Under The Hood: Cody from Jones Road

Getting Under The Hood with Cody, Director of eCommerce at Jones Road

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Hey Cody! Could you start by explaining your duties as the director of eCommerce for Jones Road?  

Yeah sure. So we’re pretty small team, about 12 people currently. On that team, I’m primarily responsible for acquisition but I also get involved on conversion rate optimization and retention. So I spend a lot of time optimizing our Facebook &  Instagram paid activity, and I work closely with an agency that manages Google. I'm from a performance marketing background. That's where I shine and what I love to do. So all the other stuff like email / sms & a/b testing I’m just learning as I go. .

Let’s chat acquisition then: What's working? Where are you spending time and money?

A big learning and realization for me is to focus more on the blended CAC vs. the paid CAC. Organic acquisition is what keeps me up at night, I want to keep a very healthy and balanced paid:organic ratio. And one of the primary drivers of organic acquisition is “brand”. And so I do spend a lot of time thinking about messaging, community, influencer marketing and things like that. And right now we’re actually performing quite well on the organic front, because my mother who founded Jones Road comes from a PR background - so we’ve been getting excellent press coverage. But I want to build even further on that. 

What about paid? 

Obviously the majority of our spend is on Facebook & Instagram. Google’s also getting good budget - mostly on Shopping ads. Beyond that I've tested Snapchat, and that’s not been great. But I’m excited about Tik Tok, it's a really fun platform where I’m mostly focused on driving top of funnel awareness, but even our lower funnel metrics are pretty solid on Tik Tok. The traffic doesn’t convert quite as well as Facebook, but it’s cheap and worth testing. 

From an analytics and attribution standpoint, are you doing anything fancy?

We originally used Nautilus analytics. And then a few months ago we switched to Statlas. We use that mainly for LTV data and to understand our customer retention better. But the main app I’m using right now is Triple Whale which helps us get similar data, but also helps with attribution. They’ve got a server-side first party pixel product release on beta, which I’m trying to get access to. It basically more accurately tells you which channels have touched your customer before a purchase. 

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On retention: What are you trying to improve upon? What are your levers there? 

It’s not SMS, not email and not subscription. We’re not going to drastically increase LTV by introducing a subscription offering. I think a lot about Apple where people are buying over and over again - not because of an email marketing strategy but instead because of a wonderful brand and product they align to. I have a goal set for myself to get our customers to spend an extra 30% then they are currently and “brand” will hopefully be my biggest leverage. 

Let's finally touch on conversion conversion rate optimization. Are you doing anything fancy? 
We have a quiz on site and that’s been really helpful. We use Octane AI for that. Because we’re a beauty brand but we sell almost exclusively online - our customers can’t easily try on colors or shades of makeup. So to help with that, we have a simple shade matching quiz on the PDPs to help visitors pick a color. That’s been really helpful and has improved our conversion rate as well as our AOV. 

That's it from me Cody.  Thanks for all the insights.