PowerDot is the maker of electronic muscle stimulators aimed to help with recovery and pain relief. In this episode of Shopify Masters we chat with the director of eommerce at PowerDot, Chase Novelich on product education, partnering with athletes, and important aspects of email flows.
For the full transcript of this episode, click here.
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/en_badge_web_music.png?v=1484775700)
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/Get_it_on_iTunes_Badge_US_1114.jpg?v=1484774726)
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/spotify_listen_badge.jpg?v=1528213174)
Show Notes
- Store: Powerdot
- Social Profiles: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
-
Recommendations: LoyaltyLion (Shopify app),
Klaviyo (Shopify app), Gorgias (Shopify app), Google Optimize
Marketing a product that requires additional education
Felix: Tell us about the origins of the company. How did it all begin?
Chase: Absolutely. The company started in 2016. It was born out of a larger medical company. Our now CEO was running the division of that company that was focused on muscle stimulation, and there was a large emphasis on creating a product that was a little more consumer-friendly. He split off and started PowerDot in 2016. I joined in 2017, as we started to put an emphasis on ecommerce and expanding our direct-to-consumer footprint.
Felix: Was it more B-to-B focus at that time? What was the spin-off to create PowerDot that was more consumer-friendly?
Chase: The company itself was focused on consumers and the medical market. Eric, our CEO, saw a significant opportunity in product development and revolutionizing how muscle stimulation was administered, especially to a consumer. The biggest hurdle in the adoption of muscle stimulation, in general, is education. To dive into the background of the product, we're an app-based muscle stimulator. Through our mobile application, we're able to provide the consumer with a ton of education. Everything from pad placement to our news feed, has a ton of information on how to use the product. We have 15 different programs that are out of the box programs. You can think of anything from warm-up to active recovery, massage, pain relief, etc. There's a program for every type of muscle therapy that you could imagine, and then also some workout programs. We really wanted to create an application that was extremely user-friendly and lowered the barrier to entry to allow more and more people to adopt the technology.
"We really wanted to create an application that was extremely user-friendly and lowered the barrier to entry to allow more and more people to adopt the technology."
Felix: When you first came on to the company, what were some of the key areas of focus that you wanted to pay attention to?
Chase: We had a distributor network that was set up by our Sales Director at the time, and the business was humming along. There were a couple of key athletes that were kind of driving the awareness for the business, primarily in the CrossFit space. There was already some adoption by the community. The main initiative was to stand up our direct to consumer business in a meaningful way. That focus over the first year was primarily the U.S. market.
We were already on Shopify at that time. We were on a basic Shopify account, and I immediately jumped in and started at the grassroots of the business. Just cleaning up, looking at site optimization for conversion rate, and then looking at some of the basics around newsletter campaigns, and setting some of those flows. That was what we initially did over the first six months. Luckily, with a little effort and a really small team, at the time it was just myself, we were able to create some significant traction in the company. We really pivoted and put a major focus on our direct-to-consumer business.
![A model in workout attire using the PowerDot on her abs to stimulate pain relief.](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/shopify-masters-powerdot-female-model.jpg?v=1606168259)
Felix: You mentioned education. Tell us about how unaware your target market was, and what steps you had to take to provide some education.
Chase: Our main market at the time, and it still rings true today, are athletes. At the core, athletes understand the fact that they need to recover in order to continue to perform at the highest level. But they're not necessarily aware of the best ways to recover or get the most out of their bodies. When you start to talk about electric muscle stimulation, people get thrown off by "electric". "Wait, you want to do what? You want to shock my body? And that's going to do what for me?" That’s the biggest hurdle that you have to get people over in the initial stages.
Beyond that, it's about how you use the product. Right? It's not a product that you inherently know, and it's a little daunting. You're sticking electrode pads onto your body, and then you're firing electricity into your soft tissue. At the end of the day, it's a very natural way to go about it, but it's still something that can put people off, or scare people a little bit.
So there were a lot of challenges at the beginning to just start to get that adoption and to break through that barrier. Luckily, we've been able to do that. on the user side, so once we've captured a customer, pushing them down to our app and allowing them to explore and be comfortable. But then how do we tell that story before somebody becomes a customer when they haven't seen our app. That’s where the direct-to-consumer side of the business is really important. We have that ability to further educate the customer in a meaningful way, with video content, and written content, and photos, and landing pages that are dedicated to each different core demographic that we're speaking to. That's why direct-to-consumer became so important for us.
"We have that ability to further educate the customer in a meaningful way, with video content, and written content, and photos, and landing pages that are dedicated to each different core demographic that we're speaking to."
Felix: How do you discern what questions or areas of confusion that need to be addressed when educating your target market? w
Chase: Part of our team was already in the industry and the rest of our team that we've built since we're all former athletes. None of us are competitive athletes at this point, but we're definitely the weekend warriors, and so just by generally understanding the market, we were able to identify that that was hesitation for people. Then it was really just about finding ways that made sense to correct that issue. I would say primarily through market research.
Felix: When addressing fear-based confusion, what's the best way to put someone at ease?
Chase: Absolutely. It's really just about validation. Right? How do you validate a product that people are fearful of, or they don't necessarily understand, or they might not believe in it in general? One of the common terms that we still deal with today is the term "snake oil". And we have tons of clinical research that backs us up, and therefore, we've been able to secure an FDA clearance on our products. As a type II medical device, the FDA clearance piece was obviously pivotal. That's a stamp of approval on a product. Outside of that, it was really validating the product through athletes, and through physicians that have gotten behind the product, and have become ambassadors for the brand. They’re able to speak to and inspire the next generation, or the next tier below them, which tend to be our consumers.
Felix: It's almost appealing to authority, or people that have this expertise coming in, and co-signing the efficacy of the product.
Chase: Yeah. And it was really co-signing the efficacy of the product in the way that we market the product. One of the other issues with muscle stimulation, and there's probably a lot of people listening to this that go, "Oh, yeah. I do know what that is." But if you look at some of the brands that have sold it in the past, it's oftentimes packaged as the 6-minute abs or the cheat code to getting fit, and that's absolutely not how we sell this product.
There are some aesthetic benefits to muscle stimulation, but we're primarily focused on muscle recovery and pain relief. This is a product that has been used for decades primarily in a clinical setting, whether you're in an athletic training room, or at your physical therapist. We’ve taken that technology and packaged it to where you can use it at home. Obviously, right now, with current times when people don't necessarily have access to getting their resources. Whether that means the massages that they used to have, or going to the physical therapist, or going to the athletic trainer if they're the collegiate or high school, or even the professional level, access is very limited right now. By creating a product that people could access similar technology from the comfort of their home, that knocked down a big barrier for us. Then it was just about validating it, and we've really done so through a list of athletes that are ambassadors for the brand, and doctors or physicians that additionally are ambassadors to the brand.
How skeptics can present opportunities for your business
Felix: As a business, how do you handle the skeptics out there who are commenting on your social media posts and/or your ads?
Chase: Absolutely. Obviously, often referred to as trolls, but some of them have valid concerns. Right? You’re always going to have that, as a business. It can be challenging at times, but we really look at it as an opportunity to further educate. For every person that asks a question, or comments that something's snake oil, or they don't believe in it, or whatever it may be, there are probably five to 10 other people that feel the same exact way. They just aren't brave enough or don't want to take the time to ask a question. When those questions are posed in the comments of an ad, we really look at that as an opportunity to not only educate that person, but educate the other group of people that may be potentially viewing that ad, and wondering the same thing. We're happy to jump in and start engaging with those people.
Felix: Where does this education usually begin? You mentioned you have the app, and the website, but where is the customer usually introduced to the product and getting that first exposure to education?
Chase: Absolutely. A majority of our advertising is done through social, both on the organic and the paid side. We found that, because it allows the community to engage, it’s a great way to start that process, to make people aware of what we're doing, make people aware that this technology exists, and we've seen that really benefit our brand.
So we continue to do that. We continue to start that journey across social, but as the brand has grown, and as our marketing budgets have grown, we've been able to secure strategic partnerships to bring awareness to the product, as well. For obvious reasons, the more awareness that we can bring to the brand, and get people interested in at least exploring what we have to offer, the better able that we have to educate those customers.
Felix: What are your goals at each of these levels? Once the first touchpoint has been made on social, what’s the goal on your website, when they’re in your funnel, in your email list, etc?
Chase: Speaking specifically to social, we use social at every stage of the funnel. We’re definitely using social as a tool to gain that top of funnel interest, and then funneling people down through education, and then through conversion. If we're speaking specific goals to Facebook advertising, our optimizations are always set for conversions because we know that we need to bring customers into the brand that have a mindset of converting.
We don't need to go too far down the Facebook rabbit hole, but one of the things that are overlooked by people often, and especially as data privacy becomes more and more prominent in our industry, is trusting Facebook's algorithm. I know it’s a hard thing to do, but it's very, very important from my experience to trust them and to allow them to find the customers that they know are right for your brand. I would say that over the last six months, one of the things that we've really done on that front, is to pull back a lot of our segmentation and go for more of a broad audience appeal at the top of the funnel.
So we'll keep it very broad, and always optimizing for conversion, and making sure our content really tells the message that we're trying to get across. As we start to drive traffic in some of our middle funnel, bottom-funnel campaigns, they're obviously a lot more segmented, and a lot more focused on pushing people through that final stage of education, and then down into the actual conversion.
"Trusting Facebook's algorithm is a hard thing to do, but it's very important to allow them to find the right customers for your brand."
Felix: You mentioned trusting Facebook’s algorithm at the top of funnel marketing stages, but you also referred to targeting through the creative that you choose to run inside your ads. Tell us more about that, how does that work?
Chase: Absolutely. The biggest goal of Facebook advertising at the top of the funnel, one of the largest goals, is to reach more people. Right? The more people that you reach, the larger your opportunity is to capture new business. One of the clear set ways to do this is to get our CPMs as low as possible, and so by keeping our audiences very broad, and allowing Facebook's algorithm to do the heavy lifting, we get better rates like that. We’re able to reach more people. And as long as our messaging is specific to what our product actually does and it's not just some click-bait messaging, then we actually get qualified customers. And we know that those people that have clicked in, are one, if you're optimizing for conversion, they are people that Facebook has flagged as people that buy products online and more importantly, through Facebook. And two, you're able to then go back and start to retarget those people with a lot of confidence.
At the top-of-funnel, it is very broad. And when I say "broad," I mean it's broad. The only segmentation that we do is male and female. Then we'll keep it within our age demo that we know is our hot age demo. But we're not segmenting by engaged shoppers. We're not segmenting by lifestyle. We're not segmenting by any of these segments. The only time at the top-of-funnel level, that we step outside of that very broad audience is when we do look-alike audiences. We’ll model lookalike audiences off of past purchases. So we’ll add the carts, and initiate checkout, and we'll create a variety of different size look-alike audiences that we also will go out and target in a very similar way. Oftentimes, those audiences are just as large as our broad audience is, but just a little bit more segmented.
Felix: Tell us about the creative side of the messaging. Once you go really broad with your targeting, how do you refine the messaging in your ads so that you’re attracting the right eyes?
Chase: Absolutely. At the end of the day, it's not like we just said "Okay, Facebook can do a better job at advertising than we can." It's really gone full circle and into understanding who your cohorts really are, and what messages make them tick. We definitely still know who our target audience is. We definitely have done the research to understand what makes those audiences tick, and we then convert those thoughts and those ideas into meaningful creative. So creative that is one, it's eye-catching; two, it's engaging; and three, it gets through the message that we want to get through. The advertising world, in general, went from exactly that to, "Hey, who can growth-hack..." that was a very popular word five years ago, "who can growth-hack the most?"
There are still ways to do it, but I think at the end of the day, most savvy advertisers that are looking to grow meaningful businesses at scale, have been forced back into, what I would consider the right way to market, and that's to really understand your customer.
Optimizing for conversion and identifying your target audience
Felix: What kind of recommendations do you have for people who might be out there right now creating their first ads and don’t have a great grasp of their audience yet. What was the process of identifying your target audience?
Chase: Test. A/B test. And continue to refine your message. My main advice would be to not start on Facebook. Don't just open up business day one, no traffic, and think you're going to throw money at Facebook and see a bunch of success overnight. A lot of people come to me and to my colleagues and say, "Hey, look. You guys are doing so great on Facebook, and really digital advertising in general. How do I replicate that?" When I hear that they have no traffic, and they've had no customers to their store either organically or through other activities, I turn them away from it. It's not smart to start there. But once you do know your customer, it's a very great place that you can scale, almost infinitely.
"Don't just open up business day one with no traffic, and think you're going to throw money at Facebook and see a bunch of success overnight."
Felix: When going organic, is there anything you would do specifically to build a stronger understanding of your customer?
Chase: Yeah. Definitely. Before you start any business, you should do a fair amount of market research. Look at your competitors, and look at other brands that are in the space, and that are successful in the space, and just understand what they're doing. It's not to say that they're doing it at 100% right, but it'll at least give you a jumping point. Then you can go and you can craft your own strategy based on that. Everyone's lying to you if they say that they're not looking at their competitors and they're not looking at the industry that they're in, and using that to guide them either through innovation or through gaining a better understanding of what that market segment is really looking for. I'd urge people to do that market research and to make sure that they understand the customer at least at a very basic level before jumping into the brand.
Felix: You mentioned optimizing for conversions. Why would you choose anything other than optimizing for conversions?
Chase: The easiest way to think about it is to think about it as a retail store, which I often do. I do that very often. I think of our online store as a retail store because it's just traditionally what people are used to. When you think about a retail store, you have the people that walk by your store and look in the window, and that's the people that are scrolling through Facebook, right? Then you have the people that walk in, and they're browsing. They're a little bit more than a window shopper, but they have no intention of buying. You even have the people that go in, and they start asking questions. And they say, "How much is this? What kind of fabric is this made out of?" based on whatever type of store they're in. But again, they still have no intentions of actually buying it. And then you have the people that are going there with an intent to make a purchase.
Obviously, Facebook's a little bit different because no one's necessarily scrolling through their Facebook with an intent to buy a product that they've never seen before, but Facebook still knows the type of people that will make a purchase. By optimizing for conversion, no matter if you're looking to convert that person on their first visit or their 10th visit, you still want to drive traffic to your site who have an intent to make a purchase, or that are comfortable making purchases online.
Obviously, Facebook can't just give us a huge segment of people that do that, but if you optimize for that, they themselves, and the algorithms can optimize your campaigns to at least only go in front of people that have that intent.
"By optimizing for conversion, no matter if you're looking to convert that person on their 1st visit or their 10th visit, you still want to drive traffic to your site who have an intent to make a purchase."
Felix: So you're saying that you would never optimize for anything other than conversions?
Chase: There's one scenario where I will, and it's lead generation. The only time that we typically do lead generation is if we're doing some sort of giveaway that we're putting paid behind, or we're looking to grow our email or SMS list.
![A model with an exercise hall and the PowerDot device on his abs.](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/shopify-masters-powerdot-male-model-medicine-ball.jpg?v=1606168295)
Felix: Tell us more about your partner program with trusted voices and authorities in the space.
Chase: Absolutely. We have a few different ways. We have our athletes that are with the brand, that we use their name and likeness across our site, across our marketing initiatives. We work with those people on two different fronts. One is amplification over their owned media channels. Whether that's their website, their YouTube channel, their Facebook, or just through branding while they're competing in their event.
We also take that same messaging or similar messaging, and we amplify it across our own media. So our social media, our newsletter, our website. That piece of it is really the validation piece. When we talk about driving awareness, utilizing those voices, one thing that we had a lot of success with, and this ties back to social once again, but it's a great place to amplify those athletes' messages and a very organic way to reach people with a message that is not from a brand, to start. A lot of people, when they hear a message through a brand, they're skeptical. They know that that brand wants to sell them a product at the end of the day. When they hear it from somebody that they either care about, or it's somebody in the vertical that they care about, they're a lot more receptive to that message, or to at least stopping and acknowledging that there is a message.
We have found a lot of success taking an athlete, pairing it with a message that is authentic to them, and then amplifying that message across social media.
"When they hear a message through a brand, they're skeptical. When they hear it from somebody they trust, they're a lot more receptive."
Felix: Do you find that using the brand ambassadors sometimes limits your ability to control the message itself? Is that a challenge you’ve run into?
Chase: Yeah, that brings up a really great point. One of the things that we've done well as a brand, is our partnerships never start with us reaching out to somebody because we think that they're the right person for it. The only time that we'll do that is if somebody's maybe injured or something, and it's truly, "Hey, we think this product can help you. If it does, let us know. We'd love to get your feedback." Most of our relationships have started either by the athlete reaching out to us, or us reaching out in that way. But it's never, "Hey, we want to pay you x amount so you can say exactly this." That's just not how we do business. By making sure that we start first with people that are actually advocates of the brand, it makes that a lot easier because they understand the value, and they're receptive to helping spread the messages that we would like to spread. Often, they're coming up with messages that resonate really well with their audience.
I don't necessarily see that as a detriment. I see it as a value-add to the business. To go beyond that, in the beginning, I said that we worked with a variety of different levels of ambassadors. The next tier would be the people that we don't necessarily have a hard-bound relationship with, but they are advocates of the brand, and we do work with them as a true brand ambassador. Below that, we have a ton and a ton of loyal customers that are arguably our best advocates.
We’ve set up a loyalty program utilizing one of the apps on the Shopify app store. It's called LoyaltyLion. And that program's done exceptionally well for us, so hats off to guys at LoyaltyLion for putting together a really awesome product. We've used quite a few different loyalty programs in the past, and this is the one that's really stuck. So we empower our community to spread the word. Often when you change people's lives for the better, people that are maybe in chronic pain, or have some nagging soreness, or nagging injury, or they're just recovering from an injury in general, when you start to change people's lives, you'd be amazed at the amount of natural support that you get. So empowering those people, and incentivizing those people to share their stories has been extremely effective for us.
"Empowering those people, and incentivizing those people to share their stories has been extremely effective for us."
Felix: What was it about this particular app that allowed you to promote or encourage your customers to spread the message of your brand?
Chase: Yeah. One of the main things that I always look for in marketing initiatives, especially ones that require the attention of a user or of a customer, is they need to be simple. Right? Simplicity allows people to easily buy into a program. It's actually very similar to why our product is as simple as it is. It just creates an easier adoption. And so LoyaltyLion really had a simple process, and they were able to bend and work with ass to create out of the box solutions.
Our product is app-based, so all of our users, any time that they engage with the product, are visiting our app. One of the things that we knew we wanted to do was, we wanted to create a landing page of course on our site, but we wanted to be able to push people there from our app. So we built-in features within the app that encouraged people to sign up for our loyalty program, and to spread the word with their friends and family. As I said, it's been extremely successful. The other piece of that is how do you reward those people? Our product has a razor blade model. You purchase the hardware, and then you have pad replacements that are required after 25 to 30 uses, so that creates a natural product for us to incentivize people with, and really starts to dramatically impact our customer acquisition cost because a free set of pads is a lot cheaper than it costs us to go out and acquire a customer on social media, or through a partnership, or something like that.
Enhancing brand engagement with email marketing flows
Felix: One other way you’ve been able to build this customer base is through your reviews. How were you able to encourage so much brand engagement with reviews?
Chase: Absolutely. One of the biggest things that we've worked on at PowerDot would be our email marketing flows. We have our company newsletters that go out. These are typically blogs that have educational content, but then we also have a lot of flows that we've built out. We use Klaviyo as our ESP, which makes it super simple to do so. But we have both pre-purchase flows, and then post-purchase flows. After you make a purchase, your experience with PowerDot, and your experience with the engagement you get from the brand, it doesn't stop there. You get a series of emails that are both educational, but then also ask a variety of different things for you to do on behalf of the brand. One of those things is to leave a review for us.
Going back to the app, we also have a feature within the app that automatically after your first session will ask you to leave a review, and we've had a very good adoption with that. Obviously, not everyone has an app. But the biggest lesson there is, once somebody buys from you, they are arguably more valuable than anybody else to your business. It’s extremely important not to neglect those people because you've already got their money. I would say if anything, it's time to double or triple down on the investment that you've made in that person to turn them from a first-time customer into a loyal customer, and then into a product advocate.
Felix: One thing I noticed on your website was the email signup takeover. How did you decide to go for this approach?
Chase: If we know that we're driving somebody from an ad that's talking about pain relief, we know we can segment or funnel that person to a landing page that speaks specifically to pain relief. But because our product does so much for so many different people, we needed a way to really start to segment who those people were. So we made the decision to go to a full-page takeover, but make it meaningful for the customer. It’s not just a full-page takeover that says, "Hey, do you want 10% off your next purchase or your first purchase? Get it by signing up for our newsletter." We wanted it to have more meaning to that.
If you notice, the first thing it does is it asks you a use-case question. What are you here for? What are you looking for? By qualifying that person, we're then able to better understand who that customer is, and push them to content that either through our newsletter, or through our website, or through our marketing because we've actually tied all of those questions back to our Facebook audiences as well. We’re not only collecting website visitors. We're collecting website visitors that have engaged with any of those, and we know who those people are, so we can tailor messages to them. Then we can also tailor larger audiences, or model larger audiences, based on those people, going back to the lookalike audiences.
But yeah. It was scary. But one of the things that we do really well is, we use Google Optimize to A/B test almost every decision that we make on the site. That’s something that a lot of people tend to overlook. People want to move so fast. They feel like they know what's right for their brand, so they make a change on their site, and then two or three weeks down the road, they're like, "Man. Why are things behaving differently?" And then you lose track of what you've changed, and you don't know what to go back to. And you just left yourself guessing. So by using Google Optimize, we're able to A/B test those changes, and you're able to know fairly accurately if that decision is the right one for your business. We did that with the site takeover, and to be honest with you, the conversion optimization based on that was outstanding. It was definitely the right decision to make, and it's here to stay. So much so that we actually look to expand on that experience.
![The Pro Bundle by PowerDot.](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0070/7032/files/shopify-masters-powerdot-product-bundle.jpg?v=1606168374)
Felix: You mentioned the use case, which is brilliant. You’re basically tagging them for a specific use case for all your marketing channels?
Chase: Exactly. They get tagged within Klaviyo, and then they also get added to a specific Facebook audience so we're able to go back. The Facebook audience happens whether or not you actually submitted your email as long as you're not blocking the pixel or the cookies. So yeah. We're able to segment in Facebook and then obviously, the next stage of the popup is more traditional, where there's an incentive to actually sign up for the email.
Soon, we’ll also be adding SMS to that, which outside the email has been established as one of our fastest-growing marketing channels.
Felix: You mentioned a pre-purchase email series, what are some of the important emails sent out to leads that are not necessarily customers yet?
Chase: Absolutely. The most important thing is your first two emails are going to be the most impactful emails on your entire flow. Making sure that those first two emails get your message across, is the most important. Typically, if you're providing some sort of incentive for signing up for your list, people will want that right away. We make sure that the first email in that segment has exactly what somebody had signed up for, whether that's a pdf document, or some education, or a discount, or whatever the case may be. Providing that to them immediately is crucial.
And then the second one is really starting to get your brand message across that is specific. In our case, because we are segmenting, and we are getting that use case specific to whatever that person had signed up for. That's why it is so important for us to understand that.
"Your first two emails are going to be the most impactful emails on your entire flow."
Felix: You mentioned SMS was another channel that has started to grow very fast. How are you collecting the phone numbers for that?
Chase: Yeah. So we primarily use that for abandoned carts at the moment. We also have a list of people that we've collected in a similar fashion. The only collection that we get is at checkout. But because we've had such success with that program, we're looking at ways that we can expand upon it, and create a similar experience that we have with our email marketing.
Felix: When you are adding SMS to your marketing channel, what are the key differences between that and email?
Chase: In today's world, you can get away with sending a lot of emails. But with SMS, you're being a lot more intrusive on that person's life. Going directly into the messages on their phone, where typically, that's not a space where brands have lived. That's for your friends and family. So being respectable about how you go about that, how often you're sending messages, what time of day you're sending the messages, and then also crafting the messages that feel like it's a text message. You definitely don't want to send an SMS message that has some long form copy in it. It's get your point across, do it in a way that's meaningful to the customer, and then be respectful about how you're collecting those phone numbers, and how you're sending out those messages, as well.
"It's get your point across, do it in a way that's meaningful to the customer, and then be respectful about how you're collecting those phone numbers, and how you're sending out those messages, as well."
Felix: Do you remember any changes that you made when you decided to start optimizing for conversion rates? Would you still recommend them?
Chase: Yeah. Obviously, optimizing for the conversion is the most important thing that you can do outside of then driving traffic to be converted. We’ve done a variety of different things. It really starts with messaging and site structure. So how are you funneling people in the least amount of clicks from point A to point B, to a purchase. We’ve put a lot of emphasis on simplifying the site as much as possible. But then also creating those unique funnels for those different segments based on what people are actually looking for, and making sure that in every scenario, you're going from point A to point B, to your purchase. Right?
Felix: You also have a live chat feature on the website, is that often utilized by the people on the site?
Chase: Totally. So we're actually a pretty small team. In the ecommerce department, we have four people. Well, we have three people actually focused on ecommerce. Then we have a content creator, and then we have two customer service representatives. One of them is exclusively on live chat throughout the entire day. There’s definitely a lot of usage through that, especially focusing on the education on the product. It provides a very easy way for customers to quickly get the answers that they're maybe not finding on the site, and get pointed in the right direction. We actually see a decent amount of revenue being generated.
And what's cool about Gorgias is it tracks all that. It tracks the interactions that you've had, and how those have converted. Yes, we see a significant uptick in customers that interact with the Gorgias app.
Felix: You mentioned that global channel expansion distribution was a focus for the business. What's in store for the future of PowerDot in this realm?
Chase: Definitely. We started in the U.S. and we've since expanded our direct-to-consumer that we actually own and operate entirely from the U.S. We now have a Shopify account, and we've expanded into all of Europe, the U.K., and Canada. We look to continue to expand now into the Middle East and Australia as well. So yeah, continued international expansion, and a continued focus on increasing conversion and driving more and more awareness for the brand.