Episode 88: Understanding Data and Analytics with Brian Eberman, Chief Executive Officer at Zeenk
In the latest episode of Subscriptions Scaled, we speak with Brian Eberman, Chief Executive Officer at Zeenk, to discuss data and analytics in depth. Zeenk is the first customer-centric data analytics solution for DTCs, e-commerce brands, and agencies.
Understanding data and analytics is important to subscription-based brands in evaluating where to spend their marketing budget and how to retain customers.
In the episode, we discuss various topics relating to data, including Zeenk’s typical customer, how each customer is evaluated and the client onboarding process. We also talk about who benefits from the data besides the client.
Keep reading to learn how understanding data and analytics affects subscription-based companies, and so much more.
Brian Eberman
Brian started Zeenk a little more than a year ago and has a deep background in analytics, data science and AI. He’s been running data-driven companies for 16 years and has been involved in data and AI-driven companies for over 30 years after receiving his Ph.D. in AI and robotics.
Brian started Zeenk as a result of his work at Thrasio, the largest aggregator of Amazon brands. Brian worked at Thrasio as an executive consultant on technology and product from late 2020 until he began Zeenk.
He saw an opportunity to build an easy-to-use but powerful analytics tool that companies could use to scale their businesses. Brian and his team took the technology from a social advertising company and repurposed it to work in e-commerce.
Brian and his team at Zeenk have a rich history of deep data science in advertising, business intelligence and advertising for a strong and effective solution.
Zeenk’s typical customer
Typically, Zeenk provides actionable analytics to e-commerce brands selling on Amazon or Shopify. While all types of customers can use Zeenk’s technology, typically clients sell something on an e-commerce platform.
Zeenk started working with Shopify businesses supporting multiple e-commerce platforms, with companies usually selling around 10 to 20 different products. While some brands sell more, they wouldn’t usually be selling hundreds of products.
These businesses are typically on multiple advertising channels, like Google and Facebook. They may also be on TikTok or Pinterest, depending on the type of brand. They would also likely be involved in retention marketing.
The questions that need to be answered are straightforward but important. For example, how much is the company spending, where is this money being spent, and who are the customers?
While many data companies just provide reporting, Zeenk grabs data from a company’s orders and other sources. The team then pulls everything together in a helpful analytics package. This analytics package allows companies to look at their data as if they were in a giant pivot table.
Brands have the power to look at whatever and whoever they want. Zeenk often finds that different teams will look at data differently and make further observations. For example, the finance and marketing teams will analyze data differently.
Evaluating customers
Zeenk takes a customer-centric view, believing that different customers are worth different amounts.
While you don’t want to remove the customers that are spending low amounts, you want to align your cost structure to the value of your customer. This means focusing efforts on the most valuable customers. Less valuable customers should be treated with less cost.
Zeenk is only a year old, but the team has a much longer history of technology and can build models of the value of each customer. Zeenk looks at each customer and can do this for different types of companies.
Types of company models
Typically, there are four or five kinds of companies that Zeenk works with, and it provides different models for each.
There are companies focused on subscriptions and others that sell a product to a customer once. For the latter, the customer's lifetime value doesn’t really matter. What matters is the cost of acquisition.
Companies selling one-off products and services want to focus on which audiences have the best return on investment.
Multi-purchase customers tend to be in beverages, food, fashion and personal care. These are consumable products or only used for a little while.
For businesses selling these kinds of products, lifetime value matters. However, they may not necessarily be subscription companies.
You need to consider other factors with subscription companies, such as cancellation terms. You need to look at early indicators of churn and the likelihood of the customer leaving for good.
Zeenk looks at signals, such as whether someone stops attending the gym with their subscription pass, constantly delays food delivery services or stops reading or opening emails.
An artificial intelligence method called boosting is used to look at these signals and determine whether customers are likely to churn. Essentially, boosting helps to compute a customer's value.
Then there are mixed subscription, single purchase or multi-purchase companies. For Brian, these companies are some of the most interesting and complicated models to work with.
Churn
Regarding churn, Zeenk is always trying to estimate the probability that someone remains a customer.
Zeenk looks across all the orders that have taken place across all the customers. Zeenk has a model that predicts for every person the likelihood that they’ll buy again by trying to get the best-fitting model across all the customers. This model estimates future revenue.
Zeenk can also predict matches and can help with financial modeling. Zeenk has the technology to estimate how fast engaged energy with a brand dissipates, estimating the decay rate.
When it comes to subscriptions, Zeenk needs to know whether customers can delay or cancel easily. Then it can estimate whether they will make these actions and stop being a customer.
To reach out to Brian and his team, visit the Zeenk website or Brian’s LinkedIn. You can discuss your company with Brian to see if it’s a good fit. If it’s not, Brian and his team are happy to provide some advice.
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