The Art of the Perfect Checkout Offer with Rokt | Behind the Numbers
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Hey gang, it's Friday, May 9th. Susie, Jeremy, John and listeners, welcome to Behind the Numbers, an eMarketer video podcast made possible by Rocked. I'm Marcus, and today we'll be discussing how you move folks from browsers to buyers. Join me for that conversation. We have three good people. Let's meet them. We'll start with our VP of content, head of our retail desk, based in New York. It's Susie David-Canyon.

Hi, thanks for having me. I thought you were going to say hey. I was waiting to be greeted. But more? You wanted more of an introduction? That was already... No, I wanted a hello.

Thank you. Senior Director of Briefings, also living in the big city, is Jeremy Goldman. You don't even have to acknowledge me, Marcus, and I will still say hey, and I'm excited for this conversation. Professional, Susie. Take this. Senior Vice President of Solutions and Operations for ROPS is also joining us. He's also based in New York. It's John Humphrey. Hey, Marcus and team. Good to be here.

Hey fella, thanks for joining us. We start when we have an external guest on with the speed intro. Get to know him a little better. All right, 60 seconds-ish on the clock. Let's do it. First question. John, you are based in New York, but where are you from? I grew up in New York. As they say sometimes, I'm a unicorn. So I grew up in New York City, moved up to Westchester when I was a teenager, and have been here pretty much ever since. I can't seem to leave. Tell us what you do in a sentence.

I run the solutions and operations team at Rockt, which manages all of the technical services for all of our clients. So I have the lovely pleasure of getting to work with all of Rockt's largest clients every day.

Very nice. Okay, final question. If you could own one arcade machine, if we could give it to you for free, lived in your house, you could play it whenever you wanted to, what would it be? Ooh, good question. Almost certainly Cruisin' USA. Just put me in there with the gear shifter that doesn't do anything and I'll just race any car for the end of time. I was going to say, which one was that? But this was obviously one of the driving ones. Oh, it was the best driving one. In fact, really the only driving one.

Okay. Very nice. Susie. So of course, I don't think I want one in my apartment because it's so big. I am a gamer. I play on my phone all the time and,

And I used to have a Game Boy growing up. So like I'm all in on the games, but standing up to be obsessively playing a game for hours on end just doesn't sound fun. Oh, but Susie, that's the beauty of cruising. You get to sit down. Oh, yeah. You picked a good one. Like one of the motorcycle ones where you said, because otherwise I would have been like Tetris, Super Mario Brothers. I'm not sure. Dating myself here, but standing up, you know, you can get a Mario still exists. Yeah.

But it was cool when I was growing up. All right. Never mind. We can cut that straight out, guys. You didn't cut the last time. The least, not last. I know, because you wanted it to be cut, so we left it in. So annoyed about that. How about you?

- This is definitely the old four player Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game that's giant. And I've got a big place 'cause I'm rich 'cause I'm a writer. And also if it's not that, then like the six player X-Men game that was like the same kind of thing that takes up even more space, yeah. - Great, great answers. The correct answer we were looking for is NBA Jam. But good attempts anyway, most of you. Susie, what happened? All right, time now for the fact.

of the day. Why is music so nostalgic? So, a few theories here. Some research, I guess I should say, not just theories. 2008 study at the University of Leeds in England identified what they call a reminiscence bump.

it's when folks retain more memories during their teenage years and early 20s than they will during any other life phases uh catherine gillespie of vice was noting this psychologists say our favorite music tends to to be from this time since these are our identity forming years and the songs that accompany our adolescent experiences leave a lifelong emotional imprint in our brain economist seth

stevens dave davidowitz uh used spotify listening data to ascertain that men's favorite songs were released when they were between the ages of 13 and 16 for women it was between the ages of 11 and 14 that blows my mind that is like i just i'm like okay that basically explains my life thank you yeah yeah it's it's um

You could have guessed this, but it's great to have some research to support that. Okay, this is why, you know, I'm still listening to, you know, Dr. Dre and Jay-Z and whatever hits from the, you know, from those few, like from those few teenage years, which was so like informative and,

research at Cambridge University in 2013 confirming that we place less importance on music as we age and the music that we do seek out tends to be less intense and more sophisticated things like jazz and classical music and

And this one's really nice stat. University of Melbourne in Australia, neuroscientist Amy Baird found that couples with a special song that signifies an important moment in their relationship will strengthen their bond by listening to it together. And it could also possibly alleviate the effects of dementia. What? Yeah. Do you have to listen to it with a person? You wonderful invention. Yeah, that was the whole point of the... Oh, no, I...

sorry you first your bond wow with that person this adds up though this is why i can still sing every lyric of little wayne mixtapes like i think this this all adds up now i get it a skill you thought wouldn't be useful in your adult life yeah exactly the things they don't teach you in school yeah i was gonna say did subconsciously having rocked on the show make you think of like a music related question as it should i have

To be sitting in the conference room, Huey Lewis and the news. Oh, then I'm going to pretend yes. Anyway, today's real topic, why the new funnel begins at checkout. All right, folks, let's start with this. John, what does Ropt do? Hmm.

an easy one for me. So, Rockta is an e-commerce technology. So, we work with a lot of the largest e-commerce brands in the world to help them deliver more value to customers when they are checking out online. And we do so in a couple of interesting ways. One is through the technology that actually powers the front end. What do we show to customers in sort of this most important moment of e-commerce, as we call it, the transaction moment?

But we also allow them to tap into what we call the rocked network. The rocked network is made up of thousands of advertisers. So advertisers who are looking to put their offers, brands, products, services in front of customers. So we actually help connect the e-commerce clients to a whole network of advertisers. So it's a business that's been around a little over 12 years at this point. As mentioned in the open,

You guys are saying that the new funnel begins at checkout. How come? And that feels like it's too late. Yeah, it's a good question. So I'll share a little bit of background with you as to sort of where Rockt came from, and I think it'll illuminate why we focus so much on it. So way back when, the CEO of Rockt, Bruce Buchanan, actually before this was running a low-cost airline, Jetstar, in the Asia-Pacific region. And

And a really interesting statistic, not just specific to Jetstar, but just about any low-cost airfare provider, is that they actually lose money every time they sell you a ticket. So every time you buy one of those tickets, they lose, I don't know, 10, 20 cents on the dollar. What's interesting though is that when you get into that moment of checkout or the transaction moment, as we call it, customers sort of enter into this really linear mindset. They go step by step. They enter their payment details, their shipping details, and then they sort of go on this journey to select all of the ancillary services that they might need to make their trip better.

So a business like Jetstar, other low-cost airline providers, and this actually extends to resellers, ticketing, events, etc.,

tend to make about 100 to 120% of their business profit in the last three to four screens of e-commerce. And so what's interesting is that while it's actually a small subset of the total customers who actually visit your site that make it into the checkout experience, it's the most data-rich environment and it's the most high attention environment that you can get in e-commerce. And it all happens in a very short period of time.

So yes, begins late, but I'd say by far the best way to extract value out of the e-commerce transaction is actually focusing on those last couple of screens and making sure you put the right thing in front of customers at any given time.

You know what I would say, Marcus? It's not, I don't know that it's starting late. I almost feel like it's restarting again, right? Because these are consumers who've already made a purchase with your brand, who like your brand. We don't concentrate enough on the transaction and the conversion. There are people you don't have to spend money on because they already like your brand. They've already purchased from you. And so now you're sending them after conversion.

care emails. I know that's not exactly what you guys do, but this is a component of keeping them engaged with you, right? And whether it's coupons and promotions, emails, SMS messages, you know, retargeting them to other adjacent products in your suite of products, all of that sort of is with an engaged customer. So it's cheaper.

I think, by the way, that's the key thing to me is the engagement level, the focus level of the customer. From the e-commerce sites that I've managed in my past life, I can tell you those are such important moments where somebody is really leaning in and can you capture and do something with that attention in addition to obviously optimizing the checkout process. That's

I think one of the key things that we're really talking about here is tapping into a customer when they're engaged the most. Yeah. What I think is tricky though, and I don't know what you guys are doing about this, John, it's the websites that are doing one click checkout, right? Cause now they're just going straight through. They don't want to have anything to do with you. They're very engaged. They're highly motivated, but they're looking for convenience in this instance, speed to, to move on with the next part of their life. What, how are you guys managing that? Yeah. I tend to think Susie that, um,

these sort of one-click checkout experiences, you'll even start to see partnerships between the likes of Shopify and OpenAI sort of trying to figure out these mechanisms, right, to speed out the checkout experience. That's all the better because what it actually allows you to do is then sort of like you said before, Susie, extend the checkout experience, right? So if you can actually get somebody through that funnel faster, you still have their attention. Nothing's changed about the

the consumer psyche in that moment. And so you have this really interesting opportunity to say, now that I got you through this faster, what else can I offer to you or what else will add value to this experience that'll actually extend this moment? And so a lot of people think of the transaction moment as fixed. It's sort of three screens.

But actually, what you start to hear a lot in the industry, and I've even heard some previous guests on the podcast talk about this, is sort of this idea of the next best action. Like, okay, I'm done with this thing. What should I do next? Where does the brand sort of want to take me on this journey? It's a really interesting opportunity. And actually, it's easier to do if you can get them through that upfront part faster. And Jeremy, what I was going to share before, as you were talking about that, I think it's a really interesting point that one

One of the challenges, I think, because the opportunity is so big, like because it's such a high intent moment for customers, you also have a really big ability to get it wrong. Like you can screw it up really, really easily. And we saw this, like if you look back, right, a lot of companies would say, this is where we make all of our profit. Let's ask customers to do 100 things.

Like, let's take a three-screen checkout experience and, Susie, do the opposite of what you said. Let's make it 20. And let's ask them for the bag and the seat and the gift card and the gas, right? And what we've learned over time is that that just doesn't work. Like, consumers just don't have the attention span to go through something like that. And that's okay. And so really it's about how do you pick the one or two things that's going to be most relevant to each person and just help them continue their journey faster.

And how do you decide what to show them? Yeah, it's a tricky one, Marcus. You know, the good thing about the way that Rockt has constructed its business

but also the privacy and security that we operate in, right? Like when you think about the transaction moment, there's a lot of sensitive information that exists in there. Customer's payment details, all of their first party data. The way that we select which ad to show is by actually being a very trusted partner to each of these e-commerce brands. So trusted that they feel confident to use their data with and through the Rocked ecosystem to actually power the selection. Whether it's an advertisement, whether it's a different type of creative,

could be something that they're offering, like a credit card that they offer to their customers, so sort of a first party campaign. So the way that Rockt works from a technical perspective is data comes in, content goes out. And because we have this massive network and have been collecting data over, gosh, I think the number is over 6 billion transactions that Rockt will optimize this year.

There's a lot of historical information that you can draw on to say, what should we do next? And that also affords you the opportunity because of the scale of the network to try new things, sort of test against those hypotheses. So we're always learning, right? You're never going to get it right 100% of the time. So the best thing you can do is try something else and see how it goes. But we have access to a lot of first party data because we sort of operate as an extension of the e-commerce partners business versus sort of this disparate ad network or something that they just tap into one off to generate a little bit of extra profit.

Do you see that there are certain categories of things that people do prefer in those moments than others? Obviously, it's going to be very unique to that person and the data that you're pulling based on them. But are there kind of themes of, okay, in these moments, people tend to like these buckets of things? Yeah, I'll give you two. I'll tell you...

a theory that's proven not true and then something that we've realized off the back. So a theory that's been proven not true is that everything needs to be contextual. So just for an example, right? Like I'm buying a flight, I need to then buy a suitcase. I'm buying a hot dog and so I need a bun, right?

That really doesn't work at scale. And it also really limits the opportunity for you to connect with the customer. And so what I've been really surprised about is that somebody might be buying a flight, but they're actually really interested in a meal kit service directly thereafter. The reasoning, you could go down the rabbit hole and try and figure out why people might be interested in that. But in reality, it's just whatever the customer wants at that given time. So that's always something I've sort of found interesting about this moment. But Marcus, the name of the game is sort of like Susie said before, it's things that people can get through quickly.

Like if somebody's buying in a moment, they don't want to then go on another nonlinear journey, product discovery journey to then have to figure out what they want. They want to stay in that sort of linear mindset. And so this idea that we can get somebody to an external landing page or to another part of your website or even keep them on that page in the moment to help them get access to these services quickly, those are the brands that tend to win. So people who forget about that sort of landing page optimization funnel tend to lose in that environment.

I think, yeah, I mean, the perfect example I can imagine is, uh, uh, I'm seeing a concert out of town and I'm, uh, buying tickets and, uh, wait a minute, I don't know where I'm going to park afterwards. Right. That could be easily like a situation where you do know something about me and my situation. And that is a relevant, like kind of, uh,

add-on that I don't want to start that, you know, process of like researching nearby garages. I just want like a recommendation. Yeah. And you know what, Jeremy, the way that it's recommended to you might be different than the way it's recommended to Susie. So for example, Susie might want to know exactly how far that parking garage is from the stadium because she's bringing her kids to the stadium and is trying to figure out how far are we going to have to walk. Jeremy, you might have a really fancy sports car. You said you were rich because you're a writer, right?

So you might want a covered garage. You want to see a picture of that thing. Like, where's my nice sports car going to be? And so the way that you receive information is also different. So it's not just about what am I going to put in front of you? It's actually the same product. I'm going to put parking, but it's also how. And that tends to be actually the sort of difference maker in trying to appeal to different types of customers.

It's very clever. It sounds like you also have a lot of different partnerships so that you have like the stadium and different parking garages. Or like I was thinking about often I use the curb, the New York taxi cab, sort of like advanced quick payment system. And then as I'm getting to the airport, there's a pop-up for clear, which in some ways is very genius. My question to you is how much information do all of the partners share with you so that if I already have clear, then you show me something like,

the Chase Lounge or some other something? - Yeah, it's a great question. My worst nightmare is if we were to show you something that you already have. Like it's just such a bad customer. - Me too. - It's such a bad customer experience. And look, like sometimes it's unavoidable and that's okay because it's always privacy first. And so the way I sort of think about this is twofold. One is the way we position Rocked is a client controlled platform. Our clients are the e-commerce businesses. And so it's up to them how much they want to use or don't want to use. And so the way we sort of coach them through that

is that the more you put in, the more you get out. The more data that you can use about a customer to make a decision, the more relevant the end decision is going to be. But on the other side, it's also up to the network, right? So these network of advertisers might say, "You know what? I don't ever want to show my service to somebody who already has it." But there's a lot of interesting marketing strategies in there, Susie. Like even though you may have, let's say, Clear, for example,

maybe they actually do want to show it to you again because it's actually now about usage. So when you get to the airport, they don't want you to avoid the clear line and go somewhere else. They want you to use the service you have access to because they're sort of focused on that longer term retention strategy of you as a customer. So you can sort of take a bunch of different approaches.

But I tend to find the best ones are some sort of combination of contextual relevance, I'm on the way to the airport and I need to get through TSA, and also individual relevance. I'm on the way to the airport, but you know what? I've really been thinking about signing up for Apple TV. It's sort of weird to think about, but it happens all the time. I'm so fascinated by this.

There is the, the like sending people off to a completely different partnership website, but it sounds like there's also a lot of advantages of keeping someone within the fold, but not like here's a dress. It comes in eight colors and 37 sizes, right? It's almost like here's a dress you just purchased. And we noticed maybe three months ago you brought red lipstick. So here it is again, in case you need it now. You know, uh,

Susie, what's interesting is, so if you think about sort of the breakdown of where the customer is in the moment, right? So let's say they're actually before they've hit the buy button. So you're on the payment page and you're entering in your payment details.

that is probably a pretty tricky time to take customers totally off-site on a non-linear journey. And so a lot of the work that we do is to try and figure out how can you actually maximize the value you get out of sort of each step in the funnel, but not disrupt the core reason that somebody came to the site in the first place, which is to buy the ticket or to buy the pair of clothes, right? And so it's a really delicate balance. Once you're post-transaction, you have a lot more flexibility because like you said before, Susie, you can start to extend the journey.

I'm going to take somebody on a totally new journey knowing that I still have their attention and can sort of make a prediction as to what's relevant. So it's really delicate balance. The further are you up, you are up in the funnel pre-purchase, the more likely it is that it's going to work better if you keep somebody on the site. And so we do a lot of work with financial services companies, insurance companies, things that sort of happen pre-purchase to actually embed the experience directly in the site because it just works better.

It's a, by the way, it's an imperfect analogy, but Susie and I often talk about, you know, beauty products. And I think a lot about what are the things that are put in the line, you know, when you're at Sephora, these are like these perfect kind of impulse purchase and things that might have high degree. Obviously they don't, you know, they can't be personalized in the way that rocked is.

But they're not meant to get you offline, you know, to jump out of the line and start to evaluate the product. They're more like, oh, I'll add this on or I won't. And I think it seems like you guys are trying to add value in a way that, you know, to your point, the worst thing you could do is stopping people from transacting. It's more so about, like, can you add additional value on top of the transaction that isn't going to complete either way? Yeah.

And truly after the transaction. So less likely to keep them on, say, the Macy's website or the Sephora website, but to move them to a partner website. Exactly. Yeah. And Jeremy, I think that's the best version of offline personalized marketing in the world is the sort of trinkets that you can cash for, right? Like, uh,

I myself, unfortunately, fall or I sort of succumb to the candy at CVS. Like I'm always at CVS and I'm like, well, obviously I need Reese's Pieces. But it works, right? It's a good strategy, Marcus. I know. I know. I know you're getting Reese's too. It's because I'm English. Every American loves peanut butter.

But yeah, it's a really powerful strategy. And look, the challenge that you run into is can you make that decision quickly and not disrupt the customer? Because if you do, you've really started to disrupt what they're there for in the first place. And so we sort of take the strategy a lot that somewhere between 20% and 30% of the time, the best thing to do is nothing.

And it's sort of odd, right? Like businesses that make money on advertisements tend to think, well, let's show more advertisements like it's my business model. Tend to take the opposite approach, which confuses people sometimes, but it works better over the long term, right? And so actually, if you can get rid of a lot of ads, the ones you leave are more relevant, right? If you can get rid of a lot of conflicting messaging, the ones you actually leave are more relevant to the customer.

Yeah. And so it's almost key to think about it. It's not like the, Oh, people who bought this also bought that, which a lot of retailers are doing on their own with their own sort of modeling, let's say, but it's once it's been purchased, sending someone to a very relevant like Starbucks or whatever it is that we know, like the adjacencies between customers who shop this brand also love this brand. Yeah. I usually say Susie that, um, uh,

Contextual relevance isn't bad. It's just not the only thing that you should think about, right? And so it's not always just this part of the outfit fits with this part of the outfit. That's great. Upper funnel, product detail pages. Sure, there's really powerful recommendation engines out there, but what else can you do? And how can you sort of broaden the scope? And I think that's sort of particularly important in a time like this, like economic uncertainty, things like that. How do I sort of expand the scope without bombarding the customer with lots of messages? Because that is not a long-term strategy that works. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

John, one thing I was kind of curious about is this is something we get clients asking us quite a bit about the new tariffs regime and a whole bunch of uncertainty tied to that. A little bit kind of unclear from an economic standpoint about what happens next. And how does that factor into your way of thinking at Rocked in terms of how you can basically add value to each transaction? I imagine that has to have some impact. Oh, without a doubt. Well,

Well, I'll share this with you. We have the opportunity to work with a lot of the major big box retailers, some of the ones you mentioned before, actually, Jeremy, are clients of ours. And those big box retailers, when they see something like this, sort of have to go through a rethink, right? Like, how am I going to remain a profitable business that can reinvest back into the growth of my business? Because a lot of these companies have to rely on net new customer acquisition just as much as they do those retention strategies. So there always has to be these budgets to push back into sort of top of funnel branding customer acquisition.

That gets really hard during a time like this. The way we sort of think about the world is the best things you can do as a vendor in a period like this is usually two things. The first is give your clients a lot of flexibility.

When I see vendors trying to lock clients into two, three, four, five-year contracts during a time of economic uncertainty, I struggle to figure out why. Is the contract more valuable than the product? What's going on here? And so is there a mechanism actually that you can take to allow your customers to extract a lot of value from your product but give them a lot of flexibility back during a time of uncertainty? So that's sort of principle one that we always take.

But principle two, Jeremy, is focus on the outcomes. The way we sort of position Rockt is twofold. If you're a partner, the easiest way to think about Rockt is that you can extract value directly from the platform without necessarily having to put any money in. You're just extracting value off the back end.

And for advertisers, when they come in, it's a new mechanism, a new sort of performance channel that they can invest in to acquire customers at a really efficient rate. We would never operate in a world where advertisers were overpaying for customers. And so it tends to be a great sort of efficiency driver. The way I generally think about this too, though, particularly in the MarTech landscape outside of this, Jeremy, is

One of the challenges is there's a lot of SaaS businesses that are sort of a step removed from the value chain. They don't have the direct ability to add revenue back into your business. You can sort of think of things like the CDP space, for example, the customer data platform. So Rocked went out and actually made an acquisition earlier this year of a company called mParticle. The whole reason for that is that if you can actually bring those types of businesses closer to the value layer, you can add way more value back to their existing clients

But then also use some of that technology to add a ton of value to Rock's existing clients as well. You sort of create these two-way streets. So I think you're going to start to see a lot of that sort of M&A activity, Jeremy, in the MarTech market of trying to get things that can't directly generate value and bring them closer up to the value chain layer. You see a lot of that activity with companies like Braze, for example, very close to the value layer, sending out these sort of marketing messages and generating

value. And so they're going out and finding other businesses that would struggle in a time of economic uncertainty, but can be great sort of bolt-on products to their suite. Let's end with this. John, what's next for Rocks? What's on the roadmap? Good one. A couple of things. So the number one thing that we always focus on is how do we improve? We sort of have these North Star metrics in the business, but how do we improve the rate at which customers sign up for the things that you offer them?

So that is always the biggest R&D investment that we will make, no matter what new products that we offer, what sort of ways you can configure our products. The underlying foundation, we call it the rocked brain. The underlying foundation should always improve a few percentage points a year.

So that's the biggest R&D investment that we'll be making forever, as I see it. That said though, Marcus, I think one of the things we're particularly interested in is stepping our way up the funnel even further. A lot of Rock's clients and sort of where Rock's has become ubiquitous is, Susie, like you were talking about post-purchase. So after somebody buys something, we'll give you this sort of special offer directly after.

Now it's about how can we take that same technology and allow clients to optimize their first party initiatives? So this might be their credit card campaigns, might be insurance that they sell. Jeremy, it might even be parking spots that they sell a ticket. So those are sort of strategic partnerships that they offer. The balance there is how do you do it in a way that doesn't impact that sort of core reason the customer came.

But when you can do that, like I said before, Marcus, that's where the value lies. You think about these low-cost airline providers, et cetera, that's where 120% of the profit lies. Imagine you can improve those outcomes by 10, 20, or 30%. So you very quickly transform the unit economics of those businesses. And our mission is to help them reinvest that in something else.

Right? Go create new stadiums somewhere, open new stores somewhere, like deliver it back to the communities that you operate in. So I think it's this really interesting flywheel that you can create if you really nail that upper funnel piece of the market.

An excellent thought to end on. Thank you so much, John. Thank you to everyone for being on the show. Thank you to Susie. Thanks for having me. Of course. Thank you, Jeremy. This was fantastic. Thank you. Thank you again to John. Great to be here. Cheers. Yes, sir. Thank you to the whole editing crew. John Lance, Danny, and Stuart from the team. Oh, I miss Victoria. Victoria's going to kill me. Oh my goodness. Please do not edit this one out.

Victoria Maley. Thank you so much to just Victoria. She's going to be so mad. Sophie does our social media. Stuart runs the team. Thank you to him as well. Thanks to everyone for listening in to Behind the Numbers. New marketer video podcast made possible by Rocks. Make sure you subscribe and follow and leave a rating and review if you have a second. We really appreciate it. We'll be back on Monday. Happiest of weekends.