Hi, I’m Jeff Benzenberg. SoapFusion is my personal website.
I’m the Director of Performance at Conversion Path.
Before that, I spent 13 years at eRetailing, where I was the Director of Marketing for Ecommerce.
Where to Start
If you want to get to know me, here are some of my favorite posts from the archives:
A/B Testing a Custom Shirts Landing Page
Fun Times with Social Media & Organic Search Rankings
A Remarkably Specific List: Surprise Monsters
I’ve been marketing and building digital products for the past 15 years.
Are you looking for a data-driven writer? Someone who can design a winning digital strategy, but also dive into the weeds of any channel? A numbers guy who can also make UX mockups in photoshop? A creative who is also an expert analyst?
That’s me! I’m a mix of all those things.
Contact me!
Where I Started
I got involved in the business of the web in late 2004. I had just earned a BS in Industrial Design from Ohio State and was feeling ambitious. A friend and I decided to build an online store that sold products from some of my favorite modern designers. We called it Follow Function. It was a neat little company, but it remained a side project.
The main purpose was to learn as much as I could about running an online company, and in that respect, Follow Function was a big success. I taught myself Google Adwords and osCommerce. I learned about shopping carts and usability. It was great.
In the winter of 2007 I saw an ad for an open position at eRetailing. They needed someone to take over their paid search programs. I had never heard of eRetailing before, but when I saw their flagship product, Customized Girl, I was thrilled. I had just finished reading Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, and right here in Columbus, Ohio I found what could have been the poster child for Long Tail economics. I think my giddiness came across in the interview and I was hired.
Customized Girl is a website where users can design their own apparel. We have an easy-to-use design center where you can add your own text, art, and images. You can change fonts, change colors, move objects around and create pretty much whatever you want. We’ll print it and ship it out (no minimums!). I suppose there were a good amount of similar websites around at the time, but this is what made Customized Girl special: you could save your designs to a gallery. At the time, only a few competitors shared this feature.
In the gallery, I saw the potential. With Follow Function, it wasn’t feasible to quickly add new products. I could only grow my paid search revenue as fast as I could grow my catalog. My other option was to go out and manufacture the demand myself, which was fun but difficult.
But Customized Girl was different. All I had to do was identify where the demand already existed, save some new designs to the gallery, and use Google Adwords to funnel that traffic to my new gallery page. It was, and continues to be, a beautiful thing.
As an example, let’s say I notice that Roller Derby is growing in popularity. I’ll have my team save a bunch of Roller Derby t-shirts, bags, and hot shorts and tag them all “Roller Derby”. I might add some custom HTML to the page if necessary. Then I’ll build PPC campaigns in Google and Bing. I’ll add the keywords, write the ads, and link them to our new landing page. I can even create a couple sets of banner ads and place them on Roller Derby websites. It’s very fun!
Areas of My Expertise
Digital Project Management
Serving as the liaison between our software developers and the rest of the ecommerce team.
Gathering requirements, making mockups in photoshop, and overseeing all ecommerce IT projects.
Using HTML and CSS to design and build custom landing pages.
Implementing Agile Methodologies.
Consumer Insights & Analysis
Analyzing & maximizing ROI across all channels.
Interpreting business priorities and market trends into actionable strategies.
Developing key customer personas and presenting them to all stakeholders.
B2B Sales
Recruiting small businesses and nonprofits to open online apparel storefronts.
Recruiting large businesses to our store auto-generation platform.
Building lists of priority targets and directing outreach.
Overseeing the onboarding process and answering questions.
Getting feedback and optimizing the client experience.
Brand Management
Writing brand stories / designing logos / implementing guidelines.
Maintaining brand consistency across all sites and channels.
Social Media
Spending up to $1M / year on Facebook & Instagram.
Evolved strategies as Meta evolved their ad platform. After much testing, I moved from highly targeted audiences (and excluding hot audiences from cold audiences) to Broad audiences and where appropriate, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC)
(See concrete examples of social media success stories here.)
Paid & Organic Search
Spending up to $4M / year on Google & Bing.
Growing revenue while hitting a profitable ROAS target.
Writing content to maximize conversion rates & organic rankings.
Expertise in link building, Moz.com, keyword research, and opportunity analysis.
Leadership
Growing experts / leading a team / hiring & firing quickly.
Building a culture of respect.
SoapFusion
Also, I’m really good at fusing pieces of bar soap together. You know when you’re almost done using a bar of soap and all that’s left is a skinny sliver? I’ve really honed the skill it takes to fuse that sliver into your new bar of soap, and I’m quite proud of it. Perhaps I’ll create an illustrated tutorial soon. Look out for that.
You can find me all over the web. Here are some of my accounts: