Joe Barsness: Thanks for joining us on the Mind Your Own Marketing Business Podcast. I'm Joe Barsness from web and software development team fjorge. And today in our show, we'll be talking with Gary Stockert from Toovio. Welcome to the show, Gary. 

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Gary Stockert: Hey, thanks for having me, Joe. Happy to be here.

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Joe Barsness: Absolutely. All right. This is a long time coming.

I've known you for quite a while. We've connected in a couple different ways over the years. But I'd love for our guests to hear a little bit about Gary, how you got into this world, where you've ended up now. So talk to me about your background and what you've done throughout your career. 

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Gary Stockert: Yeah, thanks.

Yeah, long time coming for sure. And again, appreciate the opportunity to chat a little further about my passions in the space. So really the kind of quick background on me is I've always been invested in my career in marketing for. A long time. I'll leave it at that. And everything that I've done in marketing, I've always been more interested in the places where we can show proof of performance in the most tangible ways.

So even from my early days in selling television advertising, I was really into how can we show proof of performance using like data to back, decision making for clients. And that really drove me to more of a digital focus when I started my first agency in 2009. And in 2009, really started to see how the landscape was changing and how marketing clients, especially the smaller businesses, medium sized businesses were really hungry for growth and hungry for data and hungry for opportunities to grow their ability to reach their customers in the most effective ways.

So I spent about nine or 10 years, I suppose, almost in the digital space. Helping to build, email marketing campaigns, doing social media, doing paid media, doing SEO, content, copy, all that good stuff. And as the marketing continued to evolve and AI became a bigger part of the forefront of marketing As I tended to do in my career, I like to move to the spaces that are both most innovative and also most tangible.

So artificial intelligence was sort of the natural next step for me. So about five years ago, I joined Toovio, where I've been ever since, helping to spread the good word about how predictive modeling, decisioning, and measurement can help improve the outcomes for marketers.

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Joe Barsness: Got it. I know this is kind of leading in, but, and we'll dive in a little bit more, but what in, at a high level does Toovio do?

What's the service and the platform? 

Gary Stockert: Yeah, well, I think, just to back up a half a step and then make an intro to the intro is, , marketing's evolved so quickly and really personalization or what we call contextually relevant content marketing has become, More and more important.

And I still feel that personalization in general has a long way to go to grow, to really be in a place where it's hyper contextually relevant. And what I mean by that is not just something as simple as saying, Hey, first name, how are you in an email? But like thinking about things more in a complex way, like what's the best time to send the message to the end user based on their individual, tendencies.

Like, for example, Joe, if you like to read email more at night after the kids are tucked into bed, why are we sending you messages at noon during the day? Or, for example, having one set of emails or even two set of emails to send to your clients really today isn't enough. And what I try to talk to folks about is, think about, how do you improve your outcomes in your marketing?

Well, it comes down to contextual relevancy. So what to be has been doing for over a decade is improving contextual relevancy. By using adaptive propensity modeling, which is a big word, but really predicting like when is the customer going to be most likely to respond and what types of content or messaging will they be most likely to respond to.

So we've been lucky to do it for some of the largest brands in the world and in the country. And it's really taught us a lot about not only just hyper contextual relevancy and content marketing, but also like proof of performance. How do you show lift for an organization as big as Comcast or Verizon? It's been quite a journey so far and we're having a lot of fun.

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Joe Barsness: Oh, cool. Yeah. I can't wait to learn a little bit more about that, but I can't skip my favorite question to ask almost all my guests. Throughout your career, you've been in a couple different places. You've been in this marketing world.

And my favorite question to ask marketers is, what's the coolest thing you've had the opportunity to do in your career? Like anything that really stands out as Hey, I was really proud of that. Or I thought that was really cool. Or I have the best client in the world. Cause I got a free motorcycle or whatever it might be.

What comes to mind with that question? Yeah. 

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Gary Stockert: It's, there's kind of two things I think favorite, from a professional perspective for me is pretty simple. Having a company like Toovio, which is still relatively small, even though we're international and, and growing, working in campaigns for companies, then the fortune 50 has been something we've always been really proud of.

And actually we've leveraged that to help grow down into the mid market because. One of my personal passions has always been, how do we help more people with what we're able to do in a way that's still both affordable and also produces the same types of relative results is what we were able to garner for some of the largest companies in the world.

And as I mentioned earlier, getting opportunities, to work with some of those big brands and big logos, super challenging, but really rewarding. And so I think in my career, as I've moved from, the smallest businesses you can imagine to the largest businesses you can imagine, being able to showcase improved performance at all those levels, really exciting for me and something that I'll never really stop chasing, on the personal front, it's really just opportunities that I've had to speak in front of large audiences about my passions around marketing and the things that I believe make a difference in how you talk to audiences.

I've done a couple of small publications, but the one that probably resonated the most, was really called on a shelf by yourself. And the idea was like, how do you really differentiate your business in a world where it's so cluttered with the messaging, the marketing, and all of the different media types are so cluttered.

And so for me, this was always about really again, personalizing your messaging in your brand and so the example that I always give is never tell someone you're a landscaper because it's too broad, right? Like say you're the best retaining wall building company in cottage Grove, Minnesota, and that means something to someone.

It gives you shelf space in the mind of the individual where you can stay there for a long time, hopefully forever. And that's something I've been passionate about my entire career. And so that's really it from a personal and a professional perspective. I think, what I've been proud of and what's been really fun to get to continue to do.

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Joe Barsness: Yeah. And, and how do you feel like, how do you feel like you're continually improving this, like offering that you have to these, or not necessarily from a, more from like a Gary perspective, like how do you continue to iterate? And learn and grow and use new technologies to improve your I guess I would call it consulting abilities.

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Gary Stockert: Yeah, you know that already, right? To be a consultative organization, you have to understand that questions are more powerful than answers. Our clients are certainly coming to us. For answers. And certainly we have them, but I think if you don't lead with good quality questions and you don't really challenge your clients to think a little harder and work a little harder and be a little smarter about the solutions that you helped devise for them, you're really not serving them well.

And so it's easy to say, well, I have a package for that, or I have a solution for that, and I think that's fine. But at the end of the day, if you don't lead with really smart questions, The answers that you provide won't be as valuable. And I think that goes hand in glove with both iterating a service as well as, showing proof of performance in a space that's highly competitive is you have to ask your customers all the time.

Are you getting value from this? And if not, what else can I do to make this more meaningful for you? I've used a line for my entire career that I think is not just a line. It's actually how I feel is I'm not really interested in, Working with you for a month or two or a week or two, or even a year or two.

I want you to be a part of my career and I want to be a part of your career. As long as possible. And the only way to do that is to have a, what I call no bridges, burn mentality. I always try to really take care of the relationships I have in front of me. And I also try to give as much as I receive, but in order to do that properly, you have to be really confident in understanding the power of questions.

And Toovio really relates well to that because we're here to answer marketers deepest questions about how they can improve their email and SMS. But that really is not about us answering those questions. It's about how can they leverage their first party data to answer those questions for themselves.

And Toovio really helps facilitate that process well.

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Joe Barsness: One curious question that I have for you about, you said that Toovio started 10 years ago. I know you weren't there at the time and this word that, or I guess this term that comes up all the time is AI. And I don't want to dive too deep into AI that can blow conversations out of the water, but would you say that Toovio was early on and using predictive modeling is, do you call that AI?

Like, are, how are you using that? Where do you fit in with like, were you ahead of the game? Do you feel like, where are you at with that? 

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Gary Stockert: AI, unfortunately has really quickly turned into a buzzword that doesn't hold a lot of meaning for many. 

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Joe Barsness: Yeah, 

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Gary Stockert: I think some people are afraid of it.

Some people are excited by it. Some people are in the middle, really this sort of what I would call laypersons, definition of AI should be the combination of machine learning and pattern recognition, detecting patterns, but then also predicting outcomes from those.

So like you need to have both in order to really call it true artificial intelligence because you're taking those patterns and then you're making predicting outcomes better based on them. And I think a lot of what people think about in AI today is they think about machine learning or they think about like large language models like chat GPT and, in some ways, those are just really, super good search engines that are relaying information back that are only as relevant and good as how intelligent your prompt is.

So again, going back to my point about smart questions, right? But I think from a Toovio perspective, yeah, part of our challenge has been from the beginning. That we've been well ahead of the marketplace in our thinking. And so part of what I hoped to do when I came on board five years ago, using a cheesy term that I've leveraged for my entire career is I'm here to make complicated things seem like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, right?

When you start talking about things like logistic regression, binary outcomes, decision tree modeling, people's heads start to spin and that's not really what we're selling. We're selling outcomes. So at the end of the day, what I need to do is help a brand like Toovio be better at positioning, the benefits because the features are certainly rich.

The capabilities are certainly there. But I think from a Toovio perspective, it's really just been about, aiming our messaging and our marketing to the right place. I'm a weird balance because I'm a marketer first, but I love being in front of the client. I love, tackling the tough challenges.

And so I think like a marketer, I don't just think like someone trying to sell a service. And so it does help a little bit, when we're trying to translate that messaging. So I think we're running into that again in our newest iteration over the past year and a half, moving to mid market is what we're doing is extremely disruptive.

And I'm excited to chat more about that a little later, but we're challenging the way agencies and marketers think about marketing intentionally, and it's being well received, but it's very early stage for this kind of thinking. And so we're yet again, finding ourselves a bit early for the marketplace, but we think the timing's appropriate.

We just think the messaging needs to be heard more in mass. 

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Joe Barsness: Got it. Got it. No. And that's a perfect segue. Like what, give me the high level. What is Toovio do? And we'll dive into some of the benefits. 

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Gary Stockert: I'll tell you a story. I think that really helps set up, what Toovio does well, but really it's more about thinking differently about how you create better outcomes through iteration or experimentation.

Toovio is really unique. Everything that we've built on our platform is based literally on a clinical trial of a pharmaceutical medicine, meaning we have true control groups or holdouts to make sure that when we show a lift, it's actual lift. You can prove like these people would not have bought these things without being stimulated by something in the Toovio platform.

And we do it through actual, design principles of experiments. And so iteration is the core. of how you create growth in any organization. And the reality is today, a lot of the platforms that are out there, there's a lot of limitations on how and what you can test. I'll think of one of my favorite platforms we work in, Twilio or SendGrid or, Klaviyo or even MailChimp.

These platforms are excellent in a lot of ways at automating things that are event based or what we say rule based. So if Joe abandons the cart, then send him an email an hour later. That's made it a lot simpler for marketers to make sure that they're triggering messaging to their customers in a timely fashion, so they're not having to do things manually, and they're making it simpler for them to engage with customers.

However, there's a lot of limitations in how that can affect performance. At Toovio, We've said that the biggest change we're trying to make in the marketplace is helping brands big and small understand the benefits of moving from A B testing to A Z testing. The concepts of the past of like champion challenger or running a six month test to see if you can get one subject lined out perform another are completely antiquated and frankly inefficient.

At Toovio, we believe you should be able to try 15 subject lines at the same time, or 15 different times, or every time that's in a 24 hour clock, because why not? Why not try to find out works best as fast as you can, and learn as fast as you can, and also open up your ability to experiment and iterate in a way that you've never been able to do before.

And it's not a knock on these platforms, it's that there are just limitations in how you arbitrate and experiment. when you think about how these platforms were built, they were built for split testing. And at Toovio, we just don't think that goes deep enough. And when you think about the benefits of AI, what AI can do is what I like to call augmented intelligence, not just artificial intelligence, we're taking what we already know as a customer consumer or a marketer, and we're augmenting that.

Both with data and also with automation and with, mechanized movements of data that normally would have had to been done manually that can be done on an automated fashion. So when you think about an automated system that goes left to right in our brains, right from customer transaction or product or order to, decisioning around what subject line, what body copy, what hero imagery, what time should this message be sent out at what channel should it go out on?

All of that can be arbitrated in a way that's relevant to one customer. And so when we talk about first party data, we mean it as literally as possible. Gary and Joe should get two totally different treatments based on their transactional data record and their historical engagement with the platform.

And Toovio has the ability to automatically arbitrate those experiments at a customer level. So they can be personally tailored based on an individual as opposed to rule based arbitration, which has a significant amount of limitations. So that's the biggest change with Toovio is we're trying to help marketers and effectively showing brands that there is a better way to arbitrate experiments in real time where you can show serious lift.

And when we talk about serious lift, it's cart abandonment rates that are, 4, times better than what you're getting natively because of just better contextual relevancy. 

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Joe Barsness: Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I was going to ask you about outcomes, but having cart abandonment rates make that much of a change is I'm sure a big step in the right direction for a lot of these brands.

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Gary Stockert: Yeah, I think so. There's table stakes in e-commerce that are certainly critical. Things like cart abandonment, customer reactivation, getting somebody to make a second purchase, getting somebody to subscribe and save newsletter engagement, things like shipping offers to try to help avoid slippage to Amazon.

There's a lot of table stakes in e commerce. And for the most part, what we see is the national averages on conversion rates are significantly lower than they should be because marketer's ability to experiment with different things. And, it's tough too, right? Joe. , if you go home at night and say, okay, cool, Gary, let's do it.

I'll do 15 new subject lines. Just give me a couple of months to write them. You know what I mean? Because that's, what's been nice about AI today is you can go to these platforms and you can, and Toovio gives you this ability where you can say, generate 10 new subject lines for abandoned cart emails for men who like, shirts that are at 45 to 55 that are long sleeve, they're button up or whatever.

You can be as specific as possible. And Toovio is going to do two things. It's going to look at your customer data first and say, what are your customers want in a subject line? And second, it's going to look at. Other successful subject lines across client and it's going to recommend 10 new ones for you instantly.

And then from there, that's where the augmented intelligence comes in. That's where a good marketer, a good copywriter is going to go through and tune and tweak those subject lines. So you're removing a lot of the heavy lift on a lot of us copywriters. And I've done a ton of copywriting in my life.

And one of my favorite jokes is like, somebody goes, you have to be so creative when you copyright. How do you do it? I said it's no different than if someone walked up to you on the street who you've never met and said joe be funny now like It's hard to do and it's hard to do well. But if you went to the Toovio platform and said, give me 10 new humorous subject lines about windows that I can leverage in email marketing, it would give you a starting point.

And then from there, obviously you can jump into Toovio and you can say, all right, let me refine these, approve them and then place them into a test. And Toovio will automatically arbitrate those 10 subject lines at a customer level for you, and will assign them appropriately to the customer based on their likelihood To convert from that subject line.

So it's such an advanced way of thinking that we're finding ourselves again in an education position, which is great. Cause I've always said education is where transformation occurs and we don't want to sell anything anyway. We want to help people. And so one of the best ways to help people is to educate them about just things that are new in the marketplace that they're not familiar with.

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Joe Barsness: Got it. Yeah, no, that's great. Awesome. Like it, you're absolutely right. it's a way to get a jumpstart on things. It's a way to get your mind. It's like being able to talk to somebody and getting their ideas and collaboration I think is maybe the key there. So I know that through Toovio, you have done different campaigns.

You do different things, maybe offer different discounts. Has there been any thing that has. Surprised you in its success or failure. Man, when we went from, I just thought of this, like, why does Menards do 11 percent off? Has anything like, there must be a reason it's like unique. It's not 10%.

It's why do they do that? I'm sure there's a reason, but is anything through all of the data or something where it's man, when we did this thing, I can't believe it, People bought 10 times as much at 30 percent off than they did at 40 percent off. Has there been any nuggets like that over the years at two?

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Gary Stockert: Yeah, absolutely. it's a really engaging matter of fact, we could spend 25 minutes on just about dynamic discounting and how do you address customers more at an individual level and how do you budget for discounting and how do you leverage it for different types of activities and marketing? I'll answer your question specifically about the Menards example.

And the same way I would relate to like why Walmart never does 99 cents, they do 78 or an 88 cents. There's a customer perception that they're trying to allude. And so if you think about what's the, what do you, what's the number one percentage you see off to sign up for a newsletter when you visit any website.

And so 10% Why?

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Joe Barsness: Cause everybody else does it. I don't know. They don't know. And it's 

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Gary Stockert: not their fault. It's we all are sort of following what the recipes that have been written before us. And that's normal at two VL. We think discounting should be completely dynamic. So one of our clients, , is a book publisher, really cool business.

They make these great children's books. They're completely violence free. They're weapon free. They're swear free. They're meant for kids under 12. They're wonderful books and they do a really nice business, but we learned really quickly that. Sometimes we're over discounting, we're making less margin and we're working too hard, at selling when we don't have to do that.

And one of the examples is, when we lowered, one of their pack prices dynamically, their conversion rate went down when we increased it. And we removed free and we added free shipping instead, the customer bought more. Because at the end of the day, we're not really competing so much with other book publishers that make books for kids 7 to 12 that are wholesome.

We're really competing with Amazon slippage and people going, well, I can ship it for free. So actually at the end of the day, it's still a little bit cheaper, I can just throw it in with my socks order and it's all in one place. So like a big part of it for us is trying to help avoid Amazon slippage because of the margin control.

And mostly because of the first party data, Joe, these customers that we're serving, they need these email addresses. They want to be able to talk to their own customers. They're the ones that are making these great products. So for us, like dynamic discounting and thinking about the discounting at a customer level, instead of broadly or universally is a really important thing because, Menards might find out that if they let every individual customer choose, they could be on a spectrum somewhere from six to 13 percent and maybe make higher margins than just giving everybody 11. 

Joe Barsness: I think it probably also comes they've been doing. They've been doing that for as long as I can remember, and 10 plus years ago, there was no way to customize anything. You had to give everybody the same percentage off, right? And now, especially in e commerce, you don't need to.

You can do different things to different people to figure out what the value is. And that's what I understand. Toovio to be like, really good. 

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Gary Stockert: Yeah. Fair. Obviously we're a little biased, but I think at the end of the day, I can't really, push this hard enough.

It's the arbitration of these experiments that are difficult for marketers. So even if you could say, yeah, Gary, I'd love to try 10, 20, 30 percent off and assign it to different customers. There's no good way to do that. You'd actually, in some cases be doing more harm than good than using a universal discount with Toovio, our ability to look at the customer's likelihood or propensity to convert at a certain percentage weight, is the only way you really could arbitrate that experiment in a meaningful way.

Because if you did it manually by segmentation, it would be really difficult to prove performance there, and in some cases you might over discount where you don't need to, and under discount where you don't need to. So finding that sort of sweet spot is really challenging, and I think that's because there really isn't one.

And the sort of last thought I'll give you on this discounting thing is, if you have a hundred different types of customers, let's even make it simple and say you have 50 different types of customers. And you're not thinking about marketing that way. If you're not thinking about being unique to each customer in some way, you're missing sales, you're missing revenue.

And at Toovio, we have a way to arbitrate that experiment at a one to one level, where even if one customer buys something off of one combination of time, content, and channel, it's still more meaningful than if it was the highest converting percentage offer. Because you don't really know at the end of the day, would've they bought or not.

And Toovio's control group helps answer that question. So no matter what the conversion rate is for the experiment, we can hold it next to a control group and say, did it outperform the control or not? If it didn't, it's probably not a very good campaign. If it did outperform the control group, even if it's a small percentage higher than the control group, it's still a meaningful experiment and it's helping to make you money.

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Joe Barsness: Wow, man, I could talk to you about this stuff for hours and days. So much knowledge, so much, interesting perspective and obviously backed with data. And I think that's probably the best part, but, Gary, unfortunately that's all the time we have today for, mind your own marketing business podcast.

Thank you so much for joining. 

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Gary Stockert: Thanks again, Joe. Have a great one.

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Joe Barsness: All right. And, you can find Gary Stockert, his name's spelled just how it sounds, on LinkedIn, or you can go to Toovio.com to learn more about him and his organization, T O O V I O. com. And thank you so much to our listeners for joining us.

You can download episodes of our program by going to fjorge.com slash mind your own marketing business. Or subscribing to the show on iTunes, SoundCloud, and Spotify.