Cheetah Experiences w/ Tereza Kirk

Nick Einstein: Hi, welcome to PULSE: The Cheetah Product Podcast. I'm Nick Einstein, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Cheetah Digital, joined this week by Tereza Kirk, Senior Product Manager. Tereza, we're going to be talking about Cheetah Experiences this week. Thanks for joining us.

Tereza Kirk: Hi, Nick. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here and joining you for today's conversation.

Nick Einstein: Excellent, let's dig in. Tereza, thanks so much for joining this week. Tell us a little bit about Cheetah Experiences. What is Cheetah Experiences, and what are Cheetah Experiences?

Tereza Kirk: Yeah, definitely. Thanks for having me. Cheetah Experiences is a product that is built for non- technical marketers, and with the vision to enable them to create beautiful, amazing experiences that help them collect Zero- Party Data, which is a term that we use heavily in inaudible and the rest are kind of inaudible to power personalize marketing. And we have a suite of capabilities that enable marketers to do so. Everything starts with the Cheetah Experiences' experience library, where marketers can search by marketing objective or experienced type. Find the most relevant engaging mechanic for their particular objective, and do simple drag and drop editors to build the experience itself. And then offer a type of value exchange for engagement, basically.

Nick Einstein: Excellent. Love it. You mentioned the term there Zero- Party Data that was coined by Forrester. Data that's willingly shared by consumers with brands knowingly and willingly for the purposes of personalization or any other purpose, actually. Great stuff. You also mentioned the value exchange and we talk about that a lot at Cheetah Digital. Value exchange marketing, obviously, Cheetah Experience is key to executing on that vision.

Tereza Kirk: Yeah, yeah. Sometime back we kind of sat down and we took a step back thinking about how we as Cheetah Experiences can affect not only the brand but the end consumer who's experiencing experiences. And we kind of set on a journey to define our strategic vision and we've defined it in a way that we aspire to enable marketers to create beautiful experiences that help us locate facilitate the meaningful, long- lasting, valuable relationships with their consumers at speed and scale, which is an important part of it. And that valuable relationship that really means different things for the brand and for the consumer. Because the brand is looking to collect high quality, Zero- Party Data, to be able to personalize interactions with their audience. They wanted to make sure that they're spending resources only on the relevant people that actually are engaged and want to be in touch with their brand. And we wanted to make sure that we help them collect the most accurate insights available while doing it in a compliant way and reducing any possible potential privacy and security risks. And that's what the brand will care about. Right? But for the consumer, the value on the back of that interaction is it can come in a form of an incentive, prize, reward. But it could be also better recommendations maybe in a form of knowledge and education, being able to get a more personalized and relevant connection with the brand, because even as a consumer, we are inundated by my marketing messages and really there's not enough time to be sifting through content that's not relevant to you. And I think that's really important part of what we do as well.

Nick Einstein: For sure. And getting back to the value proposition for brands and marketers, these programs really can help drive scale in kind of data acquisition enrichment programs, making a big, big impact for big brands and marketers at Cheetah Experiences.

Tereza Kirk: Definitely, we work with, with brands across different verticals, consumer product goods, consumer package goods, retailers, travel brands, a lot of big, big brands, names-

Nick Einstein: Sports teams?

Tereza Kirk: Yeah, sports teams, exactly. And these brands operate in multi- market environments or they have multiple brands and they're trying to roll out these programs across all markets, all brands, doing it at scale while of course keeping the resources to a minimum. They're trying to not outsource a lot of the data collection pieces to external agencies because there's increased data compliance and privacy risks. And therefore, we're really trying to provide the right tool for enterprise brands to be able to do more at scale while still making it feel like you're talking directly to the consumer.

Nick Einstein: Right.

Tereza Kirk: And some of the results for our brands are really amazing as you touched on. So maybe we can look at some of the stats that we know about from the years of focusing on data collection.

Nick Einstein: Yup, and here they are. And interestingly, depending on a brand's goals, there are different mechanics built into experiences to, to drive those specific goals. Maybe dig into that for a second.

Tereza Kirk: Yeah, definitely. So it really depends on the level of engagement you're expecting from your consumer. And that's very tightly connected to the value exchange you're offering on the back of it. If you're asking users to go to this store and take a picture of themselves doing something specific, you probably have to offer some really compelling incentive for that amount of effort. So you can find a really different mechanics in the platform for anything as simple as just a simple signup for a newsletter, to contest that collects the user- generated content, or quizzes, product finders, recommenders, reveals, all sorts of campaigns. But the steps we're looking at right now are across some of the most popular categories of campaign types. And you can see that the average conversion rate for all of our experiences was around 45% with a 44% opt- in rate, which is really high number. And we also know from soft data behind it, right? When we look at the mechanics and how users interact with those experiences, we know that of course, lower barrier to entry type of experiences lead to higher conversion rates. No record signs there, but we also know that higher engagement mechanics that maybe are easy to enter, but are asking for a certain level of engagement, maybe like a product finder, will lead to higher opt- in rates. And again, that makes sense, right? You engage the person you're offering them relevant content. You're asking the right questions and offering some recommendations. They're more likely to be willing to stay in touch with you and your brand.

Nick Einstein: Yup, yup. Makes very good sense. So you and the crew had been very busy building out new features in the product, releasing exciting stuff, big release very recently. Why don't you fill us into the latest in the platform?

Tereza Kirk: Yeah, thanks for asking about that. So we kind of to continue on the knowledge we've gathered over the years, working with our customers, we knew that there are the ideal number of questions to ask in a quest to achieve better conversion rates. And we know what kind of experienced types that are more engaging or less engaging. And to build upon that, we introduced Branching Logic, which is a really powerful addition to our data collection capabilities that allow brands to set up the experience in a way that when a user interacts with the questions, we either show or hide different questions based on their responses. So we're reacting to the user's context. As we responding to the questions, we're sending them on different journeys or different paths based on their responses. So, just think about it in a way that if we're asking you if you have a dog, cat, or no pet. The follow- up question probably should react to that information. Like if you have no pet, then probably you're not going to be our customer for pet food. But if you have a dog, the next question should be okay, how big is dog? Not like, okay, if you have a dog, then you know what, then this, and if you have a cat, then that, so we just want to make sure that we're asking the most relevant questions to the users, because we're just trying to make sure that they have to show minimum effort, but give us the most relevant responses so that we can provide the most applicable value exchange on the back of that.

Nick Einstein: Yep. A win for the marketer and win for the customer too. More tailored, positive, customized experience.

Tereza Kirk: And maybe we should also mention how everything we do at Cheetah Experiences fits into the customer engagement suite, how we are integrated with the other products because of course, all other products in the CS are powered by data. And as users are entering experiences, we have real- time data integration pushing that data to maybe messaging platform, to trigger, to follow action and the most relevant, personalized communication. Or to EDP and loyalty to trigger the best possible offer for the user. So, we said, we're sitting kind of like right in the middle cooperating and integrated with all the other products and UCS as well.

Nick Einstein: Indeed, indeed. As you're using Cheetah Personalization to progressively profile customers, you're using Cheetah Experiences in that functionality to make that more efficient and learn more about customers, it is great stuff. Tereza, you wrote a great blog post about it, which is out there. Now there's some excellent information on the website, cheetahdigital. com. But before I let you go Tereza, you that PULSE: The Cheetah Product Podcast, is about music. We like to have the music theme run through. And so you're about eight hours, I think ahead of me, seven or eight. And so likely getting ready to log off soon. What are you going to plug- in? What's going to be coming through the stereo when you log off this afternoon?

Tereza Kirk: That was a question I was dreading because everybody who comes to PULSE podcast offers this like, very tasteful and sophisticated answer, and mine is just shocking. So I love Latin music, so I'm going to play some reggaeton with my daughter. We're going to have a dance party and relax a bit.

Nick Einstein: I love it. That sounds great, you guys enjoy. I might Spotify some of that myself this afternoon, tune in as well. Thank you Tereza so much for joining this week, it was a pleasure having you. Thank you for tuning in and for more on Cheetah Experiences, do check out the Cheetah blog as well as the website, a lot more there. Thanks for joining Tereza. Have a wonderful afternoon.

Tereza Kirk: Thanks for having me.