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[Voiceover]: Welcome to the Checkout. We catch up with previous add to cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday.
[Ad]: Here's your host, Bushy Today's checkout features Dan Ferguson, Chief Marketing Officer at Adore Beauty. Dan has over 20 years experience in e commerce and digital marketing. Prior to joining adore Beauty in 2018, Dan held roles leading e commerce for brands such as vistaprint, Officeworks and Dell.
Nathan Bush: Dan, welcome to the Checkout. Thank you for joining us. We had a great conversation about everything that you and the team are doing in marketing at Adore Beauty and your background in psychology, which I found was fascinating. We're here to learn a little bit more about you. I've got five quick questions. Questions Number one what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Dan Ferguson: A vibrating spider head massager from temu
Nathan Bush: didn't know where you were going at the start of that sentence. What inspired that?
Dan Ferguson: Well TEMU inspired that. It's CVP is to get you to buy the weirdest thing you've ever bought online I think.
Nathan Bush: Yeah and we talked about that in the main episode how they've changed the game about everything driving us towards Cart and changing those expectations for customers. So I love that you've been drawn into that as well. It's like you always find the marketers the ones that are the greatest to market too. Right?
Dan Ferguson: I'm a complete sucker. My wife complains about it all the time.
Nathan Bush: All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer?
Dan Ferguson: I'd say my industry led response would be alter. In the US I think they collide mass with premium really strong site experience really well and an integrated retail. I'd also say Dan Murphy's in Australia. I love the way that there's handwritten notes on products in that shop that they sell everything from a really obscure French vineyard, champagne, to 4 million bottles of really economical red. I think that that there's a particular set of skills in that that is quite a win.
Nathan Bush: Absolutely. Especially at that scale.
Dan Ferguson: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Number three, which e commerce practice do
Dan Ferguson: you wish was history asking me how many emails is okay to send a week or how many SMSs, or how many push notifications? There is no golden number. You should ask yourself how relevant can you be? How fascinating can you be to then support unlimited amounts of contact?
Nathan Bush: Oh, that's marketers dream. Unlimited contact. But it comes with a cause.
[Ad]: All right.
Nathan Bush: Number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Dan Ferguson: Yeah, I'm completely biased here. I would thoroughly recommend that you get into Adore Beauty. Beauty IQ uncensored. It's been live now for quite a few years. It's regularly and most often been in the top three to five podcasts for fashion and beauty in Australia and often ranks in the top 50 globally for the UK and the US. And there is no better place to start than our first episode that goes in depth on bum hair removal. So get into it.
Nathan Bush: Glad it's a Podcast, not a YouTube channel.
Dan Ferguson: Podcast, not bug hair removal. Up to you.
Nathan Bush: Any tips for this little podcaster over here? You've grown those those series of podcasts. Nine podcasts now. What have you got? Over 6 million downloads. What's the secret to getting a podcaster out there and getting more listeners?
Dan Ferguson: Oh, look, I mean, I don't profess to be an expert in podcasts, but you know, something that I have liked doing is looking at the bisecond engagement of our listeners and seeing where they drop off. I use a term called salting the content, which is you have to talk about things, you know, particularly if you're a retail podcast. Less so for you, Nathan, because everything you're talking about probably doesn't have a. I think people suspect retail podcasts as having multiple objectives. We're trying to sell something and we're giving information. So I think you need to salt your content as a retailer. And that means providing information that is contrary to what maybe a retailer should provide. Talk about products you don't sell. Talk about topics that might be a little edgy or that are quite that your audience will love to hear but might not be the done thing in retail.
Nathan Bush: Hence bum hair removal.
Dan Ferguson: Salting the content is important.
Nathan Bush: Love it. And last one I have for you, Dan, finish this sentence. The future of retail is his customers.
Dan Ferguson: And by that I don't mean, you know, that is a cliche as the amount of appeals to our attention, the number of different ways we can shop, the number of different things we can buy just exponentially increases because it just will from here. Our brains can't handle it. Going back to psychology, our brains can't handle it and we get a narrower and narrower focus and rely more and more on trust. So the task, the job to do for retailers is to acquire a customer and then build trust with that customer and not focus on the transaction. Don't acquire a transaction to the extent that you focus only on roas, then you're completely short term. But also you're not going to win in a market where it's all about actually holding a sustainable customer base that isn't distracted, that understands your value and has a deep relationship with you. Yeah. So I think that's going to be key.
[Ad]: I love that.
Nathan Bush: Redefining customer. We talked about the double funnel. Obviously you've got the funnel to conversion but more important that funnel to the depth of relationship in our main episode. So that's a great way to close us out. Dan, thank you for joining us on the checkout.
Dan Ferguson: Brilliant. Thank you, Dan.
[Ad]: To hear more from Dan, jump back into episode 390 where Dan shares everything you need to know about app strategy, including how to avoid deletion by your customers. He also shares the do's and don'ts of SMS marketing and what matters most in the big game of ideas. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep adding to cart.
