The subscription market is predicted to grow nearly $500 billion by 2025. Recharge is the leading subscription management solution, helping ecommerce merchants of all sizes launch and scale their subscription offerings. Over 15,000 merchants use subscriptions powered by Recharge to grow their business and their communities by increasing average order value, reducing churn, and providing predictable recurring revenue, turn transactions into long term customer relationships, and experience seamless subscription commerce with Recharge. Check them out at slash dtcpod. What's up, Dtcpod? Today we're joined by Chelsea Schultz, who is the director of Performance marketing at Attitude. So, Chelsea, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about Attitude and your background as well?

Yeah, I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me, guys. I'm so excited to talk about marketing because I probably annoy my friends too much talking about marketing in my day to day life. But as Blaine said, I am Chelsea Schultz. I'm the director of performance marketing at Attitude, which we call ourselves a sustainable textile company. So we have patented and really amazing fabrics that we actually sell in the forms of linen. So they're bedding bamboo right now, which is what we call our clean bamboo. And I promise you guys, they are, like, the best sheets I've ever slept on.

And I love working for them because I love having a company where I use the product that I am fully invested in. Like, I actually personally love the product. So I'm really happy to be at Attitude in the performance marketing role, where I really tackle everything and anything that we attribute revenue and conversions to. So very much like Google focused, Facebook focused, and I'm sure that we'll dive into that. But I actually started my career in data. I went to school for being an actuary, so I thought that I was going to work in the insurance world for a while. Absolutely hated it. I'm always honest about that.

So I pivoted over into Data and analytics where I worked for about two years doing analytics and fell in love with marketing as I was doing analytics for a marketing agency. And I've been in marketing ever since, so I've really loved it. Really had a great time growing my career in marketing and there's just so much to do, so I'm so excited to see what's next out there.

Yeah. And Chelsea. One of the reasons we were excited to have this conversation is like we were chatting about offline is your background in Data isn't the same kind of background that you always see for people who are running performance in D to C. You've worked across a whole bunch of different industries for a bunch of different companies. So why don't you tell us a little bit about some of the companies you worked at before you got involved in the performance side of things at Attitude?

Yeah, so when I started my career, I was actually doing analytics for direct mail companies. So I worked with an agency that managed campaigns that were handled through like, St. Jude and Hearst. So I actually ran all the numbers to tell these companies how their campaigns were doing. And from there I got that creative marketing kind of background of like this small tweak can change the overall performance of this campaign. And I always thought that was so interesting to just dive into the numbers and know really just the smallest changes could make a huge impact for these companies. So I always thought that was fun, loved it, and then wanted to kind of make those changes myself. I was very hands on and was like, hey, I need to have more, I guess, control here.

Let me do the work and see what I can change and manage. So I got started in the service kind of industry, like the tech industry. I worked@ask.com when they were fairly large. I feel like no one now knows what Ask.com or Ask Jeeves is, but I was there and that was a really fun industry to just really our whole performance goal, I think was just to drive traffic to different websites. So it was a really strange business model because you were just taking traffic and moving it other places. So that was a whole different ballgame. And then I actually moved into Legal Zoom where I was for a few years, and Match and the dating app world for a while. So once I was doing that, it was very much like the tech world.

How do we drive traffic to apps, how do we get people to convert and buy our products. And after I was at Legal Zoom for a bit, I decided that I wanted to get into more of the D to C purchase world. I was selling services for the longest time and I felt like I wanted to have something tangible that I was giving to customers, really feeling like it was making an impact. It's just a very strange industry to sell someone something that's not tangible. So I switched over to selling products. I was at a smaller startup for a vitamin supplement for a while and then shifted over to Attitude and haven't looked back since. I would say I love the consumer goods side of things. Like I would every day sell a product over a service.

I love it so much.

Yeah, I think that's such an interesting point because when you're selling a service, obviously services make the world go round and you need them, but it's not the same tangible sort of experience as you're able to say, hey, I can experience my product because I sleep with it every night. I know it, I feel it, it makes me feel a certain way. It's tangible, it's real, and I can bring that lens into my marketing and that's the product that I'm selling. And now I'm responsible for acquiring other customers who are going to feel the same way through this product that I know and I trust and I believe absolutely. So why don't you walk us through once you kind of made that jump into Attitude, right? You have this background in data for working with customer acquisition and growth at LegalZoom and@match.com which are requiring users for either services or digital platforms. So what was the learning curve like? Were you learning new platforms? Were you using all the same tools you were using before? And what were your first strategies coming into Attitude? What were the first objectives, goals and strategies from a performance perspective?

Yeah, so that's a great question. There was so much that I felt like I tackled when I joined that was so exciting and so much fun. I think the biggest one is data and data cleanup, which I think that almost every company out there is talking about right now, since we're needing to transition everything to Ga four by June, I believe. So everyone's freaking out about that and that was a big kind of tackle that I took on when I joined Attitude of like, here is all of our data, here are all of our data sources. What is our source of truth, how accurate is it? And just matching up our data sources to make sure that we are bidding appropriately on things. I have found it funny how many companies, large and small, that I've talked to and joined that I would say trust platform data way too much and say, hey, Facebook tells me that I have a five times ROAS. And I'm like, that is so not true. I am so sorry to tell you that.

So it's always been really fascinating to join a team and just realign on what our source of truth and our data is. When I joined Attitude, I kind of like came in, started helping with the budget, started helping with launching and scaling new platforms. And that all tied into what is our source of truth? How do we know apples to apples, what is performing well? And we actually wound up onboarding new data platforms, getting rid of some old data platforms. And I've been so blessed with my team just really supporting me and believing in what I have to say in my opinions that we've been able to make these shifts and it's really helped us have a clear picture for growth moving forward. So that's been a really interesting process.

With Attribution and Source of Truth data, it can even be really time consuming and really hard to get to the source of truth point because even when you talk to many people, people have different ways of approaching it. There's different platforms, there's different ways of doing it. So I'm curious, in the early days, is it possible to get away with a blended CAC approach if you just know that you're so for example, for software, it's a lot harder sometimes for the Attribution side of things than, you know, shopify has a bunch of integrations. You're just buying a product. With software, sometimes this happens. In our case, you go from a website into a web app, there's multiple days. The journey is so much more complex. So can you get away with a blended CAC to a certain point if you just know that getting to the Source of Truth is actually going to hold you back?

Yeah, I 100% understand that. And I feel like I have had so many fights and disagreements about Attribution platforms. Some people absolutely hate them and don't believe in them at all. I will be completely honest and say I look at a blanded CAC every month. At the end of the day, you have an absolute truth of how many products went out the door. You have an absolute truth of how much you spent in your marketing. Dollars or business, dollars or fees, however you want to look at what your cost is. And I can easily calculate that.

So I calculate that every single month and look at it. It's great to have that as a trend line because you know that it's similar across all years, all data touch points. Like, if I onboard a new platform, we're going to have data gaps. We're going to only know how things have performed since the day that you brought on that data platform, which is true for us right now. We have a data gap that just started in February when we onboarded the platform. Can't see year over year yet because we brought on our Attribution platform in February, so it's great when we're going to have that. We have that insight of how all of our channels are doing. We can look at that and drive that detail, drive those changes.

Next year is going to be fantastic when we see that year over year performance and can start making more and more trends and insights. But to your point, having that just like very basic blended CAC I think is so useful and so many people just, I don't know, I think don't want to use it because it's so basic, but it is your absolute source of truth. Why not measure that? That's going to take you a few minutes to calculate out and put together, monitor it, make sure that the business is moving forward. You're hitting that goal, and you can use the Attribution platform to give you all of the other insight that you're missing. So if you don't have the time to onboard one or you don't have the money because honestly, they're expensive, right? Use that. Move forward with what you have. There's also the data overload of things that I don't think people talk about enough of. Like when you have too many sources of data and too many metrics that you look at, things get overwhelming and you're not actually optimizing to one thing.

I constantly have the disagreement of, like, are we optimizing to a ROAS or are we optimizing to a cost per order or a CPA? I was like, those two things are different. I can scale up a ton of orders for you, but a lot of those are going to probably be small orders of $50 and then our ROAS is going to go down. So what do you want more? And normally at the end of the day, it's all about money. You should be looking at a ROAS for the most part, but you can have that issue of, like, if you brought on an Attribution platform, all of a sudden you're too overwhelmed with data, you don't know what to optimize to, and you can spiral really hard. So I always tell people to be aware of that too when they're trying to talk about data, what they should clean up and onboard. Just be really specific about your touch points that you want to measure and say like, hey, this is that KPI. We're going to go forward with that and be clear when you're onboarding. Anything new?

So since you mentioned an example of a customer segment, I want to dive into Editude. For example, you guys have high end creative trying to attract mid or higher income consumer. How can you approach that with Google Ads? And in other words, what's the state of Google Ads for DDC? Because I feel like with can or Instagram, you can know you can attract a certain persona based on the creative, but you don't really have that unless it's competitive keywords. So how do you guys look at Google Ads for DDC?

Great question. And you also brought up something that I thought that I wanted to mention earlier of like, when I switched over to selling products instead of the online tech services, the thing that I had to learn was Google Shopping. And that threw me for a loop because I was like already ten years into the industry and I had no idea how this platform worked because I never touched it. So I feel like I'm still very much learning Google Shopping, it is a beast of its own. And then they got rid of our Smart Shopping and moved to Pmax and they're just changing everything up for us. So Google by itself has always been super complicated of figuring out what the best foot forward is. Search campaigns, I think are super simple. And if you want to only focus on high value customers or let's say someone with a high household income, you can layer in that audience pretty easily.

I hate doing that, to be honest with you. I know a lot of companies do that. But you're limiting the Google algorithm. And I know that the Google algorithm itself is already optimizing to those high household income people just because those are the ones that are converting at the end of the day. So when you're having all of those signals and all of that connection that you're feeding that data into Google, hopefully all of your data and connections are good to go, that Google is getting and receiving the right information from you and your website. But Google will be optimizing to that anyway. I do think that there's a lot that you can do within Shopping to highlight your product, to make sure that you're going after someone who is of value for you by imagery. The imagery that we use on Google Shopping is different than what we use on Facebook.

So, like, everything for Facebook, very UGC focused, very like, I can see this in my bedroom kind of look and feel. While Google is much more of like an elevated space, this is a studio shot. This is really formal and stunning. And that seems to work really well for us on Google and attract those high value customers. So you have a little bit of a change, but also, like all of our ad copy across platforms, vastly different. So Google kind of has its own bucket of this is how we talk to these customers, these are the ones that are converting for us. And then just using that insight to continue feeding similar images, similar copy back into Google so we can get those insights. And there is a few settings within Google itself that you can optimize for new customers versus returning customers.

And I've found that always to be really successful and really helpful to say, this is what value we find in a new customer and what does that lifetime value look like? And plugging that into Google so they're focusing on these customers that are high value for us instead of just like lower level return on ad spend customers.

So what does your team look like that you collaborate for all of this with?

Good question. So we're a pretty small team right now. It's myself and I have one other gal that works on the paid side of things. So her and I tackle all of our Paid hands on campaigns. We actually have everything in house too, which I think is really exciting because we have a lot more flexibility on what we test, when we test how quickly we can turn around things. But it's just her and I on the paid side. And then we have one other gal that is our head of retention that she manages our SMS email Loyalty reviews program and the three of us coordinate very closely. We make up the Performance marketing team, so we make sure that all of our acquisition traffic is really closely connected to our retention programs to make sure that we have a very, I guess, closed circle loop of like, this is how we talk to our customers and this is when they come back to us.

So we are a very small team. We do also have a few people working on influencer and the organic side of things on a separate team here at Attitude. So we're pretty small. I think Attitude in total is about 20 people and it's been really fantastic to see what we can scale up with just like one or two people working on Paid.

I think it's so important. Chelsea, what you were mentioning about maintaining a tight line of communication between the acquisition side of things and the retention side of things and making sure there's alignment there because as you start to acquire customers, you want to make sure they're getting that same feeling from the brand as they move through the lifecycle. So just hearing how you guys make sure that you're really aligned on that is definitely really important for brands to tune into because I know there's a lot of brands that really separate the two disciplines when in reality they are linked together and that kind of leads me in. Well, I definitely want to get deeper into that. But before we go, there one question that I would have just for our listeners, maybe people who are getting started with brands. Right. I know you were talking a lot about making sure your data is in the right place and you have a good source of truth set up. And you mentioned there are some updates coming to Ga Four.

Could you just give us a quick overview of if you're starting a brand, what's the quick 101 on what you need to know to start running performance, right? Like, what source of truth should you be using, what data should you be thinking about? And maybe what first channels should you be opening up to? Acquire customers.

Yeah. So I think that diving into Ga and having a just general understanding of the Google Analytics platform is very important. And I say that as I'm literally going through a class right now to learn more about Ga Four. But as you're starting out to know where your traffic is coming from and know the audience insights that Google can give you, I think is invaluable. You need to have that information to make those decisions of what you should continue to invest in. I love shopify. We're a shopify site. I think that a lot of companies, if they're selling a product, they're going to be on Shopify for the most part, just a huge dominant player there.

There's a ton of data that they give you that's really good and really interesting, but the thing that they lack on is where your traffic sources are. So as we're talking about performance marketing and making sure that you can scale up any sort of growth, you need to know where it's coming from. So that's really what it gets down to is you need to have your Ga connection set up. It is so, so simple to set up any sort of tracking in Ga to have just like a UTM source equals pinterest and put that on every single thing that you do on pinterest and it'll put it into a nice little source bucket in ga and you can easily view that and manipulate it however you want to, to see that data by time, by customer. And that's really where I think that everyone should dive in when they're starting a brand just very clean, like, okay, we got this amount of traffic from this source, and then the orders, and then you can back out how much your cost per order is and all that fun stuff. I think that when it comes to platforms themselves, it's really hard to have like a one size fits all approach when I think everyone in the industry is so vastly different. And right now the industry is so wild. I think that everyone's talking about inflation and frivolous spending versus what things do you need to have, and buying behavior is just all over the board.

To be honest with you, I cannot tell you anyone who's been like, yes, we've really figured it out. So you'll have to kind of test into things. There are so many small brands that have really seen success from organic TikTok, and instead of investing dollars in ad spend, they invest their time and maybe people dollars in TikTok and creating that content. You can do the same thing on Instagram and Instagram Reels. But I think that we've seen such a huge growth in organic TikTok that some brands just don't even do ad dollars. Because why? When you can build that brand awareness through TikTok? So I think that's an interesting space to be in. I think Google Ads every day, all day will be a kind of like core for every single brand. You know, what people are searching for if they want to come get your product, put up five exact keywords.

If you really only have like, $50 to spend every day, put up those keywords, drive some traffic to your website, and let Google start optimizing and learning from there, and you'll probably be able to grow that pretty well just due to Google being around and really knowing the algorithms in the industry so well, I think that you can't really beat it. So I think those are like the two that I think everyone should consider or those two main approaches. Facebook's had so many changes within the last year, it's really hard to tell people, hey, I think that you need to set aside $30,000 to get a real good ad read on Facebook. That's really hard. So I think that I would normally stick to either an organic play on any sort of social channel and then Google Ads for sure.

What do you think of YouTube ads?

Great question. I personally ignore YouTube ads. Like, if I am watching YouTube, I zone out when ads are on. And this is kind of a point of how I approach a lot of marketing, is like if I don't listen to it or pay attention to it. And I know that I'm skewing everything here because I am one person, but if it is not compelling to me, I have a hard time justifying putting ad dollars behind it. And YouTube, I think, is the one thing that people really ignore. That being said, Google is getting into the CTV world, I believe, this year, if they have not already rolled out those changes and have invested a lot in YouTube shorts and all of that. So I think that it's a really interesting place to be.

Additionally, the Pmax campaigns, the performance max, those will show up on YouTube. There's no way to remove it. Like if you have a Pmax campaign, you're on YouTube, it's really hard to know how much volume you're getting from YouTube, but you're absolutely there. So I think that's an interesting place to start because that campaign is going to be probably successful for you. But having one off YouTube ads, that one's a hard one to get a read on. That's another one that I feel like you have to set aside. I think Google, when they tell you to launch a YouTube campaign, I want to say last time I spoke to them, they said for a clean read, you should have $250,000 per month on YouTube. And it's like, how can you convince a small brand, a startup, anyone that just doesn't have this freely set aside to do a YouTube campaign to make sure that you see the lift.

So that's why I kind of stick to these Pmax that are kind of like the catch all campaigns that include those. But YouTube, I think, is just another can of worms.

I wasn't expecting that. It's interesting to know data driven Chelsea also following intuition. So it's a combination of both things. But the reason I asked the question is because Monday, for example, is just like, I get their ads nonstop by just visiting their website on YouTube ads. But I think that's really helpful context, especially in what you mentioned, that the $250,000 a month minimum just sounds bizarre just to get some data to even start.

Ramon, the other thing that I like about what Chelsea was talking about is just like, understanding the context of the ad as the user before you go and do it, and saying, my number one is going after Google search and AdWords because we know there's high intent there already. So before we start worrying about these other platforms, let's go get that. And I think, like you're saying, not all ad platforms are created equal because intent plays such a big role in it, right? Like, Google, for example, they own Waze, and I'll get ads on Waze about like, do you want to go to this location? It's like, no. When I'm using Waze, I'm using it to go to one place and one place only. I'm not happening to stop by this place that I got an ad for. But if you have a big enough budget, google's probably like, oh, you have great ROAS on. Like so understanding what your brand is, what you're about, where your buyers are, what their intent is going to be across platforms. And thinking about it that way as you kind of start chopping up your budget, I think that's a really great place to start from.

Absolutely.

And Chelsea, I know you had just mentioned some things about Ga Four, and you've been taking a class on it. So what's the quick and dirty? What's going on with Ga Four?

To be honest, I probably shouldn't talk too much about this since I'm just now diving into it, but since Google rolled out Ga Four, I'm not even sure why they decided that they needed a whole new platform. But if you haven't heard from Google already, they're rolling out Ga Four, which means that the current structure of Google Analytics and that platform will be no longer getting data. I believe it's in June. It's something really soon. And I think that everyone in June is going to start freaking out June, and July is going to be really where all the marketers are kind of like losing it because you needed to obviously turn on Ga Four to have some sort of tracking so you would get some year over year data. Otherwise turn June, you're going to see absolutely nothing in the platform other than what's currently happening. So I'm trying to dive into a class right now to make sure that we have Ga Four properly set up, that we are tracking correctly, that we can go into the next year. Feeling comfortable and also just like, learning how to use it and see that data.

I know that it's supposed to be a little bit more visually friendly, but I've also heard that you kind of need a data expert to dive into it and set it up, which is difficult for small brands. We do not have a internal data person monitoring our shopify data, our ga data. So for me as a marketer and that's something that I'm relying on, I'm kind of taking it on myself to be like, hey, we need to have this data. We need to make sure that this is cleaned up and good to go. So that's why I'm taking the class on it. So there's a lot of agencies that are out there that will help people with this transition. And if you know really little about ga and this transition already, that might be something that you want to look into hiring an agency for or just take a quick course. There is, like, the Google I don't even know what they call it there are Google classes out there that are just free and informational from Google that'll help with the transition.

But to be honest, I'm kind of freaking out about it because Google sends us reminders, I think, like every week, and you have little banners on Ga that say, hey, this is no longer going to exist in a few months. And it gives me so much anxiety. So I'm trying to dive into it and learn more about it, as I think everyone should. We should as marketers and as people in an industry that's ever changing, we should be taking classes, we should be learning about the new services and new platforms and everything that's out there, but takes up a lot of time.

So I know why people no, I'm sure a lot of marketers are super up to speed on this, but for all our other listeners who are maybe founders, builders, other sort of operators within the team, make sure your marketer knows. And I think what you said, it's like a really good point just to make sure you're managing that transition well and that you have time to gather data, get set up. And it's not like one thing where it's like, oh, wow, this is shutting down this week, and now we have to learn a whole new thing at the last second. So pro tip from Chelsea, get on your Ga four stuff now as opposed to waiting to try to figure it out in June.

Absolutely.

So moving forward, Chelsea, I think we've covered a lot of different topics around general approaches to performance platforms, getting your data set up and everything like that. But now I kind of wanted to talk about some things that you guys have done at Editude that you've found a lot of success in. Right. So what are some of the key performance initiatives that you've been able to lead over there that you found very successful.

Yeah, one thing that I've been super excited about at Attitude is that our team is constantly testing and rolling out new tests, new trials, new platforms almost all the time. And if we don't see success in it, then, oh well, we learned and we can shut it off really quickly. But that's one of the great things about us having an in house team is we're able to put something up. Like we decided, what was it, the Monday of our sale this last week, that we wanted to launch Pinterest for Cyber Week. And we were able to get that up and running within the day to say, hey, you know what, we should show up there. We should show up on Pinterest for Cyber Week. Let's do it. And we're able to accomplish that.

It was really great for sale promotions, so we were really excited to see that performance come through for listeners. Our performance metrics are pretty straightforward. It's like at the end of the day, we want to hit an X dollar CPO goal. We're looking at pure cost per order. If it hits that super successful, we're good to go. We can spend more money there. So it's a very straightforward process for us to launch something and see how it performs if we have that direct Attribution coming in. So Pinterest was one that was really fun and seemingly successful.

So we're going to continue testing on it for hopefully Evergreen. And then if not, maybe it's a promotional channel for us that during these influx of weeks to run ad spend there. I think that's something that people don't do. A lot of you either have a winning channel or like a losing channel. You don't turn things on and off that much. But if your campaigns are already set up and you just update new copy and you just let it run for promotions and it works for you, why not? You're taking a little bit of time to update. So we've been testing into that to see whether or not that's performing for us. We're trying out a few other channels in a similar aspect, but other things that have worked well for us is podcasts, surprisingly, and direct mail.

We have a kind of evergreen direct mail campaign that goes on being really mindful of how much we mail out. We do not just spam people. That's one of our biggest concerns. There's a lot of industry players that send out huge catalogs and huge print mailers and we don't want to be one of those. So we're very mindful of what we send out and who we send it out to. But we've seen a lot of success there as just like a reminder of like, this is who we are, please come back to purchase from us. And that always works well. And then podcast.

Podcast has been a great one since you have people have that personal connection to it. You have someone directly talking about how much they love the sheets. And when you have someone saying that this is similar to us having any sort of UGC content, I feel like it's so amazing to have someone having almost like a conversation with you about how amazing a product is that it's definitely going to get people to purchase. Like people love word of mouth and word of mouth has expanded that it is no longer just like friends and family. I heard about this on TikTok. I heard about this organically from whatever platform. I maybe heard about this on my favorite podcast. So having us in the podcast space has been amazing.

It is very hard to track podcasts and knowing podcast performance. I love how you guys are nodding because every time I bring up us doing well on podcast, the next question is how do you know?

I was going to ask something along those lines which was not necessarily how do you know, but how do you vet the right partner and how do you know that this is going to be the right partner? Because 3% of podcasts retain most people that start a podcast drop off. It's sort of like it's really hard to find good podcasts that have loyal audiences that haven't just spent on ads to acquire their audiences, to vet the numbers, to know they're real. So what is your process for vetting a podcast partner?

It's a great question.

So all our listeners who are looking to sponsor can then run this process on us?

Absolutely. We work with a variety of, I guess like platforms and networks that will help coordinate with us. So there's a few platforms that are out there that are self serve for you to dive into the podcast yourself. I think Red Circle and Gumball are the two that I know of that you can kind of dive in yourself and be like, I want to find a podcast that talks about this or has this type of audience and then you can book directly through those platforms. So it's almost like a nice little self serve platform that has been really fun for us to dive into testing because most of the podcasts on those platforms have smaller audiences and smaller fees. So you're talking about sometimes like fifty dollars to three hundred dollars for an ad read. So that's great because we normally want to have the host read ads. That is what we go for.

We don't want our own ad on it. We don't want this dynamically inserted, whatever, just pure script read. We want the host to talk about us. So that's easy for us to test into when we're using these platforms. From that we take what we've learned from what is successful, what genres, audiences, that kind of stuff. We scale that up with some of these networks. We've gotten really lucky with some great networks being like, I'll give you guys an example because this isn't like any sort of private knowledge, but we are a betting brand. Obviously a lot of females love us.

Women primarily purchase home products and home goods. So we target normally a female audience. And one of the audiences that works well is all the women out there watching The Bachelor. So we have been on Bachelor podcasts before that just drive so much revenue and it's so fun to see like, oh, we'll test out this audience, we'll test out this and here's this Bachelor podcast, let's work with them and it just blows up. So it's really fun to kind of get that insight and that detail. That being said to kind of like your earlier point, there's a ton of Bachelor related podcasts out there and a handful of them haven't worked for us. And it's an interesting conversation of their audience probably isn't fully invested. Maybe they're listening because they like their perspective, but maybe they don't actually really like or trust the host that they're not going to go out and purchase a product that they recommended or for whatever reason it doesn't resonate with them.

And obviously when we're talking about host Reads, some people have more of a personal spin on it than other hosts and just have a really good story to add to drive that purchase and that compelling argument there. So podcast is forever a test and learn because sometimes you'll be on a podcast for, let's say you have a six month long partnership and it'll just start to tank and you need to be aware of that, of like when did you tap out that audience? Have they heard about you enough that they're not getting new listeners in? And that's it, you need to move on. That's a hard conversation to have, but it's something that you need to be aware of when you're working with these podcast hosts. So I love podcasts. I think it's so much fun to dive into, but I feel like every time I report on it, I'm just like, well, here is all of the stuff that didn't work and then here are the three things that I found that did work. So we're going to continue with these and then here's the more other things that we're going to test. So it's a really interesting one to get into. But that is really a marketing, I think, opportunity for businesses that have a little bit more flexibility in their budget because I do think that it gets pretty expensive and the losses are pretty big because sometimes you just won't resonate with the audience and you're just out of luck for everything that you signed up for.

So when you report what doesn't work right and you see the total amount of what didn't work, what did work is interesting, but it could be a lower like it's not big enough of a return. It could actually overall have been a loss. What are you looking for, what's your target, what's your goal, what's the breakthrough that you're trying to have? Just to have more success between the batch of Next campaigns that you try?

Yeah, that's really what it comes down to is let's say I've started testing on like 30 podcasts. I want to funnel that down to five that are evergreen or seven that are evergreen that we know are super successful, and three that we're experimenting with every month. When you first start out with podcasts, I feel like you just pick something and you're throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks. You're really hoping to see something come out of it. And I think that it really depends on your data set up too, of how do you know what you're tracking. Obviously, our podcast hosts have their own specific code, but what we've also done is set up their own specific landing page. And I would prefer them to drive traffic to a landing page because once they get to that landing page, I can redirect them and add utms to it and track what they do on the website and when they come back, too. Because now we've had that cookie that's in our data platform, so we can see that attribution.

So I've been encouraging our hosts to say like, go to editude.com D to CPOD, whatever it may be, and we have that data moving forward so I can keep track of exactly what those users do, even if they purchase with a different discount code. So that has been really fun for me to set up. We also have Pod sites. Pod sites is really great to get some audience data if you're interested in that. And then you have your post purchase survey, which everyone thinks is super archaic but I love. But the post purchase survey at the end of each month is my source of truth. How many people did they say that they remember us because of a podcast? That is what I want to keep track of. And normally we know that that's going to be like a little inflated because the numbers can be all over the board.

But I have a different KPI set up for podcasts. So for, let's say, everything else, we're looking for a two X row as maybe for podcasts it's 3.2 looking at post purchase survey data. And we look at that maybe over like a three month period. So I'm taking all of our podcasts and really generalizing things and using the data of the website, the promo codes, to make sure that the actual podcasts themselves are doing well, but really looking at it as a holistic channel and seeing that improvement month over month. And I want to scale spend and make sure that I'm hitting that ROAS goal. So I'm adding more Podcasts. I'm testing out things, but I would love to get to the point where I'm like, these are my go to podcasts and we have a few of them but say like, these are my ten go to, I want to be there every month. I know that these are super successful and then testing and having like 30% testing with similar podcasts or similar audiences throughout the month.

I love testing, I love trying new things, so I definitely want to keep that going. But it's always a test and learn with podcasts to continue to grow it.

Yeah, but even what you were saying, Chelsea, just going back to before about intention and thinking about audiences and how they line up with the podcast, there's so many different components. You have audience size, how engaged they are with the host, even the way the hosts present the product. There's a difference between a pre roll ad, mid roll ad versus organic conversation where they're just talking about it and they bring it up versus the link that's in the bio. So there's so many different touch points, but I think a smart marketer will identify where there's kind of an arbitrage opportunity, where you have strong intent, strong buyer, overlap, and like, oh, this is an opportunity for me to market here. Because if I'm just looking at it from a numbers perspective, maybe I won't see it the same way. But now because I know that people who like The Bachelor, they're already in our demographic, they're already our buyer, we've already filtered for that. So now there's going to be a bunch we're going to hear, there's going to be a bunch we're going to be able to get attribution for. And on top of that, we'll probably get lift that we're not even reading because maybe they didn't go to your site, whatever the backlink or the landing page you build for them is.

So I think just having that perspective in mind and then going broad to start and then understanding who your winners are and doubling down there, I think that's a great way for podcasts. Are there any other channels? I know we've talked Pinterest, we've talked Google, we've talked Facebook, we've talked Podcasts. Now are there any other channels that you look to for performance or are those the primary ones?

You're making me second guess myself here. I'm like, what are we trust?

Do you guys do know anything? Review space? Like trust pilot. I don't know if those platforms have wait, no. Trust Pilot is for software, right?

What is the one for no Trust for consumer brands?

I think we currently use Yappo for all of our reviews and then link that through to Google and those search platforms that everyone can see our reviews and then make our reviews live on our site interestingly. I think that going back to kind of the word of mouth kind of point in conversation. We've been using reviews a lot and highlighting what people have said about us because I think that at the end of the day, that's what everyone's looking for. Especially if they're going to invest any sort of money in something, they want to know that it's good. So reviews are a big part of our role, mostly on the retention side, to make sure that we're bringing those in and then also pushing them out.

Know, that just actually sparked a thought blended with Blaine's question of are you doing anything else in performance marketing? Is there anything that you think is missing in the space? Is there anything that's missing in the space? Whether it's reviews or Attribution or podcasting stuff, what do you think is missing that would enable you to ramp up your spend more?

I would love a one size fits all data platform. I really wish that there was someone that came through and just removed the need for everything else because I think some companies have tried, but you have these things that are here's our data Attribution platform for Paid. Here's all of the platforms that you work on for Paid as well of their data. You have Shopify, you have Ga and you have CDP platforms, and then you have your Ops Warehouse data. And it's just like there's a lot and we have looked into numerous options of like, what do we want to bring on, what data points are we missing, what are the next steps? And every time I think to myself, I'm like, I wish that Shopify just had their whole system be better than Ga, connect with all of the Paid platforms, have that Attribution, and also connect with our Ops Warehouse data that we would see all of that, like shipping details, but it's just like we don't have that. And that's like the one thing that I hate because you spend so much money on these data platforms. Like, we spend so much money on an Attribution platform, spend so much money on a CDP platform, you're spending money on Shopify. If you have NetSuite, you're spending money there and it just really adds up.

And I think that that's kind of a limiting factor for a lot of brands if you have all these platform fees that you don't really take an account for. And I know I kind of went off on a tangent, but that's what I would like. I would want a one stop shop for literally everything data.

I think that has to be in Shopify, right? Because that's your storefront that has all your customer data and that's where the CDP layer starts. So obviously there's different blocker, maybe there's a whole bunch of different platforms, but hopefully that's something that they really continue to lean in and build out. I know they're building a bunch of tooling in that space, but hopefully they develop it faster because, yeah, I think as a merchant you don't have I.

Think as a smaller brand, you can get away with Shopify. I think it has enough information in it that has, like you said, that customer information and kind of, like, some of the touch points, but for the most part, no. But even bigger brands bring on more and more platforms, and it's just like, Holy cow. At the end of the day, how many platforms are you checking to make sure that your data is good with?

The thing for me, if I look at it from a DTC operator lens, the challenge I see with the platform building it is that then you're again limited to that platform. Like, if I'm selling on Amazon, if I'm selling on Shopify, Google Shopping, I want to see all that. I want it to integrate, even potentially with my credit card, even with my banking system, with my financial model, with the Ops. Just something that is not invested so much into one platform. Almost like Zapier ish for just all the data. Like, even small businesses like QuickBooks, it can integrate with whatever. It's just surprising that that's not out there. I'm sure it's probably hard to pull off and then who can use it, too? You're good with data.

You can really leverage it and use it. But then again, the other side is like, if there's not that person in the company that really understands data, it's likely not to get adopted.

Yeah. And if there is a platform out there, please find me and email me and tell me what it is, because I would love to know. I love having things consolidated, but it's just so hard. Like, you can so heavily deep dive into customer information. So it's like, that's why we have CDP platforms. Like, you can get really detailed about Attribution. That's why we have Attribution platforms. So I would love to have all of that one space.

We actually are currently sponsored by Peel Insights, which is a data platform for DDC brands, so feel free to check them out. And they also actually have the Pod link, so we're two steps ahead there for the discount.

Love it. Love it. I'll have to check them out and I'll use your link.

Yeah. Well, I have one more question remaining, and Blaine, I'll pass it over to you, but what has been your biggest breakthrough in your career?

That's a good one. I think allowing myself to be flexible and be open to new opportunities has really opened a lot for me because I was at some larger companies where things can get really siloed. You can get really stuck in your role and being like, this is my job description, and I'm not doing anything else other than that. So for me to kind of be vocal about, I'm ready to try anything, I would love to help the company move forward. And just having the, I guess, vision behind, I want to help the company grow, let me know how I can do that has put me into numerous situations where I was part of the brand team at Legal Zoom, which was fantastic, but we had a whole new rebranding that went on. And I was one of the co chairs of the Brand Council. I work in performance marketing. I was driving SEM traffic, that's what I was doing.

That was my job description at Legal Zoom. But I had the conversation with my boss of like, I just want to do anything. Where do you need me? Where does the company need me? And it somehow came up and I honestly don't know how that I really like brand and branding and they were like, let's put you here, let's let you take this on and see what you can do with it. What do you want to do? And let's drive the company forward with that. And that was such a fun experience that then I started opening myself up to more and more things, which has really allowed me to take off and grow in my career and where I'm at now. I report directly to our two co founders, Kat and Phoebe, who are fantastic. And it's been really great to have that kind of, like, open mindset because they can come to me for anything. They're like, hey, we heard about this.

We got this cold call email. We have a friend that does this. What do you think? And then allowing myself to be open to figure out whether or not that's something that we want to take on, is it outside my job scope? Sometimes it is. And just being aware of what can you take on, what you want to take on and what's going to help the company grow has really helped me have a clean vision of like, I'm going to work every day to help the company grow. I'm not going to work every day because I do SEM on Google, because that will silo you and strictly place you in your own little bubble. And I promise you, you will not grow as a person in your career. But having just that open mindset of like, oh, is this going to help the company? Let's try it, let's see what happens, let's see who I need to coordinate with and work with, has opened up so many doors and so many opportunities for me. And marketing is all about testing and learning, so why not, I guess, do the same thing with your career and learn what you're good at, learn about what you want to do and grow from there.

And it's been fantastic, but just have an open mindset.

That's amazing. I think it's so important to just be open to different opportunities and not be afraid to step outside your comfort zone. I think it helps you grow and when you're able to pull traits from different disciplines and different experiences, it just makes you better at whatever your role. Ultimately. My last question isn't as profound as that one, Ramon, but I was just wondering, because you guys are working with so many different platforms, as a performance marketer, you're constantly having to source creative to launch and create your ads with. So how do you create and how do you launch and deploy creative across the brand?

That's a great question and something that we're diving more and more into as we're scaling across these different channels and different platforms because we're finding obviously like what is working on Facebook won't work on Pinterest, what works on Instagram Reels won't work on TikTok. So you need to have all of these different kinds of creative and it is so difficult to ask that of your creative team. So we do have two in house creatives that work full time on our marketing assets, really any business assets that we have, including our website. And they are fantastic about being open minded of what do we want to test, what are the best practices here? And we additionally supplement that with a few different agencies. So we obviously want UGC content, we want influencers to talk about us. So they are helping with outsourcing that and coordinating with those teams to make sure that we get that kind of content. There's so many when you have a product itself, there's so many photo shoots that you got to coordinate too, which I never thought of before. I was in this role of like oh my gosh, so much of their role and job is also making sure that they have the content to create the content for ads.

So it's a lot on them. But what we normally do, we have a pretty heavily used Asana. So shout out to Asana. I feel like everyone has to have some sort of tracking platform or project management platform. Really helps us with clarifying the conversation of what are we requesting and when does it need to be Dubai? And to make things more complicated, I am in California, my other paid performance manager, she is also in California. Our creative team is in Australia. So we have maybe three or 4 hours overlap with our creative team. So it's not like I can just call them up on Slack and say hey, this is the kind of creative that I want, this is the content that I want.

Because our time together is very short and very valuable. So we do a lot of briefs of coordinating what is the thing that we want, put it together in Asana and have us coordinate that through the platform. And now as we're trying to scale some of these fun new platforms for us, like doing the same thing with agencies, I think agencies are fantastic for creative to help supplement what you're doing in house, but also have your creative team manage that conversation so your brand doesn't start to get broken up. Because what can really quickly happen is you have all of these, I guess, inputs of new content and you don't have that being funneled into a brand vision and a brand oversight and then all of a sudden. No one knows what your brand is.

I think you pitch trend better than I can my own business. So we'll also have a coupon code for that. So this didn't turn into a shilling products episode, but everyone loves coupon codes. That's exactly what we do. And I think our entire listener base is ecommerce founders. So whatever tools, whatever anyone knows that's out there that might be new, that might be flying under the radar, we want to amplify that. It can transform operations for businesses when you have leverage of these tools.

Yeah, 100%.

Cool. Well, Chelsea, thank you so much for coming on the Pod with us. And just before we let you jump, want you to give some shout outs. So where can our listeners connect with you either personally? Are you on LinkedIn, Twitter, anything like that? And where can they find more about attitude?

Yeah, so you can find more about attitude. Going to attitude. It's E-T-T-I-T-U-D-E. Like eco. Attitude is really what it stands for. So find us. Go check out our bedding products. We have an amazing waffle bathrobe that I have literally been living in.

And I really should have showed up to the podcast wearing it, to be honest, because it's so cozy and I work from home, so why not? But yes, please go check out editude.com. If you want to talk to me, you can email me at chelsea@editude.com or you can find me on LinkedIn. I think it's just Chelsea Schultz, and that's S-C-H-U-L-Z-I know my name is kind of hard to spell, but it was really lovely being on the podcast. I love talking about marketing, so please feel free to cold call, email me, hit me up if you want someone to talk through things. I love coffee, chats, and hangouts and really learn from other people. That's why I love the podcast of having these conversations, so people can feel like they're doing the right thing and getting those tips from other people doing the same thing. So all very fantastic and thank you guys again for having me.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Chelsea.

Thank you, Chelsea. Bye.