Ops Cast
Ops Cast, by MarketingOps.com, is a podcast for Marketing Operations Pros by Marketing Ops Pros. Hosted by Michael Hartmann, Mike Rizzo & Naomi Liu
Ops Cast
Mapping the Customer Journey: B2C Lessons for B2B Teams with Pradeep Manivannan
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In this episode of OpsCast, hosted by Michael Hartmann and powered by MarketingOps.com, we’re joined by Pradeep Manivannan, Martech Consultant at Academy Sports & Outdoors. Pradeep brings extensive experience from roles at eBay, Salesforce, and Nordstrom, offering a unique perspective on connecting data, building journey-based experiences, and aligning marketing operations across channels.
Pradeep explains how to map customer journeys effectively, leverage segmentation, and implement omnichannel strategies that work in both B2C and B2B environments. He shares lessons learned from consumer-focused marketing and how B2B teams can apply them to drive better engagement and measurable results.
In this episode, you’ll learn
- How to design seamless customer journeys from scratch
- The role of data integration across channels in marketing success
- Segmentation strategies that improve targeting and personalization
- What B2B teams can learn from consumer-focused marketing approaches
This episode is perfect for marketing, RevOps, and growth professionals looking to improve customer experience and operational efficiency. Tune in to hear Pradeep’s actionable insights on building journey-based marketing strategies.
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Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOpscom, powered by all the MoPros out there. I'm your host, michael Hartman, flying solo today. Today, we're going to be doing something a little different. We're going to be exploring how customer journey mapping, segmentation and omni-channel strategy comes to life, with lessons pulled from both B2C and B2B worlds. As you know, we tend to get a lot of B to B examples, so I'm excited to get some B to C examples here. So joining me today is my guest, pradeep Manavanan, martech consultant at Academy Sports and Outdoors. Among other things, he's held roles at eBay, salesforce and Nordstrom and brings a unique perspective that blends deep technical experience with strategic marketing operations. We're going to dive into what it really takes to build journey-based experiences from scratch, how to connect data across channels and what B2B teams can learn from consumer-focused environments. So, Pradeep, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thanks, michael. Thanks for that introduction. That's really helpful. So, yeah, so just to let me introduce myself, or let me give some more context here about my experience and then I'll directly dive into the actual questions. Yeah, sure, so by this time you guys know my name, pradeep Maniwandan. So currently I'm a MarTech architect, slash consultant at Academy Sports and Outdoors.
Speaker 2:But, as Michael said, like I, I used to work at Nordstrom, which is a very luxury retailer here in Seattle Washington, and then eBay Salesforce, mostly providing B2C kind of solutions for all of our clients. So during my Salesforce days I used to be a market tech solutions architect for Microsoft and Boeing for the World here in Seattle Washington, world here at Seattle Washington. And then, prior to that, I was at eBay, where it was like I was in the B2B business but we were even doing some consultations or consultative service for B2C as well. So that was my eBay experience. But prior to that I was at Cisco and doing consulting at Tata Consultancy Services and that's how I built my foundational experience. And then Cisco is the one which led me to dive into the smart tech stuff and all those kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:So currently, post Nordstrom, I thought let me try to get into the startup world and do something. And then I got into the healthcare startup. I was at Lumanity it's a private equity-based startup in New York. It's a private equity-based startup in New York and we were trying to work with all the pharmaceutical companies, like App-V, aweos, and then try to build an omni-channel system not just a one-term solution to run a very scalable customer journey campaign for all the HCPs, health care professionals and doctors.
Speaker 2:So I have a mix of B2C and B2B, but, as Michael said, at the end of the day it's just customers. I'm going to get into those details, but right now it's for Academy Sports and Autos. I'm working for a very interesting project there where they are trying to integrate all the point of sale and digital to the omni-channel system and then we are going to run a very kind of cross-journal journeys across mobile and email and several other digital channels as well. So that's, I just added it. So it's interesting so far.
Speaker 1:Yeah, got it. Yeah, well, we were talking before we started recording that, because you thought I might not be aware of Academy, but they're well-known here down in Texas. It is that time of year when they are extremely busy. You've got football season and hunting season all happening at one time. They get people doing both.
Speaker 2:Yes, great Agreed. They are pretty famous down south. Their headquarters is in Katy, texas. I usually travel there. I was there until last week, so I'm going to travel next week as well. The leadership is great and they have close to 310 stores or something around down south, to Charlotte, pittsburgh, pennsylvania, new Jersey, around that area, so there is less penetration in the West Coast, but they are aiming for a huge growth in the next one or two years.
Speaker 1:They are doing a lot of interesting stuff there. So for our listeners who are not familiar where Katy Texas is, it's a Houston suburb, houston yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'm in Dallas but very familiar with them, All right. Well, you said you've worked with a lot of those B2B and B2C kinds of organizations. Why don't we start with this, Like, when are you? Like you said, you know customers are customers kind of, and I tend to generally agree. But what do you see as some of the major similarities and differences between those two environments, especially when it comes to how you approach marketing operations?
Speaker 2:Sure, that's a good question. So let me answer this one by one. I think I'm going to talk about the similarities first and then the differences, and I'm going to talk about the recent trends happening in the marketing operations side. Similarities, as you said like in the sense, I think one thing is whether it's B2B or B2C, the company is interested in knowing who the customer is, kyc, know your customer, and then they just want to make sure the customer is in safe hands and then they just want to make sure the whole customer journey is all plotted and then make sure each of these touch points whether it's B2B or whether it's an healthcare side of the business or normal Microsoft kind of enterprise software kind of a business Microsoft is interesting. It's more B2B and B2C combined. So they just want to make sure each of these touch points are connected and there is a marketing, coherent marketing messages happening between all these touch points. So that's one similarity for sure. The other similarity is I'm seeing in recent times, at least for the past three, four years, more and more companies, especially the leadership C-suite. They are trying to invest more on the marketing technology and marketing operation side. But there's always this confusion of hey, is it just creative madman kind of a world, or is it just creative madman kind of a world? Or is it just art and science combined kind of the world right now? So I think it's smart tech. As the name says, it's both technology and marketing combined, so it's more art and science combined now. That's one thing, and then leadership is trying to understand hey, this is not mundane campaign operations or something. There is a strategic element there and whether it's B2B or B2C, I see that as a common element and that's something happening both in the B2B and B2C world as well. I think that's on the similarity side.
Speaker 2:On the difference side, b2c one clear thing as I come from as a, as a, you know I started as a campaign operations person. So for b2b, every single customer is precious and they are like the for an healthcare side of the business. If you're losing one doctor, you might lose close to at least 500k to 600k revenue, whether it's a cancer away of pharmaceuticals, for example, like their list is like 10,000 or 15,000 doctors. But if you lose one doctor for some reason, because of the email fatigue or some sort of a thing, you lose the doctor and then you lose the revenue. So B2B is very sensitive in that case.
Speaker 2:B2c for example, nordstrom we used to run multiple campaigns, bogo and all those kinds of stuff flash sales, merchandising sales, errand sales and all those kind of stuff flash sales, merchandising sales, errand sales and all those kind of stuff even if a customer opts out, there is there. There is not that much sensitivity towards, uh, the b2c thing. But b2c is like they want to tap into how the real life customer behaves, gen z's and gen x and all these different segments at the top level, and then like exclusively for men, women's, fashion, watches and all these subcategories involved as well. So B2C is even more deeper. And then they go to the actual tail end and make sure that the customers are there and then we are trying to bring them to the digital ecosystem or offline platform or brick and mortar or whatever, and they just want to have this omni-channel experience, because that's one portion as well. So that's the difference. And B2B there was always this budgeting discussion there. Banned those days. Budget.
Speaker 1:Oh, right, yeah, okay, Like the client or customer budget. Correct, correct customer budget.
Speaker 2:And then let's say, if you're trying to sell enterprise software or something like that, you've got to talk to VP of sales and there's the usual nurturing element. And then there are the users who are actually using the software or product or what whatsoever. And then we need we may need to just have a one-on-one sales calls or something like that to get to the platform as well. That's all in the sales off side. But marketing's job is to make sure from the top down hey, are we trying to have a right message at the b2b platform? The value, prop and everything is clearly communicated so that our enterprise software users can come to our platform and get a one-stop shop answers for all these questions. So that's the difference in the b2b.
Speaker 2:But trying these two things, what I'm seeing is there are more and more marketing operations, technology person people are hired in the company, for example, even Academy Sports. They're like hey, we are not just CDP. They used to call themselves as a CDP team. Now they're like no, we are a MarTech team. They're trying to advertise themselves or trying to propagate that message so that we are not just CDP. Having a treasured data and tying the stitching, the data ID resolution, we are doing more than that. We are trying to connect to marketers and trying to promote this and display the attributes. We are going to work with the SMS partners, list track and all these several other partners, the digital partners too and then making sure that, hey, our decentralized team is going to help you for any sort of martech needs, whether it's pure creativity-based landing page updates or anything of that sort, or the actual data reports or any sort of fanatical reports as well.
Speaker 2:So that's, something happening in the industry for sure.
Speaker 1:So it's interesting to me. One of the first points you talked about essentially is one that I see is like the scale, right, so the big difference, one of the biggest differences. Obviously, like the volume of stuff, right, and B2B tends to be relatively small compared to B2C and it's more complicated, right, the relationships, the connection points. There's a somewhat of a similarity between, like buying, complicated, right the relationships, the connection points. There's somewhat of a similarity between buying groups on the B2B side versus householding in the B2C side, right, but in general I think B2C is simpler from that standpoint. There's a little more of a direct tie to purchases. I know it's not completely direct, I mean maybe more so with e-commerce is. I know it's not completely direct, I mean maybe more so with e-commerce, but I think it's interesting that maybe I'm just sort of hitting on it.
Speaker 1:I liked your point about, in the B2B world, losing one potential prospect. There's a pretty significant cost or potential revenue loss that is associated with that. It's an interesting way of thinking about it. It hadn't really occurred to me. The other one, which is toward the end, there it feels like and I think it picked it up because you said that team at Academy had initially talked about themselves as a CDP team, right, which is basically a technology-first mindset, which means like, are they? I would assume then that is where they kind of come from, where they like embedded in it more so, which would make sense with the volumes of data that come with B2C stuff. I am sure, like it's a heavy technology, uh, storage, right, moving data, around, processing it, right, it's. It's much more significant there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so let me put it this way. So I think that's a very great question. So an academy? So MarTech is still under the technology umbrella. So Nordstrom had this debate.
Speaker 2:Before I joined Nordstrom, martech was under the marketing umbrella and then they came to know that, hey, this is not just running campaigns and creating HTMLs and anything of that sort. We are trying to talk to our marketing operations team plus the actual data science team and centralized content merchandising to several other teams, to our marketing operations team plus the actual data science team and centralized creative sorry content merchandising to several other teams. And then we were trying to, uh, like I think at dot storm there are like close to 125 to 150 attributes from data science at a very deeper level to know the customer so that we can go to the salesforce or any ecosystem to send a campaign. So they slowly move the mart tech to the technology umbrella. The similar thing is happening in the academy sports to your question. It's on the technology side, but they don't want to restrict themselves to just CDP assets. They just want to make sure that, hey, we are more than CDP. We are trying to do the digital onboarding at the same time trying to integrate to the actual real-time prescreening and all these kind of stuff with our third-party vendors and all those kind of stuff too. So just for an example here so Academy Sports, let's say, this is like Amazoncom, so if you're going and trying to buy something online or offline, they just want to make sure their customers are coming to the platform. They're getting some Academy-specific credit cards and there is a pre-approval, pre-screening checks and all these things are happening. Sure, okay, there are more customers coming to the platform and there is a loyalty base. They are trying to grow up.
Speaker 2:So what I'm seeing there is uh, the technology is there, but there is. There is this constant um combination of both. Hey, marketing is trying to tap into this technology side. Plus, they are like hey, we will do more than that. We are trying to do proof of concept on several other platforms, not just email or push SMS or several other platforms as well. So what I'm seeing is it's a combination of both uh, technology, plus there are a lot of innovative element happening there, and that's the reason it is like it's no longer on the marketing side. They are trying to. Hey, we are trying to, we are going to go into this one mail champ or mobile link and all these things. So now we have become a one-stop shop there. So that's the culture where it's very open-minded and trying to do this innovative stuff there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I don't know that. I mean I probably have a tendency to lean towards wanting more control over it, tied to the marketing right and the experimentation and all that at the same time. I think it almost doesn't matter if you've got the right structure. It's kind of like the decision about where, where do BDRs roll up into right, do they roll up to a marketing function or a sales function? And it kind of depends on where the best person is to manage that team. Who has the best experience and best chance of making them successful.
Speaker 1:I think the technology for marketing kind of probably fits in the same thing. Right, if you've got a strong IT team. And I mean just knowing what I know and it's a little bit old about the technology that is required for the volumes of data that are out there with consumer stuff, right, it's just it's huge Right, and just managing that is is a heavy technology one, as opposed to you know what you do for B2B standpoint, which has a lot of data but not even close. B2b standpoint, which has a lot of data but not even close. So I want to get into a little bit more. I mean you've sort of touched on this and I think we talked about it in the context of Nordstrom when you were there when we first talked. But you've done work where you've done customer journey mapping and then segmentation kind of related to that.
Speaker 1:Maybe two parts right parts, right one. Maybe you could do it in the context of the nordstrom one. But, like, what are some of the things that, um, you know, why do you think that's important for marketers and maybe marketing ops teams to be focused on and what do they like? What are some of the things that maybe cause them to not do it? Well, I mean, I I suspect a lot of people say they want to do custom journey mapping and they do something that is maybe not as useful as it could be. I think the same thing happens with personas, because there's so many different meanings of what that is. I agree, yeah.
Speaker 2:So let me try to synthesize this. So I think the question is why is customer journey important? And how is MarTech Maroff's team is going to help you to design a campaign or to design an omnichannel kind of a journey for a customer coming into this retailer ecosystem that's now stronger than Academy Sports. Yeah, so to the first thing, to the's Nordstrom or Academy Sports, right? Yeah, so to the first thing. Like to the first point, like why is customer journey important? So I'm going to come up with an example instead of vague explanation. So at Nordstrom, there are like close to 35 to 45 million or something like that, nordstrom rack and Nordstrom full price active customers I'm saying just active customers, so they are most of the customers at Nordstrom Rack and Nordstrom Full Price. Act to customers. I'm saying just act to customers, so they are most of the customers at Nordstrom have these different tiers called ambassadors, icon influencer and member for all the customers there. So ambassadors are the ones who create all these. They are the ones who generate more revenue to the Nordstrom ecosystem, whether it's digital or brick and mortar, and icons fall next. Now what happens is Nordstrom ecosystem, whether it's digital or brick-and-mortar, and icons fall next. Now what happens is.
Speaker 2:Nordstrom has this interesting customer option where they can purchase a Nordstrom credit card and if you purchase a Nordstrom credit card, you can shop at Nordstrom stores and they get extra discount. And you can like a Costco credit card. You can shop at any other place as well, so Nordstrom credit card customers can shop at any other place as well. So non-strong credit card customers have an option or a luxury to get into the preview of all the early sales and anniversary sales, thanksgiving sales. They get a privilege, they get this red carpet kind of a privilege where they can access this not strong thing and then they get a lot of discounts. Plus, there is a special treatment there, and not strong is famous for customer experience. It's the one absolutely yeah sure, right.
Speaker 2:So that means that. So the customer journey, the puzzle we were trying to solve, there was, I think, some of the customers who were purchasing not strong credit card. There is an active churn happening every two, three months. They're just signing up, they, they, they use the credit for for a month or so and then they are no longer seeing any values and they are like trying to, you know, trying to call the customer support and they're trying to, um, disconnect the credit card or, you know, just disable it. So now that there is a loss, there is a churn happening and then we just want to make sure that we are going to fix that leaky bucket there, leaks there. That's one thing. And then second thing is we just want to make sure that our loyalty platform or loyalty customers sorry, loyalty customer base is growing and then that's going to help the Nordstrom in general, because Nordstrom got into the different kind of a business hand business as well, nordstrom merchandising kind of a platform where Nike shoes can be applied to the Nordstrom platform as well. That's a kind of a different channel, different experimental approach they tried. So you just want to make sure all these top tier customers are into this path.
Speaker 2:So to your question here now earlier the project like before I joined RN and the project before that the before image was we didn't have any idea about these credit card customers. Why the churn is happening? Because this was all managed in a different department and this is all managed from a different system called Chase and Fiserv and all these kind of red financials and all kinds of systems. Now Nordstrom at the central they're like hey, whether it's Nordstrom Rack or full price, I'm going to see how can I bring this to the actual centralized ecosystem and kind of tie it up to the actual campaign we have here so that we can reduce the churn. I still remember the numbers. I think 29 percentage of the customers do disable the credit card within three months or so. And then our vp. They were like they came up with this interesting demand impact number which is like for every month if you tap into this customer base, at least one or two percentage from this 29% slowly, like I think within one or two years, they found out like close to 300 to 400K EBIT just for a month or so. So there is a huge potential here for this credit card customers because Nordstrom had this ambitious plan to tie all these digital offline stores and then they just want to make sure credit card customers get this privilege too. So think, in that case, to your question.
Speaker 2:Tying back to the original question, we didn't have any idea. It was a totally black box to us. Why are these customers getting churned and what's happening there? So we just want to make sure we are building the centralized ecosystem, not running a usual welcome journey or a warm-up journey. We just want to make sure. Hey, these are some of the privileges we have here. These are the early preview access to the Nordstrom platform and there is the actual tailoring shop available in Nordstrom where you can go and tap into.
Speaker 2:So we were trying to treat them in a different way. At the same time, we were trying to mix them with other kind of customer segments and tap into those kind of attributes and then run a very personalized, hyper personalized campaign there. That's, I think, in from that standpoint, customer journey is very important. We can, so that way we can understand how the customer and the day in the life is going to come into this ecosystem and what are the attributes we can tap into for journeys first. One second thing is we have all these system. Our vp always says that salesforce I think, uh, it was 12 million dollars for three years or something like that. That was a contractual value or the amount we used to pay for salesforce. So we just know that we tap into that value and then get these customers and then making sure the marketing message our systems are going to enable them and then so they are the customer life cycle value. The cltv number is stronger enough for these kind of newer customers so sure, yeah, yeah, there needs to be a financial type.
Speaker 1:So I've still I guess I'm missing the a little bit. So I get right, you were trying to, if I, if I summarize it a little bit you were were trying to identify what was the journey for those who eventually became credit card customers. And then why did the ones that churned quickly? Why did they churn quickly, right? So did you go through a process of mapping out that journey? Is that what you did, to try to identify where those leaks were happening, as you said?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now what happens is whenever a customer buys a credit card, now what happens is for the first two or three weeks there are some discounts given to the customer and after a month or so it becomes dried up and then they are like hey, you know, I'm not seeing any values out of this credit card stuff, so I'm going to disconnect or disable that. That's one thing. And then how do we find out all these stuff through the third party? That's a good question. Sorry, I missed that part.
Speaker 2:So from Pfizer and Chase there are two different credit systems. We were trying to tap into all those data and then store them with the credit card data browsing platform there. So we were trying to get into those kind of platform and then the data attributes, trying to see hey, when is this credit card customer signed up? Is there a real-time pre-screen or all those things showed up. If that is the case, why there is a delay? Why did the customer again call within 15 or 20 days, so that it's a zero percentage, one zero percentage interest rate and all those kind of stuff?
Speaker 2:We were trying to have a survey for all those kind of dropped customers and then trying to tap into those values, unstructured data, and then get into this Nordstrom ecosystem to make sure that we are running some filters on top of those kind of survey data so that we can run an omnichannel journey based on that. So, that being said, I think to your question. I think we were trying to get this data from survey through third-party system and everything through Fiserv and Chase and then tying it up with the actual purchase data and transactional data and centralized system.
Speaker 1:Okay. So what did you end up doing? Did you build out some new like change something about how that onboarding and posts? You called it a purchase but like post sign up, I guess for the card. How that happened.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's a good point. So I think what we were trying to do is this was treated pretty independently, michael, like the Nordstrom credit card customers. They were not into this ecosystem, so Nordstrom had this terminology called nordic club for all the loyalty customers yeah.
Speaker 2:So they are like hey, you know, first thing I'm going to try is this is again a combination of business, both more of strategic decisions. So they just want to make sure that, by default, if you're buying a credit card, you're going to participate at the nordic club. That's one thing. And then there was a welcome journey that was going in, and then there was another. As part of the welcome journey, we didn't want to do just a mundane a welcome to this Nordstrom platform because it's a Nordstrom retailer thing and just 15-person sale or something like that. We just want to educate them and give them several other privileges, like hey, you get an early access to the anniversary sale and the account privileges and all those kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:So, in a nutshell, we were running a 30-day customer journey, email and push combined. This was developed in Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder. So I was the one who was working with the credit card Nordstrom credit product managers and then the actual marketing strategy directors and leadership here and then the content team in terms of how can we make sure that the the actual credit product plus the content content is king these days plus the strategy aligned for these newly joined credit card customers and run a very smooth 30-day journey. I think we had seven, six emails one transactional email just for the six promotional emails, one transactional email if a credit card customer goes and activates the card and then couple of push push messages along with this. So this is purely omni-channel email plus push combined. Plus there is a transaction.
Speaker 1:Push meaning SMS, text Mobile push Mobile.
Speaker 2:Push, not SMS.
Speaker 1:This is the usual, oh, mobile app messaging. Okay, got it Mobile app messaging one.
Speaker 2:That is how we started and this was an MVP and then the initial numbers look good. My collect in the after two weeks, what I'm trying to say is at the end of sixth week, which means we'd have done with one month of campaign and then the second week of the next one. We were trying to do this readout to the leadership team and we were just going with this actual metrics. So this is an interesting one. I just want to bring this up here. So we were looking at unsubscribed rate, all these kind of things, but these are vanity metrics. But we just want to make sure that how many of these credit card customers are just actually going to the click or whatever, the CDA button and they are actually going to the ecosystem, notstromcom or notstromradcom, and doing this purchase, so that all the URL variables, everything connected and same, or even brick and mortar, not from the actual point of sale and then doing transactions.
Speaker 2:So the numbers where we were struggling to connect those dots, but we were there trying to see how the actual conversion numbers are going to look like. But the goal is to reduce the churn from 29% to 26% or 25% in the next six months or so, so that I can get into this EBIT value there. So we did this combination of both strategy plus the landing page sorry, the content portion, as well as the email. Why six or seven emails? Why not 10? Why not six? There were a lot of interesting discussions happened, so that we don't want to bombard them and fatigue them At the same time, we want to make sure that they are on this platform and doing active business.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. So you talked about tying that reduction in churn rate to EBIT, right? So EBIT meaning earnings before it comes in tax, right? Yeah, okay, I'm just trying to remember my finance terms here. So, when you were reporting on it, like, how did you like, did you even talk about, did you talk more about, the financial impacts of the work done? Or did you talk about the change in churn? Or did you talk, like you mentioned vanity metrics, which I kind of recoil at these days because I actually think that they've been given a bad name because people call them that and I think they're still useful in the right for the right thing. Right, they're not ones I would go present to executives, for example, necessarily, but, um, but, like, talk me through. Like, how did you connect the dots from here's, what we did to here was the outcome? Uh, especially how you communicated it to, like, people who are less familiar with, um, what you were doing, or what marketing, like, what marketing's role is, I guess even yeah, sure.
Speaker 2:So I think I have some numbers here, so I'm going to I don't want to rush this one up, so I'm going to slowly walk you through the numbers. So, vanity method like sorry, yeah, so the click-through metrics unsubscribe rate is still good, like, uh, we don't want to it's. It's pretty directional, like it's going to give some some directions, and that was really helpful for sure. And then this is how the numbers were, michael. So, on a daily basis, on average, we were seeing close to 700 to 800 customers joining the credit card 700 to 800 customers. I'm leaving the peak seasons like July, august, anniversary sales or thanksgiving sales on an average, 700 to 800 customers across 310 stores. That's kind of an average, uh, per year.
Speaker 2:Now, okay, after this campaign, within three, four weeks, this campaign was running for a month and then at the end of the 30th day we were like, okay, so let's try to pull some numbers. And then we had to wait for two weeks to get all these numbers. And going to the actual centralized system we used to call it as nap, not strong analytical platform that's where all this camping data goes back and there's a semantic layer there where we can pull tableau reports and all those kind of stuff okay, so it's like a data warehouse data whatever data lake, whatever.
Speaker 1:Okay, exactly, uh, it's.
Speaker 2:It's like a data warehouse data whatever data lake whatever Exactly, it's like just a one-liner definition of NAP. Nap is more of an in-house CDP built by Nordstrom leadership.
Speaker 1:Nordstrom.
Speaker 2:CEO has this vision and they want to connect all this inventory data, sales data, point of sales and everything and bring it to this analytical platform and do AIML stuff and everything like that. Because Nordstrom's customer base is huge. The data science attributes are close to 125 to 150-ish probably more than that right now. So that's how Nordstrom was planning to do. They had this ambitious vision and that's how it was.
Speaker 2:So, going back to the numbers, right, so now 700 to 800 number customers. So I'm going to be very clear here. So, within like three to four weeks from the day joined, let's say September 1st, I'm going to start this campaign and then, every day, we are going to get these kind of 700 to 800 ish customers on board. Now we could see out of, uh, like we could see, close to 80 to 100 customers are moving from member to influencer status. That is, this is all kind of a ballpark demand impact number from our finance team, so, which comes to close to 11%, and then we could see close to, I think, 18% of the customers this is a big number where they were trying to do greater than $500 transaction in a month, which puts them in a different mode which is nothing but like they might get into the icon or ambassador kind of a tiered segment. They might get into the icon or ambassador kind of a period. So, if you see this right, I think we I still remember the day it went live. This campaign went live exactly on October 31st of 2022, because that's the Q3 end date. The Q4 starts from November 1 and then it goes until Jan, and then we want to make sure that this campaign goes at the end of the Q3 so that we can reap the benefits during Q4 starts from November 1, and then it goes until Jan. And then we want to make sure that this campaign goes at the end of the Q3, so then we can reap the benefits during Q4, and then we can have a good holiday season numbers and then the profits and all those kind of stuff too.
Speaker 2:So, that being said, if I just do a math, I think there were some numbers taken. I think, if you close to when I say 18% of the numbers, it came somewhere around 1.8 million-ish or something like that for those kind of the overall customers for that particular month. So that's the kind of ballpark we got from the finance team, but this campaign was a big hit. We got from the finance team, but this campaign was a big hit. And then, from the tech standpoint, we added two new data science attributes, which is A, how many of these RAC CC credit card customers zero to six months are doing some transaction and not strong full price customers doing some transactions?
Speaker 2:And then, from the Nordic Club standpoint, this is where it's getting interesting, where for every dollar spent after some certain threshold you get two points per dollar spent or something like that. So there's kind of a flywheel, if you see this. There is this 700 to 800 customers joining on a daily basis. Close to 54 out of 700, 800 customers are moving from member to influencer. So that's a good jump. And then there is a. That's one number. And then the second number is like close to 1.8 million. That's an interesting one where it's not just influencer, icon plus ambassadors are contributing. That too. So that is like within the Q4, we could achieve that number and that's one interesting step.
Speaker 2:So from the finance standpoint, we could see that there is some traction happening there and there is lesser churn.
Speaker 2:Just because we released it pre-holiday season, that might be one of the interesting strategy as well. So from the qualitative standpoint, we were seeing more stickiness where the credit card customers are going to the actual Nordstromcom and RAC and we could see some optimizing metrics there from our tech team to find out hey, you know, there are more stickiness for these kind of credit card customers because we add all these reward on metadata, on that, sure, yeah, and then, since we launched it pre-holiday season, we could see there are more stuff happening. But in hindsight what I would see, what I would do. That is, I think instead of six to eight different emails plus push combined, we should have reduced it to close to five different topics or six different topics. I, I, I, I found out as an little little or a little little, uh, overwhelming with the eight different topics and eight different email contents and push combined. I think we should have reduced it to five or six different topics. But again, that is just an example.
Speaker 1:A little more specific to those. So I'm curious so you're talking about this revenue impact. Is there any? I mean, it's hard enough in B2B to do attribution with complex sale or something like that, but so you've got the added challenge here, where you've got brick and mortar retail stores in addition to online purchasing. Don't you have to go into a lot of detail? But how did you try to connect the dots between online I'm sorry, in-store purchases with those new customers or converted customers?
Speaker 2:Yes. So the question is how do I know that these are newly credit card customers who are doing transaction, compared to the existing customer?
Speaker 1:Well, no, like, how do you know that they're doing transaction in the store? And I guess I'm thinking about, like, if they, obviously, if they use their credit card I assume their new credit card, that's easily trackable but then how do you do it if they choose to use a different form of payment?
Speaker 2:in a store. No, that's actually a good one too. Yes, there is some percentage of data where customers do use a different credit card although they have a not-strong credit card. That's something, yes there. Different credit card although they have a not strong credit card, that's something. Yes, that's there is. There is always that percentage, but I don't exactly recall that percentage. But now what happens is even from the customer standpoint.
Speaker 2:Michael, within 90 days, if you do a purchase in general, whether it's not strong credit card, any credit card for that sake. I bought alaskan airlines. I got, I received 40 000 miles if I spend some x amount of dollars within the first three months. So I did tap into that uh, reward stuff. I got 40 000 bonus miles and I had a trip to. So, likewise, I think, nordstrom and this is where, for a nordstrom customer who are shopping during the holiday season, the naughty club points, as I said before, for every one dollar spent, there is like five x dollars kind of returns. That's one thing. And then the second thing is for non-strong credit cards. Since there is this, I think this is more of um chase flash, uh, the finance side of the business, where there is like, uh, zero person, jpr or something like that connected to it. So they just want to tap into that and then see sure, so well.
Speaker 1:It sounds like the the connect connection between the credit card and that person as a loyalty person. That's the glue that can really do it Correct.
Speaker 2:I think the first one point is more on the finance side and I think, as an outcome, we could see that, hey, the naughty club points are growing for these credit card customers. Plus we could see all these stickiness happening, plus all these purchasing behavior for these newly joined credit card customers. So, yeah, it's spot on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I know personally like there's at least one retailer probably more than one, but one in particular that I think of when I think of this kind of thing where, like, I get a ton of value for the trade-off of letting them know what I'm purchasing and using it because they are regularly providing incentives to me, right, yeah, discounts and points that go towards purchases, and to the point where, like any given purchase which I don't do a lot of, maybe once a month, once every two months it's not super infrequent, but it's not like every day kind of thing, but I can, I can get in some cases 20 off of a total purchase, like any given one, like, yeah, it's worth it. So, and it's like, yeah, it's not tied to the card I use, it's tied to me being saying, oh, this is me, right, right.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, no, spot on. I think I'm just trying to relate this to an example which is happening at Academy Sports where I think, by default, we are working in a situation where we are trying to auto enroll customers into a loyalty customer base and then Academy is also trying to come up with this Academy-specific it's called co-branded credit card where they are trying to have a tie-up with MasterCard and they try to. All Academy Sports cards, which are normal cards, are normal card customers are going to move to this co-branded credit card where you can use it anywhere. At the same time, we just want to auto-enroll them into the loyalty platform. So Nordstrom has a special thing too For Naughty Club.
Speaker 2:The way they treat the Naughty Club reward points and everything is very different too. And then there is this it's more of a gamification kind of stuff, right, and even Academy Sports, like, for every $500 spent, I think, we get a $25 rewards or something like that, where a customer can use, customer can share with their friends, families Nordstrom is very famous for that where you get a lot of preview sales and everything. So that's, I think it was not just so. This is where it gets interesting, where it was not just financial metric. They just want to align this to this overall vision of customer obsession and experience. Sure, sure.
Speaker 1:Yes, I mean it's interesting to me, like I don't know why this popped in my head, but I remember back in the day when I was a consulting, I traveled a lot back and forth to houston from dallas and so the easiest way to do that was on southwest airlines. The southwest airlines back in those days this is pre-911, so it'll literally what you could. Literally, they had so many flights going back and forth they still do that you could literally walk up. They had kiosks, kind of like an ATM, where you buy a ticket, like in person, right, you don't have to have a reservation, they called it a quick it, and every one of those tickets you know what it had on it A drink coupon, every one of them, every one of them. And if you were a loyalty member, right, the rapid rewards, uh, every time you had I think it's 10 segments you got a book sent to you with another 10 drink coupons. Like I, I had so many drink coupons, like I would literally like me.
Speaker 1:I was traveling a lot with two other, two other guys back and forth to Houston to a client site from Dallas, and like we would get to the airport on Fridays and we would just give people drink coupons because we could never use them. All you know, I flew. I flew all my wife's friends in to Dallas one time and they all got sent a book of drink coupons because they flew. That was when Southwest couldn't fly. You couldn't fly into Dallas from many places directly, so they'd had to do stops and so like. But it's great, like that. So it was like for me it was almost worth it not to have a reservation. Yeah, right, yeah.
Speaker 2:No, I think Southwest is famous for that. I think they they were the ones who came up with this interesting stuff even before customer experience. And now now we are for stuff even before customer experience. Now now we are. For the past 10 years we have been talking about this customer obsession and topic. Yes, amazon's goal was customer obsession from b1, but I think southwest airlines were so out of the curve they were doing all these kind of interesting stuff. Uh, and right now, like I think I, I can see almost every single company is trying to have this kind of an amazon effect where you know, I'm going to, I'm going to pamper the customer and then put them into this different mode where they can continuously come and shop and they just want to have this brand as kind of a mental tick mark in their brain. Like, hey, for any sports material, kind of a shopping, I'm going to go to Academy Sports. For anything luxury, not luxury, I'm going to put it any sort of a good clothes and everything.
Speaker 1:Like my daughter likes not strong a lot, she continuously shops and not strong yeah, um, I wouldn't say I mean my kids do too, but uh, mine tend to go to uh thrift shopping now. So that's, I think, the new thing yes, I go to kohl's as well.
Speaker 2:I I don't have any preference. But as an employer I used to take my friends to like, hey guys, and my friends used to like that a lot. Then I used to tell them hey, you know, if you buy a not strong credit card, you get all these kind of. And then they're like oh, we get these benefits. And I try to. It's not about promoting that, but I try to say that, hey, there are several different options here. Most of them think that it's a very luxury retailer kind of thing. But Nordstrom Rack is for everyone, for my kind of layman, normal customers too.
Speaker 1:We're going to have to wrap it up here, but there's one thing we can't ignore, which is the impact of AI in all this. What are you seeing in this space? That was what you talked about with Nordstrom and now what you're doing. But how are you seeing what you did then? How do you think it would be different now with AI in the mix, or if at all, and where do you see it going?
Speaker 2:That's a good one. So, michael, I'll start with the very basic thing. Like in the sense, I think, at not strong, we were trying to for most of the content. This was the practice. They tried to do ab testing. And then we were running a, you know, in a journey canvas.
Speaker 2:And imagine, there is a canvas which does this customer journey mapping and everything and there's an automated camping going on. Now they're like, hey, I have this flash campaign with these kinds of apparels and the same flash campaign with blue stuff, whatever different kind of a hero image or whatever, and we want the winning version to be done. So I remember Salesforce released a feature called Path Optimizer, where we don't need to manually go and pull the results, do a readout and then have a forum to discuss that and then say EA is the winning version. Let's do and bring the picture of EA for the future sense. Now Path Optimizer does everything through AI, like where it can automatically go and collect the data and then you can set it up, whether, hey, I want to go and choose based on the hero image or for a particular cta button or for a particular time frame. A lot of options are there.
Speaker 2:And then that was one of the ai features. I worked. I started, uh, exploring during my non-strong days, and I think we did that during my humanity days as well. So, path optimizer, uh, and then the content, wise. So this is a very broad question, the ai. So what I'm seeing is um there are more and more cdps coming, I think.
Speaker 2:That being said, I think when it comes to the content side of things, I'm seeing there are more ai innovation happening there. Content is king. So what I'm trying to say is it's not just dynamic rendering of Nordstromcom for several different customers, it is just trying to make sure that, hey, do I need to, based on Pradeep's past purchasing behavior, do I need to put a Nike shoes in his homepage or somewhere on the site compared to my wife's shopping behavior, wear jewelry or something like that. I just want to make sure that it there. There is a lot of stuff going on, and then this is going to this there are a lot, there is a lot of um burden reduced from these kind of optimizely kind of a platform where ai can do its job automatically around the clock, whether it's holidays or weekends or whatever it is. From the CMS standpoint, the content management system standpoint, that's one thing.
Speaker 2:I can see there is a lot happening there, but from the data standpoint, I think not so much the ZIML kind of a data science model. Sorry, I missed that part, so I'll be very specific here. So I think for each segments men's fashion, women's, kids and everything even and for men's, like for apparels, shoes and everything they were trying, as I said before, like the non-stop credit card is this customer non-stop credit card customers zero to three months, three, three to six months kind of purchasing behavior, so I could see for every single segment they were having close to at least 15 to 20 or even more than that are kind of subcategory data science attributes so that we can use it, when I say we marketing team can use it and run a very hyper personalized campaign. So there is a constant data science model which is automatically learning based on my purchasing behavior.
Speaker 2:This was all there in the past, but this is happening a lot these days and these are kind of custom models too and we are trying to tap into a third-party data, like it's not just email push Sorry, I was trying to. There is a paid campaign from Vibram too, and there is a direct mail campaign sent from direct partners Blue core for triggered sense. So there are like several other systems involved. Nordstrom was like, hey, I'm going to bring all this data, let me do this ID stitching and then do all these kind of a continuous 24 hours kind of a model and this model. I think there is a huge data science team doing all this, bringing work there. I still remember, and I think we constantly get a request to pipe in these attributes and that's a very omni-channel campaign. Those are some of the elements I could, on a day-to-day basis, I could witness, but there is a lot going on in the industry, from the AI model specific, for sure.
Speaker 1:The feeling I've got is that some of the AI ML kind of modeling capabilities are probably ahead of the kind of customer capabilities, are probably ahead of the kind of customer facing platforms, right. So, like most of what I understand about where the content management systems are trying to do sort of truly hyper personalized content in the moment, based on you know, a number of different things going on, not just attributes. Right Is probably. I mean, maybe somebody is out there doing it and I probably I always underestimate this, but I suspect that it's really expensive to do it, right, yes, so, but I, I mean, I think that's, I suspect that's where things are going, right, I think a lot of these, like, like you, when I was in the B2C world it was I built a data warehouse, right, warehouse for connecting with direct marketing. We had data scientists. Today they would be called data scientists. They weren't. Back then they were kind of restricted on what they could do based on their capacity and hypotheses and things like that. That's what I'm really kind of, yeah, interested to see how things evolve is what happens with these engines when they can kind of replace some of that hypothesis generation, right, a little bit right.
Speaker 1:So, anyway, well, listen. I I hate to cut it short because this has been a lot of fun. I think people are going to walk away from this. Going like all this stuff may be a little bit scary. I don't know if they know what's going on when they use their credit cards. They should probably already know. But anyway, this was a lot of fun, pradeep, so thank you for that. If folks want to learn more, connect with you or hear about what, you're doing.
Speaker 2:What's the best way for them to do that? Yeah, sure, so I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I always call my LinkedIn as my Facebook, so I'm always active. I keep it open for 24 hours. So please ping me via LinkedIn. It's pretty straightforward. I haven't updated to my current one, but you can see my Nordstrom and humanity experience there for sure. And then I'm not actively using Twitter, but I do check once in a while, once in a week or so, but I can share my LinkedIn profile. And then I've written some blogs too, so I can share all those blogs as well. But I'm looking forward to collaborate in the future and then share some more AI-related stuff. The one thing I'm learning from this AI thing is garbage in, garbage out from the data standpoint. So there are a lot of data coming and even at Academy Sports we are like, hey, is this a valid scenario? Is this a valid use case? So there is always this constant debate on this scenario because of this third-party system, data getting ingested in this platform and all these kind of things.
Speaker 2:And there are several other areas involved. So, that being said, ai is going to rule it and we are forced to get into that, and more and more companies are investing there for sure, but yes, yes, sounds good.
Speaker 1:Well, again, thank you, pradeep. It's been a lot of fun, thanks to our listeners and viewers and the rest of our audience. Thank you for supporting us. Thank you for listening and watching. If you have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest, you can reach out to Naomi, mike or me. We'd be glad to talk to you about that. Until next time, bye, everybody.
Speaker 2:Okay.