Snack food company Thank You Popcorn launched in 2019 from Justin Cherman’s home kitchen. By January 2020, Justin moved operations into a commercial kitchen and the company was starting to gain momentum. Then COVID hit.
Most company’s stories about COVID are negative. Not for Thank You Popcorn — the pandemic highlighted a need for people to stay connected in a light-hearted way. Enter: flavored popcorn.
“[During COVID,] people were just trying to spread gratitude for everybody out on the front lines, and corporations wanted to connect with their at-home employees.”
— Justin Cherman, Founder and CEO
THE CHALLENGE
Justin’s booming business meant he couldn’t personally dig through the ecommerce data. And he couldn’t hire a junior analyst.
But the orders kept coming, so Justin knew he needed help.
“Like the saying goes, I knew half of my marketing spend was wasted, but I didn’t know which half. [Wife and partner] Amy and I were managing online orders, the website, advertising — the whole nine yards. It was tough.”
Like a lot of small business owners, Justin is an expert in his field, not necessarily in online marketing. He readily admits, “I didn’t have much internet experience before starting my business.”
How could Justin improve his marketing-spend efficiency? How does a chef become a marketing master?
HIS PLAN
Justin started a conversation with Kate Bartkiewicz, Clickvoyant’s co-founder, that soon bloomed into a working relationship. Justin thought that Kate’s AI could save him lots of time and deliver up the type of insights only a senior analyst could provide.
Justin purchased Clickvoyant, an AI data analyst, because he knew it could collect data from multiple sources and offer up an actionable report.
The Clickvoyant AI delivers a weekly and monthly report to Justin and other small business owners. Each slide represents an algorithm that the AI has determined is statistically significant. And each slide’s insight is the start of a conversation — the “X” marked on the ground where your team should dig.
“I needed to know where my customers came from, whether they converted and why, and how my advertising impacted that purchase decision. And I need that delivered in a way I could understand and use.”
Kate and the Clickvoyant team met with Justin to connect his Google Analytics and other data sources. She configured his account in under an hour and Justin received his first report 10 minutes later.
HIS SOLUTION
Justin knew he made the right decision immediately. The insights were served up in a way anyone could understand, in simple language with clear action items.
Like any busy small business owner, Justin couldn’t enact all of the recommendations at once. But he did recognize the impact Clickvoyant would have on his small business.
“If I had listened more to Kate from the beginning, I would have landed where I am a lot quicker.”
Justin reviews his Clickvoyant reports on a weekly basis. Conversion rate is a big key performance indicator (KPI) for any company and Justin was keenly aware of its importance. “I am able to make smarter plays with this data. I know which marketing dollars are working based on the KPIs I watch over time.”
Justin knew Clickvoyant could help with basic sales, but he didn’t anticipate how far the software could go with his data. For instance, Clickvoyant helped Justin predict a seasonal flux in sales.
“We’d just started our business, the holidays were coming up — Clickvoyant enabled me to anticipate my seasonal sales volume. I could see the data and that helped me know how to spend and organize my business.”
Clickvoyant gives Justin access to the insights needed to drive success at Thank You Popcorn. But it isn’t a data-dump like Google Analytics tends to deliver. Instead, Justin is served up statistically significant information in an actionable state.
“Any eCommerce business just starting out should really check out Clickvoyant. Because the more I pay attention to those insights, the better my business performs.”
Don’t miss out on some delicious popcorn — snag a bag from Justin and Amy today.
