#107 - Owning Your Amazon Customer Data and Turning your Customers into Loyal Fans

Want to stop renting your Amazon customers and start building real retention? We sat down with Andrew Smith to unpack a practical system that captures first-party data ethically from marketplace buyers using QR-led, post-purchase journeys—no gimmicks, no review manipulation, and no forced channel hopping. If you’ve felt the squeeze of higher acquisition costs and shrinking attention, this conversation maps out a smarter path.

We trace how buying behavior shifted after 2020, why marketplaces now win attention, and what most brands miss about repeat purchases on Amazon. Andrew explains how to design compliant inserts, deliver unique Amazon-specific incentives, and personalize flows by scan count so the second interaction feels new, relevant, and rewarding. Instead of pushing people off-platform, we show how to retain them where they actually like to shop, then layer in education over time to deepen brand loyalty.

You’ll learn why awareness plays like billboards rarely convert, how lifecycle-timed emails outperform generic review requests, and the simple cadence that can double repeat rates without heavy ad spend. For new sellers, we lay out a launch strategy that uses Amazon velocity to seed an owned list, bypassing the “Meta tax” while keeping budgets sane. Throughout, we stay grounded in first-party data ethics, clear compliance guardrails, and tool choices that align pricing with real outcomes.

If you’re ready to turn one-time buyers into loyal fans with straightforward, human-first retention, this episode delivers the blueprint. Subscribe, share with a fellow seller, and leave a quick review to tell us the next retention topic you want us to tackle.

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Transcript

The Amazon Data Problem

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Are you struggling with data retention? Is Amazon keeping all of their customers to themselves and not giving any to you as an Amazon seller? This has been a historic problem. Amazon typically will rent their customers out to sellers and not let them have access to their email or any information to send a follow-up to get maybe a repurchase or incentivize a review. Today's guest is going to help us solve that problem. Not directly. Don't sue us Amazon, not directly, but he has a business known as swapped QR, and it helps you with data retention. It's going to help you take control of your customers and acquire lots of data from them to again reach out and be able to resell and retarget and use the data for bettering your business. So today's guest is Andrew Smith. Pleasure to have you on. Pleasure to chat. Excited to get into it and talk a lot about the different ways sellers can can utilize not only your businesses, but also to learn more about uh the evolution of this stuff and how we can make it better and how we can make business better. So pleasure to meet you. Likewise. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, of course. So we're going to get into it, but I want to give you a chance to explain again your story, swaps uh QR, and tell us a little bit more about the background of the business. So another elevator pitch here for you. Uh, give

Andrew’s Background And Market Shift

SPEAKER_01 1:34

us some background on the company.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Yeah, of course. So my background is I actually started at Clavio around eight years ago. And the whole journey of watching people own their customers from Shopify and what retention actually means was something that was super drilled into me from, you know, a very early e-commerce perspective. And spent some time really trying to understand what brands needed and what the future was going to be. And a few years ago, I was starting to see acquisition costs rise and the difference in how marketplace purchasing versus e-commerce purchasing uh became apparent to me anyway in 2022, which was, and it's taken a few years for the world to catch up. But basically what happened was in 2020 and 2021, just to lay the groundwork here, um, people had more time and more of a budget because COVID was happening. So people had stimulus checks. We go out for dinners and drinks and hang out with friends. And that, you know, depending on your uh budget, it could be 15K, 30K, you know, an additional expense that we didn't have during COVID. And then just the time that takes as well sucks you away from your computer. So you don't get the education that brands were able to give you before. So now everyone's racing for that ad dollar, and everyone's racing for that extremely limited attention that you get from, you know, the average consumer that goes to work and spends 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. busy, and one hour of that is going to be making dinner for their families, an hour of that's gonna be watching TV and relaxing. So getting that very limited attention costs more money now. And because of that, people are shifting towards marketplace purchases. So now you get to get the attention cross-channel. But the crazy part is that there's never really been new technologies introduced to this new evolving world. It's just the same old as it's always been. It's Shopify and Direct Sales is over here, and they're trying the education meta, um, 300% of your product sales game. And then you have over here, which is your Amazon extremely

Why Marketplaces Win Attention

SPEAKER_00 3:58

profitable engine if you can hack it, which means you have to get the reviews right, you have to spend way too much. Um, the house is starting to win too often for Amazon, including Amazon Basics. So people are starting to try to find what's new. And that's where SWAT was really thriving, which is you get to use your Amazon customers and keep them on the marketplace where they're happy shopping, which might be Amazon, but you get to increase the amount of times they purchase throughout the year to create a better shopper. And then also, by the way, if you want to educate them and you know, cross-sell to them as well throughout the year uh on different channels, that's an option.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

We always used to tell sellers, hey, put a QR code on

Using Amazon Buyers For Retention

SPEAKER_01 4:44

there, or um, what are ways we can capture email and kind of reach out back out to them? And Amazon has obviously done some of those things as well, but very limited. Um, and so it takes some innovators like you guys to make it a little bit easier for sellers to get a hold of this stuff. So um looking at it right away, how you know, we talked a little bit there and there about the consumer itself, about the uh about the customer. How does maybe the, and maybe this is uh a question for later in the episode, but how does the psychology of a customer change when they transition from a digital ad to a physical QR interaction at their table? How does that maybe affect their sense of value of the brand and their willingness to repurchase?

SPEAKER_00 5:32

Yeah. So the way I would say it is that when you're interacting with a brand, usually on ads, right, you can look at it from like a CPM perspective of you pay X amount to get three seconds of someone's time on that landing page. That that initial landing page might be three seconds on average.

Psychology Of QR Moments

SPEAKER_00 5:52

And what you're doing is you're totally missing that customer interaction engagement point from someone that purchases on Amazon or TikTok shop, even though you know that they already went through the effort of purchasing, which is gold for your brand, right? But that person that might have brought your protein, it's such a competitive marketplace on Amazon that they're not going to buy your protein again. Like most of the time, 80% of the time, plus most likely for most brands, 90% on Amazon, they are not going to go and repurchase that protein. So what I see in the psychology around it is that you're building brand awareness, brand loyalty, brand trust on the marketplaces that you need because you're not sticking out as a brand just by being on Amazon. What you are doing is you're intercepting keywords with your advertising that make someone that wants whey protein find your product first and do maybe a little research, look at the reviews, and click the buy button. But what you're not doing is you're not sticking out as that brand, which makes it extremely difficult to get repeat purchases. So this is how I see this consumer psychology. It's really just about getting as many eyeballs as possible from that physical product to whatever digital experience you need to continue engaging with the customer.

Offline Data And Real-World Insights

SPEAKER_01 7:21

And it's something that again, I believe on the website I read a lot about um, you know, uh offline data and the um offline trying you guys are trying to solve with this the offline attribution and um problem. And people would say a lot of people, uh, you know, data is obviously the most expensive or the most uh sought after. Like you said, everyone's fighting over this um value or this item, which is now data, as opposed to, you know, maybe back then it was gold and the gold, like that's data is the new gold. Um so and everyone's fighting for this. And um, most most brands, I would say, that aren't doing something similar, maybe are are are drowning in it without knowing what it actually means to have someone's data or to collect it correctly or correct it the best way possible. What is something that you've seen, maybe an example you have, what's the most surprising maybe offline insight or offline piece that you've seen a brand discover through your through swapped that they wouldn't have seen with just Shopify or just Amazon analytics? What's the most surprising piece of data you guys have collected?

SPEAKER_00 8:32

Yeah. Uh I would say that's the amount of people that will buy your product again if you ask them to. And I'll give you uh if you know their the purchaser's email. So I'll give you like sort of an overview. It because we've done a lot for a lot of brands before we ended up on this use case with offline. So we started with events, then we went to sort of like sweeps, and then we went to um like billboard advertising and spot sports sponsorships, bunch of those things. We've been like a big QR code in Times Square. We've had big QR codes

What Billboards Get Wrong

SPEAKER_00 9:07

in huge sporting stadiums on TV ads. And what ends up happening with those awareness plays and top of funnel marketing and advertising is brands get really excited about the opportunity to get more eyeballs, but these aren't necessarily customers that are ready to start retention flows or funnels yet. These are customers that you continuously need to continue, you know, purchasing more awareness plays in more to get in front of, yes. But you're most likely not going to get the eyeball to purchase rate as high as you want it to be with that campaign if you just start emailing them. But if you get the email address of a customer that has purchased, like they have purchased on Amazon, now you can start the retention game. Now you can be at build your retention flows and treat them as a normal customer and get a multi-time buyer rate that will have really good results. Um, but I've seen, like, if you were to ask me like what's very you asked me what's very surprising, I'd actually say the poor quality of customers that come from like a billboard. I hate billboards now. I just have so much data that they do nothing. And I get it, it's like a good way of flexing, maybe get some eyeballs on it. Like the the David's billboards in New York City are actually pretty good because they they do give the awareness. And I think for like a retail high velocity play like that, it makes a lot of sense. But if you're not retail high velocity, stay away from billboards. They do nothing.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

Right. And it's kind of like the billboard effect. Is that really is that is that real? Or are we, you know, they say you can never measure how many people come in from a billboard, but um, I think you're right. I think it has become more of a just I'm gonna show you that I can afford a billboard in Times Square or anywhere. Um that you're right. So it's very interesting to say that.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

And it sounds like a good excuse, like the whole like, oh, 50% of marketing doesn't work. Sounds like a great excuse for people that want you to buy more marketing space, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

So the billboard itself is somehow a metaphor. I don't know. That could be that could be a different, a different podcast. Um, we can talk about the philosophy of billboards. Um, but that also kind of actually transitions me nicely into another question that came up. I so again, with this, with this style, with these QR codes, there's a lot of things, of course, that Amazon is very uh they rent customers to people, right? That's what they say. They always say, We're renting this customer to you, so they buy your product, but really they're our customer and not yours. Um, and they're very strict about things that you can put in the product, whether it be an insert or um maybe QR

Amazon TOS And QR Compliance

SPEAKER_01 11:52

codes. I'm actually very little vague on this. Are there any rules in Amazon's terms of service that say you can't? I mean, obviously people are doing this, but what are the maybe the the guidelines for QR codes? Do they fall under something and does Amazon acknowledge this and just say, sure, go for it, but don't take their email? I mean, what are you what are you what rules do you have to follow here in the QR space?

SPEAKER_00 12:14

Yeah, so what is very interesting is that depending on where you go on Amazon, you're gonna get a different result. So if you go on their product packaging guidelines site, you're gonna see QR codes that go to D2C with a discount, and that's in their guidelines, which is kind of crazy. Um, if you go to Seller Central and look at the seller code of conduct, you're gonna see you cannot do anything. Um, there's separate articles about insert guidelines, and the insert guidelines I think are the most clear, which are basically like the underlying instructions are do not steal customers from Amazon and uh do not manipulate reviews. So as long as you stay clear of review manipulation, and the thing that I like to do with our customers is just to make sure we're really hammering this home, when we get the email address, we usually just give an Amazon discount instead of a DDC discount. And then over time, you can begin educating.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Right.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

And with education, brands can create brand fans that will eventually purchase on whatever channel. But instead of going out and saying, hey everyone, here's a discount on D2C, first and foremost, that's not good for your shopper. Your shopper likes Amazon, they purchase on Amazon for a reason. And second, so the Amazon discount is more relevant to an Amazon buyer. And secondly, it is good for just making sure that that point in compliance is checked, which is we're getting this email to validate this is a real person and to distribute a unique Amazon seller discount code to bring this customer back to Amazon.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

Yeah, no, it makes sense. Um I always like find the little the little loopholes in there. Um it's like you can't ask for a review, but you can kind of lead them to it. Um similar thing here, it sounds like so. Okay, very interesting. I again I had known that part about the product inserts, but it's interesting they have two different answers for you, depending on where you look. Um that kind of sounds like Amazon, sounds like something Amazon would would have happened. So speaking now on really the the after the scan, so they they get the package, they scan it.

Designing Frictionless Post-Scan Journeys

SPEAKER_01 14:38

How do you guys help the brands build a user experience, either maybe even with the QR code? I know that they're not just the box, it's not just as simple as um the black and white box. You guys kind of jazz it up a little bit. I saw that on the website with the G Fuel. Um, it's got the logo right in the middle, at least. But are there any other things that you do to make the uh user experience uh as easy as possible? I'm trying to think of a uh frictionless. Is that a word? I think frictionless is a word. Daddy, what do you guys do to help make the time from after purchase to the second purchase as easy as possible for the customer?

SPEAKER_00 15:16

Yep. So what we do, because often people think, why can't I just put these people to my website and just give them a simple thing? That's really it's kind of short term thinking because first and foremost, everyone can now find that link on your website, everyone can get the 15% off. And sure, maybe you don't give a crap about that. But what happens when they purchase again and they're just gonna get the same QR code. So with us, we have personalized journeys based on the amount of exposure you've had to the first QR. Once you get your second QR, we know it's your second QR, and we're able to customize the journey and give you a different flow after you purchase that second product. So you can start, for example, with a subscribe and save discount. And the second time you purchase a product, you get a buy with a gift. So now all of a sudden you're getting a different experience that brings you down a different funnel and engages you more because the purpose of our platform is to get repeat purchases. Yes, you might be able to get another discount shopper with a discount, but that's not really what we're doing. It's sort of a different argument without um understanding the grander play, which is you should have more repeat different engagement experiences every time someone visits. You don't have to set up for every every time, but basically creating that loyalty. And then we do have the automated email that sends afterwards, reminding people based on the amount of times you've purchased the product to review, to discount, etc. Right. And we see very high open rates on those emails. So, for example, one brand, the review requests that's neutral, just like the

Personalization Across Repeat Scans

SPEAKER_00 17:06

ones you'd send from Amazon that usually get half a percent or less. Ours get a 40% open rate and an 8% click-through and review rate. So the the amount of people that end up doing this if you do it right, is very high.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

Interesting. Interesting. And it's it's it's so uh it is it's very interesting, and it's so more so on that is these people are not, and correct me if I'm wrong, but these people are not uh involuntarily giving their data. They're they're willingly choosing to, of course, stay in the QR code, but then even take it further from there. You're not um it's not a requirement to open the box, right? It's not a requirement to open your package. They are choosing to do it afterwards. That's another concept that always um that is is very interesting. Again, you're not you're not taking their data, they're giving it to you, um, which is uh a neat, just again, a neat thing to get it from.

SPEAKER_00 18:03

Um first party data, these are already engaged customers 100%.

SPEAKER_01 18:08

Right. Looking sort of a little bit further there, um one of the things that I always like to ask about is is how this can help maybe uh a newer seller. So is this or would you not recommend this for a new brand? Um, or would this be really great for a new brand to start building an outside email list as well? So someone that just launched on Amazon last month, they've got a few sales, they did the Vine program. Is is swap something that they can use to get to the next level?

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Yeah. So when you're thinking of launching a brand and a product, I'll go through one of my friends, Claire, one of her dads. It's like the a huge ginseng farmer in Wisconsin. Shows she's making like an herbal ginseng macker root supplement that she's selling. And she launches on Shopify. And I immediately call, I'm like, hey, launch on Amazon because we're gonna be able to it basically you have two taxes to pay when you launch your brand that you could pay. The first is the meta tax. And what that means is that if she's selling her herbal supplement for $60, if she wants to sell it on Shopify, it might be $120 customer

Opt-In First-Party Data Ethics

SPEAKER_00 19:20

acquisition costs just for her first purchasers. Because what you're doing is you're paying that, you know, meta or Google tax. And by the way, you probably pay an agency to get you started on that $5K a month. So you're paying a lot of money to get those first customers through the door, but you get the email address. So you can bring those over to Eclavio, and hopefully those people buy two, three, four, five, six times throughout the year to make up for that $120 customer acquisition cost because the LTV is higher. Okay, that's what they ask you in Sharp Tank when you go on. Um, the second tax that you could get is the Amazon tax, where it's not over 100% of the product often. If you do it right, you and I both know if you have the review game and you get all this stuff right, you can get it for half the cost, 60%, 70% of the product, right? Every purchaser, which is great. But the issue is that every single month, because you're renting your customer, you have to pay for

Launch Strategy For New Sellers

SPEAKER_00 20:20

that again and again and again. And there is no LTV or growth metrics that would get you past that Shark Tank round. So if you're a new brand, I would recommend launching with this on Amazon, getting the emails, and then using those emails to power your Shopify to skip the meta tags. And it's a really good way of growing your brand efficiently without requiring $30,000 of spend in a multi-channel setting.

SPEAKER_01 20:51

Another question that I always have that I wanted to bring up later in the episode, so we're at that point, I think, is QR codes, and we talked a little bit maybe a little bit about the pandemic, but QR codes are at least 2020. QR codes are now synonymous with scan menus. You still have them around. They weren't a thing before the pandemic. Um, do you think people have QR fatigue from scanning all these menus? Do you think have you seen a distinct difference in maybe the way people treat QR codes since 2020, or am I making that up and projecting it?

SPEAKER_00 21:23

No, no, I think people have QR uselessness fatigue and QR forcing function fatigue. Like if I go to a restaurant, even though my company's medium, I wouldn't consider us a QR company, the medium to get your customers' QR code. Because if you think of your other options, like an NFC tag, people aren't educated on. As a medium, a QR code's great because now after COVID, everyone's educated. But I don't want to be forced to scan a QR code to get a menu when it's so much better to feel a menu in my hand. And I don't want to be shoved with Super Bowl commercials down my throat, QR codes, because marketers now think that it's going to get them website traffic.

QR Fatigue And When Not To Use Them

SPEAKER_00 22:12

I think that QR codes are really good if you need to, you know, give your customers some sort of reward, walk them through customer journeys, like I'm mentioning, after they purchase, because everyone is educated on how to scan them and their means to an end. I do not think that they should just be thrown around on every top-of-funnel marketing campaign and everything you do just because you can. Like they're they are the physical to digital connection right now, which is why they're so novel. They're the only way to connect the physical world to the digital world. And you have more control once someone lands in the digital world. But now you have to think of what that control actually means. And if people want you controlling their physical world as well. And a lot of the times the answer to that is stay out of my physical world. I'm not as interested in joining you on that physical, you know, digital journey. I'd rather hang out with my friends when I'm at the restaurant. Right. Right. And not have a be on my phone at all for anything.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

You're right. Exactly. That's a good point. It's a good, uh, a good angle I had not thought of. Um, sort of a, I guess, a follow-up to that then. Do you see in your experience, you know, I I'm I don't remember, you maybe you know the exact date that the QR code was invented. And again, I hate to harp on, I know this is about data acquisitions more. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But um, last question on specifically surrounding QR codes. Do you see, and maybe this is really for maybe I'll just ask this generally for data acquisition, the the type uh the different ways, the different mediums, I'll use your word, different mediums that we've used to acquire data has changed over the course of all of time. How do you see data acquisition changing in the next five years? Do you think you'll still be doing physically using these QR codes? Do you think something else will come up? Um, do you think the QR codes will evolve to be something else, a lot more um RFID? I mean, where do you see data acquisition moving in the next five, maybe 10 years? We'll say to give it a little more time.

SPEAKER_00 24:20

Yeah, yeah.

The Next Five Years Of Data Capture

SPEAKER_00 24:21

So data acquisition is multi-channel, right? Like the most data acquisition like you can get is a landing page form or pop-up after an ad. So I would say that that is the biggest channel for data acquisition right now, which is you spend on ads and they drive to your website, and then you have a pop-up form or a landing page specifically created to capture that email. That is the majority of data acquisition today. So I don't see that decreasing because that is Meta and Google's honeypot. Like those ads are 90% of the biggest companies in the world's revenue. So 90%, 95%. Um, so I know that there's a lot of talk about GPT commerce. I'm not quite convinced that a commerce engine is going to replace the ad engine that we have today because it would reforce and restrict the amount of information that you can get and the amount of products that can be serviced based on different results. Maybe they can get the queries right, but I think they're very far ways away. If you watch the Super Bowl ads where Anthropic was sort of trashing on OpenAI for adding ads to their app. Right. Um, because that's the that's the alternative ultimately of data acquisition. Data acquisition through ads might be disrupted through data acquisition or purchase acquisition through AI channels. But the the way that you'd have to introduce that to open AI would be so elegant that I honestly don't see a solution because, like Anthropic was pointing out, was you're at the park, you're talking to this guy that you really trust, your AI you really trust, right? Just like that guy at the park. And you ask a personal life opinion or advice, and the person that you really trust is now cramming products down your throat. It's sort of dystopian. So I have no idea how that's gonna happen. Um, like I think that the QR acquisition for data capture is so small comparably to digital. It's very targeted, it's well targeted, but it's gonna be thousands of people if you sell 100,000 units a month rather than, you know, uh 300,000 people, and then you get 100,000 of those people that purchase. Because general data acquisition, there's like almost two different types of data. There's like top of funnel data that you got to bring down the line to purchase, and then there's retention data, um, which are gonna be a smaller data set, a much smaller data set, but that data is a hundred times more valuable, at least to your brand.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

Speaking of the future, I I think I read somewhere that you guys are trying to make e-commerce just commerce.

Make Commerce Meet Shoppers Where They Are

SPEAKER_01 27:05

Is I is that a quote that I read somewhere from you guys or on the website somewhere. Maybe I made that up.

SPEAKER_00 27:11

I don't know. But e-commerce just commerce. Um, I think one thing that we have pushed before that's similar is that uh sell to your customers where they like to shop. So if they like to buy on Amazon, just sell to them on Amazon and retain them on Amazon. So just following back on that point a little more, um, digital marketing teams at companies are so strapped. So a lot of them will hire on agencies, but then they bring on an agency and they give them only a limited subset of tools to work with because a lot of what you're limited on is what is in Amazon's environment and ecosystem. So I think part of the reason why we're sort of like a buzzy tool in the Amazon space right now is because we're finally introducing a new medium for agencies to have control over their own clients and actually bring agency to their clients uh from an agency perspective that introduces growth channels for Amazon outside of being just reliant on give me more ad spend or let's create more creatives.

SPEAKER_01 28:20

Right. Right. And you guys are the essentially the operating system for the offline to online conversation. I think yeah, that's maybe where I got that e-commerce just commerce again, where it's e-commerce online. I don't know if I maybe I made that up. Maybe we should brand that. I don't know. Um, but either way, uh that kind of leads me into another a more fun question, maybe again something a little bit lower looking towards the future. Since you guys are, you guys are essentially are that operating system for the offline to online conversation? What is maybe one physical interaction in the customer experience that either hasn't been digitized yet that you would maybe like to see later down the

Human Moments Beat Forced Digitization

SPEAKER_01 29:02

line or um would like for swap to somehow adopt and and take advantage of? I don't want to get into any secrets here if you guys are preparing something. Um, but is there anything physical still that's happening in the physical world that you would like to see be translated better or seamlessly without any issue to the online world?

SPEAKER_00 29:24

So I think that I think of us a little more as like retention than just like offline. I I think like obviously like having the QR in in general can lead to an offline conversation, but ultimately what we found out and why we just focused on specifically marketplace retention is because a lot of offline top-of-funnel acquisition um creates sort of like a different marketing strategy that doesn't always require data, is what I've found. So like uh I think having, you know, uh we we used to go to these events and we'd force people just to feel what it was like to get a QR code at an event, forced to scan. We'd tell people, here's a water bottle, but you have to scan our QR. It's sort of like counterintuitive um the reaction because I thought what would happen is people would be, you know, oh whatever, and then get the email and then we'd be able to sell them later. I think just giving the water bottle would have been a better idea. Like I think skipping the QR and digitizing the the human layer OS was actually a bad idea. And this is the sort of like journey I went on that creates sort of my counterculture argument to that I have as well, and that would require a whole other podcast. But I have sort of a countercultural culture argument to this sort of like AI wave, um, which is the that humans are random and humans enjoy like you know doing things with humans and being a human. And if you start just creating digital data sets over everything you could possibly do as a human, and then you just throw AI on it, like the the amount of actual production and the amount of actual benefits towards what you're actually doing are gonna be deterred by the consumer reaction. So if I use AI to create, like just an example, I use AI to create a landing page versus I have a human, it's 10 times faster. But I'd be really worried that the AI would generate content that the human art would actually resonate with. You know, like of course you could A B test a hundred different images and make the art way faster, but I'd just be worried that the quality and you know having an actual photo shoot might be a little better of an idea, like having a designer that actually resonates rather than like creating a bunch of content and then that expands to the offline online because if you try forcing and digitizing every single customer that comes by your booth, maybe sometimes just giving them the water bottle or and a take-home that they could bring home would have led them to your website a little better than a QR code would have, which is like the exact opposite of what you'd expect to hear from a founder doing this.

Simple Retention Beats Shiny Tools

SPEAKER_00 32:17

But at the same time, like it's something that I've seen so frequently that I would actually just advise brands to use us on Amazon packages and TikTok packages because you can't like get that customer information. They might be interested in hearing from you, but it's sort of like where do you want that equal exchange? Like swapped is an equal exchange of you know, consumer purchases, you want to build brand loyalty and branding, so you give them something in return for their email and their loyalty. Um, is how I see swapped. And uh, you know, if someone doesn't want their equal exchange to be when they're hanging out with their friends, then like let them hang out with their friends and get that equal exchange when they get their product out. Right.

SPEAKER_01 33:00

Right. There's more opportunity, you're saying, even though we talked in the beginning about the customer having little time for you know shopping, and you have a very small window to get in there and get that data and and go grab their attention. There's still, I think they'd rather you give them the space to have them give you your attention, kind of like we said earlier, where they're voluntarily giving their data, they're more willing to do that than have it be taken or handed over.

SPEAKER_00 33:25

Um and this is stuff that I actually have interpreted over a lot of years of trying different things, um, and a lot of data that I have over like what works best. And what works best is way simpler than you think. Like there has to be no AI involved. It's like just if someone buys your product on Amazon, give them a little discount, give them a reward, give them a buy with gifts, like just have a few fun things that you and your team cycle out throughout the year, um, and cycle out during different customer journeys, and then um email them and text them. If your product lasts 30 days, give them a little note. You know, it doesn't have to be super complicated. Right. Give them a little note 30 days later, um reminding them that you were gonna give them something awesome if they buy again. So that's it.

SPEAKER_01 34:16

What works are beautiful is easier than you think. That might be the quote.

SPEAKER_00 34:21

Exactly. I'm trying to scale a strategy here. Yes, that that just like works. It's just a strategy that works. That's all it is. Right, it's not supposed to be super overly complicated. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 34:31

Andrew, I want to appreciate or I I appreciate you coming on. I want to thank you for coming on. This has been a great episode talking about again, an area that I'm not familiar with. I think an area that a lot of sellers I don't think utilize. I bought a lot of things from Amazon and I feel like I very rarely see something on there to get me to go back. So I'm glad that we can cover this and and bring this to some sellers that might benefit from it. So I appreciate you being a guest. I want to give you a Yeah, thanks for having me. Of course, yeah. Any any final thoughts to sum up our whole conversation?

Final Advice And How To Vet Tools

SPEAKER_01 34:59

I know we've just had a long discussion, but any any final thoughts on uh maybe maybe we just go right back to it's easier than you think. Um, but any final thoughts on the art of data retention?

SPEAKER_00 35:09

Um I would just say that my final thought that I want to hammer home is that I really feel for sellers today, it's extremely difficult to get ahead of the curve. And there are so many BS products out there now that AI has given everyone the ability to just make side products, that I have no idea how sellers right now are choosing what's something they should spend effort on and what ends up being waste of time. So I would just say if you're a seller, just look after yourself and make sure that you're giving yourself the opportunity to grow long term and don't fall for a lot of the pitfalls that are set for you right now, which are way too many to count. Um, so good luck. But what we're trying to do here is very obvious. Like it's like there's no upfront commitment, it's all pay as you go. Like, look for those sort of services because it means that they have like if I'm not charging you a thousand dollars a month or whatever, or hundreds of dollars a month, then that means that it actually has to work for us to be a company. Right. Um, and that sort of pricing model is a good one to look after uh when you're looking into software. Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 36:34

Yeah, it's it's it's it's it's it's true. Uh it's a good concept. You want the person to be a partner and not just someone that's doing a thing for you whenever they feel like it or whatnot. So yeah, that's a good good rule of thumb there. Um, Andrew, I appreciate you joining again, and I really appreciate you being a guest. I will have Andrew's LinkedIn as well as Swap's website down below in the description.

Links And Closing

SPEAKER_01 36:57

Make sure to check out both of those. And Andrew, thanks again for coming on.

SPEAKER_00 37:01

Thank you for having me. Really appreciate it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:04

Thank you all for watching. I'm your host, Velocity Pete, and we will see you next week.