Jeremy Weisz 14:47
So you’re doing a lot as it is, for sure. What’s been some of the fan favorite, you do a lot of webinars. What’s been some of the fan-favorite webinars over the past year or two years?
Aaron Conant 15:01
So a couple, if we jump into it, a lot of it is around Amazon. So if we’ll tackle that one, first, Amazon Marketing Cloud people are trying to understand that that’s been around for, five years, actually, but there haven’t been the tools, unless you have a fleet of data scientists that can go write a bunch of Amazon based SQL queries and yank it out. It’s been really hard to use, but we’ve done a bunch on Amazon Marketing Cloud. There’s a company called xmars that’s really popping up quickly right now. They’re a simple plugin, right? Couple grand a month. You plug it into your instance, and you get all the data path to purchase and everything. So a lot of people are using that because they’re then crafting it. You can put a pixel on your direct-to-consumer site, pull in your purest customer, and then just do a segmentation match into Amazon shoppers, and then retarget using their DSP, you can actually drive it back to your direct-to-consumer site.
So a lot of focus around that, how do I spend my marketing dollars more wisely? One that there’s a great podcast with retail media, I think was just before David Katz with Nate Picks, Pinkston and then from Microsoft Retail Media, and yeah, Lauren Levac from the Digital Shelf Institute, that is fantastic. We were talking a lot about the joint business planning that goes on, the one that comes out this week is with Andrea Lay from the Loom Group, and then we’re actually doing, I’m recording another one with her next week, which is Amazon AVNs. So she actually built out the negotiating platform within Amazon for the one-piece side. So we’re gonna do a deep dive with her on hey, what should brands be thinking about? But that’s it. We’re at the time of year where AVNs are top of mind, retail media and justification around dollars and then xmars, Amazon Marketing Cloud. So cool stuff.
Jeremy Weisz 17:11
Love it. What are you seeing? So you talked a little bit about the pain points that people are experiencing. One you were mentioning the profitability side. What are some of the pain points you’re seeing with all these conversations?
Aaron Conant 17:24
Yeah, profitability is the number one concern across brands today. That’s on the one-piece side, the three-piece side of Amazon. It’s on the Walmart marketplace, it’s on direct to consumer. It’s around retail as a whole. There’s the time, right, the pandemic, I’d say a year. Maybe we’re talking March 2021, right? So still in the pandemic starting to round off by the end of that year, and there is this growth at all cost. And people were just dumping tons of cash into paid media. People were not going to the store. They were buying online. And I think a lot of people thought that trajectory was going to continue, that society had fundamentally changed and now wanted to shop exclusively online, and that wasn’t the case at all. And so we’re seeing now is, the shipping rates haven’t really come down.
There are more people advertising online, so cost for advertising CPCs have gone up, and people are looking to have an intense look at their direct-to-consumer site. How much does it cost to ship? What do my bundles look like? What is the cost of operation? What is that total cost of ownership of that direct-to-consumer site? And is it even profitable? And is it worth having up? I believe it is, even if you’re not making money on it. It can be an R&D arm for understanding your customer and that profitability piece is driving then, how are we doing advertising, how are we doing shipping, how are we looking at 3PLS in warehousing? How are we looking at product bundles, new product development? A lot of those things are being driven by this profitability concern.
Jeremy Weisz 19:25
You talk to so many people, Aaron, I’m curious on missed opportunities that you see for people like low-hanging fruit. You mentioned one with the affiliates. You’re like, why is everyone not doing affiliates? And maybe it’s like, missed opportunities. People are just focusing on Amazon. They’re not going to Walmart. What are some of the missed opportunities that you’re seeing with all these conversations that more of these sellers should be doing?
Aaron Conant 19:58
I would say, well, I’ll put a caveat on there, which is, there’s been a huge trimming of digital executives in across businesses right now. I think they overstaffed a little bit coming out of the pandemic, and then as cuts have been made, it’s been a little too deep. I think that’s going to rebound after budgets are set and approved next year. So what does that mean? They’re missing opportunities, but I don’t believe it’s their fault. They’re working 50, 60 hours a week trying to keep the business going and hit numbers. And so what they don’t have is that opportunity to spend looking, and they’re inundated with AI and machine learning, right? It’s crazy. So if I would say one thing, when people think AI, they predominantly think generative AI, what’s the copy? Can it produce an image for me?
And I would say, set that aside, because that’s going to be a gigantic time suck. Doesn’t mean can’t work, but it’s going to be a gigantic time suck when there’s new tools that are popping up that are AI-driven, machine learning driven, that are incredibly cheap, and that’s how we’ve entered this age where all these tech and service providers used to say it was AI machine learning, and it was $15,000 a month. And that was really, hey, put in all your data. They throw it overseas overnight. There’s hands on keyboards. It comes back in the morning, there’s an answer. People didn’t care that that’s what was happening there, and they had the money to pay for it. Now they don’t, and now we’ve seen the cost of these things significantly come down. I’ll give you a quick example, Orita.
Orita is a plugin for Klaviyo, so people have massive email list, most of it is falling on deaf ears. So this AI tool goes in and it analyzes how all the groups are interacting, segments them, puts in holding patterns those that aren’t likely to interact because they only buy in Mother’s Day every year, or they only buy just before the holidays. It can pull them back in at the right time and pull them back out. Well, you send out significantly fewer emails, but more targeted emails, right? So you save money on your email sends. Your unsubscribes go down, your clicks to spam go down. Your deliverability goes through the roof. But it’s like 1000 bucks a month, maybe 1500 bucks, I don’t know, like you save more in your reduced Klaviyo cost than you’re spending on this tech platform, and your customers are happier, and Google loves you, like, there’s cool stuff like that.
And I would say, be looking for those things, and for that price point, that’s somewhere between 500 and 2,000 bucks, because there’s a lot of it in those tools a year ago, where eight to 15,000 a month, there’s a super simple one, CartSave, cartsave.io, you go, you just plug it in. And if people abandon this, not part of Klaviyo, if people abandon their cart, it gives them a simple message, hey, would you like us to save your cart? Just give us your email address. That’s all it does. And it reminds them the next day, hey, you left something in the cart. They take, I think, 5% so it’s basically a referral program then on what gets converted, if there’s no cost to the platform, why not plug it in? You make more money. These are the little things that are popping up now that, I mean, people just don’t have the time to go research, because they’re busy blocking and tackling the main things that are out there.
Jeremy Weisz 24:02
Any other best kept, I guess I categorize this as best kept secrets. You talked about Orita, CartSave, xMars, Archer, Cell Court, any others that come to mind that you’re like are not more people using this.
Aaron Conant 24:22
There’s probably 50. I don’t know if we have time to go through them all, but there’s probably…
Jeremy Weisz 24:30
Just a few, obviously, to discover more they can go on check out your events and podcasts.
Aaron Conant 24:36
Yeah, yeah. And a lot of these, I just, I don’t have time to do it with. There’s a really cool company that’s big in Europe, it’s on the one-piece side for Amazon, for account recovery. It’s called Baros, they’re just a flat fee. So a lot of these recovery tools want to take 15, 20, 25%. They take care of almost everything, and they’re just a flat fee. They do some really cool stuff. There’s a cool company that you have to be doing a larger amount of, like streaming TV, but like neon pixel and Brooke Parlow and what she’s building over there, if you’re doing a significant amount in streaming TV, which is going to take off through the Amazon DSP, you can buy inventory on Disney, plus you’re gonna be able to buy inventory at some point in time, probably on Netflix, Hulu, like you’re gonna be able to go anywhere and buy this inventory.
So that’s a really cool one. I’m trying to think I’ve got a whole table here of like, little sticky notes. It is Spencer Miller Berg, he created, was it One Click Retail back in the day, sold it to Essential, and now he’s built Detail Page, if you’re trying to understand market share on Amazon, but you don’t want to pay through the nose for a stack line. He’s more accurate at a quarter of the cost. Yeah. So those, those, some of the cool things are, you like, the AI portion, and what it’s able to crunch is super impactful, and you can save tons of money and get the same, if not better, results. So I’m excited. Like, the next
Jeremy Weisz 26:33
I could probably sit and listen to all 50 I won’t make you list them off, but…
Aaron Conant 26:38
I’ll just be going through my sticky notes here. I mean, I don’t have for mine, like, I share with everybody, like, these are all our partners. These are all people who brands are promoting. They’re saying, hey, these guys are cool and fun. And, you know, that’s a lot of it is Bill had this from, Bill Williams, the BW in the BWG do business with people you like and love, and that’s what we try to do. So yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 27:03
I want to dig into, you really started as a chemist, so I want to go back. I don’t want to gloss over that part, because when you were doing these launches and putting these products out there, we’re talking like multi, multi-million dollar launches, right? So talk about how you went from chemist to then e-commerce.
Aaron Conant 27:29
Yeah, so I love chemistry. I was really good at math. So, it’s one of those things where I’ll start at the way beginning, or anything. I love my high school chemistry teacher. And then I went to school to college to be a chemist, and then I got a double major in chemistry and biochemistry, and it was so much fun. And then I actually got to everyday work, where I’m at the back of the lab. I was making drugs for phase one and two clinical trials for Alzheimer’s schizophrenia. It’s just me at the back of the lab. And I love people. I was dying.
Jeremy Weisz 28:08
That’s why I’m actually shocked about this, because I was a biochemistry major as well, and I couldn’t imagine when I was looking at what to do. And you are very social, very people person. I was like, I do not want to be stuck in a lab, but you ended up going that route.
Aaron Conant 28:25
Yeah, just in college, I got hooked up with an awesome professor, world-renowned. He was on journal organic chemistry Advisory Board, like he was editing the papers, jacks, all those the huge articles. His name was Dr. Leroy B Townsend. He was awesome. He ran a cool lab. I mean, there was like six of us in there just having a blast every day. It’s not what happens in corporate America. Maybe it’s some of the smaller shops, but not at a pharmacy or a Pfizer. So I got out, I got my MBA, I went to perigo, and then, I became a project manager, and had these crazy projects that I kept taking, and then one of them was to launch a direct-to-consumer site. And then what I found was there wasn’t as much traffic there. I mean, now the traffic was Amazon.
So launched Amazon, and then we got a bunch of, like, nine number-one bestsellers. And what I found was, e-commerce is a giant experiment. It’s one big experiment. Nobody knows the outcome. Nobody knows where it’s going. Nobody’s been where we’re going next month. And so that aligned really closely with the scientific method. And so while people were out there, like trying to randomly, try stuff, and they had marketing and all this other stuff. I just let the data be a guide. And I wasn’t just throwing stuff up against the wall. I was picking a wall and picking what I want to throw up against it, and then analyzing what stuck, and then refining over and over and over again. And yeah, you don’t, obviously you don’t win them all, but every time the experiment quote unquote, “experiment” failed.
I learned something, I made an adjustment to a variable, and I took that approach to e-commerce is, hey, how many experiments can I do as quickly as possible? The most meaningful ones, so I don’t know how many people would take a face-centered design of experiments?
Jeremy Weisz 29:17
Nine number-one bestsellers is pretty incredible. What type of products were they just to give people an idea?
Aaron Conant 30:28
They were all OTC, so over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, the brand was good sense. We were just launching basic care as I was leaving to go start this up. And so yeah, that was our in house brand that was predominantly through smaller Mom and Pop pharmacies. And yeah, had to cold call Amazon way back in the day. And fortunately, the vendor manager at that time had previously worked at Cardinal Health, which is one of our big partners and distributors, and he instantly knew, instantly knew, we need this. We have a solid brand. It’s direct from the manufacturer. They own it. This isn’t a third-party reselling. And we were off to the races. And it was a blast. It was fun.
Jeremy Weisz 31:19
What made you finally take the leap then, because, again, seems like a great company, great position. You’re doing cool things, you’re launching products. You’re getting number one, what caused you to take the leap?
Aaron Conant 31:31
I think this will ring the most true for all like the third-party sellers that have your own brand out there is, at the end of the day, I build an eight-figure business, and I got none of the profits. I still got my salary, I still got my bonus, and we were on our way, like, to nine figures, and I wouldn’t see any of it, right? It’s that entrepreneurial, like I’m doing all this work. I know how to do it. The other side is, I love people, and I wasn’t getting enough people exposure. My passion is people and helping people out. And I really like e-commerce, so I built a business around that. And I would say, for the entrepreneurs that are out there, build a business around something you love, because then you don’t mind doing it every day. This is a big hobby for me, right? Like, this is my passion, right? People are my addictions, like helping people out, and so when you get into that sweet spot.
Jeremy Weisz 32:33
Pretty amazing, thinking back your journey, and as a chemist than in what you’re doing now. And the same thing for me, so I can relate. What are some of the, you talked about some really cool software and in companies, resources. What are some of your favorite conferences I know we talked about Prosper Show, Shop Talk, etail. What are some of your other favorite industry conferences?
Aaron Conant 33:06
So I’m gonna put a couple caveats on there. What I find difficult with some of these conferences is the amount, once they get acquired, there’s a huge focus on, generating revenue, and that is tough, because it changes the whole field of conference. I do really like Shop Talk. Why? Because I like people. It’s a giant e-commerce family reunion. I think they even use that their first year back after Covid. E-commerce is family reunion. I would say the same thing goes for Prosper, before it was acquired just, people there, nitty gritty, getting into the weeds on stuff. I still like Prosper I still I etail West. I was at etail East. We did a couple dinners there, was just a ton of AI talk. I didn’t get as much out of it. But, I mean, good stuff, right? I mean, anytime people together and talk ecommerce.
You can you cross-pollinate minds. That’s awesome. Let’s see, I really like the Amazon Accelerate. They’re unboxed again, giant networking. But you usually can run into a bunch of other brands there, and you can learn a bunch who else is out there. Oh, The Lead. The Lead, they do a big, really cool conference every year. Moderated a panel there this year, I really like, that’s in New York. I mean, The Commerce Next Guys, they do some cool stuff, you know, the so I think they do some dinners too. Sometimes people are like, hey, are they your competition? I don’t view them that way, like there’s enough capacity for 1000 dinners every year. So anybody who’s helped educating people in the digital space, I really like so they do some cool stuff, I think, in the East and West Coast every year.
Yeah, those are the one that’s, I don’t know I’m from Michigan, really close to Chicago. IRCE, back in the day with Scott Wingo did his Amazon and me day. That was awesome. It was really, really small this year. I don’t know how much longer it’ll be around, but yeah, those are…
Jeremy Weisz 35:17
Are there any industry-specific ones that you like, because I know, like, obviously you’re close to Chicago. Me too. McCormick Place has a lot of events. Like, they’ll just, maybe it’s outside specific e-commerce, like you get, like, the Pack Expo, or some of these other big ones, any other industry ones that you like?
Aaron Conant 35:37
I like the International Housewares Association. They have a show there every year. I do a bunch of advising for the IHA, that one’s really cool. Yeah, Pack Expo is awesome. Part of my project management career, I was on the packaging side and redoing components. And to go to pack Expo, that is phenomenal. That’s a really, really cool show. Yeah. Other than that, I just, I don’t make it to a ton, so I don’t know if I can comment on them, just we’re doing. There’s enough other times to be on the road. But yeah, I do like McCormick Place. It’s cool, yeah? Oh, Shop Talk Chicago is this year too.
Jeremy Weisz 36:21
I didn’t know that. They doing multiple events? Because I know the one I went to was in Vegas. So they do one Vegas and one.
Aaron Conant 36:27
Shop Talk, yeah, in the spring is going to be Vegas, still Shop Talk Fall is going to be at the McCormick Place the end of October, I think, or the second week of October. The same week, though, is unboxed in Austin. I think, at the beginning of the week it’s unboxed in Austin. End of the week it’s Shop Talk in Chicago.
Jeremy Weisz 36:51
Aaron, where can people, so let’s say, someone listening to this is like, I want to go to one of your events. They’re an industry professional. Or I want to check out your webinars. How do they register for one of the dinners or get a hold of you as far as I mean, we showed the BWGstrategy.com/bwg-events so they can check out any upcoming webinars. How do they get a hold of you and the team if they want to attend one of these in-person dinners.
Aaron Conant 37:22
You can just email me, [email protected] that’s a great way. You can hit me up on LinkedIn. I can connect you with our events planner, there are limited seats. Obviously, the dinners we do are all bespoke. They’re all invite only, because it has to be very, very topical. If it’s Amazon, we’d like Amazon people there, if it’s direct to consumer, if it’s SEO, if it’s marketplace, we do so many we like them to be very, very targeted. But what I would say to that is, hey, if we can’t have you into one dinner because it’s full, there’s another 99, it’s a good chance, I’d say about 40 of those. we do in New York every year. And so if you’re in that area, it’s usually pretty easy. The other ones were outside of trade shows. We do a lot of those. Of all the ones I just mentioned, we have a dinner or two that are just networking. Again, our dinners, there’s a cocktail hour six to seven.
There’s a plated service dinner. It is usually at a steakhouse from seven to 8:30, and 8:30 we wrap it up, grab another cocktail. But everybody could be home by nine if they wanted to. But it’s a guided conversation, single table, guided conversation for an hour and a half. And, I mean, yeah, they can just email me and we’ll get them signed up. Like, I mean, there’s a good chance I’ll just want to chat with you. Like, I just, I love to network and learn from people. I do a lot of help with partner selection. It’s a brand out there and you’re looking for an Amazon agency or a Walmart agency, or you need new tech providers, I spend a lot of time with brands because, the same agency that’s great for a Roku is different one than it is for rebellious beverage, right there two different things, and so help a lot with that as well.
Jeremy Weisz 39:16
How about the format a little bit from the guided conversation people, obviously, no one knows each other, obviously, you’re really good at engaging people warm, getting people in. How do you run the dinner and the guided conversation?
Aaron Conant 39:35
Yeah, so there’s a topic, right? So we’re really clear with everybody around what the topic is. So then we do a brief intro. I mean, there’s a sponsor, right? They paid, so usually kick it over. Let them have a minute or so. Hey, this is who we are. Is what we do. Super excited to be here and just happy to answer any questions that might come up. But we’re here to learn. That’s usually how they handle it. And then we buzz around the table. Name, role, company, hey, here’s the topic, what’s one thing you want to get answered?
And so by the time you buzz around the table, comes back, man, you got a list, and let’s go. Let’s start tackling we got a bunch of questions get answered here. And then that’s where a good moderator comes in where they deeply understand the conversation. They can pull on threads. They can pull out questions. They can get people engaged who might not want to be engaged, but they have a question, maybe you were talking with them beforehand. And then, in all reality, an hour and a half goes by like that.
Jeremy Weisz 40:41
I love that, because people, you know, you learn a lot of different pain points and people can share and help each other. If people are sharing, what’s the one thing you want to get answered? And the, obviously, industry professionals who are there can help each other as well.
Aaron Conant 40:57
The number one thing like, I tell everyone, so we connect everybody afterwards. Nobody’s like, these are the people that are near you because we’re using we’re doing it in a city, right? Like, they’re here. Like, meet them for coffee. Build your own network. Get your own personal board of advisors that can help you out in this space so you can meet him for coffee anytime, grab a lunch, give him a phone call. My POS didn’t come through, right? I just got warehouse space shrunk down.
I don’t have a 3PL anymore that you can call people really quick and get answers, and that’s you nailed it, like you’re learning from your peers. Oh, by the way, when things get stuck, we have the smartest people, service providers around in this area that they can jump in and answer as well.
Jeremy Weisz 41:49
So are there some recommended partner 3PLs, to mention?
Aaron Conant 41:57
There’s a bunch. I can give you my favorite. It is Corey Epirian at Da Vinci Micro Fulfillment. He’s based out of New Jersey multiple warehouses across the country. So forward, deployed inventory. Seller Fulfilled Prime Certified. So same day one, day two, day across the US, working with some really cool brands. The coolest thing is, is a flat fee for insouts, picking, packing, kidding, bundling, it’s a flat fee. And that’s what brands want, because in the 3PL spaces you’re trying to every time they touch it, it’s going to be extra money. People just want a flat fee. They can put in a different line item right column on the budget say, Okay, this is how much our warehousing costs are. And then he takes a percentage on flow through. And so you can get very, very precise in how much it’s going to cost you. There’s no craziness.
And I know the only reasons there’s not more is because that industry is very old and very cemented into their ways of how they charge and Corey is crushing it. He hit any marketplace you can create, whatever you bundle. You don’t even have to bundle it. You just send it to him and say, hey, we’re selling this bundle on Amazon. When it comes through, this is what you pick and put in the box. So it’s creating your own bundling, dropping inserts, and again, the seller fulfilled prime. If you have warehousing constrictions, if you’re one piece side, you don’t want it locked up in there. That’s just awesome. He’s doing some really cool stuff. There’s other big players that are out there that are doing cool stuff too. I like the new like I consider Corey a digital age 3PL, that’s what he is.
Jeremy Weisz 43:48
I have one last question, Aaron, and before I ask it, it’s going to be, I love to hear your mentors in the space. It could be colleagues, mentors, some of your favorite people that just you’ve learned from throughout the years. But before you answer that, I want to just point people. If you heard any cool resources on this and you contact this company, just tell them that you heard about them through Aaron and BWG Connect, because we want to spread the word on more cool companies.
And you can check out bwgstrategy.com/bwg-events, or just go to the BWG Connect in the navigation to check out more when their webinars are, when their in-person events are, and anything they have going on. And, of course, check out the podcast. He’s great people on there. You could check that out. Okay, it’s a Digital Deep Dive with Aaron Conant. Aaron, who are some of your mentors that you learned from throughout the years.
Aaron Conant 44:50
We covered one James Thompson, guys, phenomenal and just an all-around great person who else? Lou Lima, he’s at PIM Brands, so they make Welch’s fruit snacks. He’s just a digital leader as a whole. Oh. Todd Hassenfelt he’s over at Colgate Palmolive man, just absolutely phenomenal. Matt Taralo. He was at cope thing. He was at RJ Reynolds, now he’s got a bunch of his own brands. That guy just bouncing ideas, John Giorso, so he built orca Pacific and sold that to Media Monks. Wow. I don’t know if I have enough. I’ve got about 50 people that a Meghan Caron when it comes to measuring retail media, Corey when it comes to period, when it comes to fulfillment, because a lot of these are very segmented, right of where these people pop up.
They’re talking about user-generated content and connectivity. Tom Logan, over at Coley is doing some really, really, really cool stuff. George Westcott, he’s at A Ventures Global. He’s building one of the most innovative Amazon platforms. He built the first ever Amazon agency. He founded the Amazon vendor central group in LinkedIn. So he’s the moderator of that platform. Man, I could go on. I think I could go on all day. And these are the top people that I ping and like to interact with, Lauren Levac at the Digital Shelf Institute. Bill Williams, co-founder in this whole thing here.
Jeremy Weisz 46:40
Any specific advice from bill that we could end it on?
Aaron Conant 46:46
Yeah, just going back do business with people you like and love. That’s it. Man, that makes life fulfilling, and sometimes it’s hard, like, sometimes there’s a big check sitting there. People are paying the butt to deal with, and they’re never satisfied, and you just got to walk away from it. And we’re all blessed, and so just, don’t be led by the dollar, it’s not worth it. Do business with people you like and love.
Jeremy Weisz 47:20
Love it. Aaron, I want to be the first one to thank you. Check out BW G Connect. Check out more episodes of the podcast. We’ll see everyone next time. And thanks so much.
Aaron Conant 47:30
Thanks Jeremy. It’s been so much fun. All righty.
