70 Understanding the Buyer's Journey - Greg Shuey Aug 8 2024

Tim Curtis: Hello and welcome to this edition of the Digital Velocity Podcast. Today, Erik and I are speaking with Greg Shuey, the CEO and owner of Stryde to discuss how understanding the buyer's journey can transform a brand's marketing strategy. Greg, welcome to the show.

Greg Shuey: Thank you so much for having me.

Tim Curtis: It's good to have you here. Before we jump into the show, we typically like to ask the guests to get a little bit of their background, brief synopsis of their journey, and hear how they arrived to today. So, we'd love to hear from you.

Greg Shuey: Cool. Well, you know, it was a wild journey. I got my start in marketing about 20 years ago. I was working in a call center starting my first year of [00:01:00] college. I did such a great job that the company who was running the call center decided to bring me up into corporate and help them launch a new side of their business and overseeing the affiliate side and getting affiliates to come in. Had no experience, had to learn it on the fly.

After a year or so there, I'm like, how on earth are these affiliates making so much money? Like, what are they doing to get people to their website? And then I kind of fell into SEO. And that's really just been my passion forever. It's still my passion to this day. Started studying, learning SEO, started building my own website, driving traffic and affiliate revenue for that same business that I was working for.

And after, you know, another couple of years of doing that, I decided to join an SEO agency because I wanted to see what else am I potentially missing. I worked at that agency for a couple of years and then I joined another bigger agency here in Utah called seo.com. You can probably guess what they [00:02:00] do, what they did. I mean, they're not much of a business anymore, but stayed there for about four or five years. I worked my way up to be the vice president of the company.

And then, uh, I decided there's more to life than SEO, and started my agency, Stryde. And we've been doing that for about 11 years. We started out as full service. So, I had to bring on some people really fast to help me on the paid side, the email side, things that I just didn't know. Right before COVID, we decided to, uh, niche down into E-commerce. Couldn't have been more perfect timing for us going into COVID. Once COVID started, everyone became an E-commerce agency, so that was a good time.

Tim Curtis: Yeah. That's a downside.

Greg Shuey: We were positioned well, and then all of a sudden, we weren't positioned well. So, we decided to niche down into a handful of industries. And those are the same industries that we serve today, which are baby, fashion, home decor, and sporting goods. That kind of brings us up to where we're at.

Tim Curtis: Organic journey.

Greg Shuey: Organic. Yep.

Erik Martinez: You [00:03:00] know, Greg, you and I have had a lot of conversations about E-commerce and what's important in the business. And I think that a lot of brands really heavily invest in marketing tactics. And sometimes it's us agencies saying you need to be in these channels.

Greg Shuey: A hundred percent.

Erik Martinez: I think sometimes even as an agency practitioner, we get a little more focused on our services than really what's best for the client's business. As we start to think about that, what do you think E-commerce clients need to do to figure out how to allocate their marketing budgets?

Greg Shuey: Yeah, that's a great question. So, I'm not going to come out here and say that we've had it figured out forever. In fact, we were probably late to the game in kind of shifting our thinking and our mindset regarding just marketing as a whole. I'd say about 18 months ago, we decided to pivot a [00:04:00] little bit, not industries or whatnot, but we decided that marketing as it is being done by brands and by our agency is just us coming in and turning on ads.

That is very quickly becoming a thing of the past because ad costs are rising. It is getting much more difficult to be able to go out and prospect and drive new customer acquisition to the point where a brand can be profitable on that first order. Because we all know lifetime value, average order value, none of that's guaranteed. Even though we'd like to believe that it's guaranteed, it's not.

And so, making sure that we're optimizing and bringing the right customers in that are going to spend the most amount of money that are going to come back and be able to buy over and over again, and then hopefully one day become a brand advocate to where they're shouting from the rooftops. That takes a very different kind of strategy than just cool, I've got a new client. Or cool, we're going to start doing marketing for this brand, let's just turn on ads. Let's start optimizing our [00:05:00] website from an SEO perspective. It's forced us as an agency to come in and say, okay, like, let's take a step back.

Let's slow down and let's look at the customer. Let's figure out who these people are. Well, first, let's figure out who your best customer is, and then let's figure out who they are. Let's figure out what makes them tick. Let's figure out how they use the internet to make purchase decisions. And then try to piece together what that overall buyer journey looks like so that we can do better marketing from day one and not have to optimize six months later after we have a bunch of data in the ad platforms and those types of things. We can just get much more dialed in out of the gate.

Erik Martinez: When you're talking about this buyer journey and getting into understanding who they are, over the years, I've kind of pooh-poohed the idea of personas. Because sat through numerous persona discussions. I've sat through numerous presentations with [00:06:00] personas, and I've seen agencies do these presentations. And it ends up being, Hey, here's Sally. She's a middle-aged mom with two cars, you know, you get a lot of demographic information about them. And you get a lot of, Hey, they spend in these categories type thing.

I've never found it to be thoroughly actionable. And frustrating, quite frankly, because you're charging a lot of money to do some of these persona analysis and studies. A couple of years ago, I read a book kind of on this topic and it actually helped me switch my mindset. And the idea was that you can't market to every single individual out there, but you can pick who you market to.

And so, we've got this interesting balance between, we need to be everywhere for our customer whoever he, she, they may be, or we can pick a [00:07:00] customer and market to them aggressively, wherever they may be. And I think there's a little bit of a balance and a tipping point in that. So, I guess the question for you is, as you begin to think about marketing to a group of customers and learning their behaviors, what is the process for figuring that out? Do you recommend persona analysis or are there other indicators that you're looking at or factors that might help elucidate who these people are?

Greg Shuey: For sure. Yeah. So, I've never been a big fan or advocate of persona-building whatsoever. I'm more so a fan of let's figure out who your best customers are. And this is easier for brands that have a purchase history, right? They have a customer base. Brands that don't, it's a lot trickier. But the brands that do what we like to do [00:08:00] is we like to go into their customer database and we like to start segmenting their customers.

And we try to identify a customer segment that has made at least two or three purchases. So, we know, okay, we've got some lifetime value there, right? We've got people who are coming back. The products must be good. They like the brand enough to come back and continue to give them money. And then we'll take that segment out and then we'll start to do some research on that segment.

So yes, we do do demographic surveys and yes, some of the data is helpful to be able to understand who those people are. I wouldn't say it's an end-all-be-all. And it's gotten harder to use that data as Facebook has continued to take away different targeting options, right? And so, a lot of that data is just not helpful, but it's still good to be able to understand who the heck they are.

The second piece of that is we'll do customer interviews. We'll do these from time to time over the phone. We found that email is just as effective and we'll build out a 10-question kind of [00:09:00] survey that we'll send them. In that survey, we'll ask them things like, how did you first hear about us? What websites do you frequent? Where are you spending you time online? What brought you to our site to make your most recent purchase? Why do you continue to choose to do business with us? Do you have feedback on the specific product? There's a handful of other questions that we ask.

We really try to dig in and kind of get in the minds of these people and start to realize what that buyer journey looks like. I mean, it's not gonna be perfect. Kind of my favorite way to really visualize a complex buyer journey these days, because it's definitely not linear anymore. I've put this up on LinkedIn, I think a couple of times, but when we think of a buyer journey, marketers, we've been trained to think that it's linear. Oh, they see a Facebook ad, they come to my website, they shop around, they add to a cart, they buy. That's not how it works anymore. Right?

Someone sees an ad on Meta, visits the website. They look around for a [00:10:00] little bit. They don't take any action. Then they get retargeted. They come back, add something to the shopping cart. Then they think, I'm going to jump over to Amazon really quick and see if it's cheaper, if I get free two-day shipping or one-day shipping or same-day shipping, right? Yes, they do. And so, they add it to the cart and then they leave to run a kid to soccer practice. And now they have two shopping carts. They jump over to a Reddit thread, ask if anyone has used the product. They get lots of feedback. The next day they get a mailer from Costco or Sam's Club saying, Hey, we've got the product and it's cheaper. I go into the store and I buy it on Saturday.

That's a real, it's not a real example, but that's truly like a real world, and it's hard to know who gets credit for that. It's hard to figure out how do we target throughout that buyer journey without doing that customer research. As a brand, you can map this, it won't be a hundred percent accurate, but it's important to understand how all of this works together to move the business forward and to drive growth. That is why [00:11:00] customer research is so dang important.

Tim Curtis: Your comment earlier about what's happening with paid media costs, for example. Very applicable. Very applicable. Brands' budgets are under an extreme amount of pressure. During COVID we were referencing that before the show, you know, it was a time when everybody turned to E-commerce. Manufacturers all of a sudden set up an E-commerce site.

They're getting customers. Many times this is the first season where they've had this flush of customers. Now they're seeing a little bit of dip in demand as people have started going back to some brick and mortar or their buying behavior is a challenge, but you've got the pressure of these budgets. They've been very inflationary. It's not getting any better. There's no end in sight in terms of the raises. The efficacy of the ads, its plateaued and beginning a slight decline. So, all of that paints a really tough story.

Now you have the investment necessary in AI to try to keep up with the AI that's out there that you want to be a part of that game because it's an important asset. So, [00:12:00] they've got a lot of confusion. Everything's messy as you described it, those buying journeys. How do you tell a brand how they can begin to get those insights? You're in front of a brand and you're beginning to explain this is how we would go about gaining those insights.

You know, really their behaviors, their preferences at each of those stages of the journey, what are those insights, and then how that's driving marketing? Because you've got to be explaining this all the time. We always kind of think people are there and we realize every time as agency folks, every time we do that, they're not there. They're missing something. So, I'm curious what your thoughts are.

Greg Shuey: Yeah. So, as we walk through this, one of the big things for us these days, and this has been a shift, you know, in the last 6 to 12 months for us, is that we have to start collecting data throughout the customer journey. One of the ways that we do this for our clients is through pre-purchase surveys and post-purchase surveys on our clients' websites.

So, most brands today are not asking their potential customers for data. Right now, the majority of us are just trading an email address for a [00:13:00] discount, which does not help us as marketers do our jobs better. It just gets people in the door, potentially customers who are one-time purchasers who are going to suck your margins dry by trying to get the biggest discount for their one and only purchase.

The pivot or the shift that we've made as an agency is that we want to start asking follow-up questions after someone subscribes for that discount. We use kind of one or two tools right now to help us do that. One of them's called Amped and the other one's called FormToro. Usually, it's two questions that we ask right after someone gives us their email address. So, the first question is like, what are you most interested in? And the second question is, who are you buying for?

So, that first question, we're typically modeling that after two things, right? The first one is categories for brands that sell across a lot of different product types. It's like, I'm most interested in dresses or tops or shoes or whatever. Or if we [00:14:00] have a very focused product selection category type, right? Like if we're just selling coolers, for example, we'll try to gather information about who they are. Are they a hunter? Are they a fisher? Are they other type of outdoorsman? Are they a soccer mom who just wants to keep their drinks cold while they're at games all day on a Saturday?

And so, we'll gather this information and then we can start to make sense of the customer profile and that data can be pushed right into a Klaviyo or a Sendlane or whatever marketing platform that you're using. And then you can attach that to a profile and start to make sense of that.

 On the post-purchase side, this is a survey that's embedded on a customer thank you page once they place an order. We're typically asking three questions and this is where we really start to understand the buyer journey. So, first question is, how did you first learn about us? That's first-touch attribution right there. And we know that, the ad platforms, the reporting inside of Meta, inside of [00:15:00] Google, inside of GA4, like it's all skewed, right? With privacy laws that are getting stricter and tighter and people are opting out of cookies, incredibly skewed these days. And so, that helps us with first-touch attribution.

Greg Shuey: The second question that we ask is what brought you to our site today? And that would be last-touch attribution, right? Like after they've learned about you, what brought them to the site in order to make a purchase? And then, the third question that we ask is how long did you know about us before making your first purchase? And that helps us understand length of buyer journey.

For a lot of our brands, they're smaller purchases. They're somewhat inexpensive and you can expect most of the bulk of those purchases to be in the one to seven-day period, But sometimes we're shocked. Sometimes they're in the three to six to sometimes 12-month period, especially seasonal brands are sometimes out in the 12-month period. And that helps us understand, holy smokes this buyer journeys this long, how do we make sure that we're top of mind for when they're ready to make [00:16:00] that purchase? And it really starts to impact the way that we do marketing, the way that we do retargeting, the way we set up our email flows, and those types of things. So, those are like our core three that we ask with post-purchase surveys.

If we're not doing those pre-purchase surveys, we'll squeeze those same questions in as well, right? Like, what are you most interested in? Who was this purchase for? We may even go as far as asking other questions like what almost prevented you from buying today. Questions like that really help us get in the mind of the customer and kind of figure out what friction looks like, what objections they have, and really start to pull all of that data together.

And then, like I mentioned, you know, we'll do those customer interviews as well, either through phone or email. And we collect all this data, and we pull it all together, and we can start to make sense of that funnel and the overall buyer journey so that we can build the right strategy. Sorry, that was long-winded.

Tim Curtis: Well, it's a long complicated process. And I think the surveys, the questions, basically you're adding zero party data, [00:17:00] which is that data that the customer is telling you directly that you're not inferring, like, which is first purchase data. So, you're collecting what are arguably much more critical points now than they were a few years ago because of the privacy law changes, because of the lack of data you're getting from your third-party cookies or your ad platforms.

I think everybody talks about Facebook Meta, just how devastating that was when they lost all that targeting capability. So, you do have to kind of reconstruct that. And I think there's real power in being able to understand what the zero-party data is telling you and what you can deduce from it.

You mentioned how long they've known about you before your first purchase. That's powerful. That can also be used as a measure of brand awareness. It kind of gives you a sense of, okay, first touch last touch. What's our journey here? But in today's world, we've got to find more and more of those kind of things to really kind of fill the gaps in what's existing [00:18:00] now in the lack of data.

What does surprise me sometimes and this is where I think people take that information and they stretch it too far. And I've seen people who are then trying to model on that behavior, as opposed to like transactions. And so, they sort of mislabel priority of information by doing that, and they're not gaining the insights. There is no substitute for transactions.

When you're in a modeling environment, that information tells you so much more about the behavior, if you will. But to your point, these surveys, understanding the buyer journey, it's beginning to translate that. And probably, I'm sure, you have to help them understand what those questions will sort of clarify for them.

Greg Shuey: A hundred percent. My favorite thing to tell people is your customers will tell you exactly what they're thinking and how to market to them, you just have to ask, you've got to ask the right questions. If we're talking to the right customers, you know, the ones that are going to come back and buy again and again from that customer segment like we talked about, they're hopefully going to tell us how to go find more people just like them. [00:19:00] And if we listen, if we take time to interpret the data, we'll be able to build the right strategy.

Tim Curtis: Insightful.

Erik Martinez: I'm curious, Greg, you know, as you're doing this and I think what you're doing is fantastic. I think one of the next questions is, we've got all this information now and you're helping us put together a strategy, but my budget's still my budget. Money's not unlimited, right? If I could pour all the money I could into my strategy, I would. But, you know, I've got a CFO that I report to, or we just have budgetary constraints because of the current business environment.

So, how do you take the information you've got, the strategy you're developing, and now start translating it into, you've only got this pot, this is how we start. Because I think, the Holy grail of marketing for the last, I don't know, [00:20:00] since I got in the marketing a little bit longer than you did, we're not going to say how long, has been tell me where to put my budget. Tell me how to maximize my budget. People have gone down and done crazy attribution studies.

Greg Shuey: Which are not accurate.

Erik Martinez: Which are inherently flawed because they involve assumptions. At some point, you still make an assumption about the value of this over the value of this. Even some large advertising organizations that are dedicated to the advertising industry have determined that attribution modeling is spurious at best, right? So, when you're talking to your clients and saying, Hey, the best use of your money is this, how do you relate all that information together? Because I think that's the burning question, particularly right now where budgets are a little bit tighter, sales are a little more constrained, cost pressures in the [00:21:00] industry are rising. What do you say to those people?

Greg Shuey: We try to find the biggest points of leverage in the customer journey. What are those two or three things that we can double down on and focus on in order to be able to drive more revenue for the business that can then be reinvested? For every business it's different. Even sometimes we may come back and say, look, we'll find in some of our post-purchase data that Amazon and Etsy are huge referers. Could potentially shifting budget to Amazon, which is not something that we do, be one of your large points of leverage?

Once we start to get some of that data, we'll start to have some of those customer interviews. And we'll try again, like I said, to really narrow down on three to four different things that we can then really start to allocate some budget to so that we're not spread too thin at the end of the day. I also think that investing and making sure that whatever we do that we can put some money towards making sure that we have a [00:22:00] very personalized strategy so that we're taking that data and we can build personalization into it is a huge component of it.

Because I think that's one way that brands can really start to differentiate, which is going to help them stand out from the crowd, but also once we're able to acquire a subscriber, we can take a lot of that data and we can start to personalize. Like if they're interested in shoes, send them more shoes versus just blasting your entire database. Some of that data we can take and we can push right into Meta. We can push that right into Klaviyo. We can create custom audiences in Meta and Google.

And if they said that they were a hunter, guess what? I can now show the cooler with people hunting in the background. And that resonates and that drives more action, and that actually gets us better CPAs by doing so. Which again, drives the cost down, that we can reinvest money into other channels. But I would say getting highly focused on a handful of channels and then making sure that everything is insanely [00:23:00] personalized across those channels so that we can be as effective as possible.

Erik Martinez: I think that's a really sound advice, particularly in today's environment where the platforms, the Amazons and the Walmarts, they're squeezing into more and more digital spaces where they weren't. It's kind of like watching the blitzkrieg back in World War II, right? You like just saw this wave of soldiers coming at you and they were just throwing everything at it and it was just coming steadily at you.

We're also seeing in our data that we have to refine and refocus budgets because our strategy for many years had been, Hey, you know what? The internet is about distributing your product in as many corners and reaches as you can. And what I just heard you say is really focus on a handful of lever points, get really good at those. And some of those lever points may be things that we don't do as an agency today because that would be self-serving [00:24:00] versus addressing the client's need to grow their business. Those things are super effective.

The second thing I heard you say is talking about personalization and, you know, you talked a little bit about the segmentation and the data. When we talk personalization, my brain immediately goes to some of the visual aspects. And what I heard you say is really, it's not necessarily the visual piece, but it's the focus of the products, the content. But there is a component of merchandising here that is being left unsaid when we talk about E-commerce digitally.

I grew up in the direct mail business catalog industry and merchandising is everything. Specialty brands, merchandising is everything. But in today's world, merchandising has kind of lost a little bit of its luster. And I think it's hugely important in terms of one of the things that you need to focus on is also focusing within your product consideration set [00:25:00] that are going to drive customers to help make those lever points more effective. Would you agree or would you disagree with that statement?

Greg Shuey: I 100 percent agree. And one of the other activities that we like to do on a regular basis is once we segment out those customers that have a higher lifetime value, you go and you figure out what the heck are these people buying. Are there any patterns? What's their first purchase? What's their second purchase? What's their third purchase? Do we have deep inventory of these products? Are these products high-margin? The last thing we want to do is to sell a bunch of low-margin stuff.

And then we start to kind of build out what those products need to be that live inside of that strategy. And then also, that helps us with kind of the post-purchase buyer journey as well. It's like, what do they buy next? And then we can start to build that into email workflows, ad strategies, and things like that. But I a hundred percent agree with you.

Tim Curtis: I'm going to add another layer of complexity here. So, multi-channel. When brands are operating, they're operating in multiple channels at a time. We've talked about how fraught [00:26:00] with challenges attribution is, and it really is. You know, wouldn't, have a lot of history of the agencies that I've been a part of understanding and grilling, I guess, would be a better way to say it, attribution specialist. There's platforms out there that claim to have kind of the secret sauce of attribution, but invariably what we found is that there are typically holes in the attribution. Some of them glaring, some of them very, very glaring, others nuance.

One interesting observation though, that I've had, this is kind of on the larger pulse of everything is that when you take last click attribution and you run that against a post-multi-touch attribution kind of thing, the last click attribution is very, very directional. You will have some shifts in the attribution, but that last click is far more directional than you think. And so, when you're talking about multichannel, retailers, they take this approach. They need to understand how the customers are maybe bouncing between some of those platforms.

You gave the indication earlier of that messy journey. But what [00:27:00] I have found, what I've seen is that lifetime value can be really, really helpful when you start to take a look at your overall strategy. Now, yes, lifetime value can be done at an individual level. Of course, you're going to run that, but I think where the power is in lifetime value, and when you're talking about a multi-channel environment, is rolling it up one layer and looking at the specific channels. And looking at the average lifetime value that's coming out of those channels that will inform you on a lot of things.

You talked early on about discounting and throwing those discounts into email. Well, email is always the number one thing on the attribution. It's just not scalable. And it's become a channel that's been downgraded with just basically the sweepstakes sales, the clearance, all those things, deep, deep discounts, you know, training customers to hold onto that cart for a little bit until they get another email from an abandoned cart. So, these brands have to go through all that exercise.

What if any advice do you have about [00:28:00] dealing with all those channels? Do you do something similar to that to take a look? Because there are many clients that I've said over the years, you shouldn't be running in this channel. For example, affiliate. If you do not want this to go out to an affiliate network. So you need to have like a one-to-one code on your site so that it can't go viral. What are your thoughts on multi-channel? Cause it is messy.

Greg Shuey: It's messy. I wish with every fiber of my being that we could just get brands to look at an overall marketing spend and how that's spread out across the different channels and look at a return on marketing dollars versus get in and try to dissect it. Because I've said for years and years and years, and I don't know who originally said this, but like a rising tide lifts all ships.

The work that you do on Meta is going to directly impact the sales on your website. But guess what? If you're selling on Amazon, they're definitely going to impact the sales on Amazon. You have to look at the business as a whole through all the different [00:29:00] marketplaces, all the different channels and strategies that you deploy. You can't just look at first or last click. Ninety-nine percent of the time last click is going to be an email with a promo code in it. How do you like dissect that and really assign a value to it?

And back to the marketplace thing. I mean, it was funny. I was having a conversation with a potential client a week or so ago, and he was talking about his business and how they pulled back on their Facebook ads. Their Amazon sales cut in half and he's like, we turned those right back on and they went right back up. And he's like, so I understand this idea of like taking this pool of marketing dollars and looking at it as a whole.

And I think that's the direction that brands need to go while also understanding that first and last click and taking those things into account and again, trying to map that customer journey. But it's only going to get harder. It's onlygoing to get harder. Google keeps saying they're going to take away cookies and they push that out further.

Tim Curtis: Yesterday, I think they [00:30:00] just said we're not going to get rid of them after all. That's the latest. Yeah. I mean, so it's just like. Oh, you gotta be kidding me. I swear.

Greg Shuey: Oh man.

Erik Martinez: They realized that half of their revenue was gonna go away.

Tim Curtis: Yeah, the truth is, we're talking about multi-channel, this is messy. Everybody was moving a direction in a cookie-less world. And with that announcement.

Erik Martinez: Fakeout.

Tim Curtis: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm like, Oh gosh, where do you go from there to in a multi-channel world?

Erik Martinez: But then half of the devices in the world are on the other platform which is cookie-less.

Tim Curtis: And has made a clear privacy stand. So yeah.

Greg Shuey: It's going to be messy and messier as we go. And I don't know if that answered your question entirely.

Tim Curtis: There's no real answer necessarily. I think it's tactics for how you can, you know, and I offered up one of looking at that last click and comparing that against, you know, a multi-channel, but at least understanding directionally that these channels, they do have different behavior.

I was really [00:31:00] surprised at shopping and how shopping is more transient. You just don't see a lot of people build brand loyalty if they're coming in via shopping. You know, that's an example of being aware of that. That level of understanding about your, your own channels that you're marketing in should nuance what you're doing and pushing in those channels by a long shot.

Last question here, before we kind of wrap up, consumer trends. We have waves of consumer trends that come and go and, you know, some were shaped by COVID. We saw during COVID a large rise in, OTT streaming advertising and we've really kind of watched that sort of die off a little bit. Brands are kind of divesting from some of that, the returns just not there at that same level anymore. So, how do you account for, or do you account for consumer trends that can shape behavior and its applicability to the buying journey?

Greg Shuey: I don't know that you can account for it because it changes so fast. We're in [00:32:00] this weird period of time right now going into Q3. We've got an election year. We've got consumer spending tightening. I think it just shifts and pivots so dang fast that it's hard to be able to predict that and properly account for it. Because at the end of the day, I mean, there isn't a lot of data out there that says, yeah, buyers are shopping less right now, buyers are saving their money for Q4 and Black Friday.

One of the benefits of running an agency is that I can see trends across a bunch of clients in the fashion space. I have data that general companies don't have data, and that allows us to be able to account for some of that as well. So, unless you're out talking to other brand owners and building alliances with them and masterminds, it's kind of hard to tell. It's kind of hard to be able to show that.

Tim Curtis: Very much so.

Erik Martinez: I think that's absolutely right. So Greg, thank you so much for all these thoughts today. You've left us with some very [00:33:00] actionable things to think about in terms of just how to at least start the conversation on understanding that buyer journey a little bit better, some tips on how to go about doing that. Before we close out, do you have any last pieces of advice for the audience that you'd like to leave?

Greg Shuey: The thing I tell brands most often is stop sleeping on this. Call five customers by the end of the week. Literally go in, find five customers who have purchased three times from you, and pick up the phone and call them and just talk to them. You don't need to put all this fancy technology on your website if you're strapped for development resources or whatever. Literally just pick up the phone. You can have a customer service rep do this. You can have your marketing person do this. You can have your marketing agency do this. Don't waste any more time and then do it every single month.

When you have the time when you have the budget to be able to buy the tools and install them on your website, knock it out. Knock it out when you can, but [00:34:00] pick up the phone. It's easy. And honestly, your customers would love to hear from you because brands don't call customers anymore. They just don't.

Erik Martinez: Yeah. I think that's a wonderful piece of advice.

Greg Shuey: Pick up the phone.

Erik Martinez: Pick up the phone. I think that's the mantra for the next decade. I like it. Well, Greg, thank you so much for your time and your expertise. This has been a fantastic discussion. That's it for today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. We really appreciate you listening to the program today. I'm Eric Martinez.

Tim Curtis: And I'm Tim Curtis.

Erik Martinez: Have a fantastic day, folks. Thank you. [00:35:00]