336: How To Plan For 2021 And A Recap Of The Past Year With Steve Chou

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You’re listening to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Then today I’m doing a solo episode to recap the year for both of my businesses and what lies ahead in 2021. And as the saying goes, the only constant in e-commerce is change. And there are going to be some dramatic changes going forward, especially with online advertising. But before we begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Every customer is different.

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And Klaviyo helps you build more personal connections with each customer based on the things that they really care about. Send more relevant emails by tailoring every experience based on individual preferences and shopping behavior. With top-notch targeting and best in-class segmentation, you can unlock the full potential of your e-commerce data and create email marketing moments that keep shoppers coming back well past the holidays. Just ask Living Proof, Tipsy Elves, Huckberry, or more than the 50,000 other brands growing with Klaviyo.

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And because Klaviyo was built for e-commerce brands of all shapes and sizes, there’s no better marketing platform out there. And you can get started now for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. If you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing.

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SMS, or text message marketing, is already a top five revenue source for my ecommerce store, and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript.io, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in ecommerce, and ecommerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too, and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers.

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So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-C-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife Quarter Job podcast. First off, happy new year. I personally am so glad that 2020 is over with. It’s been a very rough year for both Bumblebee Linens as well as MyWifeQuarterJob.com. So today I’m going to do a solo episode to recap the year for both of my businesses and then discuss what lies ahead in 2021. Now, if you look back to the beginning of the year, things were going actually really great for my e-commerce store as well as my blog in January and February.

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But when March hit, when COVID-19 hit, my business was hit really hard. In fact, my revenue was sliced by more than half when the coronavirus first hit the United States. And as all of you who have been following me for a long time know, my primary products from my e-commerce store are handkerchiefs and weddings for special occasions. In addition, I sell personalized and monogrammed napkins for parties, hotels, airlines, and basically my store was just hit.

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hard everywhere on practically every single front. And because of the coronavirus and the shelter in place rules, no one was getting married. No one was having parties and no one was traveling or staying in hotels. And in addition, a decent sized piece of our business caters to real estate agents as well. But real estate sales stagnated as well during the crisis, which was mainly in March and April. And on March 22nd, my business reached a low point.

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And that’s when my wife and I started to panic a little bit. I remember thinking to myself, okay, if the sales are like this for an extended period, then, you what are we going to do? Should we move the business into a cheaper location? Right now we’re in this warehouse that’s costing us, I think almost $5,000 a month, which is really high. And so, I mean, all these things were going through my head, but then in April, my wife had the idea of selling masks. And so to test the waters,

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What we did is we published a tutorial on how to turn one of our handkerchiefs into a face mask without sewing. And then we started giving away these free handkerchiefs with every purchase along with the tutorials. And this promotion turned out to be a huge hit. And so what we ended up doing is we decided to import a bunch of masks and these masks started selling like hotcakes. And I completely owe this to my wife. She thought of a really great pivot for our products.

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which weren’t being used for weddings right now. So why not just turn that same material into something that people actually want. And those masks sold really well. And then we followed up our mass sales with a line of quarantine gifts. So what are quarantine gifts? Quarantine gifts are, for example, like our monogram cocktail napkins. In the past, they were for weddings, but we decided to embroider them with funny sayings like quarantiney and some other inside COVID-19 jokes. And

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people at this time, I remember because people weren’t seeing each other, they wanted to give each other gifts. And so these, these products in our stores started selling really well. And what ended up happening is that these quarantine gift sales actually got us through April when morale for our business was just about as low as it has ever been for our company. And to make matters worse, while all this stuff was happening in March and April with our e-commerce store,

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I had to cancel our annual e-commerce conference, the Seller Summit. And that period was really stressful for me as well because in a matter of just two weeks, my partner and I, the conference was already sold out at that point, right? My partner Tony, I had to give a bunch of refunds for the event and what was particularly painful is we had to fight with various vendors to get our money back and turn the entire conference virtual.

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easily one of the most stressful business situations that I’ve ever had to deal with. And I remember there was just one vendor and you got to remember at this time, everything was shut down and locked down. And we had this one vendor, which I will not name, purposely charge our credit card after refusing to give us a refund, even though the entire state of Florida was shut down at the planned date of our event, which was in May. So we had to file a charge back for that. We ended up getting our money back and we ended up negotiating with the hotel to postpone our event.

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But still, when everything was up in the air, I was looking at maybe taking a loss in the mid to high five figures, if things didn’t go right. But fortunately, we got our money, we postponed the event, and we ran a virtual event that went surprisingly well. I didn’t know what to expect, because I’d never run a virtual event, but we threw that thing together in a matter of a couple of weeks, and yeah, it was great. It went better than…

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I could possibly have imagined it would go. But even today, obviously what we did is we gave everyone a free ticket who already had a ticket to the virtual event as well as a ticket to the next event. But even today, in the beginning of January, the live event planning still remains in limbo. I know a bunch of people have been getting the vaccine or the vaccination process has been happening already, but from what I’ve been reading, the whole vaccination process has been kind of largely bungled.

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in United States. In order for us to get herd immunity, it’s probably going to take a while for everyone to get the vaccine, let’s just say. I’m very confident that there will be a seller summit this year, but both Tony and I still need to figure a bunch of things out. And even if we do set a date, you we still have to get the speakers and tickets and that sort of thing. It’ll probably happen, but it’s probably going to happen much later in the year when it’s safer to do so. But anyways, after the lows of March and April,

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when I felt like I was getting bombarded from all sides, both businesses, you know, with the Seller Summit and the e-commerce store, things ended up taking a dramatic turnaround. And starting in May, e-commerce just started taking off like crazy. I think because people were stuck at home and brick and mortar stores were closed, everyone just started shopping online and it was crazy. Even my mom, who I talk to every day, my mom is pretty tech agnostic. I mean, she doesn’t like tech, let’s just say.

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and she had long resisted buying stuff online, but all of a sudden during the pandemic, she didn’t want to go to the grocery store and that sort of thing. And so, you know, we showed her how to buy stuff online and she started getting her groceries, her clothing, everything delivered to her doorstep and she loved it. And in fact, you know, even today when stores are open now, obviously she’s probably never going to go back to the old way of physically going to the store. I mean, my mom is getting up there in age and you know, she doesn’t like to drive either.

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and now she’s adopted this online shopping mentality. And this is incidentally why I’m just so bullish on e-commerce in 2021. I went and pulled up some stats. According to Statista, e-commerce as a percentage of retail sales shot up from 11.8 % to 14.3 % in Q3 of 2020. And Q3 of 2020, this is after the stores had already reopened for the holiday season as well.

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And so I sincerely believe that e-commerce is going to skyrocket even further in 2021. And that 2021 will truly be the best time to get into e-commerce. And if you’re already in e-commerce, it’s going to be a really good year. But I do want to clarify that when I talk about e-commerce, it’s not just any type of e-commerce. And here’s my personal take on the situation since there’s many different ways to sell physical products online. But first off, because many people are going to be embracing e-commerce, marketplaces like Amazon,

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will continue to get more competitive and the evil seller activity from what I’ve seen has shown no signs of lessening. And if you listen to episode 332 of my podcast with Amanda Wittenborn, she actually had many of her most profitable listings shut down for copyright infringement when she’s the designer of her products. I she owns the copyright, yet her listings were constantly getting taken down by people accusing her of copyright infringement.

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You know, even after a prolonged battle with these malicious sellers, she still continues to have problems today with these exact same listings, which at the time were bringing in the bulk of her revenue. So what is her strategy today? Well, her Amazon strategy today is to release a bunch of new products and basically try to stay under the radar with their products, because this is what she said. And you can listen to that podcast episode for yourself. As soon as your product hits the best sellers list, it’s ripe for malicious activity.

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So it’s in your best interest, ironically, to not be the best selling item on Amazon. It’s just to kind of make your money, diversify across many different products and basically just stay under the radar. I mean, the fact that you have to go to those lengths, it’s just one of the unfortunate aspects of selling on Amazon today. Because still, even in all through 2020, it’s just way too easy for a malicious seller to take someone down. And things haven’t changed much in 2020.

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And I actually do not foresee many changes in 2021 in this department. And this is why I believe more than ever that having your own brand and your own platform is the way to go in the foreseeable future. Now it’s fine to sell in as many marketplaces as possible to proliferate your sales, but it’s important to not rely on a third party platform for all of your sales. Now, for example, during COVID, Amazon refused to take shipments into their warehouses and over the holiday season, warehouse space was really scarce.

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So people couldn’t send in as much product as they would have liked either. And in fact, Amazon, the way they calculate the amount of inventory you can send in, it doesn’t account for the bursty period over the holidays. so Amazon didn’t let us send in as much as we’d have liked. And we ran out of stock over the holidays and we were forced to go merchant fulfilled. And if you’re an e-commerce store that doesn’t have a fulfillment, a way of fulfillment on your own, then you were out of luck. And if all of your sales were

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during this period when Amazon actually refused to take shipments, then you were completely out of luck. And you know, on that front on owning all of your own stuff, even platforms like Shopify actually started banning people from selling certain products in their shops. And just as an example, an acquaintance of mine selling hand sanitizer was actually shut down by Shopify because Shopify deemed that his prices were too high. They basically thought that he was gouging everyone for hand sanitizer when everyone was on the lookout for hand sanitizer. But in fact,

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He actually was not trying to gouge anyone. His costs had risen dramatically and he was forced to raise prices basically to remain profitable. All right, so if even a platform like Shopify can call the shots on what you can sell, I mean, that’s just a problem right there, right? And I preached this all along, but you need to be in as much control as possible over your business as you can, which basically brings me to my next point.

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Out of all the marketing platforms at your disposal, you should be focusing on your owned marketing assets. And owned marketing assets are platforms that you own, like email, SMS, and to a certain extent, Facebook Messenger. I put an asterisk on that one because kind of technically Facebook controls that platform. But during COVID and the height of the pandemic, both Facebook and Google actually prohibited the advertising of masks online. And when my wife came up with that great idea to sell our own masks,

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we were actually forced to use our own channels to market our new product line. And as I mentioned earlier, during this period, Amazon also suspended shipments of non-essential items to their warehouse, which prevented us from restocking our sold out goods. And without our customer list, our business recovery would not have been possible. And we would have been in deep trouble if we relied on only Amazon for our sales, for example. So if Amazon’s bringing in most of your sales, you have to pause and take a moment to consider playing the long game.

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Now starting your own site and building your own traffic will take longer to ramp up and your sales initially will definitely be less than Amazon. But unless you start at some point, something drastic and beyond your control will eventually happen with your Amazon account. And that’s something that actually I can actually guarantee. What you need to do is you need to plant your seeds now and dig your well before you are thirsty. Because success in e-commerce in 2021 will hinge on your ability to make sales and retain your customers

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for repeat sales.

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If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

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Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

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And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show.

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So how do you build a lasting customer relationship and increase the lifetime value of your customer? One, you can segment out who your best customers are and treat them like royalty. One thing that we always do is at the end of the year, we go through our customer list, actually usually once a quarter, we go through our best customers. These are people who buy a lot and often, and we reach out to them and we offer them special perks, like special releases of products, or we’ll give them a special coupon code, or we’ll give them…

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like a dedicated representative take their orders. Make them feel special so that they’ll buy from you again and again. We also send emails and texts to our existing customers regularly. So if you’re not sending email out at least once a week, then you’re missing out on a lot of sales. And if you haven’t implemented some of these basic flows, like a pre-purchase flow or an abandoned cart flow, a post purchase flow or a win back flow, look those up on my blog if you don’t know what I’m talking about. You definitely have to implement those with your site.

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You also want to try to increase your average order value. Some of the things that we did this year for our store was we focused a little bit more on bundling certain items, trying to just boost the amount of money that people will spend. Another way to kind of artificially do this is to set a higher free shipping threshold. So by setting your free shipping threshold a little bit higher to entice someone to add an additional item, you can increase your average order value in your sales as well. One thing that I completely redid in the beginning of the year,

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was our cross-sell strategy. So we use Klaviyo, and depending on what someone has purchased, we send them now different post-purchase sequences that cross-sell them complimentary items. So for example, if someone buys cocktail napkins at our store, that sends them down a special email post-purchase sequence that tries to cross-sell them dinner napkins and lunch napkins. And we are also running Facebook Dynamic Cross-Sells as well. Facebook has knowledge of what everyone’s purchased at your store and what they’ve bought.

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And Facebook has a pretty good idea of what products are bought with each other. And so you can actually have Facebook automatically create ads with products that it thinks people are likely to buy once they bought a certain product. It’s called Facebook Dynamic Cross-Sales. It actually works really well. You can also implement a loyalty program. And this is something that we implemented with ManyChat for free. There’s a post on the blog. Just do a search for loyalty program and you can see how I implemented that for free.

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The bottom line, right now, over a third of our business is from repeat customers, and just having these repeat customers establishes a solid foundation for a business to grow every single year because we have that solid base. Now, one thing I also want to mention is that there’s going to be some really big changes on the horizon for Facebook and Google advertisers. That’s worth mentioning, and this all has to do with Apple. Starting in iOS 14, Apple is going to flash a pop-up

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Whenever someone visits your that will ask Apple users for permission to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies. I’ve seen a picture of this pop-up. It’s really obstructive. And just the verbiage that they use, you know, do you give this site permission to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies? I can only imagine that most people are going to opt out of tracking for privacy reasons. And the implications for opting out are really massive.

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in the online advertising world. Because if a user opts out, that means that you can no longer track their activity on your site. This means that you can’t tell if they visited your site, if they added an item to their cart, if they viewed a product, or if they’ve made a purchase. As you know, Apple users represent a pretty big chunk of online devices, and not being able to get conversion data for these customers will greatly reduce the effectiveness of your ads. So this means you won’t know

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that if you’re running an ad, whether it made a conversion, and as a result, your audiences might be grossly off as well. And this is just developing right now. This is relatively new, but as it develops further, I will report back with more. But one of the main ways to fix this right now is to use the Facebook conversion API with your site going forward. Basically, I’m gonna get a little bit technical here, but basically instead of using cookies, which is the way that it’s done now.

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you will actually have to have your server transmit conversion data directly to Facebook via an API call. Basically, instead of relying on cookies, which are little files that are stored in the browser, you will actually have to have your website send the conversion data directly to Facebook or Google. Now, don’t worry if this is over your head. Just be aware that support for your shopping cart for these APIs are coming soon and that you need to implement this as soon as you can if you plan on advertising going forward.

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And you will have to do this separately for Facebook and Google or for whatever advertising platform that you use that currently relies on cookies. Now, regardless of advertising, however, the best way to build sales and traffic is by creating content. All right. It doesn’t matter what you choose, whether it be through blogging, podcasting or video content attracts people who you can then convert to sales. Okay. So let’s sum things up for 2021. Since I talk about a lot of different things here.

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I know that there are listeners of my podcast at every level. And so I’m going to try to address each group differently. So if you already own or run an e-commerce business and you’re still only selling on Amazon, I think it’s time to diversify. I’ve just heard too many horror stories in 2020 for you to put all of your eggs in one basket any longer. And even though our Amazon sales continue to grow every year and Amazon still is a really good moneymaker, those sales from Amazon.

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are not only the least satisfying, but they are the most stressful sales as well. Because you might wake up in the morning, one morning and notice that your listings are suspended or Amazon has done something else to your listing or change things up. And you have to cater to all of Amazon’s whims and the support is terrible. It can easily take you several days just to even get them to respond to you. So as you are diversifying with your own site, which you should do in 2021, make sure that you focus on your own marketing channels.

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So most of you are probably on email already, but I know for a fact that a lot of you are not on SMS. So SMS should be your next target for sure, without a doubt. It’s actually killing it for our store right now. I’m using Postscript.io for my SMS marketing for e-commerce right now. Now, for those of you who have yet to get started with an online business, 2021 is probably the best time to start an e-commerce just as it begins to skyrocket. And if you don’t know what you want to sell yet, then just putting out content

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is probably gonna be your best bet. Produce content on topics that you’re interested in, build an audience, and just let your audience guide your way. And to put out content, actually doesn’t cost much money at all. Starting a YouTube channel is free. Starting a podcast can be as little as five bucks, and starting a blog will cost you as little as $3. Now you gotta realize that starting a business is mostly mental. And I know many of you are probably hesitant to pull the trigger because you might feel

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that you don’t have what it takes to succeed. But ask yourself this, what if you do have what it takes? And in case you think that you don’t have the skills to succeed, here actually is set of skills that everyone has that actually doesn’t require any knowledge at all. One, you can be on time. You can set a schedule to just work on something and just show up. You can also put your best foot forward. Try as hard as you can and just don’t give up.

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on something that you’ve put your mind to. You can have energy and passion for what you’re working on. You can get excited. Find something that you’re excited about and just put out content on it. And once you build that audience, the money will just come. You can actually have a consistent work ethic. Just make sure you show up. Set aside a time in your calendar to work on your business and make it a part of your routine. And it’s important that as you’re working on your business that you have the right attitude.

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Don’t keep telling yourself that this is too hard or that you’ve tried everything. That’s actually one of my pet peeves. Whenever someone tells me that they’ve tried everything and nothing’s working, there’s no way that you’ve tried everything because if you’ve tried everything, that means that you would have found something that worked. So have an open mind, have the right attitude, go into this believing that you’re gonna succeed. And have an open mind, be coachable. If someone is telling you that you’re doing something wrong, don’t make excuses.

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Just analyze and look at what you’re doing and find out ways or find out problems that you’re doing and try to improve on what you’re already doing. And finally, be prepared. And this is very similar to putting your best foot forward. You have to try your hardest to do something and don’t give up. You got to give everything at least three to five years. Don’t start a business thinking that it’s going to be successful in year one. You got to have a long-term mindset because things just take time to grow. Things take time to sink in.

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If you’re taking a course, if you’re trying to learn something, don’t expect to be an expert at it right away. I remember when I was taking this one engineering class in college, was easily the hardest class that I’d ever taken. And when I first reviewed the material, I didn’t understand a thing. And I didn’t understand a thing throughout the entire semester. It was only that last two weeks of the semester did things finally sink in and I ended up doing well in the class. But it took a very long time. Running a business is the exact same.

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So if you have the right attitude, good things will happen. And for 2021, I know that I’m going to be doubling down on content. In fact, I have a couple of special announcements to make in the next couple of episodes on my next content endeavors that I’m really excited about. So here’s to a prosperous 2021 for everyone. And I look forward to hearing what you guys are up to. So I hope you enjoyed my recap of 2020 and what is in store for 2021.

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And for more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 336. And once again, I want to thank Postscript.io, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at Postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. I also want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants.

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You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow or win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Now I talk about how I use both these tools on my blog. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

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Thanks for listening to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitterjob.com.