Talking Analytics – Why It’s Important with Jo Davis

00:00 Andy Splichal Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal, and we are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is talking analytics, why it is important. Today's guest is an experienced retail strategist with over 20 years of experience in product and marketing. She is the chief operating officer at Sweet Analytics, where they have a strong interest in merging data science and creativity to fuel brand growth. A big welcome to Jo Davis. Hi, Jo.

Jo Davis Hi, Andy, how are you doing?

Andy Splichal You know, I'm doing great. Thanks for joining us today.

Jo Davis Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.

Andy Splichal So analytics, I mean, it's in the news a whole bunch. It's on the forefront of everybody's mind, especially since the recent forced migration from Google Universal to GA4. But, you know, let's start. Why is having proper analytics so important for the success of your online business?

00:51 Jo Davis Well, I mean, in my opinion, I mean, I believe it's just absolutely fundamental to fuel the performance and the growth of your business. I mean, essentially, you're looking to increase efficiency, improve your profit, and match some strategy to some fantastic creative ideas out there. For me, I'm quite a creative person in my history, but I need that intel, that analytics, to make the right decisions and to know what to do next.

01:22 Andy Splichal So what is the advantage of using Sweet Analytics versus Google Analytics for GA4 is just a standalone to get your data?

01:32 Jo Davis Yeah, I'm really pleased you asked that. It's kind of, it's a comparison. It's kind of apples and pears, really. We're not trying to be GA4, and we do quite different things. We're essentially a customer data platform. So we're GA4, very focused on traffic and site metrics. We're taking first-party data directly from the platforms. So our data will always match the actual cash that was in the tail. We took 1,000 pounds last week. Our platform was, say, 1,000 pounds, and that's what we're trying to explain. We tend to see kind of five to 10 difference in numbers in GA4 compared to what the companies actually took. So that's one of the first key differences. However, we do cross over slightly with tracking. So we have our own tracking technology that we will place on our clients' websites. So we're tracking web visits and browser information. To create some slightly robust and more informative attribution models, we can answer a lot of questions around what we call them touch points, so what marketing has the customer been touch with for they made a decision to buy with the brand. But what makes us particularly different there is that we also incorporate offline marketing. So, for example, if someone was doing a brochure or a catalog or a postcard or a draw doc or something like that, we would be able to put that information into suite and know who's been sent something, regardless of whether they're a customer or what we call a cold contact, so the name's been bought. So when someone places an order, as part of that journey, we've also got the time center when they were sent a brochure, for example. So it starts to give a lot more insight in terms of how your offline and your online marketing's performing together. And this is a channel we're seeing really growing in the UK at the moment, especially with the younger demographic than it has historically. So we add a lot more depth to those marketing decisions starting with what GA4 does. But we don't tend to cover the actual insight metrics. So we work together quite well. We have an integration with GA4, so you can see that information coming together, which we really wanna do the best for our clients there.

03:34 Andy Splichal So a couple of follow-up questions on there. I mean, one of the frustrations is forever, whether it was Universal or GA4, was that numbers didn't match exactly. It was always, I would tell my clients as an agency, they're not really meant to match exact, and I've never matched exact. It's more of just to get a broader sense of how all the marketing channels are doing. And you're getting these to match exact based on, you said, first-party cookies. Now-

04:12 Jo Davis First-party data, so yeah.

04:13 Andy Splichal First-party data. Yeah. What is that with all the new privacy laws going in? How has that affected people?

04:22 Jo Davis Well, the client owns this. The clients own their first-party data. So when a customer places an order, the brand has that data. Of course, they have to act with integrity and abide by the GDPR rules. But we know whether we've got data against that customer or not. So if they haven't been able to track because they've decided to block their cookies, then there's no tracking data. But we still have that order within our platform. As a GA, just wouldn't have it at all. It just wouldn't exist. That's why you see that difference. But you'd see that order. You'd see that customer. You know all the other information about that order, such as what they bought. Was it their first order, second order? Tenth order? Were they using discount code? Are they paying for shipping or not? We still got all the information, but we would know that that order's not been trackable in terms of web visits and marketing touchpoints.

05:09 Andy Splichal And the other question I had is you had mentioned that the pounds match up to what's in the till. And so obviously you were in the UK, but your stuff is, of course, it's compatible with US companies.

05:25 Jo DavisYes, sorry. I'm saying pounds because I'm English, but I'm typically English. But yes, any currency we deal with, we deal with multi-currencies across the globe.

05:33 Andy Splichal Okay, great. Just didn't want to have anybody tune out and not listen to.

05:39 Jo Davis No, no, no. Dollars, Euros, whatever you want. We'll march back to your actual tapings, yeah.

05:42 Andy Splichal So what are some examples of some important insights that analytics could provide, and specifically, suite analytics could provide that would have an immediate impact on your business?

05:55 Jo Davis Well, when we're collecting the data, we're creating a very powerful single customer view. So for one particular customer, we know lots of information about them. So when they first placed an order, when they last placed an order, what their lifetime value is, what kind of products they're buying. And from that data, we create what's a very powerful growth modeling tool. So this is where we tend to start with clients. And I feel that this is, we feel is absolutely fundamental to growing your business is to understand how is my current database performing? So say, you're looking for a 20, 30, 40% growth increase year on year, you need to know how your current database is performing and what you expect to gain from that database in terms of revenue. And then we're looking at filling the gap with acquisition. So understanding how many new customers you need to acquire to achieve your 50% growth, for example. And that really changes by business. I mean, if you're say a very remedies business, that's very heavily reliant on subscription, you're less of a need of new customers. And if you're say a furniture company, for example, you don't get great retention rates because the nature of the product, then you're very reliant on customer acquisition. But understanding those metrics for your business is really, really important. I tend to find that's quite a light bulb moment most clients that I work with. And then once we've worked with, from all those understandings of how your customers are behaving and what you would expect to get from new customers as well based on those learnings and knowing how many new customers you need to acquire and it's really about how much do you need to spend. So what's your cost of acquisition? And it's not always what have you been spending, but what should you be spending? So part of the analytics is what we call a margin calculator. We go through the key metrics of cost and what the ROAS should be on a first time order very much work on a blended, which I really believe is right. So it starts to create a really good growth strategy in terms of what you should be spending to acquire those customers. We also, this is that single customer view and understanding how customers repeats, we've got some quite really robust lifetime value metrics. And you can break that down by cohorts as well. So there's obviously lots of different ways to acquire customers. So if you're acquiring them through Facebook, for example, through sale, so do markdowns. You might see a much lesser growth over time than if you're then you're acquiring them through organic search, for example, but you'd be able to know that through the analytics and break it down in that way. And then also, what's very key then is the relationship to products. So you start to understand, what products are best for me to acquire customers? What's the best product for me to talk about the customer next in terms of follow-up? And how do I personalize those messages to get my best return on effort, if you like, for my CRM marketing? And then we talked a little bit earlier about the touch points that we collect and be able to have really good attribution models. So things like, especially when you're doing online and offline marketing, if you're doing something offline, you wouldn't see any of that in most data-driven attribution models. It's predominantly the online activity that you're measuring your performance against.

Andy Splichal So how is that data getting into Sweet Analytics, the offline marketing?

Jo Davis So we upload it. It's a really quick wizard. You upload the mailing files. If you're mailing 100,000 people, within less than a minute, you've told Suite who those 100,000 people are. And then that information is stored.

09:15 Andy Splichal And so if they come to order, if they come to order instead of it showing direct for the marketing channel, it shows the postcard.

09:20 Jo Davis Well, it creates the touch point because essentially, especially if it's an online brand only, they still have to come to the website. So if perhaps it's showing, okay, we can see the place in order and we can look back and see, okay, all the different marketing touch points. This is very instant by this happens and it's pretty much instant time. You can see, okay, on the 1st of July, I sent that person a catalog and they placed an order on the 10th of July and they clicked through from an email. But that singular view is not particularly helpful, but through the attribution models, you can see that relationship. And then you know that direct mail and emails generated this much cash for me versus direct mail versus a paid brand campaigns, which you can say it's safe to assume, but you know that's what's happened and you can probably make the conclusion the catalog's driven that web search. Of course, attribution is never 100%, but you've got the data to make some conclusions and to persevere with your tests and learn processes.

10:17 Andy Splichal Well, I mean, that's a mouthful. Just thinking about it, what's the learning curve like using your program, Sweet Analytics, and where does a business even start?

10:30 Jo Davis Well, it's quick because we have all the data within 24 hours. So some of those insights, your lifetime value, cost per acquisition, etcetera, is very quick. You're learning that within 24 hours generally. The longer learning curve is around the test and learn because we have quite strong segmentation tools where you can segment your data and communicate that instantly back to your third party platforms, such as Facebook, Grammatics, email platforms, Klaviyo Mailchimp, et cetera. You can communicate back to them because we don't see ourselves in competition with any of those platforms. We're here to help clients enhance them. And by creating segments within our platform, you can then measure the performance of those segments in the same way. So that's the slightly longer learning curve where you're testing and learning, start to understand what's working and how to change some of your strategies. But the instant learning curve is having all those analytics within 24 hours. And the only thing, unfortunately,

11:27 Andy Splichal What kind of training do you offer like a new client? I mean, I guess that's what I'm… Yeah. It seems like it could be overwhelming for somebody coming in to try to figure out the data and all that.

11:39 Jo Davis Yeah, absolutely. And we do different levels of packages such as to manage that overwhelm, depending on where the brand is and the experience within the teams. But we have a client services team, which are on hand, and we offer complimentary calls every month to our members that are completely free. We have live chat within our system as well, where somebody is always at the other end to answer any questions. But we also run live training sessions. So we do do recordings, but we tend to do everything live. So you can book on to a particular time and you have a live person doing that training. You can talk you through and answer your questions. But we do quite a robust free trial process as well. So part of that free trial process is getting people up to speed and understanding how to use the platform. But you're right, Angie, there's a lot of information there. And that's probably one of our biggest barriers, I think, of brand owners of knowing where to start. So quite often it's talking to those. And I have a call person, if every single person that signs up for a free trial, just to understand what the problems they are facing and direct them to the correct path analytics to help them. Because it's very rare that everybody needs everything. So it's kind of understanding people's personal needs.

12:48 Andy Splichal Yeah. And I mean, besides analytics being very topical with the migration to GA4 AI, everybody's talking about. And have you guys been able to incorporate AI into Sweet analytics?

12:59 Jo Davis Great question. It's been one of my favorite subjects right now. We're working on it as the only stance. And we're gonna call it SI, so sweet intelligence. So it's gonna be our version. And in order for that to work, I think it's, AI is backed by data. You have to have great data to have good artificial intelligence. One doesn't work without the other. So we have a huge amount of data that can really help the clients. But we're working a little bit harder at the moment on understanding clients' goals. So we do a growth modeling and quite a broad goals piece. We're breaking that down into more information and more detailed metrics in terms of goals at the moment. And we're reusing that information to know whether a client, this is all through the artificial intelligence, to know whether that client is achieving their goals. And if they're not, it sends them to particular parts of the dashboard to give them further insights and actionable points on the areas that they need to increase their performance on. Like I said, not every single piece of the dashboard is gonna be relevant to everybody. But if you, for example, have a certain plan or a particular average order value you need to achieve next month and you're lagging behind, we'll pick that up for the artificial intelligence about to point you to the areas in which you can look into that in more detail. But also what to do next.

14:12 Andy Splichal You know, one of my favorite questions I always like to ask is, what are some of the trends that you're thinking are gonna come in e-commerce? And you probably have more insight to that than most, given that you're looking at numbers and you're dealing with e-commerce companies. But I guess the question, so let's say you had a crystal ball. What do you think the future holds for e-commerce over the next 12 to 18 months?

14:36 Jo Davis I think data is gonna be, is huge, especially first-party data. And I think in 18 months, it's gonna be the norm that a brand understands their first-party data, who their customers are and what they're doing. And there was a very bold statement in the Sunday Times here recently that failed to know your data, be prepared to fail. It's becoming huge. So I think that's going to become more the norm. I think artificial intelligence is growing at a phenomenal rate. I mean, there's two different types of artificial intelligence, which is generative and non-generative. And I think the non-generative is, there's a lot out there already and probably a lot more to happen. But the generative AI, I think is where it's going to get interesting, where especially things like creative advertising, and it can start to generate the right adverts, the right images, or what it thinks is the right images to particular groups of people is gonna be quite interesting. Then the other, and it's probably an unpopular opinion, maybe, but I think Amazon is growing at a phenomenal rate. It's going to be absolutely huge in 18 months and very, very dominant within the industry. It's really creating a new way of shopping and a new way of advertising, which I think that's progressing quite quickly. Obviously quite a difference there in the next 18 months.

15:50 Andy Splichal Now, your analytics, speaking of Amazon, is just working on merchants' own website. I mean, there's nothing, I mean, you're not able to get that information from Amazon, right?

16:02 Jo Davis Well, you can if the client is fulfilling the orders themselves. So it's fulfilled by merchant, and it's fulfilled by Amazon.

16:11 Andy Splichal Oh, okay, so if they're sending out postcards, you can direct them to Amazon, then you can get that information if they're doing FBM.

16:15 Jo Davis Yes, so if the client's receiving the orders and fulfilling it from their own distribution centers, then they have all of the customer information apart from the email address, but you have enough information to be able to analyze that data. I believe you're not allowed to market to them, but you are understanding, have I moved people from my website to Amazon, and vice versa. So you understand that data. But most do do FBA, so if you're filled by Amazon, so there is a slight black hole there in terms of data, but it's a big challenge with any marketplaces, you know, eBay, Etsy, I'm sure you've got some big ones in the US as well that your clients are using. It does create quite same black hole, same wholesale as well, when you start sending to third parties, you're losing the visibility of your customer data. So it's something to always consider when you're starting to push your reach out in that way.

17:09 Andy Splichal Now let's talk more about you and how you got started there. Have there been any business books that you could attribute to your success as an entrepreneur?

17:20 Jo Davis I read an awful lot actually, I'm a big reader, and I probably should have the more to mindfulness type books. So I'm a huge fan of Robin Sharma, the Everyday Hero Manifesto has been a complete life-changing book for me in the last couple of years. Also Jay Shetty, Think Like a Monk, anything that's related to ego, I absolutely love to read and I think can be a huge barrier in people's progress. I think understanding your ego is really, really important for an entrepreneur. Autobiography, some of my heroes absolutely love reading their stories. But I probably, in terms of the more business side of things, I prefer subscriptions. So I've got some favorites such as Blend Commerce and a fab lady over here called Chloe Thomas. I read the bi-weekly, a couple of times a week updates, I find those really informative and help me keep up to speed of what's happening.

18:14 Andy Splichal Oh, interesting, I was a guest on her podcast a few months ago. Oh, me too.

18:21 Jo Davis Okay. That's great, Chloe's fantastic, yeah, I think she brings some great insights to the marketing world.

18:26 Andy Splichal Now, let's talk a little bit more about Sweet Analytics. Do you have a favorite success story of one of your clients that you could share?

18:35 Jo Davis Yeah, we have lots, which I'm really pleased to say, but there's probably one that's standing out when I saw that question. And it's a fashion retailer that I've been working with since 2019. And I don't know, you may have seen a similar thing from your end, but when COVID hits, an awful lot of brands pulled back on marketing and spend and got quite scared, wanted to really protect profit. But this particular brand held their nerve. And through the growth modeling exercise that we'd done with them, it showed very clearly if they was gonna pull back on the marketing, the acquisition would have really dropped and what the impact would have been in two and three years time when you had less people to retain, especially as a very strong retention business. But they held their nerve and they pushed forward and they achieved some amazingly low cost per acquisitions as a lot of people did in that time. And four years later, they're 15 times growth what they were in 2019. Yeah, absolutely phenomenal performance. And everybody do put it down to hold in their nerve during that time. And just monitoring it. It wasn't just spending, they're using analytics, they're measuring their performance, ensuring that the marketing was doing reach and bringing in new customers and it's really paid off for them.

19:48 Andy Splichal And on the flip side, what are some of the challenges you struggle with in getting results for clients?

19:54 Jo Davis Yeah, and a great question. I think the certain scenarios are very, very difficult to work with low AOV and low margin with high cost per acquisition cost is very, very difficult. And when I say high acquisition costs, it may not be high as a number, but high as the percentage of the AOV can make things very, very difficult. And sometimes it gets quite hard to find opportunities and maneuvers to keep growing a business profitably when we're dealing with those metrics. They're probably our least favorite to work with. Yeah, it gets very difficult.

Andy Splichal And how does the fee structure work with Sweet Analytics?

Jo Davis Yeah, great question. So we start from a free model, which is a few areas of the dashboard. And then it grows roughly around 500 pounds per five million of turnover per year to be a member. But then we do offer additional services on top for consultancy and some actual doing marketing services as well. So the package could be quite tailored, but we're broadly speaking 500 pounds per five million.

Andy Splichal And what's the exchange rate for US dollars?

Jo Davis It's about 1.3. Yeah, so I think we're looking about $700 for 700 million turnover in dollars.

Andy Splichal $700 per seven million traffic?

Jo Davis No, revenue. So we'll do a roll in 12 months revenue. Yeah. But on our website, suiteanalytics.com, which I know you're coming to, we have all our pricing information on the website. Okay.

21:32 Andy Splichal And who is the perfect listener if they're out there listening to this episode, they could benefit by taking a free trial, they get to start to suite in.

21:42 Jo Davis Yeah. So small to medium sized businesses. So we start with people that are just about to start trading, want to have all their data docs in a row before they start trading. Up to around 20 million is our most common areas that we work with, where we feel we can make a big difference by offering our solution.

21:59 Andy Splichal And what would you tell them to why they need Suite Analytics to help grow their business?

22:05 Jo Davis I fundamentally believe you need the intel to understand what's happening. Everything I've probably just talked about for the last 20 minutes, absolutely fundamental to make the right decisions to grow your business. I think there's been such a change in the last 20 years, when we start very much trading bricks and mortar 20 years ago, we didn't have a lot of data, we didn't have the intel we do now. There's an awful lot of information available, we can get quite overwhelming. So having a data system like Suite that can turn all that data into really easy, understandable and actual insights is really, really key for growth in my opinion.

22:43 Andy Splichal Ian, is that the advantage over using just Google Analytics GA4 as a standalone, is it's gonna make it more understandable for the business owners?

22:54 Jo Davis Yeah, 100% is more understandable, but it adds a whole new layer about understanding your customer performance, not just your site metrics and being able to do something with that data.

23:04 Andy Splichal All right, well, this has been great. Thanks for joining us. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

23:10 Jo Davis No, it's something I've probably just got to say, we generally work with B2C companies, the direct to consumer, and we predominantly work with the lifestyle sectors, but we can do anything that's B2C. And yeah, we do a free trial for two weeks. I'd love to hear from anybody who wants to discuss an opportunity of working with us and just go to sweetanalyze.com and click book demo and more than happy to have a conversation with anybody.

23:35 Andy Splichal Well, this has been great. Thanks for joining us today, Jo.

23:39 Jo Davis Thanks Andy. Thanks for having me.

23:42 Andy Splichal For listeners, remember if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information on speed analytics or connecting with Jo, you'll find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our podcast resource center available at podcast.makeeachclickcount.com. We have categorized all of our different past guests by show topic and included each of their contact information in case you would like more information on any of the episodes that I've had, all of any of the guests of previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing, and I'll talk to you in the next episode.