Motion & Replo: Full-Funnel Creative Strategy With HexClad – Connor Rolain

Evan Lee: Creative team members. Yeah. Carney, you got a, you got a wide audience here. You got a wide audience.

Sanjay Jenkins: Sweet.

Connor Rolain: Cool. Well, we uh, I mean, that's what it's all about is like creating like seamless feedback loops between all these people. So I think it's good that we have a, a variety here.

Evan Lee: Amazing.

Evan Lee: So, everybody, super, super excited to welcome uh you all to our event. So on our end, Motion, Replo, coming together. Sanjay, Evan, co-hosting up here. What's going on guys? Excited everybody's here.

Sanjay Jenkins: This is going to be incredible. I'm, I like this is we've been building up for this for a couple weeks now and honestly, I'm, I'm like kind of like just excited just to learn. Like this is I feel like Connor's going to give us so much stuff that, you know, I want the answers for. So this is uh almost like a, like a selfish like little like a treat that that that we all get.

Connor Rolain: Damn, pressure's on. That's a, that's a big, that's a big lead in. I'll see what I can do.

Evan Lee: You guys got to extract it out of me. You know we will. You know we will. And everybody, before we get to all things Connor, just wanted to set the stage a little bit. So Motion and Replo, myself and Sanjay, we've been talking for a long time on how we can really serve our community with information that's going to be valuable. And what came top of mind for both of us almost immediately was full funnel creative strategy. And there's no one better than Connor to be able to talk about this. But before we get into the meat and potatoes here, I just wanted to go through some housekeeping and some introductions first and foremost. So I'm actually going to go ahead and share my screen now.

Evan Lee: So on the housekeeping end, some things going on here. So questions, if you have them, what you'll notice is in the right hand side, we have the chat. Please, please, please fill it up. But there's also a Q and A tab. Any questions, throw it into the Q and A tab instead of that chat. So we can put you on stage if it makes sense or the question on stage. The second thing is, is don't even fret. The recording will be made available after this bad boy, so you're good to go. And then the third thing is, is any feedback you might have, you know all three of us are open to it. So please, please, please let us know what's going on in your lives. So that's what we got from a housekeeping standpoint. When we're talking about intros, I think it's only right guys that we talk a little bit about Motion, Replo, and all things Connor to make it come to life. So on the Motion end, I can kick us off before handing us over to Sanjay.

Evan Lee: Is on the Motion side, uh we are focused on everything creative strategy. As everybody knows, when it comes to creative, it's the number one lever of success for all things paid social and paid advertising. But the two people involved or two teams involved, being media buyers and creative team members, almost have a natural disconnect between both of these sides because because of the analytic personalities and creative brains that are involved. So where Motion comes into play is we really help bridge the gap between those two teams so they're operating like this instead of like this. So that's what we got going on at the Motion side. Excited to chat. And Sanjay, I'll hand it over to you.

Sanjay Jenkins: Yeah, thank you so much. Uh this is going to be so much fun. So on the Replo side, Replo is the landing page solution for your Shopify brands. If you're on Shopify, you need to bring landing pages to life. Let's say you're building out an ad campaign or even, you know, stuff that's not necessarily directly related to to customer acquisition, some way to bring all the amazing creative that you make to life, give people the customer journey that they deserve and that ultimately makes you the most revenue and profit. So Replo, super drag and drop tool. We've got amazing templates from brands that you know and love. We've got an AI tool that'll let you spin up pages in uh like less than a minute. And again, if you're building on Shopify, it is the way to go. We're really excited to like kind of open up some of the pages that that Connor's actually built on Replo uh for HexClad. So uh you'll get to see exactly what the uh the net result is of of both the the work that the Motion team does and the Replo team does to to bring uh full funnel to life.

Connor Rolain: And I will I'll second both of you guys and say we use Motion and Replo a ton at HexClad for reporting, um a variety of different landing pages. I, I, you know, unbiasedly think both of these tools are some of the best in the game for for what each does respectively and they've been incredibly helpful for our decision making. So highly recommend both of them.

Evan Lee: Appreciate you, sir. And we're going to make sure that we throw everyone's socials just into the chat in a second here so we can stay connected as a community. But now, let's get to it. We have the man, the myth, the legend, Connor in the building, everybody. So let's show some love in the chat just for some uh emojis, drum rolls, all that good stuff. I've had the, I've had the pleasure of knowing Connor for a little while now and he's someone that I deeply respect. Connor really got his teeth cut on the agency side of things where he was able to dig in with brands, not only just scaling like large, large companies as we know him for, but everybody who is even just starting out. So really learned and cut his teeth there. And what he's more recently up to, as everyone knows by the title of this event, is he's the head of growth over at HexClad, making everything happen profitably at the end of the day. So we're super excited to have Connor here and ultimately tell us about full funnel creative strategy. Everybody, let's give him some love in the chat. Let's give him some love in the chat.

Sanjay Jenkins: Thanks y'all. Appreciate it.

Evan Lee: There we go. There we go.

Sanjay Jenkins: So let's get into this thing.

Evan Lee: Let's let's let's jump right in. We're like ready to rock and roll.

Sanjay Jenkins: Connor, I'm going to I'm going to open it up really fast just by setting the stage for what full funnel is. Like what we're like just to give everybody some context. So when we talk about full funnel, part of part of what we're talking about is, you know, taking, thinking about every little piece from your ad creative to the landing page to, um, you know, elements like your back end, like what what's your checkout experience like, what's your email flows, all all these sorts of things. So, um, I think it's important for everyone to understand like that's what we kind of talking about when we're talking about full funnel. So in your day-to-day life, you're sitting down, you're thinking about, okay, how do I grow HexClad? How does, you know, full funnel creative strategy fit into your your daily life and and and what does that actually look like tactically?

Connor Rolain: Yeah, yeah. So we have, we have a higher AOV, um, than most e-com brands and a much longer consideration period than most e-com brands. So we definitely are thinking about that. Like, you know, a lot of e-com brands, that conversion's going to happen within seven days. Some of them it's the first day, right? Like people are discovering that brand, making that conversion the same exact day or within seven days. For us, those two, those two discovery to conversion windows are actually our, our least common. And we know this because we ask our customers, how long have you known about us since you made this purchase? So for us, actually the most common time lag is one to three months from discovery and the second most common time lag is three to 12 months from discovery. So we really think a lot about full funnel in the context of creative specifically. Um, yes, in in the context of like how does someone go, you know, in a within a funnel, like how does someone go from an ad to a page, to our product page, to checkout, um, then how do we cross sell them again, you know, through email, SMS, like that's a totally separate, I guess, like full funnel lens. But in terms of our just creative, um, that's what I was going to talk about today because we are rolled out now on, I mean, we're probably spending on at least 10 channels and we've added three to four this year successfully. Um, so we really think about like what is the different creative that we're going to show to people at different stages in the funnel. So it really, it all starts with that first touch point. For us, for the most part, that is YouTube, that is connected TV, that is linear TV, and then and then it's Facebook and TikTok to an extent, but not as much, I will say. That's become much more of a middle of funnel channel for us as we as we track by percentage of new visits. But the the one question we ask ourselves as it pertains to our discovery channels is if someone sees this ad, are they going to tag HexClad as premium and as like, you know, some of the highest end cookware they can get? Like that is the lens we approach all of our top of funnel creative from. So if you are watching TV and you see a linear ad or you're streaming Hulu and you get our connected TV ad or you're watching on YouTube, what you'll notice about all of that creative is it's all very high production value. It's very scripted. Um, we show the product beautifully, like shot on a really nice camera. Like you can see the the the hexagon pattern looks beautiful. Like any, any creative you see through those channels, if it's your first time seeing it, again, the goal is for that someone to finish seeing that and be like, wow, like that's really nice cookware. And that's the, that's the first touch point, right? Like the first impression is so important. We're not running like direct response static images on those channels. We're not running really like native iPhone shot UGC in those channels. Um, the creators and the angles are generally very product focused, very feature focused. You know, we'll use Gordon Ramsey, we'll use other well-renowned chefs. Um, but it's all very like studio shot, beautiful creative. And that's very intentional, right? Again, premium from the jump. Then as people start getting more bottom of funnel, more into our what I would call like our last click conversion channels, being Facebook is our is our best one-day click paid social channel. Actually, Twitter has, although the scale is much, much less, has actually been as good as Facebook recently, which is interesting. But this is where we start pulling some more of those direct response levers. So I would like broadly categorize all of our top of funnel creative is like more brand marketing centric. You know, we're not necessarily saying, hey, someone needs to, someone should watch this and then purchase. Whereas in our more bottom and middle of funnel channels, that's where we say, hey, what's going to make someone buy right after they saw this ad? So this is where we see the direct response stuff, right? Like the user generated content that's like very native feeling, very specific angles, like where we're really hammering on social proof or maybe we're really hammering on like a specific problem with maybe like a different cookware surface that that we think we have a much better solution for. Um, this is where we're rolling out product focused statics with offer overlays. This is where we really go hard when we do run a sale, when we're promoting those offers, like we're pushing them mainly in Facebook because we know like those audiences are so beefed up from all the top of funnel stuff we're doing. So this is where it's just very direct response. We want you to click, we want you to buy right after you see this ad. And that's really how we think about first touch point to last touch point. And all of this is informed by last click data, it's informed by post purchase survey data, asking people, where'd you first hear about us? Where did you come to us today after you bought? And then obviously, if we can measure the click data, it's pretty clear to see which channels are driving that last click conversion. So that's ultimately like when you talk about full funnel, a full funnel creative approach, that's it right there. Like top of funnel brand marketing, as you get down further down funnel, it gets more and more direct response, more and more sales tactics. Um, and that's how and that's how we look at full funnel creative strategy.

Connor: Connor, love that. Love that. Setting the stage really well for how you think of the full funnel creative strategy. What I want to do next is actually just pull it back a little bit. Before we start making anything, before they live in ads, before they live on landing pages, wherever it might be, I like to think of the very first step. And that question is about like, who are we actually going after and the personas that we're ultimately lining them up with, what are the offers to make this come to life? And where we really want to spend some time is diving into those numbers. But Connor, I'll be mad at myself if I didn't ask this question. The influencers, the creators that you're using in your ads, they range, man. You have the Gordon Ramsays of the world and all the big time players, but you also have the micro influencers and UGC creators. Can you talk to the people just really quickly about how you go about sourcing your creators or anything you're willing to share there?

Connor Rolain: Yeah, so, um, you know, you called it out, but we we use a handful of different resources for sourcing these. So on the, on kind of like the everyday creators front, we use a really awesome agency called Align Growth Management. That's run by Josh Durham. Highly recommend them for an influencer marketing agency. They lead the charge on our, on our product for content exchange. So like, I myself, our e-commerce manager, London Spilker, super talented as well. Um, he's a new addition to the Hex team in the last four months.

Evan Lee: Shout out London.

Connor Rolain: Yeah, shout out London. So him, myself, and Marissa really dial in those content briefs. And then they handle all of like the prospecting and and deal making with all of these creators. Um, that often leads to our white listing, right? So like if they reach out to 50 creators for content, we might follow up with the the five that give us the best content and say, hey, we'd love to, we'd love to cut a one-month white listing deal with you as a test run to see how your funnels perform. And if we run, you know, 10, 10 everyday creators, you know, maybe two or three have average or above average performance and then we'll cut a longer term deal with them. So that's like, yeah, like that's kind of the everyday creator stuff. Um, we do have some creative partners, like agencies that also as kind of like a side offering offer UGC. That's that's much less of a, but if we need to like turn something around very quickly and we have something very specific we want, we'll maybe go to an agency partner because we can just work more closely with them. Um, if we need like native style B-roll, so like iPhone shot B-roll, maybe there's like a certain clip that we really want that we don't have. We have some like creators that we have on contract directly where it's just like, hey, hourly rate, as needed, we'll approach them. So again, it's all about like how specific and how quickly do we want something, we'll go to those contracted creators. I think ultimately at some point we'll probably bring some of them in house full time because we have a lot of needs. Um, higher end studio stuff, like we have a head of content in house who's amazing on set. So like if we need something of higher production value, you know, usually B-roll, we'll try to get something integrated into like his next shoot. It usually won't be the purpose of the shoot. It's like, hey, can you spend 10 minutes getting us this? And he's usually pretty good about that. All of our brand ambassador deals, like, you know, the Gordons, um, the Chris Babers, the Robbie Follies, all those people, we all have, all of them have like, um, direct to camera ad reads as part of those contracts and B-roll as part of those contracts. So like once a month or once every few months, we're shooting ads with those people and that's how we get like, you know, our ad content from some of the bigger, um, like celebrity chef type people. And then last but not least, we recently rolled out with Archive AI, also highly recommend that tool. It automatically scrapes content from socials as your brand is tagged. And we've gotten a lot of amazing content through that that purely organic, people just love our product and they're posting cool stuff on Instagram and TikTok. And then we'll sometimes reach out to those people and say, hey, love your video. Um, is it okay if we use it in in an ad or here? And most of the time they say yes because they posted it organically. Like they already like the brand. They're like, oh yeah, you guys want to like use my stuff? That's awesome. Um, so I'd say those are the big resources for sourcing, you know, that was mainly kind of user generated content, but also, um, studio shot stuff as well.

Sanjay Jenkins: Incredible. I I there's so many projects that that I get to see, get to talk to that I know I'm I'm going to be like, all right, y'all, we just had this crazy conversation. We got to like implement everything that Connor said today. Um, Connor, thank you so much for for just sharing all this value and I know that we're going to have to do this again because we've got so much more that we want to talk about. We want to make sure that the audience's questions get answered today. So we're going to transition into some Q and A. Uh and I'll kick it off with uh the highest voted question that we've got um from David, which is, uh are you giving, so going back to personas, um, are you giving those personas their own campaigns? So this is an ad structure question. Are you giving those personas their own campaigns or is everything grouped into CBOs and you let them battle it out for spend?

Connor Rolain: Yeah, it's a good question. Again, this all, this allude, this is all modeling. This is all structure. This is like technical structure and it matters. It it really does. Um, so the way we creative test is, we have a single creative testing ABO. It's a, it's not an ASC plus campaign because we want to, we want to ultimately test creatives on as much top of funnel as possible. Um, every creative test gets its own ad set. That's not every ad, but like every batch of creative gets its own ad set to ensure that it gets spend. And then again, we're comparing the the metrics on that ad set and the individual ads in that ad set to our control metrics. So, um, sometimes if we want to like have a really controlled test, we'll actually rebuild the funnels of our winning of our current winning variants just in our creative testing campaign because that gets rid of the social proof, it get it gets rid of all the data from the winning funnel because otherwise you're you're measuring like a net new funnel versus something that has thousands of dollars of spend behind it and it's just like it's not a fair comparison. But um, that's only sometimes for certain tests that we really want to like have a true like control from zero, test from zero and split it that way. But yeah, I mean, any, every time, like we launch anywhere from like four to six batches of new creative a week, that's four to six new ad sets. So we ensure that they're all getting spend. If we have like eight ads in a batch and we notice that four get spend and four don't, we'll just duplicate the ad set, turn off the four that get got the spend in the initial to get spend behind the other four. But um, yeah, we just really want to make sure that you don't want to put in all this time and effort of producing assets and then not have it get spend because of how Facebook decides to spend on it. That's stupid, right? So we set it up in a way to and then we'll scale it if they win, we'll bring them out into our scaled campaigns and then we'll let them duke it out with the other ads that are also in that scaled campaign. It's all winners, so we are pretty confident in anything that serves there.

Evan Lee: I love that. And just to give everyone a refresher, testing campaign, every single batch that you get, every single creative gets its own ad set. You go a little bit contrarian that if something doesn't get spend, it's not Facebook, we want to make sure it gets some spend. And then they'll graduate to the scaling campaign. Gotcha.

Connor Rolain: Yep. And ABO, ABO there so you can control all your budgets.

Evan Lee: There we go. There we go. Perfect. Okay, sticking in the same world of a little bit of persona, but now just getting to overall full funnel creative strategy that we've been talking about. Rick has a question. What sort of alignment do you have between acquisition and owned channels?

Connor Rolain: Yeah. So, great question. And and owned channels is we have such a big opportunity here because we we've rolled out some amazing products this year and we haven't gotten them all built out yet into our our cross-sell flows. But ultimately, we've really identified like two or three core products that people buy for the first time. Um, so all of our funnels are built out around that. And then from there, it's like, well, now, now what do we do? Well, now it's all about using owned media to get them buying these other relevant products. So, in terms of alignment between acquisition and owned media, we're really focused on these core products in in the acquisition. And then what we're hyper focused on, and this is actually becoming part of our new product drop strategy, not only having like all the owned media campaigns dialed in from the jump, but also having the life cycle automations dialed in from the jump. So the barbecue pan is a great example of this where we launched a new barbecue pan. It's an incredible product, super seasonal, perfect time of year. We had an awesome lift when we dropped it because we had some really awesome owned media campaigns. But what we did then from the jump, not from the jump, a couple weeks later, now we're doing it from the jump with everything moving forward. We wrote a brief to manipulate those launch campaigns to be more focused on like a post-purchase cross-sell automation. Um, and now that's pulling, you know, tens of thousands of dollars in revenue on an automated basis. So that's the balance is like, let's get people in the door on these high AOV acquisition products, then let's increase their LTV by cross-selling them. So that's one, one big kind of like, um, handshaking between acquisition and owned media. The other one is upsells. And this is something we've used Replo for, which is incredible. But we have like, we have probably 100,000 people in our in our CRM that maybe only own a single pot or pan. Now, us for a business, we obviously want to get that person to buy a full set. So what we've done is we've created these post-purchase upsell flows all segmented by the individual, the one-off products that people have bought. And then it's a three-email drip. Email one's no additional offer, email two an additional 50, email three an additional 100. Depending on the link they click for the product for the product funnel they're in and the offer they're in, it has custom content UTMs and the content on the landing page changes based on the UTM. So like it'll say, hey, you've already bought the 12-inch pan plus lid for dynamic price, like complete your set and get the rest of these pieces for dynamic price. Like we're getting, like that's a huge like perceived value from that person. And then the visual of showing those two products, you know, red out with all the other 11 products not red out. Um, it's it's that's how we, that's how we go about saying, hey, we maybe try to get you to buy the 13-piece set, but you bought a 12-inch pan only. Um, how do we get this person up to a 13 or six-piece set? So the next variation of that on Friday, we're actually launching all of the other variants of the one-off products um that we could upsell someone into a 13-piece set with. And then we're going to split test upselling them into a 13-piece versus a six-piece set. Um, I don't know if we if we have time, I have the page pulled up if we want to see it, but uh,

Evan Lee: Throw it up there.

Sanjay Jenkins: Let's take a peek. Let's see what that, let's see what that looks like.

Evan Lee: Let's take a look at it.

Sanjay Jenkins: What one of the things that I'll call out is like I look at probably thousands, this is not an exaggeration, thousands of pages every month. And what Connor is is doing here is not something I've seen anyone else do. Like this is such a smart thing. It's so cool to see this come to life.

Connor Rolain: Yeah, no, this is this has definitely been one of my favorite pages to make or work on, um, because it's so cross-functional. But essentially, this is the page. So now that you felt the power of your 12-inch hybrid pan, this is just the, it it generically defaults to the 12-inch hybrid pan, but this is where if I put in different content UTMs, um, it'll it'll change this. So complete your set for $300 off. Again, we're highlighting the product they already have. And then we're saying, hey, you know, there's 12 other pieces that you haven't got yet. You've already paid 200 for a 12-inch pan. Complete your set for just $4.99.99. Like that's, that's huge value. If you just do a little back of the napkin math there on like the price per piece that we're, you know, upselling them to, um, super high perceived value. Then they go, then they go down into a look inside the set section, followed by a video that goes through the use cases of the different pieces in the 13-piece set. Um, but it's the same landing page for all of the variants. It's just the content UTMs that that manipulate this, it'll manipulate, like if you get into email, if you get into email three where it's the additional 100 off, this will now say 400 off. And then down here, it'll have this price struck through and it'll have 399.99. Um, this is this is going to be a huge part of our upsell strategy in in years to come. I mean, I think we'll be able to get, you know, thousands of orders on this complete your set SKU, um, which is a totally different SKU in our Shopify back end. Um, this is, this is huge. Like this is one of the things Jason, our president from day one was like, I need you to figure out how to get everyone that's only bought a single pan into a set. I'm like, all right, like it took us a while because there's a lot of moving pieces and it's a fairly technical funnel, but like this is going to be huge for us. And again, this is all automated now. Like we put in a lot of work up front to build it, but now people are going to automatically get funneled into this based on some segmentation criteria we've set. Um, and yeah, shout out Replo because this page has been awesome to build and it's super easy to change on using Replo.

Sanjay Jenkins: Incredible. I didn't even know you could do that, genuinely. I had no idea that was possible. That's just absolutely amazing.

Connor Rolain: I didn't either. We have a, we have an awesome dev in house. Um, and it's, I was just say having a dev in in house is it's kind of crazy what it unlocks in terms of, in terms of what you can build from a funnel perspective. It's it's been a lot of fun working very closely with them.

Evan Lee: Connor, this has been absolutely incredible. We have hit time here and there are still some questions. What I'm thinking is is if you don't mind, we can talk about it offline. Maybe you can make a quick loom just going through some of the questions we have because I know the audience is so, so curious to to learn more. Everybody who's still with us, just going to throw another quick poll up.

Evan Lee: So again, Motion, Replo came together, teamed up, brought the man on stage, Connor to absolutely crush it. If you're interested in learning more from us, please, please, please take a quick vote on screen so we can make that happen for you. But other than that, folks, we love the community we have here centered around creative strategy and everything from top to bottom of funnel. Let's show some love to Connor in the chat. Absolutely killed it. Absolutely killed it, everybody.

Connor Rolain: Thanks y'all. It was a lot of fun. Yeah, uh, if you, if you have other questions that you think of later too, like DM me on Twitter. Um, I'll I'll get to them and and I would love to just connect. I'm always down to connect with awesome marketers. I think it's one of the best things about about the bird app, um, bringing, bringing cool, like-minded, smart people together. So, uh, yeah, that's probably the best place to uh get a hold of me as it as it pertains to e-com stuff.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Guys, it's been a pleasure to share the stage with both of you. Community, you are all absolutely wonderful. Everybody, have a really great day and we're going to talk to you all really, really soon, okay? Thank you, thank you.

Sanjay Jenkins: See y'all. Thank you all.

Connor Rolain: See y'all.