#119: Build Omni-channel Marketing Campaigns In Minutes

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Claus Lauter: Hello and welcome to another episode of the e-Commerce Coffee Break. One thing that all Shopify merchants have in mind is how can they do more with less? So that means how can they generate, for instance, more revenue and save time? Not an easy task to do, but there's ways to do so. Today we wanna talk about how to build a personalized experience in a matter of minutes and how to expand your ad spend without increasing budget.

We are addressing both of the things, increasing your revenue and save. Guest on the show today, is Vibhor Kapoor. He is the Chief marketing officer of AdRoll. It's a division of nextroll. AdRoll is a marketing and advertising platform for direct to consumer brands. Vibhor's Charter at Adroll includes driving growth and leading all aspects of marketing, planning, strategy, development, and with over 20 years of industry experience, Vibhor brings business leadership expertise in SaaS and cloud platforms. Most recently, he was a senior director in Adobe's digital media business where he led marketing and GT effort efforts to incubate new categories in experienced design and developer platforms.

Before he was with a Adobe and Kawa was also a senior leadership position at Box and Microsoft. So let's say hello and how are you?

Vibhor Kapoor: I am great and thanks for having me on the

Claus Lauter: show. So we wanna talk a little bit on how merchants can create more with doing less, and AdRoll is a tool that can help us that I have used aro myself in the past.

Very successful. We wanna dive a little bit more into this. Give me an overview what AdRoll actually is for listeners that haven't heard about it.

Vibhor Kapoor: Yes, absolutely. , excited to be here. So, as you just rightly said, Adro is a marketing and advertising platform. We're really focused on e-commerce brands, helping them grow revenue as well as save time, all in one streamlined platform.

So take display ads, take web advertising, take social advertising, adding emails, making them work together. So that you can structure your campaigns, measure them, and optimize your marketing efforts. That's really what we do. And we are somewhat engaged across all stages of the journey of a shopper. We bring the shoppers into the funnel, , with brand awareness ads.

And then we turn those low intent shoppers and browsers into high intent customers, and we have a retargeting recipe, which several of our customers love. And then we take those high intent customers into real customers that are buying from your website. We do that using other recipes like Sh Carter Abandonment.

And then finally we, , evolved them into loyal shoppers and brand advocates using our newsletters. We've been around for a fairly long time, since 2007. We have helped maybe over 140,000 brands, and we have helped drive $246 billion of sale annually. So excited to be talking about Agile and what we are

Claus Lauter: up to.

So we already touched a little bit on this. Obviously most versions are using , some kind of paid traffic platform that might be Facebook ads, that might be Google Ads or any other of the social media platforms. And we all know how difficult it's to maintain the ads, to be in there every day, to figure out what works, what doesn't work, to adjust budgets

, and then the platforms themselves change all the time. Policies change. Accounts get disapproved. So it's a really a pain and an act for a lot of merchants out there. Now, ATL comes in a stage where a lot of AI takes over. Tell me a little bit on how that works.

Vibhor Kapoor: Yeah, absolutely. We've been doing this for several years and we have industry leading automation.

We have industry leading personalization. And what we do is we, , advertise, we take real time advertising. In fact, we make more and more predictions about shopper behavior than what you might see from any of the most significant stock exchanges around the world. , and we basically use your AI technology to help customers really get higher performance from their campaigns.

, the fundamental premise behind Adro class is that when you take marketing channels and make them work with your ads, You have a holistic approach to creating your campaigns and you have a holistic approach to measuring their impact, which means you can do a better job of optimizing them.

That's the fundamental, the premise with which we are operating at aro.

Claus Lauter: To make a campaign successful, there's a lot of moving parts in there. You need to have your copy. You need to have your artwork, as you said, and you need to find out which platform works the. How does that go in hand? In hand?

Maybe you can give me an example for a merchant that comes new to you, to aro and what would be the process of getting all the bits and pieces together to get started? It

Vibhor Kapoor: really depends. Our clouds, to be honest, we have two sort of ways customers work with us. One is where they're coming from a self-service funnel.

, imagine that they're actually on the Shopify app store. we have been working very closely with Shopify over the last seven years. We are a Shopify Plus partner, but let's assume that they start their sign of process there, like I was referencing earlier. , they have a user journey where we help them along the way in terms of structuring their campaign.

In our user experience, we have queues so that they can set their first campaign up. But there is also a parallel funnel where let's say if you meet the minimum spend threshold that you will have on your advertising, we will have an onboarding specialist that will walk the way with you hand in hand. So we really have two battle of paths, and depending on.

The onboarding process is different, but a lot of our Shopify merchants operate in a self-service mode and have had successful outcomes. It's, indicated in some of the reviews that we have seen on Shopify. We have over 300, I think almost 305 star reviews had over 80,000 app installs. And since the time we started, in fact, in 2022, we had 16,000 installs already, and we have over 2000 merchants.

Spending with us today, which talks about, our onboarding experience, , which is very core to setting the campaigns, but also the fact that they are able to optimize their campaigns and drive impact With

Claus Lauter: Google, you are limited on the Google X space with Facebook, you're limited, obviously on the platform at all.

Goes a little bit wider than.

Vibhor Kapoor: Absolutely. As I was saying earlier, in terms of adro and the span that we have, we make display and web advertising and we have social ads and we have emails. , what we really enable our customers to do to be able to. Place ads across all of these channels. So when it comes to social, you can think about all of your standard social channels, whether it's Facebook, pens, Instagram, , we help customers place ads across all of them.

In fact, what we have is one of the capabilities, we call it connected social ads, and as a part of connected social ads, what you will be able to do starting next week. Is that you'll be able to create ads across all of these social channels and execute them on a consistent way. So think about the power of being able to create and edit ads across all of these different social channels through one single surface.

And that's what we've been building over the last few months, and we are excited to bring that, to the. Okay.

Claus Lauter: That sounds , like a complete time saver. Otherwise, you're on all these platforms and you have to c everything for every platform. , so how do you do it from your end? How does

Vibhor Kapoor: that work?

Yeah, so, , it is part of our core functionality as a part of what we say is the marketing and Ads plus package. As I was saying, this is one of the capabilities that we've been working on for the last several months. The way it works is you come in and you are able, Create your campaigns across these social channels.

And because these are bidirectional integrations with the social platforms, let's assume that you want to do any edits for your campaigns. You can actually do the edits and the management of those campaigns, , together too. And the beauty of it all towards the end is the fact. You can actually do the optimization of the candidates do.

When you can see your spend, you can see your results in a consistent manner, then you can really know which channel is working and you can, shift your dollars and marketing effort accordingly.

Claus Lauter: One mistake that I see often that they are merchants or people using ad platforms are pulling the trigger too fast before there is enough data there.

Aros ai, how does that work? Or how much data do you need to have, or for how long do you need to run a campaign from your experience before it really kicks in?

Vibhor Kapoor: I think again, that's like many things in life. It depends. We've seen our customers starting to see strong results from their campaigns within a short period of less than 30 days.

But sometimes the customer's market segment may be very specific. And, , creating the campaigns and seeing the outcome of those campaigns could take as much as, 60 to 90 days. What I would say the first 90 day is a pretty healthy marker that you get in terms of how the campaigns are performing.

Claus Lauter: Strategy. Okay, so with the recession and inflation and everything talking about this, what do you think Black Friday, Cyber Monday this month, will a top last year's number, or will it

Vibhor Kapoor: be. Wow, you are actually asking me to predict a lot of things. Cloud . What we do analyze because we have access to a ton of data, is what are the patterns of, let's say, CPM and advertising cost at this period, and that's at the heart of.

What we've been working on. So it goes without saying the macroeconomic condition is tough, times are gonna be challenging, contradict how it's gonna be. But what we do know, as I said in our holiday guide, is that CPMs are the highest at this point in time. What we've been working on for the last several months is on a partnership with Shopify so that we can exactly address that, which is how can merchants increase their ad spend without having to increase their budget.

So what we are announcing is a new program, it's called Program, and what this program does , it allows merchants to get credit. For the advertising costs that they have input with ad rolls, web advertising. So imagine you spent hundred dollars in this month on web advertising with adro. We give you $10 back as ad credit so that you can spend it on a rolling basis.

We believe by actually giving those 10% back, we are enabling the merchant. To be able to take their, ad spend, go even further. So we continue to see higher CPM at this time. , tough economic, environment. And we believe that this program's gonna really help, our merchants.

Claus Lauter: Okay. That sounds like a very good solution. So I'm a strong believer that AI helps you, and specifically in the economic situation that we are right now, I think it's, a no brainer to go for ai cause figuring it out on your own, you're lost there. And a tool like Agile specifically was the onboarding process gives you safe path on getting the best out of the data that you have.

One thing that

Vibhor Kapoor: we did not talk about fast as a part of solving for how. Save time and take your ad dollars further. We talked about the rewards program. We didn't talk much about what we call is the automation studio. That's again, one more tool that we have launched and while the, powers of that tool is that you can launch your campaign in minutes one with some of the saving of the time that we were talking about earlier, you were with the automation studio, what you're able to do.

Builds dynamic automations across all those channels that we were talking about. Imagine that you have a canvas. Where you are able to put some of these channels, , together to create dynamic automations and be able to launch your campaign. , why does it matter? It matters because marketers have less time.

We have heard that repeatedly. Why does the rewards program matter? It matters because our macro conditions are tough and we wanna make sure that we can help our marketers do more with

Claus Lauter: less. With all this experience and this ton of customers that you have, what's the biggest mistake that you see that merchants usually.

Vibhor Kapoor: I think one of the things I would highlight, and I'm talking about this in the broad context, is that customers often think about omnichannel marketing as, Hey, I want to be present in every channel that's out there. That is not what omnichannel is. Omnichannel is being in all the channels that are relevant for your shopper, but being there as if you.

Same customer. So the consistency of the brand, the message, the creative across all channels, thinking about one customer is the approach that I often see many marketers take wrong. They're thinking about each of these channels in silos individually. So I would say that's one single advice that I would give, which is think about the customer as.

Think about this, the channels that they engage in. Think about the customer as a single person that you want to engage with. Giving them a holistic experience. Don't go channel by channel. Go customer first. It seems so fundamental, but it is one that several time

Claus Lauter: marketers get wrong. Where can people find out more about aro?

Yeah, I

Vibhor Kapoor: would just say go to adroll.com. Second, I would say go to Shopify listing of adroll. I think those are great places to start. You'll find, the quick tips for you to get started.

Claus Lauter: Okay. I will put the links as always in the show notes and you just one click away and I would recommend really click through and have a look at aro.

As said, I have used it in the past very successfully and I can vouch for it people. Thanks so much for your time, I really appreciate it. And talk

Vibhor Kapoor: soon. Okay. Thank you.