Brandon Amoroso is the Founder and Head of Shopify Plus agency Electriq Marketing. Under his leadership, the company grew to a team of 45 employees within three years, before it was acquired by DRINKS.com in April 2022. Brandon also earned coveted certifications in the DTC field such as Shopify Plus, Klaviyo Elite, Attentive Pioneer, Okendo Platinum, and more; including the prestigious Recharge Innovative Partner of the Year honor.

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

• Brandon Amoroso is the Founder and CEO of Electriq Marketing
• Brandon shares how he is solely focused on improving customer retention
• He shares his 3-step process, which are: audit, proposal, 30/60/90 day plan
• He empowers team members to scale their departments
• How he manages his biggest departments, which are: Email, SMS, and Web Design development
• Niched down into wine & spirits industry through DRINKS.com
• Utilizing Shopify Plus as their only real-time tax and compliance solution for wineries and retailers
• Split up transactional communications between one-short customers and subscription customers
• Utilizing data from quizzes and surveys to personalize experience
• Retargeting and remarketing through Shopify Plus

In this episode with Brandon Amoroso

In this episode with Brandon Amoroso, Brandon shares his story about being an accidental owner and shares how he grew Electriq Marketing from two to fifty people, along with the customer retention process he created to increase customer lifetime value.

Brandon Amoroso is the Founder and CEO of Electriq Marketing, Brandon discusses how he was able to manage his two biggest departments, which are email/SMS, and website design development, which are both key drivers for customer retention. He talks about the steps involved in his customer retention process including an audit, a proposal, and 30/60/90 day plans to generate ROI.

In today’s episode of the Legends Behind The Craft podcast, Drew Thomas Hendricks is joined by Brandon Amoroso, Brandon Amoroso is the Founder and CEO of Electriq Marketing. He explains why their agency does not focus on Facebook ads due to its algorithm complexity. As part of their acquisition by DRINKS.com, they are now working with a larger number of wineries and modernizing alcohol e-commerce. He shares how wineries can use Shopify Plus and Klaviyo to better their customer experiences. This includes integrating with legacy POS systems, using Shopify’s POS solution, unified customer review, retargeting and remarketing customers, using push notifications and direct mail, and AI personalized video messages via email or SMS to increase engagement.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Drew Thomas Hendricks on LinkedIn
• Barrels Ahead
• Nick Buzzell on LinkedIn
• Brandon Amoroso
• Eletriq Marketing
• DRINKS
• Shopify Plus
• Bloom
• Etsy
• Klaviyo
• Commerce7
• WineDirect
• O’Neill Wines
• Novel
• OpenSea
• Attentive
• Wine Insiders
• Macy’s Wine Shop
• Windsor.io
• Quickbooks

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Barrels Ahead.

Barrels Ahead is a wine and craft marketing agency that propels organic growth by using a powerful combination of content development, Search Engine Optimization, and paid search.

At Barrels Ahead, we know that your business is unique. That’s why we work with you to create a one-of-a-kind marketing strategy that highlights your authenticity, tells your story, and makes your business stand out from your competitors.

Our team at Barrels Ahead helps you leverage your knowledge so you can enjoy the results and revenue your business deserves.

So, what are you waiting for? Unlock your results today!

To learn more, visit barrelsahead.com or email us at hello@barrelsahead.com to schedule a strategy call.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Drew Thomas Hendricks here. I’m the host of the Legends Behind the Craft Podcast. On this show, I talk with leaders in the wine and craft beverage industry. Before introduced today’s guest, I got to have the sponsor message. Today’s episode, is sponsored by Barrels Ahead. At Barrels Ahead, we help the wine and craft industry scale their business content. Go to barrelsahead.com today to learn more. So before I introduce our next guest, last week, we talked with, Nick Buzzell, creator of the Spirits Network, which is really kind of revolutionizing the spirits buying experience through, streaming content and giving users the ability to purchase the product while they’re actually watching the, feature rich content. If you haven’t listened to that episode, give it a listen. Today I am super excited to talk with Brandon Amoroso. Brandon is the founder and CEO of Electriq Marketing that was recently acquired by the DRINKS company. Welcome to the show, Brandon. 

[00:00:50] Brandon Amoroso: Thanks for having me on. 

[00:00:51] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah. Thanks for being on. So, Brandon, I gotta hear a little bit about your story and background. You’ve had an incredible trajectory from USC to Electriq to into DRINKS. 

[00:01:02] Brandon Amoroso: Yeah, so, I originally started freelancing, about my second year at USC. Just for like small, businesses and around the LA area who were selling on Shopify, it’s usually like one to two person companies. They’d, usually have some sort of like artisan or craft, style product.

So things you would typically see on Etsy, for example. So I did that for, about a year and sort of did it under the guise of like electric, like as an agency, even though. It really wasn’t, it was just me, freelancing. but in year three, when I was at USC, just about, month, month and a half before graduating.

Was fortunate enough to get it to a point where I was able to hire my first, full-time team member. 

[00:01:43] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, actually, what was your first, I always asked this. What was your first hire? 

[00:01:46] Brandon Amoroso: So at the time we were primarily focused on, SEO and content marketing for our Shopify brand. So our first hire was a sort of an offsite SEO, specialist to help with, some PR outreach and backlink outreach for the clients that we were doing content marketing for.

Sure. So, as able to make that higher. unfortunately got the business into a place where it could support me before graduation, so I didn’t have to go and get a quote unquote, real job. 

[00:02:12] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Now, was your goal always to run an agency or is it a lot of us are kind of accidental agency owners or it was not planned on doing?

[00:02:19] Brandon Amoroso: No, it was more about just, wanting to do my own thing. And agencies have very low cost to get up and running, it was completely bootstrapped. So, and it also gave me just a ton of experience as well. It’s not like I had some undying desire to be an agency owner. It was more about the entrepreneurship side of things. And I was looking at other potential avenues. but that was really the lowest hanging fruit for me. Just sell my own services, scale up a team. And I think it was pretty valuable too, especially with how quickly we grew. I learned a lot that’s gonna be very easily translated into other types of, businesses and industries, just when it comes to sort of managing and structuring, a team.

[00:03:00] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Absolutely. Now did you come from an entrepreneurial family? 

[00:03:03] Brandon Amoroso: Yeah. Yeah. My dad as well as, one of my close family friends. They’ve been in entrepreneurship, either for their entire life or mid to late twenties when they got started. So, 

[00:03:15] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That’s so helpful. I come from a family of doctors and attorneys who still don’t understand what the heck I do. 

[00:03:22] Brandon Amoroso: Yeah. I think even that though, I mean, I remember, right before graduation, like there were a couple of job offers I had that would’ve been super secure and, you know, would’ve set me up on a nice trajectory.

But I mean, I would’ve been super bored personally but there were still some of that family pressure of well, you know, because, they all went and worked first before jumping into entrepreneurship versus just going for it right off right outta the gates. Yeah. Yeah. But, It turned out okay. 

[00:03:52] Drew Thomas Hendricks: It sounds like it. So talk to me about this scaling, cuz that’s something, as an agency owner, we all face, we expand and we contract growing from what? Talk to me about it. It’s like two to like 50 people now. 

[00:04:03] Brandon Amoroso: Yeah. So we have about 45 people now. and we started, it was very quick because when I get my ears mixed up now with COVID, it’s all I can blur, but, we technically launched May of 2019.

That was me and the one team member. We ended 2020 with about 12 people, but then we ended 2021, with about 40. Oh wow. So the growth in 2021 was really the. A massive accelerant, which was a little bit overwhelming. but there was so much demand for our services and the business that we had to scale.

I think what was interesting for me not having any sort of agency background whatsoever, it was working through how to basically do everything, I mean a lot of it was collaborative with team as well, which they truly were an integral part to sort of building out, what we were doing.

But as that scale continued, it became really crucial that we had documented processes around how we did certain things from how we engage with the prospect to how we onboard them, to how we interface with the client on a weekly and monthly basis all the way through. What does an offboarding procedure even look like? To make sure that that’s smooth as well. and we didn’t really get to a place where it was super tight until. I would say early this year because we were also evolving the services that we offered to our clients as well. Like in the beginning we did everything because any additional revenue for me would allow me to go hire like more team members, which sounded like a great idea at the time. but once we finally figured out like, okay, these are two or three core areas that we really are specialists in, here’s the messaging and sort of the electric process that we’ve put together that we can now take to market. Not only did it improve our client retention significantly. But it made the sales process so much easier too. Like, Hey, if you’re gonna work with us, we have this proven sort of framework of how we’re going to engage here that’s going to be able to, set us up for success and deliver results. 

[00:06:04] Drew Thomas Hendricks: that’s great. Now talk to me about your proven framework that kind of was your lead, and then the next question is on, did you do the framework and then find a niche for it or so? 

[00:06:14] Brandon Amoroso: I mean, the Electriq process sort of evolved over time, but two key things happened for us, one was repositioning our messaging from like a Gen Z E-commerce agency who sort of does everything to an agency solely focused on retention marketing. So we stylize it as like a retention as a service agency. So anything to do with, once that first order is made all the way through, increasing the lifetime value of, your customers. As a byproduct of that, our two biggest departments are email and SMS and web design development, cuz those are the two sort of single biggest drivers to retention. But now that, that paid off very well for us because, If a brand is like, oh, well, where do I go to get help with my email, SMS marketing or my retention marketing? Because of the way that we positioned ourselves we’re looked at as like that go-to for that particular, area of expertise, and it really resonated with a lot of brands as well too, like, we don’t do acquisition, we don’t do affiliate, we don’t do influencer, we don’t do this, we don’t do that. We solely focus on improving your customer retention. so it made the sales process a lot easier. The second one was actually like defining what the electric process was, and it’s really three steps, when we start engaging with a potential client, all of them have to go through, an audit of ours. and that audit. We turn around within five business days, which comes with basically a full deck of our strategic recommendations, but also three potential, move forward plans to work with us.

And then, once we present those move forward plans and some of our, sort of revenue forecasting around what our initiatives would do for the brand if they decide to move forward, then we have a very extensive sort of Electriq onboarding questionnaire and process that they have to go through.

And then from there we do everything in 30, 60, 90 day plans. So all of our engagements are four months at a minimum, on a monthly recurring basis. And these 30, 60, 90 day plans allow us to sort of bucket out, here are the highest priority initiatives that are gonna generate the most ROI all the way through some of the more like long tail stuff that we’ll finish up at the end of that 90 day period.

So one audit, two proposal, 3 30, 60, 90 day plan then that’s just ongoing. So that’s the framework that we work with all of our clients on. And once we define that our, like our one pager includes our messaging around being a retention marketing agency and then includes our messaging around our Electriq process.

And that basically is very easy for any business owner or marketer to wrap their head around because it’s so clearly defined. Whereas before, find a sell was a lot more difficult because, those two things were pretty crucial for us. 

[00:08:59] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That’s pretty quick to realize saying no is so important. How did come about that? Cuz it’s every agency has that tendency to just kind of add something on. I’m sure we can do this extra thing. how did you develop that like clean line of like, nope, we don’t do that. 

[00:09:13] Brandon Amoroso: Part of it is what I was more interested in. So I was never a fan of, Facebook ads or just acquisition in general. And I also didn’t think that we were set up internally to be able to have like a successful media’ s team. Just because of how many different moving parts there are. You really need to be at scale for it to be effective. So it’s much harder to like grow your agency with that versus emailing SMS.

You can work sort of across the board in terms of client size and be able to generate results that, I was much more confident in servicing that too. Like I’d be almost 99.99% confident that we could help any brand improve their email on SMS in retention versus when we were doing ads. It’s kind of sort of a tossup. You’re throwing it into this black box algorithm and you can think through different strategies of deployment, but at the end of the day, you’re ultimately at the whims of, that algorithm. So that was one of the components. The other was that, the way I sort of went about building it, I focused on putting one key sort of team member above each department and really enabled them to scale it and grow it to how they saw best fit within the overall framework of the agency. And, luckily to find, a web development team member early on who’s actually still with us, who’s been integral in like building out that Department of Electriq and then was able to find somebody else for the email and SMS side who really took it under her wings and, and grew it as their own. Now, in some of the other areas, like ads for example, Weren’t, we just weren’t able to find that person who was, who wanted to like, roll up their sleeves, really dig in and, build out this department within a ledger. So, part of it was that as well, not being able to find the right team member, for doing that.

[00:10:57] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That’s smart business model. Empowering that’s really the only way to scale. Cause you can only scale so much yourself. I mean there’s oftentimes you find some way wanting to keep their finger on every single little, little thing that’s going on. 

[00:11:09] Brandon Amoroso: Yeah. And I’m the opposite now, I would say like, I much prefer to delegate and focus on, my strengths. And, but in the beginning it was hard to like go of some of these things. cause like an ideal world you’d be able to hire people who are going to be able to do it better than you can. But the reality was that I was the subject matter expert for Klaviyo and the Shopify like ecosystem of apps. And I had to be okay with, you know, as opposed to all of our clients getting the 10 out of 10 that I was confident in providing them for the service level. Being okay with a nine out of 10, because it’s still better than the vast majority of what they would be able to get elsewhere. So that was, one component that was difficult for me and I had to almost go from working directly with clients, more so to building out enablement materials for our own team and like educating and training them to be able to effectively work with our clients. so that was a big component to that. And then I realized that I was actually hurting the team by being too involved because then we’ve all been, the client would be like, oh, well, where’s Brandon and we wanna talk to him, or this or that. And so, removing myself from things like, the sales process or even when I do some sales calls now, it is very well documented, like everything’s recorded, any suggestions that I make or things like they’re gonna be there so that they can get handed off to the team versus like me doing the, all the selling and then disappearing. Yeah. Which doesn’t set the team up for success at all. yeah, as an agency, you’re super dependent on your people. And I think that aspect of it will translate well into any other business endeavors that I would potentially embark upon, even if it is in a completely different industry and a completely different business model. 

[00:12:57] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, completely transferable. Those are profound advice right there. I mean, I belong to a few agency mastermind groups and there’s a hundred of us, and we’re all still struggling with too much client involvement. So that’s a very profound like to shift though. So when did you niche down into the, wine and spirits or alcohol 

[00:13:16] Brandon Amoroso: category? So we actually did not, do that intentionally. And we still work with a bunch of other Shopify plus brands, typically in like the CPG space or the skincare and beauty, or some celebrity brands as well. And the reason why I think that’s important is because, the wine industry, the alcohol industry in general when it comes to e-commerce is not exactly at the cutting edge of things. And so us being able to work with some of the more forward thinking brands like a soil or, an American girl or some of these other, more like digitally native brands allows us to then take what we’re learning over there and translate it into, the wine and spirits and beer category. So keeping that alive because there’s so many learnings that we can bring over to help sort of modernize, alcohol’s e-commerce way, but when we were acquired at the end of April this year, by DRINKS.com. Just inherently, as a byproduct of that, we’re now working with a significantly larger number of wineries. And also helping educate. And enable the, the category as a whole. So working with, other Shopify agency partners to sort of teach them about the wine industry and why this is such a big opportunity, who the current players are in the space, what are some of the pain points? What are some of the things wineries cares about when they’re trying to ship direct to consumer? All the way through, putting together sort of resources and guides for the industry to be able to better, work with and service, their customers online. So we’ve got a couple of big migration projects that we’re working on right now, for, wineries and retailers who are moving over to Shopify Plus, which I’m really excited about. And it’s a very new initiative for them, but something that they’re really invested in. So it only publicly launched at the end of July, and just to step back for a moment, the reason why drinks acquired us is because they developed in partnership with Shopify, the only real-time tax and compliance solution, in the marketplace for wineries and retailers to be able to use Shopify to ship direct consumer.

Historically, you either had to use like a Commerce7 or a WineDirect or you could use Shopify with a bunch of different workarounds to try and make it compliant and to handle the tax appropriately. Yeah. So, that’s why, they acquired us is because they needed to Shopify experts. And so our Shopify expertise combined with their decades of alcohol experience is sort of this perfect match of being able to help, move forward the industry, as a whole. 

[00:15:53] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That’s really interesting. Cause in my past we’ve spent a lot of time working with Commerce7 and pulling people off of Shopify, but that was before this new Plus platform came out. Now what would be the ideal winery or client to like move from something like a Commerce7 over to Shopify? 

[00:16:09] Brandon Amoroso: So really, and obviously I’m biased here. Sure, sure, sure. But Shopify as an e-commerce platform is, is unmatched. and there’s a lot of reasons for that. But one of them being the amount of just resources that they have.

I mean, you’re looking at a 9,000 person company versus point solutions that have been built for, winery e-commerce. Now not to. knock them or anything, but it’s just, inherently obvious that if you have a team of a thousand engineers versus a team of 15 engineers, that the end product is going to end up being different. But I think the biggest differentiator is the Shopify ecosystem. So you have, I think it’s like 9,000 apps now, but, I mean, we work with like, very specifically 15 of them that have sort of like the cream of the crop when it comes to email marketing or SMS marketing or product reviews or quizzes, that sort of ecosystem and rapid pace of development does not exist anywhere else except within Shopify like if I was gonna go start a new e-commerce, solution or app like I’m building it for Shopify first and foremost. And that’s where the vast majority of my customers are gonna be. So you have so much sort of just innovation and development happening within Shopify from thousands of other parties that you don’t get to, you don’t get that advantage when you’re on a more like point solution, commerce platform. So really I think, there are some specific use cases right now as it relates to like POS and, club functionality that, are not a hundred percent perfect yet on Shopify, but we’re rapidly developing towards that. And, by Q1 of next year, I think it’s gonna be something that a lot of, brands need to think about. Because you already see. constellation Brands with all of their properties on Shopify, O’Neill Wines as well, who’s actually leveraging the drinks app to power their taxing appliance for their Shopify stores. So, we’ve got a couple of other really exciting ones that I can’t talk about yet, but once those go live, or at least are publicly announced, like early next year. Once that happens, I think the rest of the ecosystem will sort of see the writing on the wall. That this is an opportunity that we really need to pay close attention to, because if the biggest players in the space are doing it, then we should probably follow and suit. 

[00:18:29] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah, it makes sense. And I can tell you a lot of these existing legacy eCommerce platforms, they’re all lacking something. And right now there’s a big hole, the name skips me, but we’re highly allocated wineries dealing with the allocation programs. 

[00:18:43] Brandon Amoroso: Yes. And there’s actually a really unique, so we’ve partnered with, bloom. So, historically bloom has been like the way that you sell wine on Shopify, cuz they had an external checkout that they created that would pass over to ship compliant and Avalara. but those external checkouts aren’t really supported by Shopify anymore cause they wanted to go through their payment system. And also just a bunch of like, you don’t want that many different parties and integrations and the orders hopping from here and there. But they have a new sort of, club and memberships app that they’ve recently released. and that is the only solution right now, that supports the allocation model on Shopify.

So that actually is solved for, and 

[00:19:30] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, that’s fantastic to hear. 

[00:19:32] Brandon Amoroso: Oh, a lot of the more like higher end wineries will be able to still leverage Shopify. And utilize that allocation model that they’re familiar and comfortable with, but in at the same time upgrading the rest of their entire experience because, I don’t know why, but for me is, I also love wine, so I, well, I’m on all the lists and try to get as much as I can, but the experience for the. For the wineries that are allocation model are awful, like, I haven’t yet to go on to a winery website that does the allocation model where it’s not like a 1980 style order form and that’s it. Like there’s no other experience associated with the ordering process, is a shame you 

[00:20:16] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I feel so happy that you can log in and buy something and kind of yourself. No, I got it. 

[00:20:21] Brandon Amoroso: Yeah. Which is a shame because there’s so much, I would say, history and story behind a lot of the wineries that you would get if you went into the tasting room. But unless you’re in that tasting room, the online experience is miles behind it. Like There’s so much opportunity for wineries like take that tasting room experience online, whether it’s through like content, better user experience on site. T here’s so many things that can be done there, live shopping events that can be powered through like a Shopify app. There’s a lot of really innovative, and I mean, even pre-selling wine with NFTs is something that we’re working on right now with a couple of brands, which is a great way to get not only, revenue. 

[00:21:02] Drew Thomas Hendricks: What platform are you using for your NFTs?

[00:21:05] Brandon Amoroso: So on Shopify, the app that we typically use is called Novel. that’s just N O V E L and it allows you to mint NFTs and can associate it with like an actual bottle. So the way it would work, Let’s say it’s, I don’t know, Harlem Estate, and I get my allocation, but it’s not gonna ship for like three years. And maybe I don’t even like, take possession of it. and I leave it at the winery for them to hold, which some places will do. Well, I can purchase, let’s say, I don’t know, let’s say it’s five grand. I can spend the five grand, but now I get this NFT that I hold onto until I’m ready to redeem it for like the actual product or some wineries, like you just get the NFT and then once the product’s ready as well, they get sent to you too. But a cool, unique experience and, especially at the higher end, I think, part of the allure of wine is the, exclusivity of it. but also just the general experience and like people love collecting like, I know part of the reason why I like buying wine so much is because it’s, like collecting. And so, that’s a natural path to, NFTs and having some sort of unique experience that makes you feel more connected to the brand, more of a brand ambassador. So absolutely a lot of exciting and then the end user combines sell those NFTs. So you’ve really streamlined the investment process. 

[00:22:24] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Are these NFTs, are they on like Ethereum or Polygon or 

[00:22:28] Brandon Amoroso: Ethereum? yeah, Ethereum, they’re on OpenSea. 

[00:22:33] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Open sea. Oh, that’s awesome. So stepping down on the exclusive plug-in set. So, you mentioned nine plug-ins and there’s the wine industry or the alcohol industry is a highly regulated industry.

What do wineries need to be looking for in these plug-ins? Cuz I know we’ve had challenges with SMS and and stuff. What’s some of our clients? 

[00:22:53] Brandon Amoroso: Yeah, so If you’re using Shopify in the drinks app, like from a compliance and tax standpoint. Y ou’re completely covered, and any of the other Shopify. Yeah, any of the other Shopify apps that you’re gonna want to plug and play, since they all go through the Shopify checkout, you’re totally set. the only area where you do run into some potential issues is things like SMS marketing. So we actually, right now Klaviyo can’t support it, but they should be able to support it, early next year. But for the time being attentive, is the SMS marketing platform that we use for all alcohol brands. Which one was that? And the attentive. 

[00:23:28] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Attentive, yes. 

[00:23:29] Brandon Amoroso: Yeah, they have age gating on the lead capture and are able to support, alcohol companies. So we actually have Wine Insiders and Macy’s wine currently leveraging, attentive for their SMS marketing program. But the vast majority of the other products, there’s no concerns or issues with it being wine. 

[00:23:49] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Now, let’s talk about Klaviyo for a second. You’re an elite or top partner in that. Let’s talk about just email in general and just use wineries as the use case.

what advice would you give a winery with their email retention marketing, and it can be in related to? 

[00:24:02] Brandon Amoroso: So, yeah, I think most of the. I think there’s a big disconnect, frankly from a retention marketing standpoint when it comes to wineries, especially, wineries that have like a significant, tourism and like tasting room, revenue.

There’s so much opportunity to create post per post-purchase journeys that get your customers to come back and buy more. Even after they leave the tasting room. So if I were a winery, I would really start with the basics. You have your simple like, oh, place in order, thank you, experience educating them with more, brand content depending on, whether you are dealing with somebody who’s a white wine drinker, a red wine drinker, or maybe mixed, you can sort of bucket them and branch them down different paths. Whether you want to start showcasing different, like recipes or tasting pairings that they could leverage based off of their order.

Trying to make it as experiential as possible. And then from there, once you have like all the basics sort of covered, then you can start to think about testing. Like testing within your email on SMS marketing strategy. But also if you are on Shopify, how do you take all the data that is getting fed into Klaviyo via Shopify, but also via all these other apps that you’re using. To make your campaigns that go out or your automated flows more relevant to, your customers. And that’s where things get really. Really interesting because Klaviyo being really a, customer data platform, first and foremost, you can have a complete profile on a customer.

like let’s say I’m shopping from one of like constellations, websites and they have a quiz. That asks me like four or five questions and then gives me a product recommendation. Well, those four or five questions that I just answered now get fed into Klaviyo. And, maybe it’s, I like red wine. I like dry wine. I prefer to purchase bottles in this price range and two other questions. Now all that data is in Klaviyo and can be used to personalize my entire experience from an email and SMS marketing standpoint for the rest of my time with them.

That extends into like a post-purchase survey. It extends into the product reviews. Any information that I’m giving is being fed into Klaviyo and can be used for personalizing the experience. So the easiest one that I do with almost every brand that we’re working with is customizing the transactional journey.

So we’ll always split it up between one-shot customers and subscription customers. So, if you’re a one-shot customer, your transactional communications will drive you to an order tracking page that, sure, it shows you where your order is, but it’s also highlighting all the benefits of what you would get if you were a subscription customer. So, trying to push subscription as much as possible for the subscription customers transactional experience, we’re reinforcing the value, crop value benefits that they’re getting. Since they’re a club member but then we’re also promoting things like the referral program, like refer a friend and then you’ll get $30 off your next subscription order.

So it’s all about personalization and Klaviyo allows you to do that because it integrates, just like Shopify integrates with all these other solutions, it integrates with them so that you can get that complete customer profile and not have your data in a bunch of different places. 

[00:27:24] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That’s very smart. No, it’s, I like that. I mean, so few wineries actually utilize that sort of, just the simplest kind of splitting up the two types of customers that you have. 

[00:27:34] Brandon Amoroso: Yeah. I think the biggest issue, again, comes back to the technology that they’re not being enabled with best-in-class technology and everything is custom integration or custom setup. There’s no one click now, Okay, all of your data from your quiz is gonna feed into Klaviyo. And connect to your e-commerce platform. So there’s gonna be a lot of, I think, education that’s required, to show, not only hear all the things that can be done, but also why it matters.

And like we went through a really simple exercise with, sort of a, a winery parent company that were migrating five of their brands over to Shopify Plus, the next couple months and they just wanted to get a sense of like some of the extra ROI they could expect by making the transition.

And all I did was look at, you have the ability to do a post-purchase, like one click cross sells on Shopify with one of the apps. So as soon as you place an order, let’s say I just bought, a hundred dollars’ worth of wine. And I go on the order confirmation page, instead of like a thank you page, you get a popup that shows you any sort of offer that the brand wants to show, but let’s say it’s add these three bottles for a limited time, for 30% off to your existing order, like you have five minutes. Typically, we’ll see 10 to 15% of customers click that button and it just adds in. As an additional line item to that existing order. So that right there, 

[00:28:57] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Five Minute Buy it or lose it, you’ll never see it again. That’s a tried-and-true method. That right there is a Brunson in a box there. 

[00:29:05] Brandon Amoroso: Yeah. That right there is just free revenue. So, and all I need from a brand is, Hey, how many orders are you currently doing on your existing e-commerce platform? Great. Well, let’s say. let’s get really, sort of let’s temper our expectations and let’s say only 5% of customers are gonna take advantage of this, cross-sell offer. And let’s say the average value of it’s gonna be $35. Well, if you have 5,000 orders a month going through your website, that’s a significant amount of additional revenue just from one use case.

I’m showing you of how Shopify is gonna help you sell more, convert more, and have a better customer experience. So you can go on and have that exercise with like 30 or 40 different points of the customer experience. And the numbers start to add up pretty quickly, even for the smaller wineries.

[00:29:51] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, absolutely. Now on the plus, and this is great education, I’ve gotta really dive deeper into this. How does Shopify Plus, and you can explain this to wineries listening, integrate with like their legacy POS systems in the tasting room and onsite? 

[00:30:06] Brandon Amoroso: Yeah, so it really depends on the POS system that they are using Shopify does have a POS solution though and 

[00:30:14] Drew Thomas Hendricks: So ideally just bring it right into their winery and say, just use this. 

[00:30:18] Brandon Amoroso: Exactly. That would be the ideal case scenario. I mean, it’s not like a table management solution. So if you’re a winery that has more of like a restaurant style, a tasting room, you’re probably still gonna end up using a different POS for that. But any like, actual transactions of, the wine. Part of the power of using the Shopify POS is that all the orders feed into Shopify, and so then anything you’ve set up from like a Klaviyo standpoint. You can start to retarget and remarket these customers immediately from the tasting room, like, thank you so much for coming in and visiting.

I don’t know, sign up for our loyalty program here. Then six months later, send ’em a reminder to reorder all and then. You get the unified customer review too, so I can see, oh, like John has purchased two times in the tasting room, but he’s purchased three times online. It’s way more powerful than having a disjointed experience, which you get if you have a separate solution there.

[00:31:13] Drew Thomas Hendricks: So is Klaviyo would be the brain and Shopify’s kind of the, one of the end points, rather Shopify being the brain. 

[00:31:19] Brandon Amoroso: Yeah, I mean, Shopify is obviously the e-commerce platform, but, Klaviyo actually has more data on a customer than Shopify would because Klaviyo is pulling in all the data that Shopify has.

But then it’s also pulling in all of the data that the other apps have, which aren’t necessarily being surfaced in Shopify on like the customer profile. So Shopify is the, sort of the engine to power the e-commerce functionality. But then where we’re architecting most of the customer experience and journey thereafter happens in Klaviyo. And you can do push notifications as well as, direct mail outta Klaviyo as well too, which we’ve started to experiment and test more. 

[00:32:02] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That’s incredible. So in direct mail is one of the, at least in my opinion, it’s old school, but it’s one of the least utilized. Well now that the elections are finally over, we’re getting a little less junk mail.

So you might actually find the mail, but it’s one of the least, utilized methods and maybe most successful if you’re, especially for retention, if you’ve got a membership base, they’re gonna open up the mail from the winery that they subscribe to. 

[00:32:26] Brandon Amoroso: Yeah, I mean, and now with the Klaviyo integration with, some of the direct mail partners, we can, not only do one-off campaigns, but we can have them as a part of automated flows.

So let’s say, we have a customer win back flow that happens 120 days after. A purchase has been made. If they haven’t come back and made another one, we can not only send them an email and text to get them to come back, but we can have a piece of direct mail go out automatically as well, with a unique offer for them. So the more sort of touchpoints you can get, the better. 

[00:32:59] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Absolutely. Now, what sort of results are you seeing with this direct mail test that you’re doing? 

[00:33:04] Brandon Amoroso: So it’s still too early on. For me to say what sort of performance we’re gonna see for the wineries, my assumption would be the same that we’re seeing across the other brands, but we’re just starting to get up and running with some of these wineries on, Klaviyo, and we’re taking baby steps because most of them, I would say, have a little bit of email marketing going on. They have zero SMS marketing going on. And almost none of them have direct mail. So in terms of like the pecking order, it really is let’s get email in a good place, but then fast follow with SMS because SMS is such a high converting channel. And then from there, if the appetite is there, which it isn’t all the time. How do we look at like direct mail or potentially push notifications and, stuff like that. But for the one brand that we work with that does, direct mail campaign pieces, it is their number one source of customer acquisition. 

[00:33:55] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Well, How do you track the direct mail? That’s always the challenge that people ask me.

[00:34:00] Brandon Amoroso: So with any of the direct mail providers that we work with, that integrate with Shopify and Klaviyo, they’re tracking via, the specific offer that goes out, whether it’s like a specific URL or specific code that’s included within that piece of direct mail. And then we also know too who it got sent to.

So we can see in Klaviyo, okay, this person got a piece of direct mail and they came back and purchased. So even if they didn’t use the code or the URL. You can still attribute some of it there, but most of the platforms will tell you, oh, you spent, I don’t know, $5,000 on direct mail pieces, but you made $50,000 in revenue because they’re all integrated with Shopify and Klaviyo.

[00:34:38] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Okay, so yeah, the key is to segment, to give a special offer. I mean, too often the biggest objection is I can’t track it, but they’re just sending everyone to their homepage or they’re sending ’em to a product page that really can’t tell if it was email, SMS, or just, yeah, that part of the reason they decide to buy it.

[00:34:56] Brandon Amoroso: That’s part of the power being on Shopify, is that you then, can track these things very easily and you can even use unique codes instead of, single so like, as opposed to a comeback 20 code, it would be unique to that particular customer and single use. So that way that there’s no coupon abuse either. And you’re able to associate that order directly with that customer. Stuff like that’s only possible by leveraging Shopify, a direct mail platform that’s integrated with it, and then Klaviy a. 

[00:35:26] Drew Thomas Hendricks: We’ve seen a lot of success, those single use codes tend to get used a little bit more cuz they feel a little more special than the save 20.

[00:35:34] Brandon Amoroso: Exactly, there’s some really, I met with a company earlier this week who is doing, sort of AI personalized video messages via email and text. And we’re gonna start rolling them out for a lot of our clients but 

[00:35:48] Drew Thomas Hendricks: How does the AI video work? so basically they were walking me through it. 

[00:35:52] Brandon Amoroso: You typically have, you can do it in abandoned carts or you can do it in like a, oh, customer winback flow, but let’s say it’s an abandoned cart. we have the name of that person and some information. So the founder will go on record, maybe like a minute long video. And as opposed to saying an actual name, for this software, you say the word watermelon, and then the software is able to take the name of that person somehow, put it into your own voice, and then do it at scale across everybody who abandons cart.

And so, as opposed to just getting an email with the products that you left and a discount code, you’re now getting a personalized video from the founder that, I mean, You would’ve no idea that it wasn’t actually recorded by him. 

[00:36:36] Drew Thomas Hendricks: No, that’s awesome. I could just think of the one time it messes up and you get this, “Hey, watermelon, why didn’t you buy that?”

[00:36:45] Brandon Amoroso: They actually, and they have like quality assurances too, so it won’t go out if their system isn’t able to get it perfect, which happens probably like 5% of the time. But I was just thinking about it from a winery perspective. It’d be really cool to get my allocation email from the founder. Absolutely addressing me personally and even including like what I ordered in the past.

And so, that also shows you an example of just people creating really cool shit on top of Shopify and Klaviyo, that you only get that sort of innovation in this ecosystem because of the vast amount of merchants that are on it. 

[00:37:18] Drew Thomas Hendricks: what’s This, video AI engine that you’re referring to? 

[00:37:22] Brandon Amoroso: It’s, called, windsor.io. I’ll drop it in the chat here. 

[00:37:28] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, that is fascinating. 

[00:37:30] Brandon Amoroso: really, really cool, natural sort of, extension of our retention as a service offering. And we actually worked with them on one client, a, plant-based ramen company. And they AB tested the results of an abandoned card email without the video, and then the abandoned card email with the video and with the video, like converted that with something like 2x and also increased the average order value and people loved it, and that just goes to show you how, I don’t wanna say easy, but how, how much is available at your fingertips to sort of test and try to see whether or not you can provide an incremental lift. 

[00:38:08] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Absolutely. That is fascinating. I am, checking that out for sure. So, Brandon, as we’re kind of wrapping down here, give advice from your growth journey, from where you started to where you are now. What would you have done differently? 

[00:38:21] Brandon Amoroso: Well seeing as how we don’t have an hour and a half, I will try to distill it into, yeah. Yeah. One minute, couple of things. I think, if I, some of the things I would do differently are, focusing on specialization sooner, as opposed to doing everything specializing a little bit sooner, saying no more often than not. Not everything is a perfect fit, being comfortable with saying no is, really powerful. And I’d say third is just like, focusing intensely on documenting all processes and things that you do and taking the time to delegate. And one example I’ll use of this is, like the QuickBooks invoicing that I used to have to do myself like a year and a half ago. Sure it might have taken me like an hour and a half to do it every week, which didn’t seem like that much, but then there was like 18 other things I was doing that also were taking that amount of time, but I was so busy that I didn’t necessarily have the time that it would take to train somebody else to do it, even let’s say it would take six hours to train them to do it in one week. But for me, it just takes an hour and a half to just keep doing it myself. So I got stuck in that trap a little bit too much early on of just like dealing with it, versus taking the time and investing in another team member to get them up to speed.

And part of what helped with that was just documenting and recording everything to make it as self-service as possible. So processes, are super important to any growing business, but the thing that I stress to the team is just because we have processes doesn’t mean that. like it’s this way or the highway.

Like I expect that you challenge the processes where necessary improve upon them, where we could potentially, be offering a better service. Whereas I think if you look at some of the larger companies, they have processes and the processes are what they are. Yeah. And they’re very rigid, which you don’t want either because that stifles, really any sort of innovation.

And then you don’t have as much buy-in from the team if their voice isn’t being heard around how and what you should be doing. And the last thing I’ll say is, on a quarterly basis we were doing, sort of a feedback from the team. Everybody needed to submit three things that we’re not doing that they thought we should be doing.

So by the time we had 40 people that gave me 120 things that were submitted to sort of think about, whether or not we should incorporate them into our move forward plan. And, that was really powerful to get buy-in from the team, but also help me a ton in structuring where we would go and then having a follow-up meeting with the entire staff for either an hour or an hour and a half walking through each suggestion. And giving them the feedback around, this is how we’re addressing it. This is how, maybe we’re not addressing this specifically, but we’re doing something else, or, hey, we can’t focus on this right now because of money or priorities or whatever it may be. But having that feedback too, for them to know, like, oh, it’s actually being listened to. It was really valuable. And, we didn’t make it anonymous either because I wanted to be able to work with the people who brought the suggestions forward on actually implementing it. Whereas if it was all anonymous, then, it wouldn’t be as effective. So, 

[00:41:29] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And you want people to think about it. That is such smart advice, the one thing that we’ve also added on to that is I also ask people one thing that they’d stop doing and do away with. Like it’s, if you’re always adding, you gotta kind of remove too. That’s true. That’s something we, that’s true. we recently implemented, 

[00:41:47] Brandon Amoroso: I might have to steal that one.

[00:41:49] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah, no. So Brandon, this has been a really great conversation, is there everything we haven’t talked about that you’d like to bring up in the closing moments here?

[00:41:56] Brandon Amoroso: I don’t think so. I mean, for anybody that’s listening, winery retailer, brewery, Liquor company. Who wanna learn more about what we have going on with, Shopify. I’m happy to chat through, show you a demo, talk about where I think the industry is headed. Some of the unique opportunities that are representing themselves going into 2023. So 

[00:42:16] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Absolutely, where can people best get ahold of you and find out more about Electriq? 

[00:42:21] Brandon Amoroso: So you could, either go to our website, which is just electriqmarketing.com. It’s a “Q” instead of a “C” at the end of Electriq. You also just find me on LinkedIn at Brandon Amoroso or my DRINKS email is very easy, it’s brandon@drinks.com. So cool. You could reach out to me there and, yeah. 

[00:42:38] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Awesome, Brandon. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. 

[00:42:41] Brandon Amoroso: Thank you for having me, really interesting conversation. 

[00:42:44] Drew Thomas Hendricks: You have a great day.