Nelio Leone is the Founder of UrbanMonks, a growth marketing agency headquartered in Dubai. Nelio started his career working for brand-driven corporate clients like L’Oreal and Chanel. Then, he left it all behind to help start what would become the “Uber” of the Middle East. Today, his goal is to drive growth through branding and storytelling. He hopped on the podcast to explain why brand is important for startups of any kind, and how his go-to framework for brand-building involves a heavy dose of customer research.

Turning your hard-earned website, visitors and subscribers and loyal customers is likely high on your list of marketing priorities, especially if you're investing in paid advertising. But what's the most effective way to start improving conversion on your website? In this episode, I'm joined by John McDonald for a special part two of the Why I Bought This series on ButcherBox. John is a CRO expert with more than a decade of experience, helping top brands from Nike to Red Bull improve their website conversion rates. Today, John is going to be auditing ButcherBox's existing website and applying some of the learnings from my interview in the first Why I Bought This episode with a ButcherBox customer to propose research back to ideas for conversion experiments.

Fulfillment and supply chain logistics might not be the sexiest part of the e-commerce ecosystem, but it's impact on the overall customer experience is undeniable. I'm joined by ShipHero founder Nicholas Daniel-Richards to dive deep into how he's expecting shipping and fulfillment to impact customer experience this holiday season.

Personalization has been a hot topic in marketing over the last couple of years. And the expectations from consumers for brands to speak that language has never been higher. I talked to Matt Schlitt and Ben Parr, the founders of Octane AI about the impact personalization can have on an e-commerce business and how to implement personalization that delivers on the promise of actually improving the customer buying experience.

The chances are you know customer research is a helpful tool to grow your business but when it comes to actually doing effective research it can feel intimidating and easy to deprioritize. Today I’m joined by the former head of Research at CopyHackers Hannah Shamji to chat about the research playbooks DTC brands can use to go beyond the numbers and start capturing the voice of their customers.

Customer support might not be the first place you would look to drive revenue for your store but today I’m joined by Lucas Walker from Gorgias to chat about how brands can leverage proactive customer support and a concierge shopping experiences to increase AOV and drive up loyalty through Black Friday and beyond.

Today, I'm chatting with Ryann a busy mother of two from Florida about her experience with ButcherBox. There's no formal script, trick questions, or wrong answers. I just want to hear her story.

Being close to your customer is one of those things that is easy to say but often hand waved at in practice today I’m joined by founder and CEO of Form Nutrition Damian Soong to chat about how they bridge the gap and build meaningful relationships with customers.

Meeting your customers where they are and building deeper relationships with them is coming to the forefront of DTC in 2020 and today I’m joined by founder and CEO of Carthook Jordan Gal to chat about how brands can start building longer-term relationships with customers from their very first checkout experience.

Understanding why your customers buy and what they are ultimately hoping your products can help them do, feel, and achieve is arguably the closest thing to a silver bullet that exists in marketing. Today I’m joined by Katelyn Bourgoin to chat about her experience launching a new DTC brand during Covid and the incredible insights she uncovered in customer insights.