How Prehook Can Help Increase Your Shopify Revenue

Who is Gen Furukawa?

Furukawa is the co-founder of the leading quiz platform for Shopify merchants called Prehook. Having explored eCommerce for over a decade, Furukawa is part of the founding team and vice president of marketing at Jungle Scout-the leading software for Amazon sellers. You can reach Gen Furukawa via email on gen@prehook.com. He is always happy to answer questions to help improve the lives of eCommerce owners.

What is Prehook?

Prehook is designed and targeted for high-growth Shopify merchants who want to sell more, accelerate list growth, and capture zero-party data using the power of quizzes. 

The idea of Prehook took root in 2015, while Fukukawa was part of the founding team of Jungle Scout. Jungle Scout started as a Chrome extension to help Amazon merchants identify the demand and opportunity to sell on Amazon. Furukawa and his two co-founders decided that they wanted to do something on their own. They built their own product software in the eCommerce enablement space. They aimed their focus on Shopify, instead of Amazon. The partners noted that the differences in the challenges that an Amazon seller faces were very different from what a Shopify seller has to contend with. 

• An Amazon merchant understands who their core customer is and what they're looking for. They will build a listing that is optimized to appear in the search engine to address the specific objections, questions, all within the very uniform format of an Amazon product listing. 
• The Shopify merchant has different challenges because they can have a wide variety of customers. It is unclear what that customer is shopping for. 

Furukawa and his partners conducted research by speaking with merchants. They discovered that Shopify sellers were using a software called Typeform. "While this is a great product, it was not designed for eCommerce—It doesn't tie in with your Shopify inventory or other eCommerce tools like Klaviyo." 

Furukawa is proud of the fact that hundreds of merchants have found value in Prehook. We have helped with—

• Conversion rates
• ROI
• Receiving customer data that is relevant 

"Apple has rolled out iOS 14.5. This update protects consumer privacy and consumer data. It prevents apps like Facebook from tracking your actions and behaviors across sites. This means it has become more difficult to find your customers. Therefore it is more important for a brand to build a direct relationship with a customer—and the most reliable method to do this is by  capturing email addresses and phone numbers that you can SMS, allowing you to communicate with your customers."

Zero Party Data

Zero party data is a new term. from maybe just a few years ago. It is data that a customer proactively and willingly shares with you‐in the form of a questionnaire,survey or a quiz, a support chat or a sales conversation. 

First-party data is data that is captured passively through website activity, pages that you viewed on a website or actions that you performed. The challenge with second-party data is that it is repackaged and sold. Third party data is aggregated secondary data.

"As you move further away from zero-party data, your data is getting dirtier." This leaves you with gaps and forces you to make assumptions about the customer.

Zero party data is helpful because it shares direct insight into why the customer is purchasing the product.

How Do You Use Zero Party Data To Personalize Customer Experience Across Channels?

Furukawa explains the process. "Email is one of the most important channels for eCommerce brands. Statistics show that a large amount of all online revenue comes from email. The question that entrepreneurs should ask themselves is how should they personalize the email? 

You can do any number of things: 

• Use Klaviyo or Omnisend—these are two premier email service providers. You can perform email and SMS marketing. 
• Dynamically insert a custom property or an attribute about the customer. Eg. What is your favorite color of shirts?

You dynamically insert this information into your email or SMS to personalize it. You can do this by adding a placeholder in the emails.

The Quiz And Data

The data arises from the quiz that your customers take. Most quiz products integrate with different tools. Quiz responses directly customize the email. "This in itself is zero-party data. This is where we understand what your goals, challenges, preferences, and habits are." 

The answers to the quiz will be in your Klaviyo profile, Omnisend profile or Postscript profile. This is the data that you are going to use to understand how to tailor messages or arrange campaigns.

How Top Brands Use Zero-Party Data To Create A Defensible Marketing Strategy?

Teelixir-Teelixir is an adaptogen brand. Adaptogens are natural plants, including herbs and fungi to address health issues. The cofounder was using them as a homoeopathic solution. Through quizzes, it was identified that this was a superb homoeopathic remedy. The challenge was that modern consumers were not familiar with adaptogens. 

Four Sigmatic- Another big brand in the same space. They use different mushrooms to address various health needs. The issues that arose related to consumer education and product recommendations. How does the consumer know that this is the best product for them? 

The quiz identifies the problems you are trying to solve, what the customer's lifestyle is like, and preferred method of ingestion. Other answers the quiz helps with is how to reach the customer in order to share more information.

The quiz is helpful in terms of 

• Improving the customer education
• Helping understand what and where the gaps are 
• Identifying the demand in the market
• Information on how to pair the customer with the right product

"Ultimately the results speak for themselves in terms of lead generation."

The quiz is versatile as it is also a bottom funnel tool. This comes in the form of subscription eCommerce brands and post-purchase surveys.

Closing Remarks From Gen Furukawa

"You might hear the best time to start building your list is right now." Furukawa agrees, but he adds that a brand just needs a few data points to start. "Start with what their challenges and goals are. This is infinitely helpful in how you are sending the customer information. It also provides you with information on how to establish yourself as an expert. 

eSenshi is an accounting firm specializing in working with eCommerce businesses. We provide a variety of services such as Virtual CFO services, Sales Tax Services and income tax preparation and planning for eCommerce businesses.