Lifecycle Is Everything: The Retention Framework Every Ecommerce Brand Needs With Andrew Christison

Andrew Christison is the Co-founder and CEO of Retencity, a full-service customer lifecycle and loyalty marketing agency. Under his leadership, Retencity has worked with fast-growing brands like epres, Revision Skincare, and Diamond Art Club. The agency is also a member of 1% for the Planet and has planted over 80,000 trees and served over 100,000 meals through food banks across the US. Before Retencity, Andrew was the Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Sendlane.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:07] Andrew Christison breaks down the e-commerce marketing flywheel
[5:09] How to identify imbalances in the flywheel and evaluate traffic quality and scalability
[10:08] Metrics and strategies for diagnosing retention issues in $10 million brands
[13:41] Why list growth involves initiating relationships
[20:08] When to collect zero- and first-party data to deepen personalization
[26:41] How to balance list quality and quantity in acquisition strategies
[32:21] Common blind spots in tech stacks and how to integrate new technology
[43:02] Mapping marketing calendars to customer behavior rhythms, seasonality, and lifecycle stages
[59:32] Tips for building authentic brand intimacy
[1:05:39] How Andrew’s multicultural upbringing shaped his leadership approach

In this episode…

Many e-commerce brands struggle to scale sustainably because they rely on short-term tactics like discounting or top-of-funnel traffic generation, neglecting the long-term impact of customer retention and lifecycle marketing. Even brands generating $10 million in annual revenue can lack the infrastructure and strategy to nurture lasting relationships with their customers. How can companies rethink their tech stacks and messaging to build genuine brand intimacy and retention that drives growth?

As an expert in lifecycle marketing and customer relationships, Andrew Christison maintains that brands can shift from transactional messaging to experience-driven communication. This requires building trust from the first interaction by treating email and SMS acquisition like the beginning of a meaningful relationship rather than a sales funnel. Brands can also employ zero- and first-party data to personalize messaging over time and integrate tech stack automations, like back-in-stock notifications, to address hidden retention gaps. Additionally, aligning your marketing calendar to seasonality, customer lifecycle stages, and weather patterns can guide more relevant and timely campaigns.

Tune in to the latest episode of the Up Arrow Podcast as William Harris chats with Andrew Christison, Co-founder and CEO of Retencity, about creating customer retention strategies that drive growth. Andrew explains why authenticity matters more than automation, how to balance list quantity and quality, and how he diagnoses retention issues in growing brands.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

“You're starting off a relationship with trust... If that trust is broken, it's hard to rebuild.”
“Lifecycle is really the main communication channel — it's the voice and relationship element of your brand.”
“Email and SMS become a major driving force and just become part of the flywheel.”
“You're talking about human lifecycles. What cycle of life are you in, and what do you buy?”
“We're talking about building a relationship over time in a sincere and genuine way.”

Action Steps

Prioritize lifecycle marketing from day one: Building trust early in the customer journey sets the tone for long-term engagement and loyalty. It turns email acquisition into a relationship, not just a transaction.
Audit and optimize your tech stack: Many brands underutilize existing tools or suffer from broken integrations that quietly undermine retention efforts. Fixing these issues unlocks immediate improvements in performance and personalization.
Collect zero-party data consistently: Asking customers about their preferences and needs enables more relevant, tailored communication. This increases engagement, reduces unsubscribes, and strengthens brand trust over time.
Use behavior-based segmentation in campaigns: Leveraging data like purchase history or email clicks helps brands deliver targeted messaging at the right moment. This relevance improves conversion and customer satisfaction.
Align campaigns with life stages and seasons: Understanding customer context — such as weather, holidays, or personal milestones — makes messaging more meaningful and timely. This emotional resonance can significantly boost campaign performance.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders, sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show.

William Harris 0:13

Everyone, I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond as you up arrow your business and your personal life, today's guest is the kind of human who can talk to you about customer retention, homesteading and moon cycles all in the same breath. Andrew Christison is the founder of Retencity, a company that's thoughtfully reshaping how brands think about lifecycle marketing, while most marketers chase hacks and attribution band aids. Andrew zooms out, way out, and sees the entire flywheel, traffic, conversion, retention, all orbiting around one central force relationship. This episode is a masterclass in scaling smarter, serving deeper and building a brand that actually matters. Andrew Christison, welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast.

Andrew Christison 1:01

It is my pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me, William. This is exciting. Let's, let's talk a lifecycle in life.

William Harris 1:09

Yeah, I've got a lot of interesting things I want to talk to you about, because we've chatted a little before. I do want to give a shout out to the one and only, Dilliar Askar. If you're in e-commerce and you don't know him, you're missing out. He's the one who put us in touch for this podcast. So thank you, Dilliar, for making that happen.

Andrew Christison 1:25

Yeah, we love you. Dilliar. Dilliar Askar iconic young gentleman who is passionate, charismatic and always, always happy to connect people and lead with his heart.

William Harris 1:37

He really is last interruption, and then we'll get into the good stuff. I do want to announce our spot. To announce our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that IPO Ed. You can learn more on our website at Elumynt.com which is spelled elumynt.com, Okay, onto the good stuff. Let's talk about this flywheel that you showed me. Break it down for me,

Andrew Christison 2:07

yes. So, so the way that I like to think about e commerce, so I've been in the space for about 13 years at this point in time, and working with, you know, in speaking with hundreds of brands a year, having the opportunity to really understand what makes them tick and grow and expand, really, when we're talking about on site for brands, and we're talking about e commerce in that capacity, we're talking about the marketing flywheel that starts with a traffic so first you need to make sure that you're getting folks to your site. If you're starting a business from scratch, this is true just as much as it's true if you're $100 million $1 billion brand. So traffic is step one. Step two is, once they're on your site, you need to be able to convert them. That's a lot where Elumynt comes in, and you come in to making sure that those conversion rates are are hard hitting and performative as possible. And then step three is retention, slash . So so the marketing flywheel is a very simple framework for really understanding where you need to focus if your site isn't getting substantial enough traffic, that's really where you need to begin to understand and maximize the channels that are available there. That could be Google AdWords, that could be Facebook, that could be Tiktok, that could be ChatGPT optimization these days, SEO etc, conversion rate optimization could be testing on site. It could be optimizing your website. It could be migrating to a platform that optimize that is already optimized out at the bat, as well as has the integration ecosystem that can provide the best benefit. And when it comes to retention, as you know, I like to refer to it as . Retensity is a full service agency, and I like to view the entire world as . And is really the main communication channel, so marketing, messaging, channel for your brand. So that's the voice of your brand. That's the relationship element of your brand. And if your traffic and your conversion is to a point where you actually are scaling properly because of the things that you've done already to date, in order to make sure that you're taking things to the next level and you're treating folks with the quality experience that you would want to be treated as as a customer of yours, then that's where really comes into its own, with email marketing as well as SMS marketing, as well as, like, on site list growth, as well as any other channel that could be corollary to that, mobile app messaging, etc.

William Harris 4:39

I love that you called out that idea of even, you know, if you don't have traffic, then none of that other stuff matters. But if you have traffic, but you haven't done these other things that they don't matter, they all play in together. And the image that popped in my head as you were saying this is just like the classic, uh, guy that's done all upper body and hasn't done legs at all, and he's got the chicken legs. And you're like, Okay, you're imbalance. Tier, there's an imbalance. We can visually see that when it comes to somebody who's working out, how do we see where the imbalance is between those three in this flywheel?

Andrew Christison 5:09

Yeah, most definitely. I mean, really, it's, it is relatively simple. If you're traffic, traffic is the top of the funnel. So, and it is probably not even the very top of the funnel. What you're doing in order to get the traffic is totally vital. That said, you can very simply look and see how many unique site visitors folks are getting per month, what the sources for those unique site visitors are, what the intent of those unique site visitors are, how long they're spending on site, et cetera. That is a pretty heavy determining factor of where they're going to go. So for example, you could have insane site traffic, but it's through SEO that you've done old school style, and you've written 7000 articles that are kind of corollary to what you're selling, but they don't actually fit the mold. And so you're getting, you know, million site views a month. But when it comes down to it, those site visitors aren't actually converting. They're not actually driving the growth that's necessary. So that's that's one aspect, is the traffic quality. Is it coming from the sources that you want, that you desire, and then is your method for gaining that traffic a scalable method? So yes, you've been able to invest X amount of dollars. Are you able to invest invest X times two and get twice the results. Are you able to invest, invest X times three and get three times the results? Do you feel comfortable that at least maybe you can go up a 10th of an X every single time and continue scaling it? And if that is true, then the next thing is conversion. So conversion is something that people focus on really early in their business, and then it's something that I think people neglect until they need to come back to it, oftentimes, unless they feel like they need to design refresh, and they're not even thinking about conversion, actually. But then the next step of conversion is, is both content oriented, so optimizing specific pages for what content on there, and then secondarily, optimizing for in running tests. So So Testing, testing content, testing actual copy, testing structure, etc. Once again, this is not actually what my business does, but these are all things that are absolutely necessary when you are running this type of business, and something that we really, you know, we try and advise companies aggregately on holes in their marketing flywheel, even if we are only working on one aspect of it, because we know that strengthening one aspect is only going to make our work more productive, more profitable for the brand, and higher revenue generating that said, once you've taken care of CRO, which is actually probably continuous process, forever, if we're honest with it, then then retention comes into play. So I think that oftentimes starting off an organization, unless you have high AOV or really sharp brand, we work with a lot of beauty brands, so obviously pristine brand control is critical there. But unless you have those factors, you could theoretically get away with maybe not doing the best job with email for a little bit. But once you start to hit a decent numbers like 5 million annual revenue, 10 million annual revenue, the expectation of your client base changes pretty significantly, and the expectations for you to be able to continue to grow and scale past those numbers requires you to actually make sure that you're building the relationship that endures the test of time. And that relationship really starts with a lot of the messaging that they're going to be receiving from an ongoing basis, then you will see that email and SMS and apps, mobile apps, become a major driving force for driving traffic on an ongoing basis, and just become a part of the flywheel in all facets of it. That said, if we're sending traffic to a landing page, for example, and that landing page or that product page isn't optimized for conversion. Theoretically, that you could have 2x the conversion on that same landing page, but we're sending X amount, we're sending a certain amount of traffic, and we're not seeing the results. Then we want to advise you on that also, to make sure that you have a healthy pipeline and make sure that you're creating the quality experience throughout the entire engagement that you have on the life, life, lifetime of your business.

William Harris 9:27

Like you said, a lot of these, all three of these pieces of the flywheel, are ongoing optimizations. You're constantly figuring out how to get more traffic, cheaper traffic, better traffic. You're constantly figuring out how to improve those optimizations, the conversion rate optimization, etc. You're constantly working on, how do we make sure that we're training even more of our people? I like that you called out that this is, let's say, the $10 million business, because that's really who I like to focus on. Let's say that you've made it to 10 million. You've proven you've got some product market fit. How do you know, looking at this $10 million business, whether or not the problem. Which one of those three? How do you know that you're like retention is the problem that you have right now that we need to dig into. What metrics, what are we seeing going on with the business?

Andrew Christison 10:08

So that is good. So, so it's tricky. I think is the correct answer to that? So, so, as you pointed out, and as we've been discussing, and I think as as we both mutually agree, like this is all interdependent, right? So the whole world is interdependent everything that we're operating on. And when we're talking about marketing in particular, it's very interdependent. When you're talking about one organization's marketing, one organization's business, and this is why you see businesses that are maybe the same exact revenue, they're the same exact size, they have the same amount of employees, they have very similar looking positioning from the outside. And maybe one is going to be twice, twice the value next year and twice the revenue next year, and the other one will be about exactly the same. And it's because it actually does come down to the details when you get inside it. So so a lot of it is, is analyzing where, what, what, what the performance is what's going on actually within the structure of the program. And so there are bad habits that some companies get into, like, like sending daily emails, or multiple emails a day, or or sending, you know, not doing any priority in regards to the triggered automations that they do. So for example, you could get like an automation for browse simultaneously. You're getting like a cart automation simultaneously. You're getting a campaign email, et cetera. You could have someone that's super neglecting list growth, which is the bread and butter that actually makes all of this happen. It's the fuel to the engine that runs , so absolutely critical. And so, so all of these little, little things, all these little things matter and make a big difference in compounds, and that's why. And then in addition to that, it's on top of just those best practices and the initial look into the brand it's really looking at now, now, are you actually speaking to your customer directly? Are you you keeping your consistent brand messaging as it stands? Are you fulfilling the expectation and the promise that you gave them in your ad, that you gave them on your website, that you gave them on the pop up when they actually subscribe to your email? And if so, is that promise, something that you can continuously fulfill over and over and over again to build the consistency that builds the faith that gets somebody to convert on an ongoing basis. And so your brand is unique to you. Your customer experience is unique to each and every customer that you're dealing with, and then also your repurchase cycles are unique to your business as well. So all of these factors really come into play, and need to have have a look taken at them in order to make sure that we're maximizing as well as we possibly can on an ongoing basis.

William Harris 12:55

Yeah, again, it reminds me of you were talking about how the message needs to you need to be able to back up what you're saying in the ads and back what you're saying. You know, it reminded me of, let's say you've got a dating profile and you say, I like long walks on the beach. And, you know, we go on a date and we've gone, you know, point one mile, and you're like, All right, that's long enough. You don't like long walks on the beach. You haven't lived up to the hype that you said here. You like romance. You don't like long walks on the beach. When I think about it, because I like relationships, just being in my mind. A lot of founders, you brought up list growth. A lot of founders think of list growth as just collecting emails, but it's really about starting relationship. This is something you told me. How do you help brands frame it that way from day one? So, really,

Andrew Christison 13:41

so, so. And this is, this is even potentially a controversial take within the industry. So the way that, the way that I stand, and it's not controversial to like the normal person, but it might be in the industry, but basically, the way that it works is, you are starting off a relationship with trust, like, let's say that you do say you like long walk to long walks on the beach, and that is not fulfilled. How do you feel at that moment? You feel like there's a disconnect, and then maybe you're like, you know what? I'll still give them a chance. Maybe I was wrong about that. So you still go on the second date or the third date or the fourth date, but then you see, maybe, like there's some but you always have this in the back of your head. They lied about that first thing, like, right in the beginning, this is awkward, this is weird, this is strange. So I believe the same exact way actually, about consent. So, so consent, when you're opting in, is absolutely critical. It's not, you know, I mean, in GDPR is a little bit more strict, and Castle in Canada and CCPA in California, talking about it really from just a normal perspective of, are you gaining consent from the get go? Are you like, did I say that I wanted messaging from you in any capacity, in any way, shape and form that you have recorded? I think that that is kind of like the first step everyone ever like when it comes. To marketing, there's a lot of bad actors, just in general, that are trying to get into the inbox. And that ISPs are constantly trying to fight and move, move, move to the appropriate spots in the inbox. You don't want to add to that Rubble, right? Even if somebody came to your site and they didn't consent to anything, let's try not to send them a message that they didn't consent to. And so I think starting off a just fulfilling that very promise makes a lot of sense. Secondly, when we're talking to a brand about like, what their offers are and and what the BEST OFFERS they they can give are, and what their customers typically want, and then what's like more normal in their industry and their vertical, other brands that are more similar to them, or have like a similar offer for coming coming through the gate. Then we just want to make sure that we can be aligned on something, and that alignment can work with the way that their business is structured, the way that they're if they're selling everywhere, quote, unquote, on Tiktok shop or Amazon that we're respecting the boundaries of those platforms as well simultaneously while we're providing this offer. So we want to make sure that we're giving them something that is a clear and clean offer, that is something that can be viewed as a privilege to the customer, and we're going to be giving them messaging that is high quality and interesting and unique and also designed to, like, educate, inform and convert. So it's, it's not just about giving you the the shiny object and hoping that it converts. And then this is when cadence, you know, Cadence increase can it can really it can get conversions, but it'll eventually burn your list as well. So contact acquisition needs to be thought of, not only at the acquisition point, but it needs to think about, well, how do I give this contact the highest possible experience, in the fastest, the best possible experience over time? So where do you see a lot of those really bad practices initially, like in the normal world, not necessarily e-commerce. You see it in folks like selling something that they're only going to sell for like three months. So if I'm just selling you an information product, for example, and this information product is only available for a limited time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I can send you like 75 emails in like 30 days. And, you know, sure, right? That's perfectly fine, it doesn't it. You know, no sweat off my back, etc. But when we're talking about a brand that is trying to build an audience of people that are passionate about their brand, interested in their brand, and and actually care about it, and and there's there's companies I'm sure that you know of that you have mad respect for. Maybe you subscribe to the emails for a little bit and then you unsubscribed or something, or maybe you just heard about them, and you still have never subscribed or even gone to their website. But when you somebody brings them up, you're like, Oh, I've heard great things about them, XYZ, like, and you have all of these comments about it. Do you want that, that that interaction to be like, Oh, my God, they like, completely created the worst experience for me ever. Like, I didn't even consent, and then I got all these messages, or I consented, and then I got in and they didn't give me the offer that they like said initially, or it didn't pop up for five more days. And then when I did receive emails, they were not appropriate, and they, you know, they they're missing a lot of the pieces. And so when we're talking about like personalization, segmentation, we're talking about like leveraging tools of like predictive tools, etc, that is really just those are tools and technology to help us to gain intimacy, to to gain gain trust in in a relationship that we're building over time in a sincere and genuine way. And that's how you keep a healthy database growing and expanding and and hope, hopefully flourishing. And it makes it so that if they unsubscribe, they unsubscribe, because, you know what? Maybe they're not, this isn't they're not in the buying cycle anymore, and they're not ready for it right now, or maybe they're getting from somewhere else, and they just don't need to receive your emails, because they're automatically getting it from another place that you're selling it. And you want them to still maintain that that positive, positive attitude towards you and your brand,

William Harris 19:14

this is why I love personifying a brand, right? Because if you personify your brand, and you think, Is it weird for Joe to send Kelly 13 text messages in a row on the same day? Yeah, it probably is right. Like, you know, maybe Kelly appreciates that. Probably not. And so it's like, when you personify your brand, you can actually put it together of like, two human beings actually creating relationship. Does this make sense? Let's talk zero party data. Then, right? So I want to talk about how early is it to start collecting preferences, because creating relationship means you know more about that person, the more you know about the person, the better you can serve them. But there's like, this balance. You can't just go on again, going to the first date thing. You can't just start going down. You know, it's like, well, what kind of medications do you take? Do you have any allergies to anything? It's like, Wait a minute. Wait a minute. That's some. Personal information here. Let's just eat some dinner and talk about a little bit more superficial stuff. And so you know, how early Can you start collecting zero party data on preferences?

Andrew Christison 20:08

Well, well, I'll give a comment on those questions. So obviously, if there's a HIPAA violations occur, and you're selling those things, that example, you want to be even more careful. But, but zero party data is something that you can you obviously want to start collecting as early and often as possible and as deep and as long as you possibly can and and so I believe in like zero and first party data pretty heavily as well. So when you're looking at brands coming through from social, where brands came from, which we previously mentioned there so or where traffic has come from, then tagging that traffic for contacts as they come in also makes sense, and maybe it doesn't give you a lot of information. Maybe it doesn't give you the exact right view now, but maybe it will later, as we continue understanding that audience and understanding of the profitability per channel also, and making sure that things are being as productive as they possibly can be. And maybe, if they're coming from Facebook, for example, and you're paying a lot more, which a lot of people are paying a lot more for Facebook these days, then that paints a different scenario. And maybe those customers just need a steeper offer also, and you're willing to lose a little bit more money, or invest a little bit more money or have tighter margins in order to convert those because you are pouring so much in at the top, especially during the market like right now, that said the zero party data. So we, once again, we work with a lot of beauty brands as well. So we work with all types of E commerce brands. But I think beauty brand is like, a quintessential example of like, lifecycle glory, because it utilizes all the aspects, really, when we're talking surveys. So So I think surveys make a ton of sense, and survey funnels also make a ton of sense when people want a customized experience, like, what is your skin type? What is your hair type? What is you know, What? What? What What are your health issues when we're talking about supplement brands, what are the things you're hoping to accomplish and achieve when you're talking about fitness brands? And I think that asking the questions that kind of let people disclose where they're at in a manner that is, like, safe and comfortable and informative for them. I mean, think about how, like in the early days of the Internet, how many of those like what Simpson's character are you? You know did Sure, did you do it? And people love them because it does tell them something about themselves, but it also tells them something about what they should be getting and what is recommended for them also, and I think that that's very useful for them to be directed to the right products and services, but it's also simultaneously helpful for us to be able to make sure that we understand at least a little bit more. And maybe you answered the questions not how you answer them every single time. So we're not we're not going to exclusively shut you down from like receiving any communications outside of the questions that you answered, but we will try and lean in to making sure that we're helping you solve the problem that you mentioned that you had. And if we're showing other messages, we can show dynamic content, perhaps about the things that you asked about and requested about. And we could start segmenting so we know that people have that have this problem may be more likely to purchase at this cycle and so on and so forth. So so so you can, you can gain a lot of information from explicit information that's received. In addition to that within emails, specifically, you can have UTM structures built throughout your entire email. I mean, you you do it, hopefully you have it set up correctly. Not everyone does. You probably should if you're listening to this. And so as such, you know where people are clicking through on the email and what people are clicking on also. And so you can gather together if you have one specific product that a lot of people, like some a bunch of people, have clicked through on over a year time, and you've been collecting this data, and then you're running a huge sale just on that product. Guess what? Audience is probably perfect for that product, not only your engaged audience, your your, you know, VIPs, your your your loyalty folks, but also the folks that have been clicking on it in the last year that haven't yet converted, or maybe they did convert, and it's been a long enough window. So I think just thinking about, how do you how do you help people to better navigate your brands, products, SKUs, everything about your brand, I mean, the education around it. How do you help them to get to know you better and to find what they need from you, by by the things that they've they've told you, whether it's explicitly through, like a survey of clicking on things, or it's kind of implicitly, I think, also through clicking on things on site, or how they how they got to in the first place.

William Harris 24:56

I forgot all about those quizzes like, which Simpsons character are you you brought? That up, and I just kept thinking. I was smirking for a little while there, because I was like, I can't even fathom the amount of psychographic data that BuzzFeed had on every single person. Like, an insane amount of

Andrew Christison 25:11

information, an insane amount, I mean, there was and you just, like, did them no matter what, like, I didn't even there. I think that in the early ages of the internet, and this is, this is all of us today, but in the early ages of the internet, we were just like, You know what? For us, we're willing to trade, like, our personal data for anything, for anything. And now we're at the point where, like, maybe we shouldn't have done all of that. Maybe we should be a little bit more restrictive about it. So I really do like the privacy wave that's come about, and I'm definitely not taking those surveys anymore, but I do think that it does tap into something when you can have that those questions and questions and answers and surveys and information from your client base to help them navigate how they can be successful

William Harris 25:59

with your brand. Now, if we're building a list, there's always the argument between, let's say, quantity over quality. And I think you would agree with the me on this, that the highest quality person that you can add to your list is going to be somebody who purchased from you at full price, like not even a discount like that is a very high quality person on your list. But then there's, you know, the other flip side of that, which could be the lowest quality person that you have, which is they didn't even click on the Facebook ad. It was just the Facebook lead, right? And so it's like, boy, this is a really low lift. They didn't have to fill anything out. Like there's the lowest lift possible. Where do you how do you figure out you know which to focus on, quality versus quantity and balancing those two so,

Andrew Christison 26:42

I mean, so when it comes down to it, you want to, you want to test new acquisition channels, if at all possible. So when you're talking about Facebook leads, way, way back in the day, we were working with a brand, and they a jewelry brand that ended up exiting after growing pretty substantially. They were really focused on, how do we acquire more? And they had maxed out, kind of like, what they did on, on, on all of their paid media channels. And we were, you're, we were, you know, killing it on the retention side. And so we suggested doing Facebook lead ads as a test and and we've done this multiple times since then. But this is a brand that was like, super bought in on like, let's do it and let's figure it out. So what they were able to figure out is they were able to get, like, each email address for about $2 and we just had to see, could we, what could we do in order to make sure that that was a profitable acquisition for them by converting as best as possible. And so we created a custom experience entirely behind that so that we could convert those folks. And we did, and it was, it ended up being very successful. I think the price ended up fluctuating after like five or six months to like way higher and died. But it was a very lucrative way to go about it for a temporary period of time. On the other end of the spectrum, we do work with a lot of brands that do contests. From time to time, contests are either like very, you know, they're very hit or miss, and I would say more often than not, they're missed, but well orchestrated, well coordinated, working tightly with influencers, your core demographic, brands like that are just perfectly aligned with you. They can be very successful. But for these also, we tend to like to make independent automations that are so it's like a modified welcome series for these contacts, just because they tend to be much lower quality, and we want to get rid of them if we possibly can, if we need to, and if not, we want to make sure that they're going to be active, but we want to be a little bit more delicate with them, because you could get a unbelievable amount of contacts, but those contacts could be low quality, and you don't want to be sending off low quality contacts messages, because they're going to end up having deliverability problems in the law on the long tail. So when we come back, when we come back to, like, the, did somebody consent as well? This is the same, the same concept of, or, like, the Publishers Clearing House, like, twice, yeah, it's the same concept. Like, I had no idea I can send it to that and so, so in those scenarios, we want to make sure that there, you know people are, we're not sending to people that that are like, Who is this brand? Why are they contacting me? I want nothing to do with them, etc. We want to make sure that we're sending to people that are looking forward to seeing the messages, or at least interested in saying, seeing like, what is this? At the very least, and then if that curiosity keeps bubbling like they're opening all the messages. They start clicking through, etc, etc. Then, then we're getting to a place where we know we can start building a relationship over time

William Harris 29:49

with them, yeah. Um, I glad you brought up, uh, like, sweepstakes and things like that, because I hadn't thought about contests in a while, but I'd love a good contest. Um. One of the things that I always critique people about whenever they would run contests, is it's like, okay, you're giving away an iPad. So is everybody else. First of all, and you sell patio furniture. Like, what does the iPad have to do with this? There's no relevance, right? Versus, let's say that you sold pool furniture or or pool supplies, or whatever. It's like, you're giving away a a clean pool cleaning robot. Like, that's actually giveaway. You're like, well, if they actually want the pool cleaning robot, there's a good chance that they have a pool, but if they have a pool, they're likely interested in all the rest of your products. And so there's at least some relevance to this.

Andrew Christison 30:32

Yeah, absolutely. And that's in So, and if you're in a branch, so when you're talking about, like, specifically the pool cleaner, right, there's probably not a huge quantity of places they could buy that specific pool cleaner also, right? So maybe, if you're the manufacturer seller, best case scenario, if you, if not, are you like a RE, like, one of like seven retailers that are, like the largest, and you have other notable things about you, etc. And so I think thinking about, like, how that is going to come across, and what the relevance of it is, is so spot on of an argument and discussion. So I like the idea which, which, honestly, it's not it. I don't think it performs as well for, like, the largest possible quantity, which is oftentimes contest, especially partnered contest, will go for. But I like the concept of gift cards or credit, or store credit as a gift. So mostly because it gives you, you know, it's bringing the it's bringing the customer right back to you to give that experience to as well. And also everyone that's signing up there, they, maybe they'll be like, you know, $200 to this company. Like, who is this company? And it gets a little them a little bit more curious then to like, to like this merchandise that is $200 value. Maybe that merchandise is more enticing, but are they going to be able to tie that to your brand over the long horizon of time? And is everybody else going to be able to do likewise? I'm not so sure I like contests are a little tricky always, yeah,

William Harris 32:01

100% I want to talk a little bit about the Teck and infrastructure, because that's another aspect that you've told me about that you know, people are missing out on. You called it like, like, this gold mine of tools that they aren't using. What's the most common blind spot that you see in tech stacks at the $10 million level? So

Andrew Christison 32:21

I that's this is a really good question, and I appreciate the phrasing of it also when we're looking at brands. So obviously, making sure the water is flowing fully and completely and well, in regards to contact acquisition and list hygiene, it's critical. But the next thing, and that we do in the very beginning of engagements is really focus heavily on like their technology infrastructure. So we live in the age of ecosystem. You know, I love it, honestly, like I think to imagine that a company like Shopify could have 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of integrations, and companies like Klaviyo, equally, can have 1000s and 1000s of integrations that are deep and run well. Is astounding to think about just five years ago honestly. So, so when we're working with brands, we're inevitably working with a relatively sophisticated tech stack. Yes, when you go, the further upstream you go, and the further enterprise you go, everything looks familiar. And everything looks pretty familiar once you start, once you get to 10 million also. But that said, there are oftentimes massive amount of integrations that are critical for that are critical to come into the ESP that you're working with. And some a lot of times, people have the the have the technology, they have, like an integration set up, but they're actually not feeding the data in correctly. And this is way more common than I would ever like to say. But this is the truth of the matter. I saw a presentation about 10 years ago by the former VP of Marketing for the IBM marketing cloud silver pop, and he was saying that that that a 90% of their clients use less than 10% of their platform, and I don't think that. I do think the adoption is a little bit higher today than it was then, because things are a lot easier to use. But I do think that it is that everything is horribly underutilized in regards to not only the core, ESP platforms, but also the integrations, and so just neglecting all of that additional data, you're talking about, creating a personalized experience and collecting zero party data, like the zero party data of, do they have a ticket open? Did they do a review that was positive or negative? Like, I mean, th, that information or that specific data, having that within your platform? Form is going to give you a leg up for being able to be relevant and accurate to your client base, and if they did leave a bad review, did you trigger an additional message saying, Hey, how can we help make this better? Did you have someone from CS reach out or give them the opportunity to communicate on a ticket after that? So, so, so technology setup is a critical component, and then over time, you have to check it on a regular basis to make sure that it's still operationally working the way that it should. And, you know, integrations break over time. I mean, this, this happens. So, so if someone has a subscription technology, and that subscription technology stop sending over all of the inputs that trigger out the messages you need to make sure that you're staying aware of these changes and modifications over time. And what often happens when we're coming into brands is we'll see, oh, this broke four months ago. This broke seven months ago. This probably broke about a year and a half ago, and so so they just don't realize that these little, tiny components have been knee capping them for so long. And then we're able to come in, we're able to get everything lined up, and then we're able to just keep it buttoned up on an ongoing basis while we're building the rest of the program for

William Harris 36:15

them. Yeah, it sounds like you're actually about to give more than just a golden nugget, a golden egg. Here, I can hear the chicken?

Andrew Christison 36:22

Yeah, we, we. I did not lock out from from the the adjacent area. We have a, we have 100 chickens.

William Harris 36:32

That's awesome. I have chickens as well, but only, I think, like, I don't know, seven or something, not 100

Andrew Christison 36:37

of them. See, that's a, that's a reasonable number. I think you're at the reasonable range.

William Harris 36:42

I brought a chicken on the podcast one time. Actually, I held it, you know, Aaron or if you know Aaron Orndorff too, yeah. So Aaron Orndorff is, you know, he's always showing off his bunny rabbit, whatever it's like. I brought a chicken on there just to one up him a little bit. I mean, that's perfect. So okay, I let's say that, you know, bad review. That makes a lot of sense, right? There's nothing worse for your, Let's even say advertising, than advertising a product to somebody who's already left you a bad review, they're just going to destroy you in the comments on that ad. That's terrible, right? So having that data flow besides that, what are some other examples that you're like, Look, these are the things that need to be flowing in there.

Andrew Christison 37:21

I mean, I think that when we're talking about CS having having customer service tickets available, and as much information flowing in from those is is super critical. Some platforms are like building this all in and like the unified sort of manner, but most people are still using third party technology for it absolutely important. Once again, when we're talking about, like, pop ups, yes, once again, platforms have their own built in, but there are third party pop ups and like, how much information are you actually getting into your platform? And is that information actually correct and accurate? Do you have data integrated into the platform from paid media. So, so are there, are like, should we should be be utilizing like, are you sending out, like, certain lists to it, or are you having to export it and send it over? Either one of those is, like, perfectly acceptable manage of doing it. But let's discuss what the strategy is and how it's actually being executed. When you're talking about the $10 million mark, like, what becomes more important? I think once we're once we kind of are establishing, like, making sure everything's flowing properly and operating cohesively, then really the next step is, you know, what's the lowest hanging fruit, easiest to execute, highest potential revenue yield on the roadmap. And we're executing, but we're we're trying to be also conservative in regards to like, recommending that they are spending more money on on more platforms and more technology as well. But that said, I mean, when you're looking at things like CDPs, or you're looking at platforms that may offer the capability for better identification as well for contacts, there's, there's multiple things that come into play, but it's oftentimes, when is the right time for those was the right time for it five years ago? Was it today? Is it a year or two from now or or maybe even longer out from that? So I think that, just keeping in mind that while, you know, I think a lot of people like to look at a brand that's just killing it out of control, and everybody's a huge fan of they have a really charismatic Head of Marketing who's on and talking about what they're using and what their tech stack is across the board. And people go, Oh, I need that exact tech stack. And they get it, and then they don't have the people to execute on it, they don't have the infrastructure within their organization in order to do it, and it's just not operating the way that we want

William Harris 39:47

it to you. Answered the next question I was gonna ask, when would it be? A hey, let's do this in a year or two. I was like, I couldn't think of a reason why you're like, Well, why not integrate it now? The reason being, you might not be able to actually do it. Well,

Andrew Christison 39:59

yes. And. And and also it, maybe it's it's not, it's not until the eighth step. Also, like if you, let's say you're missing seven automations or key options that probably makes sense, that need to be implemented step by step, and test it into and make sure that they're performing and these should be the chunk of your program that's generating 30, 40% of all of your revenue if those aren't set up properly, what's the point of getting a technology that costs, like a few extra $1,000 a month that gives you insights on ways to better test those in the future? I think really going that. I don't like to say crawl, walk, run, because it makes you think we're crawling, but really, I think you want to take care of that lowest hanging fruit, easiest execute, highest potential revenue yield, and you want to move out from there, as long as it's, you know, you also want to make sure it's relevant for the time frame and the client base

William Harris 40:49

and stuff like that. What's one, let's say, relatively small automation that has an outsized return?

Andrew Christison 40:57

So I would, I mean, if we're just going to ignore welcome, browse, abandonment, add to cart and check out. Although add to cart is probably one of the most neglected ones still, because you do need to add like custom code to your site, and people think that abandoned checkout is it? So I would say, Add to Cart. We'll say that first, but I think, back in stock notifications. So especially when you're talking about a scaling e commerce brand, I mean, this is just something that happens. So the smaller you are, the more likely you are to go out of stock. Your inventory is not under control yet, and that's okay. That's how everybody is. Unless you're a second time founder or third time founder and you're an ace, you're going to run out of stock of things, especially your best selling products. So making sure that you have people lining up in order to get them when they come back in stock, and that is capable of being properly communicated is absolutely critical, and will basically just put money in your pocket every single time you get things back in stock. But then, as you grow, your SKU counts continue to expand, and you're going to run out of stock of more things more uniquely, you're not going to be able to really still assess 100% accuracy how much inventory is actually necessary, necessary until you get to a more advanced stage in the organization. Oftentimes. Now, some businesses, they don't ever have this problem, at least that I see on the outside, and I am very impressed. But I would say nearly every business that I've worked with has had some sort of issue with inventory management and at younger, younger stages particularly. But as things scale up, back and stop, is basically just a money printer and a very easy to execute item. I mean, maybe not the easiest to execute, but it works really

William Harris 42:42

well. Yeah, no, that's brilliant. I like that. I want to talk about some of the behavior cycles, because you've brought these up before. We talked about it in the intro. I love how you compare customer behavior to gardening and moon cycles. Can you give an example of how you've actually mapped a marketing calendar around some of these rhythms. So

Andrew Christison 43:02

that's a really good question. I would say, when we're talking about what I'm trying to think of a good scenario here, I think that when you're talking about relevance, once again, we're talking about there's two key components to what we're executing on a normal basis. So we're building out roadmap. So roadmap is typically like initiatives that need to be taking place. So think of it as like ongoing projects, or projects in order, and then we're project managing them, and then campaigns. So campaigns is basically your calendar. So calendar strategy, calendar management, calendar collaboration is basically our wheelhouse there. So I think that it's the cycles that we're thinking of are actually cycles that are broad, too. I'm not saying that that that we're going to send something just, you know, on the new moon, which it's actually tomorrow morning. But so I think that when we're we're thinking of it. We're thinking of what is the calendar look like for the year, and then what are the holidays for the year? What are the what are the things that are relevant to your brand? Working with a lot of skincare brands, for example, summer, where there's an extra lean into SPF. In the winter, when you're talking about SPF, you might be talking a little bit more about longevity, right? So, so you're speaking to the same things differently, depending on what's happening around, around where you're communicating, and how you're communicating when you're talking about rejuvenating masks, etc, like it should be to look forward to something, it should be thematically relevant. One of our brands is a very high end jewelry brand, and so obviously, with Wimbledon recently, we wanted to make sure that, like there was at least subtle Wimbledon references with an email for tennis bracelets and. Which are, you know, incredibly gorgeous items made famous by the sport of tennis, and particularly historically at Wimbledon. So, so there are things that you want to play into that are occurring throughout the year. But this is also relevant for like Black Friday, Cyber Monday. This is also relevant for culturally. Now we're all attuned to Prime Day. So when we're looking at Prime Day here, we're like, like, most brands should be messaging something unless you're not doing any discounts at all whatsoever as a brand, most brands should be messaging something relevant during this time frame, even if they're not selling on Amazon because people have their wallets out and they're planning on spending to buy. Yeah, prime time to buy and so. So when people are getting primed to purchase, you want to be there. But also when people are being primed for anything that's relevant because of the timeframe, the whether or not that's Fourth of July, or Labor Day, or, you know, the traditional holidays, where they're sales oriented periods, or it's things that are very specific to your brand, your product offerings, your stage of life. One of the brands that we're talking to right now is a brand that's focused on furniture for babies. So when we're talking about we're talking about cribs and furniture and and decoration. So what becomes the most critical then? I mean, you know, I hear there is a correlation between moon cycle and childbirth behind I don't want to Sure, makes sense, but, but, but I think one of the things that we focus that, that we're planning on implementing here is really an extreme focus on when is the estimated date of birth, and then, like, what are that? What? When are people making decisions on this? Like, what is the typical buying cycle look like? How do we make sure that we're serving people the items that they want? Are they just getting the nursery set up initially, with a crib and some blankets and some, you know, in some some toys, they're going to receive gifts. It's a community event, obviously. So there's like, registries as well that are involved in this process. And so what's going to be fulfilled by the registry? How are people going to feel after the baby comes? Are they going to be interested in maybe exploring more furniture? Then, what furniture Do they feel like they need before, sure. And then after the baby's born, Is this their first child is their second child is their third child. So understanding as much as we possibly can This is where zero party day comes into play, but understanding as much as we possibly can about this customer and and where they're at in their maternity journey. I mean, I know you have children. I have children too. These are deeply emotional parts of our lives. And like, what comes into what comes into play for somebody that's making those purchases? There's a lot that that matters. Style, yes, of course. But really, safety, practicality. Like, where is it going to be in your house? Like, do you think that, you know, is there going to be a transition between crib and side of the bed, and when does that take place? Or, you know, vice versa, like, do we want to give options for being in the bed before going to the side of the bed, before going into the crib? Does this crib convert into something? Do we need to help the beds afterwards? And so, so just going through all of those things we're talking about. So when we're saying lifecycle, we're not we're like, this is actually an example of, like, a human lifecycle, but that's what we're talking about. We're talking about human lifecycles. What are you doing in your life? What cycle of life are you in? And what do you buy because of that? Right now, I'm obsessed with some longevity stuff. I know stereotypical. It might be a

William Harris 48:43

little stereotypical. It is. I'm in there too. I Okay. So I signed up for function health. I did all that stuff. I'm 40 this year, right? So it's like, I gotta start doing all this stuff. But, yeah, so longevity stereotypical.

Andrew Christison 48:56

It's very stereotypical, but, but yeah. So I started getting very, healthy at like 39 I'm 41 My birthday is coming up too, so I think that so, so that's, that's some aspect. So for this audience of, what are you doing during this time of your life? What are you focused on? You don't you, you're, you're not concerned that you're going to die next year, right? But what you are concerned with is that you have kids, and you want to make sure that you're healthy and happy for them. You're also concerned that in 30 years, that you're around so that you can maybe meet your grandchildren, maybe be lucky enough to live another 5060, years, so that you can meet your great grandchildren and spend time with them. And so really talking about these stages of development of of like a normal human life and a lifecycle, and really getting deep into like so. So oftentimes brands have their own persona development, but we really need to peel back the layers in order to make sure that we're we're giving communication that makes sense, and maybe that communication is broad at first, and then it gets more specific as we learn more over time too. So I don't. Want to say, like, we're coming in hot, like, you know, 39 year old male, let's get them, you

William Harris 50:04

know. But it makes sense. And so, like, you uncover these things, there's human lifecycles. I like that. There's a lot of psychographics that can go into this. Just as BuzzFeed, they probably have all the information about what we need to do here, yeah. But so you're working on those. I do like that. You called out, though, like moon cycles, and I didn't think about it, but it's like, it but it's like it probably affects more than we realize. What about some of those, like, smaller, more hidden, nuanced things that are outside of the human lifecycle? How can brands discover those things that are and I'll give another example here too, like, so you talked about seasonal ones, another seasonal one that's maybe interesting. I haven't looked at this, but I was tempted to go over to Google Trends here and just look through this right now. But I was like, I'll get distracted. But okay, sunglasses, you talked about SPF sunglasses. I live in Minnesota. I'm sure that sunglasses in summertime go up in Minnesota, because all of a sudden the sun comes out. We're excited about it. But I would also be surprised if there wasn't a smaller blip that took place in, like, January, because all of a sudden it's snowy, and that is bright white light hitting your eyes, and you can't see in January. And so sunglasses come out again in January Minnesota. And you think, January in Minnesota, why do we need sunglasses? But you do, right? So, like, there's, like, these little nuance things that you might not know to look for unless you're just, like, you know, really with it and you're aware. How do you discover some of these things? So,

Andrew Christison 51:23

I mean, I think, I think a lot of it is understanding, I mean, the founders of the brand, the leaders of the brand, the insiders at the brand, this is why. So we're basically outsourced marketing department, and we are, you know, passionate to know everything that we possibly can about the brands that we're working with and their their psychographics, demographics, customer behavior, etc. But really, if they you, you've been, you've been a part of this brand for 567, years, and you're on the marketing team or marketing leadership, then you are going to have some great insider information just about your client base and customer base and things that you haven't done. And I guarantee you, every single brand has a wish list, whether or not it's actually formally written of like things that they wish that they could be doing in regards to like their lifecycle marketing. And we want that wish list. We want to understand we want to understand that you have a high cohort of clients in in Minnesota, we know that Minnesota has the worst snow ever in the United States, but Canada still scoffs at it and and as such, you you know you love you love Hockey, and you're going to have a huge glare. Yeah. Yeah, and so. So I think that that works perfectly. I think the other things are so. So, I think you can uncover these things from learning. You can uncover these things from thinking, planning and strategizing. At the the email marketing agency that I used to work at, we had a technology that we developed, we developed a complete separate brand, actually, that was weather based email targeting. So it was actually triggering emails based off of the local weather. So what we're doing is we're pulling API weather data, making making it more robust by it, by reviewing a few, a few, a few different technologies. We're overlaying that over ZIP Code throughout the United States. And then you could trigger off a message to everywhere where it's it's raining right now, obviously you want to put some caps on it. And then you want to be a little more sensitive, you know, in the Pacific Northwest, where I am currently, but, but I think that being as aware of possible. If it's over 100 degrees, is there like that gives you a great reason to message somebody. If it's sunny and clear, maybe there's another reason to message somebody. And so these weren't to be used like on a constant, constant basis. They obviously you wanted to make sure that you had caps on it and you had control over it. It still played into your messaging hierarchy, but you could get really intimate in regards to messaging for it and one of our largest clients, obviously. So we had, we had the an extremely large sunglass conglomerate, I'll say, as a client. But we also had a another brand that was insurance oriented. And so for insurance actually, it is like the best fit ever. So once we kind of built it for E commerce and thinking apparel and apparel did work well, and sunglasses worked but, but insurance actually is where the bread and butter is. If you have a hail storm or a severe weather alert, then you can time a message after for getting a claim for, like, the rocks through your windshield, etc. And so there's actually a whole thought process about like, cycles and relevance, and like, what's going on with the weather that affects us all and how that makes an impact. So that said, we still want to, we still want to collaborate. Is with, with folks inside the brand that are, I mean, and we will collaborate on an ongoing basis. The other side is, and this just came to mind when you were talking about when you when you're intro in it. This is where I thought you were going with it. But the fact of the matter of of time of day and day of week, descent, I think a lot of brands, they kick off, they kick off, and they will just start sending. They'll send it a specific time of day that somebody else recommended, and then they'll send the three messages on three separate days, the same exact three days a week, which, which I do think is good for, like training your database exactly when to expect messages, etc. But it's worth testing. It's worth testing. Are there optimum times to be sending messages? Could you utilize AI in order to choose the best send time per candidate? Yes, and or if this message is time sensitive and does need to go out at specific times, is their best time. That's for, like, the entire your entire database. Are you just US based? Are you global? If you are global, is everybody in American, English and stuff like that, like, how relevant and accurate Are you getting? And then secondarily, days of the week. So we have a brand that tried and true. They actually do new arrivals, new arrivals email every single Saturday, and it is high performing. It is a beautiful email that we like, we actually spend the most time on. But it is a weekly email comes out once a week, and it's with new rivals that come into their in stock every single week. And everybody loves it. It is unbelievable. Just open rates, click through rates, purchase rates. It's, it's like their number one driver. And so yes, that is like, a perfect scenario, but maybe they have, like, let's look at the other emails they're sending out. Do those need to be on like, this specific day, at this specific at the same time? Not really. We should change it up. We should, we should. We should also make sure that we're creating a different experience, because maybe you're missing the messages, because all the messages are coming in at, you know, 9am your time, and at 9am your time, you're always doing X, Y, Z. So maybe if they just came at 1115 you actually are normally taking, like, your break right before you know, your last thing, right before lunch, and that's a better time for you to receive it. So I think testing out your audience, testing out your demographics, and testing out your messaging, makes sense, and then also, once again, with machine learning and AI tools built into ESPs, some of this is already available data for you that just people don't use. Yeah,

William Harris 57:39

I remember there was a time when hanging out with my brother in law, and he came home at like, 2am and I walk out in the kitchen because he's making a bunch of noise, right? It's like, what are you doing? And he's like, I'm making a chicken caesar salad. You want something like, No, I want you to be quiet so I can go back to bed. And so to your point, I like a chicken caesar salad, right? Like, I would appreciate that, maybe at noon, but not at 2am and so finding that right time for each person, it was, apparently the right time for him, at 2am chicken caesar salad.

Andrew Christison 58:09

We, I can't remember what brand it is right now, we used to work with this brand, and we were doing testing, and we were like, we had this hypothesis that maybe this was something. It was, it was a, I can't remember what the product was. It was something that, like, correlated with, like, going out, or was a hang. It was a hang. It was, it was, it was for hangovers. It wasn't actually explicitly for hangovers. Hangovers was, like, one of the things that it could be utilized for. And it was a drink. And so we decided to do some testing for sending it out at like, 12am 1pm 1am 2am Yeah, and it actually turned out that, like, 2am best time ever to send this email, on a Friday and Saturday. And so it became, it was something that we did, like on a monthly basis. We'd actually send interesting that on a weekend night, because the audience that's interested in it for that use. Actually, that's the best time to actually contact them about it, because that's that's what it can add the most value to their lives.

William Harris 59:10

Brilliant. I want to talk about authenticity that converts because you and I have talked about authenticity and how that plays a role in this. I feel like authenticity gets watered down really quickly, right? A brand can be authentic for a message, and then very quickly they're they're not, they're great, back into bye, bye, bye, more of our stuff. How do you separate real brand intimacy from the BS?

Andrew Christison 59:32

So, I mean, I guess the endless question, right? I do think it is the endless question. So, so really brands, and this is where it comes into like personification. How well is that? Does that brand have set values and a set culture and a set way of communicating and set colors and set guide guardrails for what? Influencers, they will and will not use set guardrails for the type of imagery that they'll use and how it will come across, and what the level of, you know, what the level of, I want to say, classiness, but maybe that's the wrong word that they'll want to use. So everyone in their own personal life has these has these guardrails, has these values, etc, and and maybe you won't know exactly from looking at them, but you might get a hint from looking at them, from talking to them, from getting to know them a little bit. But a brand needs to exude those qualities in all that they do. And so this is why well defined brands that are that that really do have these, these tight guard rails are great clients, and they also are great opportunities for continuing to grow and continue to expand and continuing to flourish, because the earlier that you have it all dialed in, which, which, I'm not saying it's like, you don't need to get it all dialed in, like, sub 1 million, or, you know, maybe sub 3 million. And like, I mean, by all means, like, I understand there's not everything's perfect. And I'm not trying to say people need to be perfect. You don't, but I do think that that when you do have a lot of these core features and functionalities of the vision, the mission of the company, core values, etc, dialed in, that you're able to be authentic as a company, and then you translate that authenticity to the communication mechanism. So So in communication, we know what the guardrails are. We know exactly the words that we should use and the words that we don't use when we're when we're talking about things. We know to say value based things versus sale and discount oriented things we know to say sale and discounted things instead of value based things. We know what like, how we want to be participating in in dialog with our customers and so, so some of that, we will craft ourselves, and we'll try and fit a persona on how we'll be doing it, and then we can control it on an ongoing basis, because we do own the messaging channels. And then we can share that information across verticals with either other agencies or their internal teams that are doing other channels, etc. And we can, we can continue to develop from there, but really it has to start somewhere, like somebody has like, like, the like, it either comes from the top of the organization, or we also can be the tail to wag the dog, but when it comes down to it, that's the only way to be successfully executing at, like, a very, very high level across the board, and that's when it is authentic. And people like say, like, I saw this study, and I'm not gonna be able to cite it or where it's from, or who it even came from, but the scenario was they were looking for, they interviewed a whole bunch of people, and they had people watch the interviews, and they with all of, like, the brain, oh, yeah, brain things on, eg, there, yeah, eg. And so they were seeing like, what the brain activity was. And there's like, a series of parts of the brain that, like, gear towards connection. It actually, like, lights up several sections of the brain. And what they found is it was actually during the parts when people were most authentic, all of these sections lit up. And then you would like, people's hair on their arms would raise. And so people would like, mention like that. That was the biggest impact for me during this specific time. And they went and looked through and they were like, oh, what question Was it? What did the person like? And so on and so forth. And it was, it was all sorts of different questions. Like, there wasn't, like, a clear continuity to it. And so they had to keep digging deeper. Well, was it a certain demographic? Was it like, like, was it a tone where they like, like, loud or silent, and what they found, what they believe they found, is that it actually was when people were being their most authentic and raw that that it was able to actually cultivate the best connection with the audience. And so I don't know if you're giving people goosebumps when you're sending emails, just to be clear here, but I do think that the brand, the more authentic the brand is, and the clearer they are on their core core values, the better opportunity they have to connect with their audience authentically. I

William Harris 1:04:11

think there's something to that, though there's something about truth that I think resonates, let's just even say in quantum field theory, like, there's something that resonates beyond what we can see right now, that I think people perceive more than we might realize.

Andrew Christison 1:04:27

Yeah, I mean, I, you know, as we've, we've, we've established, I believe in, like, you know, divine inter interdependence of, you know, everyone and everything in the world. And I do think that, like, quantum theory addresses some of those facets. But really, what it is is humans are seeking connection in general and And so creating an authentic connection in real life, in zoom calls, in in email, and it matters. And. It should be, it should be expanded upon. Now, obviously nothing beats like real life connection with nature and other other animals and other human beings, but, but, but I do think that there, there's an element of it that that is, is usable and is beneficial. When it comes to marketing,

William Harris 1:05:19

this is a good time for me to switch into who is Andrew Christison, because I like getting to know the human being behind who we're talking to. You had quite the multicultural background in childhood. Tell me a little bit about your childhood and how that's helped shape you.

Andrew Christison 1:05:39

Yes, so I was so my dad is half Japanese and half Scottish. My mom is half Mexican and half Irish and English. The Mexican side is actually half indigenous and half Spanish as well. And so I grew up really, really close in a close knit family. I have an older brother and sister, and we spent an unbelievable amount of time with my grandparents, too. I was lucky. My both my parents are the second oldest in their families of five children each, and and so, and we live close to them, so we got to see them our entire childhood, which was incredible. And so, so having, having had kind of like this, you know, melting pot of the background. It really makes you identify and know that you are so clearly a part of so, so clearly, like, just like everybody else, and so clearly not like anybody else. And so when people say, like, humans are like, you know, 98.9% exactly identical, and it's just that, like extra 1.1% of our like our DNA modifications, that make us a little bit different. I think that that makes sense, and I think that people need to recognize that we are actually all the same species and come from the same background. My parents were super hard working. I was actually thinking about this after our last call. So my, my parents always encouraged us to like, do things like, like, like, and pushed us to become what we ended up becoming. But basically, my, my mom was a leader in our I was born and raised Catholic, and she was a leader in our church. And she was so I participated in all of the things, like, you know, as an altar, bore boy, a lecture, a Eucharistic Minister, I led retreats, I led youth group, etc, etc. And in addition to that, I also taught, like, religious education to second graders for like, several years as a child and so, so she would, like impromptu, like, have me come and, like, speak to like, groups of children or parents. And I particularly remember one time I was 10 years old, and I was talking to the parents of seven year olds, teaching them how to, like better, connect and explain things to their children, which is just the most preposterous thing to think about. In retrospect, I realized it was preposterous about 10 years later, but, but at that time, it seemed like perfectly normal to me that that could occur. In addition to that, like my dad, he was like, you know, I used to have a newspaper route. You should get a newspaper route. So during seventh and eighth grade, I actually had a newspaper route that I did every single day for two full calendar years, and then I quit right before I started high school. Probably should have continued, honestly, but, but it was fun. I rollerbladed it nice and in a lot of that stuff, I mean putting yourself out of your comfort zone for like public speaking, or dealing with, like, groups and stuff like that. I think I was really lucky. It's not like I wasn't nervous, and I still would get nervous for quite a bit of time after that, but and then doing the newspaper route, once again, didn't pay very much. I it wasn't, it wasn't big money then or now. The per hour rate was, like, less than minimum wage, if you actually calculate. Sure me, but for me, it was fantastic. And I loved, like, waking up and like, going and, like, I was responsible for doing it. I was responsible for going and collecting the money door to door. Most people were mailing in checks and stuff. And so it was, like, really great, really fun, really fulfilling. My dad also would be like, hey, you know, like, because I wouldn't meet most of the people because they don't wake up at 5am so he would say, hey, on holidays, you should print out. You should print out something saying, like, Happy Thanksgiving from your paper boy. And so, like, I started making these flyers that were one page flyers on our printers, and then I would wrap them in the newspaper on like, Christmas and Thanksgiving and stuff like that. And so it make people remember, and then it would actually prompt them to tip me better and stuff like that. So, so, so I think that I was very lucky to grow up in a environment where I felt a lot of love and had a lot of support throughout. And then I think also having the multicultural background, it gave me a pre. Disposition towards compassion for other people and other people's situations, and really kind of understanding the migratory patterns of humans and civilization throughout the world a little bit more

William Harris 1:10:14

deeply. I love that I had a paper route as well, and I was also, you know, at the point where I had to go and collect the money door to door. And you're right, it challenged you. I didn't rollerblade though. I didn't think about that. We rode our bikes. We just like, wrap the wrap it around our bike, you know, and ride around there, my brothers and I, and, no, it was a very good learning experience. And I'm very thankful that I that I had that growing

Andrew Christison 1:10:37

Yeah. I mean, I don't think that they let kids do I mean, I kind of understand. Wouldn't Sure, yeah, but, um, but yeah. I don't think they let kids do it anymore. And, but, but, yeah, it was fun. And also, if you think about it, it made so little money that, like an adult in a vehicle could, probably could cover like, 10 times. Sure, I did, but, but the way that it was organized was, I'm glad that I was able to participate in it. It also gave me, and you might have done this too. Did they would do like these pizza nights, like one time on Wednesday nights, and you could go in and you get free pizza with the other paper boys. And then, or I say, paper boy, but there was girls too, and totally Yeah, and, and we would call cold call people, basically asking them to subscribe, yes, and then I would get, like, a $2 commission if they subscribe. Yeah, but I was just there for the pizza, for the pizza, you know? Oh,

William Harris 1:11:31

that's so good. Well, my other favorite memory from that was when we would get paid. We actually had to go and meet at the mall. And I think it was Canton center mall that we would meet at, and they would give you the money. And I had my own checkbook. Then, as like, an 11 year old, I felt like, you know, super baller. But then right next to that was Camelot music. And so I would, I would go over there and I'd spend a little bit of my money that I just made on CDs before that was tapes, right? So it's like, tapes, like, I go up there and buy a new tape or something.

Andrew Christison 1:11:56

That's sweet, that's sweet here. Wait, I'll share one more, one more tidbit here. So I about so I would have to do the same thing. So I always owed money, so I had to pay money first, because more people didn't send in

William Harris 1:12:10

their money. Sure, yes, yeah, right. You had to turn that in the money that you collect. So I had to turn in the money that

Andrew Christison 1:12:15

I collected, and then I would get to keep the rest. And so when I would go in, I had to go to Bank of America. So that's the bank that they went to. So talk about custom. About customer experience. I they always treated me so terrible, really, so terrible. And I was like a little I was like a little kid, you know, I was 1112, years old, and I, like, they like, there was never somebody being nice to me there. They were always seemed like annoyed and like bothered when I was there, man. And I was trying, I was always just trying to give them money for them to deposit into this account, so that I could be like even, and that I could keep all the collection from there and so, but because I had to go there every single month for two years, and I never had a good experience, honestly, like, I've just never said anything nice about Bank of America in my entire life. And so if you think about that from like, how are you communicating with your customers? And maybe it doesn't need to be 24 times. There are places that I've I've been insulted once, and I'm like, you know, you can go there anymore. I think that that's what you need to think about when you're when you're managing communications for brand with this is whether it's PR or paid marketing, or any type of communications on behalf of brand, even if you're a CS agent or or an employee, I would say it's, it's something to think about. People are impacted by experience and Bank of America. I mean, they could, if they gave me the best experience of my life, they probably could have made a ton of money on my lifetime value at this point in time, but when I turned 16 and I was able to get my own bank account fully, completely, I demanded to go somewhere else and so on and so forth, and I just never went back. So there's, there's a, there's a, there's a 10 bit of a lesson there, I think in

William Harris 1:13:54

CX, I can't share in your misery. There, I went to a credit union. They had a little toy train that I could play with a completely different experience. That's good. You also like to just learn about lots of things. And this is something that you and I share that's like, I like to learn about anything, whatever the rabbit trail is that I want to learn about. And one of the things you told me that you actually are going down the rabbit trail of right now is rocks. Tell me about rocks so

Andrew Christison 1:14:23

So, once again, this is interdependence. So I believe there's this concept in Buddhism. I mean, so I'll start with non Buddhism. So, so Stephen Covey and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I read a lot of personal development growing up, also, thanks my parents. And so the last one is the seventh habit is interdependence. And so this is really where it's basically saying, this is like the opera, where you should be operating if you actually read Peter Drucker's work. Also, he talks about interdependence as like a huge value, also organizationally. But really I look at it even like at a. A way deeper level, like in more of a Buddhist philosophy of like interdependent co arising in which we are, like, all completely interdependent. This is kind of like karmic etc, the law of cause and effect, the things that you were talking about in regards to, like quantum, quantum particles, so but, but if you think about it, in regards to wait, I forgot what the exact just rocks. No, when you think about it, in regards to rocks, rocks are freaking miraculous, right? Yeah, absolutely, they are freaking miraculous. So, so, so, so I live in the Pacific Northwest and and here we actually have, there's a rock formation off the coastline of a huge limestone deposit that's 12 to 18 million years old that sits upon another deposit that's like 30 to 45 million years old. And so when you're going through the beaches, you can find agates. You can find really unique rocks of all different types, and I basically didn't know anything except that I like going. I mean, I've gone to the beach for a long, long time, but I just started going to the beach recently and checking out the rocks. And like collecting rocks, and like looking at rocks and collecting and my wife ended up giving me a rock tumbler because I collected all these cool fossils and rocks that I found and and so I started tumbling rocks and then better identifying them, and then understanding where they are at in the rock cycle, which is basically just the completely recycling of the matter on Earth. Limestone actually is biological matter. So this is like past civilizations, past human plant matter that has been compacted over time. And you can see that there's a lot of history in every single rock that you're at. And so walking across my property out here, I started looking at the rocks that I have, and I realized that I have like, these huge granite deposits, which actually aren't from my area, and it's likely from, like, a glacial melting during the last ice age that ended up dropping off these huge boulders on my property over time. And so I think that when you think about things on a long enough timeline, and we were talking about, we also talked a little bit, I'm like a little genealogy nerd as well. So I've been able to trace my lineage back to a lot of like the master profile. So I can go back into, you know, royalty, royalty. So whenever Lord song comes on, I feel like, except for us, except for us. You can call me. Pardon me, do you have a great Poupon? My name is Duke Christison. So I think that when you go back far enough, you realize, oh, my god, like, how many grandparents, great grandparents, great, great grandparents, great, great, great, great, great grandparents do we have? And then how interconnected are we? Like, I'm connected to, like, a bunch of presidents, like, pretty like it during, like, they're several cousins away. And this is just through connecting a couple of the many lines that I have. And so I think that when you look back on a long enough timeline, you see that we're all related. We must all be related, no matter how similar or different we look. We're definitely all from the same lineage. It's just a matter of when and where we are. And the same is true for rocks. Rocks actually have gone through like, every stage of development and transformation as well. When you're looking at 4.6 billion years, and we're talking about a rock formation from 12 to eight 18 million years ago, we're talking about, like, the difference between, you know, there's a difference between a millionaire and a billionaire, and it's a lot of and it's a lot of numbers, and that's a lot of time, and a lot of compact and a lot of transformation, and those things will continue to happen over time. So So I think that rocks by themselves are super interesting and cool. They tell you a story when you look at them, and then simultaneously, beyond the little story that they tell you, they they also like, tie you into, like, the world on, like, a much deeper level, and ancestors and ancestry and and what could have been and would have been living during the time period that those came

William Harris 1:19:09

from. I love it. The way that you nerd out about rocks is probably the way I learned about light. And what's interesting is, and I'm drawing a blank on the name, I was trying to look it up here real quick, but there's, like, double polarized light, and there's a name for this, where it's polarized one direction and then also polarized in the other direction, right? Yeah, when you look at rocks through double polarized light, there are a couple of them. Most rocks end up looking like bland, like nothing. Then when you look through it with this double polarized light, there are 12 of them that I know that they've identified. There may be a couple others, but I know there's 12 that they've identified that are absolutely amazing, some of the most beautiful things you can ever think of. Interestingly enough, those 12 are the ones that are found that the Bible lists as being on the gates of heaven. What right? And you're just like, Wait a minute. This was written way before. Are we even understand now, you know about double cross, polarized light. And so I, I would say that because of my fascination with light, I have a fascination with some stones and rocks now too. And so I love that you shared that

Andrew Christison 1:20:15

well. So, so I'll go, I'll go a step further. And so there's also, I mean, so there's also, in Buddhism, they have this thing. It's called the Noble Eightfold Path. Basically, think of like, right view, right perspective. Are a couple of them. Basically, you get any right, you get them all right. That's how, that's how it goes. And so what, what is the right view? And the right view is this, like, you know, everything's transient, everything's interconnected, sort of thing, right? And so if you think about it from the perspective of, how are we capable, as humans, with these eyes, actually seeing right view? I don't think so. So, so this is where it's, it's, it's a little tricky, because we know that we can only see a tiny part of the light spectrum at all, like a very miniscule amount. And there's tons of other animals and creatures that can see far more than we can simultaneously. Our ears, can we hear the best of any animal? Absolutely not. There's whales that are like communicating like miles and miles away from each other and communicating in ways that we don't even understand. Like dolphins simultaneously, they're communicating in ways that we just don't even understand, that we can't even really grasp how it is actually occurring. So when we touch something, are we touching it like, is that like, exactly how it feels? I mean, that's a relative question. That's a relative answer to who we are, what we are, what our epidermis looks like, and how it's actually structured. And so when you think about like, what is the right point of view and what is like the best perspective? I wonder if, in the Bible, you know, there are people that also have unbelievable hearing, there are people that have unbelievable smell. I read about this woman that could smell Parkinson's and she actually could smell Parkinson's disease, and they ended up figuring it out, and she was able to basically smell before they were diagnosed with Parkinson that's and so and people can taste like a wide spectrum, like, I don't think I can be a sommelier. In fact, my DNA evidence either, at least, might not be that good, but, but I think that having this, there's this whole spectrum of experience that we are all individually and independently lacking. So, so, so to understand the world and to understand the interconnectedness, you have to kind of go beyond what you feel like you're experiencing as well, because there is a greater experience that you're a part of, that you need to

William Harris 1:22:32

acknowledge that's beautiful. We're getting to my favorite part of the conversation, and I have to end it here, which stinks, because I would go on this for the next hour, but Andrew, I do want to say like, Thank you for sharing your time, sharing your wisdom with us. If people wanted to follow you or they wanted to work with you, what is the best way for them to

Andrew Christison 1:22:53

do that? So the easiest way is to find me on LinkedIn. Probably my name is Andrew, Andrew Christison probably in the show notes, and I'm a co founder and CEO of Retencity, retencity.com, so either way is easy peasy, or you can contact William say, yo. I want to speak with Andrew. Let's do this.

William Harris 1:23:21

I will give you his cell phone number. You his cell phone number. You can call him at two in the morning.

Andrew Christison 1:23:26

Yeah, I'll be sleeping. Then that's I'm not the demographic for

William Harris 1:23:30

them. Yeah, no, but again, thank you for sharing your time, sharing your wisdom with this. It's been a lot of fun talking to you, and maybe we'll have to come a part two where we actually just go on on quantum field theory and physics and stuff like that.

Andrew Christison 1:23:43

Yeah, we can, we can get weird, but I massively appreciate your time. This has been a pleasure and hopefully helpful for your audience in regards to how they think about stepping up their marketing game.

William Harris 1:23:55

Sure, it has been. Thank you for listening. Have a great rest of your day.

Outro 1:23:57

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, we'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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