Mapping the Customer Journey: B2C Lessons for B2B Teams with Pradeep Manivannan

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman. I'm Naomi Liu. And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

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Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MoPros out there. I'm your host, Michael Hartman, flying solo today. Today, we're going to be doing something a little different. We're going to be exploring how customer journey mapping, segmentation, and omnichannel strategy comes to life with lessons pulled from both B2C and B2B worlds. As you know, we tend to get a lot of B2B examples, so I'm excited to get some B2C examples here. So joining me today is my guest, Pradeep Manavanan, martech consultant at Academy Sports and Outdoors, among other things. He's held roles at eBay, Salesforce, and Nordstrom, brings a unique perspective that blends deep technical experience with strategic marketing operations. We're going to dive into what it really takes to build journey-based experiences from scratch, how to connect data across channels, and what B2B teams can learn from consumer-focused environments. So Pradeep, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining.

Thank you. Thanks, Michael. Thanks for that introduction. That's really helpful. So yeah, so just to— let me introduce myself, or let me give some more context here about my experience, and then I'll directly dive into the actual questions. Go for it. Yeah, sure. So by this time you guys know my name, Pradeep Maniwanan. So currently I'm a martech architect/consultant at Academy Sports and Outdoors. But as Michael said, like I used to work at Nordstrom, which is a very luxury retailer here in Seattle, Washington, and then eBay, Salesforce, mostly providing B2C kind of solutions for all of our clients. So during my Salesforce days, I used to be a martech solutions architect Microsofts and Boeings of the world here in Seattle, Washington. And then prior to that, I was at eBay where it was like, I was in the B2B business, but we were even doing some consultations or consultative service for B2C as well. So that was my eBay experience. But prior to that, I was at Cisco and doing consulting at Tata Consultancy Services. And that's how I built my foundational experience. And then Cisco is the one which led me to dive into the smart tech stuff and all those kind of stuff. So, currently, post-Nordstrom, I thought, let me try to get into the startup world and do something. And then, I got into the self-care startup. I was at Lumanity. It's a private equity-based startup in New York. And we were trying to work with all the pharmaceutical companies like AbbVie, Aveos, and then try to build an omnichannel system, not just a one-time solution. To run a very scalable customer journey campaign for all the HCPs, healthcare professionals and doctors. So I have a mix of B2C and B2B, but as Michael said, it's at the end of the day, it's just customers. I'm going to get into those details, but right now it's for Academy Sports and Outdoors. It's a— I'm working for a very interesting project there where they are trying to integrate all the point of sale and digital to the omnichannel system. And then we are going to run a very Kind of cross-channel journeys across mobile and email and several other digital channels as well. So that's, that's, I just started it. So it's interesting so far. So.

Yeah. Got it. Yeah. Well, I know we were talking before we started recording that, because you thought I might not be aware of Academy, but they're well known here down in Texas. And it is that time of year when they are extremely busy. Yes. You got football season and hunting season all happening at one time. And so. They've got people who are doing both.

Yes. Great. Agreed. Agreed. No, they are, they are pretty famous in, uh, down south. So they, their headquarters is in Katy, Texas. So, uh, I usually travel there. So I was there until last week. So I'm going to travel next week as well. Uh, the leadership is great and they have close to 310 stores or something around down south to, uh, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, around that area.

So.

There is lesser penetration in the West Coast, but they are aiming for huge growth in the next 1 or 2 years. They're doing a lot of interesting stuff there, for sure. Yeah.

So, for our listeners who are not familiar where Katy, Texas is, it's a Houston suburb.

Houston, yes.

Yeah. So, I'm in Dallas, but very familiar with them. So, all right. Well, let's, you know, you said you've worked with a lot of those B2B and B2C kinds of organizations. Why don't we start with this? Like, when are you, like you said, Yeah, customers are customers kind of, and I tend to generally agree, but what do you see as some of the major similarities and differences between those 2 environments, especially when it comes to how you approach marketing operations?

Sure. That's a good question. So let me answer this one by one. I think I'm going to talk about the similarities first and then the differences, and I'm going to talk about the recent trends happening in the marketing operations side. Similarities, as you said, like in the sense, I think one thing is whether it's B2B or B2C, the company is interested in knowing who the customer is, KYC, know your customer. And then they just want to make sure the customer is in safe hands. And then they just want to make sure the whole customer journey is all plotted and then make sure each of these touchpoints, whether it's B2B or whether it's in healthcare side of the business or normal Microsoft kind of an enterprise software kind of a business. Microsoft is interesting. It's more B2B and B2C combined. So, so they just want to make sure each of these touchpoints are connected and there is a marketing, coherent marketing messages happening between all these touchpoints. So, that's one similarity for sure. The other similarity is I'm seeing in recent times, at least for the past 3, 4 years, more and more companies, especially the leadership C-suite, They are trying to invest more on the marketing technology and marketing operations side, but there's always this confusion of, hey, is it just creative Mad Men kind of a world, or is it just art and science combined kind of the world right now? So, I think it's martech, as the name says, it's both technology and marketing combined. So, it's more art and science combined now. That's one thing. And then leadership is trying to understand, hey, this is not mundane campaign operations or something. There is a strategic element there. And whether it's B2B or B2C, I see that as a common element. And then that's something happening both in the B2B and B2C world as well. I think that's on the similarity side. On the differences side, B2C, one clear thing, as I come from as a— I started as a campaign operations person. So for B2B, every single customer is Precious. And they are like, for a healthcare side of the business, if you're losing one doctor, you might lose close to at least $500K to $600K revenue, whether it's cancer, a way of pharmaceuticals, for example, like their list is like 10,000 or 15,000 doctors. But if you lose one doctor for some reason, because of the email fatigue or some sort of a thing, you lose the doctor and then you lose the revenue. So, B2B is very sensitive in that case. B2C, for example, Nordstrom, we used to run multiple campaigns, BOGO and all those kinds of stuff, flash sales, merchandising sales, year-end sales, and all those kinds of stuff. Even if a customer opts out, there is, there is not that much sensitivity towards the B2C thing, but B2Z is like, they want to tap into how the real-life customer behaves, Gen Zs and Gen X and all these different segments at the top level. And then like exclusively for men, women's fashion, watches. And all these subcategories involved as well. So B2C is even more deeper. And then they go to the actual tail end and make sure that the customers are there. And then we are trying to bring them to the digital ecosystem or offline platform or brick and mortar or whatever. And they just want to have this omnichannel experience because that's one portion as well. So that's the difference. And B2B, there is always this budgeting discussion. They're banned those days, budget.

Oh, right. Yeah. Okay. Like the client's, the client or customer budget. Correct. Correct.

Customer budget. And then let's say if you're trying to sell enterprise software or something like that, you got to talk to VP of sales and there's this, the usual nurturing element. And then there are the users who are actually using the software or product or whatsoever. And then we may need to just have a one-on-one sales calls or something like that to get to the platform as well. That's all on the sales ops side, but marketing's job is to make sure from the top down, hey, are we trying to have a right message? The B2B platform, the value prop and everything is clearly communicated so that our enterprise software users can come to our platform and get one-stop-shop answers for all these questions.

Yeah.

So, that's the difference in the B2B. But tying these 2 things, what I'm seeing is there are more and more marketing operations technology person, people are hired in the In a company, for example, even Academy Sports, they're like, hey, we are not just CDP. They used to call themselves as a CDP team. Now they're like, no, we are a martech team. They're trying to advertise themselves or trying to propagate that message so that we are not just CDP having a treasure data and tying the stitching the data ID resolution. We are doing more than that. We are trying to connect to marketers and trying to promote this and display the attributes. We are going to work with the SMS partners, Listrak, and all these several other partners and the digital partners too. And then making sure that, hey, our decentralized team is going to help you for any sort of martech needs, whether it's pure creativity-based landing page updates or anything of that sort, or the actual data reports or any sort of analytical reports as well.

Yeah.

So that's something happening.

So it's interesting to me, one of the first points you talked about essentially is one that I see as like the scale, right? So the big difference, one of the biggest differences, obviously, like the volume of stuff, right? In B2B tends to be relatively small compared to B2C.

Yeah.

And it's more complicated, right? The relationships, the connection points. There's somewhat of a similarity between call it like buying groups, right, on the B2B side versus householding in the B2C side, right? But in general, I think B2C is simpler from that standpoint. There's a little more of a direct tie to purchases. I know it's not completely direct, I mean, maybe more so with e-commerce, but I think it's interesting that maybe I'm just sort of hitting on it. I liked your idea, your point about In the B2B world, right, losing one potential prospect, there's a pretty significant cost or potential revenue loss, right, that is associated with that. It's an interesting way of thinking about it. It hadn't really occurred to me. The other one, which is toward the end there, it feels like, and I think I picked it up because you said that team at Academy had initially talked about themselves as a CDP team, right? Which is basically a technology-first Mindset, which means like, are they— I would assume then that is where they kind of come from, where they were like embedded in IT more so, which would make sense with the volumes of data that come with B2C stuff. I am sure like it's a heavy technology, uh, storage, right? Moving data around, processing it, right? It's, it's much more significant there.

Yeah. So let me put it this way. So I think, no, no, that's a very, uh, Fair question. So, at Academy, Martech is still under the technology umbrella.

Yes.

So, Nordstrom had this debate before I joined Nordstrom. Martech was under the marketing umbrella, and then they came to know that, hey, this is not just running campaigns and creating HTMLs and anything of that sort. We are trying to talk to our marketing operations team, plus the actual data science team and centralized creative— sorry, content merchandising to several other teams. And then we were trying to—

Sure.

Like, I think at Nordstrom, there were like close to 125 to 150 attributes from data science at a very deeper level to know the customer so that we can go to the Salesforce or any ecosystem to send a campaign. So, they slowly moved the martech to the technology umbrella. The similar thing is happening in the academy sports, to your question. It's on the technology side, but they are, they don't want to restrict themselves to just CDP as such. They just want to make sure that, hey, you know, we are, we are more than CDP. We are trying to do the digital onboarding at the same time, trying to integrate to the actual real-time prescreening and all these kinds of stuff with our third-party vendors and all those kinds of stuff too. So just for an example here, So Academy Sports, let's say this is like amazon.com. So if you're going and trying to buy something online or offline, brick and mortar, they just want to make sure their customers are coming to the platform, they're getting some academy-specific credit cards, and there is a pre-approval, pre-screening checks, and all these things are happening.

Sure.

There are more customers coming to the platform and there is a loyalty base they are trying to grow. So what I'm seeing there is the technology is there, but there is, there is this constant combination of both. Hey, marketing is trying into this market, marketing is trying to tap into this technology side. Plus they are like, hey, you know, we will do more than that. Like we are trying to do proof of concept on several other platforms, like not just email or push SMS or several other platforms as well. So what I'm seeing is it's a combination of both technology plus there are a lot of innovative element happening there. And that's the reason it is like, it's no longer on the marketing side. They're trying to, hey, we are trying to, we are going to go into this one, Mailchimp or Mobile Ink and all these things. So now we have become a one-stop shop there. So that's the culture where it's very open-minded and trying to do this innovative stuff there at Academy Sports.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know that, I mean, I probably have a tendency to lean towards wanting more control over it tied to the marketing, right? And the experimentation and all that. At the same time, I think It almost doesn't matter if you've got the right structure. It's kind of like the decision about where do BDRs roll up into, right? Do they roll up to a marketing function or a sales function? And it kind of depends on where the best person is to manage that team, who has the best experience and best chance of making them successful. I think the technology for marketing kind of probably fits in the same thing, right? If you've got a strong IT team. And I mean, just knowing what I know, and it's a little bit old about The technology that is required for the volumes of data that are out there with consumer stuff, right, is just, it's huge, right? And just managing that is a heavy technology one as opposed to, you know, what you do for B2B standpoint, right? Which has a lot of data, but not even close. Well, so I want to get into a little bit more. I mean, you've sort of touched on this and I think we talked about it in the context of Nordstrom when you were there, when we first talked, but you've done work where you've done customer journey mapping and then segmentation kind of related to that. Maybe 2 parts, right? One, maybe you could do it in the context of the Nordstrom one, but like, what are some of the things that, you know, why do you think that's important for marketers and maybe marketing ops teams to be focused on and what do they, like, what are some of the things that maybe cause them to not do it well? I mean, I suspect a lot of people say they want to do customer journey mapping and they do something that is maybe not as useful as it could be. I think the same thing happens with personas because there's so many different meanings of what that is, but—

Yeah, yeah. So let me try to Let me try to synthesize this, right? So I think the question is, why is customer journey important? And how is martech, MarOps team is going to help you to design a campaign or to design an omnichannel kind of a journey for, for a customer coming into this retailer ecosystem, whether it's Nordstrom or Academy Sports, right?

Yeah.

So to the first thing, like to the first point, like why is customer journey important? So I'm going to come up with an example instead of vague Explanation. So at Nordstrom, there are like close to 35 to 45 million or something like that. Nordstrom Rack and Nordstrom Full Price active customers. I'm saying just active customers. So they are most of the customers and Nordstrom at these different tiers called ambassadors, icon, influencer, and member for all their customers there. So ambassadors are the one who create all these. They are the ones who generate. More revenue to the Nordstrom ecosystem, whether it's digital or brick and mortar, and Icons fall next. Now what happens is Nordstrom has this interesting customer option where they can purchase a Nordstrom credit card. And if you purchase a Nordstrom credit card, you can shop in Nordstrom stores and you get extra discount. And you can, like a Costco credit card, you can shop it at any other place as well. So Nordstrom credit card customers have an option or a luxury to get into the preview of all the early sales and anniversary sales, Thanksgiving sales.

They get privilege.

They get this red carpet kind of a privilege where they can access this Nordstrom thing and then they get a lot of discounts. Plus there is a special treatment there and Nordstrom is famous for customer experience. It's one of the—

Absolutely. Yeah.

For sure. Right. So that being said, so the customer journey, the puzzle we were trying to solve there was, I think some of the customers who were purchasing Nordstrom credit card, there is an active churn happening every 2, 3 months. They're just signing up. They use the credit card for a month or so, and then they are no longer seeing any values and they are like, trying to, you know, trying to call the customer support and they're trying to disconnect the credit card or, you know, just disable it. So now that there is a loss, there is a churn happening. And then we just want to make sure that we are going to fix that leaky bucket there, leaks there. That's one thing. And then second thing is we just want to make sure that our loyalty platform or loyalty customers, sorry, loyalty customer base is growing. And then that's going to help the Nordstrom in general because Nordstrom got into the different kind of a business, ad business as well, Nordstrom merchandising Okay. Where Nike shoes can be advertised on Nordstrom platform as well. That's a kind of a different channel, different experimental approach they tried. So you just want to make sure all these top-tier customers are into this platform. So to your question here, now earlier the project, like before I joined, or in the project before that, the before image was we didn't have any idea about these credit card customers, why the churn is happening, because this was all managed in a different department. And this is all managed from a different system called Chase and Fiserv and all these kind of Red Financials and all these kind of systems.

Yep.

Now, Nordstrom at the center, they're like, hey, whether it's Nordstrom Rack or Full Price, I'm going to see how can I bring this to the actual centralized ecosystem and kind of tie it up to the actual campaign we have here so that there is, there is no, so that we can reduce the churn. I still remember the numbers. I think 29% of the customers do disable the credit card within 3 months or so. And then our VP, they were like, they came up with this interesting demand impact number, which is like for every month, if you tap into this customer base, at least 1 or 2 percentage from this 29% slowly, like I think within 1 or 2 years, they found out like close to $300K to $400K EBIT just for a month or so. So there is a huge potential here for this credit card customers because Nordstrom had this ambitious plan to Tie all these digital offline stores, and then they just want to make sure credit card customers get this privilege too. So, I think in that case, to your question, tying back to the original question, we didn't have any idea. It was a totally black box to us. Why are these customers getting churned and what's happening there? So, we just want to make sure we are building the centralized ecosystem, not running our usual welcome journey or a warm-up journey. We just want to make sure, hey, these are some of the privileges we have here. These are the early preview access to the Nordstrom platform. Got it. And there is the actual tailoring shop available in Nordstrom where you can go and tap into. So, we were trying to treat them in a different way. At the same time, we were trying to mix them with other kind of customer segments and tap into those kind of attributes and then run a very personalized, hyper-personalized campaign there. That's, I think from that standpoint, customer journey is very important. So that way we can understand how the customer and the day in the life is going to come into this ecosystem and what are the attributes we can tap into for journey. First one. Second thing is we have all these systems. Our VP always says that Salesforce, I think it was $12 million for 3 years or something like that. That was a contractual value or the amount we used to pay for Salesforce. So we just make sure that we tap into that value and then get these customers and then making sure the marketing message, like our systems are going to enable them. And then so they are the customer lifecycle value, the CLTV. number is stronger enough for these kinds of newer customers. So, sure.

Yeah. Yeah. There needs to be a financial tie. So, uh, I've still, I guess I'm missing the, the, a little bit. So I get, right, you were trying to, if I, if I summarize it a little bit, you were trying to identify, um, what was the journey for those who eventually became credit card customers? And then why did the ones that churned quickly, why did they churn quickly? Right. So did you go through a process of mapping out that journey? Is that what you did to try to identify where those leaks were happening, as you said?

Yeah. Yeah. So now what happens is whenever a customer buys a credit card, now what happens is for the first 2 or 3 weeks, there are some discounts given to the customer. And after a month or so, it becomes dried up. And then they're like, hey, you know, I'm not seeing any values out of this credit card stuff. So I'm going to disconnect or, you know, disable that. That's one thing. And then how do we find out all these stuff is through the third party. That's a That's a good question. Sorry, I missed that part. So from FISA and Chase, there are 2 different credit systems. We were trying to tap into all those data and then stored into the credit card data warehousing platform there. So we were trying to get into those kind of platform and then the data attributes, trying to see, hey, when is this credit card customer signed up? Is there a real-time prescreen or all those things showed up? If that is the case, why there is a delay? Why did the customer again call within 15 or 20 days so that it's a 0% one, 0% interest rate and all those kind of stuff. So we were trying to have a survey for all those kind of dropped customers and then trying to tap into those values, unstructured data, and then get into this Nordstrom ecosystem to make sure that we are running some filters on top of those kind of survey data. So that we can run an omnichannel journey based on that. So that being said, I think to your question, I think we were trying to get this data from survey through third-party system and everything through Fiserv and Chase, and then tying it up with the actual purchase data and transactional data in the centralized system.

Okay. So did you, did you, what would, what did you end up doing? Did you build out some new, like change something about how that onboarding and And post, yeah, you called it a purchase, but like post-signup, I guess, like for the card, how'd that happen?

Yeah. So that's a good point. So I think what we were trying to do is this, this was treated pretty independent, Michael, like the Nordstrom credit card customers, they were not into this ecosystem. So Nordstrom had this terminology called Nordy Club for all the loyalty customers.

Oh, I'm familiar.

So they're like, yeah. So they are like, hey, now first thing I'm going to try is this is again a combination of business, both more of strategic decisions. So they just want to make sure that by default, if you're buying a credit card, you're going to participate in the Naughty Club. That's one thing. And then there was a welcome journey that was going in. And then there was like another, as part of the welcome journey, we didn't want to do just a mundane, hey, welcome to this Nordstrom platform ecosystem, Nordstrom retailer thing, and just 15% sale or something like that. We just want to educate them and give them several other privileges like, hey, you get early access to the anniversary sale and the account privileges and all those kinds of stuff. So, in a nutshell, we were running a 30-day customer journey, email and push combined. This was developed in Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder.

Okay.

So, I was the one who was working with the credit card, Nordstrom credit product managers, and then the actual marketing strategy directors and leadership here. And then the content team in terms of how can we make sure that the actual credit product plus the content— content is king these days— plus the strategy aligned for these newly joined credit card customers and run a very smooth 30-day journey. I think we had 7, 6 emails, 1 transactional email just for— 6 promotional emails, 1 transactional email if a credit card customer goes and activates a card. And then couple of push messages along with this. So this is purely omnichannel, email plus push combined. Plus there is a transactional—

Push meaning SMS text?

Yes.

Mobile push.

Mobile push. Not SMS. This is the—

Oh, mobile app messaging. Okay. Got it.

Mobile app messaging one. That is how we started. And this was an MVP. And then the initial numbers looked good. Michael, like in the sense after 2 weeks, like what I'm trying to say is 6th week, at the end of 6th week, which means we'd have done with 1 month of campaign. And then the 2nd week of the next month, we were trying to do this readout to the leadership team and we were just going with those actual metrics. So this is an interesting one. I just want to bring this up here. So we were looking at the click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, all these kinds of things, but these are vanity metrics.

Sure.

But we just want to make sure that how many of these credit card customers are just actually going to the click or whatever the CTA button, and they're actually going to the ecosystem, nordstrom.com or nordstromrack.com, and doing this purchase so that all the URL variables, everything connected at the same way, or even brick and mortar, Nordstrom, the actual point of sale, and then doing transactions. So the numbers where we were struggling to connect those dots, but we were there. Trying to see how the actual conversion numbers are going to look like. But the goal is to reduce the churn from 29% to 26 or 25 in next 6 months or so, so that we can get into this EBIT value there. So we did this combination of both like strategy plus the landing page, sorry, the content portion, as well as the touchpoint, like the email. Why 6 or 7 emails? Why not 10? Why not 6? There were a lot of interesting discussions happened so that We don't want to bombard them and fatigue them. At the same time, we want to make sure that they are on this platform and doing active business.

Gotcha. So you talked about tying that reduction in churn rate to EBIT, right? So EBIT meaning earnings before income and tax, right? Yeah. Okay. I'm just trying to remember my finance terms here. So when you were reporting on it, like, how did you even talk about Did you talk more about the financial impacts of the work done, or did you talk about the change in churn, or did you talk— like, you mentioned vanity metrics, which I kind of recoil at these days because I actually think that they've been given a bad name because people call them that. And I think they're still useful in the right— for the right thing, right? They're not ones I would go present to executives, for example, necessarily. But, um, but like, talk me through, like, how did you connect the dots from Here's what we did to, here was the outcome, especially how you communicated it to like people who are less familiar with what you were doing or what marketing, like what marketing's role is, I guess, even.

Yeah, sure. So I think I have some numbers here, so I'm going to, I don't want to rush this one up, so I'm going to slowly walk you through the numbers. So vanity metrics, like, sorry. Yeah. So the click-through metrics unsubscribe rate is still good. Like we don't want to, it's pretty directional. Like it's going to give some of us, give us some directions. And that is sure. That was really useful for sure. And then this is how the numbers were, uh, Michael. So on a daily basis, on an average, we were seeing close to 700 to 800 customers join the credit card.

Okay.

700 to 800 customers. I'm leaving the peak seasons like June, July, August anniversary sales or Thanksgiving sales. On an average, 700 to 800 customers. across 310 stores. That's kind of an average per year. Now, after this campaign, within 3, 4 weeks, this campaign was running for a month. And then at the end of the 30th day, we were like, okay, so let's try to pull some numbers. And then we had to wait for 2 weeks to get all these numbers and going to the actual centralized system. We used to call it as NAP, Nordstrom Analytical Platform. That's where all this campaign data Goes back and there's a semantic layer there where we can pull Tableau reports and all those kinds of stuff.

Okay. So it's like a data warehouse, data, whatever, data lake, whatever.

Okay. Exactly. It's like a, just a one-liner definition of NAP. NAP is more of an in-house CDP built by Nordstrom leadership, right? Nordstrom's CEO had this vision and they want to connect all this inventory data, sales data, point of sales and everything and bring it to this analytical platform and do AI/ML stuff and everything. Like that. So, and because Nordstrom's customer base is huge, the data science attributes are close to 125 to 150-ish, or probably more than that right now. So that's, that's how Nordstrom was planning to do. And they had this ambitious vision and that's, that's how it was.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So going back to the numbers, right? So now 700 to 800 customers. So I'm going to be very clear here. So within like 3 to 4 weeks from the day I joined, let's say September 1st, I'm going to start this campaign. And then every day we are going to get these kind of 700 to 800-ish customers on board. Now we could see out of, like, we could see close to 80 to 100 customers are moving from member to influencer status. That is, this is all kind of a ballpark demand impact number from our finance team. So which comes to close to 11%. And then we could see close to, I think, 18% of the customers, this is a big number, where they were trying to do greater than $500 transaction in a month, which puts them in a different mode, which is nothing but like, they might get into the icon or ambassador kind of a tier.

Okay.

So, if you see this, right, I think we, I still remember the day it went live. This campaign went live exactly on October 31st, 2022, because that's the Q3 end date. The Q4 starts from November 1st and then it goes until Jan. And then you want to make sure that this campaign goes at the end of Q3 so that we can reap the benefits during Q4. And then we can have good holiday season numbers and then the profits and all those kinds of stuff too. So that being said, Like if I just do a math, I think there were some numbers taken. Like I think if you be close to, like when I say 18% of the numbers, it came somewhere around 1.8 million-ish or something like that for those kind of the overall customers for that particular month. So that's the kind of ballpark we got from the finance team. But this campaign was a big hit. And then from the tech standpoint, we added 2 new data science attributes, which is, hey, how many of these rack CC credit card customers 0 to 6 months are doing some transaction and not strong full-price customers doing some transactions? And then from the Nordic Club standpoint, this is where it gets interesting, where for every dollar spent after some certain threshold, you get 2 points per dollar spent or something like that. So, this is kind of a flywheel. If you see this, there is this 700 to 800 customers joining on a daily basis, close to 54 out of 700, 800 customers are moving from member to influencer. So, that's a good jump. And then, there is a— and that's one number. And then, the second number is like close to 1.8 million. That's an interesting one where it's not just influencer, ICON Plus, Ambassadors are contributing that too. So that, that is like within the Q4, we could achieve the number. And that's one interesting stuff. So from the finance standpoint, we could see that there is some traction happening there and there is lesser churn. It's just because we released it pre-holiday season. That might be one of the interesting strategy as well. So from the qualitative standpoint, we were seeing more stickiness where the credit card customers are going to the actual nordstrom.com and Rack. And we are trying to, we could see some optimization metrics there from our tech team to find out, hey, you know, there are more stickiness for these kinds of credit card customers because we add all these URL metadata on that stuff for those customers. Yeah. And then since we launched it pre-holiday season, we could see there are more stuff happening, but in hindsight, what I would see, what I would do that is I think instead of 6 to 8 different emails plus push combined, we should have reduced it to close to 5 different topics or 6 different topics. I found out as a little overwhelming with the 8 different topics and 8 different email contents and push combined. I think we should have reduced it to 5 or 6 different topics. But again, that is just an example.

A little more specific to those. So, I'm curious. So, you're talking about this revenue impact. Like, is there any, I mean, it's hard enough in B2B to do attribution. Yeah. With complex sale or something like that. But so you got the added challenge here where you've got brick and mortar retail stores in addition to online purchasing. How do you, like, what, don't you have to go into a lot of detail, but like, how did you try to connect the dots between the online, I'm sorry, in-store purchases with those new customers or Converted customers?

Yes. So the question is, how do I know that these are newly credit card customers who are doing transactions compared to the existing customer?

Well, no, like, how do you know that they're doing transactions in the store? And I guess I'm thinking about like, if they— obviously, if they use their credit card, I assume their new credit card, that's easily trackable. But then how do you do it if they choose to use a different form of payment? In a store?

No, that's, that's actually a good one too. Yes, there is some percentage of data where customers do use a different credit card, although they have a Nordstrom credit card. That's something. Yes, that's— there is always that percentage, but I don't exactly recall that percentage. But now what happens is, even from the customer standpoint, Michael, within 90 days, if you do a purchase in general, whether it's a Nordstrom credit card, any credit card for that sake, I bought Alaskan Airlines, I got I received 40,000 miles if I spent some X amount of dollars within the first 3 months. So I did tap into that reward stuff. I got 40,000 bonus miles and I had a trip too. So likewise, I think Nordstrom had this where for a Nordstrom customer who was shopping during the holiday season, the Nordy Club points, as I said before, for every $1 spent, there is like 5x dollars kind of returns. That's one thing. And then the second thing is for Nordstrom credit cards, since there is this I think this is more of, um, Chase slash, uh, the finance side of the business where there is like, uh, 0% APR or something like that connected to it. So they just want to tap into that and then see.

Sure. So it sounds like the connection between the credit card and that person as a loyalty person, like that's the glue that can really do it. So in essence, okay.

I think the first one point is more on the finance side. And I think as an outcome, we could see that, hey, the Nordic Club points are growing for these credit card customers. Plus we could see all these stickiness happening, plus all these purchasing behavior for these newly joined credit card customers too. Yep. Spot on.

Yep.

That's right.

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, and I mean, I know personally, like there's at least one retailer, probably more than one, but one in particular that I think of when I think of this kind of thing where like, I get a ton of value for the trade-off of letting them know what I'm purchasing and using it. 'Cause they're regularly providing incentives to me, right?

Yeah.

Discounts. Yeah. And, um, points that go towards purchases and to the point where like any given purchase, which I don't do a lot of, maybe once a month, once every 2 months. It's not a, it's, it's not super infrequent, but it's not. Like every day kind of thing, but I can, I can get in some cases 20% off of a total purchase, like any given one, like, yeah, it's worth it. So, and it's like, yeah, it's not tied to the card I use. It's tied to me being, saying, oh, this is me, right?

Yes. Yes. No, spot on. I think I'm just trying to relate this to an example, which is happening at Academy Sports, where I think by default, we are working in a situation where we are trying to auto-enroll customers. into a loyalty customer base. And then Academy's also trying to come up with this Academy-specific, it's called co-branded credit card, where they're trying to have a tie-up with Mastercard.

Yeah.

And then try to, all Academy sports cards, which are normal cards, are customers, are normal card customers are going to move to this co-branded credit card where you can use it anywhere. At the same time, we just want to auto-enroll them into the loyalty club. So Nordstrom has this special thing too, Naughty Club, the way they treat the Naughty Club reward points and everything is very different too. And then there is this, it's more of a gamification kind of stuff, right? And even Academy Sports, like for every $500 spent, I think you get a $25 reward or something like that where a customer can use, customer can share with their friends, families. Nordstrom is very famous for that where you get a lot of preview sales and everything. So that's, I think it was not just So, this is where it gets interesting, where it was not just financial metric. They just want to align this to this overall vision of customer obsession and experience.

Sure, sure.

Yes.

Yes. I mean, it's interesting to me, like, I don't know why this popped in my head, but I remember back in the day when I was in consulting, I traveled a lot back and forth to Houston from Dallas. And so, the easiest way to do that was on Southwest Airlines. And Southwest Airlines back in those days, this is pre-9/11. So it'll— you literally would— you could literally— they had so many flights going back and forth, they still do, that you could literally walk up. They had kiosks kind of like an ATM where you buy a ticket, like in person, right? You don't have to have a reservation. They called it a Qicket. And every one of those tickets, you know what it had on it? A drink coupon.

Okay.

Every one of them. Every one of them. And if you were a loyalty member, right, the Rapid Rewards, Uh, every time you had, I think it's 10 segments, you got a book sent to you with another 10 drink coupons. Like I, I had so many drink coupons. Like I would literally like me, I was traveling a lot with 2 other, 2 other guys back and forth to Houston to a client site from Dallas. And like we would get to the airport on Fridays and we would just give people drink coupons because we could never use them all. You know, I flew, I flew all my wife's friends in to Dallas one time and they all got sent. a book of drink coupons because they flew— that was when Southwest couldn't fly. You can fly into Dallas from many places directly. So, they'd had to do stops. And so, like, but it's great like that. So, it was like, for me, it was almost worth it not to have a reservation.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah. No, I think Southwest is famous for that. I think they were the ones who came up with this interesting stuff, even before customer experience. Now, now we are, for the past 10 years, we have been talking about this customer obsession topic. Yes, Amazon's goal was customer obsession from day one, but I think Southwest Airlines were so ahead of the curve. They were doing all these kinds of interesting stuff. And right now, like, I think I can see almost every single company is trying to have this kind of an Amazon effect where, hey, you know, I'm going to pamper the customer and then put them into this different mode. where they can continuously come and shop and they just want to have this brand as kind of a mental like tick mark in their brain. Like, hey, you know, for any academy, for any sports kind of a sports material kind of a shopping, I'm going to go to Academy Sports.

Yeah.

For anything luxury retail, not luxury, I'm going to put it any sort of a good clothes and anything like my daughter likes Nordstrom a lot. She continuously shops in Nordstrom Rack.

Yeah. I wouldn't say— I mean, my kids do too, but mine tend to go thrift shopping now. So that's, I think, the new thing.

Yes, I go to Kohl's as well. I don't have any preference. But as an employee, I used to take my friends too, like, hey guys, and my friends used to like that a lot. Like, yeah, then I used to tell them, hey, you know, if you buy a Nordstrom credit card, you get all these kind of— and then they're like, oh, we get these benefits. And then I try to It's not about promoting that, but I try to say that, hey, there are several different options here. Most of them think that it's very luxury retailer kind of thing, but it's not. Strong Brackets is for everyone, like for my kind of layman, normal customers too. Yeah.

Well, let's, we're going to have to wrap it up here, but I want to, there's one thing we can't ignore, right? Which is the impact of AI in all this. Like, what are you seeing in this space? Like, you know, that was a What you talked about with Nordstrom and now what you're doing, like, you know what you're doing, but like, you know, how are you seeing like what you did then, right? How do you think it would be different now with AI in the mix, or if at all? And like, where do you see it going?

That's a good one. So, Michael, I'll be, um, I'll start with a very basic thing. Like, in the sense, I think at Nordstrom, we were trying to, for most of the content, this was the practice. They try to do A/B testing, and then we were running in a journey canvas. And imagine there is a canvas which does this customer journey mapping and everything, and there is an automated email campaign going out there. Now they're like, "Hey, I have this flash campaign with these kind of apparels, and the same flash campaign with blue sorts of whatever, different kind of a hero image or whatever, and we want the winning version to be done." So I remember Salesforce released a feature called Path Optimizer, where we don't need to manually go and. pull the results, do a readout, and then, you know, have a forum to discuss that and then say, hey, A is the winning version. Let's do and bring the picture of A for the future sense. Now, Path Optimizer does everything through AI, like where it can automatically go and collect the data, and then you can set it up whether, hey, I want to go and choose based on the hero image or for a particular CTA button or for a particular timeframe. A lot of options are there. And then that was one of the AI features I worked— I started exploring during my Nordstrom days. And I think we did that during my Humanity days as well. So path optimizer. And then the content-wise, so this is a very broad question, the AI. So what I'm seeing is there are more and more CDPs coming. I think that being said, I think when it comes to the content side of things, I'm seeing there are more AI innovation happening there. Content is king. So, what I'm trying to say is like, it's not just dynamic rendering of nordstrom.com for several different customers. It is just trying to make sure that, hey, do I need to, based on Pradeep's past purchasing behavior, do I need to put Nike shoes in his homepage or somewhere on the site compared to my wife's shopping behavior, wear jewelry or something like that. I just want to make sure that there is a lot of stuff going on. And then this is going to— there is a lot of burden reduced from these kind of optimized kind of a platform where AI can do its job automatically around the clock, whether it's holidays or weekends or whatever it is. The con— from the, from the CMS standpoint, the content management system standpoint. That's one thing I can see there is a lot happening there. But from the data standpoint, I think Nordstrom had this AI/ML kind of a data science model. Sorry, I missed that part. So I'll be very specific here. So I think for each segment, men's fashion, women's, kids, and everything, even, and for men's, like for apparels and shoes and everything, they were trying to, as I said before, like the Nordstrom credit card, hey, is this customer a Nordstrom credit card customer?

Yeah.

0 to 3 months, 3 to 6 months kind of purchasing behavior. So I could see for every single segment, they were having close to at least 15 to 20 or even more than that kind of subcategory data science attributes so that we can use it. When I say we, marketing team can use it and run a very hyper-personalized campaign. So there is this constant data science model, which is automatically learning based on my purchasing behavior. This was all there in the past. But this is happening a lot these days, and these are kind of custom models too. And we are trying to tap into third-party data. Like, it's not just email push. Sorry, I was trying to read. There is a paid campaign from LiveRamp too, and there is a direct mail campaign sent from direct mail partners.

Yep.

Blue Core for True Gutsense. So there are like several other systems involved. So Nordstrom was like, hey, I'm going to bring all this data. Let me do this ID stitching and then do all these kind of a continuous 24-hour kind of a model. And this model, I think there is a huge data science team doing all this bringing work there. I still remember, and I think we constantly get a request to pipe in these attributes and that's in a very omnichannel campaign. Those are some of the elements I could, on a day-to-day basis, I could witness, but there is a lot going on in the industry from the AI/ML specific, for sure.

The feeling I've got is that some of the AI/ML kind of modeling capabilities are probably ahead of the kind of customer-facing platforms, right? So like most of what I understand about where like content management systems are trying to do sort of truly hyper-personalized content in the moment based on a number of different things going on, not just attributes, right? Is probably, I mean, maybe somebody's out there doing it and I'd probably—

Yeah.

I always underestimate this, but I suspect that it's really expensive to do it, right?

Yes.

But I mean, I suspect that's where things are going, right? I think a lot of these, like you, when I was in the B2C world, it was, I built a data warehouse, right, for connecting with direct marketing. We had data scientists, today they would be called data scientists, they weren't back then, who were turning through and they were like kind of restricted on what they could do based on their capacity and hypotheses and things like that. But, um, that, like, that's what I'm really kind of, yeah, interested to see how things evolve is what happens with these engines when they can kind of replace some of that hypothesis generation, right? A little bit, right? So anyway, well, listen, I, I hate to cut it short because this has been a lot of fun. I think, you know, People are going to walk away from this going like, all this stuff, like, maybe a little bit scary now that they know what's going on when they use their credit cards. If they're— they should probably already know. But anyway, that was— this was a lot of fun, Pradeep. So thank you for that. If folks want to learn more, connect with you, or hear about what you're doing, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, yeah, sure. So I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I always call my LinkedIn as my Facebook. So I'm always active. I keep it open for 24 hours. So please ping me via LinkedIn.

It's Pradeep Mani Mani.

and it's pretty straightforward. I haven't updated to my current one, but you can see my Nordstrom and Lumenity experience there for sure. And then, I'm not actively using Twitter, but I do check once in a while, once in a week or so. But I can share my LinkedIn profile. And then, I've written some blogs too, so I can share all those blogs as well. But I'm looking forward to collaborate in the future and then share some more AI-related stuff too. The one thing I'm learning from this AI thing is garbage in, garbage out from the data science standpoint. So there are a lot of data coming, and even at Academy Sports, we are like, hey, is this a valid scenario? Is this a valid use case? So there is always this constant debate on the scenario and update because— sorry, scenario and situation— because of this third-party system data getting ingested into some platform and all these kinds of things.

Sure.

And there are several other players involved. So that being said, AI is going to rule it, and we are forced to get into that and More and more companies are investing there for sure. But yes, yes.

Yeah, sounds good. Well, again, thank you, Pradeep. It's been a lot of fun. Thanks to our listeners and viewers and the rest of our audience. Thank you for supporting us. Thank you for listening and watching. If you have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest, you can reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me, and we'd be glad to talk to you about that. Until next time, bye everybody.

Okay.