Post-purchase surveys can teach you a lot about your customers, and no one knows that better than my most recent guest, Trevor Crump. 

Trevors is the co-founder of Bestie, which is one of the fastest-growing post-purchase apps on Shopify. 

We talked about the key questions you should ask your customers and how you can turn their answers into extra cash! 

Make sure you give this episode a listen to learn key things like...

• The 3 questions that need to be on your post-purchase survey. 
• Where your customers are coming from (because we all know how hard attribution can be). 
• What Trevor has learned from running one of the most popular post-purchase survey apps on Shopify. 
• Plus, some of the most surprising things surveys can reveal. 

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Transcript:

Trevor:

So one of the things we talk a lot about is you've got this, there's a lot of trends out there that merchants follow. Oh, I'm seeing a lot of people do use U G C right now, so I'm going to create U G C. I see a lot of people creating listicle ads such as for the five reasons why I bought Tushy or whatever. And so I think that there's this two-tone approach that you need to go about. The brand should go about things. One is I think that following trends can be great. Try to be early in some of those trends because you'll see that U G C is still super important, but it is not doing what it used to do and people are starting to see through a lot of it. So you got to go a little bit deeper.

Brett:

It's time for this spicy curry hot. Take the segment of the show when I get just a little bit spicy. Let me quote Mark Twain for you. He said, it's not what we don't know that gets us into trouble. It's the things we know for certain that just ain't. So. Now I believe what we don't know about our customers is hurting us, but I also believe there's some deeply held beliefs, myths we have about our customers that just aren't true. As an example, I think a lot of people believe they know the reason their customers buy from them, but often they're off base. So one of the things we talk about in this show is a brand who believed the two main reasons people bought from them were one, cost savings, and two, the fact that their product was environmentally friendly. It turned out as they asked their customers, less than 10% of people believe those two reasons were important in purchasing.

And so can you imagine what if you were crafting all of your sales pitches in a way that only landed with one out of 10 in your audience, or you could shift it? And when you really know why people buy now, you can craft your message so that it strikes a chord with nine out of 10 of your ideal prospects. So what myths do you have that need to be busted? Hopefully we'll answer that on this show. Hot Take over. Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, c e o of o m g Commerce. And today we're talking about do you really know your customer? Do you know them as well as you think? Do you, I mean, do you really, really know them? Because if you knew your customers better, I bet you do at least a few things differently. And so today my guest is Trevor Crump. He is one of the co-founders of Bestie Bestie app, and so excited about this topic. I'm very passionate about it. I love the tool that Trevor and team have designed. Trevor is a fellow podcast host, so when you get two podcast guys together, it's going to be a little bit nutty. It's going to probably go off the rails, it's going to be valuable, but it may go off the rails. So with that, Trevor, how's it going, man? Welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time.

Trevor:

Yeah, man, I'm super excited to be here. Really, really appreciate it. Yeah, I actually love interviewing other podcast hosts because dude, so

Brett:

Fun.

Trevor:

It's a blast sometimes when you're interviewing somebody you never know, are they going to be short-winded? Are they going to be long-winded? Am I going to have to be cutting this person off? Am I going to have to be stretching for questions? And so sometimes the episode doesn't go where you think it should go, but it always turns out super entertaining and super valuable. And so I am a big fan of it, man.

Brett:

Yeah, me too. Because yeah, and really, I don't know which is worse, you have a guest who really doesn't say much. That's difficult, but you can also have someone that just doesn't know when to stop, and then you've got to interrupt because it needs to be a dialogue. If it's not a dialogue, it's not an interesting radio. And so yeah, I like interviewing podcast hosts as well, because what I'm always trying to do just for fun, when someone asks me a question, I'm a guest on another podcast, I'm trying to think how do I package this answer in a way that's authentic, meaningful, fun, but also where I don't talk for seven straight minutes because the host wants to talk to right? And the listener needs that. So that's awesome, man. So first of all, what is your pod and why did you start down the path of podcasting and yeah, tell us a little bit about that. Yeah,

Trevor:

So our podcast is called the Unstoppable Marketer. It's specifically meant to interview marketers and entrepreneurs in the D two C space. So we interview founders, we interview VPs of marketing, CMOs, et cetera. And it's just really to figure out where were you before, where are you now, where are you going and what are you doing to get there and what are some of those big mistakes? And so yeah, I've got a following on social media on Instagram and TikTok that's a decent size, and so was doing a really good job at the short form content side of things. At the time, our main business was actually a marketing agency. So rather than you're very specific on the YouTube side of things, Google side of things, we were very specific in TikTok and Meta. That was our big time breaded butter, little Google too as well, just as ancillary. But TikTok and Meta was where

Brett:

Supports it well, provides a good underpinning for TikTok and other socials. Google kind of closes the deal.

Trevor:

Yeah, absolutely. And so I was getting so much traction, so much interaction on my short form content that I needed to complete. We wanted to complete that funnel. And so we said, let's create a podcast for the people who I've just learned that anybody can be a short form content. It's pretty easy, especially with AI nowadays, if you're good at speaking, you can literally have AI write everything out for you. And as long as you can present it, you can look like you're super knowledgeable when you may not be. And so we said, let's create a podcast, and me and my business partner, we love to just talk and we love to meet other people. And so we created the podcast and it's been awesome ever since. Man, it's been really successful. It's got us a lot of good contacts and also a lot of business.

Brett:

That's one of my favorite parts about the podcast is just the people you meet. You get to hang out for an hour with smart people like you, grilling you with questions and learning, and you get to share that with people. And you're right, you can fake a two minute, one minute TikTok video. It's pretty hard to fake a 45 minute interview. And so the truth comes out when you go long form, which is super fun. So let's dive into a few things. First of all. So to kind of have a preview for the audience, we're going to talk about how do we get to know our customers better? How do we craft surveys, what do we ask? When do we ask it? How do we then use that to improve all the metrics we love like lowering CAC and raising L T V and all kinds of good stuff. So I can't wait to get into that. Also, going to talk about some surprising lessons like, hey, you thought this about your customer, but then actually the opposite was true. So we're going to get into that in a minute. But you ran an agency and then you pivoted to bestie app. Talk to us about that. Why'd you make the pivot? When did that happen? Why did that happen?

Trevor:

Yeah, super good question, man. Actually, before I started the agency, I was formerly A C M O for a big eight figure brand out here in Salt Lake City called Fond Design, which is a women's diaper bag and accessory company. And at the time, this was back in 2018, attribution tools were really, really expensive. I mean, they still are, right? But they were really expensive back then, and I could not convince my C M O or not my cmo, my C F O to get us, give me the budget for an attribution tool. And so we just were doing a little research, we were trying to figure some things out at the time, back in 2018, it was over attributing everything to us. So now it's under attributing. Back then it was over attributing meaning like Klaviyo, if my Shopify said I made a million bucks that month, Klaviyo's telling me that I made 500,000. Facebook's telling me I made 700,000. Google's telling me I made 300,000, but I'm only making a million, right? Yeah.

Brett:

So according to all the tools, the aggregate of 2 million, but you only made a million. And so yeah, exactly one over index thing over attributing. Now post I was 14 really under attributing,

Trevor:

Right? A hundred percent. So it's like, Hey, we got to figure this out. So we were just doing, me and my e-comm director, we were doing some just brainstorming and we saw that our email open rate for our thank you email was like 80% right? And normally our open rates back then were like 20, 30%. And I'm like, holy cow, 80% open rate, 50% click-through rate. This is massively valuable real estate. It's that confirmation, Hey, your order was placed. Here's your shipping information. So we just got a freemium account on SurveyMonkey and we asked three questions. We said, Hey, how did you hear about us? What brought you to the website today? And how long have you known about us? And let's see if that just information gives us some solid information. And we started learning things about our customer that we had no idea, and it became the most pivotal piece of the puzzle when it came to us understanding how our customers heard about us.

And so we started running surveys like crazy through that. So the moment we got enough attribution surveys, then we started asking questions about why they were buying the product. Then we started asking questions about who they were, what podcasts they listened to, what influencers they followed. And it just became the catalyst to so much that we did. And so fast forward, it helped us scale from this seven figures to an eight figure business. Fast forward back to this agency and we just kept finding that a lot of D two C brands, all these companies that we're working with these merchants, none of 'em were talking to their customers. The way they were talking to their customer was usually through dms or an Instagram poll. That was the majority of their conversations. And so we thought, Hey, listen, remember we did this back then let's find a way to automate this and build this process out and really help brands get a better qualitative understanding of who their customer is and what makes them tick. And so we started to develop bestie in 2022, just going through developers overseas and contractors and Fiverr and going down all these routes. And eventually we came with product market fit in first of this year, got approved on the Shopify app store and really just started grinding and getting more and more customers and the rest has been history.

Brett:

Love it, man. And I know you guys are really growing rapidly and I love this process. So let's talk about those three questions for just a minute. And you guys went low tech, right? Or lower tech, right? You used that thank you email. You used SurveyMonkey, right? We got inexpensive tools available if you need 'em. And I know Bessie is inexpensive as well, but yeah, you hear about us, what brought you here today and how long have you known about us? And I think once you get these answers, then it just blows your mind. You're like, wait a minute, I didn't know that. And now that I know that, now I want to know more. And once I know more, then we can start changing things. And so what were some of the surprising things you guys learned? And you said that was called Fawn Design was the name of the brand. What were some of the surprising things you learned in that first round of questions?

Trevor:

Two really big things that we learned. One thing that we learned was that 40% of our audience, the first time they heard about us was through word of mouth. So that was the biggest channel. And as you know, there's no attribution tool that can account for word of mouth. There will be. And so we always had this fear of, okay, hey, we're at our highest CAC possible right now, so any more money we spend, we start to go over that CAC and things become inefficient. And so that was a huge learning is we were stuck in this spend of 50,000, $60,000 a month. And when we saw that, it's like, okay, hey, 40% of our customers first heard about us through other people buying the bags and then walking around with them. So essentially the way we sell more bags is by selling more bags. Exactly. Does that make sense?

Brett:

Each bag you sell is now a

Trevor:

Walking advertisement

Brett:

Billboard. And now that new customer is not just the value of the new customer, but now they're going to be attracting other customers.

Trevor:

Well, not only that, but moms, if anything about the mom world, anything that helps moms be better moms or look like better moms from a style aesthetic perspective, they are going to shout it from the rooftops all. Absolutely. So not only did we say let's try doubling spend and just see what happens. Can I get approval from our C ffo and can we go from 50 grand a month to a hundred thousand dollars a month and just see what happens

Brett:

There? The CFO didn't sleep good that night. Trevor, the CFO was like, man, I don't want to release this money. But

Trevor:

After 40 days, all of a sudden, like CAC went up a little bit, but it was like, Hey, just keep with it, keep with it, keep with it. The other thing that we learned was that our buying cycle was under 30 days. So that was the other thing for us. So it was like, okay, cool. We theoretically should see the fruits of the labors of the word of mouth by doubling our spend within a month here. So it's not like we're going to have to go six months and hope this is going to work and have a really, really bad CAC for six months, but then it's going to start to get better. So that was huge for us.

Brett:

Love that. So you found this key insight word of mouth is driving 40% of business, so let's just sell more bags to sell even more bags, but then knowing 30 day selling cycle, we don't have to commit to a test for that long, so let's commit to a test for 30, 40 days now we should be able to get some really meaningful data and see if our theory was correct.

Trevor:

Totally. And then the other thing that we did is we built, I know there's a lot of arguments and debates around loyalty programs if they work or not. And we took our stab at building a loyalty program because we thought that was a no brainer. If people are organically sharing about us, 40% of people are organically sharing about us. Let's build a loyalty program. And the original loyalty program we built didn't work very well for us. We did just your standard loyalty program that you're going to find on any other website, and it just ended up being more work to the customer to go through those hoops and they were going to share about it anyway. But what we actually ended up doing that started moving the needle big time is we created incentives to say, Hey, not only if you shout to us, shout out to us on social media, we are going to refund five orders a week and we're going to give anybody who shouts to us, they're going to enter in a giveaway and get a hundred dollars off their next order. And so we just started doing a bunch of things like that that started getting us more content and more opportunities to work with new influencers. And yeah, it was awesome, dude. So that was one massive learning. I can go into a ton that we learned there, but yeah, it was really cool.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. And I think that's something to keep in mind is with loyalty programs, especially if you've got a product like this where tight community, it's beneficial to the shopper to share your product, makes them feel good, look good, all those things people are going to share anyway. So if you create a loyalty program, it's overly complex, overly hard to understand and feels like a lot of work, you're not gaining any ground. So people are going to share anyway. But I love this where just make it fun, make it random, make it like, Hey, you're going to share anyway. We will do these little fun things and celebrate it. So shout at us on social media and we'll make it worth your while. Super, super smart. Let's dive in then, and we'll probably drill into some other lessons there from Fawn because I am interested in that, but I want to shift fast forward a little bit. So now with Bestie, I know you're working with lots of different brands. What are some of the scenarios where brand thought one thing was true about their customer? Did a survey found actually that the opposite or something totally different was true? Let's talk about some examples.

Trevor:

Maybe the first one that comes to my mind and I say these people, they've given us permission to talk about this story. So there's a brand out there called pajamas. And Pajamas is like a built-in potty training aid for parents who are trying to teach their kids how to not wet the bed at night. So essentially it's like reusable diapers that you can rewash, kids can pee in it and it doesn't soak their bed. And when they originally came to their agency, they said, Hey, people buy us for two reasons. They buy us because it saves them money and diapers cost a lot of money, number one, so it's going to save you money. And number two reason is it's going to save the environment because I think every pull-up takes 15 years to decompose. And so there was this big eco push that they were trying to go.

So sure enough, the agency that they're working with creates all the content around those two solutions. And because this is such a problem solution product, people see it and problem solution products tend to sell themselves usually. Now when you really hit on the actual reason somebody buys it, they sell 10 x more. So they were running those ads for quite some time. And then we got bestie set up and we said, Hey, I know that these are the two reasons why you say people are buying from you, but what if we just created a survey and we asked one question and the question just said, what motivated you to buy pajamas today? And we listed those two right cost savings, and then we added three or four more responses with one open-ended response, like an other open-ended response. And after a week or so, we got enough statistical significance data that said, okay, let's see if eco-friendly and diaper savings costs are the number one and number two drivers and eco-friendly accounted for about 7% of the reason why people purchased and cost savings accounted for about 9%. Wow.

Brett:

So two of the lower priority reasons that people are purchasing that. Really interesting. So what were the winners?

Trevor:

The number one, which was 53% over half the time somebody's buying was they wanted to shorten the window it took for them to potty train their child. So they didn't want to have a six, eight-year-old wedding, the bed they wanted to get them in, they wanted to fix that, nip that in the bud quicker. So that was the number one reason by 53% shortening up that window. And then the second reason, the second reason, which was like 24%, was to improve child's confidence. No five-year-old feels confident going to bed with a pull-up on, but if they're wearing pajamas, they don't feel like they're a little baby anymore.

Brett:

I love that so much. And as a parent, and I don't know if you know this, Trevor, a lot of the listeners do. My wife and I have eight kids, count 'em, eight

Trevor:

Kids. Oh my gosh,

Brett:

Dude, oldest is out of the house, second oldest is in college. Yeah, lots of kids. So dude, the number of, we calculated one time the number of pul numbers, number of diapers, and now I've forgotten, but I think it's like four to 8,000 to 6,000 per kid or something like that is the average. So you do the math there, it's an insane amount of pull-ups and diapers. They are expensive. What's really interesting, I think this is a difference between this is the business owner mindset. This is what we think is most important from a business standpoint. But then when you put your parent hat on and your parent lens on your parent glasses so to speak, this is what's important. But when you look at that, yes, we want to save money and yes, we want to save the environment, but what's interesting about the environmental issue is in surveys, we see that all the time show up way lower than the business owner thinks.

And that's not to say that you shouldn't be environmentally friendly, people do care about that, but it's just not at the top of the list when it comes to where am I going to spend my money? We think that it's, but in this case, yeah, it's my kid's confidence and my kid's psychology. I'm motivated for that. I'm motivated to spend money for that. And let's face it, man, I don't want to change wet sheets for the next five months next year. No way. If we can get this trained faster, let's do it right now. So love that. Kudos to you guys for asking the questions and really kudos to the business owner for being open to it because I think some business owners approach it, they're like, no, no, no, no, I know my customer. I know this is the reason. These are the reasons. But that ain't necessarily true. So love that. Any other kind of aha moments surprising? I thought this thing, it was actually the opposite.

Trevor:

Yeah, I think maybe another, okay, yeah, another one was there was a women's clothing boutique, and this one's a little bit more on the attribution side, on the women's clothing boutique. They're a big massive clothing boutique here in the Salt Lake area, and they kind of felt like they were hitting a wall when it came to their ad spend, right? Hey, nobody can really help us here. We just need to find either a good in-house marketer, a good agency who we can just trust that are going to spend our money effectively. This is what our CAC is, this is what our L T V is and this is what it's going to be. We're going to be an x million dollar a month business and that's it. And they kind of felt like that was their fate for a little bit. And so we started to run attribution surveys and just back to those same three questions, how did you hear about us?

Where did you come from and how long have you known about us? And this founder, the way they sell a lot of their clothing is she is wildly, wildly interactive in her stories. So she'll jump in her stories and she will try clothes on and she'll say, Hey, I am this tall. I weigh this much, this is how my body fits in it. And people just love it because they're like, oh, cool, I can see that. I can visualize it. I'm the same size, or I'm a little bit bigger, I'm a little bit smaller, so I'm going to need a small versus a medium or what have you. And so she just tries on every new piece of clothing that comes in. So if you go look at their stories, they've got a hundred stories, not a hundred stories, 25 stories a day, and they were convinced like, Hey, we're the ones who are selling Google Analytics attribution.

It's all telling us people are coming from our Instagram referrals. That's where everything's coming from. And so we said, let's just run an attribution test. Let's see what's going on here. Come to find out that 75% of the people who said they first heard that brand, that women's clothing boutique was through Facebook ads, Facebook and Instagram ads. So it had nothing to do with her stories, nothing, right? It was the ad first and then how they got to the website today. The top two reasons was from her stories or they just remembered her. They had remembered it. So we came back and said, Hey, the insights here, the actionable insights here for you are, I know once again, this goes back to what was happening over at font design, this word of mouth thing. It's like, Hey, I know that it looks like the people who are buying are people who are coming just from you guys organically, but they first started following you and heard about you through your ads.

Why don't you try to double your ad spend and see what happens? They doubled their ad spend for three months and their business has five XD since then, and they're scaling and growing and opening up new locations all because it was just like, oh my goodness, we've got the right L t V for this and let's just test it out and see what happens. And sure enough, they're absolutely crushing it, their m e r, so their marketing efficient rate, efficiency rate didn't increase, didn't decrease. It stayed the same, but they five x their monthly revenue because of just putting the money where they need to

Brett:

Put it. It's amazing. It's amazing. And it kind of goes back to that first touch, last touch type of argument. And yes, we've got tools that can calculate that, and I like attribution tools. There's several. I like triple oil, north Beam, there's several that are good, but they're not perfect. And so getting these questions answered is huge where we thought that it was all our stories and organic, but really it was ads. We had something kind of similar with one of our brands or jewelry brand, and we were doing just a small YouTube test. Of course we were running all their Google and that was going very, very well. But we wanted to test YouTube. They wanted to test YouTube, ran it for a little while, and they were like, I don't know. I mean the numbers and the different platforms, they look okay and this's one thing we've seen with YouTube a lot under attributed in platform almost always, it's like, well, we're going to ask.

We're going to ask. Actually, they didn't even think about this. They were just like, well, we don't know if we're going to keep going. And then they came back to us the next week and they said, Hey, wait a minute. We started doing post-purchase surveys and we started looking one out of five people this last week mentioned YouTube, and they're like, oh, let's jack up the spend here. So it's one of those things where maybe it doesn't show up in the attribution modeling, but you ask people and then you see it. And I'm curious too, I got asked this question, remember I bought some apparel online. It was a brand that I really like, and I saw this question of how long have you known about us? And I stopped to think about it. I was like, you know what? I think I first heard about this brand seven, eight months ago, and I just hadn't done anything. I saw it, thought it was cool, didn't need it, kind of moved on whatever. But the ads, I kind of saw the ads for a little while. They went away and then they came back. Any surprise learnings you're seeing there? I know with Fawn, you found the buying cycle was short 30 days, but any examples where you've learned the opposite, where there's a significant number of people that heard about our brand months ago and they're just now purchasing?

Trevor:

Yeah, yeah. There was a golf bag brand that we worked with or that uses bestie, and they were really, really shocked by their results. They found that 60% of their audience didn't hear about or didn't purchase until after a year. So they were in this buyer's journey for a year. And so one of the things for them, if you're a golfer, golfing is a seasonal sport. In some states it's not. Obviously in the Californias and the Arizonas and states like Florida, you can golf year round and plenty of other states, but buying season, there's a difference between golfing season and buying season. And so what a lot of these golf brands will do is they'll shut their ads down or they'll turn spend down dramatically in the off months. And that's what this brand would do is they would turn their spend down dramatically, but it come to find out they need to be advertising in October so that they are going to have a really good February, march, april, may when people really, really start to buy.

And so that was really shocking for them. You tend to see that a little bit more though anytime I've recognized anytime something's above $200, you do tend to see the buyer's journey extended a little bit more. That becomes less of an impulse buy. And so you start to get more responses like oh three to six to 12 months before I heard about you before I actually purchase. So yeah, we see it all the time. We see it short and long. I mean, the Fawn Design one was interesting because that was a $200 diaper bag too, but it was under 30 days. But I also think a diaper bag can be very problem solution. So people definitely can buy those

Brett:

Problem solution. There's an easy justification for the diaper bag. I'm going to look like a good mom, I'm going to feel like a good mom. I'm going to be able to execute a good mom with golf equipment. And some of those other things like maybe I got to justify this with my spouse, or maybe I got to sneak in the purchase or do I really need it? So maybe I'll ask for it for Christmas. All kinds of things like that can kind of come into play so good. And I think this just underscores the more we know about our customers, the more we're going to shift. I would argue for the golf client, if I knew that my 60% of people were waiting more than a year, I may look at, okay, I don't have enough urgency. Maybe that's unnaturally long. Maybe I need to up my urgency or how can I get someone on the list?

How can I get them to purchase a little bit quicker? But I think part of that is it's just going to be a longer sales cycle. It's going to be longer than diaper bags or something else. And so then I need to work within that. And yes, I need to maybe now advertise more in October and do some of the off months, but if I know that I'm going to shift my behavior. Let's talk about, and I love the questions you mentioned so far, what else would you say are kind of top questions to ask? And are those the three you start with and then you go somewhere else? And then when and where should you be asking these? Yeah,

Trevor:

Super good question. So a couple different answers to those, right? So it's like attribution stuff is always great to just be getting a better handle on things. I think a lot of people rag on attribution with post-purchase surveys because they say, oh, how does a customer remember? But at the end of the day, sometimes it doesn't matter if the customer's wrong about what they remember because at the end of the day, it's what they remember what, so they

Brett:

Remember that you're going to see patterns as well. If it's true, if you start seeing patterns emerge with a lot of customers, you can bank on it being true or true enough to take action

Trevor:

A hundred percent. Eventually things start to you get enough data and you're like, okay, hey, are all these people wrong? So attribution is always a really good one. Those are the three questions I love the most. I don't think that those three questions are good questions to ask alone. So if you're just asking, how did you hear about us? That's tough because it doesn't tell the full story. If you're just asking what brought you to the website today? If you're just asking how long have you known? It just doesn't tell the full story. So I like those three questions in that story. Those

Brett:

Three pair well together like fine wine and cheese, you got to have 'em together.

Trevor:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Some other really good questions, I talked about motivation. Motivation question is by far one of my favorites because that gives you your value props. You think that your value props, your unique selling propositions are X, y, Z, but your customers are telling you exactly why I thought that somebody was buying because, but they're actually buying because they want to help their kids' confidence. I never thought about that, so let me change. And that nowadays, you probably know this, especially on the YouTube side of things, we know this from meta and TikTok, audience segmentation, that kind of stuff, placements that stuff. No more silver bullets when it comes to media buying like that anymore. The silver bullets are how you create your content and how you message it. And so the motivation question is so pivotal because then you bring that to your creative team or to your social media team or to your media buyers or whatever, and you're now telling 'em, this is why people buy.

Brett:

And you can potentially maybe shift the audience you're building just a little bit on Google. You've got the ability to shift based on keywords and things like that. But yeah, ultimately you're shifting the angle in the story and think about how big of a difference this is. What if my ad was 30 seconds and 20 of it was about saving the environment? And then I just mentioned something about my kids' confidence. That's very different than saying, Hey, kids struggle when they wet the bed and when we've seen these studies that do this, but man, if you can increase that, I'm just totally making this up as I go, but you lean into confidence and then you say, and what if you could cut the time training from an average of three months to just two weeks? And you know what? This is also, you're saving the environment. You're going to save money. Those become cherries on top or the additional benefits. Everybody wants that. Nobody wants to destroy the environment, nobody wants to spend more, but those just weren't the primary drivers. So focus on what's primary and then mention those other things that really kind of push someone over the edge. And that is a big, big difference That can be a total game changer for your ad campaign. So absolutely love that.

Trevor:

Some other questions that kind of tie into motivation is like how do you plan to use the product? So whatcha are going to use this product for what problems are you trying to solve? Why did you pick us over a competitor? What almost stopped you from purchasing today? That's a really, really good one, dude.

Brett:

I love that one. Any insights on that? Any insights that have come from that question? What almost prevented you from buying?

Trevor:

Yeah, absolutely. You get a lot of people who taught price compared to lack of review. So I've recognized that the people who, because you can do, at least with bestie, you can do follow-up questions. So if somebody says, Hey, it was a price thing, you can ask about the reviews or the testimonials that they saw. Did you see any reviews, testimonials or do you have any social proof? And so I think that ties a lot into it. You get some people who say your website was just really, it was really challenging to get through to get to the product page. That was really challenging. You get some people who just will flat out say, we've seen responses such as the competitor I was looking at was out of stock. And so I came to you. I mean, you get all sorts of stuff. You get all sorts stuff.

Brett:

You're my second choice.

Trevor:

You're our second choice. But here I am,

Brett:

You lucked out. But man, talk about valuable insights. So it shows how you stack up and man, what insight would that be where you're like, yeah, you know what? I almost didn't buy because your website's so stinging hard to navigate. But I was really desperate, so I bought it, right? So that's like, oh no, my website's great. It's converting. No, you're actually, they won it so bad. They're fighting through your website. So yeah, love that question. By the way, before I forget, and this just a quick side note, we'll get back to this topic. You mentioned Utah a minute ago. I'm in Missouri. We're Midwest guys. Our golfing season is not the same as our friends in California and Florida and Arizona. Why is Utah such like this D two C hotbed? I remember several years ago we had a client in Ogden, Utah, so flew into Salt Lake, went just, I think, is it north? Is it north of Salt Lake? Yep.

Trevor:

Ogden's North.

Brett:

Yeah. And maybe it was Logan, actually Logan. Anyway, but this guy was like, dude, you got to move out here. I'm like, well, I'm pretty plugged in Missouri. I'm not moving. But he's like, no, no, no, no. The scene here is amazing, like tech D two C, it's happening. So what are some of you posted on LinkedIn recently? Some of the brands, the amazing brands that are in Utah. Can you run through some of those by memory and what's with Utah? Why is it such a hotbed of D two C and tech growth?

Trevor:

There's so many responses that I've heard from this down to, from religion to all sorts of things. But yeah, I mean there's a lot of really cool D two C back to businesses from the Tech D two C side of things, or also the merchant side of things. So you've got Ekk who's here, that's one of the fastest growing footwear brands in the world right now. D two C footwear brands. You've got brands like Kodiak Cakes that started here. You've got brands like Clean, simple Eats, just ingredients. Those are in the C P G space. You've got Mixers, which is a big female founded brand that's absolutely crushing it right now here in Utah. You've got Gab Wireless. I'm not sure if you've heard of Gab Wireless, but that's this massive brand right now where it's phones for kids. So it's giving them the smartphone experience without the dangers of smartphones. Dude,

Brett:

Love that.

Trevor:

Which you'll have to look it up. They're one of the most fantastic brands right now as somebody with kids. I love it. Traeger, you've heard of Traeger. Traeger started out

Brett:

Here. I totally heard of Traeger. Yeah. Got lots of friends

Trevor:

That Traeger. Yep. My lifetime value at Traeger is stupid, so that's great for me.

Brett:

V i p at Trager.

Trevor:

Yeah, that's right. Also

Brett:

Shout out, I saw on your list thread wallets. Yep, threads. Shout out to Colby Bauer. He was on the podcast. Oh,

Trevor:

Amazing.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dude's awesome. It's been a hot minute. It's may have been like three years ago. May have been pre,

Trevor:

Yeah, Kolby and Mackenzie are great. You were about to say Skull Candy, that's another brand that came out of Utah that's still here in Utah. Kick in Alive and well, I mean list goes on and on some e-commerce brands, you've got pattern pattern's absolutely massive. You've got

Brett:

Pillow Cube.

Trevor:

Oh yeah, pillow Cube's a big one. You've got creatively, you've got the Harmons Brothers came out of here. I think you've got the list is Big Corso, which is route shipping insurance. Those guys came out of Utah. So it's massive. So reasoning why, I don't know. You do have, Utah is just in general a very entrepreneurial minded place.

Brett:

That's what I've noticed.

Trevor:

Yeah. I have some theories I have behind it is you get a lot of young men who go on what's called moron missions. So like L D SS missions two

Brett:

Year Mission, man, it's like primetime preparation for being an entrepreneur.

Trevor:

Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest, I am one of those people who did that, who did a two year mission. And one of the biggest things you learn as a missionary is number one, hard work. You are working your butt off. It's nonstop. You're up at 6:00 AM you're in bed by 10 30 and you're on a very rigid schedule. And it's during these years of your life that are really impressionable, right? 19 to 21 years old. And then not only that, but you are getting rejected literally 24 7. And if you're an entrepreneur, like rejection is, you just got to be used to rejection. You got people who are telling you left and that this is not going to work. You got your parents, especially if you got older school parents who are maybe more in the baby boomer side who don't understand entrepreneurship, who are just go get the nine to five. So you get a lot of rejection and so you're not afraid. You're not afraid of failure. And so I think personally that that's a huge, huge reason is I

Brett:

Think it is too. I think it's huge because that learning to deal with rejection, and I got my start in college was selling radio, trying to put myself through college. I got married young and I dealt with a lot of rejection and I realized this isn't that bad. I didn't die. I got told no, but I didn't die. This is no big deal. I'm just going to keep cranking. And what's interesting, and we're people of faith, I've got lots of friends who are Mormons, but not Mormon myself, but my son is selling solar systems door to door. And it's another, all the great companies are based out of Utah and it makes sense. And so he's leading a team. He's in Connecticut right now leading a team, but most of his buddies there are went on warm a missions and stuff. And I would agree, man, one of the best ways to train as an entrepreneur or salesperson is going through that experience. So

Trevor:

There's also a couple colleges here as well that really pride themselves in entrepreneurship as well. So it's not just the religion side of things, but there are some colleges that are very, very into it. You also get on the other side of things this kind of times, Utah is a very family friendly culture. And so traditional motherhood, fatherhood roles are very big. And you also get a lot of big female founders here have been moms who are thinking about other things that they can do. So you get a lot of moms out here who've started businesses that have blown up and just succeeded just out of solving a problem for other moms.

Brett:

Don't Sleep on Utah, man, Utah, it's a rising star in the D two C place. Keep your eye on it, think about how you can partner there. And so really, really good stuff. Love this topic so much. And my head is spinning and now I'm thinking of questions and advice. I got to give you clients so we can really maximize what we're doing here. But love that you talked about, what problem are you solving? Why'd you choose us over competitors? You, and I know I'm putting you on the spot here, but can you think of any insights or aha moments from those questions?

Trevor:

Yeah, I can think of one. So there was a men's bag company who did you choose us over? Your competitors? And a massive, massive response that we got. So one of this brand that was using bestie, they started to just go really, really deep into the entertainment or the, there's a name. It's combining entertainment and education at the same time. Yeah,

Brett:

Edutainment.

Trevor:

Edutainment, right Space. It's something that was just kind of like bags kind of lame ish. And they went really, really hard on TikTok and started to get a big TikTok following from an organic perspective. And so these people found that, hey, one of the number one reasons people are picking us over competitors, bigger competitors that have a big name in the space is because they're following us on TikTok and they love what we're doing and the questions we're answering and how they, we've turned such a mundane thing into something a lot more fun and turn something mundane to fun and interesting. And so that was a huge reason why they're picking them over a competitor.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so great. And it's just a reminder that yes, we do want good features and we want to save money or pay a fair price or whatever, but we also want to be delighted and we want something to kind of make our day better. And so sometimes just the content you create, the message you present is enough for someone to say, Hey, all things being equal here as far as features and stuff, I like your personality better. I get more enjoyment from working with your brand than with another. And I'm going to go with you one of my favorite stories, tushy, the Bidet attachment company. So I had Mickey Agrawal on the podcast a couple of years ago, and so she talked about, Hey, we want to communicate just like we're friends with people and we want the whole journey to be fun and entertaining and we want people to talk about it.

And so we saved this. We bought one for the office because people requested it, but there's this little guide that's this number two shall pass, and it's just like a series of puns, like bathroom puns. So it's like part guide, but then part just humor. And that thing has been passed around, hopefully didn't make trips to the bathroom and then get passed around. I think it's all been contained in the office, but people talk about it, it's hilarious. It's so much better than just a user manual. And so adding personality in what you're doing, it can allow you to charge a premium and really endear customers to you. So really good stuff. Really good stuff. Awesome, man. Well, hey, any recent episodes of the pod that you want to highlight that people should go back and listen to? I mean, I know we should just binge listen to all of it, but can you think of

Trevor:

Any? Yeah, should we just have an episode where we just Yeah, I'm trying to think of maybe some of my favorite episodes. Kik, we had the VP of marketing over at Kik on, he was awesome to listen to. Really, really cool to see what's going on with that. Because what happened is the story of Kik is such, they kind of switched their entire persona buyer of who was originally buying the shoe to who's now buying it now and how they've scaled to a nine figure business. That's a really, really cool episode. I think we just did an episode where just my co-host and I, we just did it. We didn't have a guest on, it was our actually most recent one. And it was actually one of my favorites where we just talked about what content is converting right now, what content is working to drive sales, why is it working? Why is certain content not working anymore? What are some inspirational brands who are doing it cool, who are some inspirational, we dove into directors and tied certain directors and how they create movies and why they're so good and some of those attributes and how you can pull that from your business. So that was a great episode.

Brett:

Yeah, that's fantastic. So just as a teaser for that episode, what is some content that is converting now versus that isnt? So

Trevor:

One of the things we talk a lot about is you've got this, there's a lot of trends out there that merchants follow. Oh, I'm seeing a lot of people do use U G C right now, so I'm going to create U G C. I see a lot of people creating listicle ads such as for the five reasons why I bought Tushy or whatever. And so I think that there is, there's kind of this two-tone approach that you need to go about. The brands should go about things. One is I think that following trends can be great. Try to be early in some of those trends because you'll see that U G C is still super important, but it is not doing what it used to do and people are starting to see through a lot of it. So you got to go a little bit deeper,

Brett:

Has to be good. U G C, it used to be just run U G C, you win. Now it's got to be this U G C has to serve a purpose. It's got to be authentic, it's got to be compelling, it's got to be good.

Trevor:

Yeah, exactly right, exactly. So how do you get to trends as quick as possible? So totally good with doing that kind of stuff. I don't think U G C ever goes anywhere. What's now happening a little bit more. What we're seeing with U G C is U G C tends to do a lot better towards the bottom of the funnel. So it's like, hey, I don't really care what somebody thinks about a product that I don't know about yet. So tell me about the product first. Then I want to see a few people who look like they really love the product, work with it. But the other thing that's working really good is just storytelling ads. It kind of goes against the grain where nowadays it's like, Hey, that first five seconds is so important. So first five seconds is so important, which is totally true, but most people are thinking those first five seconds is five reasons why you should, or this is why you shouldn't do X, or this is how I made more money here, or this is why my butt is getting cleaner, or you're getting these really impactful hooks.

But I even think that with how saturated TikTok is and what's happening with Instagram right now, you're getting so many people who are, that's becoming noise. Those hooks are becoming noise. I'm not saying that they don't work still and they can't, but when you just jump into the narrative of a problem, oh, the other day I was doing X, Y, z. That goes against the hook, like your general hook standards. But people are starting to key in on storytelling a lot more. And then if you can get to the problem really, really quickly and you really follow a good storytelling framework, which is just jumping right into it, what is the problem, what is the solution? And you're kind of following it, that content's working really, really

Brett:

Good. Yeah, I love this. And really I think this comes down to understanding why is something working. So if U G C is working or if listicles are working, why it's not, just because there's something magic in that it's not just totally formulaic, there's something behind it. So understanding the psychology and the persuasion behind it and the attention grabbing factors, you got to understand that. And then I think you can kind of riff on things. And I agree with you, I think U G C will never die, but you can't just wing it. You got to be good at U G C. And I think that's really key. So dude, this has been fantastic. Thoroughly enjoyed this episode. And so you got to go check out the podcast and it is the Unstoppable Marketer. Did I get that right? Yep. Nailed it. Unstoppable Marketer and then bestie app. So how can people check out bestie? Give us the quick pitch. I think people are now sold on your approach to asking questions, but why should I choose bestie and how can I learn more? Yeah,

Trevor:

Yeah. So bestie app.co is where you can go. We offer free trial right now, so go check it out. We're more than happy to jump on a call with anybody and help you set some stuff up. We're kind of approaching things a little bit different right now. There's plenty of post-purchase survey tools that you can look at, but one of the things that we're most interested in is how can we deliver actionable insights that the user doesn't have to really do anything to figure out marketers nowadays we have, each one of us has a thousand tools. We're looking at every single day. We're being pulled in a hundred different directions. And so the question is, how can we deliver those insights to you? So you have actionable ways to just get up, you see what's going on with your surveys, what's happening with your customers, and you got the actual tips to go and check it out. And so go check it out. We've got some really cool things happening right now, some cool partnerships and some cool feature drops that are going to happen in the next couple of weeks. So go there, or if you want to just follow me on social media, all my handles are at the Trevor Crump and I talk about bestie all the time as well. So that

Brett:

Is awesome. So check it out, bestie app.co. You just got to do it. Get started. Do the free trial because when you know more about your customers, you know what to do differently and you know how to maximize things. Trevor Crump, ladies and gentlemen, Trevor, that was a ton of fun, man. You crushed it. We'll have to do this again sometime.

Trevor:

Absolutely. Now I got to have you on online, so we will swap it. Yeah,

Brett:

Absolutely. Man. I thought you'd never ask. I was just sitting over here like Unstoppable marketer, all these cool guests. I'm like, I've never been a guest.

Trevor:

We'll get You seem unstoppable. You seem unstoppable. So we'll get you

Brett:

There. Awesome. Thanks dude. Tons of fun and I look forward to it.

Trevor:

I appreciate you having me on.

Brett:

Awesome. And thank you for tuning in. We could not do this show without you, and hey, we'd love your feedback. What would you like to hear more of? What other topics should we dive into on this podcast? Also, connect with me on the socials, getting pretty active on LinkedIn, posting almost daily with some good stuff, good clips, good insights. So reach out to me there. Love to keep the conversation going there. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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