Formtoro

We're building out a new category of signups that allow for live data collection that are aligned with the modern customer journey. We're huge fans of building experiences that benefit both the customer and the company to reduce guessing.

More at formtoro.com

Co-Founder

Ecom with Jon

Jon as a Service. (JaaS)🚀

www.jonivanco.com/newsletter

Real ecommerce advice from someone that has actually done it and currently does it across all customer journey touchpoints for brands of all sizes.

The vast majority of questions that I answer daily for people don't necessarily relate to Formtoro and data collection. Instead, I'm asked a lot about strategy related to ads, landing pages, product pages, emails, etc.

Most people are still learning the basics and understanding how KPIs work, we need to level that knowledge up before moving to advance data first strategies.

Here's my vision for eCom with Jon:
(It's what I wish I had when I was starting out)

✅ A safe space to ask questions directly 1:1.

✅ No one has to know you're subscribed, I answer your questions, slack, videos, whatever 1:1.

✅ If you want to be part of the broader community, that's an option for you too, but only if you want to be.

✅ Continual ongoing education added monthly to the internal documents based on testing we run on our own stores.

✅ Weekly office hours and bi-weekly 1:1 recorded video calls in the form of a Q&A sessions covering what's come up over the course of the week generally - so everyone constantly benefits.

✅ Small capped cohorts, there's only so many hours in the day, realistic cap will be around 50 people.

This is a great fit for you if:

1. you run an agency and need experienced eyes on a strategy
2. you run a brand and need an outside resource without bias
3. you're an employee of either in over your head or actively trying to learn but don't have the structure in place or someone to turn to or that has the time to mentor you personally within your organization

There's 100% a gap in this market from all the conversations I've had with people and I think I can fill it for a lot of people.

Sound like something you would benefit from, get in touch.

Founder

Boon Road

boon
/bo͞on/ (noun)
1. a thing that is helpful or beneficial
road
/rōd/ (noun)
 1. a wide way leading from one place to another
 2. a series of events or a course of action that will lead to a particular outcome

Parent Company to Formtoro.

LatticeWork

Direct support to the CMO and CEO. Tasked with working internally with various teams to streamline communication, product road map, and go to market strategy.

Latticework is envisioning the future of data privacy.

CX Advisor

Cryptopal

Advertising is changing, blockchain is taking over and adblockers now rule the internet.

It's time to make the experience a bit more personal without sacrificing consumer privacy.

Strategic Advisor

LIFX

Redefined efficiency across our support team.

Developed end-to-end self help flows that resulted in greater than 70% reduction in tickets.

Aggregated data from all tickets to understand trends and provide feedback to design and engineering team to integrate into the product and apps.

Introduced non-standard KPIs to track progress across the Support Team, Engineering Team, Sales, and other teams correlating Support with value add.

Consistently use best in practice information delivery to create customer experiences that get results and better help internal teams to process the information as it comes in and react and inform customers in a more timely manner.

Achieved a 0 new ticket balance at a rate of 100% outside of holiday periods and greater than 92% overall including holiday periods.

Director of Customer Experience

Successfully launched 10+ products over 2.5 years across 80 countries.

Partnerships with Apple, Google, and Amazon through co-marketing efforts and branded integrations lead to continued growth into new regions and across the whole of the Smart Home Market.

Experience working with strategy, roll-out, and other positioning to fuel continued growth in an increasingly competitive industry.

Played a key role in increasing revenue by double digit multipliers, consistently.

Director of Product Marketing, Partnerships, and PR

AffinityLive

- Second sales hire at emerging startup in workplace automation space
- Demoed and engaged with customers of all sizes sub 5 to more than 2000 employees
- Cross functional role, account executive, solutions consultant, and sales engineer from trial request to close with some implementation throughout
- Proficient and expert level in our complex and expansive platform encompassing four areas: Sales, Project Management, Service Desk, and Retainers
- Operationally, worked to refine sales process, build tools, and video library to connect with customers at all hours including implementing extensive automation via triggers
- Closed in excess of 20 account multiple months with average sales cycle of 45 days
- Received more than 6000 page views on video library where I recorded more than 140 videos
- Consistently went above and beyond for clients on six continents and multiple time zones
- Worked with marketing on content development and outreach
- Assisted customer service with escalated calls

Solutions Consultant/Account Executive

RGI Consultants

•	Small business consultant to numerous startup and technology companies as well as non-profits
•	Integrated within organizations to learn product, company culture, and goals
•	Prioritized goal structure and built out roadmaps for accomplishment
•	Evaluated the strengths of team members, worked with management to better delegate and direct their workflow to promote improved organization through lean process methodology
•	Introduced collaboration tools to improve communication between employees
•	Created surveys and outreach to understand customer and client needs
•	Designed sales plans and evaluated effectiveness of current materials
•	A/B testing of sales and marketing materials to increase effectiveness
•	Advised on the implementation of new technologies to improve efficiency
•	Trained, supervised, and taught new staff through presentations and on the job learning
•	Analyzed market trends and created a plans recommending adjustment
•	Tracked financial modeling to ensure that targets were met and productivity was improving
•	Created and facilitated proposed expansion into new markets through presentations and lectures to business owners on behalf of clients
•	Advised on social media creation and content to assist clients in gaining web presence and connecting with their customers
•	Evaluated existing procedure and wrote protocol for better information management
•	Familiar with process, activities and tools (DMAIC) utilized in lean process efforts

Small Business Consultant

UCSF Medical Center

•	Experience in high volume, fast paced, team oriented healthcare environment with staff that exceeded twenty people in one unit.
•	Handled in excess of two hundred and fifty phone calls daily while multitasking in other departmental duties including assisting Neurologists and Neurosurgeons with transcription of medical orders and prescribed therapy.
•	Proficient in medical terminology and medical procedure terminology with knowledge in scheduling hospital procedures and tests.
•	Experience working with automated purchasing and materials management system and other computer based programs and office hardware.

Hospital Unit Service Coordinator III

Formtoro.com - Zero Party Data Ecommerce Strategy

Helping ecommerce companies understand the difference between a Customer Journey and Company Journey.

We're changing the future of eCommerce one company at a time through quantitative and qualitative data.

Always up for a chat about the industry: calendly.com/jonivanco

You should sign up for my newsletter at www.jonivanco.com/newsletter that's where I drop all my hot takes.

I love zero party data and data analytics and a good debate around them.

Klaviyo could put all their agencies out of business inside of 6 months.

They are a data company.

1. They know length of flows, time between sends, by category, price point, website, traffic, etc.

2. They know which campaigns do the best, times, list size, offer size, etc.

3. They know which designs people like, templates saved, blocks used, etc.


Is there technology there yet? Probably not.

Will it be there faster than anyone else can build something to compete? Probably not.

Will it matter? Not one bit.


They have all the data sets needed to solve for the biggest problems that brands have which is email automation on the fly.

This is their CDP play, without having really looked at it, this is the hedge to aggregate that data to use for email automation via ai.

Do I know this for sure? Nope.

But it's what I would be doing.

And I think they have people that are smart like me working on this opportunity, because it's an add on service that they can up charge double the price of most of their plans while removing the need for agencies and increase the production output.

It will still be cheaper than an agency and allow functionality to be brought inhouse. Which will be a big shift for brands watching margins.

You don't grow from 200 to nearly 2000 agencies inside of 5 years thinking that the market needs all of them, you use them for a land grab to push out products to more people and boost revenue in the short term to work on your expanding data models to automate everything.

Then you train on all these agencies work.

They you weaponize it against them.

Because that's what I would be doing.

Just saying...

Things are going to get spicy and their share price depends on them making this move.

#email #ecommerce #marketing

🏌🏼‍♂️Jon Ivanco

One of the deciding factors of whether or not I comment on a post.
If I see these on your post, I'm not engaging.

Two people click on your ads.

They both purchase.

One spends $100.

One spends $50.

Which one is worth more? Which one is higher quality?

It's a trick question and depends on whether or not they come back and purchase again.

The person that spent $100, never comes back.

The person that spent $50, comes back twice.

So now who's worth more? Obviously the second one.

The problem is this happens in a 90 day period from the original purchase.


This is the fundamental problem with ROAS as a measurement. The lifetime ROAS was higher on the ad that didn't show immediate ROAS.

This is the exact reason why you need different data sets when figuring out what ads are working or not working.

Most of the stats people use to determine the success or failure of an ad, don't actually take into account these repeat purchase behaviors or opportunities.

So if you've read this far, you're probably thinking along the lines of what I'm thinking...

If everyone measures the success of an ad the same way and it doesn't account for the above nor does it take the steps to measure the quality of the audience in a meaningful or insightful way, then how can the platforms know which is likely to yield the best results?

In truth a lot of the time they can't.

This questioning of how we currently do things lead me instead to thing of ways we can grab more information relative to those purchases.

If I have common traits about the customer journey that leads to an outcome then it forces the question to a quality of audience one.

Just because a hook is working on an ad, doesn't mean it's attracting the types of customers most likely to shop multiple times.

This is the kind of stuff that goes beyond what normal platforms are using.

I've been thinking a lot about the future of digital marketing and I see a lot of opportunity in improving this one little spot around measuring the quality of the audiences.

#marketing #ecommerce #ads


Where someone heard about you doesn't matter.

What social media platforms your customers spend their time on does.

What about the buying process helped them the most while buying does.

What they are most looking forward to about their purchase does.


What most people are looking for to help them solve for attribution gaps is really the wrong question to focus on. Instead you want to understand where your visitors spend the most time, then build messaging for those channels where the algorithms will be able to put your content in front of them.


The first tells you where your audience hangs out.

The second tells you which of your efforts is having the biggest impact on the journey.

The third allows you to follow up directly with the customer to see how their experience matches up to their feelings during the purchase decision.

#ecommerce #data

People that subscribe are responsible for 40%+ of all your first time sales.

You have the ability to collect data relevant to the customer journey including:
- Who someone is shopping for?
- What they are looking for?
- What matters to them in that product?
- How often they use those products or the use of the product?
- When they are looking to purchase?

You 100% can and should be using this data to build out your marketing strategy. Ads. Landing Pages. Product Pages. Emails.

I've been talking about subscription to conversion rate, but what I haven't been talking about is the percentage of those subscribers that convert in terms of first time purchases.

Easy math 40% of your first time purchasers are willing to provide you data relevant to their customer journey, are you really still only going to collect and email and/or a phone number?

It seems borderline negligent as a marketer not to be collecting data from such a large portion of first time purchasers and potential purchasers.

So when are we going to start talking about how pretty much every ecommerce SaaS company is looking to replace agencies with data and ai?

Agency cost per month $3000-$6000+.

Software cost that does 80% of what's needed $500-$2000 a month.

The thing is software is getting better than people at strategy, we're watching it play out right now.

So if I were an agency, I'd be purchasing this software and using it internally before brands catch on, just saying.

This is why I've always had a love hate relationship with agencies, they are the current gatekeepers to clients, but if I'm honest, I really don't see a future where for most stores they are needed.

Instead, I see a few algos running, some creation tools, and it will be good enough for most brands with a fraction of the work.

Then it becomes a matter of reallocating resources to other tasks.

This week I talked to Max Sidebotham and Eileen Dai, they are off to a good start with their software program built around ai generated emails for brands tare ai.

What they are missing is consistently updated data driven inputs to put creation on autopilot.

Guess who has all the data to make this happen? Yup. I do.

I'll be running some tests over the next few months, but for small teams that just need to produce a consistent volume of emails and feel comfortable that computers are pretty good at things, this is likely going to be the future.

Email creation visually will only get better and the heavy lifting is already being done.

I really do see this as the way forward for brands because my background is building data-driven processes to make these sorts of things happen.

I bet there's someone out there doing the same thing for ads that I should talk to as well...

#ecommerce #ai #marketing

Facebook ads are one of a DTC brand's biggest expenses.

There's a bunch of different ways to try to counter this.

But there's only one approach that will work every time.

Collect data from your customers, build models based on opportunities related to revenue and conversion rate.

Use those combinations to built ads that speak directly to the audience that is generating revenue and has high conversion rates.

Your goal as a brand is just to find more people like you're best customers, it's why Lookalike audiences exist.

The problem with Lookalike audiences though is that they are based on sales only rather than customer responses about their preferences within products most of the time.

These used to work well prior to iOS changes, now you just need to add in other data sources to make up the difference and tailor your ads to the feedback you receive.

Something really special happens when you can combine both.

#ecommerce #ads #marketing

I'm gaming the system.

I have a system in place that is trending toward 70% of all first time orders coming from popup subscriptions with zero party customer journey data.

It's a long term strategy that is going to allow me to eliminate guessing.

I'm going to be able to use all this data to...

Create ads that speak directly to what people are telling me they are looking for and what matters to them from people that are converting.

Build landing pages talking about what matters to them with differentiation of our product being called out.

Personalized bucketed segments for emails down the road paired with offers and first opportunity sales.

Did I mention that we've already factored in the popup discount pricing directly into our margins so it's all a wash?

So essentially, we've built the perfect data capture system that influences all of the things we need to build out a complete marketing stack.

Next up, automating the creation of all marketing touchpoints.

This is coming, it's possible.

#data #ecommerce #marketing
Emails are coming first, then Ads.

Our product pages and landing pages are already pretty solid but AI generated creative an emails are an opportunity to give us more options.

The difference is, I get to play with a functional data set.

Did you know that I have a near 6 hour course about customer journey that's $499?

I feel like I talk about a lot of the same things, but most answers around customer journey can be found in that course.

Arguably, I think it's the best money you can spend outside of paying me per hour to answer specific questions about your store.

I'll take free money, but you should start with the pre-recorded stuff.

The production value is what it is because I don't care about those things, but the knowledge is real.

It's about the price of a single email from your email agency.

I do an absolute shit job of marketing it which is on me, (if someone reading this wants to own that part for me, you let me know, I'll pay a nice commission per sale, I just have a million other things going on)

Most people don't even know that it exists, but it's solid gold in terms of understanding customer journey that a lot of people just aren't taught.

It's based on my free resource on my website around my customer journey checklist which is more than 5000 words long.

It's dense with long lessons, but it's actually practical with examples.

I'll leave the link in the comments because LinkedIn likes that for some reason.

So if you're new to following me, like what I say, and want to learn a bit more, I highly recommend picking it up, it's my default for people to go through usually before I do ecommerce consulting work these days.

That same level of detail hourly would be more than 10x that price.

#ecommerce #courses #marketing

Sometimes I do things that might not benefit KPIs because it's the right thing to do.

Like making the close button easier to reach on mobile by moving it from the top corners of the popup to the bottom of the popup on every step.

About 4 years ago most browsers started putting the url on the bottom of their apps because phones had become so tall making it hard to get to the top, following on this logic, I've decided to test just putting the close button for mobile on the bottom of the forms.

I haven't come across this before, but whether it yields positive results or not, I'm pretty sure this is just a better customer experience for those of us that have smaller hands and/or browse one handed.

#usability #ecommerce #popups

There’s parts of ecommerce that are very difficult.

And then there’s parts of ecommerce that people make way more difficult on themselves than they need to be.

There is no harder part of ecommerce than distribution of your product. Finding an audience to sell your product too is most time-consuming, an expensive portion of the journey for most companies.

 it really is the basics that allow people to succeed in the space. The basics of knowing one’s numbers, the basis of knowing who their customer is, and the basis of being able to leverage the voice of that customer back at them in order to attract similar audiences.

By far the most common of mistake, I see that people don’t accurately capture relevant data in order to build those audiences. 

I know because most of the companies I talk to don’t have a good solid understanding of statistical analysis. Which typically leads them to ask questions that don’t have any guidance on the customer journey.

The interesting part about this is the quest to understand more about their customers, yet the hesitant of using what they do know to actually build model to improve the customer journey. 

 although the customer journey is complex, we make it infinitely more complex, simply by failing to ask the right questions at the right time.

For as much as people say they’re collecting data very often is any of it actually actionable.

You'd be amazed what you can learn just by asking your customers.

#zeropartydata

I want to rethink the customer journey to better benefit both sides.

Brand spends money on Facebook ads, hopes for a return on ad spend.

What most brands lack though is a steady stream of people producing video reviews of their products and sharing them to social media.

I'm fascinated that most people have 4k video cameras in their pockets, yet the vast majority of product pages rely on pictures and words to sell you on their products.

The below form can be triggered to only show to people that haven't purchased before from Facebook ads.

Or I can show it to anyone really, including people that already love the product, and are looking to buy more, lots of options here.

Looking to build this into our store in the next few weeks.

For a Friday/Saturday this marks three changes to tests in Formtoro in two days.

1. Yesterday's post moving the close button to the bottom on mobile popups much like browsers have done for urls

2. Added a guided size guide with the same questions we have been asking in support for 6 months directly onto the size page that collects data - should have done this a while back, but got distracted with other things

3. Then this one, which is coming at the same time as launching an email campaign of basically the same to existing customers to collect UGC video reviews

(and yes all those data points are being reported on and correlated and pushed into Klaviyo/ESP profiles)

Not bad for a few hours of work, save hours on support tickets, save hours on collecting UGC, provide people with an opportunity to try our product in exchange for something of value to us, product feedback plus something we can reuse in marketing, as it's asked for in the form itself.

This is kind of where I straddle the line of software dude and customer journey advocate that is actually using the software to improve the customer journey and build new customer friendly experiences to drive collective growth for brands.

I honestly don't know too many other ecommerce SaaS founders that are actively using their technology in new ways to solve fundamental gaps in the ecommerce customer journey.

If you're out there, hit me up.

#ecommerce #saturday #marketing

Ecommerce KPI definitions for those doing popups.

Sign Up Rate - the number of people that view a popup and subsequently decide to provide either an email and/or phone number during a set time frame expressed as a percentage

Subscription to Conversion rate - the number of people that signup that purchase something during a set time frame expressed as a percentage

First purchase subscriber contribution rate - the number of first time purchasers that come from people that also subscribed to your popup as a function of all first time purchasers expressed as a percentage

You'll want to break these down by source, medium, and in the case of paid ads, you'll want to see a breakdown by campaign, adset, and ad.

The reporting should also include a breakdown by: form, device, source, average order value, and number of orders.

Fun facts about the above:

Sign Up Rate

Varies based on the offer, timing, and quality of traffic. There is no gold standard in terms of a sign up rate, it's all driven by offer and quality of audience.

Subscription to Conversion Rate

Should be minimum 20% and you should goal it at 60% or so, it will again vary by the quality of the audience, offer, and relevant brand strength.

First Purchase Subscriber Contribution Rate

We're tracking this to be between 30-60% meaning that for all first time purchases between 30-60% of people are signing up for your offer via a popup before making a purchase.


OK stats aside there is a 100% chance given the above numbers above that you should be collecting more data relevant to your signups beyond an email or phone number and there's 100% chance given that last stat that says 45% of first purchase sales come from people signing up for an offer.

Beyond that nail your ads leveraging that data, watch those numbers climb.

On average we see about 12% sign up rate from Facebook ads and a 33% subscription to conversion rate from those signups.

Then we just recycle the answers provided from those that converted and come up with new creative that speaks to the things they told us, rinse and repeat until all the numbers go higher.

Please leave questions in the comments, my goal is for everyone reading this to become a data driven marketer at this kind of level.

#ecommerce #data #marketing

Direct to Consumer (DTC) has never actually been Direct to Consumer.

There's always been a third party inbetween.

What happens when that changes?

What happens when styles and cuts become uniform and best of breed and you as the consumer select the patterns, materials, colors, etc.

What happens when these things can be delivered directly to your door for less than what current DTC brands are charging for products?

I'm a big fan of custom stuff, but MOQs for common items are just too high most of the time.

1 Hat is $50 for custom
2 hats is $42 for custom
3 hats is $38 for custom
4 hats is $35 for custom
5 hats is $32 for custom
6 hats is $30 for custom
7 hats is $30 for custom
8 hats is $30 for custom
9 hats is $30 for custom
10 hats is $30 for custom
11 hats is $30 for custom
12 hats brings the price down to $26 for custom

1000 hats is still $20 for custom

So the best value is at 6 hats, but I don't need 6 hats.

The thing is though, most hats retail from companies at between $30-$35 dollars or that custom 4-6 hat range.

But I also get free shipping because of the higher price.

So essentially, if you have a small buying group of 4 people, it's actually cheaper to buy custom and pay the same price as retail.

The unit economics just don't make much sense from a business perspective.

There's room in this space and I'm talking to some people that I think might be able to pull it off.

Pay attention to where this market is headed. It's entirely possible that there is an entire backend waiting to happen for the right types of brands in this space.

I think this is truly the future of DTC.

#ecommerce #DTC #marketing 

suno.com • 1 min read

Suno

I keep talking to a lot of retention agencies.

There's only 6 types of emails that move the needle in campaigns and the vast majority of all revenue is being generated by existing purchasers.

1. Sale announcement email
2. Back in stock email
3. New product email
4. Customer Spotlight email
5. Company update email
6. Lifestyle newsletter email

I know that the other ones people like to say work are, product education emails, product spotlight emails, etc.

Those are just filler where you get it right in timing, the majority of that content should already be on the product pages.

Let's be honest, most people just look at the images and if there are no images, then they click through out of curiosity on occasion.

Think about your own behaviors with email.

1,2,3 are the top openers.

4,5,6 secondary but if you like the brand you engage.

Product spotlights of something you already know of, you might open but you're not getting a click.

#emailmarketing #data #ecommerce

I spent all day in spreadsheets but found a combination of data points that converts at 70%. 

(Also a top 3 across categories)

Guess what ads are getting made tomorrow?

Also guess what’s getting built into Formtoro…

Business is much easier when you have data. 

#business #ecommerce #data

How popups became the gateway to improving the customer journey

Did you know that upwards of 60% of first time purchases come from popup subscribers?

🏌🏼‍♂️Jon Ivanco here, writing to put Formtoro on your radar if it isn't already.

We make advanced newsletter signup forms (aka popups) built to collect customer insights beyond just an email or phone number to understand why that 60% converts.

So you can leverage those data insights to increase your revenue while reducing your customer acquisition costs across all your marketing channels.

We integrate directly with Klaviyo, Shopify, and Meta.

You only need to turn your existing popups off and turn on ours.

I’ll personally get you set up leveraging my over 15 years of experience in marketing and include a 30-day free trial.

All our customers begin to see results within a few hours of going live.

Our month-to-month pricing starts a fraction of a single day’s ad spend. 

For a complete overview of our product and pricing please visit our website at Formtoro.

If you're interested in a free quick video audit of your existing popup, just let me know with a comment.

P.S. Zero Party Data collection and data-driven marketing not a priority for you currently? No worries, I’m here to be a resource to you either way when you’re ready.

Join the 8,500+ other ecommerce professionals that follow me on here LinkedIn where I share my learnings from over 15 years in marketing and building brands.

Additional ecommerce resources can be found at Ecom with Jon. 

I look forward to having you in my network.

#formtoro #data #ecommerce #marketing

Don’t be surprised when everyone in ecommerce LinkedIn starts talking about the concept of how to determine what makes a quality audience beyond the sale. 

We’ve anchored this for the last 4 years as the proper way to identify and evaluate traffic in ecommerce and people are starting to figure it out. 

Ask them when they say it how they are evaluating what makes someone quality though. 

I’m not aware of any working models outside of the ones we use at Formtoro to evaluate and or solve for this. 

#ecommerce #data

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