How To Reach New Customers And Personalize Their Journey With Your Brand

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Francois Marchand: Personalization. As more people shop online and turn away from traditional brick and mortar stores, providing a dedicated experience for every customer has become a huge priority for e-commerce manager. With a growing selection of new tools and technology available, it’s never been easier to build a truly personalized customer journey online.

Welcome to The Ecomm Manager podcast. Our mission is to help you succeed in your e-commerce journey with helpful, actionable advice from the experts who made it big. I’m your host, Francois Marchand. 

Today I’m joined by Leah Tu’inukuafe, Head of Digital and E-commerce at Motto Fashions and one of BigCommerce’s Top 50 People in E-commerce for 2023. We’ll be chatting about personalizing the customer journey for your e-commerce business. So stay tuned to discover the best practices on how to build a personalized customer journey, what Motto did to analyze their customer interactions, and what kinds of new tools and technology can help you make each customer touchpoint more customized and personal.

Welcome to another edition of The Ecomm Manager podcast. I’m Francois, the Editor of ECM. 

Here today to chat about personalizing your journey or the customer’s journey with your brand with a very special guest, I’m very glad that she accepted to be on the show today, Leah Tu’inukuafe, Head of E-commerce and Digital at Motto Fashions.

Leah, thank you so much for being here. 

Leah Tu’inukuafe: Oh, thank you for having me. It’s my pleasure. 

Francois Marchand: Leah, before we get started, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself, what Motto Fashions does, and how you got into e-commerce to begin with? 

Leah Tu’inukuafe: Oh my goodness. That’s a very big question. Well, me, I’m Leah, obviously. I have worked in ecom and digital, I reckon 15 plus years now, and absolutely love it.

I thrive in challenges and there’s so many different perspectives in this industry and everyone does things differently and it just fascinates me. So, I’ve just thrived in that. But I came from traditional marketing, like your normal in-store point of sale, ent like ticket entries for competitions.

I’m not kidding you, we had so many entries into one competition. I think I was like 21. And we had to put all these tickets in a blowup swimming pool, and I had to get in and pull these ticket out. So, you know what I mean? It’s just and then I kind of fell into digital. So I was working for a company called Tabcorp and they had a maternity leave role and they said, Leah, we can teach you. We know what you’re about, yeah, we can teach you. And then that’s just how it started really. I just kind of held onto it and kept running. 

Francois Marchand: Nice. What brought you to Motto Fashions, and maybe you can tell me a little bit about what Motto Fashions is all about?

Leah Tu’inukuafe: Yeah, of course. Well, so what brought me there is Lauren French, who’s the owner and designer. She literally harassed me on LinkedIn I’m not kidding you, to the point where I had a phone call booked in with her, and then I got covid and I was like, oh, I’m too sick, I can’t. So I just kind fogged it off and then she kept following me up and I was like, oh, okay, I’ll have a chat with you.

You’re very eager conversations is where, beautiful relationships can start. And then after talking to her, like just her energy and her passion, I was like, okay, maybe I need to know more about this business. So, Motto Fashions has been around for almost 40 years. Started in bricks and water, obviously. 

40 years ago we weren’t doing e-commerce. And it was started by her parents, and it’s always been women’s fashion. But it’s always been about how we empower women to be comfortable in their skin and find the right clothes to suit their season. We don’t like to necessarily label things with numbers.

Obviously there are sizes. But we talk about, we don’t say this is for a 20 year old. It’s, that’s just an, a label, right? It’s about your season. Where are you at in your life? How are you feeling, and how do you wanna project yourself to make, the best version of you with clothes, right? Like we all do it.

It’s an extension of how we’re feeling that day. I know I do it. It’s clearly cold here in Melbourne cause I’m covered in black. It is my uniform though. So if you see me in hot pink, it’s like I’m having a fantastic day. That’s what it’s about. Like it’s ingrained in the DNA from day one. And Faye, who is Lauren’s mom, still works in the business.

John, who’s her dad still works in the business. They truly believe in empowering women through fashion because it is such a subjective area. And then you’ve got the likes of media and social media and Instagram, you know, reality versus Instagram giving a false sense of what we should be looking like. So it’s really, that’s where the passion came from.

That’s why I went there. I was like, okay, these guys aren’t very mature in their e-com business. It really flourished through Covid and Covid locks down as most e-com. But now that we’re out of that, what does that mean to this business, right? Acquired so many new customers, they’ve barely dipped their toe in the water from even general paid advertising with Meta.

They only started that last year. Right? So it just like mind blowing when you start to hear these things and when you see the data and their conversion rates and their retention, you’re just like, there is something organically here. I wanna be involved in that. So that’s how I got there. That’s a bit about them.

Francois Marchand: That’s great. And that’s how you got here, because that’s what we want to talk to you about and we want your insights on, the customer journey. You mentioned brick and mortar obviously for a long time from Motto Fashions before Covid changed everything and e-commerce kind of became the norm. It was a thing before the pandemic, but it’s become sort of a necessary form of transactional commerce with a customer.

The journey’s changed, so let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about how you reach new customers now as opposed to before. And maybe what the typical customer journey looks like for an e-commerce company like Motto Fashions, because we can call Motto Fashions an e-commerce company at this point. 

Leah Tu’inukuafe: It’s huge. It’s the biggest part of their business now, organically, mainly, right? That’s crazy considering this business has been around for almost 40 years. But as a e-commerce professional, it’s like, how do I bottle this? And I don’t even know how to blame it properly without actually diving into numbers and having those think tank sessions.

But ultimately, once someone has been exposed to Motto or have purchased clothing and actually experienced our customer experience, the comms, the brand, which is Lauren and Faye ultimate, and the warmth that they have, they tend to just, it’s like a cult. They just stay, which I love. But then there’s that other part of things as well.

How do you acquire new customers and how do you show them all of that through an acquisition process and through that journey? And that’s the toughest part. We’re still, I’m a big believer in you should still always be learning in that part, especially in the acquisition and especially when the brand is so much about the individual interpretation of how fashion makes them feel.

So we can’t make any assumptions. Obviously we can’t do one-to-one personalization in the acquisition part of the funnel. I would love to we’re not there yet. That’s the dream, right? But what does this message mean to them? If you see an image of Lauren and Faye, what does that mean to you? So at the moment, we’re still going through that process, but the typical new customer, like crazily comes through Google organic search.

We do pretty much zilch of SEO. So that tells me that it’s word of mouth. People are seeing us somewhere and turning to Google to really discover us, right? So majority of that traffic does come through to our homepage or our new arrivals. Now we have, I hate saying homepage, right? Because like it’s just so magaziney, I don’t know what else to call it.

Like we have a strategy to change that. It’s changing, right? It’s going to be about that journey and where that person comes from, but ultimately that’s where they go. So what do they see? We all talk about above the blog content and call to actions and again, it’s so subjective, but it’s okay, we need to consider that they’re being introduced to the brand.

And again, really amazing picture of a model in our clothes doesn’t represent who we are. So for us, it’s really giving that customer the understanding of our clothes and trying to add that quirkiness to it and that realism to it. And again, that says we haven’t overcomplicated that process because it is so subjective and we constantly adjust and pivot through that content strategy and that journey for that customer.

Ultimately, once we’ve got them within our welcome series, so now that they’re a subscriber or they’ve purchased something, that’s when the magic really happens because we really introduce Lauren and Faye to those customers. And we really make it personal like our emails have been written by them.

They’ve created that content specifically and it actually comes from their email addresses and we have customers emailing them back. Right? So, it’s so amazing when I think this is a really lovely story. We had a lady a couple of weeks ago, email Lauren, and literally she was like, you saved my life.

Like I am in my late thirties, I’ve had children. I’m now trying to go back to work. I’m trying to discover who I am. Your identity is so much about what you wear. And she was introduced to Motto, and this is when I talk about seasons, right? It’s how you feel and how we lift you up through those moments in discovery.

And that’s ultimately the journey we give people, whether they react in that way and actually tell us, but that’s our journey for them and it’s, giving them the opportunity to be able to purchase our clothes that fit them. It’s not about email blasting or SMS blasting. And look, I look at open rates, click through rates, conversion rates. That’s my job. But ultimately the customers at the forefront there. 

Francois Marchand: Yeah. You mentioned organic and I wanted to know there’s a word of mouth thing happening. So when someone goes to Google, do they enter Motto Fashions? Is it because they heard the brand names somewhere from someone they trust and they’re looking the company name directly?

Or is there a little bit of sales involved, like PPC ads or anything like that involved as well? No, none? None at all? That’s amazing. 

Leah Tu’inukuafe: No, nothing. So I literally just did an audit earlier this week. So I call it my monthly audit to really understand where our entries are, what are those journeys like, where our exits, our bouncers, and obviously a lot of that comes from Google search.

So then I look at what those queries are, what are those pages, like what is that journey? And everything is in the top 20. A variation of Motto Fashion. 

Francois Marchand: Interesting. So yeah, let’s talk a little bit about that audit, right? Because that was going to be my next question. So you looked at Motto Fashions’ website, or homepage, if you wanna call it that, I guess. 

Using tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar, I believe, other tools were involved in that process to look at where are people clicking? What words are they connecting with visuals on the page, are they attracted to and want to connect with using that mouse click?

Leah Tu’inukuafe: Yeah. I’ve only used Hotjar and Google Analytics.

I don’t like to overcook things, especially when you’re in small business and you know your resources and time, very like thinly spread. It’s enough, right? It’s enough to make assumptions. It’s enough to curate a path or an optimization that’s not gonna cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in development work.

In my mind, they should all be minor tweaks that you constantly are evolving and evaluating. So I like to look at my year in three monthly sprints from an ecom and digital perspective. So I do this every three months. But ultimately what it discovered with us is, like no one would be surprised that most of our traffic’s on mobile, that 50% of them don’t scroll below the fold.

And they’re all safe assumptions. So they came out of the analysis. But what I found really interesting was the amount of customers that engaged with the product content on a category page. So flipping through and they were constantly our high click, they were. So the browseability of our pages was such, has to be top of mind.

And majority of those people are either engaging within the search bot or the navigation menu. And I’m like, well, okay, what are they looking for? What are they not finding? And it was a pretty safe assumption that was gonna happen. We release new clothes every day. It’s crazy. So for us, something that we released this time last week is no longer new.

Right? But to a new customer, that’s still new. To a returning customer, it’s not. So, it’s so interesting on, okay, how do we carve this path out based on our loyal Motto fans that expect something new every single day, versus a new customer that’s really searching for something that’s potentially seen something on Meta, or they’ve seen one of their girlfriends wear it and they said, oh, I only bought it a couple weeks ago, but yet, it’s like on page three of new arrivals.

Francois Marchand: Yeah, exactly. 

Leah Tu’inukuafe: It was really, what that brought to me was we really need to have a seamless way of navigation for those new customers. It may be overkill, but you know, having more segments within you instead of just hitting new arrivals and you get this like 20 pages of product, it’s okay, well, do you wanna search new tops or dresses or pants? 

And then those people go, oh, I actually know I’m looking for a pair of pants, so I’ll look in there. We’re just about to execute that, cause that was a really big one for us. Outside of that, it was a lot of layout issues that was just like, you know when you look at something and then you see the data and you’re like, how did I not figure this out?

And that’s exactly where I was like, we had a recommendation widget on our cart page that was sitting above the actual details of what’s in their cart and the pricing. So, so many people were going like clicking the cart button again cause they thought they weren’t in their cart. And I’m like, Okay, we need to flip that because that’s a problem and that’s probably a conversion issue.

Yeah. So look, it doesn’t feel like it’s rocket science or massive projects, but these little things have really made a difference. And there’s no point in redoing or reinventing the wheel if you can spend less money and less time and get the same result. 

Francois Marchand: Yeah. Fantastic. That’s such a good way to kind of paint a picture of how businesses can use even small data points in their analysis to change the entire experience and how people will actually go to cart and click checkout and have a seamless kind of experience from browsing to selecting to payment. So how do you define customer personalization as pertains to Motto at this point? 

As you lean into that personalization strategy in the olden days and the before times, a brick and mortar store could just rearrange the layout of its store. Place new arrivals or sales in a certain way, or target a specific segment of customers by having these labels above certain display racks and so on. How do you do that in an e-commerce setting like Motto? As you lean into that strategy, what does that look like? 

Leah Tu’inukuafe: Yeah, I think, so we’ve already started doing some personalization and remote across our site, so we obviously value our own assets as well. So truly understanding within the email marketing, SMS schedule, what are we saying to these customers? What segment is it going to?

Are they people that know our site that never, are they new? Are they, have they engaged in the last 90 days? So it’s really understanding where we’re sending them to. And making sure in that site, most of them go to new arrivals. Let’s remerge that page. Let’s make sure that the products they’re seeing through the pretty campaign shots and all that sort of stuff. 

I’m like, that’s not my forte, that they’re actually seeing the right product. Right? The visual representation of that product. So, like I think it’s funny because we have new arrivals every single day, but we don’t send emails every single day.

So like today’s email could have been, I think it’s actually something we launched on Monday. So we have to remerge that entire new arrivals page just to suit that comms. Now, that’s just part of our process to give those people that information instead of it clicking through just to the product page. Because ultimately we’re not just showing them a singular product in those comms, we’re showing them the outfit, where to wear it, the feeling of it.

So we send them to a category. Outside of that, we have started doing some smart recommendations and personalization based on a well, in partnership with an AI company called Insider. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with them. Oh my God. Get on it. It’s look, if I could stand on the biggest mountain in the world and scream out, “All e-com managers, look into Insider”, I would. Seriously, this is not the first time I’ve introduced them to a business.

I have worked with them in the past. And it’s incredible, like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what this platform can do. It is insane. From the perspective of it doesn’t just capture data on your customers. You have email addresses. It creates segments on the unknown user, those people who haven’t purchased yet, those people who haven’t subscribed, and truly understanding the behavior of that browseability.

So that really helps from that acquisition perspective. So we’ve started implementing smart recommendations for those customers as well based on past history. So any of our recommendation bars, unless we have zero history on you, then obviously it’s our top sellers or people also bought with or all those sorts of things.

But if you’re coming to our site and you’ve been to our site before and you are, have an affinity to purchasing dresses over pants, that recommendation will do that for you. Absolutely. And that’s only one part of what we do with them. We do a lot of social proofing. So when you’re on a product page, you’ll see how many people have that in their cart.

Like those things are no brainers. I understand that’s creating a sense of urgency, but when someone’s making a decision, and keep in mind, we’re also a business that only releases a limited amount of unit per drop. So like this jumper for example, we released two weeks ago. It’s already sold out, but we only made a hundred of them.

Francois Marchand: So if you can put a counter on the page or saying “Only three left in stock”, “90 people are looking at this product right now”, all of a sudden you have, you get a click, you get a conversion. Someone will just say, well, I better grab this before it’s too late. 

Leah Tu’inukuafe: Exactly. And I think, the downside of this is we have so many people that are considering our products but not purchasing.

And by the time they decide to purchase, it’s gone. And we have such a high amount of new users coming to our site. How do you educate them on what we do? Like we don’t make in bulk. Like it’s not something we do. It’s very limited edition. So that even makes my job even harder, right? Imagine the amount of content and journey changes I do on a daily basis, sometimes.

It’s fine if it’s the nature of the business, you need to be agile. But we’re also going to start implementing from a personalization perspective with Insider using the tools of known and unknown users. If they do land on the homepage from a Google search, we’re gonna actually use that data to present different content to them.

So it won’t be your typical homepage anymore. It will have a suite of different creatives that it can served. And all of this is A/B tested. So at the moment, everything we do with Insider has a control group and we’re doing 50/50 so we can truly understand what our conversion rate uplift is based on all of this.

So, and it requires no dev work, so it’s literally an overlay of your site. I’m surprised you don’t know this brand. They’re global. 

Francois Marchand: This is kinda mind blowing, like really. I’m happy that you’re mentioning this. 

Leah Tu’inukuafe: Yeah. So there are other companies out there that claim to do similar things, and they do, right?

I’ve had pictures from them as well. But the difference between any other company that does this in Insider is they’ll offer you a proof of concept period free of charge. You use their product live to customers to prove that this product will make you money for a two to three month period, depending on what your contract is.

And then you have, okay, if it didn’t reach those goals, a handshake and we both walk away. 

Francois Marchand: Wow. Handy. 

Leah Tu’inukuafe: They know their product works. Like when someone comes to you and says, I will let you use this 100% free of charge for three months to prove it works to you. You listen, right? And then you’ve got multiple opt-out points, so we’ve barely scratched the surface.

And with them, they have a program called Architect, where we’ll literally know if someone becomes a, an unknown user to a known user. They morph those profiles together. But ultimately for me, from a personalization perspective is the system will understand what platform they wanna receive communications from and how often.

So whether it be email, SMS, Web Push, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, you can plug in your ads. So Google ad, Facebook ads, and ultimately you’re not paying for people that you would’ve converted anyway, or you’re not harassing people with frequency of your ads either. So ultimately that for me, that’s the personalization goal.

Francois Marchand: That’s amazing, to think that we’ve gone from AB testing, sort of a one-size-fits-all, to use a fashion term, one-size-fits-all web experience homepage to basically almost getting to the point where an e-commerce store can be personalized in its entirety. Like the experience can almost be entirely customized and personalized to every specific new and existing customer.

That’s poof, like my mind just exploded. 

Leah Tu’inukuafe: My mind explodes too, because I still obviously I haven’t gotten to that point yet. Right? 

Francois Marchand: Yeah. But that’s the dream, right? That’s the goal. 

Leah Tu’inukuafe: Exactly, and it’s to be able to take such an amazing brand on this journey, it’s incredible. It’s just like I’m learning as well. Like this is something I’ve never done before. Yes, I’ve worked with them, but I’ve never gotten to that point. So it’s it’s just incredible of what they can do. 

Francois Marchand: That’s amazing. We’ve covered we’ve touched upon so many things. We’ve talked about what our assumptions are when it comes to the customer experience for a new customer, existing customer, how we measure those things, how we optimize these things.

For e-commerce managers that are listening, besides Insider at this point, if they haven’t tried Insider yet, how do you ensure that your personalization efforts are consistent across all touchpoints? Whether it’s the website, your newsletter, your email blast, SMS, and so on? 

Leah Tu’inukuafe: A really good question because we consider our customer service team, so we have an online customer service team that answer like our live chat.

They answer the phones obviously like all of that sort of stuff. We sit, all of us sit together, we’re in an open plan office. We do a standup. We communicate, okay, what are we doing here? This is the message, this is where it’s going. And then everyone has, like I’ve created, instead of it being a org chart, we have an accountability chart.

So ultimately, in those quick standup meetings, everyone knows what they’re accountable for and their check. So it’s literally like, all right, you know our e-com coordinator, is this done? Is it merged? Are we ready to go? And then it’s also their accountability to tell us if something’s not working. 

Cuz we know tech can fail, right? But the biggest problem is when we don’t know tech fails and something goes live, it’s a problem. And our customer service team is such breadth of knowledge. Like Callie, who heads up that team, has been with the business for 30 years. She knows like the ins and outs, she knows what our customers think. So it’s literally asking those who know, Hey, what do you think our customers are gonna think about this?

What do you think about this is a visual versus the message versus where they’re going and what we’re trying to get them to do? It’s as simple as that. We are a very small business, so we have the luxury of having those conversations and pivoting really quickly. I think in bigger businesses it’s really hard to steer the ship in another direction, but smaller ones it’s a lot easier.

So having those collaborations, but I think the best thing I’ve ever done through my career is really changing the mindset of PDs and org charts and having this accountability and ultimately everyone in our business is accountable for growth. So just because you don’t think it’s your bucket of accountability, if you see an opportunity, you need to grab that. And that, I kind of went off on a tangent cause I do that a lot, but that’s how we continue to check in for that experience, that personalization outside of numbers. Cuz ultimately people aren’t numbers.

Feelings aren’t numbers like, feelings are subjective. If someone didn’t like something like I was, on our Instagram page last night, we had a influencer that went live, a live try on, and I was answering questions. There was clearly a customer that had, was a past customer, and their comment quality has gone down.

I’m not gonna argue with that person cause I actually don’t know what they’ve experienced. I don’t know what they bought. I don’t know what potentially happened. Was it faulty? How many times did it happen? But there’s my opportunity to really grab a breadth of information and that’s what I take it. And you need genuinely understand that person’s experience and that’s what we all do in the business. 

I answer Facebook messages, our customer service team does. Our social media coordinator does. Faye and Lauren do, but ultimately we see them as opportunity. 

Francois Marchand: People, not numbers. 

Leah Tu’inukuafe: Yeah. I mean, numbers can help guide you, but your ultimate decision or your goal should be people.

We have a really good saying in our office, this goes for anyone internally or our customer service perspective is, “If in doubt, be generous.” Because ultimately you’re never gonna understand how someone else feels. So if you ever have that doubt, just be generous. 

Francois Marchand: Agreed. 100%. 

Leah, thank you so much. We’ve covered so many things today. People, not numbers, but the numbers help. Data is important. We know that it can help personalize, customize the customer journey and make your e-commerce business better. 

Leah, where can we follow your work? Where can we follow Motto Fashions? Give us a little bit of your vital statistics right now. 

Leah Tu’inukuafe: Yeah, sure. So you can follow me on LinkedIn. So I will give you Francois, you’ve got my details if anyone wants it, but you can search me. So Leah Tu’inukuafe. If you can spell it. I will come up under my maiden name too, so that’s Adams. But I don’t post a lot of my work. I do a lot of collaborations and stuff like that, so I’m happy, I’ve got a lot of groups.

I message a lot of people there. So if anyone has any questions, they can hit me up there. And if anyone wants to follow Motto Fashions, we’re on Facebook and Instagram. We do daily lives with Faye and Lauren, so you can get to know them. You won’t see me. I’m behind the scenes. But yeah, that’s where we are.

Francois Marchand: Fantastic. Leah, thank you so much for joining us today. Everything we just talked about, all the links, all that stuff, we’ll put that in the show notes. So don’t forget to go and check that up. Click on the links and explore. 

Again, a big thank you for being here today from myself, from our listeners. Thanks for listening to The Ecomm Manager podcast.