction, from a happiness perspective, so that when you acquire that 11th customer, something is very different and you have an opportunity to actually keep them. 

[00:31:17] Andrew Michael: It matters. It matters. I think that's also specifically like acquisition is typically like where every company always focuses. And then at some point they realize, okay, like we should have thought about this retention thing a lot sooner. And it's often like too late, unfortunately, in a lot of cases. Last question then is like, obviously you speak to a lot of brands, you speak to a lot of companies when it comes to their performance marketing. What's one question that you wish more people would ask you, but they don't when it comes to their performance marketing?

[00:31:46] Susan Keplinger: Well, that's a good question. I think the thing that people… underlies a lot of this is a lack of trust and they don't believe that it's possible to trust the data. And so I think if I think about what is the unlock, what is that question that people could ask it's. Prove to me, I can trust this data or how can I trust this data so that I can have confidence in this data? Because it's like… I play a bunch of extreme sports, right? My son's getting me into climbing right now. It's like crazy to go from… I thought my quiver of kite surfing and mountain biking and skiing was full, but no, now we're adding climbing. 

[00:32:24] Susan Keplinger: And when my four year old is climbing that wall and is up 30 feet in the air, right? I have to trust the system. I have to trust the rope. I have to trust all of the things because if she falls, then she's dead, right? And so for me, I've been able to learn to trust equipment in the sports that I play. And so often I find that executives aren't able to trust data. And so I wish the thing that they could do is, what do I need to do to trust the data so that I can make big bold bets on top of that data and I can have confidence that I'm going to come out in a really positive place? 

[00:32:57] Susan Keplinger: And so I think that's the one thing everyone wants to pretend like they know data and they're comfortable with data. But if you look at ChatGPT usage, less than 0.3% is on data analysis. No one's comfortable with data. Like there's so few people that are actually good and comfortable with data. So the core is what do I need to do to get comfortable with data so that I can trust it so I can make these big bets on my company, on my brand, on my customers and what we're doing. 

[00:33:24] Andrew Michael: Yeah. It's so interesting. I think that… thinking through my career as well, like how often that I've worked with people that never really understood data. And so they would never base decisions or never like have the trust to make a decision off of it. And like, when things were just clear as day, like you could say, okay, like this makes complete sense. Like trying to rationalize it to somebody who didn't have the trust or didn't have the understanding with data was almost futile or impossible. But then the people that like get data and understand things, like it would just be like, yes, this is it. Let's do it. Let's go. 

[00:33:57] Susan Keplinger: This was Jamie Siminoff’s superpower. And this is how Ring became such an explosive success. He not only trusted the data, but he poured conviction and money behind that data. And it kept working and working and working. And he was rigorous in making sure that he understood how it was built and where it was collected and making sure the right people were or the right team was there that he could trust. And then he just poured dollars on it and, really arguably built, I mean, a mega brand on the top of quantitative. 

[00:34:31] Andrew Michael: I think like my perspective on like data now is, it like, after seeing so many different startups is that like, I think in the early days, like data is not very reliable. You don't have enough of it to get any statistical significance. And more generally, not just on a performance side. So you tend to sort of rely on founder intuition a lot. And that helps get you a long way to begin with. But then there comes a tipping point where like the company scale to the point now where the decisions you make are lot more costly if they're wrong. And data becomes more and more important where you actually need to make the switch. 

[00:35:03] Andrew Michael: And it's like, think for me, it feels like that is the turning point for companies. And the difference between like making or breaking is that if they're able to understand with which point they need to move away from this founder intuition now and say, okay, let's put our trust in the data now and let's be data backed and make decisions that we can rely on and we can measure. Because like the ones that are the companies I've seen, they've been unsuccessful. The ones that just been like trying to rely on this intuition forever. And it will get them to some degree, to some point, but then eventually they end up like making bigger swings, having bigger costly mistakes and it ends up ruining them. 

[00:35:37] Andrew Michael: But the ones that are able to like really dive into the data and be methodical and say, if I'm going to do X, I expect to see Y at the end of it. So I'm going to measure it. This is what we're going to do. And those are the companies I think that always like are the ones that… we read about and you see on the Forbes lists and so forth. So I mean… 

[00:35:53] Susan Keplinger: I think like that on a fundamental level, this is how you move from potential to power, right? And everybody can start and you start by collecting the data. You don't have to use it. You can still rely on your founder intuition, but start collecting it so that you can then start to use it. And that was something that was really interesting. Also at Ring was we realized like, oh my gosh, we're not even collecting half of the stuff that we wish we had. And so just start, start from as early as you can to collect, organize and structure, and you'll find that it becomes easier and easier to start asking questions against that data and making decisions against the data. 

[00:36:27] Andrew Michael: 100%. Very nice. Susan, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting to you today. Is there any final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with before we wrap up? 

[00:36:34] Susan Keplinger: I think the thing that I keep hearing from all of my CMOs and everyone is this AI thing, like what's going to happen to my job, what's going to happen to my company, like what's going to happen. I think my fundamental message is just don't be afraid. Right? Lean in and trust that it's going to amplify you. It's going to amplify your brand and it's going to make what you're doing just faster and better. But to do that, you need to be systematic. You need to be structured and you do need to take it seriously. But it should help you win more. 

[00:37:07] Andrew Michael: Yep. Absolutely. I think now's the time to be like diving in, hit first, figuring it out, not shying away from it. And I think like, probably six months ago, there was more people that were more apprehensive and then like, oh, this doesn't work. Like turning things down, like trying to almost be defensive. But I think even those people that were defensive have now starting to like turn around, paying a bit more attention. Like maybe I should be paying more attention to this. And it's inevitable that like the direction things are moving and the faster you can adapt and get ahead of the curve, I think the better. 

[00:37:40] Susan Keplinger: And this goes back to this whole data thing, right? Cause what's AI super, super good at? It's super good at identifying patterns. And so if you can start making sure you're collecting your data and structuring your data, then things like AI will help you figure out how to amplify yourself by finding the patterns of what's working. But if you don't collect the data, ain't going to find no patterns. 

[00:37:58] Andrew Michael: And always make sure to say please and thank you whenever you're chatting to an LLM. You never know how it's going help you someday. Very nice. Susan, thank you so much for joining. wish you the best of luck for the listeners. We'll make sure to leave everything we discussed today in the show notes so you can pick that up there. And yeah, wish you the best of luck going forward.

[00:38:15] Susan Keplinger: Awesome. Thanks, Andrew. 

[00:38:17] Andrew Michael: Cheers.