Episode 309 / Splendid Uchechukwu / GoCardless / Growth Marketer
Stop Filling a Bucket Full of Holes
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Data driven marketing is too obsessed with acquisition, according to Splendid Uchechukwu, Growth Marketer at GoCardless. Instead, marketers need to remember that retention is king.
Splendid’s journey into marketing started in… architecture! Driven by curiosity and a willingness to start before feeling fully prepared, she pivoted into tech and marketing. It’s a lesson she has for young people just starting out: “The biggest blocker that I've seen is just waiting to be ready.” Her advice: “Decide on what you want to do, find the shortest free course on YouTube if possible, get a free internship and just get started.”
Splendid also urges all marketers to think about how they use data, going beyond the simple numbers and accepting experimentation. Data is only useful when you’re able to interpret it, to understand what it means for your campaign, and to tell a story with it.
Finally, while acquisition often gets the lion’s share of attention and budget, Splendid argues that retention is where real growth happens. “You just get stuck in the circle of always acquiring, never truly growing. It's just like filling up a bucket with holes, so you celebrate all these acquisition numbers, but your funnel’s actually leaking, and you don't know it,” she says.
Find out how to avoid a leaking bucket from Splendid’s top tips, on the podcast.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Splendid Uchechukwu 0:00
Don't just look at numbers. Of course, there's no assumption in marketing, so don't just look at numbers. It's more or less like, what does this number mean for my customer? What does this number mean for my campaign?
Speaker 0:14
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Tom Ollerton 0:47
Hello and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of Automated Creative, the creative effectiveness ad tech platform, and this is a podcast about the future of data driven marketing. Every week or so have the pleasure and the privilege of interviewing one of our industry's leaders about the future of data driven marketing, and this week is no different. I'm on a call with Splendid Uchechukwu, who is growth marketer at GoCardless. So splendid for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do, could you give us a bit of background?
Splendid Uchechukwu 1:18
Yeah, hi everyone. I'm Splendid, a strategy good marketer with six to seven years experience in the field. Currently, I work at GoCardless as a growth marketer, and I am also the founder of good tech splendid, which is pretty much a non profit community that just helps women break into tech through marketing. Fun bit, I studied architecture, so probably get into how that switch happened, probably on this podcast or not, and on the bright side, my favourite right thing to do is to travel. Yeah, I currently have a goal to get to 30 countries before I clock 30. So yeah, that's a little bit about me.
Tom Ollerton 1:52
And where are you on that 30 and 30?
Splendid Uchechukwu 1:56
I'm on 10! I did four last year. So hopefully we get somewhere this year.
Tom Ollerton 2:01
I was reading something the other day on the BBC about how people are going to European destinations for a day, because you can get, like, a return flight to Florence, whatever, for 20 quid, and people are just going for like, five or six hours and then blasting back.
Splendid Uchechukwu 2:15
Yeah, it's way cheaper to, like, explore European countries living in the UK, compared to like, going to, like London from just where I like, live in Birmingham. So it's cheaper to literally move to a different country. And I think that's also what helps you, like move fast in your in your you know, I mean your list, like, I have 30 countries, and I could literally just spend five days going to 10 European countries, Switzerland, France. So yeah, it's pretty much like, really easy and affordable living in the EU to just explore other countries. I completely agree with that.
Tom Ollerton 2:42
Yeah. Well, I don't know, the environmental footprint is pretty wild, isn't it? But, you know, I guess some people are less interested in that. So, yeah. So before we get distracted by travel plans, what? Because you set up your own business, you work for GoCardless, and you've had a number of different roles over the years. So what bit of advice would you give to a smart, driven student who wanted to get into this industry?
Splendid Uchechukwu 3:09
I think it's the shortest phrase I could ever say: start before you're ready. And the reason why I say that is as a person that has maybe been in the forefront of speaking to people that probably just want to get started. The biggest blocker that I've seen is just waiting to be ready. And what that means is waiting for, like, a perfect plan. I mean, perfect laptop, certificates, 10 courses, all of that. And for me, you just pretty much need curiosity and, like, willingness to get things started. So just to dive into that, a bit like when I started my career, like I said, I studied architecture, and that's like a very massive switch to, okay, what am I doing? Because my intention was to actually be like an architect and be like one of the best architects in the world. But then there was willingness for getting into tech it too. And so it was more or less like, now that I have this little time and opportunity, how can I get started? So like I said, it's very easy to get into the circle of just trying and taking courses and all, but I like to, you know, make it really simple in four key plans. So the first thing is, decide on what you want to do, find the shortest free course on, you know, YouTube, if possible, get a free internship and just get started. That's as simple as that. So if I go deep into this, decide on what you want to do, even if it's in the marketing field. Marketing world is very broad. There are different rules. So deciding on where you want to start with, I mean, you could fail there, but this, you start failing early. And we already know, the earlier you start to fail, the earlier you start to reach you, I mean, to get to the success, you know. And then when you decide on what you want to do, you find the shortest free course. I feel like that's where everyone faces the... especially students just wrapping up school, you know, and then they want to get into the tech world. It feels like, Oh, they're like, 400 courses, you know, to take, and everything could take, like, seven months. But for me, it's literally just starting with the shortest free course, like, available to you, especially with limited resources, maybe being a student and all and the next thing, which is where people really struggle, because they just really want to make money fast. It's being able to tell yourself, I might just have to take a free internship for like, three months. But what that then does to you is it gets you in faster, like, way faster. I mean, when you compare yourself to someone that has been on, you know, a very I mean, 10, their 10th course, and they're pretty much still not able to visualise what they're doing. Can we compare that to yourself that has pretty much just done the little course and then you're implementing the difference is definitely going to be very clear. So that's how I like to break it down. For if you're students, and you're probably just wrapping up school and thinking of what's the best way to get started. It's as simple as that. Just pay the sacrifices early, get a free internship, get a free whatever volunteer. I mean, there are many of that available in the UK, and when you're done with that, you could then get into, like a paid role. And of course, the tip is always to the free tip there's always to make sure you have, like, a community or mentor. I used to be on good mentor, but that's now paid like it used to be paid. Now that's a bit pricey. So it could be anyone at all, just have a community, have a mentor, and easily be able to, like, hop on a call with someone. And second tip is to put yourself out there. We're in the era where personal branding is really the thing. So if you should definitely have a LinkedIn profile, if you definitely considering career as a thing, so you should have a LinkedIn profile, personal branding. Put out things. Put out your failures. Put out, oh, I just tried this campaign. I just put out this last week. Or what do you think about AB? AB testing versus this, and just have people interact with you, because your next job might just be amongst the people that are interacting with you. So that's how I'd summarise it.
Tom Ollerton 6:43
So assuming someone's got a job and they followed your advice, but they're a few years into their career, and these are people that you work with, perhaps, like, what? What is that best bit of advice that you give data driven marketers?
Splendid Uchechukwu 6:54
Yeah, first thing again, I think two things come into mind. The first thing is, don't just look at numbers. And the second thing is, get very comfortable with experimentation. So don't just look at numbers. Of course, there's no assumption in marketing. So as a data driven marketer, it's more or less like, Yeah, I'm looking at numbers, but what does what I mean? What does this mean? So I feel like right now, data, as in the marketing field, is more inclined to, oh, how much can you use Luca? How much can you use j4 to create all these beautiful dashboards? But in the real sense of it, it's more or less like, how are you able to interpret everything you're seeing, to tell to tell you what next to do, right? Or to literally just tell a story. So basically, it's not just about don't just look at numbers. It's more or less like, what does this number mean for my customer. What does this number mean for my campaign? So it's not okay, just about the numbers. And a quick example to that would be, if you're running an experiment, for instance, there's a variable, there's a control, and you're maybe looking at the website, and you're seeing the average time per session spent on this particular experiment A is this versus what is what is spent here, is this? It's not just Okay, yeah. Now I've seen the numbers. Like being able to tell a story to say, yeah. So that basically means that, you know, people are spending so much time here because they are finding difficult to understand what to do on the page. You know. So for data driven person, the advice I need to, I always try to give, is, for marford, when it comes to data, you need to learn how to interpret data to retell exactly what you're trying to say. That this is what it means for the customer. This is what it means for the campaign. And then second thing is, get very comfortable with experimentation, because AB testing is key. And I feel like I beg to differ. But another key thing is, you know, experimentation is always, like, assumed to be for, like, maybe growth rules or, you know, stuff like that. But I feel like for every marketer, regardless of your role, experimentation is key, even down to the smallest thing as Okay, yeah, I need to run a paid campaign. Then I should experiment two copies. And so those are, like, the two points, you know, probably give us an advice to, you know, data driven marketer.
Tom Ollerton 8:55
So your shiny new object's an interesting one. Yeah, you've told me it was retention is king. So retention isn't massively new or shiny, but yet you've said it's very important. So why have you chosen that as a shiny new object? Why is this something different that data driven marketers should be aware of?
Splendid Uchechukwu 9:16
So I've chosen this because I think it's a personal experience. I wouldn't say it's what is happening, but I've pretty much seen that it's, you know, as much as it's something that it feels like, oh, we should already know that there should you should look at it, retention, it's not really been. I mean, physically on paper, like when you get to do your jobs, you realise that there's not much attention given to retention as much as it should be. So every given chance, I always try to speak about that, and that's the reason why I chose it as my shiny new object topic for today.
Tom Ollerton 9:46
So, so tell me why retention so important to you as a data driven marketer there, and how should we be thinking about it in the ways that you think that maybe people in the industry aren't?
Splendid Uchechukwu 9:58
Okay. So retention is king for me. Because earlier in my career, for instance, just to call me be personal, I was focusing on acquisition roles initially. So I was like, working as an Acquisition Manager, PPC Manager, performance marketing manager, and it was more or less like, you know, this is your role. These are the metrics to focus on. Just do your thing. There's the growth team, there's a life cycle team. So just do your thing. So I was more focused on, laser focused, like metrics, like CAC, you know, CTRs, and, you know, pushing more and more to the top funnel. That's what PPC meant for us back then. Anyways, like, in terms of, oh yes, my role is a PPC role. So that's what I pretty much do. It was never from the mindset of everyone, regardless of your role in marketing, needs to think of retention. And then I started working across different organisations, and I noticed the pattern for me again, where, like, this is a personal observation, where, like, yes, we're great in getting the users in, but we're kind of like, terrible in keeping them. And yes, we know we are terrible because we feel like we should have a separate team to focus on retention, but in actual sense, everyone should be focusing on retention. And what does this mean? It means like, as simple as, as a PPC marketer, when you're reporting on your on your dashboard, you send, you're pretty much showing different things, like also this campaign worked, or this that campaign worked on. But, oh yeah, I ran ads on this channel. I ran ads on that channel. I did this. But we need to look for that. So yeah, if I have campaigns on Google, Facebook, all of these places, which of these campaigns actually driving the, you know, the users that being detained the most for everything, think of retention. So pretty much like, even when you're thinking of your copies, your ad copies and you know, that is a referral, you know? I mean, there's a referral plan going on at the moment. You should probably think of, oh, how this referral plan is going to help retain this customer. So I should probably add this copy in my ad. It's not just about that's not my business, because I'm just here to acquire I should probably think of how exactly this will help retain them. And we start to notice that, you know, was from one of the companies I worked at, we started notice that there was all this ad spend being put in, and we were not looking at, what does day seven look like for this user, when the user start dropping off? And it was more just focused on, you know, yeah, everyone do your thing, focus on bringing in users. We weren't even looking at cohort analysis. It was more or less like, yeah, only the cohort, only the growth team, should probably see that. And that's when we started to see that there was an issue. And I feel like the reason why I talk about it this way is because I've watched how, um, changing that completely transformed, you know, numbers for us in like three months where everybody started to work together and start to think of, you know, we've done enough when it comes to acquisition. Yes, we do have the ad spend, but how exactly do we want to better, you know, move this retention rate from like, 20 to 30% next quarter. How is everybody working towards that? Because here's the thing, you can't if you can't report back on retention, you just get up and stuck in the circle of always acquiring, never truly growing. It's just like filling up a bucket with holes, so you celebrate, like all these acquisition numbers, but your funnels like actually leaking, and you don't know it, you know, because you just feel like that's not the end of your that's probably not your concern for the role you're in. And so we started thinking, end to end, are we doing the right things, tracking retention properly? It was more or less like then having a proper training where every marketer, regardless of your real estate, to understand what retention is. And how can I help retention, even though I'm focused on the top funnel, top funnel as like in my role, and that really did a tremendous change for us. I've been taking this strategy through across most of the places I've worked at, and I've also seen how everyone thinking together of retention, but it doesn't really help save the business some money, because you wouldn't just keep focusing on acquisition, which, of course, requires money most times, we haven't looked at the PPC end, but it also helps everyone think of how exactly can I keep these numbers? And that generally helps users use the you know products more, and just you know, generally helps your revenue. So in summary, it's more or less like track retention study or drop off points you know, build your strategies, regardless of your role in marketing that relates to how exactly are you thinking of retention? And I mean, your answers aren't in how much more spend can we put? They're already living in your data. You just need to look at them. So yeah, that answers it for me.
Tom Ollerton 14:19
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Tom Ollerton 14:56
So one thing I'm still a bit confused about is how, if you're working in a top of funnel, or even just, you know, converting customers from PPC or paid social or whatever, the platform, and how do you like if your job's not retention, then how would you help retention, if you're just trying to get people from somewhere on the internet so your site and converted? I haven't quite grasped that.
Splendid Uchechukwu 15:22
Okay, just top of my own thinking. So the first thing I tried to mention recently is understanding, like if you just said, if you're running campaigns across different channels as a PPC marketer, you could definitely track through on j4 to see you could create quote analysis on each of these channels, you could see which channel is driving better. So when it comes to like, you know, as a PPC marketer, I'm sure every quarter, every month, there's new strategy, there's budget changes, that is also supposed to drive your decision. So you're also supposed to bring in your contribution to say, I've seen, you know, the last three months, although we spent more on Google, Facebook gives us, you know, users actually stay more gives us more stickiness, because I was able to draw this quote analysis from different channels, and I've seen this, and I've seen that, and therefore I think for this quarter, we should probably spend more here, because if we look at the lifetime value, if I'm doing my it's a higher CPA. This can give us way lifetime value of people that actually going to stay. So that's like, one way. I don't know if that answers the question for you, right?
Tom Ollerton 16:20
Okay, yeah, no, no, I've got it so, so it's you don't. You're not changing the the creative itself or the ads. You're going, right? You're doing it. You're doing different cohorts, right? So your cohorts within, within Google or within matter, or comparing platforms to different platforms, or markets to markets and so on. And which, yeah, which?
Splendid Uchechukwu 16:39
Second thing to add to that is, when it comes the ad itself, I'm sorry for interrupting,
Tom Ollerton 16:45
No, no, go on please.
Splendid Uchechukwu 16:47
Like, I just said, like, for instance, if, if I'm more aware, as when it comes to, like, the marketing field, that it's not just retention, it's not just for the good or good team, or lifecycle team, or, you know, whatever. That would help. Like, you know, like, for example, the PPC team, rather than just, okay, yes, we need to acquire customers. If it is a little bit of retention metric in their in, you know, their KPIs or something, then they start to think of, how exactly can I think of my creatives or my copies? So, like I said, for instance, the company might even be running a referral, you know, package, or be running like, you know, when you stay up to this particular time you get this, and it's probably not in their copies, because what they really care about is acquisition. So they've not put it in, like, the thought process of, how do I put this in in my, you know, creatives, how do I put this in my copies? You know, it's just, more or less, like passing information to just keep them there and then. So that's why I think of it from the entire process of you actually need to know, like as a marketer, regardless of your role, that you're not just thinking of acquiring users, you're actually thinking of acquiring the right users that are going to stay and therefore, like in everything you do, you just, it's just going to stick in to say, okay, yes, I probably need to add this copy here that says, on your 90th payment, you know, you get this, you Know, to this to the copy of running retargeting campaign to people that have previously, you know, create that account and sign in that are already active, really processing payments, stuff like that, to tell them that on your 90th day, you get this, because then you're definitely helping people stay longer.
Tom Ollerton 18:15
Right. So the, so, the retention benefit is actually part of the hook, part of the close right? So you're saying, become a customer and be a really good customer, and then you'll get all this stuff?
Splendid Uchechukwu 18:27
Exactly.
Tom Ollerton 18:29
Right. Fantastic. I've not considered it like that before, so that's a really good perspective. So I can, I can see this working nicely if it's, you know, if it's a small team, growth performance team. But what happens when you've got a large paid organisation, you know, you've got a PPC team over there, and you've got paid social team over there, and all the rest of it, and then everyone's sort of pulling in different directions. Have you found a way of making all this work together really simply and easily?
Splendid Uchechukwu 18:59
Yeah, yeah. That was the situation I just gave this example for the place I worked previous. Place I worked previously, it was quite massive, I guess, because the paid the, I think timing was about 14. So that was, like, a good, good number, I guess, I don't know if that's a massive history, but that was a good and I think for me, it's just about like, what really helped us set up, how we thought about it was, you know, like I said, bringing up, bringing it up as something we need to run consider, and then the next step we had towards it was just to set a reoccurring meeting. So it wasn't people working in silos, because that happens a lot in marketing where, you know, you know, probably, like, you might never even have, like the, you know, acquisition team interacting that much with the growth team and stuff like that. Just everyone's doing their thing. And I don't, I don't think that's the right practice, regardless of what I'm talking about, which is retention. I think it's very important that everyone works together closely, regardless of the size of the team. Like, and this could just even be a once in a month, you know, conversation reoccurring, but realising that you need to understand what's how you can, you know, both work together, like as a team. It's very important. So for me, it was more or less like setting up a reoccurring, bringing this up. And like I said, it was an education done on retention, where a course was, you know, gotten for all of us in the performance team, where we got to understand retention a bit. It wasn't just about, oh yeah, the growth team, you know, basically focused on retention. On it. It was more or less like we received some form of education, and then we started to think of it as how exactly, because, like I said, we started having a little bit of retention metrics included in Okay, so it's not just about the CTRC, scarc, it's also about Okay, your campaign, how you know, thinking of it that way. So I think it's more or less like just communication, regardless of the team size. I think there's definitely a way to have everyone you know in the same room for, like, a proper conversation in once a month, drawing up the strategies together, sharing what the goals are, and, most importantly, maybe including it to like the top goals. Because every every company has a strategy plan. Every company has it broken down by different teams marketing. And also just including that, everybody could see that we are all working towards the same thing, which is not just to keep the spend of acquiring new users. Everyone is thinking of, how do we make sure that that bucket, you know, at the end, is not just flowing out, you know, so that that's that's how I think of it.
Tom Ollerton 19:00
So unfortunately, we're at the end of the podcast now. If someone wanted to get in touch with you, where's the best place to do that and what makes a really good message that you will reply to?
Splendid Uchechukwu 19:54
Yeah, so the best place to reach out to me? I'd say it's LinkedIn. My LinkedIn is Splendid Uchechukwu. And yeah, what makes the best message? I'm very much open to any form of guidance, mentoring, although I could take some time, but I'm very much open. So if there's anything that relates to growth marketing, or conversations relating to getting into tech, when it comes to marketing, I'm more than happy to help. So that would make a great message for me.
Tom Ollerton 21:45
Brilliant. Well, Splendid. Thank you so much for your time.
Splendid Uchechukwu 21:48
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
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