Interview with Sanjay Jenkins, Head of Growth at Replo

If you follow 'DTC Marketing Twitter' or pay attention to e-commerce tech, then you've definitely heard of Replo—the leading landing page builder for Shopify storefronts.

We chatted with Sanjay Jenkins, a lifetime e-commerce marketer who has led Growth at Replo for the last 1.5 years. Sanjay shares his insights into how they've been able to produce and distribute large volumes of content (using Assembly!), to answer questions about e-commerce that their customers truly care about. Now, let’s meet Sanjay!

Can you introduce yourself?

Absolutely - I'm Sanjay Jenkins. I lead growth at Replo. Replo is a visual page building tool for Shopify. You just plug into your Shopify store, then drag and drop to build pages, product pages, homepages, specific sections to make your store better, increase your conversion rates, and create the customer experience of your dreams. That’s what we do. I love e-commerce. I’ve been doing e-commerce my entire career, and it’s just really cool to be able to build a tool and share it with all the people that I love - e-commerce people.

How do you think about your content and social strategy at Replo?

We like to replicate the Gary Vee content model, which starts with a set of pillar content. 

Usually, it starts with a long-form video that I record. From there, we’re able to cut it up into blog posts, guides, build assets from that, templates, guides, emails, etc. things that then gets syndicated across all of our different platforms.

The goal is we start with some pillar content, answering the key questions about why someone would use our tool, answering all the common questions that they have when they start using our tool, pitfalls, things to avoid, things to do, hot tips, etc.

How do you think about different content pillars in e-commerce and how you prioritize them at Replo.

A lot of the folks on the team have experience running e-commerce brands. So for us, a lot of this is somewhat second nature. And it’s been an interesting exercise to go back into our own careers and think, okay, “What was I thinking?” “What are the questions that I was asking when I was trying to figure out how to do it, who to talk to, so on and so forth”
It really just starts with “What are we trying to do? Or “What is the person trying to get to? What questions do they have?” And then building content that answers each one of those questions. We’re trying to be as exhaustive as possible at every tier of customer.

There are a couple of different ways that we approach this, but the main spirit of it is we first ask where our audience wants to get to, what’s their end outcome? If it’s, “I want to build a scalable business, moving physical goods, using the internet.”

How do you guys think about the ROI of content?

Content is one of the highest leverage, highest ROI things that can be generated. It’s one of those you build it once and it gets used, consumed multiple times. One of the most interesting things I like to hear is we have a new team member that started this week and he messaged me just before we started talking here.

He said, ‘Hey, I’ve been watching your videos. I feel like I already know you’ and being able to build that relationship at scale with someone I’ve never even met before. That’s the leverage in the power of content. Initially we were just throwing stuff at the wall, just to see what works, what’s getting impressions, what’s getting engagement, what’s potentially driving sign ups for our tool. And then from there, when we looked at the data to actually build the infrastructure and reporting totrack this effectively and restructuring how we actually construct and distribute our content itself so that we’re tracking email signups. So it's an evolution.

Tell us about your content workflow. What tools are you using?

Sure. There’s a certain degree of vibes from this. We’ve all been e-commerce operators and a lot of the content we make or the content plans we have come from a place of experiencing a problem or having a question. We use a tool called Fathom that records customer calls. It’s like Google Meet and Fathom.

We take the transcripts and the AI summaries out of Fathom and dump them into GPT. Sometimes Fathom generates a list of questions for us to answer. From over 200 customer conversations, we condense it down to the top 30 questions. This gives us an idea of the content we can generate by answering these questions. So, Fathom and Google Meet are one set of tools.

We also use Loom extensively for screen recording with video and audio narration. If we’re doing anything that’s like, “Follow along as I build something on screen”, sometimes Loom doesn’t capture the specific click actions well. So we use a tool called Screen Studio, which has a really great pay once, own it forever model instead of it being SaaS. If you’re clicking on certain elements, it automatically zooms into what you’re clicking on or hovering over, which highlights things better and reduces the amount of editing after the fact. If I record on Screen Studio or Loom, I typically dump it into Descript.

Descript transcribes the entire audio. By editing the text script that I’ve already recorded, I can add B-roll, edit the text, cut out whole sections or re-record things if needed. It has a great AI dubbing feature. So if I had to record a training script, but now it has my voice. So if I need to overdub in my voice, it has the AI to do it. I can just type stuff and it’ll say it in my voice. It’s kind of creepy sometimes, but it’s pretty cool.

The last tool we use is Riverside. Riverside.fm allows us to record high quality content, especially when we have external partners. If we’re doing any live events or if we want a higher degree of quality in some of the long form video pieces, I’ll record in Riverside. Often, 50% of the content is just me talking to the camera and I’ll still use Riverside for that. So that's kind of the main tech stack as far as video production.

On the written side, for planning content generation, we use SEMrush and Ahrefs for keyword research, Google Analytics to understand what’s happening on our site, and stay plugged into our community. A big part of our community, the e-commerce community, lives on Twitter or X. So, staying plugged in there is key for us.

How do you guys use Assembly?

Assembly is where we do all of our content planning and organization. I can look at the next 30 days or so and we take our research, which we drop into Notion for organization. Then I can say, we need to write this blog post. Here’s the topic and it’s going to get syndicated on these channels or we’ve got a newsletter that’s going to cover a new product feature. Being able to syndicate across multiple platforms, one piece of pillar content distributed across multiple channels.

It allows us to plan content efficiently, to syndicate it across multiple channels simultaneously in a few clicks, which is actually super clutch.

This aligns with the Gary Vee content model, one piece of pillar content distributed across multiple channels in the format that makes the most sense for that platform. It helps us stay organized as a team. I know the product team is expected to drop content for the Monday product newsletter by Friday. If I don’t see it, I can ping them about it. When they add it, they add me as an approver. That way, I still have some degree of editorial control to make sure it fits with everything else that we’re sharing. Things don’t get missed. Those are the big ways that we use Assembly. 

Why do you think e-commerce tech is so prevalent on Twitter?

E-comm tech people are loud on organic channels because it’s hard to acquire customers in paid ways without it being expensive. When you look at the incumbents in a lot of different product categories and ecomm tech, such as Yotpo for reviews and Recharge for subscriptions, they raised a lot of money early. They weren’t necessarily the first people in the space, but they raised a lot of money. Attentive is another great example, Attentive and Klaviyo’s raised a ton of money, built a lot of infrastructure, and became the go-to people in the space. They were able to capture so much market share. And because they have big budgets, they can throw big events at conferences. They can run ads unprofitably for a long time on a $50 ACV, which prices everybody else out of the market.

Being able to build a good product that people will refer other users to is key. E-comm SaaS people being loud on online Twitter prominently is just a function of it being one of the most effective channels for them to spread the word, without it being so insanely cost prohibitive. Like I don’t have to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to get in front of tens of thousands of people. It creates a level playing field if you have a good story to tell and if you have a good product to sell. So, it’s almost a survival mechanism against the very high cost of doing business in this space if you don’t have a big war chest or a really great acquisition funnel.

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To learn more about how Replo uses Assembly, check out our case study here - https://assembly-marketing.webflow.io/case-studies/how-b2b-startup-replo-uses-assembly-to-3x-content-output