Interview With Jason Dea at Forewards - A product that helps online store owners get more referrals
Forewards is a product (currently in beta testing) that helps online store owners turn happy customers into a sales army.
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Please tell us about Forewards. How did the product come about and how does it help save the world?
When we started development of Forewards, we wanted to solve a fundamental issue we saw in every other marketing tool on the market. What we found was that the vast majority of marketing software out there is made for âmarketersâ. Almost to a T they all follow a similar metaphor.
They are usually structured as a design tool with the same workflow. Blank page > Select template > modify design elements > insert ,marketing message. Whether the product is designed for email marketing, social media marketing, search or even other customer referral tools, they all follow that same workflow.The problem is that that metaphor assumes that the user is a âmarketerâ.
That is, the user has experience doing things such as using design tools, or copywriting skills or even modifying HTML and CSS. The fact of the matter is, once you step into the world of the small to mid-sized business, very rarely do these business owner/operators have that background, and even if they do, they probably donât have time to worry about that level of detail for each and every marketing tactic they want to use as part of their strategy.
We wanted Forewards to really be designed from the ground up for that SMB who needs a marketing platform that works, not a platform that requires they take a certification course or spend hours on Google searching for tips.
Your company, Toocoo, was rated Canada's second fastest growing tech company this year in the Branham 300. Is Toocoo primarily a marketing agency or do you make your money from Forewards and your other products?
Toocooâs evolution is what led us to Forewards development as well. Like most other agencies out there, we used to focus on big projects, with big clients, that had big budgets. While that proved to be successful we found we were turning away lots of smaller sized businesses who were simply too hard to manage with services resources. We began developing Forewards as a way to address that portion of our market.
Once that decision was made we quickly learned two really interesting things: 1) The SMB market (particularly in the ecommerce space) is a significantly larger opportunity than the niche big businesses we were working with on the agency side, and 2) The nature of the relationships weâre developing with these smaller businesses who are often pursuing some type of personal passion is, dare I say, quite a bit more fulfilling.
So as a result weâre in a bit of a transitionary stage, where we believe our future will be much more heavily skewed towards Forewards and our software business.
There are a lot of entrepreneurs on Erli Bird that also target the SMB market. What has been the best advertising channel or marketing tactic you've used to find new customers?
The best advertising weâve seen for Forewards to date has been old fashioned community outreach and engagement. Weâve seen great engagement and measurable uptake in users when posting and commenting to various ecommerce user groups and forums. Specifically, Reddit subreddits such as entrepreneur, ecommerce, and shopify, and the native Shopify user forums as well.
The other thing that has worked for us is finding influential bloggers in our space to cover our app and what we do. Again a pretty measurable uptake whenever we get mentioned by an ecommerce blogger of note. Nothing particularly groundbreaking and a lot of effort goes into this outreach, but it definitely pays off.
The first step of creating a campaign on Forwards is to define your target audience for marketing emails that you will send. Is this is a target audience from within a store's own existing customers? How is this information used?
The philosophy we have with Forewards is simple. What weâve learned as marketers over the years is, itâs not âwhatâ you ask that determines whether a recipient will click on a call to action or not, but âhowâ you ask. We use the target audience information we ask a user for, to populate the contents of the email referral campaign that Forewards will send out.
That is we use that target audience information to pre-populate the message content as well as influence certain design elements to reflect our userâs value proposition. Rather than forcing our users into a blank page that they must design, we auto-generate an email campaign âdesigned and written by a marketerâ (essentially codifying the thousands of email marketing campaigns weâd sent out as an agency). If a user wants to edit it or fine tune the campaign, thatâs fine. But we feel itâs far easier to fine tune a few elements of a marketing campaign, than it is to create one from scratch.
Do you integrate only with Shopify or other store solutions as well?
Weâve just launched Version 1 of Forewards which is tightly integrated with Shopify as the first platform that we are supporting. However we are actively investigating what other ecommerce platforms to support next. If any of your readers have any opinions not hat weâd love to hear them. We try our best to not make decisions in a vacuum and rather want to base our decisions from real user feedback. In a sense thatâs how and why we began developing Forewards in the first place. Our customer asked us.
Aside from ecommerce platforms, weâre also investigating what it might look like to support other customer platforms that small business use. Something like an accounting or invoicing platform, while not ecommerce per se, could be a great fit with what weâre doing with Forewards, offering services based small businesses the opportunity to tap into word of mouth marketing and customer referrals as well.
How big a customer base is needed for a store owner to get a lot of value out of your product?
Customer referral programs are a fantastic way to help turn existing customers into powerful advocates for your business. Effectively turning 1 sale into more sales. That being said, for a referral program such as Forewards to really work well a business does have to have crossed that âfirst customerâ barrier.Â
What sort of results have your customers seen after implementing Forewards? Do you have any data to share?
So far weâve seen really great success with our initial customers. The general performance we see from looking across our entire customer base is that the referral rate (that is the number of customers who will go ahead and refer a friend through email or Facebook) sits at about 30%. How those referrals are translating into new shopper traffic is interesting as well, weâre seeing that for every referral stores are seeing about 2 new visitors.
From an ROI or sales standpoint what we then see is that the conversion rate (or number of new visitors that are buying product) will be slightly better than a storeâs typical conversion rate. The industry average for ecommerce conversion rate is about 1.5% (so 1.5 out of every 100 visitors will purchase) what we see is that the conversion rate of referral traffic actually tends to be a bit higher than this as a whole. Which makes sense given the nature of how those visitors are getting there.
Can you share any interesting data you have that can help product owners get more referrals? For example, you allow store owners to reward users that refer others with a coupon on a future purchase. Does a bigger coupon always lead to more sharing?
One of the most interesting observations weâve made is that while incentives and rewards certainly help the rate of referrals of our programs, some programs can also be effective without an incentive at all. Again back to our belief that itâs not âwhatâ youâre asking your customers, but âhowâ and also in the case of referrals that youâre asking them at all.
If your business is offering a great experience with great products, what weâve seen is that quite a few of your customers will be willing to refer your business or store to friends regardless of whether they are incented to do so or not. You just need to ask them at all, and asking them ânicelyâ when you do helps as well. Incentives, coupons and rewards are a proverbial icing on the cake, helping to improve a referral programs performance, but they definitely are not the be all and end all.
As a product owner, when providing a reward for a referral, there's often a question of whether you should only reward a successful referral (e.g., a friend actually signs up or completes a purchase) or just the act of sharing regardless of whether or not their friends actually sign up. How does Forewards do it?
We like to keep things simple. We think the act of sharing and providing the word of mouth for a business should be enough to warrant a reward. As such we reward referrers at the point of sending a referral email, or posting a referral to their Facebook timeline.
What is the most interesting thing you've learned lately?
The most interesting thing Iâve learned lately business-wise is that itâs amazing how much opportunity there is online for aspiring entrepreneurs. In fact the more unique, quirky or niche your product line is online, the higher your likelihood for success. Itâs actually quite amazing and inspiring to see the types of businesses that are signing up for Forewards.
Non business-related the most interesting thing Iâve learned lately is that Rick Astley has only earned $12 in royalties from the phenomenon known as the Rick-roll.
