Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Tim Cakir is the COO of Carts Guru, a multichannel retargeting platform aiming to convert abandoned carts for e-commerce businesses. He joined the company at the beginning of this year because he was impressed with the level of growth and potential Carts Guru has. He took the opportunity to be a part of it all and is currently focusing his work on evolving the team and helping the business reach new heights of success.

Tim: Hi Arlen. Thank you so much. And thanks for trying to pronounce my last name correctly.

Arlen: Yeah, I don’t want to butcher people’s names and I don’t want to you know, give it a shortcut. So I hope I did it justice.

Tim: That was great. Thank you so much.

Arlen: Oh, yeah sure. Not a problem. Well, you know, of course as I mentioned in the intro, of course you work with cards do and of course your bread and butter there is retargeting and that’s going to be the topic of today’s episode. But before we get into all of that, why don’t you give us a little bit of background on You know how you got started and how you got into got into what you’re doing today? Because I see that you’ve been with cards Guru for just about a year. So why don’t you let us know what you were doing prior to that?

Tim: Yeah, of course. I didn’t the so basically I’m in my career started in sales and that’s when I used to live in Los Angeles.

I used to sell carpets door to door. It was a very fun experience. There were Turkish handmade carpets caramel candies. I’m rugs if you want to go to carpets or rugs, and that’s the sound from turkey. And so I used to sell carpets door-to-door. It was a very good experience. So I had a chance to travel the whole of us with the truck and a couple of colleagues.

And you know is to stay in motels or just to stay in the truck on top of carpets. So those are good times and then I moved to London where I became more of a market here. So there I did marketing for a few years in agencies and creative agency. From there on I moved to Barcelona Spain where I am today, where cars Guru is as well one of the offices and here I was in marketing heading SAS company’s marketing department.

Usually very early stage startups creating the marketing department from scratch. That’s where my experience has been in the last three years. And from there on I became a growth consultant’. So helping CEOs and startups early stage startups prepared to scale and then get ready to scale basically with my marketing and sales experience.

There are also I realized I was lacking a bit on technical stuff. So I went to learn a bit of coding of ever products and project management and this is where I became this growth consultant’ for about a year and there are I met David lalume, which is the CEO, of course girl, which was my. And then I joined cards Guru to for an amazing challenge actually because I’ve never done operations.

So now I’m the Chief Operating Officer as you mentioned. It’s a great challenge. The team is ready to scale. We’ve been working on this for the last year. All right,

Arlen: that’s awesome. Well Tim, one of the things that I wanted to mention is interesting that you mentioned your background in sales. And the first thing that kind of caught me is that you said you did door-to-door sales you selling these Turkish rugs in La I could imagine that was quite an experience people that tell me they’ve done door-to-door sales.

I always know that they are the real deal when it comes to sales to be able to sell door-to-door and it takes a special type of person you have to have a certain skill set. So in demeanor and. You have to have a lot of patience to be able to do that because that’s difficult. Especially I don’t know what years you were doing that but I know these days door-to-door salespeople are often unwelcomed.

So I know that was difficult.

Tim: I mean this used to be a at least 13 years ago. Okay ten to fifteen years ago. It was quite tough and I for me wasn’t the patients but it was the energy you had to always keep this higher energy up, you know, and and go ring the next door and read the next. You know and just act like it’s the first door you ringing, you know, and I do you still exciting as you were as the first or after a million dollars, you know, right maybe I exaggerated with a million.

Arlen: But yeah, definitely and I think you know, the thing with you door-to-door sales is a lot of times you get in people there at their house and you know, sometimes your own urine welcomed and do you know, I know you’ve had a lot of experiences but yeah, it it really kind of goes to show as far as cells are concerned that type of sale.

Just reinforces the fact that it really is about consistency and no matter how many knows that you get you really you really have to keep going. And just continually look for that that next sale in and always tweak your sales process. So for every experience that you have I know you were able to probably pick something up and make adjustments and pivots when you approached that next potential customer for sure.

Tim: I think it’s a you get to know people right and when the door opens and you look at the eyes of somebody and the clothes and you see a bit of the house. Right there in a second. You have to try to analyze and without. Oh, okay. I know this type of person, you know, I’m going to start very light or I’m going to be very friendly.

I’m going to be more casual, you know, this was I think the best challenge that I had in that and I think it makes you a bit of a people person

Arlen: it’s true. Yeah, if you weren’t a people person at the beginning of that, I’m sure after after talking to hundreds and thousands of people you probably became

Tim: one exactly.

That was fun times though. I didn’t miss this. Days.

Arlen: Yeah, that’s cool. That’s awesome stuff. Well, you know, like I said at the beginning today’s focus of the podcast is going to be on retargeting which is you know, really what you’re focused on there at carts Guru. So why don’t you kind of break it down for a little bit for maybe those that aren’t familiar with that terminology or little unsure body.

What would actually is.

Tim: Let me know first of all, I’m going to talk about then the to explain a little bit about Behavior retargeting because I mean it’s a form of online targeting advertisement, right? So how to Target for advertisement. So I think those days. That we used to know it retargeting in the back changed a little bit.

Why because consumers now, they’re used to the internet. Of course, they’re used to looking at product and receiving lots of spam emails and so on. So retargeting now they for us I think. To really find out those people who had an intention of buying something and reminding them that they still can buy this product and maybe they can even buy it for a better price that what they’ve seen and this is where the value comes in retargeting.

So I know that there is a lot of retargeting out there in done in a really bad way. So when I’m in a bad way, it’s just spamming you. All the time. We just visit one website and they keep spamming with ads on Facebook and so on. So that’s not where we say retargeting should be and we want to make it a bit more personal a bit more emotional to the person.

So if you do look for something that you wanted to buy, but you. Something else that happened right your food in the kitchen that was burning or you had a kid that started crying and you left that product and you didn’t think about it. Maybe it was going to be an impulsive buying but maybe it was going to make you happy.

So we allow our clients to do a bit better retargeting by personalizing this. So that’s how we trying to make retargeting a bit of a better word actually a better definition

Arlen: that’s good because a lot of times people that are familiar with the terminology think about retargeting you think about in the traditional sense.

Like you said capturing some information from somebody that’s visited a website and then. Spanning the hell out of them, you know everywhere they go online. So, you know when they’re going to their your site and then they go to other websites that are within the kind of the whole and AD Network.

Maybe they’re going to CNN. They’re going to some other sites. They’re going to different sites. They start seeing your ad everywhere and then that’ll boost the global. That’s what it is. But we’re talking about is a little bit more sophisticated rather than. Blindsiding people with your company’s information just because they visited your site one time.

It really makes sense.

Tim: I had that’s why we focused on made on e-commerce as you actually do had the or you had the intention to buy something right and that’s where we prefer to retarget somebody because you have shown interest not just by visiting the website for a few seconds or downloading just an e-book but by choosing a product or choosing something that you wanted to buy for yourself kids for your wife or your family.

Arlen: Yep, definitely and you know as far as what you’re doing and kind of your experience there at carts Guru. What are some I guess some clear examples of retargeting campaigns that. You Commerce businesses have done that or successful.

Tim: I mean we’ve been focusing on the most major one, which is the abandoned cart, right?

Okay of is mentioning a little bit is that if you put something in your cart in your shopping cart, that means that you took the time to actually almost by that we I call it almost because that means that you were almost a buyer you were almost a client of our. But something happened and really it’s not that you didn’t like the product anymore because you did spend time until you put down the shopping cart.

Usually we don’t put things on the shopping cart just to put them on a shopping cart. We look at pictures with research him. We asked friends maybe if they had this product and then we put in a shopping cart and usually we buy it in that couple of minutes by when you’re trying to check out a lot of things happen really and it just can be personal things.

This could be a business things. So many things happened that we. So we focused on abandon the cards and what we realized by focusing on abandoned cart is that we really brought a lot of value to our customers and our customers customers maybe had value by actually finishing the purchase that they really wanted this product.

It could have been a gift for somebody for Christmas and something happened they forgot. So we’re living really busy lives and since the internet is getting. Much more popular. I mean when I say popular not just Intel me social media. Everything is always on internet where on internet 24/7 so it is normal that we do forget things.

So hopefully that product that you put on your shopping cart is something that you really want and that our client can remind you of that product and we always advise our clients to give a little bit of a discount give a little bit of promotion give a little gift to bring that almost. To become a client.

So we’ve been focusing on abandon the cards but there is many many ways of retargeting which we can cover if you like but there’s so many ways, but the abandoned card has been the most high value for our clients today and we’ve learned so much from it that we’re going to build on top of it and we’re going to help on retargeting in other things like if you’ve seen.

Let’s see through three different products, but you’re not put them in the shopping cart with machine learning in the near future. We would learn exactly your taste, you know, and we might be able to give you a little coupon towards a category or product. Right? So our kids will be able to do that very soon.

Arlen: Okay, that’s some really cool stuff. And I think you really kind of nailed the whole environment that we’re in right now as far as why. Taking advantage of people that have been in cards to so important because there’s so many factors as to why somebody’s going to jump ship or abandon a car. And a lot of it is just predicated on the fact that we’re everybody so distracted these days.

There’s so many things going on and everyone’s lives whether they have their day-to-day responsibilities, but people are on social media and just everything is just so accelerated. So most of the time with somebody does abandon a car doesn’t necessarily mean that they didn’t want that product anymore.

It’s just something happened. It could finish the check out. So that’s um, yeah, very important. I think that nowadays more than ever. Another thing I thought about it. I think which makes abandoned car probably a little bit more prevalent these days is the internet’s download speeds, you know these days with our high-speed services that we have.

Most people are on a high-speed connection at least here in the US and a lot of. European countries as well run a higher speed internet connection. It’s so easy to just bounce off and go somewhere else both another site. Check your email. Do all of these things multitasking. Whereas think of course dating myself when we started things how often and how many started like mm.

Don’t mean we were on a dial up internet connection. If you can remember that those days where you know, we never connected and you were going to a site, you know, you had a particular Mission you weren’t jumping off you weren’t. Anywhere else if you wanted to buy something online at that time, you know, you were going to go through it because you know it some time, you know time for the page to load up the time for the payment processor to calculate things.

So if you got to the car and most likely you’re going to go through it. So with the I think the internet speeds definitely have something to do with it as well. It’s just so easy for people to to just jump all over the place, you know you dimension. Of course, you guys are focused more on the abandoned cards.

What are some other types of retargeting types of campaigns that you’ve seen? That people have been successful with

Tim: so people that have been successful with other types. As I was mentioning a bit is about understanding the interest of people from different categories of products from where they spend time on certain pages, right that’s been quite effective as well.

But most Technologies hasn’t put machine learning yet. So it’s been a bit more on rule-based. So, you know, you just put some rules and then you hope that is going to match everybody and that’s not been really the case. This is why that we are thinking now or building already something that is going to help technology decides who actually fits in more Niche categories and help him really understand what they like as well and help our clients understand what their clients like and give him a better approach and a better user Journey until they buy this product

Arlen: right?

I can definitely see how that will help will you really kind of tying into and analyzing people’s interests and then. Sending them something specific based on that and words just kind of doing it in the last analysis rather than just so somebody blindly thinking that you know, this is what they want because they were on a certain page.

So yeah, I can see all of that advancing pretty quickly.

Tim: I get a bit worried when I say this stuff because then it’s likely the listeners now might think that we use this data. We don’t use this data, you know where we’re not going to we’re not going to look at your bank account Nobody Does that actually said okay some Bad Company’s does it as 15 in London use of course, right?

But what we want to do is actually give a better experience to the. Rights to find what they want and to get a better price on other way and a little tip that I would give that I shouldn’t but I will is you know, if you’re going to buy a product don’t buy right away put it in your cup first and then leave you might get retargeted.

You know?

Arlen: Yeah, that is the great consumer Sylvia, right that’s happened to me. Actually. I haven’t done it in intentionally, but I have seen what you’re saying. I’ve gone to a cart and you know, just like I said, I bought I jumped off had to do something else now. I actually forgot about it and then I got an email.

So yes, definitely something you can take advantage of

Tim: don’t buy a plane ticket. That’s for sure. You know,

Arlen: those

Tim: you got to go

Arlen: public. Yeah, for sure with a plane ticket though. You got to be pretty quick on those because you could lose a good rate. But yeah now as far as all of us need targeting we talked about the different campaigns what really.

The tools and resources and things kind of behind the scenes that make all of this stuff happen and the retargeting work.

Tim: So if we’re going to go down to the technology a little bit if that’s what you mean Island. Yeah, and so basically our technology is being focused on that pixel that is behind the cards, right?

So the second that if you’re going to buy from a store that has a Shopify and Magento prestashop will come on. Or any other cms’s a Content Management Systems the second that you put that product into the cart. This is where our pixel will fire and our pixel will take that data say XYZ had put product XY Z into their carts and then when you leave we know after 30 minutes that you’ve left.

This is where this will fire and our client creates a customer Journeys around the abandoned cart. So what they can say is okay. Let’s send an email in about an hour. To remind them. Hey, you’ve left this product in the cart. Okay. This person doesn’t come back doesn’t right back. So what we can do is.

The next day we can send a Facebook Messenger if we know them on Facebook if they’ve already opted in and we know this person’s Facebook. Then we can send a Facebook message. It’s a bit more friendly as well as it’s more direct because everybody uses Facebook and to say hey your card still there.

You can also say this product. There’s only two left in the stock. You can give a discount. Usually we really recommend to give a discount. And usually the biggest the biggest killer of all is the SMS, especially in the United States, you know, because we don’t SMS anybody anymore. So when we receive as an SMS is like wow, okay who sent me an SMS and when it’s from an abandoned cart and you’re giving me a 20% discount if I click on the link, and I’m going to go buy this product.

In the next 24 hours. It’s like oh there’s an urgency that I’m going to go buy this so our technology has been very multi-channel approach. And this is where we’ve signed in the last couple years since we exist and this is why that’s I’m going to say we not just better than our competitor, but we have more of a very.

Approach to it by giving multi-channel. So SMS Facebook messenger and email are one a lot of people will use just email and this is where your abandoned caught won’t have results like our software can give up to 20% higher conversion. And that is our value. You know, we help our clients make up to 20% more profit.

Arlen: Okay. Gotcha. Yeah multi-channel is really the buzzword these days because I’m constantly here. I you know, I listen to a ton of. Other marketing podcasts and I read a ton of marketing blogs and I’m constantly seeing what multi-channel and it’s so cute these days because you know, like you said a lot of the you like yours, you said your competitors they focus on just doing the email retargeting but these days not everyone is on email not every consumer or potential consumer is either on Emo or is going to be checking their email on a consistent basis.

You got to hit people where they’re at. There’s going to be some people that are only attack on. Next a lot of the Millennials these days strictly text may be very rarely will lineal Community send out emails. It’s all about the text. And so if you’re not hitting people there then you’re missing a large chunk of potential sales and potential customers.

So that multi-channel approach makes definitely makes a lot of.

Tim: It’s also High what’s the last time that you’ve not had more than a hundred 50 emails a day, right and how many of them goes to spam or how many of them you just have to delete and unsubscribe. It’s not the place that sometimes going to get somebody’s attention and as you’re right, it changes from generation to generation, of course not so given the multi-channel approach.

It really does help our clients be able to catch their consumer where they are at the right time at the right place, which is much easy to say but also. When we say multi-channel in as you said, you’re listening to a lot of podcasts hello, people will talk about multi-channel. But usually what the lower people do is to use different software’s to create an experience like a multi-channel, you know, as you said our competitors does email some of them does SMS we’ve seen so many other competitors now that came after us with SMS because we’ve been doing it since I think I think we are one of the first ones that did retargeting abandoned carts on SMS.

And now the last time we were in Reno Nevada for a conference, which was so many. Many so many competitors doing SMS retargeting. And so if you want to use a competitor to do email and another one to do SMS, you’re going to have some data problems. You’re not going to be able to synchronize. You’re not going to be able to do the best customer Journey that you can

Arlen: yeah, definitely that’s kind of key to as well when you’re talking about multi-channel and using different solutions.

Thinking is a key thing because if you don’t have your data sink, then it can become a nightmare too. Make sure you reaching out to the right people. You’re not duplicating your responses. And I know how that goes with regards to data syncing for sure. So with Rue targeting he’s talked about a lot about the cart abandonment campaigns and some of the other campaigns based on.

Do you have any particular stats as far as what a business and e-commerce business can expect when they do launch a retargeting campaign. What are some of the results they can

Tim: look for? Yeah, of course. I mean this really depends on the vertical I always say it’s usually when I see the vertical is more of the value of the product that this emergence are selling if it’s more of a luxury item if it’s fashion basically people can put in the category of an impulsive buying so when you put an impulsive buying the conversions can go up to 20.

Tent and when it’s more of a like don’t know so I’m going to call it drop shipping because there’s so many dropshippers out there. You know that they expect this 20 percent conversion as well the higher conversion as well and I tell them no because I mean your products are things that are sadly to say some of them are really plastic things that you can just buy anywhere, but because it’s a popularity that comes in before six months or a year as a drop shipper products.

These will have about 10% to 12%. Conversion but our clients which have high fashion really these they really make really really really good conversions and they really happy and they keep our software for a years, you know for two years. We had some great fashion customers and when we speak to them, they really happy with what we do, but we’re when we speak to a drop shipper.

They’re a bit more annoyed. You know, I was expecting more.

Arlen: Right? Right,

Tim: but the your consumer expects better quality as well. Right?

Arlen: Right. Definitely that’s that’s what it always comes down to, you know, as far as the different platforms are concerned. We talked a little bit about social media, of course Facebook and all these different environments and these different channels.

All of these things are constantly changing their all of these social networks are adding functionality. They’re changing how they present things to customers and. You know, it kind of keeps app companies such as yourself. And in my company as well, we’re from here with this as well. What we always got to be on our toes because whenever they make a change we do often have to Pivot.

So right now the way you see it, are there any limitations with regards to certain social platforms and browsers that can cause any issues with retargeting or cause me, we targeting not to work.

Tim: Okay, I think as long as you don’t use Internet Explorer you find I hope you’re not using it. You know the technology is okay.

I mean Google is coming up with some new security about the pixels and stuff like that. So that makes our job a bit harder of course, but I think the challenge for us is not to Pivot various to give more features. And when I say more features is also more channels night as you mention, you know, maybe Facebook will slow down and the generations one have faced with are gonna have Instagram, right but.

Like remark owns that as well for him, but also I know you will now we are building WhatsApp and Viber Integrations, you know, because people use WhatsApp much more WhatsApp open their API finally we’ve been waiting for this for a while viral same thing, you know, so it’s to find where these consumers are and help our clients get to them.

That’s our challenge.

Arlen: Gotcha. That makes sense. Yeah, I understand it, you know these days with the social networks these different browsers and different platforms are cognizant of the fact that they have to be able to be compatible with with all of these different apps and they have to make the integration.

Possible because you know, if they don’t then they’re going to lose business they’re going to lose out and they’re going to get a lot of negative media so that I think they don’t haphazardly make changes. They do try to you know, at least provide a notice and fair amount of documentation anytime.

They make some type of change where it could affect. App companies like yourself. So I do see that happening more and more these days.

Tim: I mean Facebook is not been always the most popular about letting their customers somehow or their business partners know that they’re changing something on their API, right Saturday you go to bed and in the morning you wake up and something of your software doesn’t work.

Right and I’ve seen this in many many other companies as well. And you know, you’re like, oh wow. Okay developers. Come on. Wake up. Let’s let’s fix this issue. You know I have. And then the like that it’s just a little article or they won’t even say and you have to have a connection inside Facebook and say hey what happened?

Oh, yeah, we updated this wrong. Thanks for letting us know. Usually, I mean the you understand them as well because you know, so they have some of these problems where people actually tried to scrape their data, so they try not to communicate all this but of course everybody is not evil, you know, if we did.

There will be a good software some people build things to scrape your data to use it any worse ways. Yeah, but I think the challenge is it’s not a challenge but it’s just you have to keep yourself updated every day every day. You need to you need to check your status and shake your apis and make sure everything is running smoothly.

Arlen: Yeah, that is so true. Yeah, you definitely have to stay on the pulse of things especially nowadays because things are changing. So quickly. Yeah, you have to be on the pulse of of everything. I will send me a it’s been a pleasure speaking with you. I definitely appreciate you coming on to the e-commerce marketing.

You said a lot of different things should a lot of light on retargeting in general and some things that I hadn’t really even thought about it. And I know are going to be a benefit to our listeners and one final question that I always ask all of our guests on the podcast is just kind of Switching gears here.

What is one thing that our audience would be surprised to know about you,

Tim: but I don’t know if it’s surprising but something that I’d like to share about that. I guess it’s on a Friday or Saturday night. You can find me in an underground Club DJ. I’m a techno DJ and a sound engineer. It’s all good.

Okay, so what I’m not retargeting I am actually playing music the crowd.

Arlen: That’s awesome. I did that’s definitely something surprising to me. I wouldn’t have guessed that that you’re not Underground club scene with playing the Techno music. That’s awesome. And I know that’s a that’s huge in Europe.

It really amazed me because the way house music and dance music. It really was actually I’m originally from Chicago and I think wow my history my history is not correct. I think that is the birthplace of what is house music and dance music these days and. Amazing that because I kind of saw the birth of it when I was in high school and in my early college days when I would come home and go to the club’s

Tim: I am now jealous.

Arlen: Yeah it just to see how it’s been adapted worldwide is it’s just been unbelievable. But yeah, that’s good stuff man. I appreciate you sharing that. If any of our listeners like would like to get in touch with you and pick your brain anymore about retargeting. What’s the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Tim: First of all linked in with my name Tim Cook here or Tim Checker as you said well done. Thank you so much again. I got used to it to not say it properly as well to make it easier for people but also a Tim at carts that Guru is my email address. If anybody has any questions I can help you out. I can answer them and I can direct you to the best of her.

And if you’re already a client or support, if you do need our services our product then I can pass it on to our amazing account executive team, and I would love to help in any other questions that you also have not just on retargeting anymore, but marketing Automation and e-commerce. That’s where we’re exhaling every day.

So I’d love to help anybody listening. So thank you so much.

Arlen: Alright, no problem. Thank you. Again, Tim for joining us today on the e-commerce marketing podcast.

Tim: Thank you.

Arlen: Thank you for listening to the e-commerce marketing podcast. Do you need to get more feedback and reviews from your customers and improve your customer retention.

We have made it easy to do all this with our customer feedback software. Just visit

Tim: OSI feedback.com and sign up for a free trial today. That’s OSI

Arlen: feedback.com if you’ve enjoyed this episode. E-commerce marketing podcast be sure to rate review subscribe and share it with everyone, you know.

Podcast Guest Info

Tim CakirChief Operating Officer of Carts Guru