Turn Anonymous Traffic Into Revenue: How To Name Your “Unknown” Visitors With Francesco Gatti

Francesco Gatti is the Co-founder and CEO of Opensend, a data company for e-commerce brands that converts anonymous visitors into leads. The company works with brands, including TrueClassic, OatsOvernight, Benchmade, AlexaderWang, and Rhone. With over a decade of digital marketing experience, Francesco held roles at companies, including VOLTN, Burrata House, Herb, and Grata.

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

[2:48] How Opensend identifies anonymous website visitors through a pixel and a large publisher network
[8:41] Signs a brand has an identity matching problem and how to capture value from non-converting traffic
[11:38] The percentage of anonymous visitors to websites
[18:32] Balancing personalization and privacy when using identity data
[22:53] High-intent behavioral signals that reveal purchase readiness and how Opensend’s algorithm evaluates them
[28:43] The role of LLMs in consumer research and how identity resolution adapts
[31:23] Best practices for implementing Opensend and integrating with platforms like Klaviyo
[37:25] Creative incentives and offers that drive higher engagement and conversion rates
[44:24] How feeding richer identity data into Meta’s algorithms improves look-alike audience building and lowers customer acquisition cost
[53:40] Leveraging demographic-based cohort analysis to help AI models generate tailored ad creatives and messaging
[57:35] Francesco Gatti’s early entrepreneurial health challenges and how he rebuilt his personal wellness routine

In this episode…

Most brands invest heavily in driving website traffic, yet the majority of visitors stay invisible and never convert. How can companies uncover these hidden audiences and turn them into engaged customers without invading their privacy?

According to identity resolution and data-driven marketing expert Francesco Gatti, brands can recognize high-intent visitors and nurture them into buyers by analyzing on-site behavior — like reading product details or checking contact pages — to gauge purchase readiness. He recommends filling ad platforms with rich, accurate data to improve look-alike audiences and cut acquisition costs. By combining quality data with careful personalization, companies can elevate ROI while respecting consumer trust.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris chats with Opensend Co-founder and CEO Francesco Gatti about turning anonymous traffic into known, marketable relationships. Francesco explains how high-intent signals reveal purchase readiness, why rich data strengthens Meta ad performance, and how AI-driven cohort analysis powers personalized ad creative.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

"The fact that we're able to provide the data doesn't mean that the data should be abused."
"Good AI is just good data, transformed and essentially displayed in different ways, right? But that's what it ultimately comes to."
"Athletes have breaks. Entrepreneurs never have breaks. Every day it's game time; every day it's the final."
"Happy wife, happy life. And the things that matter give you a score, and that score better be high."
"If you don't have that energy, you're not going to be able to take things to the distance."

Action Steps

Strengthen your identity data strategy: Building a rich, accurate identity graph improves ad platform targeting and lowers customer acquisition costs. This ensures marketing budgets are spent on high-intent audiences rather than wasted on unqualified traffic.
Monitor high-intent user behaviors: Track signals like reading product descriptions or visiting contact pages to identify purchase readiness. Recognizing these subtle actions allows timely, personalized outreach that drives higher conversions.
Enhance ad platforms with clean data: Feed Meta and other platforms with complete, verified customer information to improve look-alike audiences. Better data input means the algorithms can find new customers and increase return on ad spend.
Personalize marketing with AI-driven cohorts: Use demographic and behavioral insights to tailor creative and messaging for specific customer segments. Customized campaigns resonate more deeply, boosting engagement and long-term loyalty.
Maintain balance between personalization and privacy: Treat collected data responsibly and respect consumer trust when crafting targeted campaigns. Protecting privacy safeguards your brand reputation and strengthens customer relationships over time.

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 0:15

Hey 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 early your business and your personal life, I'm told that most brands are flying blind with their best customers, returning visitors they should recognize but don't. Today's guest decided to fix that. Francesco Gatti is the co-founder and CEO of Opensend, the identity engine, helping DTC brands turn anonymous traffic into known, marketable relationships and real revenue. He bootstrapped Opensend from zero to over 1000 brands, democratizing fortune 500 level data for the 20 to 100 million operators who actually need it. Born in Milan, sharpened in London's grind and now building in Los Angeles. He blends founder scrappiness with data science rigor to make identity resolution as simple as turning on your email flows if you care about ROAs LTV and owning your customer file in a post cookie world, then listen up. Francesco Gatti. Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast.

Francesco Gatti 1:15

Buongiorno William. Thank you for having me.

William Harris 1:18

Yeah, so I got to give a little praise to Sean Larkin over at Fueled.io. He's the one who put us in touch so we could bring this awesome message out to the world. But I also have to say I got to tell a quick story. I don't know if you knew this, but So Sean was on the podcast with me, and when I first started doing the podcast, I almost to kind of get over like my own head and things, I had little silly things that I would do on the podcast. If you've ever seen Impractical Jokers, stuff like that, just just dumb things that it was like, I dare you to do this on a podcast for Sean's episode. I peed my pants. I didn't really pee my pants, but it looked like that. And so it's like, I'm up there, like changing the light bulb or whatever. And it's like you can see the anyways, Sean was very gracious about that. So Sean, thank you for being gracious and for putting me in touch with Francesco. That's hilarious. Last interruption. Then we'll get right into the good stuff. 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. You can learn more on our website@Elumynt.com which is spelled E, l, u, m, y, N, t.com. Okay, Francesco, you've said that Opensend identifies high intent, but anonymous visitors for e-comm brands in a sentence or two, what problem are you solving that most founders think Shopify or pixels or their CDP already solved?

Francesco Gatti 2:48

Yeah, totally. So essentially, what we're able to do by placing a pixel on our customer side, we're able to identify unknown visitors coming to their side, because the vast majority of the people that come to any e commerce site are unknown, and they're not taking any actions. So those are the two main issues, because any side will have a commercial rate that it's going to be anywhere between one and 4% on average, right? So what about these 9596 97% of the people that come to your site, there is going to be a subset that is going to be able to be identified by the CDP solution, by server side tracking solution, and so on and so forth. But the reality is that there are a lot of people that are net new, and there are also a lot of people that are returning customers who are returning from different browser and devices, and that's when we come into play. So the two main use cases where we're able to support brands are one, when somebody goes to visit their website and they just don't know who they are. They don't have their email address. This person just completely new to the brand. And so what we're able to do is that, by working with a network of over 200,000 publishers, we were able to essentially get zero party data from those publishers when any of those consumers has opted in into one of their freemium products by bridging the gap between publishers and merchants in order to enable publishers to monetize those freemium products and For the merchants to monetize the data into actual transactions. So by doing that, when Joe who have been on a large publication and read an article for free in exchange for their for his email address, he agreed to receive relevant marketing material by their partners. So what we do is that we then are able to provide the email to one of the brands we're working with, in order for the brand to be able to send a cart abandonment email, checkout abandonment, product abandonment email, whatever is the highest intent action the user have taken on their site, in order for the brand to be able to again, retarget the consumer and try. To have them to convert with a smart discount, a promotion or something that is going to get their attention over time. The other use case, which is, I would say he less less intuitive, right in a sense that a lot of brands, they think that by leveraging a CDP, a server side tracking solution, they've kind of done it all right, but the truth is that in the American market, mostly considering that it's a country where, you know, there is a massive technology adoption, and consumers are always trying to chase the new devices, the new browser, the new the new software and these sorts of stuff. The issues that brands are encountering is that Joe, who has already been a customer, has been a customer for two years. He's a loyal is really loyal to the brand. Now he buy his iPhone, 17, it's Black Friday, 2025, and the brand has no idea that this is your right. Why? Because they have no idea about his new user agent combination. So they don't know about the new device. And then he decided to also test Firefox on his new iPhone, because he's tired of Safari, whatever and and so what we're able to do is that again, by working with the publisher, our publishing network, where, obviously Joe have already went to read his favorite news. I've already went to consume his favorite newsletter from his new phone, because that is the first thing he has done. He downloaded the app for his favorite magazine. He went up there and he started to consume content the moment that happened, the magazine passed the information to us. So then, when that user goes back on true classic called Super night, whichever brand we're working with, right, we're going to be able to provide an assist to Klaviyo, for example, by providing a new user agent combination, which is going to help the ESP and Klaviyo, or whoever is managing their abandonment flow, to be able to actually trigger an email despite the fact that he returned from his new phone, which is going to improve the experience on the Consumer, not just on the retargeting side, but also on the on site optimization, because to a returning customer, it's not right to show them a welcome pop up, right? Because they shouldn't be welcome they should be welcome back. And so that's, that's kind of the whole point. And and, yeah, so, I mean, our goal is to be able to essentially help brands to connect with new people that are reaching their website and they're interested to buy their products and they're probably in in evaluation moment right across different brands as well as we Want to help brands to reconnect with existing customers when they lose signal because they are returning from different browsers or devices than the one they know of.

William Harris 8:08

There's so much that I want to unpack there. We're going to get deep into that. I want to set the stage a little bit more for people to really make this make sense. Let's say that you're a marketing manager for one of these brands that you just mentioned. What's the telltale sign for them that they have they're flying blind on identity right? Is there something in the, in the in the dashboard of the metrics that they can look at? They say, like, we likely have an identity matching problem here. I mean, look

Francesco Gatti 8:41

at everybody have an identity problem until they try to resolve this kind of like how the world goes, right? So, so, yeah, so, I mean, look there. He has said, when you have so much traffic and there is so little conversion, and you're paying so much for generating those impression, the way I like to frame it as well, with with our customers, to kind of like, get them into the mindset of what they're living on the table. It's really the fact that we operate as an insurance, right? I mean, are you investing dollars against this traffic, right? Do you have anything that ensure you that this traffic is not going to just come to your site and then drop normally, not, right? So what we're able to do is that we're able to, you know, help you invest 10 cents every $10 you're investing, right, in order for you to make sure that you're going to be left with something, even if the person doesn't do anything on your site. Because, for example, like the most, in my opinion, clear example of this. It's like the supplement space, right? I mean, tons of traffic during Black Friday and so on, but not a lot of people are buying. Right? Because people are about to get fat during the holidays, right? And so what they're doing is that they're waiting for their new year, new me, right, to actually buy this product. So the goal is to, you know, bring everybody on anytime you can, right? Because that's something that it's out of your control, and then being able to actually capture some of these informations in order to then be able to leverage them as soon as January 1 come in and saying, like, Hey, Joe, you're near me, right? It's now the time for you to, you know, take care of your health and get in better shape and so on and so forth. And that's how you know, you understand that if they're coming to your site and they're not by now. That doesn't mean that they don't buy it, they don't like your product, or they don't they don't need it, it just they maybe they don't need you right now, or they don't have the money right now, but they might want to buy it for some valentine day, for Mother's Day, for Father's Day, for Halloween, for whatever it's going to be the next promo that it's going to be able to really get them just up and then, and at that point, you know, you will be able to get a return on investment, on your initial investment, on the advertising side, which would have been lost otherwise.

William Harris 11:11

Yeah, hey, Joe, we know about that box of Twinkies. It's time for you to come back and take your health seriously. Okay, let's imagine $50 million dollar DTC brand, um, they've done all of this stuff to make sure that they've mapped as much of their customer identities as possible. What percent is acceptable to say, these are likely still going to be anonymous, though, like 50% like, what percent is like a Yeah, that's still going to be anonymous.

Francesco Gatti 11:38

So look, well, that's a very tricky question, right? Because, if we're looking at the subscription brand, obviously, you know, half of their traffic is going to be returning, right? If we're looking at the one time buy product, right, that's something that you know, there's going to be very little return in traffic. Well, if we're looking at consumables or things that just get where, like we work with companies like me and this, for example, right socks is Android T shirts, true classic branded bills, hats and these sorts of stuff. I mean, these are normally sites that get anywhere between 20 and 40% of return in traffic, right? And the thing is that when a brand is hitting that $50 million mark, that means that they have been able to accumulate quite a little bit of customers, right? So for this type of rents, it's as important to get, you know, new new data into their funnel for new people service in their site. But it's also extremely important, probably even pretty important, to maintain the signal with existing customers, right? Because, again, they have a meaningful, a meaningful pool of customers that they should try to get them to return to the site and to continue to consume in order to be able to extend the lifetime value of their customers. And to give you an example for this, right? What product I ever mentioned? It's our kind of like third pillar, which is our revive product. And what we do there is that when you have a customer who has been a customer of yours about three products from you in last three years, we've been able to help you to maintain the signal across devices and so on. But still, you can still lose right? And the way you lose it's when Joe changes email address, and that's something that we all do, right? We change job, we change city, we break up with our partner, whatever that is. We hate our neighbor, and keeps harassing us, whatever is the reason, right? It happens to all of us every 345, 10 years time. You know, really depends from person to person, life events, right? But the fact that we changed our emails also, because changing these emails is normally free, so it's something that people do without, you know, thinking about it too much, and when that happened, normally, Joe have not unsubscribed from true classic, right? But what I've done is that they just changed their email address, but they still love true classic. They still want to receive promotion from them. So because they've not unsubscribed. What we're able to do with our revive product, they were able to substitute a bounced email with a latest, most active email address for that consumer. Because again, Joe, when he changed his email address, he changed his email address because he hated his neighbor, right? But he loved to receive his favorite football newsletter, and that's the first thing he has done the moment he changed it, he went back to his favorite sport magazine, and he signed up to his favorite football newsletter to do all the latest score every weekend and so on. And so when that happened, we're able to get the new, fresh data from the publisher in order to. Push it into the merchant side in order to be able to revive a dead email address that would have bounced otherwise, and that's another way to be able to extend the lifetime value of a customer, because, again, they didn't unsubscribe, they just moved on with their lives.

William Harris 15:18

How much money are we talking somebody implements this again, let's say they're, you know, between 20 million, 100 million. Somebody implements, you know, Opensend here, and they're, they're, how much money are they going to make from doing this? Totally.

Francesco Gatti 15:34

So look, in terms of, like the ROI, it's really dependent also on average order value, right? Because, I mean, we work with brands that are selling $18 product once, right, and brands that are settling $5,000 coal punches type of thing, once and, and so, so that they're really, They're really varies, right? That being said. I mean, what's a, you know, happiness to us, it's for smaller brand that we have anywhere between five and 10x ROI on their investment. And we're able to prove ROI through incrementality, hold the groups. And, you know, there are many ways to show that what we're doing, it's full incremental, because that's obviously the challenge nowadays for brands, because they are overly SaaS served, right? And they're obviously retargeting these customers on endless platforms. So the tracking and the attribution, it's something a little bit tricky, but anyway, so that being said, for smaller brands, we look at an ROI that it's anywhere between five and 10x, and then you always have outliers who have higher than that. And for larger brands, we normally look at an ROI that it's anywhere between 10 and 50x because obviously you know when, when you get to certain volumes, then you get to an economy of scale. And obviously, like every other SaaS company, the more you buy, the less you pay from us as well, right on top of the fact that obviously everything you have going on, it's heavily optimized. So then, obviously there are, yeah, these sorts of brands are able to get a lot more velocity. And the most important thing is that it compounds over time, right? So that's normally what we're looking at for a, you know, 30 to 90 days, kind of like ROI. If you look at the ROI after six to 12 months, it's obviously going to be a lot higher, because, again, somebody they didn't bought today. It's not that they didn't like the brand or they will never buy, but they probably were just not ready to buy, and they need to be nurtured over time and receive many more emails in order to convert.

William Harris 17:55

I want to dig into some of the philosophy here a little bit. You talked about returning visitors. I always think of the song from cheers, you want to go everybody knows your name, right? And it's like, we do. We want to go where somebody knows our name. I go to a website. I want them to know a little bit about me. I like I'm not one of these people that blocks all of that stuff. I want my experience to be accustomed to me a little bit, right? Where do you draw the line, though, between, let's say, delightfully known, versus, you know, stalker, creepy?

Francesco Gatti 18:32

Yeah, totally. And look as the everything these require balance, right? The fact that we're able to provide the data doesn't mean that the data should be abused, right? And the reality is that those people should be treated with more care than the one that they've actually signed up on their own. Because the reality is that what we have done here is that these people have not, you know, necessarily raised their hands that they wanted to receive their email in writing, but they kind of like raise their hand virtually, in a sense that what we've done in order to make sure that we heavily qualify these customers who are then going to receive an email they were not potentially expecting, right? They what we've done, which is the thing that really differentiate us from from other players in the market, and the reason why we got the trust of you know, very major brands, is the fact that we have built a proprietary lead scoring algorithm who is helping us through AI to determine what is the level of engagement of any visitor coming to our site, and then make internal calculations around, okay, if this consumer have done this this and that he's most he has 33% more likelihood to convert. So we should send him X emails and show him why ad, in order to have them to convert. Right? And the way this works. Is that through the pixel that we have on our customer side, we're able to analyze things like pages viewed, depth scroll was the dev scroll list 40% in each page they visited? Did they spend one minute to read the description on the PDP? Did they click on sizes, color, packages, differences they look at subscription add to cart. You should the checkout and so on and so forth. And this is one plus two plus three plus four plus five and so on and so within the algo, we are making math around, okay, is this user engaged enough to not be upset and potentially convert, right? So this is kind of like the equation. So by, you know, making this equation, we've been able to prove that quality is always winning over quantity, right? So instead of providing a list growth story to our customer, which is something that just doesn't fly anymore in 2025 what we're focusing on is only the highest intent customer, right? And for all the others, is not that we close our eyes, right? We still identify them. We put a check mark there, right, in order to wait for them to come back, to qualify to take more actions, and so on and so forth. So even multiple visits will show the intent of a customer, right? Actually, that's, in my opinion, one of the highest flags for intent, right? And so by doing that, what we're able to do is that we're able to see across over 1000 customers in our network, an average open rate of over 50% and an average click for rate of around 10% which is pretty incredible, considering that, again, these people were not expecting an email from the brand, but considering the level of engagement and the quality of the offer they received, they decide To ultimately open and click, and we're seeing over 70% of the emails that we're able to provide our customer to remain active after 180 days from when the emails were provided, which again, shows that these people are not ready, but definitely interested into what the brand is selling.

William Harris 22:19

I know you're an engines guy. We've talked about that. I actually want to bring that up a little bit later on, but right now, I want to see the engine. Let's lift the hood like you talked about the frequency of them coming back to the website as being one of the higher flags of intent. What are some other things that are going on in the background here that are likely you'd say the algorithm is picking up this is a high, high, high intent. What are some of the high intent ones? And then I also want to know, like, what are the some, some of the things that people think are good flags, but likely are a lot lower intent than what we would normally think.

Francesco Gatti 22:53

Yeah, totally. So look, I mean, in my opinion, one of the, you know, most important thing outside the obvious, because obviously somebody's adding to cart, initiating a checkout and so on. But when you see that somebody is opening up the little curtain where there is the product description and actually really reading that or highlighting that text, right, we're seeing that that's when you know, people are actually really, really interested to buy the product, because that's when you're actually reading about it, materials, what it's made of, what it was made, and kind of like all these sorts of things, and that might feel counter intuitive. Or also when people are going to see a contact page, because before buying from a somewhat known brand that is not on TV yet, is not on billboards yet, and so on, people want to make sure they're not going to get scammed, right? So it's about, you know, when the consumer is informing himself with things like privacy policy, terms and condition, Contact page, team page, and in these sorts of stuff, or when from the website, they go and check what is their word or social pages, and what is, for example, their you know how well known they are on Instagram and looking for social validation, right? Those are all really significant flags that could feel like whatever, right? But the reality is that if you're not interested, you don't take those actions,

William Harris 24:32

right? Yeah. And so you could have somebody that's visited three times, somebody else that's visited three times, maybe they visited for a minute each time. They've also visited for a minute each time, but then you got somebody else that like but they also clicked on looking at their contact information and their social media. And you're like, This person is significantly higher interest than this other person who did other similar things on site. But it's like, Let's go beyond like the basics,

Francesco Gatti 24:54

and I'm going to over complicate it for you a little bit, William, because perfect. I love it as you. Did it sound because it's, it's linear when you're talking about guys that are, you know, from our generation or previous generation, right? When you go into the youngsters and the Gen X, Gen Z, and so on and so forth. I mean, kids are not spending a minute anywhere. You know what I'm saying? Sure? Why? Because they're seeing it on LLM. They already know they don't have a lot of money. They already know what they want. They're not just zapping around because they have millions of dollars laying in their bank account. They've been desiring this thing for months. They follow them on every social account. They probably spend very little time on their website, but when it's time to convert right, they just go on the side. They spend 30 seconds, in 30 seconds that look at five pages, they read the description, they went, you know, like and the reason why, you know, we're able to stay, to stay true, to also the generational change and how the younger generation are experiencing navigating the web is that, through the algorithm, we don't care, right? Because it just again, it doesn't matter how much time you spend there, right? The only thing that really matter, it's like what you have done, right? Then, obviously, we provide our customers, we call them, kind of like the guardrails, right? And this is mainly pages viewed and time on site, because the reality is that if somebody have to spend $5,000 for a cold clients, they will have to spend at least a couple of minutes on your site right to inform themselves. So that's kind of like an initial qualifier. But the reality is that, you know we were seeing with the younger generation that you will get to that time threshold, like with multiple visits, right? Not necessarily with one visit, because they already inform themselves elsewhere, on a review site, on on their social media and all these sorts of stuff. So it's, you know, it's not linear, but I feel like there are, there are ways to, you know, always be able to do it right by whoever's on the other side on the screen.

William Harris 27:13

I love that you called out the shopping by LLM something that I remember from my SaaS days. I was in SaaS before I got into E commerce. And it was like, We never had more than three pricing options. If you had more than three pricing options, you know, it seemed like the science suggested that it's like, that people just couldn't make a decision. It's like, oh, there's four. Now, I don't know what to decide. I gotta really think about this. There's three. There's usually, like, the middle one, the middle one's the best one, blah, blah, blah, right? And it's like, it's highlighting, you're just like, hey, great, that's the one I'm gonna go with. I feel like we've almost needed this LLM to start making our decisions or our choices fewer, because I feel this way, on making a lot of decisions on what I want to buy, sometimes you're like, man, there's like, 8 million of these options now I don't know which one I want, and I don't want to take the time to sit there and think through it. I don't want to make a bad choice, so I'll just come back to it later. Um, but with the LLM, you know, that's how I use it. It's like, okay, narrow it down to three for me. What are the top three that I should use? And here's what the criteria, right? I want to know that there's good, positive reviews on it. I want to know, you know, what are people saying negatively about it on Reddit, right? Like, I'm going through these types of things to help identify what I want to spend money on. And that helps. To your point, though, it changes some of those signals, because now that's the first time that that person's come here, because they've already looked how. How are you able to still identify those people where it's like this, it's a one and done. They've already done all the research. Is there stuff outside of the website that you're looking at.

Francesco Gatti 28:43

Yeah, definitely. So, so look, the reality is that with llms, right, there are, there are some people using perplexity and stuff where they will just never go on the site. So, so that's gonna be on us to identify the agent who represent Joe. So Joe's agent who went to the site, and the thing is that that's kind of like still happening is not like, fully solidify how, you know, in the future, our agent will have, you know, a second layer identity of who we are, type of thing, right? Because at the end of the day, that's going to be the only way to be able to retarget whoever, right, if they're only operating through llms At the same time, I feel like, you know, lot of people use the LLM to, kind of like, do their research, right? And then they ask to the llms to share links with them, because they actually want to go and, like, see the website. Kind of experience it for themselves. Obviously, if it's a $20 you know, impulsive purchase thing, it's whatever. But I don't know if you're buying a course, if you're buying a supplement, if you're buying you know, things that will ultimately really impact. Your Life, I believe that people are still, still care about, you know, sing with their own eyes and not just trust the llms. And also, you know, it's, it's really the fact that, in terms of, like, reviews and these sorts of things the llms are capturing, you know, all the shiniest stuff, obviously, because they're going to be the one with the most review. Well, I feel like there are also of consumers that are looking for emerging products, new things and so on. And they still want to, kind of like, get into that research mode if it's something that they really care about. Obviously, if they're trying to buy toilet paper, that doesn't matter to anybody, as long as it's soft and you can afford it, right?

William Harris 30:47

I mean, well, that's being challenged, right? I had, uh, Sam Neville on here, good wipes. So are you buying toilet paper? Are you buying flushable wipes? I it's being disrupted too, but yes, to your point, it's still something you're doing a lot of research in. Um, you've mentioned true classic, you've mentioned a lot of other really good brands you guys have worked with. What's a brand that you think has done an exceptional job of implementing this and seeing good results? And what are those results like? You know, hey, they came in. We did this. Here's what happened 3060, 90 days later. Here's the results that they've seen.

Francesco Gatti 31:23

Yeah, totally. I mean, to be honest, William, it's, it's hard to to name one per se, because the things that we just work with incredible professionals in a variety of verticals, and I feel like it's, it's more about the fact that the way we structure Opensend is to not just provide a tool to brands, but to also provide the type of support that they need in order to be able to maximize their return on investment. And in terms of like best practice and what we recommend is to, you know, create tiny variations of their existing flows. Because, again, we're not going to be the one that are going to teach them how, you know, how to make the HTML on their on their email offers. This is more people like yourself and integrate, you know, service based operator that are in the business and all the great agencies that we work with, but, but bottom line, it's really to, you know, try to create as long of a funnel as possible, right, with as many emails as possible, while not, you know, abusing These people that have kind of like, trusted it, meaning that they received an email, they didn't opt in, but they liked it, and they kind of like silently agreed to continue to receive it, otherwise they would have unsubscribed, right? So, so yeah, so it's, it's a matter of, you know, having a measured engagement with these folks, because the reality is that if somebody have opened a promotional email, if not open the second, the third, maybe you get them off of your monthly newsletter, right, and you only send them the seasonal stuff, while if somebody is opening and clicking every single email that you send them, then you opted In into the weekly one, right, instead of the monthly one. So it's really about, you know, going with the flow and following the signals. And I mean, companies like Klaviyo are, you know, incredible at helping brands to actually orchestrate those signals in order to automate how more or less a consumer should receive based on the actions that they've taken with the marketing material that they receive.

William Harris 33:52

Ultimately, I'm glad you brought it. Klaviyo, one of the things that something like this can kind of have we use ice scoring with a lot of the growth tactics that we use. It's a great scoring method for those who aren't familiar with the ice. We can get into it later. You can look it up. But one of the things you got to look at here is, how long, how complicated is this to actually implement? And so with Klaviyo, I know that you guys released an integration that basically makes this really, really, really stupid simple. Now you know what you would have taken you could do, what, five minutes, what would have taken a week to do? Like, how difficult? How easy is this for somebody to implement growth? Manager, marketing manager, who's like, great, yep, I'm sold. Let's do it. Let's implement this. This is going to help unlock some

Francesco Gatti 34:35

growth. Yeah, totally. That's a great question. So we claim you we have a special relationship with because we are the only identity provider that was allowed. Yeah, that was exciting time. We definitely love the team, and they're doing a tremendous job for the industry. So we really wanted to make sure that. That we tuned our system right in order to place their customer success team, their deliverability team, and all this sort of stuff, obviously, because they are very attentive the deliverability of their customers ultimately, which is the lifeline of an email program, right? So what we're able to do there is that if a customer is using, for example, Shopify and Klaviyo, right, it will literally take them five minutes to implement right? In a sense that they're gonna implement our Shopify app, they're gonna log in into their Klaviyo account through an OAuth, through their Opensend dashboard, and then they're pretty much off to the races. All they have to do is to just to go in Klaviyo and duplicate the flows and potentially provide a little bit of a higher incentive to some of these people, or free shipping, or whatever that is, in order to sweeten the deal a little bit more and make them, you know, feel like they're, they're getting something extra and, yeah, and that's, that's pretty much right, that that being said with other providers, it might take, you know, 2030, minutes and so on. Normally takes a long time when people forget their password, credit, their login credentials for the tool that we need to get plugged into. But, you know, if everything is smooth, it can be, you know, a very quick implementation normal. We're seeing brands starting to generate new revenues kind of the same day from when they implemented the tool. If they have any

William Harris 36:41

of traffic, I'm not seeing a lot of downside. You know, five to 10 next return taking five minutes. It seems like it's kind of a no brainer.

Francesco Gatti 36:49

For 14 day trial, limited for $1 you're making it. You're giving

William Harris 36:53

a lot of good incentives. And that's something that you mentioned here, which was, okay, one of the things they'll need to do is, when they duplicate these trials, have some other incentives. How to sweeten the deal, things like that. What are some of the things that you have seen be most effective? You know, obviously, give a discount code, right? And it's like, well, if you're already doing 25% off is, does it really sweeten it to go 30% or free shipping? Most people are doing free shipping. Some people aren't. But it's like, what are the other things that are, maybe the non obvious ideas that you've seen people do that you're like, Oh, that was a genius idea.

Francesco Gatti 37:25

Yeah, totally. I mean, look, companies that make, for example, special editions, right? Look at Dr squash, Call of Duty, or, you know, like these sorts of stuff. And when you make them limited, and it's like, hey, like, you know, like this, this is what you can get, right, and, and, you know, like, or alo yoga, or, you know, like, all these dynamic brands, that's definitely an angle, right? Or, or otherwise, it's also to, you know, offer them bundles, offer them, you know, a significant entry level offer, for example, the everyday those team have, you know, an incredible entry level offer where they send you a hoodie, a mug, a mixer and, you know, all these sorts of stuff, which, again, will make people feel special, and that's going to give them an extra reason to really become a vivid part of the brand community and ultimately a raving fan, right?

William Harris 38:30

Making people raving fans reminds me of actually, just last week, we had the owner of genies on Akash Nigam. And one of the things that's interesting about genies, they are AI companions. And let's go back to the relationship with the customer you had before. It's like brands had a relationship through email, then SMS, maybe a little bit through social media. We're getting to the point where they can have a relationship with an AI companion. And one of the ones that he gave a great example of is like, the Home Depot guy, right? And it's like, there's this AI companion you can go and you can build stuff with and whatever. And it's like, okay, you maybe don't even own a home yet, but you're building things with your Home Depot guy. And eventually, when you have a home, you're like, Well, I of course, I want to go buy at Home Depot. I'm like, Oh, that's a really interesting idea. But the more that you know about these, each of your customers being able to identify them across different places. I'm just wondering it's like, Have you thought about how even, like, building that relationship would transfer into, like, the AI companion phase?

Francesco Gatti 39:33

Yeah, to be honest, you will that. But yeah, I believe it's definitely a great, yeah, great perspective. And look, I believe that these AI companion will get to, you know, will get to a point where they're gonna operate as us, because they will know us so well. All and and will will essentially be able to go out there and kind of like, do things for us, and ultimately bring those results to us for kind of a final, a final decision, and that's where you know it's gonna be. It's really on us to then be able to identify these companions when they go and visit different websites around the web, in order to again, be able to understand who's on their behalf, right, or who they are on operating on their behalf, or in order to, then, you know, be able to understand who's the human behind it, and ultimately, considering that it's still going to be the human to consume eye watering videos on Tiktok or Instagram and so on or YouTube shorts, it's a matter of also, how are we then going to be able to pipe this data through Meta conversion, API integration in a way that it's uncommon to how it's happening today. Because the thing is, that problem with iOS 26 with, you know, all the all the tribulations that every brand had to go through in the past few years. With, you know, all these new restrictions coming into play, it's really going to be a matter to be able to continue to keep up with this innovation in order to, for example, with the meta cap integration, what we're able to do is that we're able to help brands to really improve their Meta score, and that's something that we're doing very extensively with Sean, who has an incredible metacamp integration at fueled or IO, where you have essentially figured out how to really transform the data in much more optimal ways than many other CDPs or server Side tracking. And the thing is that the his only quote, unquote issue is that he can help brands to, you know, do more what they know, right? Well, what we can bring to the table, it's what they don't know, right? And what they don't know. It could be the next five emails that William said, the other three device, the other two, AP, the other three phone numbers, right? So when you know fuel is able to essentially push in to meta, a meta copy integration, what's in klayvio, which is one good email, one good device, one good IP, and so on and so forth. When we come in and we're adding to the one email, another five emails to the one device, another three device to the IP, another four IPs, plus phone numbers, post address and so on. Meta is like, oh my god, this is amazing, right? This is so much data. I now know so much more about this person, and that doesn't just help meta to reach that person better. It helps me to reach that person better and to find more people like this person, because now they actually understand who the person is and where the person likes, in order to then be able to create the lookalike audiences for which it's down matter is the best, the best in the business, kind of like figuring this stuff out, but you know, at the same time, you know, like every other advertising engine, you know, they want to keep you fat, but they don't get you too fat, right? We, you know, like it's important to also, you know, do do the same thing across other platforms, like now, for example, we're creating custom audiences for platforms like Amazon trade desk and so on. And that's another project which we're collaborating with Sean and fuel and and, yeah, and it's, it's very exciting, right? Because not all advertising platform are equal. Not everybody's as smart as meta, right? So through our data set, we're still able to really go and influence other advertising platforms to essentially help reach those consumers who might not go on the website anymore, right? But they will still, you know, be consuming social content and these sorts of

William Harris 44:24

stuff. I want to make sure that I call this out, because it's something that come up actually, on a call recently with another customer, I think you did a really good job explaining this, if you can get meta to even do a 5% better job of understanding who that is that just made this purchase on your website, the likelihood that meta can find the next person who is also likely going to make a purchase goes up significantly. It's kind of like if you knew if I was trying to teach my. Kids what a tree was, and I show them two trees, I'm like, okay, here you go. That's a tree, right? They might get it. They might not, right, but if I could show them like 30 trees, they're gonna go, Okay, I very clearly understand what a tree is, and I can identify it a lot better the more that you give the algorithm on meta or any of the other ads platforms, so that it can really, truly understand who made that purchase, the more likely they are to be more efficient finding the next thing. And let's face it, who does not want another 10% incremental improvement in efficiency on meta, because if you do that unlocks significant room for growth, for you to scale up as well. And so it's this is probably the thing that I'm the most excited about what you're doing and how you're pairing this with what Sean's doing, because it affects me the most because, you know, we run ads.

Francesco Gatti 45:52

Yeah, absolutely. And, and, look, I mean, Mehta is, as far as I'm concerned, equal, equal to life, right? Happy wife, happy life. And the things that matter give you a score, and that score better be high, right? Because the reality is that that score will define, you know, will define how good is the data that they're able to get from you, right? And ultimately, how good is their understanding of what is a tree, right? To just go back to your analogy, right? The reality is that if you, you know, show them a drawing, it's very different than if you show them a photo, it's very different if you show them a color photo, it's very different you show them a video of a tree through seasons and so on and so forth, right? So the more things you're able to provide, the higher that score it's going to be. And they and what we have seen is that for brands that are, you know, on a 6.1 6.2 which is, you know, pretty decent score for meta, considering it's a very picky wife, right? And and we're able to jack up that score to a 7.4 7.6 I mean, we're seeing a tremendous impact on the overall return on advertising spend, where we're seeing improvements that are up to 25% and the meaningful decrease in CAC, which we've seen anywhere ranging between 13 and 16% across the customers we're serving, which, again, it's extremely meaningful, because when you combine these two things together, plug the identity resolution component on email, plus a Post story targeting strategy, plus a connected TV strategy, and so on. It's very hard to miss anybody at this point,

William Harris 47:49

100% I got one more example, slash story analogy, whatever we want to call it here, which is on the flip side of this. A lot of people talk right now about, it's like, it's all about the creative, and creative and creative is so important. And I do not want to take away from that right creative is how meta is doing a better job of understanding who is likely to want this because of it understands contextual what's on the creative. But in order for that to work, it has to know very deeply who is the right person. And so when you look at this and you say, hey, I can show you like you said, two trees, 10 trees, video of a tree, Real Life Tree. Have you smell a tree, hug a tree like you're the more that you can make sure that meta knows who that is, the better. And on the flip side, the more you can eliminate bad data. Because we've seen this, we've run into this, and I'll just give a shout out to both. Click, see Cloudflare. There's a couple of other programs that we've used that have helped to eliminate bad data going into that as well. That's like, I don't know if you are saying, all right, I want you to LLM I want you to give me, you know, the best output. I'm gonna give you two trees, a bush and a vine, but I only want you to give me the trees. And it's like, well, I don't know was this which ones, but you don't tell it. Which ones are the you know, which one's the bush and which one's the vine? It's like, how about be very specific with the data you're sending, and send as much of that data as you have, the good data as you possibly can. I think it's we underplay it more than we should in the end.

Francesco Gatti 49:18

Yeah, I agree will. And look, one of the things that makes me the most excited about what I'm doing at Opensend, it's the fact that we're not necessarily an AI first company, which means that you're not that sexy anymore, right? But the thing that a lot of you know people in the industry are kind of like undervaluing is the fact that good AI is just good data, right? 100% transform, you know, and essentially displayed in different ways, right? But that's what it ultimately comes to, right? So what we're doing. Thing in order to, you know, stay up to date and keep up with the trends, is that my belief, it's that with, you know, all these, you know, new kids coming to market, I feel like I kind of understand what they understand, but they know that they understand nothing about what I understand. And the thing is that this is just like really creating a, you know, in harmony, right between kind of, like, what is the kind of like old per se data business, like, the value of having a very comprehensive identity graph. I mean, these are stuff that you cannot just build overnight, right? This is like years of building relationships here, of like shaking hands and drinking and, you know, everything that comes with it, right? In order to get to do business with with the right people, we're going to be unlocking the right data sets, right that and And essentially, what we're kind of finding ourselves to do now is to be able through MCP, so like the model context protocols, right in order for us to be able to push these data into AI first companies, in order to be able to inform these models, right? In order for them to be able to actually be extremely customized. So let me give you an example, right? You mentioned ad creatives, right? If through our persona product, which is essentially a cohort analysis product based on demographic information, we're able to ingest all your customer base, right? And then we're able to put those customers into different buckets, which could be luxury buyers, comfortable buyers, emerging adults, and so on and so forth, right? Then what we're able to do is they were able to essentially inform the LLM about the fact that Mary is a grandma. She lives in California. She loves pink because every one of their social pages have pink on it, right? So what should the LLM do when building an ad for her, right? In the ad that there should be a California bear with probably a little heart next to it, right? Because we love California, and it should have like pink roses in the background to make her feel like it's something that she resonate with, right? And so on and so forth and so on and so on is for right? Then, obviously the copy should match, you know, who she is, the tone, sweethearty, or, you know, like all those things, which is very different than if you're talking to the 35 years old redneck Joe, right? Who is, you know, just want it quick and it's, you know, like you want to see an American flag behind the ad, and want to know that it's made in America and so on and so forth, right? So in this way you can, you know, you can really mutate What is your your campaign, and how you present yourself to potential customers in a chameleon way, right? But the reality is that all these LLM companies are incredible at creating those customization they just don't know better what they have to customize because they are lacking the origination data, which is the thing that will ultimately inform how the model should react to a certain consumer versus another.

William Harris 53:40

Yeah, I'd like to get to know Francesco got the human being. You're an adrenaline junkie. You love engines. What is the fastest, or, let's just say, What's the most fun car you've ever driven?

Francesco Gatti 53:58

Yeah, definitely. It's a great question, and it was a GT, three Rs, which is also my, yeah, my, my, my dream, and hopefully one day we'll be able to put one in the

William Harris 54:09

garage. Oh, yeah. How fast did you take it?

Francesco Gatti 54:13

Yeah, it was almost 300 hours, kilometers, no miles. So, yeah, yeah.

William Harris 54:22

What's going on? Like, you know, Are you, are you, are you calm and collected in that, or is your heart racing a little bit? I mean, look,

Francesco Gatti 54:30

definitely, when you go high speed, it's things always can get interesting, but it's ultimately when you're able to, you know, put in a good drift, or take the right corner where I think that that's when the adrenaline really can because, you you know, deal with the real G Mach Force. And it was actually funny last time I went to the racetrack, I didn't know, but didn't the iPhone. 16. I just, I just changed phone. They have essentially a sensor inside which measure how many G Mac you have, because if it's more than a certain amount, that means that you got in a car accident. You're like, driving like crazy. So they set us to put our phone in a pocket in the office. We got inside last week, and we were here and to analyze this game. And it's definitely not, not a cheap mistake. Yeah, it's, it's funny, oh

William Harris 55:30

man, uh, aside from cars, are you also an adrenaline junkie, engine junkie in other ways, like motorcycles, things like

Francesco Gatti 55:38

that. Yeah. Definitely grew up on, their bike two wheels. And I have a Husky 250 that I'm taking out at times. But I had, I had a new board 10 months ago. So I gotta be honest, the last 10 months have been a little bit different.

William Harris 55:55

Yeah, thinking about mortality there.

Francesco Gatti 56:00

Yeah, not so much about that, but it's more about the time that is is more limited and but, yeah, I definitely tried to take the bike out as often as I can,

William Harris 56:14

any broken bones or close calls.

Francesco Gatti 56:17

Oh, lots of them. Yeah, absolutely, when I was a lot younger on how I'm a lot more careful when I do these sorts of stuff, because you gotta be able to afford it to me for three months, that's definitely not what I'm what I'm looking to do these days.

William Harris 56:35

What's if you could, what's, what's another car or or jet engine or whatever. What would you like to be able to get behind one of these days?

Francesco Gatti 56:46

Look, I mean, I was actually thinking about it. I would love to try one of these speed boats and, like, this crazy one where you're like, locked inside. And, yeah, because I have, I have a friend that is that actually tried not long ago, and he showed me a bunch of medium like, Well, yeah, I've never, never tried that. That sounds definitely really interesting. It's actually also very dangerous, so better do it in, in the sea or a lake versus the ocean. But, yeah, definitely, definitely very, very appealing,

William Harris 57:21

something you and I were chatting about the other day is how you know, earlier on in building your business, you neglected your health for a little bit. Tell me about what was going on and like, what shifted your thinking and what you're doing now.

Francesco Gatti 57:35

Yeah, totally. Look, I feel like in the in the life of heavy entrepreneurs, you know you're going through a roller coaster. You want it or not, unless you're too lucky, and that was in my case. So what happened is that I feel like, you know, you have a dream, you want to fulfill it, and then you know, you start to go through, you know, ups and downs, and you start, you know, putting in the 16 hours a day to, you know, push things to brute force, and sometimes you have to pivot. And, you know, there are, you know, crazy things that you have to go through in your life, and at the end of the day, you need to realize that you're an athlete, as much as, like every athlete that you look on the weekend on TV, right? You maybe don't have to run, you know, the 15 miles on the football field every weekend, but I mean, if you have to be on eight hours, of course every day, it's no different than that, because you will need breath. You will need to be able to keep up with it, emotionally, physically, and it's, you know, it's as hard as it gets, right? Then, obviously it's a lot easier than a lot of other things, right? But the challenge that entrepreneurs have against athletes is that athletes have spikes, right? Athletes have the game, the championship, blah, blah, blah, right, the tournament, right? But then they have breaks. Entrepreneurs never have breaks. Right? Every day it's game time. Every day it's the final of the Champions League. Every day it's Super Bowl, right? For a reason, or for another one, because you're closing the month, because you're closing the quarter, because your best sales guys left you, because your marketing campaign is going to shit, because your media buyer have not, you know, been performing as well as it was in the past 90 days, and so on and so forth. And there are literally a million things that can really take the piece out of you, and I feel like that that comes with, you know, having a hard time sleeping, having a, you know, a hard time sometimes focusing when you are socially with other people, and you're just like, in your world, thinking about your stuff, right? And so I believe it's just like, so important for you to like, feel good. About yourself, your body, your mind, and everything that comes with it in order to be able to perform. And I believe that that's something that it's very important for entrepreneurs to also make sure that you know your families understand this, right? Your families understand that you are an ambitious, crazy dude that you know have just, you know, just bugging himself, and there's nothing can do about it, and so you got to just operate, you know, for it. And in my case, I mean, look, I've, I've always been an active person in my life with sports and stuff like that. But the reality is that with the pandemic, and, you know, like all this crap that happens, I get it just like it was just not like my priority for a certain period of time. And I've definitely seen my, you know, my health, degrade somehow, right? You have less breath, that you have less endurance, you have, you know, all those things that only come with practice, right? And and and they felt it. I felt that, you know, I was bruising heavily after being on an hour on a call, or after a podcast like this and these sorts of stuff, things that, or after a long meeting with the whole team where I had to give everybody a shampoo and a double conditioner and these sorts of stuff. And ultimately, these people are feeding on your energy, right? And if you don't have that energy, you're not going to be able to take things to the distance. So living in Los Angeles, obviously you put a fee outside your house. You spent $100 just by breathing, right? I always try to look for a personal trainer, because I'm, again, I'm an extremely diligent person when it comes to a meeting, an appointment, a work related things, but I'm not as diligent with myself. So was trying to find a personal trainer. Obviously, in LA it's really prohibitive to afford something like that. So what I did, it's like Francesco, what do you do when you need to find somebody for you know, lower cost than he can afford. I just be resourceful as much as you are. For often, from your startups, right? So it's like, what would I do? I go on app work. I went on app work. I found the calisthenics expert that for, you know, 13 bucks, 13 bucks a day, every morning. He just like ripping me right and telling me that, you know, I need to go harder, and you know I can push an extra one, and so on, and so in that way, I know I have an appointment. I can, I can't let the person down. We have agreed that if I don't show up, he's going to charge me anyway. So that's an extra that's an extra financial incentive for me to be there. And every morning at at 645, I just show up in my garage on with a selfie stick and just telling me what to do. And and since I started to do that, I just feel, you know, so much better. And then, you know, I sign up for things like function health and, you know, these other stuff who can help you to, you know, make sure that you're taking the right supplements and they are, your levels are right, and all these sorts of stuff in order to, you know, try to get in this craziness to the highest level of harmony that You can possibly aim for, which is still very low. It's definitely higher than if you don't do any of these things.

William Harris 1:03:27

Yeah, I've heard somebody say that your company is going to be very unsuccessful if you're in the hospital too, and so you have to take care of your body. I'm not gonna let this slide though. You said, if you're in a meeting and you have to shampoo and condition. Wait, when are you shampooing condition? What kind of a meeting is

Francesco Gatti 1:03:44

this? Oh, I mean, that's, it's a way of saying when that we have in Italy's when, you know, when somebody do something wrong, you give them a shampoo and conditioner. Yeah, exactly, and, yeah, but anyway, so it just, just said that obviously, you know your your team is, ultimately, you know, feeding from the energy that you're able to put out there. And if you know you're not the excited one, don't expect for anybody has to be excited about your business, right? So the point here is to, you know, being able to have enough energy to be able to, you know, heat up the room and making sure that you know, everybody's gonna ultimately Believe in your dream and help you achieve it.

William Harris 1:04:30

I'm gonna start using that one from now on. I love Italian phrases. My favorite one is always il Dolce farniente, right? It's like, ah, the sweetness of doing nothing. And as an entrepreneur, it's what I have to remind myself of every once in a while, too. That's right. Francesco, it's been very, very fun getting to know you, learn from you today, if people want to work with you or follow you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Francesco Gatti 1:04:52

Yeah, 100% so feel free to reach me on LinkedIn. I'm very active there, and I'm happy to. Don't book a call with anybody who wants to work with us, or just want to learn more about what we do and how to ultimately grow their e-commerce business. You know, I'm very passionate guy, so don't, don't take things personal. There's something you like, but, yeah, that's, that's pretty much it. Or, you know, you can reach out to me through our website as well by submitting a form. And, yeah, again, we try to make it easy for everybody to test out the product and in the solution. So we would love for, you know, anybody interest to take take advantage of these unlimited trial and see if it's if it's good for you and if it can help you to make this Black Friday better.

William Harris 1:05:46

Well, thank you again for sharing your time and your wisdom with us today. It's been a lot of fun.

Francesco Gatti 1:05:50

Thank you so much. really appreciate you having me.

William Harris 1:05:53

Thank you everyone for listening. Have a great rest of your day.

Outro 1:05:57

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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