Connected Commerce: Stop Collecting Emails. Start Collecting Context.

Hai Mag 00:00

Welcome back everyone to the Connected Commerce podcast. And here is your host, Hi Mac, who is the founder of Eva Commerce and the CEO. And today I have my good friend John, who is the founder of FormToro, and he will be telling us about some great stories on the Connected Commerce. So welcome, John.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 00:22

Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Hai Mag 00:25

So tell us a bit about yourself and the company, please.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 00:29

my journey in e-commerce started multiple decades ago. and kind of my last big stint at at a brand, part of the brand I currently co-own was in the smart home space. I worked for a company called LifeX that was doing smart home Wi-Fi connected light bulbs. And it was really kind of a rebaptism by fire. I'd been out of marketing for a while and came back into it. And I got obsessed with what the customer journey was and how we could improve.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 00:54

the journey and real focused on how can we better collect useful pieces of information from people in order to drive stuff forward. So they sold in 2019 and while doing some consulting gigs with some other brands, we stumbled on the same problem that we'd been having over and over and over. And that was better understanding who our customers were as they were joining our mailing list. So we were treating everyone the exact same way. And

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 01:18

FormTora was born out of that with an idea of, hey, what we're doing isn't really that efficient and not really working. And how do we make it better and add context to who's signing up and why they're signing up and who's more likely to convert than others.

Hai Mag 01:30

I mean, that is amazing. Like, as you said, a lot, like, I mean, we do work with a company that I invested personally called Rav Lexo. And we do we focus more on retention and how we can keep the companies, the the the consumers on a subscription. But before everything else, like before you kind of work on the retention, you need to know

Hai Mag 01:53

Exactly where the traffic is coming from, what type of a traffic, who is your audience? How can you customize based on the audience? Right. It's not just about a simple 10% coupon for you. Okay, subscribe. That's what everybody's doing, right?

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 02:08

I mean

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 02:09

that's fine. I mean, you can do your ten percent off. That's fine. The the thing that I think a lot of people don't understand though is when most people I mean, I don't like pop-ups. Actually, our latest implementation is not a it's a pop-up, but it's a teaser that sits under the add to cart button. So it doesn't block the journey, it doesn't stop the journey, it doesn't interrupt the journey. It's completely moved to being part of the customer journey.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 02:32

Whatever your discount is, it's more of a location of where you put that discount and what you're trading for that discount. And the biggest problem I see people doing is they're saying, we we got like three different versions right now. We've got the gamification where people are doing a spin to win and you put an email and then they're just collecting for an email and that's it. Great. We have the question first, which doesn't make any sense because you can't attach it to an email all the time and you get skewed data. and then we have

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 02:59

The standard, you know, sign up here, give us your email. here's your coupon code. What people forget, when someone checks out, you also get that email. You also get a phone number. So we're trading a discount for no value. And we're under the assumption that 10% off is really gonna push someone over the line and get them to purchase when they wouldn't previously purchase. 10% doesn't even cover shipping. In a lot of cases, it doesn't cover tax.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 03:23

in a lot of cases. So we've completely kind of bastardized this this contract we had where you you come to a website and you get an offer and you opt in and give up your information and then you take advantage of that. And I think that's kind of the weird thing where there's no real intrinsic value in an email anymore or a phone number. And the value of that goes to zero if they don't purchase in like the first seven days.

Hai Mag 03:47

I mean, that's very interesting for me. That's why instead of maybe just jumping into the connected commerce story, I'm like still want to stay in the subject because it's already connected, anyways. Like we're talking about like,

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 03:59

It is.

Hai Mag 04:00

okay, so we're talking about like a consumer which already purchased, right? Now this person comes back to the website, and we do not expect the same person to

Hai Mag 04:12

spin the the w the wheel again or you know maybe it's just coming for the spin the the wheel right spin the wheel every time.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 04:18

It's it's w it's well

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 04:21

that's that's part of it. A large part of the gamification stuff actually attracts people that have already purchased because they think it's new novel and they want a second chance and everyone has five or six emails that they're using. So trust, we've run like a lot of the numbers on this and as many people wanna argue with me as possible on this. It it

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 04:36

Just never works out that way. Consumer behaviors, if you provide them with multiple options and one is bigger than the next, and you don't get that, and there's another chance to go for the bigger prize, you're gonna play again. So you're gonna end up skewing numbers. And there's zero ways for people to stop that from happening. Like we're a pop-up company, we can't stop it from happening, right? Anyone can open up an incognito window and give it another whirl and we'll see what happens, right? Like it's just really tough to do that.

Hai Mag 05:01

Yeah, I'm thinking about

Hai Mag 05:02

even myself, I'll do the same.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 05:04

100%.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 05:05

It's it's what human nature does. There's is there's no stopping that from happening. we do s do some interesting stuff though, because we do retarget by segment. So I think I just launched something today where for our brand we're gonna give away a free hat if they answer eight questions and they're long form questions because we wanna test their patience and break it down. But the questions are specifically built around marketing insights that we can reuse. what was your previous favorite?

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 05:30

brand, what could we do to improve our product? how do you feel about our new bundle pricing? Is it fair, good value, not good value at all? Like we're constantly trying to close the feedback loop while providing enhanced benefits. One of the main things that we heard, and this was from our conversation earlier, is that people felt they got a really good deal for their first offer, because we offer 50% off your first pair, limited to one pair, and they're like, that's great. How about for our second people?

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 05:57

It's like, well, we have bundles, it gets them down. Like we take a loss on this one, guys. Like, this is meant to get you in the door and then test this out and figure it out. But a lot of people feel like they're they've earned loyalty, where if they shop from you instead of someone else, they deserve a higher amount of loyalty and that they should get a better deal, offer, bargain, et cetera. which is a really strange consumer dynamic shift.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 06:20

'Cause that didn't used to be there. It always used to be you only had a couple options and you shot between these specific options. And now I feel because there's so many different options with similar products, people are almost just racing to the bottom and are very quick to call out your product and say, Yeah, it's great, but this one's really similar to you guys and it's cheaper, way cheaper. So I think I'm just gonna buy them instead.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 06:44

And we didn't see that like 10 years ago, 15 years ago, that wasn't the case. Like people found a brand that they liked and they stuck with it. And today it's completely flipped.

Hai Mag 06:53

Right. But I mean, if that's the case, does it mean that like for example, introducing the loyalty programs and giving them points or free gifts or things like that would d you know, kind of keep them within the brand or you know, there are some other ideas to do that?

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 07:11

I have some crazy theories about this. and they're

Hai Mag 07:13

Okay.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 07:13

not being done by a lot of people, which is why they're like absolutely the first time people are gonna hear it, maybe for for a while. I've kept them mostly to myself. I think there's a lot of brands that misuse their budgets massively. we run an underwear brand. People don't talk about their underwear, they don't see their underwear. So if we do hats, we give hats away for just a little bit above cost. We use them as a marketing vehicle and a marketing engine.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 07:38

'Cause it's something that's visual that gets our brand out there. we just had that conversation internally and I was like, we're gonna make shirts and they're gonna be great, but I wanna make shirts with the R logo as big as possible on them, and I wanna charge less for those than a clean shirt without logo or discrete logos because it's functioning as a branding thing.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 07:57

It's like your your bar, restaurant, et cetera, that sells tchotchkis or shirts or t-shirts and you're paying thirty-five dollars for a shirt. Hell no. Pay five dollars for a shirt. Get your branding out there. Use it as a marketing vehicle. I think a lot of brands are gonna fall into that where they're gonna specialize in a specific, specific section and that's what they do really well. And then they're going to basically run an advanced merch store above that and use that for marketing in the real world. And

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 08:22

It's a crazy concept. I don't know anyone that's done it really, really well. So it's just completely an experiment. But I I I think we're at that point where, you know, giving away subscriptions or free products or loyalty tiers and everything else. I know some people really buy into it, but all those things have a they have a lifespan. And the hardest problem about loyalty and subscriptions these days is that most subscription products, they let you pause.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 08:47

Does your subscription pause let people pause their subscription for a portion of time?

Hai Mag 08:51

Yeah, I mean

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 08:52

Yeah, I

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 08:52

mean if if you can pause it, like you're still subscribed and the numbers look good, but are you really buying a lot? No, you're just gonna wait for something to pop

Hai Mag 08:59

Mm-hmm.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 08:59

up that shows up, right? Like that's kind of one of the things that I've never been huge on loyalty. I've never been huge on subscription because I believe in freedom of choice. And on occasion, a lot of these brands run sales. Subscription is great if you don't run sales.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 09:17

Loyalty is great if you don't run sales. If you run sales and you count on sales and you have a steady sales cycle of when you're doing things, people can just wait. They can park their points and wait for a huge sale and clear you out and you'll make zero margin on that. And we used to watch this happen with with our our previous company. People would absolutely clear us out and then we do the math and we realize we were losing money on every single customer that purchased over a portion of time.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 09:40

same thing with like store credit. People are huge on store credit. They love it. Send them a gift card, whatever. They're it you it gets treated like cash though. So when you do your 50% off clearance sale and someone has a gift card sitting around, they're getting your stuff for free, essentially. Like there's a lot of things I think people that aren't operators don't think about within this entire space. but to what you're saying, like.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 10:03

I do think that if we treated, and here's here's a hypothesis someone signs up, they they buy your supplement product, right? And they're they're really feeling good about it. They don't really want to buy a subscription though, but you run sales and you run sales quarterly because you know you got to hit numbers. Okay. What's stopping you from giving that subscriber or that person that's purchased once your sale whenever it's

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 10:27

best for them within their time period of using the product. We have arbitrarily set up times where we think we should run sales instead of basing it on that customer's journey and experience with your product. If I sign up for a brand and I buy their product and I think it's really great and I've tested it out first 30 days, you know, 60 days, my hot spot, and you're gonna have a discount that comes out on Black Friday, but I'm not gonna get access to that until Black Friday and you're gonna make me wait.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 10:55

What's gonna happen? What if I was ready to buy and swap out my entire closet at those prices within like a month? Why didn't those show up to me? And that's like a concept that I have is we become so sale dependent in across e-com to move products that we don't actually offer those to people when it's the right moment. I think everyone that purchases on any given day with their cycle should experience the same offer as everyone else has available to within the next twelve calendar months.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 11:20

At the time that's right for them. Cause otherwise we're just hoping, wishing, and praying, and that doesn't make any sense. Like and we started testing this a little bit when someone buys and they write in and we're like, hey, what would it take for a discount for you to change your entire drawer right now? And just ask the question and just see, you know, w where their minds at with that. Because if I can close my LTV out in thirty days instead of waiting, you know, 180, 360 couple of years, why not close it out for a reduction in margin?

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 11:46

I'll do that every day of the year.

Hai Mag 11:47

Right. I mean tell like I mean, have you done that? Like have you tried if it works? Like because we're talking about I don't know, like a virtual artificial subscription. There everybody who purchased the first time is already we assume they will they are subscriber. And I mean if you believe in your product, like why not? You know, like they're gonna use it again, you know. So why not to act? Yeah.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 12:10

think there's yeah there's there's

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 12:12

a couple there's a couple parts to it right like there really are if I get a product and I'm testing it and you know I'm testing against other versions of it and you know that it's better and it's stacking up better than other versions that you're testing and the only thing left to negotiate on is price. If you if your perceived value of the product is very high, you don't have a problem paying the price. Cool. Done.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 12:34

There's always gonna be, you know, a bell curve though of some people that want to pay, some people don't want to pay, and their perceived value changes and might be their first jump into paying so much for something, etc. Right? Like it's so many things. I think we can do it. I'm pretty sure there's a way to do it where you can send someone down a a path and say, Let's make a let's make a deal. Where are you and how do you feel about the following? Okay, this person's, you know, here. We should really push harder on this person and give them a pretty sweet deal here because this is their.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 13:01

Strike all the iron's hot moment. We know who else that they're comparing us against. This is this is where it's gonna hit. This is this is the thing, right? I that this is data collection. We don't know. You

Hai Mag 13:11

Yeah. Yeah. Mm.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 13:13

don't know who they're comparing you against. You don't know the competitors that they're currently testing you against. I don't know. I don't know unless they I ask them and they tell me. So all of these things that we want to improve come down to our ability to know the answers to questions that.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 13:28

We don't ask and we don't collect data about, which is the craziest thing to me.

Hai Mag 13:32

Right. So I mean, you know, a lot of these tools like, you know, even Clavios and you know, subscription tools, there is of course when they started and even today, like it is too much data if it is personalized, like, you know, based on the individual who is purchasing. In s you know, instead obviously there is all the segments created, right? There are segments of people, but

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 13:57

Yeah.

Hai Mag 13:57

If you think about everything like seg what is a segment like what is it like the thirty-five years old male is now the segment, really, you know, probably it's misleading, right? I mean, and then segment based targeting, it's suboptimal, you know, compared to what you're talking

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 14:13

It it all is.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 14:15

I well, Clavia was an ESP and now they're trying to turn into a CRM, but they don't really well, I won't talk badly about them. Their initial product has changed quite a bit since it it came out and there was a lot of limitations early on. Like like I said earlier, I mean I've been on them for like eleven years. I've watched the product. I used to like have calls with customer support in the early days and things didn't work. Like been there, saw how it's progressed.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 14:39

Who wins though is the real question to that one. Shopify has released messaging now. It does WhatsApp. It does SMS. It does email to connect it into Flow. It has a lot of different variable points. The only thing Calebio has is a JavaScript that allows it to track certain actions on the site. And they're not super granular. They only go down so far. So it's really just like one

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 15:00

Pixel scripts that could be integrated. And now all of a sudden Shopify has access to all of the apps that you use and all the data in all the apps that you use, whereas Clevey only has ones that you connect to it. And there's only one source of truth, which is Shopify.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 15:13

Most of the interactions and personalization that we have are going to take place on the one true source of data. And it's a matter of pushing as much data into that app as possible and then leveraging the existing infrastructure in order to deliver an experience. We have data. How much of it is useful data or usable data? That's the other question. I love segments. Building segments is the most painful experience ever in certain platforms.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 15:38

And they're never accurate and they don't work. And you can't troubleshoot them. It's not so much building segments, but knowing that they're actually reliably being done is the hardest part about it. The other thing is we build too many. I don't think I use more than maybe a dozen. And I think a lot

Hai Mag 15:54

Exactly.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 15:55

of a lot of marketers are churning into I think they're taking on this mentality of why did we make everything so complicated?

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 16:02

Why why can't we just bucket people better? And there's a there's an article that's really great. It's about Pixar marketing. I don't know if you've read it. If not, I'll send it to you. And it goes over like the architecture of how Pixar markets all its products and how every movie Pixar makes appeals to every single person because the messaging is overarching. So everyone gets value out of it. Like every marketer would be so much better thinking of it that way. It's not different personas. It's

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 16:27

different messaging that talks to all the personas. It's that's that's how things are should be done. You can pick and choose. Your quality of audience exists across all channels. Your your audience is everywhere at this point. You just need the messaging that's gonna attract them to take action or get a reaction, emotional reaction out of them based on what you're sharing. That's it. That's this marketing in a nutshell. So my whole like context on this attribution doesn't matter, you know

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 16:52

subscription or not subscription, it doesn't matter. How do you better understand who your customers are and then make messaging that gets a reaction from them and causes them to take an action? That's it.

Hai Mag 17:02

Man, I mean so amazing. Like all the things you say is I'm already like thinking about the first point, which was like, Hey, should I be greeting a merch company which works with the brands and like automatically sends the hats with their you know?

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 17:15

Do it. Do it today.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 17:17

Doug, honestly, I I'm serious. Like, do it today. Think of something if your product does not, if your product is something that someone wouldn't see, like you're in it, you're or can't experience, how do you, how do you brand beyond that? And this is something that this is something we've we've had this conversation so many different times with so many different brands. And it's like, if you see two people wearing a sweater, how do you know the difference between the sweaters or who makes it?

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 17:41

unless you're asking them, right? Like they're it's just so, so tough. I think of certain companies do a really good job. Tom Shoes used to do a really good job of it. The n the toe on the Tom shoes was distinctly Tom's. It's distinctly Tom's. You could spot it. You knew what you were looking at, right? Adidas and Nike do it via logos, right? They figured out how to do that. But without the branding, most of the stuff just blends in. It really just blends in.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 18:05

And if you have a product, like you don't know what shirt this is. There's no, there's no brand on it. I don't know what shirt you're wearing. There's no brand on it, right? Like that becomes hard for us. might make the best thing in the world, but if no one knows what it is. So what if we split? What if we split and said, okay, we're gonna pay, we're gonna let you pay less, but you're gonna like walk around and brand for us. Let's go. And

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 18:26

you know, have a different subsection of merch that actually promotes the brand in ways that it normally wouldn't. And, you know, you bill it at a price point that's higher than everyone else because you have to, because of the quality materials you're using and everything else. But maybe there is a a way to drop the price for other people. Maybe there's a, you know, a an uplift that comes with making a version that functions more as marketing. Maybe you can take a 10% haircut on that.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 18:49

unlock another group of people that can afford your product now and don't mind the trade-off. there was a I think Columbia did this. They did a jersey and they had different pricing based on how big the logo was. So that everyone could afford the jersey and the largest logo had the lowest price on it because it was more of an advertising, which is a genius move to make. Absolutely genius move. But up I want to see more

Hai Mag 19:09

Man, this is amazing.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 19:12

of this. Like I I want to see people having these conversations and

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 19:17

And saying, okay, what's my goal? Okay, how do I move past this goal? And on the consulting stuff and the clients that you guys work with too, every conversation starts with what's your goal? And then you look at everything that you want to do and say, okay, how does it affect my goal and how does it lead me to accomplishing my goal? If it doesn't accomplish my goal, what do I learn from the failure? Those are the only questions you have to have about anything that you do.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 19:39

Will it flop? Who knows? We gotta test it and see what's up. But what do we learn from the experience that we can take forward and improve next time?

Hai Mag 19:46

Absolutely. So John, it's already you you put some amazing not just ideas, like seeds like that for people to think, you know, like what is the the the the right way, the best way in other ways to get the customers in and then keep them keep them loyal. And thank you very much for all this very

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 20:07

Absolutely.

Hai Mag 20:07

different ideas that you seeded in this podcast.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 20:12

That's that's that's I just want people to have the conversation. Just think we in e com specifically, we fall into the same patterns of just saying this is industry best practice, or we should do something this way, or we should do something that way, because this is how it's always done been done before. A good solid chunk, and I'll leave everyone on this. This is like my favorite thing to make people do that are getting involved in the space.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 20:34

If you're trying to solve for something, it used to be Google. Now I guess we can use an LLM instead. It's so much easier. Just type in your question, how to improve abandoned cart rate, and then look at all the responses. And then go to Google and do the exact same thing. And then open everything in a different tab and then see how much crossover you have. And if everything says the same thing, no one's thinking about the problem correctly anymore. It's

Hai Mag 20:55

And that is exactly

Hai Mag 20:56

what we are saying as like telling people it's as the connected commerce, right? So now you connect all the dots and you connect the conversations, and more important, you connect the consumer into your journey to give the feedback, you know, like and that is amazing. So

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 21:12

Yeah. Absolutely.

Hai Mag 21:16

I mean, already a lot of

Hai Mag 21:18

Great ideas for our audience to think about. So thank you very much, John, for being a guest and hopefully we will meet again and continue the conversation.

Jon Ivanco (Formtoro) 21:28

Sounds good. Thanks for having me.

Hai Mag 21:30

Thank you.