Marketing

Why spending on branding can be a key to long-term success

Mike Kwatinetz Advertising, Early-stage, Marketing

A friend called me the other day and inquired as to whether I was ok, as I had not posted in several months. While my goal has been to do about 10 blog posts per year, my frequency has always been erratic, and this year has really been sparse. To make things up, I am going to try for 2 new posts in the next 3 weeks or so that stem from the Azure Marketing Day, held each year for our portfolio companies to gain exposure to advanced techniques across multiple marketing areas. Since the speakers are truly knowledgeable of their arena, using one or two talks as a basis of a post makes me look good!

This post will focus on branding and how to measure whether it is working. The next will delve into direct (snail mail) marketing and how some companies are finding it quite effective.

How to measure the efficacy of brand campaign spend

Spending on branding is quite different than spending for customer acquisition. While many ads serve both purposes, the difference is based on whether there is a direct call for action…usually to buy something. For simplicity, I assume that if there is a call for action, the ad is for customer acquisition, if there is no call for action the ad is for branding.

By improving their brand, a company can experience:

  1. Higher conversion rates on its customer acquisition spend
  2. An increase in the number of people who visit their site
  3. An increase in the LTV (lifetime value) of customers

One method of measuring whether a branding campaign is effective is to determine whether people in the geography where the marketing takes place become more aware of the brand. This is done by measuring the awareness of the brand both before and after the campaign. The most common measure for younger companies is called “Aided Brand Awareness”. Aided brand awareness is determined by conducting a survey of a statistically significant random sample of the population of the geography. In the survey, each person is asked to say which of a list of products/companies they recognize. The percentage that picks the product or company as one they know of is designated as the Aided Brand Awareness.  Most TV ads are for improving brand awareness, whereas a large proportion of online ads are for customer acquisition.

While it may seem surprising now, when I was on Wall Street covering Microsoft (and others), Bob Herbold, Microsoft COO, believed a lack of universal brand awareness was limiting the company. So, Microsoft engaged in a significant spend to raise its brand awareness from well below 50% (as I recall) before the campaign. It was one of the many smart strategies the company used to become what they are today. An improved brand helped drive a massive gain in market share for Microsoft productivity applications.

At the Azure Marketing Day, Chris Bruzzo, EVP Marketing and Commercial at Electronic Arts, provided a session on the importance of branding. He outlined one method of testing the potential effectiveness of a branding campaign without breaking the bank. He suggested, if possible, to start by picking matched geographies for a test. You then conduct the branding campaign in the test location and compare results to the control (the second location). By limiting the test to a few geographies, the cost can be kept reasonable while acquiring information on how much impact a branding campaign could have on your company. EA found advertising to improve its brand was quite effective. While I can’t cite EA data due to a public company’s need for confidentiality, I can say it led to higher customer Life Time Value and an increase in the success of customer acquisition campaigns in the test geographies. I have been given permission to review a similar test conducted by Azure portfolio company Chairish.

Chairish recently conducted a test of whether spending on branding would prove beneficial. They decided to select 3 cities for the test. For confidentiality, I’ll refer to them as Test Cities 1, 2 and 3. Each was measured against a control city where no branding spend was done. The paired cities, control cities 1, 2 and 3, respectively, each had similar population demographics to the test city it was paired with. The first measurement of benefit was the change in Aided Brand Awareness. Pre-campaign the test cities averaged 6% awareness and the control cities 8%. Post campaign the test cities increased to 13% awareness and the control cities to 9%. So, the lift for the test cities was 7% and for the control cities 1%. I believe that the control cities represented the natural gain the company was getting without a branding campaign, while the branding campaign added an additional 6% of the population to those aware of its brand.

Comparing Test Cities to Control Cities for Branding Campaign  

The table shows the average benefit of the marketing campaign across the test cities when compared to their matched control. For example, during the test period the increase in average overall revenue was 23% greater in the test cities than in their paired control locations. A month later, the difference in gain had improved to 25.8%. The reason for such large revenue gains stems from some of the other metrics measured, especially the massive gain in registrations because of the branding campaign.

Given these results, Chairish will be increasing its spend on branding. For those of you who decide to try a branding campaign, it is important to make sure you can measure results. Once the results are in hand, the next step is to compare revenue and gross margin dollar gains to the cost of the campaign. This allows a company conducting a branding campaign to understand the initial incremental cost and the time to recover the investment. Having that in hand allows for a reasonable forecast of the cash flow implications of increasing the spend for branding. One caveat is, while hard to forecast, there is also often the benefit of an increase in customer LTV (life-time value) as greater awareness of the brand also spurs more visits (and spend) from existing customers but this is more difficult to measure in the short run.

While mature companies typically spend a portion of advertising on branding and conduct these types of Aided Brand Awareness measures many younger companies do not consider this. As companies cross the $20-30 million threshold, we believe they should consider experimenting with a brand spend in the manner discussed in this post. Many will find that it is another valuable tool to use as part of marketing spend.

Soundbytes

In our post on September 10, 2020, A Counter Theory to Potential Recession (during week 26 of Shelter in Place), we advocated a counter-theory to widespread predictions that there would be a recession as the pandemic ebbed, stating:

“Much of the public dialogue concerning the economic effect of Covid19 has centered around the large number of people who have lost income, with the conclusion that the US will potentially experience a continued recession going forward. What seems to be lost in the discussion is that the 90% of the labor force that is employed is saving money at an unprecedented rate. This has occurred partly through fear of future loss of income but mostly by a reduction in spending caused by the virus.”

We estimated that consumers would save trillions of incremental dollars if Covid lasted through year end. And that a large portion of it would subsequently be spent on furniture, luxury items, vacations and more. This is now occurring, leading to substantial increased demand for many goods and services and inflationary pressure.

The pressure of this increased spend coupled with continued supply chain issues due to Covid provides the opportunity to keep prices firm (or even increase them) as demand will outstrip supply in many sectors, possibly through year end. 

The Impact of Gen Z on Marketing

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Economics, Marketing, Metrics , , , , , , ,

Azure Marketing Day

Each year, Azure hosts a marketing day for CMOs and CEOs of its consumer-facing portfolio companies. This year, on February 27th, we had sessions on the following topics:

  • Refreshing Your Brand as the Business Grows
  • Metrics for Evaluating Successful Marketing
  • Leveraging Comedy to Lower Customer Acquisition Cost
  • Know the Next Generation: An introduction to Gen Z
  • The Benefits and Drawbacks of a Multi-Channel Strategy
  • Influencer Strategies
  • Optimizing Pinterest

I presented the one on Metrics, but the other sessions are conducted by a combination of portfolio executives and outside speakers, each a leading thinker on the topic. Since I invariably learn quite a lot from other speakers, it seems only fair to borrow from their talks for a few blog posts so that I can share these benefits.

Much of this post will be based on concepts that I found especially enlightening from the session by Chris Bruzzo, the current CMO of Electronic Arts, on knowing Generation Z. I won’t cite each place I am using something from Chris versus my own thoughts; but you can assume much of the content emanates from Chris. Since Chris is one of the most creative thinkers in marketing, I’m hoping this will make me look good!

Marketers have Defined Generational Characteristics

Marketers often use personas to help understand what they need to do to address different types of customers. A persona may be:

  • A married woman 35 years old with a job and 2 children aged 6 and 9;
  • A 16-year-old male who is a sophomore in high school;
  • A non-working woman aged 50

A great deal of research has been done on the characteristics of particular “personas” to better enable a company to create and market products that meet their needs. One categorization of people is by age, with 5 different generations being profiled. The youngest group to emerge as important is Gen Z, roughly defined as those born between 1995 and 2012. Currently the U.S. population over 12 years old is distributed as follows:

What this means is that Gen Z has become a significant portion of the population to consider when creating and marketing products. With that in mind, let’s compare several characteristics of the youngest three of these groups.

Source: EA Research

Gen Z is the first generation that are digital natives. They are profiled as having cautious optimism, wanting to be connected, seeking community and wanting to create and control things. Earlier generations, including Millennials, watched TV an increasing number of hours, often multi-tasking while they did. Gen Z has replaced much of TV watching with device “screen time”, including visiting YouTube (72% of Gen Z visit it daily). When asked “What device would you pick if you could have only one?”, GenZers chose the TV less than 5% of the time. Prior generations respond well to email marketing while Gen Z needs to be reached through social media. Gen Z has little tolerance for barriers of entry for reaching a site and will just move on (I feel the same way and think many members of other generations do as well).  So, when targeting new customers (especially Gen Z) remove barriers to entry like requiring registration before a user becomes a customer. It is important to demonstrate value to them first.

Gen Z grew up in an era where the Internet was part of life and smart phones were viewed as essential… rather than a luxury. On average they spend 40% of their free time on screens. What is even more eye opening is that 91% go to bed with their devices. Advertisers have responded to these trends by gradually shifting more of their spend online. This has been difficult for newspapers and magazines for quite a while, but now it is also having a major impact on flattening out the use of TV as an advertising medium.

There are several implications from the numbers shown in the above chart. First, it is very clear to see that newspapers and magazines as we know them are not viable. This has led to iconic players like the New York Times and Fortune monetizing their brands through conferences, trips, wine clubs, and more. Lesser known brands have simply disappeared. In 2018, TV revenue continued to grow slightly despite losing share as the smaller share was of a larger pie. But in 2019, TV advertising dollars declined, and the decline is forecast to continue going forward. Several factors can be attributed to this but certainly one is that brands targeting Gen Z are aware that TV is not their medium of choice. One unintended consequence of major brands shifting spend to the Internet is that because they are less price sensitive to cost than eCommerce companies, this has led to higher pricing by Facebook and Google.

Personalization is Becoming “Table Stakes” and Offering Co-Creation is a Major Plus

Consumers, in general, and especially Gen Z, are demanding that brands do more to personalize products to their needs and interests. In fact, Gen Z even wants to participate in product creation. One example involves Azure portfolio company Le Tote. The company, much like Stitch Fix, uses algorithms to personalize the clothing it sends based on specifics about each customer. When the company added the ability for consumers to personalize their box (from the already personalized box suggested by the algorithm) there was a sizeable spike in satisfaction…despite the fact that the items the consumer substituted led to a decline in how well the clothes fit! This example shows that using customer data to select new items is only a first step in personalization. Letting the customer have more of a say (be a co-creator) is even more important. 

Conclusions

  1. Startups need to diversify their marketing spend away from Facebook and Google as the ROI on these channels has contracted. At the Azure marketing day, we highlighted testing whether Pinterest, influencers, brick and mortar distribution and/or comedy might be sources that drive a higher ROI.
  2. If Gen Zers are being targeted, YouTube, Snap, Instagram, and Twitch are likely better places to market
  3. When targeting new customers (especially Gen Z) remove barriers to entry like requiring registration before a user becomes a customer. It is important to demonstrate value to them first.
  4. Build great apps for iPhones and Android phones but what is becoming most important is making sure that smart phones work well on your site without requiring an app, as most Gen Zers will use their phones for access. When they do, the mobile web version needs to be strong so that they don’t need to download your app before discovering the value you offer.
  5. Involve customers as much as possible in the design/selection/creation of your products as this extends personalization to “co-creation” and will increase satisfaction.

Soundbytes

  • Readers are aware that I invest in growth stocks (some of which I suggest to you) to achieve superior performance. What you may not be aware of is that over the past 25 years my strategy for investing has been to put the majority of capital in A or better rated municipal bonds (Munis) to generate income in a relatively safe way (and I believe everyone should diversify how they apportion capital). I use a complex strategy to generate superior returns and in the past 25 years I have earned, on average, between 4% and 5% tax free annually.  But in the current environment new investments in Munis will have much lower yields so I have started to look at “safe” alternatives to generate income. This type of investment is for income generation and involves a different category of stocks than the growth stocks I target for high returns through stock appreciation.
  • Given the recent downturn in the stock market I did my first “bond alternative” investment earlier this week. My goal is to generate income of over 5% on an after-tax basis in stocks that are “safe” investments from the point of view of continuing to deliver dividends at or above current levels.
  • My first set of transactions was in Bristol Myers Squibb:
    • I bought the stock at $56.48 where the dividend is 3.2% per year
    • I sold Jan 21 calls at a strike price of 60 and received $4.95
    • If the stock is not called my cash yield, including $1.80 in dividends, would be $6.75 over less than one year which would equal 12% before taxes
    • I also sold Jan 21 puts at a strike price of $55 and received $6.46. If the stock is not put to me and is not called that would increase my one-year yield to over 23% of the $56.48 stock price and I would repeat the sale of calls and puts next year. Since my net cost was $43.27 the percentage yield would be over 30% of my cash outlay.
    • If the stock was called my net gain would equal the profit on the stock, the dividends for one year plus the premiums on the options and would exceed 30%
    • If the stock went below $55 and was put to me at that price I would be ok with that as the new shares would have a net cost of just over $49 with a dividend yield of close to 4.0% (assuming the company follows past practice of raising dividends each year) and I could sell new puts at a lower strike price.  
  • The second stock I invested in for income is AT&T.
    • I bought the stock at $34.60 where the dividend is 6.0% per year
    • I sold Jan 21 calls at a strike price of $37 and received $2.05 per share
    • If the stock is not called my year 1 cash yield would be $4.13 per share over less than a year or about 12% before taxes
    • I also sold Jan 21 puts with a strike of $32 and received $3.30 per share. If the stock is not put to me and is not called, that would increase my one-year yield to over 20% of the stock price and over 25% of the net cash outlay
    • If the stock was called, I would only have 3 quarters of dividends, but the gain would be over 30% of my net original cash outlay
    • If the stock was put to me my cost of the new shares, after subtracting the put premium would be $28.70 and the dividend alone would provide a 7.2% pre-tax yield and I could sell new puts at a lower price.
  • We shall see how this works out but unless they cut the dividends, I won’t worry if the stock is lower a year from now as that would only increase my yield on new stock purchased due to the puts. The chance of either company cutting dividends seems quite low which is why I view this as a “safe” alternative to generate income as I won’t sell either stock unless they are called at the higher strike price.
  • I also began reserving capital starting about a month ago as I expected the virus to impact the market. These purchases used about 10% of what I had put aside. I put another 15% to work on Friday, March 13 as the market had fallen further and valuations have become quite attractive – remember the secret is to “buy low, sell high”. When the market is low its always scary or it wouldn’t be low! I do confess that I didn’t sell much when it was high as I tend to be a long-term holder of stocks I view as game changers…so I missed the opportunity to sell high and then repurchase low.

2020 Top Ten Predictions

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Economics, Golden State Warriors, Marketing, Metrics, NBA, Predictions, Startups, Stocks, Technology, Unicorns , , , , , , , ,

I wanted to start this post by repeating something I discussed in my top ten lists in 2017 and 2018 which I learned while at Sanford Bernstein in my Wall Street days: “Owning companies that have strong competitive advantages and a great business model in a potentially mega-sized market can create the largest performance gains over time (assuming one is correct).” It does make my stock predictions somewhat boring (as they were on Wall Street where my top picks, Dell and Microsoft each appreciated over 100X over the ten years I was recommending them).

Let’s do a little simple math. Suppose one can generate an IRR of 26% per year (my target is to be over 25%) over a long period of time.  The wonder of compounding is that at 26% per year your assets will double every 3 years. In 6 years, this would mean 4X your original investment dollars and in 12 years the result would be 16X. For comparison purposes, at 5% per year your assets would only be 1.8X in 12 years and at 10% IRR 3.1X.  While 25%+ IRR represents very high performance, I have been fortunate enough to consistently exceed it (but always am worried that it can’t keep up)! For my recommendations of the past 6 years, the IRR is 34.8% and since this exceeds 26%, the 6-year performance  is roughly 6X rather than 4X.

What is the trick to achieving 25% plus IRR? Here are a few of my basic rules:

  1. Start with companies growing revenue 20% or more, where those closer to 20% also have opportunity to expand income faster than revenue
  2. Make sure the market they are attacking is large enough to support continued high growth for at least 5 years forward
  3. Stay away from companies that don’t have profitability in sight as companies eventually should trade at a multiple of earnings.
  4. Only choose companies with competitive advantages in their space
  5. Re-evaluate your choices periodically but don’t be consumed by short term movement

As I go through each of my 6 stock picks I have also considered where the stock currently trades relative to its growth and other performance metrics. With that in mind, as is my tendency (and was stated in my last post), I am continuing to recommend Tesla, Facebook, Amazon, Stitch Fix and DocuSign. I am adding Zoom Video Communications (ZM) to the list. For Zoom and Amazon I will recommend a more complex transaction to achieve my target return.

2020 Stock Recommendations:

1. Tesla stock appreciation will continue to outperform the market (it closed last year at $418/share)

Tesla is likely to continue to be a volatile stock, but it has so many positives in front of it that I believe it wise to continue to own it. The upward trend in units and revenue should be strong in 2020 because:

  • The model 3 continues to be one of the most attractive cars on the market. Electric Car Reviews has come out with a report stating that Model 3 cost of ownership not only blows away the Audi AS but is also lower than a Toyota Camry! The analysis is that the 5-year cost of ownership of the Tesla is $0.46 per mile while the Audi AS comes in 70% higher at $0.80 per mile. While Audi being more expensive is no surprise, what is shocking is how much more expensive it is. The report also determined that Toyota Camry has a higher cost as well ($0.49/mile)! Given the fact that the Tesla is a luxury vehicle and the Camry is far from that, why would anyone with this knowledge decide to buy a low-end car like a Camry over a Model 3 when the Camry costs more to own?  What gets the Tesla to a lower cost than the Camry is much lower fuel cost, virtually no maintenance cost and high resale value. While the Camry purchase price is lower, these factors more than make up for the initial price difference
  • China, the largest market for electronic vehicles, is about to take off in sales. With the new production facility in China going live, Tesla will be able to significantly increase production in 2020 and will benefit from the car no longer being subject to import duties in China.  
  • European demand for Teslas is increasing dramatically. With its Chinese plant going live, Tesla will be able to partly meet European demand which could be as high as the U.S. in the future. The company is building another factory in Europe in anticipation. The earliest indicator of just how much market share Tesla can reach has occurred in Norway where electric cars receive numerous incentives. Tesla is now the best selling car in that country and demand for electric cars there now exceeds gas driven vehicles.

While 2020 is shaping up as a stairstep uptick in sales for Tesla given increased capacity and demand, various factors augur continued growth well beyond 2020. For example, Tesla is only partway towards having a full lineup of vehicles. In the future it will add:

  • Pickup trucks – where pre-orders and recent surveys indicate it will acquire 10-20% of that market
  • A lower priced SUV – at Model 3 type pricing this will be attacking a much larger market than the Model X
  • A sports car – early specifications indicate that it could rival Ferrari in performance but at pricing more like a Porsche
  • A refreshed version of the Model S
  • A semi – where the lower cost of fuel and maintenance could mean strong market share.

2. Facebook stock appreciation will continue to outperform the market (it closed last year at $205/share)

Facebook, like Tesla, continues to have a great deal of controversy surrounding it and therefore may sometimes have price drops that its financial metrics do not warrant. This was the case in 2018 when the stock dropped 28% in value during that year. While 2019 partly recovered from what I believe was an excessive reaction, it’s important to note that the 2019 year-end price of $205/share was only 16% higher than at the end of 2017 while trailing revenue will have grown by about 75% in the 2-year period. The EPS run rate should be up in a similar way after a few quarters of lower earnings in early 2019. My point is that the stock remains at a low price given its metrics. I expect Q4 to be quite strong and believe 2020 will continue to show solid growth.

The Facebook platform is still increasing the number of active users, albeit by only about 5%-6%. Additionally, Facebook continues to increase inventory utilization and pricing. In fact, given what I anticipate will be added advertising spend due to the heated elections for president, senate seats, governorships etc., Facebook advertising inventory usage and rates could increase faster (see prediction 7 on election spending).  

Facebook should also benefit by an acceleration of commerce and increased monetization of advertising on Instagram. Facebook started monetizing that platform in 2017 and Instagram revenue has been growing exponentially and is likely to close out 2019 at well over $10 billion. A wild card for growth is potential monetization of WhatsApp. That platform now has over 1.5 billion active users with over 300 million active every day. It appears close to beginning monetization.

The factors discussed could enable Facebook to continue to grow revenue at 20% – 30% annually for another 3-5 years making it a sound longer term investment.

3. DocuSign stock appreciation will continue to outperform the market (it closed last year at $74/share)

DocuSign is the runaway leader in e-signatures facilitating multiple parties signing documents in a secure, reliable way for board resolutions, mortgages, investment documents, etc. Being the early leader creates a network effect, as hundreds of millions of people are in the DocuSign e-signature database. The company has worked hard to expand its scope of usage for both enterprise and smaller companies by adding software for full life-cycle management of agreements. This includes the process of generating, redlining, and negotiating agreements in a multi-user environment, all under secure conditions. On the small business side, the DocuSign product is called DocuSign Negotiate and is integrated with Salesforce.

The company is a SaaS company with a stable revenue base of over 560,000 customers at the end of October, up well over 20% from a year earlier. Its strategy is one of land and expand with revenue from existing customers increasing each year leading to a roughly 40% year over year revenue increase in the most recent quarter (fiscal Q3). SaaS products account for over 95% of revenue with professional services providing the rest. As a SaaS company, gross margins are high at 79% (on a non-GAAP basis).

The company has now reached positive earnings on a non-GAAP basis of $0.11/share versus $0.00 a year ago. I use non-GAAP as GAAP financials distort actual results by creating extra cost on the P&L if the company’s stock appreciates. These costs are theoretic rather than real.

My only concern with this recommendation is that the stock has had a 72% runup in 2019 but given its growth, move to positive earnings and the fact that SaaS companies trade at higher multiples of revenue than others I still believe it can outperform this year.

4. Stitch Fix Stock appreciation will continue to outperform the market (it closed last year at $25.66/share)

Stitch Fix offers customers, who are primarily women, the ability to shop from home by sending them a box with several items selected based on sophisticated analysis of her profile and prior purchases. The customer pays a $20 “styling fee” for the box which can be applied towards purchasing anything in the box. The company is the strong leader in the space with revenue approaching a $2 billion run rate. Unlike many of the recent IPO companies, it has shown an ability to balance growth and earnings. The stock had a strong 2019 ending the year at $25.66 per share up 51% over the 2018 closing price. Despite this, our valuation methodology continues to show it to be substantially under valued and it remains one of my picks for 2020. The likely cause of what I believe is a low valuation is a fear of Amazon making it difficult for Stitch Fix to succeed. As the company gets larger this fear should recede helping the multiple to expand.  

Stitch Fix continues to add higher-end brands and to increase its reach into men, plus sizes and kids. Its algorithms to personalize each box of clothes it ships keeps improving. Therefore, the company can spend less on acquiring new customers as it has increased its ability to get existing customers to spend more and come back more often. Stitch Fix can continue to grow its revenue from women in the U.S. with expansion opportunities in international markets over time. I believe the company can continue to grow by roughly 20% or more in 2020 and beyond.

Stitch Fix revenue growth (of over 21% in the latest reported quarter) comes from a combination of increasing the number of active clients by 17% to 3.4 million, coupled with driving higher revenue per active client. The company accomplished this while generating profits on a non-GAAP basis.

5. Amazon stock strategy will outpace the market (it closed last year at $1848/share).

Amazon shares increased by 23% last year while revenue in Q3 was up 24% year over year. This meant the stock performance mirrored revenue growth. Growth in the core commerce business has slowed but Amazon’s cloud and echo/Alexa businesses are strong enough to help the company maintain roughly 20% growth in 2020. The company continues to invest heavily in R&D with a push to create automated retail stores one of its latest initiatives. If that proves successful, Amazon can greatly expand its physical presence and potentially increase growth through the rollout of numerous brick and mortar locations. But at its current size, it will be difficult for the company to maintain over 20% revenue growth for many years (excluding acquisitions) so I am suggesting a more complex investment in this stock:

  1. Buy X shares of the stock (or keep the ones you have)
  2. Sell Amazon puts for the same number of shares with the puts expiring on January 15, 2021 and having a strike price of $1750. The most recent sale of these puts was for over $126
  3. So, net out of pocket cost would be reduced to $1722
  4. A 20% increase in the stock price (roughly Amazon’s growth rate) would mean 29% growth in value since the puts would expire worthless
  5. If the stock declined 226 points the option sale would be a break-even. Any decline beyond that and you would lose additional dollars.
  6. If the options still have a premium on December 31, I will measure their value on January 15, 2021 for the purposes of performance.

6. I’m adding Zoom Video Communications to the list but with an even more complex investment strategy (the stock is currently at $72.20)

I discussed Zoom Video Communications (ZM) in my post on June 24, 2019. In that post I described the reasons I liked Zoom for the long term:

  1. Revenue retention of a cohort was about 140%
  2. It acquires customers very efficiently with a payback period of 7 months as the host of a Zoom call invites various people to participate in the call and those who are not already Zoom users can be readily targeted by the company at little cost
  3. Gross Margins are over 80% and could increase
  4. The product has been rated best in class numerous times
  5. Its compression technology (the key ingredient in making video high quality) appears to have a multi-year lead over the competition
  6. Adding to those reasons it’s important to note that ZM is improving earnings and was slightly profitable in its most recent reported quarter

The fly in the ointment was that my valuation technology showed that it was overvalued. However, I came up with a way of “future pricing” the stock. Since I expected revenue to grow by about 150% over the next 7 quarters (at the time it was growing over 100% year over year) “future pricing” would make it an attractive stock. This was possible due to the extremely high premiums for options in the stock. So far that call is working out. Despite the company growing revenue in the 3 quarters subsequent to my post by over 57%, my concern about valuation has proven correct and the stock has declined from $76.92 to $72.20. If I closed out the position today by selling the stock and buying back the options (see Table 1) my return for less than 7.5 months would be a 42% profit. This has occurred despite the stock declining slightly due to shrinkage in the premiums.

Table 1: Previous Zoom trade and proposed trade

I typically prefer using longer term options for doing this type of trade as revenue growth of this magnitude should eventually cause the stock to rise, plus the premiums on options that are further out are much higher, reducing the risk profile, but I will construct this trade so that the options expire on January 15, 2021 to be able to evaluate it in one year. In measuring my performance we’ll use the closing stock price on the option expiration date, January 15, 2021 since premiums in options persist until their expiration date so the extra 2 weeks leads to better optimization of the trade.

So, here is the proposed trade (see table 1):

  1. Buy X shares of the stock at $72.20 (today’s price)
  2. Sell Calls for X shares expiring January 15, 2021 at a strike of $80/share for $11.50 (same as last price it traded)
  3. Sell puts for X shares expiring January 15, 2021 with strike of $65/share for $10.00 (same as last price it traded)

I expect revenue growth of 60% or more 4 quarters out. I also expect the stock to rise some portion of that, as it is now closer to its value than when I did the earlier transaction on May 31, 2019. Check my prior post for further analysis on Zoom, but here are 3 cases that matter at December 31, 2020:

  • Stock closes over $80/share (up 11% or more) at end of the year: the profit would be 58% of the net cost of the transaction
    • This would happen because the stock would be called, and you would get $80/share
    • The put would expire worthless
    • Since you paid a net cost of $50.70, net profit would be $29.30
  • Stock closes flat at $72.20:  your profit would be $21.50 (42%)
    • The put and the call would each expire worthless, so you would earn the original premiums you received when you sold them
    • The stock would be worth the same as what you paid
  • Stock closes at $57.85 on December 31: you would be at break even. If it closed lower, then losses would accumulate twice as quickly:
    • The put holder would require you to buy the stock at the put exercise price of $65, $7.15 more than it would be worth
    • The call would expire worthless
    • The original stock would have declined from $72.20 to $57.85, a loss of $14.35
    • The loss on the stock and put together would equal $21.50, the original premiums you received for those options

Outside of my stock picks, I always like to make a few non-stock predictions for the year ahead.

7. The major election year will cause a substantial increase in advertising dollars spent

According to Advertising Analytics political spending has grown an average of 27% per year since 2012. Both the rise of Super PACs and the launch of online donation tools such as ActBlue have substantially contributed to this growth. While much of the spend is targeted at TV, online platforms have seen an increasing share of the dollars, especially Facebook and Google. The spend is primarily in even years, as those are the ones with senate, house and gubernatorial races (except for minor exceptions). Of course, every 4th year this is boosted by the added spend from presidential candidates. The Wall Street Journal projects the 2020 amount will be about $9.9 billion…up nearly 60% from the 2016 election year. It should be noted that the forecast was prior to Bloomberg entering the race and if he remains a viable candidate an additional $2 billion or more could be added to this total.

The portion targeted at the digital world is projected to be about $2.8 billion or about 2.2% of total digital ad spending. Much of these dollars will likely go to Facebook and Google. This spend has a dual impact: first it adds to the revenue of each platform in a direct way, but secondly it can also cause the cost of advertising on those platforms to rise for others as well.

8. Automation of Retail will continue to gain momentum

This will happen in multiple ways, including:

  1. More Brick & Mortar locations will offer some or all the SKUs in the store for online purchase through Kiosks (assisted by clerks/sales personnel). By doing this, merchants will be able to offer a larger variety of items, styles, sizes and colors than can be carried in any one outlet. In addition, the consolidation of inventory achieved in this manner will add efficiency to the business model. In the case of clothing, such stores will carry samples of items so the customer can try them on, partly to optimize fit but also to determine whether he or she likes the way it looks and feels on them. If one observes the massive use of Kiosks at airports it becomes obvious that they reduce the number of employees needed and can speed up checking in. One conclusion is this will be the wave of the future for multiple consumer-based industries.
  2. Many more locations will begin incorporating technology to eliminate the number of employees needed in their stores. Amazon will likely be a leader in this, but others will also provide ways to reduce the cost of ordering, picking goods, checking out and receiving information while at the store.

9. The Warriors will come back strong in the 2020/21 season

Let me begin by saying that this prediction is not being made because I have been so humbled by my miss in the July post where I predicted that the Warriors could edge into the 2020 playoffs and then contend for a title if Klay returned in late February/early March. Rather, it is based on analysis of their opportunity for next season and also an attempt to add a little fun to my Top Ten List!  The benefit of this season:

  • Klay and Curry are getting substantial time off after 5 seasons of heavy stress. They should be refreshed at the start of next season
  • Russell, assuming he doesn’t keep missing games with injuries, is learning the Warriors style of play
  • Because of the injuries to Klay, Curry, Looney, and to a lesser extent Green and Russell, several of the younger members of the team are getting experience at a much more rapid rate than would normally be possible and the Warriors are able to have more time to evaluate them as potential long-term assets
  • If the Warriors continue to lose at their current rate, they will be able to get a high draft choice for the first time since 2012 when they drafted Harrison Barnes with the 7th pick. Since then their highest pick has been between the 28th and 30th player chosen (30 is the lowest pick in the first round)
  • The Warriors will have more cap space available to sign a quality veteran
  • Andre Iguodala might re-sign with the team, and while this is not necessary for my prediction it would be great for him and for the team
  • The veterans should be hungry again after several years of almost being bored during the regular season

I am assuming the Warriors will be relatively healthy next season for this to occur.

10. At least one of the major Unicorns will be acquired by a larger player

In 2019, there was a change to the investing environment where most companies that did not show a hint of potential profitability had difficulty maintaining their market price. This was particularly true of highly touted Unicorns, which mostly struggled to increase their share price dramatically from the price each closed on the day of their IPO. Table 2 shows the 9 Unicorns whose IPOs we highlighted in our last post. Other than Beyond Meat, Zoom and Pinterest, they all appear some distance from turning a proforma profit. Five of the other six are below their price on the first day’s close. A 6th, Peloton, is slightly above the IPO price (and further above the first days close). Beyond Meat grew revenue 250% in its latest quarter and moved to profitability as well. Its stock jumped on the first day and is even higher today.  While Pinterest is showing an ability to be profitable it is still between the price of the IPO and its close on the first day of trading.  Zoom, which is one of our recommended buys, was profitable (on a Non-GAAP basis) and grew revenue 85% in its most recent quarter. A 10th player, WeWork, had such substantial losses that it was unable to have a successful IPO.

Table 2: Recent Unicorn IPOs Stock Price & Profitability Comparisons

Something that each of these companies have in common is that they are all growing revenue at 30% or more, are attacking large markets, and are either in the leadership position in that market or are one of two in such a position. Because of this I believe one or more of these (and comparable Unicorns) could be an interesting acquisition for a much larger company who is willing to help make them profitable. For such an acquirer their growth and leadership position could be quite attractive.

Recap of 2019 Top Ten Predictions

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Economics, Marketing, Predictions, Stocks, Technology, Unicorns , , , , , ,

Bull Markets have Tended to Favor My Stock Picks

I entered 2019 with some trepidation as my favored stocks are high beta and if the bear market of the latter portion of 2018 continued, I wasn’t sure I would once again beat the market…it was a pretty close call last year. However, I felt the companies I liked would continue to grow their revenue and hoped the market would reward their performance. As it turns out, the 5 stocks I included in my top ten list each showed solid company performance and the market returned to the bull side. The average gain for the stocks was 45.7% (versus the S&P gain of 24.3%).

Before reviewing each of my top ten from last year, I would like to once again reveal long term performance of the stock pick portion of my top ten list. For my picks, I assume equal weighting for each stock in each year to come up with my performance and then compound the yearly gains (or losses) to provide my 6-year performance. For the S&P my source is Multpl.com.  I’m comparing the S&P index at January 2 of each year to determine annual performance.  My compound gain for the 6-year period is 499% which equates to an IRR of 34.8%. The S&P was up 78% during the same 6-year period, an IRR of 10.1%.

The 2019 Top Ten Predictions Recap

One of my New Year’s pledges was to be more humble, so I would like to point out that I wasn’t 10 for 10 on my picks. One of my 5 stocks slightly under-performed the market and one of my non-stock forecasts was a mixed bag. The miss on the non-stock side was the only forecast outside of tech, once again highlighting that I am much better off sticking to the sector I know best (good advice for readers as well). However, I believe I had a pretty solid year in my forecasts as my stock portfolio (5 of the picks) significantly outperformed the market, with two at approximately market performance and three having amazing performance with increases of 51% to 72%. Regarding the 5 non-stock predictions, 4 were right on target and the 5th was very mixed. As a quick reminder, my predictions were:

Stock Portfolio 2019 Picks:

  • Tesla stock will outpace the market (it closed last year at $333/share and opened this year at $310)
  • Facebook Stock will outpace the market (it closed last year at $131/share)
  • Amazon Stock will outpace the market (it opened the year at $1502/share)
  • Stitch Fix stock appreciation will outpace the market (it closed last year at $17/share)
  • DocuSign stock will outpace the market in 2019 (it is currently at $43/share and opened the year at $41)

5 Non-Stock Predictions:

  • Replacing cashiers with technology will be proven out in 2019
  • Replacing cooks, baristas, and waitstaff with robots will begin to be proven in 2019
  • Influencers will be increasingly utilized to directly drive commerce
  • The Cannabis Sector should show substantial gains in 2019
  • 2019 will be the year of the unicorn IPO

In the discussion below, I’ve listed in bold each of my ten predictions and give an evaluation of how I fared on each.

Tesla stock will outpace the market (it closed last year at $333/share and opened this year at $310)

Tesla proved to be a rocky ride through 2019 as detractors of the company created quite a bit of fear towards the middle of the year, driving the stock to a low of $177 in June. A sequence of good news followed, and the stock recovered and reached a high of $379 in front of the truck unveiling. I’m a very simplistic guy when I evaluate success as I use actual success as the measure as opposed to whether I would buy a product. Critics of the truck used Elon’s unsuccessful demonstration of the truck being “bulletproof” and the fact that it was missing mirrors and windshield wipers to criticize it. Since it is not expected to be production ready for about two years this is ridiculous! If the same critics applied a similar level of skepticism to the state of other planned competitive electric vehicles (some of which are two plus years away) one could conclude that none of them will be ready on time. I certainly think the various announced electric vehicles from others will all eventually ship, but do not expect them to match the Tesla battery and software capability given its 3 to 5-year lead. I said I’m a simple guy, so when I evaluate the truck, I look at the 250,000 pre-orders and notice it equates to over $12.5B in incremental revenue for the product! While many of these pre-orders will not convert, others likely will step in. To me that is strong indication that the truck will be an important contributor to Tesla growth once it goes into production.

Tesla stock recovered from the bad press surrounding the truck as orders for it mounted, the Chinese factory launch was on target and back order volume in the U.S. kept factories at maximum production.  Given a late year run the stock was up to $418 by year end, up 34.9% from the January opening price. But for continuing recommendations I use the prior year’s close as the benchmark (for measuring my performance) which places the gain at a lower 25.6% year over year as the January opening price was lower than the December 31 close. Either way this was a successful recommendation.

Facebook Stock will outpace the market (it closed last year at $131/share)

Facebook, like Tesla, has many critics regarding its stock. In 2018 this led to a 28% decline in the stock. The problem for the critics is that it keeps turning out very strong financial numbers and eventually the stock price has to recognize that. It appears that 2019 revenue will be up roughly 30% over 2018. After several quarters of extraordinary expenses, the company returned to “normal” earnings levels of about 35% of revenue in the September quarter. I expect Q4 to be at a similar or even stronger profit level as it is the seasonally strongest quarter of the year given the company’s ability to charge high Christmas season advertising rates. As a result, the stock has had a banner year increasing to $205/share at year-end up 57% over the prior year’s close making this pick one of my three major winners.

Amazon Stock will outpace the market (it opened the year at $1502/share)

Amazon had another very solid growth year and the stock kept pace with its growth. Revenue will be up about 20% over 2018 and gross margins remain in the 40% range. For Amazon, Q4 is a wildly seasonal quarter where revenue could jump by close to 30% sequentially. While the incremental revenue tends to have gross margins in the 25% – 30% range as it is heavily driven by ecommerce, the company could post a solid profit increase over Q3. The stock pretty much followed revenue growth, posting a 23% year over year gain closing the year at $1848 per share. I view this as another winner, but it slightly under-performed the S&P index.

Stitch Fix stock appreciation will outpace the market (it closed last year at $17/share)

Stitch Fix, unlike many of the recent IPO companies, has shown an ability to balance growth and earnings. In its fiscal year ending in July, year over year growth increased from 26% in FY 2018 to over 28% in FY 2019 (although without the extra week in Q4 of FY 2019 year over year growth would have been about the same as the prior year). For fiscal 2020, the company guidance is for 23% – 25% revenue growth after adjusting for the extra week in Q4 of FY 2019. On December 9th, Stitch Fix reported Q1 results that exceeded market expectations. The stock reacted well ending the year at $25.66 per share and the year over year gain in calendar 2019 moved to a stellar level of 51% over the 2018 closing price.

DocuSign stock will outpace the market in 2019 (it is currently at $43/share and opened the year at $41)

DocuSign continued to execute well throughout calendar 2019. On December 5th it reported 40% revenue growth in its October quarter, exceeding analyst expectations. Given this momentum, DocuSign stock was the largest gainer among our 5 picks at 72% for the year ending at just over $74 per share (since this was a new recommendation, I used the higher $43 price at the time of the post to measure performance). The company also gave evidence that it is reducing losses and not burning cash. Since ~95% of its revenue is subscription, the company is able to maintain close to 80% gross margin (on a proforma basis) and is well positioned to continue to drive growth. But, remember that growth declines for very high growth companies so I would expect somewhat slower growth than 40% in 2020.

Replacing cashiers with technology will be proven out in 2019

A year ago, I emphasized that Amazon was in the early experimental phase of its Go Stores which are essentially cashierless using technology to record purchases and to bill for them. The company now has opened or announced 21 of these stores. The pace is slower than I expected as Amazon is still optimizing the experience and lowering the cost of the technology. Now, according to Bloomberg, the company appears ready to:

  • Open larger format supermarkets using the technology
  • Increase the pace of adding smaller format locations
  • Begin licensing the technology to other retailers, replicating the strategy it deployed in rolling out Amazon Web Services to others

Replacing cooks, baristas, and waitstaff with robots will begin to be proven in 2019

The rise of the robots for replacing baristas, cooks and waitstaff did indeed accelerate in 2019. In the coffee arena, Briggo now has robots making coffee in 7 locations (soon to be in SFO and already in the Austin Airport), Café X robotic coffee makers are now in 3 locations, and there are even other robots making coffee in Russia (GBL Robotics), Australia (Aabak) and Japan (HIS Co). There is similar expansion of robotic pizza and burger cooks from players like Zume Pizza and Creator and numerous robots now serving food. This emerging trend has been proven to work. As the cost of robots decline and minimum wage rises there will be further expansion of this usage including franchise approaches that might start in 2020.

Influencers will be increasingly utilized to directly drive commerce

The use of influencers to drive commerce accelerated in 2019. Possibly the most important development in the arena was the April 2019 launch by Instagram of social commerce. Instagram now let’s influencers use the app to tag and sell products directly, that is, their posts can be “shoppable”. Part of the series of steps Instagram took was adding “checkout” which lets customers purchase products without leaving the walls of the app.

A second increase in the trend is for major influencers to own a portion of companies that depend on their influence to drive a large volume of traffic. In that way they can capture more of the value of their immense influence. Using this concept, Rihanna has become the wealthiest female musician in the world at an estimated net worth of $600 million. The vast majority of her wealth is from ownership in companies where she uses her influence to drive revenue. The two primary ones are Fenty Beauty and Fenty Maison. Fenty Beauty was launched in late 2017 and appears to be valued at over $3 billion. Rihanna owns 15% – do the math! Fenty Maison is a partnership between LVMH (the largest luxury brand owner) and Rihanna announced in May of 2019. It is targeting fashion products and marks the first time the luxury conglomerate has launched a fashion brand from scratch since 1987. Rihanna has more than 70 million followers on Instagram and this clearly establishes her as someone who can influence commerce.

The Cannabis Sector should show substantial gains in 2019

The accuracy of this forecast was a mixed bag as the key companies grew revenue at extremely high rates, but their stock valuations declined resulting in poor performance of the cannabis index (which I had said should be a barometer). A few examples of the performance of the largest public companies in the sector are shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Performance of Largest Public Cannabis Companies

*Note: Canopy last quarter was Sept 2019

In each case, the last reported quarter was calendar Q3. For Tilray, I subtracted the revenue from its acquisition of Manitoba Harvest so that the growth shown is organic growth. I consider this forecast a hit and a miss as I was correct regarding revenue (it was up an average of 282%) but the stocks did not follow suit, even modestly, as the average of the three was a decline of 54%. While my forecast was not for any individual company or stock in the sector, it was wrong regarding the stocks but right regarding company growth. The conclusion is humbling as I’m glad that I exercised constraint in not investing in a sector where I do not have solid knowledge of the way the stocks might perform.

2019 will be the year of the unicorn IPO

This proved true as many of the largest unicorns went public in 2019. Some of the most famous ones included on the list are: Beyond Meat, Chewy, Lyft, Peloton, Pinterest, Slack, The Real Real, Uber and Zoom. Of the 9 shown, four had initial valuations between $8 billion and $12 billion, two over $20 billion and Uber was the highest at an $82 billion valuation. Some unicorns found the public markets not as accepting of losses as the private market, with Lyft and Uber stock coming under considerable pressure and WeWork unable to find public buyers of its stock leading to a failed IPO and shakeup of company management. There is more to come in 2020 including another mega one: Airbnb.

2020 Predictions coming soon

Stay tuned for my top ten predictions for 2020…but please note that all 5 of the stocks recommended for 2019 will remain on the list.

Soundbyte

  • Before the basketball season began, I had a post predicting that the Warriors still had a reasonable chance to make the playoffs (if Klay returned in late February). Talk about feeling humble! I guess, counting this I had 3 misses on my predictions.

Calculating and Acting on the Right KPIs is Critical for Success

Mike Kwatinetz KPI, Marketing, Metrics , ,

Advanced metrics for Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Lifetime Value (LTV)

What is the purpose of CAC, LTV and Payback Period?

Often entrepreneurs we meet have a list of their KPI’s, but as we dig deeper, it becomes clear that they don’t fully comprehend the purpose of the KPI or why we think that they are so critical in helping us understand the health of a business. I’m a believer in thoroughly understanding the economics of your business, and the metrics around Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Customer Lifetime Revenue (LTR), Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) and Payback Period are important metrics to work on improving. In this post we use the word customer to mean a ‘buyer’, someone who actually orders product and will use customer and buyer interchangeably.

  • LTR (Customer Lifetime Revenue) is the total revenue from a customer over their estimated lifetime (we prefer using 5 years as representing lifetime)
  • MCA (Marketing Spend for Customer Acquisition) is the marketing cost directed towards new customer acquisition
  • CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) captures the cost of acquiring a new buyer
  • LTV (Customer Lifetime Value) is the estimated lifetime profits on new customers once they have been acquired
  • Net LTV is the estimated lifetime profits on a new customer taking acquisition cost into account or: LTV – CAC
  • Payback Period is the time for a new customer to generate profits that equals his or her CAC

When LTV is compared to CAC a measure of the future health of the business can be seen. Most VCs will be loath to invest in any company where the ratio of LTV/CAC is less than 3X and enthusiastic when it exceeds 5X. I also favor companies with a short payback period especially if the recovery is from the first transaction as this means almost no cash is consumed when acquiring a customer.

I have previously written about Contribution Margin (gross margin less marketing and sales spend) being one of the most important metrics for companies as it tells me how scaling revenue will help cover G&A and R&D costs. Once Contribution Margin exceeds these costs there is operating profit. A company with low Contribution Margin needs much greater scale to be able to reach profitability than one with high Contribution Margin. Both the LTV/CAC ratio and Payback Period are important predictors of future Contribution Margin levels. Table 1 shows two companies with the same revenue, R&D and G&A cost. Assuming R&D and G&A are fixed for both, at 5% Contribution Margin Company A would need to reach $50 million in revenue to break-even while Company B would be at break-even at under $4 million in revenue given its 65% Contribution Margin.

Break Even Revenue = (R&D + G&A)/ (Contribution Margin %)

For Company A = $2,500,000/ (5%) = $50,000,000

For Company B = $2,500,000/ (65%) = $3,846,154

The problem for Company A stems from the fact that for every $40 spent in acquiring a customer the total LTV (or subsequent profits on the customer) is only $76 making Net LTV $36. With such a low ratio of LTV/CAC, Contribution Margin is also quite low. I’ve chosen two extremes in gross margin to better illustrate the impact of gross margin on Contribution Margin. 

Table 1: Illustrative Example on the Importance of Contribution Margin

In a second example, Table 2, we show the impact of much more efficient marketing and remarketing on a company’s results. We assume gross margin, R&D and G&A are the same for Company C and Company D, but that Company D is much more efficient at acquiring and retaining customers, resulting in a lower CAC and a higher LTR and LTV for Company D. This could be due to higher spending on branding and remarketing, but also because they are very focused on the metrics that help them optimize acquisition and LTR. The result is considerably higher LTV/CAC and significantly higher Contribution Margin. 

Table 2: Impact of Efficient Marketing & Remarketing on a Company’s Results

A few rules regarding Contribution Margin

  1. Higher Gross Margin means greater opportunity for high Contribution Margin – for example, Company A at 20% Gross Margin is severely limited in reaching a reasonable Contribution Margin while Company B at 80% Gross Margin has an opportunity for high Contribution Margin and can reach profitability at lower revenue levels
  2. Companies with many new customers acquired through “free” methods like SEO, viral marketing, etc. have higher Contribution Margins than similar companies with a low proportion of free acquisitions.  Notice Company D can spend less on marketing than Company C because it acquires half of its customers from free sources whereas Company C has none from free sources.
  3. Returning buyers contribute heavily to Contribution Margin since they require little if any marketing cost. A high LTV/CAC ratio usually means customers return more often, which in turn should increase future Contribution Margin. Company D with its very high LTV/CAC likely has much lower churn than Company C and therefore most of its marketing spend is for adding incremental customers rather than just replacing those that churn. If a company simply stopped spending on marketing, its revenue would be from existing customers and new customers acquired from free methods making Contribution Margin roughly equal to Gross Margin. Of course, lack of marketing could have a major impact on future growth
  4. All other things being equal, companies with short Payback Periods tend to have higher Contribution Margin than those with longer Payback Periods

Marketing Spend on Branding versus Customer Acquisition

Branding is the communication of characteristics, values and attributes of an organization and its products. What is the purpose of spending on branding?  To create a strong image of the company and its products so that existing customers want to stay and spending on customer acquisition will be more efficient. Great brands should have a lower CAC and higher LTV than weak brands.

Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign worked well in establishing a brand message that resonated. Their more recent campaign centered around Colin Kaepernick was riskier as it had pictures of the quarterback and the slogan: “Believe in something even if it means sacrificing everything”. While Kaepernick is controversial, he appeals to a large part of the Nike existing and potential buying audience. The campaign helped lift sales by 27% in the first 4 days following the ad launch. Karen McFarlane, founder Kaye Media Partners summed up Nike’s strategy: “Nike’s mission is to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. Colin Kaepernick, through his advocacy, conviction, and talent on and off the field, exemplifies those values in the strongest of terms. Couple that with Nike’s commitment to diversity and community, particularly against the backdrop of today’s America where politics have amplified cultural divisions, Nike took the opportunity to lean into their mission and values.”

Marketing campaigns that are for direct customer acquisition differ from branding campaigns as their goal is to directly acquire customers. It is not always clear whether marketing dollars should be classified as acquisition or branding. The key point is that branding is building for the future, whereas acquisition campaigns are measured by how efficiently they deliver current customers. This brings us back to measuring CAC, as the question becomes whether branding campaigns are part of the calculation of CAC. I believe they are not, as CAC should represent the direct cost of acquiring a customer so that increasing that spend will allow us to estimate how many more customers will result. So, I conclude that marketing for branding should be excluded from the calculation of CAC but can be an important strategy to improve efficiency in acquiring customers and maximizing their value. It should be part of the Contribution Margin calculation.

Paid CAC vs Blended CAC

If CAC represents what it costs to acquire a customer, what about those customers that are acquired through SEO, viral marketing, or some other free method? If one simply divides the spend on Marketing for Customer Acquisition (or MCA) by the total number of new customers, the result will be deceptive if it is used to estimate how many more customers will be acquired if MCA spend is increased. Instead companies should calculate CAC in two ways:

Blended CAC = MCA/ (total number of new customers)

Acquisition CAC = MCA/ (number of new customers generated from acquisition marketing only)

Attribution Models and how they help understand CAC by Channel

CAC helps predict the impact of different levels of spending on marketing. Companies also need to know where spending has the best impact, and therefore need to calculate a CAC (and LTV) for each channel of marketing. If a company uses multiple channels like Facebook, Google, and Snap they need to assign credit to each channel for the customers generated from that channel as compared to the spend for that channel to determine the channel CAC. The most simplistic way of doing this is to say, for example, that Google advertising gets credit for the customer if the purchase by the customer occurs after clicking to the site from Google. But what if a consumer sees a Facebook ad, goes to the site to look at products, then a week later comes back to the site from a Snap ad, and then visits the site again because the company sent them an email that they click on, and finally buys something after clicking on a Google ad?  Should Google get the entire credit for the customer?

Attribution models from companies like Amplitude and Hive attempt to appropriately credit each channel touchpoint for the role it played in acquiring a customer. For example, a company might assign 50% of the credit to the last touchpoint and divide the other 50% equally among prior touchpoints or use some other formula that is believed to capture how each channel participated in driving that consumer towards a purchase. Attribution models attempt to help companies understand how scaling spend in each channel will impact customer acquisition. For example:

Google CAC = (Google marketing spend)/ (number of customers attributed to Google ads)

One question that arises when using attribution models to credit each channel is whether “free” areas should share the credit when both paid and free touchpoints occur before converting a consumer into a buyer. The issue is whether the free touchpoints would have occurred had the company not spent on paid marketing. In my prior example the customer would never have received an email from the company had they not first seen the Facebook and Snap ads so eliminating these ads would also eliminate the email which in turn probably means they never would have become a customer. In a similar way, someone who clicked on a Google ad but did not buy, might later do a search for the product, and go to the site from SEO and then buy. So, one method of assigning attribution would be to divide the entire attribution among paid channels if a consumer touched both paid and free ones before becoming a customer. If the consumer only went to free channels, then they would count in blended CAC but not as a customer in calculating paid CAC or CAC by paid channel.

Where does Marketing to an existing customer fit in?

CAC is meant to measure new customer acquisition. So, marketing to an existing customer to get them to buy more should not be part of CAC but rather should be subtracted from MCA. I view it as a cost that reduces Lifetime Value (LTV). Many startups ignore the possibility of “reactivating” churned customers through marketing spend. Several Azure portfolio companies have seen success in deploying a reactivation strategy. I consider this spend as marketing to an existing customer and resulting profits an increase in LTV. Revising the definition of LTV (see Table 1):

LTV = LTR – COGS – Marketing Costs to existing customers

MCA (Marketing Cost for Customer Acquisition) = Marketing Costs – branding costs – marketing to existing customers

In Table 1, remarketing expense is 1% of Lifetime revenue for both Company A and Company B or:

Company A LTV = (GM% – remarketing%) X LTR = (20% – 1%) X $400 = $76

Company B LTV = (80%– 1%) X $400 = $316

What about new customers that return the product?

This is a thorny issue. If a consumer buys their first product from a company and then returns it, is she a customer? I think it would not be wrong with interpreting this either way. But I prefer considering her a customer as she was a buyer, and while the return zeros out the revenue from that purchase, she did become a customer. There is ample opportunity for marketing to her again. Considering her a customer lowers CAC as there are more customers for the spend, but it also lowers LTV for the same reason. So, if the interpretation is applied consistently over both CAC and LTV, I believe it would be correct.

More mature companies should apply the methods shown here to better understand their business

By better understanding acquisition CAC and LTV of each channel of customer acquisition a company can direct more spending to the most efficient ones (those with the highest LTV/CAC). By experimenting with “reactivation” spending a company can determine if this improves LTV/CAC. Companies that improve LTV/CAC will likely generate higher Contribution Margin. Those that increase the proportion of customers acquired for “free” can also improve Contribution Margin. Improving CAC and LTV can be accomplished in several ways as described in prior posts:

Optimizing the cost of customer acquisition modeling metrics to drive startup success (March 2014)

How to improve Contribution Margin (Nov 2018)

Without proper metrics a company is essentially flying blind and will be far less likely to succeed. This post provides a blueprint towards a more sophisticated approach to understanding any business.

Defining Key Elements of the New Model for Retail

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Economics, Marketing , , , ,

In our October, 2015 Soundbytes (https://soundbytes2.com/2015/10/)  I predicted that Omnichannel selling would become prevalent over the ensuing years with brick and mortar retailers being forced to offer an online solution, ecommerce companies needing to access buyers at physical locations and online brands (referred to as DTC or direct to consumer) being carried by 3rd party physical stores. Since that post, these trends have accelerated (including Amazon’s announcement last week that it is opening another “4-star store” in the bay area). Having had more time to observe this progression, I have developed several theories regarding this evolving new world that I would like to share in this post.  

Issues for Brick and Mortar Stores when they Create an Online Presence

Physical retailers are not set up to handle volumes of online sales. Their distribution centers are geared towards sending larger volumes of products to their stores rather than having the technology and know-how to deal directly with consumers (a situation which motivated Walmart to buy Jet for $3.3 billion). In general, a retailer starting to sell online will need to create one or more new distribution centers that are geared towards satisfying direct to consumer online demand.  

Another rude awakening for brick and mortar retailers when they go online is a dramatic increase in returns. On average, returns are about 9% of purchases from a retail store and 30% when purchased online. The discrepancy is even greater for clothing (especially shoes) as fit becomes a major issue. Given that consumers expect free shipping, and most want free return shipping, this becomes a cost that can eviscerate margins. The volume of returns also creates the problem of handling reverse logistics, that is tracking the return, crediting the customer, putting it back into the inventory system as available and restocking it into the appropriate bin location. Then there is the question as to whether the item can still be resold. For clothing this may require adding the cost of cleaning and pressing operations to keep the item fresh and having the systems to track movement of the inventory through this process.

Lastly, the question becomes whether a brick and mortar retailers’ online sales will (at least partly) cannibalize their in-store sales. If so, this, coupled with the growth of online buying, can make existing store footprints too large, reducing store profits.

If Brick and Mortar Retailers Struggle with an Omnichannel Approach, why do DTC Brands Want to Create an Offline Presence?

The answer is a pretty simple one: market access and customer acquisition.  Despite a steady gain of share for online sales, brick and mortar still accounts for over 70% of consumer purchases. Not too long ago, Facebook was a pretty efficient channel to acquire customers. For the past 5 years, Azure portfolio companies have experienced a steep rise in CAC (customer acquisition cost) when using Facebook as the acquisition vehicle. There are many theories as to why, but it seems obvious to me that it is simply the law of supply versus demand. Facebook usage growth has slowed but the demand for ad inventory has increased dramatically, driving up prices. For large brands that use advertising for brand building rather than customer acquisition this does not appear to be a problem, especially when comparing its value to ads on television. For brands that use it for customer acquisition, doubling CAC changes the ratio of LTV (lifetime value or lifetime profits on a customer) to CAC making this method of customer acquisition far less effective.

The combination of these factors has led larger (and smaller) online brands to open brick and mortar outlets. Players like Warby Parker, Casper, Bonobos and even Tesla have done it by creating stores that are a different experience than traditional retail. Warby Parker, Bonobos and Tesla do not stock inventory but rather use the presence to attract customers and enable them to try on/test drive their products. I have bought products, essentially online, while at Warby Parker and Tesla physical locations.

I then had to wait between 2 to 6 weeks for the product to be manufactured and delivered (see the soundbite on Tesla below). What this means in each of their cases is that they kept their business models as ones of “manufacture to demand” rather than build to inventory.  It seems clear that for all four of the companies cited above there is a belief that these physical outlets are a cost effective way of attracting customers with a CAC that is competitive to online ads. They also effectively use online follow-up once you have visited their brick and mortar outlet, thus creating a blend of the two methods. Once the customer is acquired, repeat purchases may occur directly online or in a combination of online and offline.

The Future Blend of Online/Offline

While we have seen a steady progression of companies experimenting with Omnichannel whether they started as offline or online players, we have yet to see an optimal solution. Rather, various players have demonstrated parts of that optimization. So, I’d like to outline a few thoughts regarding what steps might lead to more optimization:

  1. To the degree possible, online purchases by consumers should have an in-store pickup and review option at some savings versus shipping to the home. For clothing, there should also be an opportunity to try the online purchased items on before leaving the store. In that way consumers have the ability to buy online, coupled with the convenience of trying products on in a store. This would expose the customer to a broader set of inventory (online) than even a large footprint store might be able to carry. It would improve fit, lower cost to the brand (by lowering returns and reducing shipping cost) while allowing the brand to begin acquiring better information on fit – insuring an improvement for the next online purchase. A secondary benefit would be the increase in store traffic that was created.
  2. Many retailers will add Rental to the mix of options offered to customers to improve profits. Azure portfolio company, Le Tote, is a subscription rental company for everyday women’s clothes. As women give feedback on a large variety of aspects of fit and preferences it can improve the fit dramatically with each successive box. Retailers need to have systems that replicates this knowledge of their customers. The problem for pure brick and mortar retailers is that they have not had a relationship that enables them to get the feedback…and they don’t have software systems to build this knowledge even if they were to get it. Le Tote has also built up strong knowledge of women’s preferences as to style and has created successful house brands that leverage that knowledge based on massive feedback from subscribers. You may have seen the announcement that Le Tote has just acquired Lord & Taylor, the oldest department store in the country. It plans to use the millions of existing Lord & Taylor customers as a source of potential subscribers to its service. It also has a rental vehicle that can be used to improve monetization of items that don’t sell through at the stores.
  3. Successful online brands will be carried by offline retailers. This has already started to occur but will accelerate over time as DTC brands like Le Tote (and perhaps Stitchfix) use their tens of millions of specific customer feedback data points to produce products that meet the needs expressed in the feedback. If they have correctly mined the data, these brands should be quite successful in offline stores, whether it be their own or a third party retailers’ outlet. The benefit to the retailor in carrying online brands is two-fold: first the online brands that have effectively analyzed their data create products they know can sell in each geography; and second carrying online brands will improve the image of the retailor in the eyes of shoppers who view DTC companies as more forward thinking.
  4. Department store footprints will need to shrink or be shared with online players. The issue discussed earlier of overall ecommerce coupled with brick and mortar stores cannibalizing store demand when they start selling online can be dramatically mitigated by having smaller stores. In that way retailers can maintain their brand presence, continue to get foot traffic, and improve store efficiency.  Any larger footprint store may need to take part of its space and either sublet it (as Macys is doing in some locations) or attract online brands that are willing to pay for a presence in those stores in the form of a percentage of revenue generated or rent. The offer to DTC brands may be to have a pop-up for a set period, or to agree to a longer-term relationship. By working with DTC brands in this way retailers can improve gross margin per square foot (a critical KPI for brick and mortar players) for poorly utilized portions of their store footprints. The secondary benefit to the retailer would be that the online brands will generate additional traffic to the stores. There are already a few startups that are creating a store within a store concept that carries DTC brands. They hope to be the middleman between DTC brands and large retailers/shopping malls making it easier for the DTC brands to penetrate more locations, and easier for the retailer to deal with one new player that will install multiple DTC brands in their locations.
  5. There will be more combinations of online and offline companies merging. By doing that the expertise needed for each area of the business can be optimized. The online companies presumably have better software, logistics and more efficient methods of acquiring online customers. The brick and mortar retailers have greater knowledge of running a physical store, an existing footprint to carry the online brands, locations that allow for delivery to their stores, and a customer base to market to online (reducing the CAC and increasing LTV).
  6. For Omnichannel companies, revenue attribution is complex but becomes essential to managing where dollars are spent. Revenue attribution is the tracking, connecting, and crediting marketing efforts to their downstream revenue creation. For example, if a potential customer responds to a Facebook ad by going online to look at items, then visits a store to check them out live, but eventually buys one or more of the items in response to a google ad, the question becomes: which channel should get credit for acquiring the customer? This is important as the answer may impact company strategy and help determine where marketing dollars get spent. Several Azure portfolio companies are now using 3rd party software from companies like Hive to appropriately give attribution to each channel that helped contribute to the eventual sale. This process is important as it helps determine future spending. We expect better run Omnichannel companies to evolve their analysis of marketing to include attribution models.  

Conclusion: The future winners in retail will be those that successfully migrate to the most optimal omnichannel models

What I have described in this post is inevitable. Some large proportion of customers will always want to do some or all of their shopping at a brick & mortar store. By blending the positive attributes of physical retail with the accessibility to the larger number of options that can exist online, companies can move to more optimal models that address all potential customers. But unless this is done in an intelligent way booby traps like inefficient floor space, excessive returns, high shipping costs and more will rear their ugly heads. This post describes steps for retailers/brands to take that are a starting point for optimizing an omnichannel approach.  

Soundbytes

  • When I had just left Wall Street, I received calls from the press and a very large investor in Hewlett Packard regarding my opinion of the proposed acquisition of Compaq Computer. I said: “HP is in 6 business areas with Imaging being their best and PCs their worst. Doubling up on the worst of the 6 does not make sense to me.” When asked what they should do instead, I replied: “Double up on the best business: acquire Xerox.” My how the tide has turned as Xerox was in trouble then and could have been bought at a very low price. Now it appears Xerox may acquire HP. To be clear, Xerox is still a much smaller market cap company…but I’m enjoying seeing how this process will work out.

  • In the last Soundbytes, I mentioned that I had purchased a Tesla Model 3. What is interesting is that 6 weeks later I am being told that it may take as long as 3-4 more weeks before I receive the car.  This means delivery times have extended to at least 9 weeks. I can’t say how reliable this is but the salesperson I am dealing with told me that Tesla has prioritized production of Model S, Model X and shipments to Europe and Asia over even the more expensive versions of Model 3’s (mine cost almost $59,000 before sales tax). One can easily conclude that production must be at full capacity and that the mix this quarter will contain more higher priced cars. So, demand in the quarter appears to be in excess of 100,000 units and price per car appears strong. Assuming the combination of maximum production in the U.S. and some production out of the Chinese factory, supply might also exceed 100,000 units. If the supply is available, then Tesla should have a strong Q4. However, there is the risk that Tesla doesn’t have the parts to supply both factories or that they have somehow become less efficient. The latest thing to drive down the Tesla stock price is the missteps in showcasing the new truck. I’m not sure why a company should be castigated for an esoteric feature not working in a prototype of a product that won’t be in production until sometime in 2021. Remember, Tesla at its core is a technology company producing next gen autos. I’ve seen other technology companies like Microsoft and Oracle have glitches in demos of future products without such a reaction. As for the design of the truck, I believe Tesla is targeting a 10% to 20% share of the truck market with a differentiated product rather than attempting to attract all potential buyers. 10% of the U.S. pickup market would result in 250,000 units per year. The company has announced pre-orders for the vehicle have already reached 200,000. If these orders are real, they have a home run on their hands but since the deposit is only $100 there is no guarantee that all deposits will convert to actual purchases when the truck goes into production.  

How to Improve Contribution Margin

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Golden State Warriors, KPI, Marketing, Metrics, NBA, Technology

This post is the third in my series on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), with a heavy emphasis on contribution margin (CM). Previously, I analyzed why CM is such a strong predictor of success. Given that, companies should consistently look at ways of improving it while still maintaining sufficient growth in their business.

In Azure’s recent full day marketing seminar for our consumer (B2C) focused companies, my session highlighted 6 methods of improving CM:

  1. Increase follow-on sales from existing customers
  2. Raise the average invoice value of the initial and subsequent sales to a customer
  3. Increase GM (Gross Margin) through price increases
  4. Increase GM by reducing cost of goods sold (COGs)
  5. Reduce Blended CAC (cost of customer acquisition) by increasing free or very low cost traffic
  6. Decrease marketing spend as a % of revenue

Before drilling down on each of these I want to define several key terms that will be used throughout the discussion:

  • Contribution Margin = GM – Marketing/Sales Costs – other cost that vary with sales
  • Paid CAC = Market Spend/New Customers acquired through this spend
  • Blended CAC = Market Spend/All new customers
  • CAC Recovery Time (CAC RT) = the number of months until variable profit on a customer equals CAC
  • LTV/CAC = Life Time Value (LTV) of a customer/CAC

I will now review each of these strategies and provide some thoughts on how to activate these in consumer-facing businesses:

1. Increase Follow-On sales from existing customers 

Since existing customers have little or no cost associated with getting them to buy, this will decrease blended CAC, increasing CM.

  • Increasing customer retention through improvements in customer care, more interesting and more targeted emails to a customer, or launching a subscription of one kind or another can all help.

On the first point here is an email I received shortly after subscribing to Harry’s, that I thought did an excellent job at engaging me with their customer support, increasing my likelihood to keep my subscription active:

Hi there,
My name is Katie, and I’m a member of the Harry’s team. I wanted to reach out and say thanks for supporting Harry’s.
You are important to us, and I am here to personally help you however I can to make your Harry’s experience as smooth as possible – both literally and figuratively. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any thoughts or questions about your Harry’s products or Shave Plan, or just life in general. (And just a reminder that your next box is scheduled to ship on October 27th.) Thanks again for your support, and I hope to speak soon!
All the best,
Katie

On the subscription concept, think about Amazon Prime. How many of you buy more frequently from Amazon because of being a prime member?

  • Add to product portfolio. By giving your customers more options of what to buy (all within the concept of your brand) customers are given the opportunity to spend more often.
  • Make sure your emails are interesting. This will increase the open rate and drive more follow on sales. If all your emails are about discounting your product, then customers will have less interest in opening them and your brand will be devalued. I’ve received emails from numerous sites that say an X% discount is available until a certain date, and then when that date passes, I receive a new offer that is the same or sometimes better.  The most frequently opened emails have headers and content that creates interest beyond whatever products you sell. A/B test different headers and different content. It doesn’t matter how small or large you are or how many emails you send, it always pays to try different variations to increase open rates and conversion. Experiment with different messaging to different customer segments like those who purchased recently, those who “liked” an item, those that have never purchased, etc.
  • Build a Community of your customers. The more you can get customers engaged with you and with each other, the more committed to you they become and the longer they are retained. Think through how you can build an active community among your users through shared photos, videos, chatting, podcasts or events. Most of this should not involve trying to push new purchases but engaging your community to interact with you and each other.

2. Raise the average invoice value of the initial and subsequent sales to a customer

Since shipping costs will not increase proportionately, this will raise GM dollars and therefore CM.

  • Increase pricing. Most startups underprice their product thinking that will increase market adoption. Even some of the largest companies in the world have found there was ample room to increase prices. Thinking differently, Apple upped prices to over $1,000 for an iPhone. And then increased it again to $1,349 for the top of the line product. Five years ago, how many of you thought people would pay over $1,000 for a cell phone? This shows that unless you A/B test different price points you have no idea whether a price increase is the right strategy.
  • Upsell logical add-on products. While trying to get a customer to add to their shopping cart may seem obvious, many companies do not do this on a consistent basis. Some examples of ones that have: a flower company added vases to the offer, a mattress company added pillows and sheets; a subscription razor company added shaving gel; a cell phone company added a case. All of these led to reasonable attach rates of the add-on product and higher average invoice value. Testing what you could add to generate upsell should be a constant process.
  • “Selling” value added services is another form of upsell. This could include things like concierge customer service, service contacts, premier membership with benefits like: invites to special events, early access to new products, reduced shipping cost, preferred discounts on products, etc. If you get your customers to engage in one or more services, you will significantly increase their connection to your product and likely increase retention.

3. Increase Gross Margin through price Increases

Surprisingly, sometimes higher prices position a product as premium (having more value) and generate increased unit sales. Often higher prices generate more revenue even when fewer unit sales result. What may be counter intuitive is that GM$ can increase even if revenue declines. For example, suppose a company has COGs of $50 for a product and is currently pricing it at $100. If a price increase of 20% causes 20% lower unit sales, revenue would decline by 4% while GM$ would increase 12%. Higher gross margin dollars provide more ability to spend on marketing.

 

4. Improving GM by reducing COGs

  • Better Pricing: When your volume increases, ask for better pricing from suppliers. Just as its important to price test regularly, its also important to talk to multiple potential suppliers of your parts/product. An existing supplier may not be eager to voluntarily offer a price discount that goes with increased volume but is more likely to do so if it knows you are checking with others.
  • Changing Packaging: Packaging should be re-examined regularly as improvements may help customer retention. But it also may be possible to lower the cost of the packaging or to change it in a way that lowers shipping costs since that may be based on the size of the box rather than weight.
  • Shipping Costs: Lower shipping cost per $ of revenue (increasing GM and CM) by generating larger orders. In addition to upsell, this can be done by offering better discounts if the order size is larger. One site I have purchased from offers 10% discount if your net spend (after discount) is over $100, 15% if over $150 and 20% if over $200. Getting to the highest discount lowers the price of the product by enough to motivate buyers (including me) to try to buy over $200 in merchandise. The extra revenue creates incremental product margin dollars and decreases shipping cost as a percentage of revenue. This in turn increases GM$.

For a subscription company this can be done by scheduling less frequent (larger) deliveries. The shipping cost of the larger order will be a much smaller percent of revenue, raising GM.

  • Opening a Second distribution center to reduce shipping cost. Orders shipped from a west coast distribution center to an east coast customer will have 5 zone pricing. By having a second distribution center in a place like Columbus, Ohio (a frequently used location) those same orders will usually be 1 zone, sometimes 2 zone pricing, resulting in substantial savings per order. The caveat here is that a company needs enough volume for the total savings on orders to exceed the fixed cost of a second distribution center.

5. Improving CM by driving “free” or “nearly free” traffic

The higher the proportion of free or inexpensive traffic to total traffic, the lower the blended CAC.

  • Improving SEO (search engine optimization). I’ve learned from SEO experts that optimizing SEO is not free, but rather very low cost compared to paid traffic. Our previous post walks through some of the science involved in making improvements. I would suggest using an SEO consultant as it is likely to lead to far better results.
  • Convert a visitor not ready to buy to an email recipient. If you do that than you will have subsequent opportunities to market to her or him. A slightly costlier version of this is to use remarketing to woo visitors who came to your site but didn’t buy. While using remarketing (advertising) has a cost, it is usually much lower CAC than other methods.
  • Produce emails that get forwarded and go viral. Such emails need to motivate recipients to forward them due to being very funny, of human interest, etc. While there is typically a product offering embedded in them, the header emphasizes the reason to read it. One Azure portfolio company, Shinesty, recently had an email that was opened by about 7X the number of people it was initially sent to.  That generated a lot of potential customers without spending extra marketing dollars. Engaging emails has enabled Shinesty to maintain high CM and high growth.
  • Use social networking to generate incremental customers. Having the right posts on a social network like Instagram can lead to new potential customers finding out about you and lead to additional sales.
  • Optimize Customer Retention. Or as my good friend Chris Bruzzo (CMO of EA) spoke about at the Azure Marketing conference: “Love the ones you’re with.” Existing customers are usually the largest source of “free” buyers in a period. The longer you retain a customer, the more repeat buyers you have, increasing contribution margin. So, it’s imperative to take great care of your existing customers.
  • Drive PR. Like SEO, there is some cost involved in this but if you are judicious in any agency spend and thoughtful in creating news worthy press releases this can be a great source of traffic at a modest cost. However, I recommend you try to understand what you are getting from PR because I have seen situations where the spend did not produce meaningful results.

6. Decrease Marketing Spend as a % of Revenue.

The CAC Recovery Time plays a major role in how to manage your market spend to balance growth and burn. For example, if CAC Recovery Time is one month, spending more will not drive up burn appreciably. If it takes more than a year to recover your CAC, moderating market spend is critical to achieving a reasonable CM. If you recoup CAC faster, you can invest more quickly in the next round of customers. In the consumer space, I won’t invest in a company that has a long (a year or more) CAC Recovery Time as customers are likely to churn in an average of 2-3 years, making it difficult to achieve a reasonable business model. For B2B company’s customer longevity tends to be much longer, and the LTV/CAC can be 5X or more even if CAC Recovery Time is a year.

When a company decreases its market spend as a % of revenue it may experience lower growth but better CM. However, many companies have waste in their marketing spend so it’s important to measure the efficacy of each area of spend separately and to eliminate programs with a low return. This will allow you to reduce the spend with minimal impact on growth rates. There is a balance needed to try to optimize the relationship between CM and revenue growth as higher burn requires raising money more frequently and can put your company at risk. On the other hand, a company generating $1M in revenue needs to be growing at 100% or more to warrant most VCs to consider investing. Since CM should improve with scale, spending more on marketing may be a viable strategy for early stage companies. Once a company reaches $10M in revenue, annual growth of 50% will get it to $76M in revenue in 5 years so such a company should consider better CM rather than driving much higher growth rates and continuing to burn excessive cash.

In summary, Contribution Margin is the lifeblood of a company. If it is weak, the company is likely to fail over time. If it is strong and revenue growth is high, success seems likely. Improving CM is an ongoing process. I realize many of you probably feel much of what I’ve said is obvious, but my question is:“How many of these suggestions are you already doing on a regular basis?”

While you may be using several of the suggestions in this post, I encourage you to try more and to also double down where you can on the ones you already are trying. The results will make your company more valuable!

 

SoundBytes

  • I just want to remind readers that my collaborator on my blog posts, Andrea Drager, doesn’t typically take a bow for her significant contributions. Also, in this post, Chris Bruzzo added several improvements that have been incorporated. So many thanks to Andrea and Chris.
  • Can’t help but comment on the start to the NBA season. Not surprisingly, the Warriors are off to a great start with Curry and Durant leading the way. Greene and Thompson now have moved close to their usual contribution so I’m hopeful that the team can keep up its current pace.
  • What surprised me early on was the lack of recognition that both Toronto and San Antonio would be greatly improved. Remember, while San Antonio lost Kawhi, he only played a few games last year so with the addition of DeRozan should improve and once again reach the playoffs. For Toronto the change to Kawhi is a marked improvement placing them very competitive with the Celtics for eastern leadership.
  • I also feel it necessary to comment on the “Las Vegas” Raiders. I call them that already as they have shown zero regard for Oakland fans. While commentators have criticized their trading of all-star level players for draft choices, this is precisely on-strategy. When they get to Vegas they want a brand-new set of rising stars that the new fan base can identify with (using the numerous first round draft choices they traded for), and they don’t mind having the worst record in the league while still in Oakland. I believe Oakland fans should stop attending games as a response. I also think the NFL continues to shoot itself in the foot, allowing one of the most loyal and visible fan bases in the league to once again be abandoned

Why Contribution Margin is a Strong Predictor of Success for Companies

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, KPI, Marketing, Metrics, Technology , , , , , , , , , ,

In the last post I concluded with a brief discussion of Contribution Margin as a key KPI. Recall:

Contribution Margin = Variable Profits – Sales and Marketing Cost

The higher the contribution margin, the more dollars available towards covering G&A. Once contribution margin exceeds G&A, a company reaches operating profits. For simplicity in this post, I’ll use gross margin (GM) as the definition of variable profits even though there may be other costs that vary directly with revenue.

The Drivers of Contribution Margin (CM)

There is an absolute correlation between GM percent and CM. Very high gross margin companies will, in general, get to strong contribution margins and low gross margin companies will struggle to get there. But the sales and marketing needed to drive growth is just as important. There are several underlying factors in how much needs to be spent on sales and marketing to drive growth:

  1. The profits on a new customer relative to the cost of acquiring her (or him). That is, the CAC (customer acquisition cost) for customers derived from paid advertising compared to the profits on those customers’ first purchase
  2. The portion of new traffic that is “free” from SEO (search engine optimization), PR, existing customers recommending your products, etc.
  3. The portion of revenue that comes from repeat customers

The Relationship Between CAC and First Purchase Profits Has a Dramatic Impact on CM

Suppose Company A spends $60 to acquire a customer and has GM of $90 on the initial purchase by that customer. The contribution margin will already be positive $30 without accounting for customers that are organic or those that are repeat customers; in other words, this tends to be extremely positive! Of course, the startups I see in eCommerce are rarely in this situation but those that are can get to profitability fairly quickly if this relationship holds as they scale.

It would be more typical for companies to find that the initial purchase GM only covers a portion of CAC but that subsequent purchases lead to a positive relationship between the LTV (life time value) of the customer and CAC. If I assume the spend to acquire a customer is $60 and the GM is $30 then the CM on the first purchase would be negative (-$30), and it would take a second purchase with the same GM dollars to cover that initial cost. Most startups require several purchases before recovering CAC which in turn means requiring investment dollars to cover the outlay.

Free Traffic and Contribution Margin

If a company can generate a high proportion of free/organic traffic, there is a benefit to contribution margin. CAC is defined as the marketing spend divided by the number of new customers derived from this spend. Blended CAC is defined as the marketing spend divided by all customers who purchased in the period. The more organically generated and return customers, the lower the “blended CAC”. Using the above example, suppose 50% of the new customers for Company A come from organic (free) traffic. Then the “blended CAC“ would be 50% of the paid CAC. In the above example that would be $30 instead of $60 and if the GM was only $30 the initial purchase would cover blended CAC.

Of course, in addition to obtaining customers for free from organic traffic, companies, as they build their customer base, have an increasing opportunity to obtain free traffic by getting existing customers to buy again. So, a company should never forget that maintaining a persistent relationship with customers leads to improved Contribution Margin.

Spending to Drive Higher Growth Can Mean Lower Contribution Margin

Unless the GM on the first purchase a new customer makes exceeds their CAC, there is an inverse relationship between expanding growth and achieving high contribution margin. Think of it this way: suppose that going into a month the likely organic traffic and repeat buyers are somewhat set. Boosting that month’s growth means increasing the number of new paid customers, which in turn makes paid customers a higher proportion of blended CAC and therefore increases CAC. For an example consider the following assumptions for Company B:

  • The GM is $60 on an average order of $100
  • Paid CAC is $150
  • The company will have 1,000 new customers through organic means and 2,000 repeat buyers or $300,000 in revenue with 60% GM ($180,000) from these customers before spending on paid customers
  • G&A besides marketing for the month will be $150,000
  • Last year Company B had $400,000 in revenue in the same month
  • The company is considering the ramifications of targeting 25%, 50% or 100% year-over-year growth

Table 1: The Relationship Between Contribution Margin & Growth

Since the paid CAC is $150 while Gross Margin is only $60 per new customer, each acquired customer generates negative $90 in contribution margin in the period. As can be seen in Table 1, the company would shrink 25% if there is no acquisition spend but would have $180,000 in contribution margin and positive operating profit. On the other end of the spectrum, driving 100% growth requires spending $750,000 to acquire 5,000 new customers and results in a negative $270,000 in contribution margin and an Operating Loss of $420,000 in the period. Of course, if new customers are expected to make multiple future purchases than the number of repeat customers would rise in future periods.

Subscription Models Create More Consistency but are not a Panacea

When a company’s customers are monthly subscribers, each month starts with the prior month’s base less churn. To put it another way, if churn from the prior month is modest (for example 5%) then that month already has 95% of the prior months revenue from repeat customers. Additionally, if the company increases the average invoice value from these customers, it might even have a starting point where return customers account for as much revenue as the prior month. For B-to-B companies, high revenue retention is the norm, where an average customer will pay them for 10 years or more.

Consumer ecommerce subscriptions typically have much more substantial churn, with an average life of two years being closer to the norm. Additionally, the highest level of churn (which can be as much as 30% or more) occurs in the second month, and the next highest, the third month before tapering off. What this means is that companies trying to drive high sequential growth will have a higher % churn rate than those that target more modest growth. Part of a company’s acquisition spend is needed just to stay even. For example, if we assume all new customers come from paid acquisition, the CAC is $200, and that 15% of 10,000 customers churn then the first $300,000 in marketing spend would just serve to replace the churned customers and additional spend would be needed to drive sequential growth.

Investing in Companies with High Contribution Margin

As a VC, I tend to appreciate strong business models and like to invest after some baseline proof points are in place.  In my last post I outlined a number of metrics that were important ways to track a company’s health with the ratio of LTV (life time value) to CAC being one of the most important. When a company has a high contribution margin they have the time to build that ratio by adding more products or establishing subscriptions without burning through a lot of capital. Further, companies that have a high LTV/CAC ratio should have a high contribution margin as they mature since this usually means customers buy many times – leading to an expansion in repeat business as part of each month’s total revenue.

This thought process also applies to public companies. One of the most extreme is Facebook, which I’ve owned and recommended for five years. Even after the recent pullback its stock price is about 7x what it was five years ago (or has appreciated at a compound rate of nearly 50% per year since I’ve been recommending it). Not a surprise as Facebook’s contribution margin runs over 70% and revenue was up year/year 42% in Q2. These are extraordinary numbers for a company its size.

To give the reader some idea of how this method can be used as one screen for public companies, Table 2 shows gross margin, contribution margin, revenue growth and this year’s stock market performance for seven public companies.

Table 2: Public Company Contribution Margin Analysis

Two of the seven companies shown stand out as having both high Contribution Margin and strong revenue growth: Etsy and Stitch Fix. Each had year/year revenue growth of around 30% in Q2 coupled with 44% and 29% contribution margins, respectively. This likely has been a factor in Stitch Fix stock appreciating 53% and Etsy 135% since the beginning of the year.

Three of the seven have weak models and are struggling to balance revenue growth and contribution margin: Blue Apron, Overstock, and Groupon. Both Blue Apron and Groupon have been attempting to reduce their losses by dropping their marketing spend. While this increased their CM by 10% and 20% respectively, it also meant that they both have negative growth while still losing money. The losses for Blue Apron were over 16% of revenue. This coupled with shrinking revenue feels like a lethal combination. Blue Apron stock is only down a marginal amount year-to-date but is 59% lower than one year ago. Groupon, because of much higher gross margins than Blue Apron (52% vs 35%), still seems to have a chance to turn things around, but does have a lot of work to do. Overstock went in the other direction, increasing marketing spend to drive modest revenue growth of 12%. But this led to a negative CM and substantially increased losses. That strategy did not seem to benefit shareholders as the stock has declined 53% since the beginning of the year.

eBay is a healthy company from a contribution margin point of view but has sub 10% revenue growth. I can’t tell if increasing their market spend by a substantial amount (at the cost of lower CM) would be a better balance for them.

For me, Spotify is the one anomaly in the table as its stock has appreciated 46% since the IPO despite weak contribution margins which was one reason for my negative view expressed in a prior post. I think that is driven by three reasons: its product is an iconic brand; there is not a lot of float in the stock creating some scarcity; and contribution margin has been improving giving bulls on the stock a belief that it can get to profitability eventually. I say it is an anomaly, as comparing it to Facebook, it is hard to justify the relative valuations. Facebook grew 42% in Q2, Spotify 26%; Facebook is trading at a P/E of 24 whereas even if we assume Spotify can eventually get to generating 6% net profit (it currently is at a 7% loss before finance charges and 31% loss after finance charges, so this feels optimistic) Spotify would be trading at 112 times this theoretic future earnings.

 

SoundBytes

I found the recent controversy over Elon Musk’s sharing his thoughts on taking Tesla private interesting. On the one hand, people want transparency from companies and Elon certainly provides that! On the other hand, it clearly impacted the stock price for a few days and the SEC abhors anything that can be construed as stock manipulation. Of course, Elon may not have been as careful as he should have been when he sent out his tweet regarding whether financing was lined up…but like most entrepreneurs he was optimistic.

Ten Predictions for 2018

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Marketing, Metrics, Predictions, Stocks, Technology , , ,

In my recap of 2017 predictions I pointed out how boring my stock predictions have been with Tesla and Facebook on my list every year since 2013 and Amazon on for two of the past three years. But what I learned on Wall Street is that sticking with companies that have strong competitive advantages in a potentially mega-sized market can create great performance over time (assuming one is correct)! So here we go again, because as stated in my January 5 post, I am again including Tesla, Facebook and Amazon in my Top ten list for 2018. I believe they each continue to offer strong upside, as explained below. I’m also adding a younger company, with a modest market cap, thus more potential upside coupled with more risk. The company is Stitch Fix, an early leader in providing women with the ability to shop for fashion-forward clothes at home. My belief in the four companies is backed up by my having an equity position in each of them.

I’m expecting the four stocks to outperform the market. So, in a steeply declining market, out-performance might occur with the stock itself being down (but less than the market). Having mentioned the possibility of a down market, I’m predicting the market will rise this year. This is a bit scary for me, as predicting the market as a whole is not my specialty.

We’ll start with the stock picks (with January 2 opening prices of stocks shown in parenthesis) and then move on to the remainder of my 10 predictions.

1. Tesla stock appreciation will continue to outpace the market (it opened the year at $312/share).

The good news and bad news on Tesla is the delays in production of the Model 3. The good part is that we can still look forward to massive increases in the number of cars the company sells once Tesla gets production ramping (I estimate the Model 3 backlog is well in excess of 500,000 units going into 2018 and demand appears to be growing). In 2017, Tesla shipped between 80,000 and 100,000 vehicles with revenue up 30% in Q3 without help from the model 3. If the company is successful at ramping capacity (and acquiring needed parts), it expects to reach a production rate of 5,000 cars per week by the end of Q1 and 10,000 by the end of the year. That could mean that the number of units produced in Q4 2018 will be more than four times that sold in Q4 2017 (with revenue about 2.0-2.5x due to the Model 3 being a lower priced car). Additionally, while it is modest compared to revenue from selling autos, the company appears to be the leader in battery production. It recently announced the largest battery deal ever, a $50 million contract (now completed on time) to supply what is essentially a massive backup battery complex for energy to Southern Australia. While this type of project is unlikely to be a major portion of revenue in the near term, it can add to Tesla’s growth rate and profitability.

2. Facebook stock appreciation will continue to outpace the market (it opened the year at $182/share).

The core Facebook user base growth has slowed considerably but Facebook has a product portfolio that includes Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus. This gives Facebook multiple opportunities for revenue growth: Improve the revenue per DAU (daily active user) on Facebook itself; increase efforts to monetize Instagram and WhatsApp in more meaningful ways; and build the install base of Oculus. Facebook advertising rates have been increasing steadily as more mainstream companies shift budget from traditional advertising to Facebook, especially in view of declining TV viewership coupled with increased use of DVRs (allowing viewers to skip ads). Higher advertising rates, combined with modest growth in DAUs, should lead to continued strong revenue growth. And while the Oculus product did not get out of the gate as fast as expected, it began picking up steam in Q3 2017 after Facebook reduced prices. At 210,000 units for the quarter it may have contributed up to 5% of Q3 revenue. The wild card here is if a “killer app” (a software application that becomes a must have) launches that is only available on the Oculus, sales of Oculus could jump substantially in a short time.

3. Amazon stock appreciation will outpace the market (it opened the year at $1188/share).

Amazon, remarkably, increased its revenue growth rate in 2017 as compared to 2016. This is unusual for companies of this size. In 2018, we expect online to continue to pick up share in retail and Amazon to gain more share of online. The acquisition of Whole Foods will add approximately $4B per quarter in revenue, boosting year/year revenue growth of Amazon an additional 9%-11% per quarter, if Whole Foods revenue remains flattish. If Amazon achieves organic growth of 25% (in Q3 it was 29% so that would be a drop) in 2018, this would put the 3 quarters starting in Q4 2017 at about 35% growth. While we do expect Amazon to boost Whole Foods revenue, that is not required to reach those levels. In Q4 2018, reported revenue will return to organic growth levels. The Amazon story also features two other important growth drivers. First, I expect the Echo to have another substantial growth year and continue to emerge as a new platform in the home. Additionally, Amazon appears poised to benefit from continued business migration to the cloud coupled with increased market share and higher average revenue per cloud customer. This will be driven by modest price increases and introduction of more services as part of its cloud offering. The success of the Amazon Echo with industry leading voice technology should continue to provide another boost to Amazon’s revenue. Additionally, having a large footprint of physical stores will allow Amazon to increase distribution of many products.

4. Stitch Fix stock appreciation will outpace the market (it opened the year at $25/share and is at the same level as I write this post).

Stitch Fix is my riskiest stock forecast. As a new public company, it has yet to establish a track record of performance that one can depend upon. On the other hand, it’s the early leader in a massive market that will increasingly move online, at-home shopping for fashion forward clothes. The number of people who prefer shopping at home to going to a physical store is on the increase. The type of goods they wish to buy expands every year. Now, clothing is becoming a new category on the rapid rise (it grew from 11% of overall clothing retail sales in 2011 to 19% in 2016). It is important for women buying this way to feel that the provider understands what they want and facilitates making it easy to obtain clothes they prefer. Stitch Fix uses substantial data analysis to personalize each box it sends a customer. The woman can try them on, keep (and pay for) those they like, and return the rest very easily.

5. The stock market will rise in 2018 (the S&P opened the year at 2,696 on January 2).

While I have been accurate on recommending individual stocks over a long period, I rarely believe that I understand what will happen to the overall market. Two prior exceptions were after 9/11 and after the 2008 mortgage crisis generated meltdown. I was correct both times but those seemed like easy calls. So, it is with great trepidation that I’m including this prediction as it is based on logic and I know the market does not always follow logic! To put it simply, the new tax bill is quite favorable to corporations and therefore should boost after-tax earnings. What larger corporations pay is often a blend of taxes on U.S. earnings and those on earnings in various countries outside the U.S. There can be numerous other factors as well. Companies like Microsoft have lower blended tax rates because much of R&D and corporate overhead is in the United States and several of its key products are sold out of a subsidiary in a low tax location, thereby lowering the portion of pre-tax earnings here. This and other factors (like tax benefits in fiscal 2017 from previous phone business losses) led to blended tax rates in fiscal 2015, 2016 and 2017 of 34%, 15% and 8%, respectively. Walmart, on the other hand, generated over 75% of its pre-tax earnings in the United States over the past three fiscal years, so their blended rate was over 30% in each of those years

Table 1: Walmart Blended Tax Rates 2015-2017

The degree to which any specific company’s pre-tax earnings mix changes between the United States and other countries is unpredictable to me, so I’m providing a table showing the impact on after-tax earnings growth for theoretical companies instead. Table 2 shows the impact of lowering the U.S. corporate from 35% to 21% on four example companies. To provide context, I show two companies growing pre-tax earnings by 10% and two companies by 30%. If blended tax rates didn’t change, EPS would grow by the same amount as pre-tax earnings. For Companies 1 and 3, Table 2 shows what the increase in earnings would be if their blended 2017 tax rate was 35% and 2018 shifts to 21%. For companies 2 and 4, Table 2 shows what the increase in earnings would be if the 2017 rate was 30% (Walmart’s blended rate the past three years) and the 2018 blended rate is 20%.

Table 2: Impact on After-Tax Earnings Growth

As you can see, companies that have the majority of 2018 pre-tax earnings subject to the full U.S. tax rate could experience EPS growth 15%-30% above their pre-tax earnings growth. On the other hand, if a company has a minimal amount of earnings in the U.S. (like the 5% of earnings Microsoft had in fiscal 2017), the benefit will be minimal. Whatever benefits do accrue will also boost cash, leading to potential investments that could help future earnings.  If companies that have maximum benefits from this have no decline in their P/E ratio, this would mean a substantial increase in their share price, thus the forecast of an up market. But as I learned on Wall Street, it’s important to sight risk. The biggest risks to this forecast are the expected rise in interest rates this year (which usually is negative for the market) and the fact that the market is already at all-time highs.

6. Battles between the federal government and states will continue over marijuana use but the cannabis industry will emerge as one to invest in.

The battle over legalization of Marijuana reached a turning point in 2017 as polls showed that over 60% of Americans now favor full legalization (as compared to 12% in 1969). Prior to 2000, only three states (California, Oregon and Maine) had made medical cannabis legal. Now 29 states have made it legal for medical use and six have legalized sale for recreational use. Given the swing in voter sentiment (and a need for additional sources of tax revenue), more states are moving towards legalization for recreational and medical purposes. This has put the “legal” marijuana industry on a torrid growth curve. In Colorado, one of the first states to broadly legalize use, revenue is over $1 billion per year and overall 2017 industry revenue is estimated at nearly $8 billion, up 20% year/year. Given expected legalization by more states and the ability to market product openly once it is legal, New Frontier Data predicts that industry revenue will more than triple by 2025. The industry is making a strong case that medical use has compelling results for a wide variety of illnesses and high margin, medical use is forecast to generate over 50% of the 2025 revenue. Given this backdrop, public cannabis companies have had very strong performance. Despite this, in 2016, VCs only invested about $49 million in the sector. We expect that number to escalate dramatically in 2017 through 2019. While public cannabis stocks are trading at nosebleed valuations, they could have continued strong performance as market share consolidates and more states (and Canada) head towards legalization. One caveat to this is that Federal law still makes marijuana use illegal and the Trump administration is adopting a more aggressive policy towards pursuing producers, even in states that have made use legal. The states that have legalized marijuana use are gearing up to battle the federal government.

7. At least one city will announce a new approach to Urban transport

Traffic congestion in cities continues to worsen. Our post on December 14, 2017 discussed a new approach to urban transportation, utilizing small footprint automated cars (one to two passengers, no trunk, no driver) in a dedicated corridor. This appears much more cost effective than a Rapid Bus Transit solution and far more affordable than new subway lines. As discussed in that post, Uber and other ride services increase traffic and don’t appear to be a solution. The thought that automating these vehicles will relieve pressure is overly optimistic. I expect at least one city to commit to testing the method discussed in the December post before the end of this year – it is unlikely to be a U.S. city. The approach outlined in that post is one of several that is likely to be tried over the coming years as new thinking is clearly needed to prevent the traffic congestion that makes cities less livable.

8. Offline retailers will increase the velocity of moving towards omnichannel.

Retailers will adopt more of a multi-pronged approach to increasing their participation in e-commerce. I expect this to include:

  • An increased pace of acquisition of e-commerce companies, technologies and brands with Walmart leading the way. Walmart and others need to participate more heavily in online as their core offline business continues to lose share to online. In 2017, Walmart made several large acquisitions and has emerged as the leader among large retailers in moving online. This, in turn, has helped its stock performance. After a stellar 12 months in which the stock was up over 40%, it finally exceeded its January 2015 high of $89 per share (it reached $101/share as we are finalizing the post). I expect Walmart and others in physical retail to make acquisitions that are meaningful in 2018 so as to speed up the transformation of their businesses to an omnichannel approach.
  • Collaborating to introduce more online/technology into their physical stores (which Amazon is likely to do in Whole Foods stores). This can take the form of screens in the stores to order online (a la William Sonoma), having online purchases shipped to your local store (already done by Nordstrom) and adding substantial ability to use technology to create personalized items right at the store, which would subsequently be produced and shipped by a partner.

9. Social commerce will begin to emerge as a new category.

Many e-commerce sites have added elements of social, and many social sites have begun trying to sell various products. But few of these have a fully integrated social approach to e-commerce. The elements of a social approach to e-commerce include:

  • A feed-based user experience
  • Friends’ actions impact your feed
  • Following trend setters to see what they are buying, wearing, and favoring
  • Notifications based on your likes and tastes
  • One click to buy
  • Following particular stores and/or friends

I expect to see existing e-commerce players adding more elements of social, existing social players improving their approach to commerce and a rising trend of emerging companies focused on fully integrated social commerce.

10. “The Empire Strikes Back”: automobile manufacturers will begin to take steps to reclaim use of its GPS.

It is almost shameful that automobile manufacturers, other than Tesla, have lost substantial usage of their onboard GPS systems as many people use their cell phones or a small device to run Google, Waze (owned by Google) or Garmin instead of the larger screen in their car. In the hundreds of times I’ve taken an Uber or Lyft, I’ve never seen the driver use their car’s system. To modernize their existing systems, manufacturers may need to license software from a third party. Several companies are offering next generation products that claim to replicate the optimization offered by Waze but also add new features that go beyond it like offering to order coffee and other items to enable the driver to stop at a nearby location and have the product prepaid and waiting for them. In addition to adding value to the user, this also leads to a lead-gen revenue opportunity. In 2018, I expect one or more auto manufacturers to commit to including a third-party product in one or more of their models.

Soundbytes

Tesla model 3 sample car generates huge buzz at Stanford Mall in Menlo Park California. This past weekend my wife and I experienced something we had not seen before – a substantial line of people waiting to check out a car, one of the first Model 3 cars seen live. We were walking through the Stanford Mall where Tesla has a “Guide Store” and came upon a line of about 60 people willing to wait a few hours to get to check out one of the two Model 3’s available for perusal in California (the other was in L.A.). An hour later we came back, and the line had grown to 80 people. To be clear, the car was not available for a test drive, only for seeing it, sitting in it, finding out more info, etc. Given the buzz involved, it seems to me that as other locations are given Model 3 cars to look at, the number of people ordering a Model 3 each week might increase faster than Tesla’s capacity to fulfill.

How much do you know about SEO?

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Marketing, Metrics, Startups , , ,

Search Engine Optimization: A step by step process recommended by experts

Azure just completed its annual ecommerce marketing day. It was attended by 15 of our portfolio companies, two high level executives at major corporations, a very strong SEO consultant and the Azure team. The purpose of the day is to help the CMOs in the Azure portfolio gain a broader perspective on hot marketing topics and share ideas and best practices. This year’s agenda included the following sessions:

  1. Working with QVC/HSN
  2. Brand building
  3. Using TV, radio and/or podcasts for marketing
  4. Techniques to improve email marketing
  5. Measuring and improving email marketing effectiveness
  6. Storytelling to build your brand and drive marketing success
  7. Working with celebrities, brands, popular YouTube personalities, etc.
  8. Optimizing SEO
  9. Product Listing Ads (PLAs) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

One pleasant aspect of the day is that it generated quite a few interesting ideas for blog posts! In other words, I learned a lot regarding the topics covered. This post is on an area many of you may believe you know well, Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I thought I knew it well too… before being exposed to a superstar consultant, Allison Lantz, who provided a cutting-edge presentation on the topic. With her permission, this post borrows freely from her content. Of course, I’ve added my own ideas in places and may have introduced some errors in thinking, and a short post can only touch on a few areas and is not a substitute for true expertise.

SEO is Not Free if You Want to Optimize

I have sometimes labeled SEO as a free source of visitors to a site, but Allison correctly points out that if you want to focus on Optimization (the O in SEO) with the search engines, then it isn’t free, but rather an ongoing process (and investment) that should be part of company culture. The good news is that SEO likely will generate high quality traffic that lasts for years and leads to a high ROI against the cost of striving to optimize. All content creators should be trained to write in a manner that optimizes generating traffic by using targeted key words in their content and ensuring these words appear in the places that are optimal for search. To be clear, it’s also best if the content is relevant, well written and user-friendly. If you were planning to create the content anyway, then the cost of doing this is relatively minor. However, if the content is incremental to achieve higher SEO rankings, then the cost will be greater. But I’m getting ahead of myself and need to review the step by step process Allison recommends to move towards optimization.

Keyword Research

The first thing to know when developing an SEO Strategy is what you are targeting to optimize. Anyone doing a search enters a word or phrase they are searching for. Each such word or phrase is called a ‘keyword’. If you want to gain more users through SEO, it’s critical to identify thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of keywords that are relevant to your site. For a fashion site, these could be brands, styles, and designers. For an educational site like Education.com (an Azure portfolio company that is quite strong in SEO and ranks on over 600,000 keywords) keywords might be math, english, multiplication, etc. The broader the keywords, the greater the likelihood of higher volume.  But along with that comes more competition for search rankings and a higher cost per keyword. The first step in the process is spending time brainstorming what combinations of words are relevant to your site – in other words if someone searched for that specific combination would your site be very relevant to them? To give you an idea of why the number gets very high, consider again Education.com. Going beyond searching on “math”, one can divide math into arithmetic, algebra, geometry, calculus, etc. Each of these can then be divided further. For example, arithmetic can include multiplication, addition, division, subtraction, exponentiation, fractions and more.  Each of these can be subdivided further with multiplication covering multiplication games, multiplication lesson plans, multiplication worksheets, multiplication quizzes and more.

Ranking Keywords

Once keywords are identified the next step is deciding which ones to focus on. The concept leads to ranking keywords based upon the likely number of clicks to your site that could be generated from each one and the expected value of potential users obtained through these clicks. Doing this requires determining for each keyword:

  • Monthly searches
  • Competition for the keyword
  • Conversion potential
  • Effort (and possible cost) required to achieve a certain ranking

Existing tools report the monthly volume of searches for each keyword (remember to add searches on Bing to those on Google). Estimating the strength of competition requires doing a search using the keyword and learning who the top-ranking sites are currently (given the volume of keywords to analyze, this is very labor intensive). If Amazon is a top site they may be difficult to surpass but if the competition includes relatively minor players, they would be easier to outrank.

The next question to answer for each keyword is: “What is the likelihood of converting someone who is searching on the keyword if they do come to my site”. For example, for Education.com, someone searching on ‘sesame street math games’ might not convert well since they don’t have the license to use Sesame Street characters in their math games. But someone searching on ‘1st grade multiplication worksheets’ would have a high probability of converting since the company is world-class in that area. The other consideration mentioned above is the effort required to achieve a degree of success. If you already have a lot of content relevant to a keyword, then search optimizing that content for the keyword might not be very costly. But, if you currently don’t have any content that is relevant or the keyword is very broad, then a great deal more work might be required.

Example of Keyword Ranking Analysis

Source: Education.com

Comparing Effort Required to Estimated Value of Keywords

Once you have produced the first table, you can make a very educated guess on your possible ranking after about 12 months (the time it may take Google/Bing to recognize your new status for that keyword).

There are known statistics on what the likely click-through rates (share of searches against the keyword) will be if you rank 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. Multiplying that by the average search volume for that keyword gives a reasonable estimate of the monthly traffic that this would generate to your site. The next step is to estimate the rate at which you will convert that traffic to members (where they register so you get their email) and/or customers (I’ll assume customers for the rest of this post but the same method would apply to members). Since you already know your existing conversion rate, in general, this could be your estimate. But, if you have been buying clicks on that keyword from Google or Bing, you may already have a better estimate of conversion. Multiplying the number of customers obtained by the LTV (Life Time Value) of a customer yields the $ value generated if the keyword obtains the estimated rank. Subtract from this the current value being obtained from the keyword (based on its current ranking) to see the incremental benefit.

Content Optimization

One important step to improve rankings is to use keywords in titles of articles. While the words to use may seem intuitive, it’s important to test variations to see how each may improve results. Will “free online multiplication games” outperform “free times table games”. The way to test this is by trying each for a different 2-week (or month) time period and see which gives a higher CTR (Click Through Rate). As discussed earlier, it’s also important to optimize the body copy against keywords. Many of our companies create a guide for writing copy that provides rules that result in better CTR.

The Importance of Links

Google views links from other sites to yours as an indication of your level of authority. The more important the site linking to you, the more it impacts Google’s view. Having a larger number of sites linking to you can drive up your Domain Authority (a search engine ranking score) which in turn will benefit rankings across all keywords. However, it’s important to be restrained in acquiring links as those from “Black Hats” (sites Google regards as somewhat bogus) can actually result in getting penalized. While getting another site to link to you will typically require some motivation for them, Allison warns that paying cash for a link is likely to result in obtaining some of them from black hat sites. Instead, motivation can be your featuring an article from the other site, selling goods from a partner, etc.

Other Issues

I won’t review it here but site architecture is also a relevant factor in optimizing SEO benefits. For a product company with tens of thousands of products, it can be extremely important to have the right titles and structure in how you list products. If you have duplicative content on your site, removing it may help your rankings, even if there was a valid reason to have such duplication. Changing the wording of content on a regular basis will help you maintain rankings.

Summary

SEO requires a well-thought-out strategy and consistent, continued execution to produce results. This is not a short-term fix, as an SEO investment will likely only start to show improvements four to six months after implementation with ongoing management. But as many of our portfolio companies can attest, it’s well worth the effort.

 

 

SoundBytes

  • It’s a new basketball season so I can’t resist a few comments. First, as much as I am a fan of the Warriors, it’s pretty foolish to view them as a lock to win as winning is very tenuous. For example, in game 5 of the finals last year, had Durant missed his late game three point shot the Warriors may have been facing the threat of a repeat of the 2016 finals – going back to Cleveland for a potential tying game.
  • Now that Russell Westbrook has two star players to accompany him we can see if I am correct that he is less valuable than Curry, who has repeatedly shown the ability to elevate all teammates. This is why I believe that, despite his two MVPs, Curry is under-rated!
  • With Stitchfix filing for an IPO, we are seeing the first of several next generation fashion companies emerging. In the filing, I noted the emphasis they place on SEO as a key component of their success. I believe new fashion startups will continue to exert pressure on traditional players. One Azure company moving towards scale in this domain is Le Tote – keep an eye on them!

When and How to Create a Valuable Marketing Event

Mike Kwatinetz Marketing, Startups , ,

Azure CEO Summit
Snapshots from Azure’s 11th Annual CEO Summit

A key marketing tool for companies is to hold an event like a user’s conference or a topical forum to build relationships with their customers and partners, drive additional revenue and/or generate business development opportunities. Azure held its 11th annual CEO Summit last week, and as we’re getting great feedback on the success of the conference, I thought it might be helpful to dig deeply into what makes a conference effective. I will use the Azure event as the example but try to abstract rules and lessons to be learned, as I have been asked for my advice on this topic by other firms and companies.

Step 1. Have a clear set of objectives

For the Azure CEO Summit, our primary objectives are to help our portfolio companies connect with:

  1. Corporate and Business Development executives from relevant companies
  2. Potential investors (VCs and Family Offices)
  3. Investment banks so the companies are on the radar and can get invited to their conferences
  4. Debt providers for those that can use debt as part of their capital structure

A secondary objective of the conference is to build Azure’s brand thereby increasing our deal flow and helping existing and potential investors in Azure understand some of the value we bring to the table.

When I created a Wall Street tech conference in the late 90’s, the objectives were quite different. They still included brand building, but I also wanted our firm to own trading in tech stocks for that week, have our sell side analysts gain reputation and following, help our bankers expand their influence among public companies, and generate a profit for the firm at the same time. We didn’t charge directly for attending but monetized through attendees increasing use of our trading desk and more companies using our firm for investment banking.

When Fortune began creating conferences, their primary objective was to monetize their brand in a new way. This meant charging a hefty price for attending. If people were being asked to pay, the program had to be very strong, which they market quite effectively.

Conferences that have clear objectives, and focus the activities on those objectives, are the most successful.

Step 2. Determine invitees based on who will help achieve those objectives

For our Summit, most of the invitees are a direct fallout from the objectives listed above. If we want to help our portfolio companies connect with the above-mentioned constituencies, we need to invite both our portfolio CEOs and the right players from corporations, VCs, family offices, investment banks and debt providers. To help our brand, inviting our LPs and potential LPs is important. To insure the Summit is at the quality level needed to attract the right attendees we also target getting great speakers.  As suggested by my partners and Andrea Drager, Azure VP (and my collaborator on Soundbytes) we invited several non-Azure Canadian startups. In advance of the summit, we asked Canadian VCs to nominate candidates they thought would be interesting for us and we picked the best 6 to participate in the summit. This led to over 70 interesting companies nominated and added to our deal flow pipeline.

Step 3. Create a program that will attract target attendees to come

This is especially true in the first few years of a conference while you build its reputation. It’s important to realize that your target attendees have many conflicting pulls on their time. You won’t get them to attend just because you want them there! Driving attendance from the right people is a marketing exercise. The first step is understanding what would be attractive to them. In Azure’s case, they might not understand the benefit of meeting our portfolio companies, but they could be very attracted by the right keynotes.

Azure’s 2017 Summit Keynote Speakers: Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento Commerce & Co-founder of Bill Me Later. Cameron Lester, Managing Director and Co-Head of Global Technology Investment Banking, Jeffries. Nagraj Kashyap, Corporate VP & Global Head, Microsoft Ventures.

Over the years we have had the heads of technology investment banking from Qatalyst, Morgan Stanley, Goldman, JP Morgan and Jeffries as one of our keynote speakers. From the corporate world, we also typically have a CEO, former CEO or chairman of notable companies like Microsoft, Veritas, Citrix, Concur and Audible as a second keynote. Added to these were CEOs of important startups like Stance and Magento and terrific technologists like the head of Microsoft Labs.

Finding the right balance of content, interaction and engagement is challenging, but it should be explicitly tied to meeting the core objectives of the conference.

Step 4. Make sure the program facilitates meeting your objectives

Since Azure’s primary objective is creating connections between our portfolio (and this year, the 6 Canadian companies) with the various other constituencies we invite, we start the day with speed dating one-on-ones of 10 minutes each. Each attendee participating in one-on-ones can be scheduled to meet up to 10 entities between 8:00AM and 9:40. Following that time, we schedule our first keynote.

In addition to participating in the one-on-ones, which start the day, 26 of our portfolio companies had speaking slots at the Summit, intermixed with three compelling keynote speakers. Company slots are scheduled between keynotes to maximize continued participation. This schedule takes us to about 5:00pm. We then invite the participants and additional VCs, lawyers and other important network connections to join us for dinner. The dinner increases everyone’s networking opportunity in a very relaxed environment.

These diverse types of interaction phases throughout the conference (one-on-ones, presentations, discussions, and networking) all facilitate a different type of connection between attendees, focused on maximizing the opportunity for our portfolio companies to build strong connections.

Azure Company Presentations
Azure Portfolio Company CEO Presentations: Chairish, Megabots & Atacama

Step 5. Market the program you create to the target attendees

I get invited to about 30 conferences each year plus another 20-30 events. It’s safe to assume that most of the invitees to the Azure conference get a similar (or greater) number of invitations. What this means is that it’s unlikely that people will attend if you send an invitation but then don’t effectively market the event (especially in the first few years). It is important to make sure every key invitee gets a personal call, email, or other message from an executive walking them through the agenda and highlighting the value to them (link to fortune could also go here). For the Azure event, we highlight the great speakers but also the value of meeting selected portfolio companies. Additionally, one of my partners or I connect with every attendee we want to do one-on-ones with portfolio companies to stress why this benefits them and to give them the chance to alter their one-on-one schedule. This year we managed over 320 such meetings.

When I created the first “Quattrone team” conference on Wall Street, we marketed it as an exclusive event to portfolio managers. While the information exchanged was all public, the portfolio managers still felt they would have an investment edge by being at a smaller event (and we knew the first year’s attendance would be relatively small) where all the important tech companies spoke and did one-on-one meetings. For user conferences, it can help to land a great speaker from one of your customers or from the industry. For example, if General Electric, Google, Microsoft or some similar important entity is a customer, getting them to speak will likely increase attendance. It also may help to have an industry guru as a speaker. If you have the budget, adding an entertainer or other star personality can also add to the attraction, as long as the core agenda is relevant to attendees.

Step 6. Decide on the metrics you will use to measure success

It is important to set targets for what you want to accomplish and then to measure whether you’ve achieved those targets. For Azure, the number of entities that attend (besides our portfolio), the number of one-on-one meetings and the number of follow-ups post the conference that emanate from one-on-one are three of the metrics we measure. One week after the conference, I already know that we had over 320 one-on-ones which, so far, has led to about 50 follow ups that we are aware of including three investments in our portfolio. We expect to learn of additional follow up meetings but this has already exceeded our targets.

Step 7. Make sure the value obtained from the conference exceeds its cost

It is easy to spend money but harder to make sure the benefit of that spend exceeds its cost. On one end of the spectrum, some conferences have profits as one of the objectives. But in many cases, the determination of success is not based on profits, but rather on meeting objectives at a reasonable cost. I’ve already discussed Azure’s objectives but most of you are not VCs. For those of you dealing with customers, your objectives can include:

  1. Signing new customers
  2. Reducing churn of existing customers
  3. Developing a better understanding of how to evolve your product
  4. Strong press pickup / PR opportunity

Spending money on a conference should always be compared to other uses of those marketing dollars. To the degree you can be efficient in managing it, the conference can become a solid way to utilize marketing dollars. Some of the things we do for the Azure conference to control cost which may apply to you include:

  1. Partnering with a technology company to host our conference instead of holding it at a hotel. This only works if there is value to your partner. Cost savings is about 60-70%.
  2. Making sure our keynotes are very relevant but are at no cost. You can succeed at this with keynotes from your customers and/or the industry. Cost savings is whatever you might have paid someone.
  3. Having the dinner for 150 people at my house. This has two benefits: it is a much better experience for those attending and the cost is about 70% less than having it at a venue.

Summary

I have focused on using the Azure CEO Summit as the primary example but the rules laid out apply in general. They not only will help you create a successful conference but following them means only holding it if its value to you exceeds its cost.

 

SoundBytes

The warriors…

Last June I wrote about why Kevin Durant should join the Warriors

If you look at that post, you’ll see that my logic appears to have been born out, as my main reason was that Durant was likely to win a championship and this would be very instrumental in helping his reputation/legacy.

Not mentioned in that post was the fact that he would also increase his enjoyment of playing, because playing with Curry, Thompson, Green and the rest of the Warriors is optimizing how the game should be played

Now it’s up to both Durant and Curry to agree to less than cap salaries so the core of the team can be kept intact for many years. If they do, and win multiple championships, they’ll probably increase endorsement revenue. But even without that offset my question is “How much is enough?” I believe one can survive nicely on $30-$32 million a year (Why not both agree to identical deals for 4 years, not two?). Trying for the maximum is an illusion that can be self-defeating. The difference will have zero impact on their lives, but will keep players like Iguodala and Livingston with the Warriors, which could have a very positive impact. I’m hoping they can also keep West, Pachulia and McGee as well.

It would also be nice if Durant and Curry got Thompson and Green to provide a handshake agreement that they would follow the Durant/Curry lead on this and sign for the same amount per year when their contracts came up. Or, if Thompson and Green can extend now, to do the extension at equal pay to what Curry and Durant make in the extension years. By having all four at the same salary at the end of the period, the Warriors would be making a powerful statement of how they feel about each other.

Amazon & Whole Foods…

Amazon’s announced acquisition of Whole Foods is very interesting. In a previous post, we predicted that Amazon would open physical stores. Our reasoning was that over 90% of retail revenue still occurs offline and Amazon would want to attack that. I had expected these to be Guide Stores (not carrying inventory but having samples of products). Clearly this acquisition shows that, at least in food, Amazon wants to go even further. I will discuss this in more detail in a future post.

Lessons Learned from Anti-Consumer Practices/Technologies in Tech and eCommerce

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Marketing, Metrics , ,

One example of the anti-consumer practices by airline loyalty programs.

As more and more of our life consists of interacting with technology, it is easier and easier to have our time on an iPhone, computer or game device become all consuming. The good news is that it is so easy for each of us to interact with colleagues, friends and relatives; to shop from anywhere; to access transportation on demand; and to find information on just about anything anytime. The bad news is that anyone can interact with us: marketers can more easily bombard us, scammers can find new and better ways to defraud us, and identity thieves can access our financials and more. When friends email us or post something on Facebook, there is an expectation that we will respond.  This leads to one of the less obvious negatives: marketers and friends may not consider whether what they send is relevant to us and can make us inefficient.

In this post, I want to focus on lessons entrepreneurs can learn from products and technologies that many of us use regularly but that have glaring inefficiencies in their design, or those that employ business practices that are anti-consumer. One of the overriding themes is that companies should try to adjust to each consumer’s preferences rather than force customers to do unwanted things. Some of our examples may sound like minor quibbles but customers have such high expectations that even small offenses can result in lost customers.

Lesson 1: Getting email marketing right

Frequency of email 

The question: “How often should I be emailing existing and prospective customers?” has an easy answer. It is: “As often as they want you to.”  If you email them too frequently the recipients may be turned off. If you send too few, you may be leaving money on the table. Today’s email marketing is still in a rudimentary stage but there are many products that will automatically adjust the frequency of emails based on open rates. Every company should use these. I have several companies that send me too many emails and I have either opted out of receiving them or only open them on rare occasions. In either case the marketer has not optimized their sales opportunity.

Relevance of email

Given the amount of data that companies have on each of us one would think that emails would be highly personalized around a customer’s preferences and product applicability. One thing to realize is that part of product applicability is understanding frequency of purchase of certain products and not sending a marketing email too soon for a product that your customer would be unlikely to be ready to buy. One Azure portfolio company, Filter Easy, offers a service for providing air filters. Filter Easy gives each customer a recommended replacement time from the manufacturer of their air conditioner. They then let the customer decide replacement frequency and the company only attempts to sell units based on this time table. Because of this attention to detail, Filter Easy has one of the lowest customer churn rates of any B to C company. In contrast to this, I receive marketing emails from the company I purchase my running shoes from within a week of buying new ones even though they should know my replacement cycle is about every 6 months unless there is a good sale (where I may buy ahead). I rarely open their emails now, but would open more and be a candidate for other products from them if they sent me fewer emails and thought more about which of their products was most relevant to me given what I buy and my purchase frequency. Even the vaunted Amazon has sent me emails to purchase a new Kindle within a week or so of my buying one, when the replacement cycle of a Kindle is about 3 years.

In an idea world, each customer or potential customer would receive emails uniquely crafted for them. An offer to a customer would be ranked by likely value based on the customer profile and item profile. For example, customers who only buy when items are on sale should be profiled that way and only sent emails when there is a sale. Open Road, another Azure company, has created a daily email of deeply discounted e-books and gets a very high open rate due to the relevance of their emails (but cuts frequency for subscribers whose open rates start declining).

Lesson 2: Learning from Best Practices of Others

I find it surprising when a company launches a new version of a software application without attempting to incorporate best practices of existing products. Remember Lotus 123? They refused to create a Windows version of their spreadsheet for a few years and instead developed one for OS/2 despite seeing Excel’s considerable functionality and ease of use sparking rapid adoption. By the time they created a Windows version, it was too late and they eventually saw their market share erode from a dominant position to a minimal level.  In more modern times, Apple helped Blackberry survive well past it’s expected funeral by failing to incorporate many of Blackberry’s strong email features into the iPhone. Even today, after many updates to mail, Apple still is missing such simple features like being able to hit a “B” to go to the bottom of my email stack on the iPhone. Instead, one needs to scroll down through hundreds of emails to get to the bottom if you want to process older emails first. This wastes lots of time. But Microsoft Outlook in some ways is even worse as it has failed to incorporate lookup technology from Blackberry (and now from Apple) that always allows finding an email address from a person’s name. When one has not received a recent email from a person in your contact list, and the person’s email address is not their name, outlook requires an exact email address. When this happens, I wind up looking it the person’s contact information on my phone!

Best practices extends beyond software products to marketing, packaging, upselling and more. For example, every ecommerce company should study Apple packaging to understand how a best in class branding company packages its products. Companies also have learned that in many cases they need to replicate Amazon by providing free shipping.

Lesson 3: The Customer is Usually Right

Make sure customer loyalty programs are positive for customers but affordable for the company

With few exceptions, companies should adopt a philosophy that is very customer-centric. Failing to do so has negative consequences. For example, the airline industry has moved towards giving customers little consideration and this results in many customers no longer having a preferred airline, instead looking for best price and/or most convenient scheduling. Whereas the mileage programs from airlines were once a very attractive way of retaining customers, the value of miles has eroded to such a degree that travelers have lost much of the benefit. This may have been necessary for the airlines as the liability associated with outstanding points reached billions of dollars. But, in addition, airlines began using points as a profit center by selling miles to credit cards at 1.5 cents per mile. Then, to make this a profitable sale, moved average redemption value to what I estimate to be about 1 cent per point. This leads to a concern of mine for consumers. Airlines are selling points at Kiosks and online for 3 cents per point, in effect charging 3 times their cash redemption value.

The lesson here is that if you decide to initiate a loyalty points program, make sure the benefits to the customer increase retention, driving additional revenue. But also make sure that the cost of the program does not exceed the additional revenue. (This may not have been the case for airlines when their mileage points were worth 3-4 cents per mile).  It is important to recognize the future cost associated with loyalty points at the time they are given out (based on their exchange value) as this lowers the gross margin of the transaction. We know of a company that failed to understand that the value of points awarded for a transaction so severely reduced the associated gross margin that it was nearly impossible for them to be profitable.

Make sure that customer service is very customer centric

During the Thanksgiving weekend I was buying a gift online and found that Best Buy had what I was looking for on sale. I filled out all the information to purchase the item, but when I went to the last step in the process, my order didn’t seem to be confirmed. I repeated the process and again had the same experience. So, I waited a few days to try again, but by then the sale was no longer valid. My assistant engaged in a chat session with their customer service to try to get them to honor the sale price, and this was refused (we think she was dealing with a bot but we’re not positive). After multiple chats, she was told that I could try going to one of their physical stores to see if they had it on sale (extremely unlikely). Instead I went to Amazon and bought a similar product at full price and decided to never buy from Best Buy’s online store again. I know from experience that Amazon would not behave that way and Azure tries to make sure none of our portfolio companies would either. Turning down what would still have been a profitable transaction and in the process losing a customer is not a formula for success! While there may be some lost revenue in satisfying a reasonable customer request the long term consequence of failing to do so usually will far outweigh this cost.

 

Soundbytes

My friend, Adam Lashinsky, from Fortune has just reported that an insurance company is now offering lower rates for drivers of Teslas who deploy Autopilot driver-assistance. Recall that Tesla was one of our stock picks for 2017 and this only reinforces our belief that the stock will continue to outperform.

 

 

The Ultimate Marketing Framework

Mike Kwatinetz Ecommerce, Marketing

Combining a Top Marketing Specialist’s Framework with Our Thoughts

We just spent several hours speaking with Marc Schwartz, an Integrated Marketing Specialist.  Marc has been in marketing for 25 years in various high level positions with companies like Kraft/Gevalia, Publishers Clearing House, Starwood Hotels, Wyndham, Pfizer and Sanofi. His experience spans both online and offline. In this post we combine his concept of a marketing framework with our thoughts on specific topics within that framework.

Creating a Marketing Framework

Marc points out that it is important for every company to have a marketing framework that has three common threads throughout:

  • Consistently build your brand throughout every step in the process.
  • Measure everything – “If you can’t measure it, don’t do it!”
  • Be customer centric – always think about how the customer will feel about anything you choose to do

Marketing can be broken down into 4 important steps and companies will likely need different people with different skill sets to address each step:

  1. Acquisition
  2. Retention
  3. Upsell /Cross sell
  4. Winning Back Customers

1. Customer Acquisition – The 40/40/20 Rule

Marc’s experience has shown that in acquiring new customers 40% of success has to do with targeting the right people, 40% with the nature of the offer and 20% with creative.  Worth noting while creative and messaging is critical, in direct marketing the right offer delivered to the right audience is the most important factor. Targeting is not about mass marketing but rather about knowing your potential customers and finding the most efficient way to reach them.

Targeting

One important thing I have found is that it may make sense to spend more money per potential customer (referred to as Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC) if you reach individuals who will be greater spenders on your product (this is referred to as Life Time Revenue or LTR).  For example Facebook charges more to find closer matches to your target demographic but spending more initially has led several Azure portfolio companies to acquire a stronger customer set which in turn increases LTR and and makes the higher spending worthwhile. The key is to compare the CAC of each particular acquisition channel to the value of the customer (Lifetime profits on the customer or LTV). When LTV is higher than the CAC that means the customer is profitable. But we discourage our companies from going after marginally profitable customers so I would encourage you to think in terms of LTV being at least twice the CAC (I won’t invest in a startup unless I believe the ratio can exceed 3X). Each acquisition channel can become less effective when going beyond a certain scale but that scale will differ dramatically with the products being offered. The determination of where to cap spend should be decided by gradually increasing your commitment on a successful channel until you find that the incremental spend is not yielding good incremental results.  It is important to avoid being a one trick pony so using multiple channels helps scale customer acquisition without hitting diminishing returns for a much longer period. Any channel that tests well should be utilized with the total spend being apportioned based on effectiveness (the ratio of LTV/CAC) of each channel.

The Offer

Each campaign should lead with an offer that is a strong value proposition for the target customer. The offer must have a very clear call to action. Saying “try my product” would not usually be viewed as a compelling offer. At Gevalia Coffee, the company offered a free coffee maker if you began subscribing. At Publisher’s Clearing House the company entered you in a contest where you could win $1,000,000. More recently, Warren Buffet offered $1 billion to anyone who picked every game right in the NCAA tournament (his risk of paying out is low as the odds of there being a correct answer among 100 million unique entries is less than one in 10 billion!).  Marc points out that his experience indicates there is a direct correlation between the value of what you give away and retention. The more compelling the offer, the lower the retention as more “cherry pickers” sign up so starting with a free month of a physical product can potentially backfire.  In fact, these days, there are bloggers who tell their following, “Go to this site for a free month of some product”. It would be surprising if your company recovered it’s CAC on this set of potential customers as followers of such bloggers will rarely become paying customers.

Therefore it’s important to find the balance between your brand equity and the value of the premium used.  While a lower valued premium will probably lead to fewer customers being acquired, it is likely to also lead to higher LTV for those customers and stronger brand equity. The key with this, as with everything in this blog post, is a continuous A/B testing philosophy to see what works best.

One note of caution: From early November through late December, the cost of virtually every form of marketing goes up due to increased purchasing that takes place for Christmas gifts. If your product won’t benefit from this, your annual plan should have the lowest spend (if any) during this period.

Creative

Marc ranks creative at 20% of the formula for winning customers. This is half the importance of proper targeting and the nature of the offer because great creative can’t overcome a poor offer or going after the wrong customers. However, the creative is where you get to explain who you are (your brand statement), why the offer has value to the target customer and your call to action. If the call to action is not clear enough than you won’t get the desired action. The creative needs to be A/B/C tested for best language, fonts, colors, graphics, etc. Every element of the creative has an impact on how well the offer performs. You also need to decide if different offers and/or creative should be used for different subsets of the target customers. One of the best examples of this that I have seen was a campaign that targeted graduates of various schools and led with something like: “Your Harvard degree is worth even more if you …” The conversion rate of this highly targeted campaign was more than double the norm for this company.

2. Optimizing Customer Retention

On Boarding

I’m sure you have heard the expression: “You only get one chance to make a good first impression.”  Your best opportunity comes after the customer has placed their order (although the acquisition process was the first step). For this section I’m going to assume you are sending the customer physical goods. Marc calls this first experience “The Brand Moment”. If you think of how Apple packages its products, they have clearly enhanced their brand through the packaging with every element of the package as perfect as they can make it. Opening their box certainly enhances the Apple brand. So you need to balance the expense of better quality packaging against the degree to which it enhances your brand equity. The box itself should be branded and can contain a message that you want to relate to the customer. The nature of collateral material, how many items, what messaging on the materials and the order they are placed in the box needs to be researched. Have you included easy to find information on how to resolve a problem? Should there be a customer support phone number to call if something is amiss? Is your brand position re-emphasized in the materials?  A good impression can lead to higher LTV, recommendations for other customers and more.

Communications

Marc believes the first step in communications should be to welcome the new customer. This would usually be through an email (or snail mail). Marc finds an actual phone call is highly effective but costly.  Obviously your business model will determine the appropriate action to welcome the new customer. The welcome email (or call) is an opportunity to re-emphasize your brand and its value to the customer. It’s important to communicate regularly with every customer. He actually found that placing a phone call can often improve customer retention even more than giving something for free.  To the degree that it makes sense, customers should be segmented and each segment should get their own drip campaign of emails.  Don’t over communicate!  This can be even more negative than under communicating and can cause churn. Of course if you can offer real value to the customer in greater frequency than do so – for example, customers that sign up to a “daily deal” product probably expect daily emails. There are some email platforms that automatically adjust frequency based on open rates (very low open rates are a good indicator of over communication with that customer).

Retention Offers

Various types of premiums can be used for retention. Much like those used in acquisition there should be careful testing of cost vs expanded LTV. For any offer, tests should be constructed that track how paired groups perform who haven’t received the offer vs those that have.  If the LTV of the group receiving the offer doesn’t exceed the LTV of the paired group by more than the cost of the offer than the offer should not be rolled out. Marc found in the past (in a subscription model) that if an offer is too valuable the company may see a large churn of customers in the month subsequent to the offer being received.

3. Cross Sell/Upsell

There are multiple ways to think about increasing a customer’s LTR:

  1. Keep them as customers longer
  2. Get them to buy more frequently
  3. Get their average invoice value to be higher, i.e. cross sell/upsell

The strategies I spoke about for retention actually focus on the first two of these. The third is an extremely valuable part of a marketing arsenal and I am surprised on how underutilized this tactic is among many companies. To begin, you need to have things in your product set to upsell or cross sell. The items should be relevant to your brand and to your customers. If you are already shipping a box to your customer as their base order, adding another item or shifting to a more expensive version of the base item typically makes the order not only higher in revenue but also can increase the Gross Margin on the order as shipping and fulfillment are unlikely to increase much, if at all (and these days shipping is usually absorbed by the seller). Every company needs to think about brand positive ways to make such offers.

When I was the primary analyst on Dell it was the early days of selling online. Dell quickly created a script that included several upsells like “add another x bytes of storage at 75% of the normal price” (and huge GM to Dell), “financing available for your computer”, etc.  Several phone manufacturers started to offer the ability to insure your screen against breakage (usually from a drop). What is interesting there is insurance sometimes covers things the company would have done anyway but is now being paid extra.

For clothing companies, saying “this blouse would go very well with the skirt you’re buying” or “for the suit you bought which of these three ties would you like to buy”, can substantially increase cart size and increase margin.  One company I’ve dealt with has an increasing discount on the entire order based on the total dollars you spend (net of the discount). Since it sells T-shirts, socks, underwear, etc., it’s easy to add to your order to get to the next discount level and given my personality I always wind up buying enough to qualify for the maximum 20% off.

4. Winning Back Customers

Cancel/Save Tactics

Customer service is usually the first line of defense for preventing customer cancellations. The key to saving a customer is to listen to his or her issue that is causing the cancellation and to be able to adjust your relationship in order to solve that issue. Most companies match each cancellation reason with a particular offer. A simple example is if a customer thinks the product/service is too expensive, a company may offer a discount.

Creating rebuttals and scripts

Your company should create a list of reasons why a customer might cancel. If a new reason why a customer cancels arises, add it to the list. For each reason they might cancel, you must prepare a rebuttal that addresses that issue. If she is receiving too many offers you can agree to cut the frequency to what she prefers, if she is unhappy with something you sent her you can agree to take it back or give a coupon towards the next purchase, etc.  Marc says the key is creating scripts and emails that address every reason for cancellation with a counter that you believe will make the customer happy (without too much cost burden on you). Once you have this in place, anyone who will be dealing with the unhappy customer needs to be trained on how to use the script and what escalation (to a supervisor) procedure should be used.

Winning back Customers

The least expensive customer to acquire is a previous customer. You know quite a bit about them: what they prefer, how profitable they were and more.  Given what you know, churned customers can be segregated into groups as you are probably willing to spend more to win back the high value group than a lower value one. For each group you need to go through the process of original acquisition, but with a lot more specific knowledge. So an offer needs to be determined for each group and creative needs to be created. The methodology should parallel that of customer acquisition with the difference being a defined target.

5. Summary

The steps of the framework have been outlined in detail. But there are a few more points to be made.

  1. SEO should be utilized by all companies as it’s the lowest cost of access to target customers.
  2. Work with a very strong agency partner who understands the fundamentals of marketing.
  3. Have a solid set of vendors for things like email, campaign management, etc.
  4. Data is crucial. Make sure you track as much as you can regarding every potential and actual customer.
  5. If you can’t measure it don’t do it!

SoundBytes

  • There has been much chatter this season about Curry becoming the 8th player with 50/40/90 stats – 50% field goal shooting, 40% 3-point shooting and 90% from the foul line. My partner Paul Ferris noted that if we raise this to 50/45/90 Curry is only the third. And the surprise is that the other two are Steve Nash (not a surprise) and Steve Kerr! Data for this observation was gleaned from BasketballReference.com.