00:29
But before I begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-commerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash dv.

00:59
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, who’s also a sponsor of the show. Now, are you working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined? And do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? And do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their needs change.

01:28
These companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information, and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash mywife. That’s klaviyo.com slash mywife.

01:57
And finally, I wanted to mention a podcast that I recently released with my partner Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interviewed successful e-commerce entrepreneurs, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now on to the show.

02:27
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I have Kathleen Booth from clean.io and she is the VP of marketing over there and she is on a mission to help you grow your profits and make smarter marketing decisions by improving the effectiveness of your discount strategies. Now, I’ve actually never met Kathleen before, but her company helps to solve a problem that my online store has had for a very long time and that is a problem of coupon abuse.

02:54
Now, almost as soon as I issue a coupon on my site, it mysteriously ends up on every coupon site on the internet. And in addition, apps like Honey will try a bunch of coupon codes automatically on your site. in this interview, Kathleen is going to teach us how to combat this practice, how it works also. And with that, welcome Michelle. Kathleen, how are you doing today? you. I’m so happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s a very interesting topic when you reached out and I’ve never talked about this before on

03:24
podcast. I’m hoping to get to the bottom of this coupon abuse problem. It’s definitely a problem that I think affects a lot of retailers. And it’s frustrating for sure. Yeah. So first off, Kathleen, just give me your background and tell me how you got into this coupon abuse or what you guys call digital engagement security. Sure. So I

03:46
owned a digital marketing agency for a little over a decade and worked with companies across a range of different industries. I loved it. was fascinating and fun to learn about, you know, all different types of businesses. So, you know, I did that for a while. I sold my agency in 2017 and I had wanted to go in-house and help high growth startups kind of take it to the next level. I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart.

04:14
And so I knew if I sold my own company that I’d want to be in that startup world. And so I’ve, I’ve been head of marketing for a series of different companies. The latest being clean.io where I am now. And joined here because it’s, was a really interesting combination of a couple of things I’ve done in my career. I’ve spent my whole career marketing to marketers and, helping marketers. So I’m really passionate about making other marketers successful. And that’s part of what we’re all about at clean.io.

04:44
But then I’ve also interestingly done a couple of stints in cybersecurity. And although I wouldn’t classify us as a cybersecurity company, there are elements of that here. And it’s really rare to have those two things kind of come together, marketing and security. Most marketers, when they hear the word cyber or cybersecurity, they kind of think that’s my IT guy. And so I loved the combination of it and that’s what brought me here. Cool.

05:09
So can you just kind of explain what I think you guys refer to it as a coupon hacking or coupon abuse. Can you explain what that is and why it’s a problem? Sure. So I guess I’ll back up just for a second and say that, that, you know, historically when, when coupons were used, I think the first coupon ever was issued by, I want to say it was like the Coca-Cola company and historically coupons have used, have been used very top of funnel. in marketing speak, you know, at the top of the funnel to get people who

05:37
maybe aren’t thinking they have a need for your product or your service to, to all of a sudden decide they might need to check it out. So the example I love using, of course, is the famous Bed Bath and Beyond coupon, which would arrive at your house, you know, via the mail and you didn’t need new sheets or pillowcases or towels. But as soon as that coupon came, you’d be thinking, gosh, I should go to Bed Bath and Beyond. And maybe there’s something there I might need because I have this deal. And so what was something that was very top of funnel,

06:05
has really changed with the internet and with the way we have e-commerce stores and the way we market digitally, it opened up new possibilities to use couponing and discount strategies at different parts of the funnel. So we can still use it top of the funnel to get people to realize a need that maybe they weren’t feeling, but we can also use them for getting, incenting repeat purchase behavior, getting people not to abandon their carts or to perhaps spend more than they might’ve.

06:35
So there’s all that potential. because of that, think, you I strongly believe coupons and discounting play a really important part in the e-commerce marketing mix. But as you alluded to, the problem is that just as couponing has changed with the internet, so has the way that shoppers can use and redeem coupons. mean, again, not to date myself, but I used to be that person that had the little like,

07:00
coupon organizer accordion file in my purse many years ago and I would cut the coupons out of the Sunday circular and pop them in my organizer and go the grocery store and pull them out. And thank God those days are over, right? You know, it’s funny, you use the Bed Bath and Beyond example. And I remember like, I used to get those coupons so much, like I wouldn’t even go to Bed Bath and Beyond unless I had a coupon. Yeah. So it actually prevented me from shopping there in a lot of cases.

07:29
Yeah. And that’s a great example of how couponing can also, if it’s not done well, right, train your customers to, and also really dramatically affect customer lifetime value. So, you know, the, coupon redemption behavior has changed and, and it started with the kind of emergence of these deal sites. I’ll never forget when I first discovered like retail, me not as a shopper. And I was like, this is great. I can go here and search, you know, pop the, word old Navy in and

07:58
maybe there’ll be a coupon when I buy my son’s school uniforms, you know, and, that was convenient. was convenient, but, it still took us away from the sites we were on. had to go search for coupons and then we had to individually test them all out to see if they might work. And it was a pain in the neck. And the latest evolution is making shoppers lives even easier. We don’t have to search. We don’t have to test. There are these coupon extensions that do it all for us.

08:26
where they have the codes just like these deal aggregator sites do. Only now you can be shopping at Old Navy or whatever store it is that you’re on. You can put things in your shopping cart. And when you’re literally getting ready to put down your credit card and make the payment, the extension pops up and says, you know, we’ve got coupons. We think we can save you money. Would you like to try? And of course, what shopper isn’t going to say yes. And then

08:52
the extension just automatically tests them all for you. It picks the one with the highest discount and it applies it. Or if it doesn’t have a valid coupon, it renders a default state that says, congratulations, you already have the best deal. So that’s sort of like the landscape that has emerged to your question. What is coupon abuse? The answer to that is really that, you know, all of these coupons that are being issued by retailers,

09:21
or designed in most cases for specific purposes. Yes, there are broad coupons that they will advertise on their homepage and give to everybody who comes to the site. But then there are also other coupons like the 10 % they reward to people who subscribe to their email newsletter or the discount they offer when they do podcast advertising or the affiliate codes that they give out and are using to track the performance of their affiliate marketing relationships.

09:51
And those codes are not meant for everybody. They’re meant for, you know, in this case, it was newsletter subscribers or, you know, affiliate audiences or, you know, other particular audiences. so, so the problem arises when those limited use codes get out one way or the other, and we can talk about all the ways they get out and are used by audiences for whom they’re not intended. And that really has two key negative consequences. One is

10:21
It erodes profit margins by lowering average order value for a much larger swath of the customer set than you had intended. And two is it makes your marketing attribution data unreliable. Right. Yeah. You know, what’s funny is, uh, whenever I detect a coup, like I’ve had cases where a coupon code that I just gave to one of my best customers somehow got out and it was a pretty substantial discount. And so now what I do is I track whenever a coupon is used. And then I actually.

10:51
It tells me like the customer journey of that person in terms of the emails. Usually we email that our coupons and whenever something is suspicious now, I immediately just change up the coupon, but that’s kind of a pain in the butt. Yeah. The hassle factor is huge on a number of fronts and good on you for actually looking at your data. I feel like there are a lot of retailers that have this problem and they don’t know it because their data hygiene is just poor. They’re not checking it regularly. And so they could have

11:19
codes kind of running out of control and not even realize it, but it tends to be when people realize they have the problem, it’s because they’re looking at their coupon redemption data regularly. And when they see a spike in it and it doesn’t correlate with some sort of marketing activity, whether that was their activity or something an affiliate has done, you know, when there’s that mismatch, that’s when they tend to realize they have a problem. the hassle factor kind of

11:46
is a big deal, not just for what you mentioned. there is absolutely the, spend hours per week, you know, tracking down which coupon sites have gotten my codes. You could, you know, writing to them, asking them to take them down. Sometimes you get lucky and they do it. Sometimes they don’t, but then deprecating those codes, issuing new ones. Even worse is when it’s an affiliate code. you know, we had, talked to somebody who had a customer ambassador program.

12:12
where the customers weren’t even getting paid. They were just spreading the love because they love the product. And then to have to go to those ambassadors or affiliates and say, Hey, your code got out. I’m going to cancel it. I’m going to give you a new one. Can you please replace it on your website and your Instagram and your emails? Like that introduces a ton of unnecessary friction and relationships that you can’t really afford to have friction in. here’s what gets me. So I track now whenever someone enters a coupon code and it gets denied.

12:41
I actually get emailed and occasionally I’ll go and I’ll stock that person directly on my site. And what I found is that like if they try like two or three coupons and they don’t work, they end up checking out anyways. So if they were to get a coupon, that’s just like lost margin because they would have checked out regardless, at least in my limited, you know, experiences on my own site. your experience is actually very indicative of what we’re seeing in a broader data set.

13:11
Oh, okay. And this is fascinating to me because I talked to a lot of e-commerce retailers and I would say about maybe 20 % of them realize that this is a problem and are looking for a solution to it. And then I think the other 80 % are under the impression that coupon extensions are really good for business. They feel like it helps with card abandonment. They feel like it brings in net new customers, but they’re basing that on not much more than kind of gut instinct. so

13:37
We actually did some A-B testing and we can get later into why we did that and how we did it, but we did some A-B testing to see what would happen if on 50 % of your website traffic, you were able to automatically block the coupon extensions from auto-injecting codes so that all of your visitors would come and those with coupon extensions, they’ll still see them pop up and it’ll still look as though they’re testing the codes out.

14:06
But for half of them, they won’t get a successful code and the other half would. And what we found was that either it had no impact on conversion rates, meaning card abandonment didn’t get worse, or it actually improved conversion rates in some cases. And I think that could be because there was less distraction at the end of the day. People weren’t caught up in the coupon thing. They already had expressed a high intent.

14:33
to buy the product in the first place because they put things in the cart. And I think you’re right. What we also saw was average order value went up by between three and 10%. Well, that’s because the coupon’s not getting used, right? Right, exactly. Exactly. So if you can increase average order value by three to 10 % and not see any negative impact on conversion rates, all of a sudden it starts to be this incredible smoking gun that like, wait, maybe these extensions are not.

15:02
really that good for me. find it interesting that the conversion rate actually went up without the coupon extension. Are we talking about a statistically significant number? It’s not a huge sample and we’re continuing to AB test, should add. So it’s the data is evolving over time, but, so far we’ve seen pretty consistent results and it’s across retailers in a range of different verticals. So it was DPG apparel.

15:32
beauty and like home decor, would say. Okay. Actually our store falls under that demographic. What you know, what’s funny is I never use any of those extensions when I shop because I’m paranoid. Like I know extensions like honey or any Chrome extension. So I’m an electrical engineer and I, I do some coding for my own site and whatnot. And I know that if you have a Chrome extension, they can, they have so much visibility depending on what options you choose when you install. And a lot of people kind of gloss over it.

16:02
I’ve always been curious how apps like Honey actually make their money and exactly how much data they’re actually taking from you. Do you happen to know that? Oh, I love this topic because I don’t think anybody really has looked under the surface. um, Honey was purchased by PayPal. think it was about a year and a half, two years ago for $4 billion with a B. Yeah. Crazy. Crazy. Right. And there’s a famous saying, I’m sure you’ve heard it.

16:29
That is, if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. Yep. And so almost everybody who uses these extensions, like consumer level users who are shoppers, you’re not paying for it. So yes, you are the product. They the reason that PayPal, a payment processor purchased honey and the reason, by the way, that Capital One purchased what was Wikibuy, which is now Capital One shopping. Like there’s a pattern. It’s all these financial services and payments companies. It’s because they want

16:58
the data. They want deeper insight into what you’re spending, where you’re spending it, how much you’re spending. And when you start to think about the fact, like let’s take Capital One, the fact that for many people, they have their credit cards there, they have their bank accounts there, they have savings accounts there. They’re developing this insanely well-rounded financial picture about their users that if you have any concerns about your own data privacy, I think it’s a little alarming.

17:27
Yes, the data is one of the products that they are building with these extensions. But the other way they make their money is through affiliate fees. Honey and Capital One Shopping themselves are affiliates. And many of the retailers we talk to who do have code issues will tell us that they’ve written to these companies and said, hey, you’ve gotten either my wholesale codes or some other codes that are not meant for general consumption. We need you to take them down.

17:57
Sometimes the company will answer and do it. Other times the answer will be, hey, if you join our partner program, which is effectively their affiliate program, you’ll have more granular control. This is honey’s affiliate program or whatever the app or exactly, exactly. So the message to the retailer is join the program will give you more control. But what happens when you do that is in exchange for control, you’re then agreeing to pay them a commission every time.

18:24
somebody with a coupon extension shops on your site. And that’s a problem for a number of reasons. I mean, obviously you’re already taking a hit on your average order value when the coupon is used, but then you’re on top of that, you’re paying a commission. There’s a deep well of issues here that I could go into if you want surrounding things like how it affects your marketing investment decisions and why your customer acquisition cost calculations need to be tight and also how the cookie that they drop

18:53
can affect. this is where I’m lost. So they get an affiliate commission off of whatever company you’re shopping at. Is that correct? Yes. So if I’m the shopper and I go to your store, and I have a coupon extension present, if you are a part of their program, if you have joined their affiliate program,

19:17
and I shop at your store and the extension’s present, whether I have a successful coupon or not, this is where it starts to get really interesting. If I have the extension there, it’s going to claim credit for the sale and you’re gonna have to pay them a commission on that sale.

19:35
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.

20:03
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.

20:33
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now back to the show. I see. So I guess the terminology is what’s confusing me here. You’re joining their affiliate program, but you’re paying them for a conversion. So it’s almost like they’re a member of your affiliate program. Correct. So the merchant, well,

20:57
Although really it’s the merchant opting into, I’ll just use Honey as example, opting into Honey’s program. But then Honey becomes an affiliate for the merchant. Got it, got it. Okay. So this is a little devious here because this, I didn’t know that this could happen, but Honey as an extension on your browser can actually insert an affiliate cookie onto the user’s site, to the user’s computer. Yes. Okay. This is why I’m paranoid about extensions like Honey and

21:27
just anyone out there who’s using any Chrome extension, depending on what permissions, which most people don’t read, you can literally be passing all of your web browsing data, everything over to the app owner of the Chrome browser. I don’t know what honeys are, because I never installed it, but do you happen to know what information they track? Beyond coupons, I’m not exactly sure. I’d have to look deeper into their terms of service. when you sign their

21:54
their terms of service, I know in their privacy policy, it explicitly states that you’re giving them permission to effectively scrape the codes that you manually enter. So that’s a big part of how they get their codes is if I’m your VIP customer, like you mentioned that as an example, you send somebody a really nice discount code, if they have honey in the browser, and then and that all the extensions work the same way. And then they go and they enter that code that you’ve given them.

22:23
it’s going to scrape it and then it’s going to share it with everybody in their database. I see. So the person that you’re giving the code to isn’t deliberately sharing their code, right? It just so happens they probably have an extension that’s that’s track. mean, they could be because there certainly are ways to to manually give codes to the extensions. And that is a concern, particularly if you’re working with affiliates. Yes, definitely. It’s actually it’s very devious. And then you’re paying affiliates for sales that they didn’t drive.

22:53
Right, so just to be clear to the people listening, so first of all, an affiliate is when someone’s like a virtual salesman for your store and oftentimes you issue them special coupon codes where if someone uses that coupon code, they get affiliate credit and you pay them a commission. So I guess if you’re devious and you’re an affiliate, you could give sites like Honey or Capital One your coupon code for a widespread distribution and then you get paid out for sales that you didn’t even refer, is that correct? That’s right and it works the other way too, which is that

23:22
If you’re an affiliate, you could legitimately have shared your code with your audience. And if one of your audience members goes to the site and tries to use the code, but has Honey present, if Honey has a larger coupon in its database, it’s going to overwrite the affiliate code and they won’t get paid for a sale they really did drive. it cuts both ways. see. So now see, it’s funny. I had my buddy, Kevin Stecco on the show, maybe

23:52
you know, half a year ago. And we talked about coupons, particularly, and how like margin sucking like a coupon is like you don’t even think about it until you run the numbers. But like a 10 or 15 % coupon means that you have to generate significantly more sales than you think to make up for that discount. So this is a big problem. If your coupons are just getting used willy nilly. It’s it’s a huge problem. For you know, many of reasons you mentioned, like we talked about customer lifetime value, if

24:22
coupon extension users, that extension is present every time they come to your website. And so the expectation would be that they would use it every time they come to your website. So you’re not necessarily going to make it up on the backend, which is what most companies hope to do. But it’s also really frightening when you think about the fact that it’s coming in just at the last mile of the customer journey. And you’ve already, when you think about customer acquisition costs and micro conversions,

24:51
you’ve already essentially paid to acquire that customer through your Facebook ad or, whatever other marketing channels or campaigns you’re running, there’s a cost associated with those. And then at the end, you’re also paying this cost of the discount from a coupon extension that really had no part in bringing that person to your website. Here’s what I want to ask you. You mentioned earlier something about attribution. let’s say someone clicked on a Facebook ad for the conversion.

25:19
These apps, they’re not going to override that, are they? It depends. And I mean, we’re still learning a lot about this. What I will say is that I do know if you are, if you are part of their affiliate programs and you’re using an intermediary affiliate platform, such as a share a sale or something of the like in, those cases, it does, it does drop.

25:47
a first party cookie that overwrites attribution. Really? Okay, well that’s a huge problem. Yes. Okay. Cause then you don’t even know like it affects your advertising spend and all that stuff as well. That’s exactly right. And it does that. It overwrites attribution, whether it successfully applies a coupon or not. So it might test coupons, not find one that works and it still claims credit for the sale. Okay.

26:14
Here’s just a random question, because you know, Apple has been combating like this practice of cookies. Do you see this problem going on even after Apple is done with all the, it seems like everyone’s moving away from cookies. I actually see the problem getting worse because with iOS 15, that is going to essentially include browser extensions in, in the iOS 15 sort of Safari browser. And so.

26:43
And there are a lot of other browsers that are adding mobile capabilities. Really until now, coupon extension problems have been limited to desktop shoppers, which for most e-commerce stores, as you I’m sure know, are the minority, right? So it’s a hassle, it’s a problem, it’s affecting things, but it certainly isn’t as dramatic as it could be. And I actually think it’s going to get much worse before it ever gets better because of the direction that a lot of these browsers are moving in to incorporate.

27:10
extensions. And in fact, I believe, if I’m not mistaken at Apple’s developer conference where they rolled out iOS 15, honey was actually one of the partners that participated in that event. And they made a big announcement about their partnership with them. Okay, so what you just brought up something that I wasn’t aware of. So these extensions, they don’t work on mobile. They haven’t until now. Okay, interesting. Do know how widespread of a problem this is? Just kind of curious how like how many app installs do they have?

27:38
collectively, like the big ones. I mean, it’s millions of people and it’s growing. It’s growing extremely quickly. I, you know, I don’t know if you’ve seen the ads. I was really struck this year. started during the Superbowl when I saw ads with like Samuel L Jackson in them for Capital One shopping. And, you know, all of them have deep pockets and they’re advertising aggressively. And it used to be that

28:00
Coupon extensions were mostly used by women and particularly younger women, which is why you see verticals like apparel and beauty having particularly severe problems. That’s really beginning to change with those, the advertising campaigns they’re doing that are, in my opinion, clearly targeted at expanding the male demographic that uses them. The problem is definitely more severe in the United States. As I mentioned, it’s certainly more severe on desktop. I think on average, what we see is that

28:30
for companies that are e-commerce retailers that have coupon extension problems, it usually affects about, and this is gonna be an average of course, but around 10 % of orders. And that number will just grow. Right. Okay, I think we’ve defined the problem well enough at this point. Do you have anything to add before we talk about solutions? No, I I think we’ve covered it pretty well. Okay. So, Aisha, do you wanna just talk really briefly about what your company does and how it works?

29:00
Sure. So we’ve been around since 2017. And when we first started, our initial product was in the advertising technology space. We have a product called Clean Ad that protects large online publishers. Our clients include companies like the Boston Globe and CBS Interactive. We protect them from malicious ads delivered through programmatic marketplaces. And because of that, why that’s relevant to this conversation is that it’s all about

29:28
essentially helping website owners control the third party code that executes on their site to protect their user experience and their brand. And because of how our script sits on page, we see a lot of third party code. And it was in the course of doing this on the, think it’s like 8 million websites where our code lives right now. We saw these unusual other types of what are called client side injections and cybersecurity terms, which is another word for what browser extensions do, you the behavior you described earlier.

29:58
where they can go on sites and execute script. in some cases it’s benign. And in other cases, like with coupon extensions, it actually has a material impact on the business. And so that’s how it came on our radar. We built this new product called Clean Cart and it came out of private beta in March. And what Clean Cart does very simply is it allows online retailers to prevent coupon extensions from auto-injecting codes at checkout. It does not prevent shoppers from entering codes manually.

30:28
And it also doesn’t change the user experience. if somebody comes to your website and they have the extension present, it will still pop up. It will still look like it’s testing codes. It will just render that default state and say, congratulations, you already have the best deal because we’re blocking it on the backend. So what’s interesting about this is I was going to write my own thing because I noticed that these extensions, like, honey, they try them. And if they fail, like right now I have an alert whenever a coupon fails.

30:57
How does your technology differ from like, let’s say they tried twice and I just block out all coupons after that, after they’ve failed a couple of times. So what I love about our product is that, like I said, it doesn’t affect the user experience, which is paramount. And because of the way the coupon extensions function, you know, they watch what codes are successful and

31:23
When over time, as they start to see these codes become less successful, it effectively trains them to drop the codes from their databases. And so not only do we immediately upon installation of the script eliminate this problem, because you no longer have the auto injection over time, we eliminate the codes even from appearing in the databases so that if somebody did choose to visit the site and see if there was a code and then manually type it in over time, they’ll find fewer and fewer of your codes there. But

31:53
You know, so that’s, that’s sort of the benefit in terms of how the coupon extensions work. But the other side to that is that I think, you know, in a perfect world, we would all use, um, single use codes, right? Sure. In our email, in our SMS, what have you, but there are use cases. And I described some of them earlier, be it affiliate marketing or podcast advertising or display ads, you know, there are use cases where a single use code simply isn’t possible. And so the best thing about it to me is that it frees you up.

32:23
to use discount codes in the way they were intended without having to think about whether they’re gonna leak. It gives you peace of mind and it you don’t have to spend those hours per week doing all that manual stuff. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I see the value there. You know what’s funny, Kathleen? I’m just a very paranoid person when it comes to this code. So like I’ve, I’m so careful about like the plugins and everything that I installed because when you install code on your own website, like willingly,

32:50
that company has access to everything also, right? So like I once used an extension, which I won’t really mention publicly, I found it like, cause I look at the web traffic and I noticed that they were taking all this information and sending it off to these advertising firms. So they were actually taking my customer information without my knowledge and sending them off to some other agency. And that made me very mad.

33:18
And I stopped doing so now today I’m like very paranoid about everything that I install, whether it be a Chrome browser extension, which is probably just as bad. Um, so I’ve just cautioned. don’t want to make everyone listening to this paranoid, but like if, if something is free, then that usually means like, like you mentioned earlier that they’re selling the information somehow. You know, Steve, you totally just described.

33:43
at the heart of what digital engagement security is all about. And so I love that because it’s about the fact that the way we engage with our customers, our prospects, our audiences, it’s online these days. And for most of us, it’s either entirely online or a good portion of it’s online. And we all saw the same thing. We all saw trust, right? And so we want to create an environment that’s trustworthy for them. We want to also create an environment where our businesses can thrive. And I always say this,

34:12
As a marketer, my whole career, I’ve been told you own your website and it’s really not totally true. mean, legally you own it, but from a user experience standpoint, and, and when you think about what happens on your site, you don’t really own that because you just said it like the way modern websites are built. They’re.

34:35
you know, 99 % of them are built either on some other platform or CMS, you know, or shopping cart platform, which is third party code. We add apps and plugins to our websites, which are third party code. And then our visitors come to our websites, bringing with them these browser extensions, which are third party code. Our websites are rife with third party code that we don’t own or control. so digital engagement security is all about like,

35:04
understanding that doing your due diligence on what that third party code is and being able to control it to the extent possible so that you’re able to protect your user experience and your brand. Yeah, you know, I was just thinking about that experience where I was using code where information was being passed. And again, I’m not trying to make everyone paranoid, but like if someone has a little piece of JavaScript code on your site, they can literally scrape everything that’s typed into every form field.

35:32
And without your knowledge, they could be sending like all these email addresses somewhere randomly and kind of get you in trouble for two in case someone comes back and says, Hey, that I was the only the only shop site I shopped at was yours and my email got leaked. And that was like a unique email that I only used to shop at your store. I don’t know. I’m just paranoid. It’s pretty scary when you start to think about it. And this is, know, me putting my cybersecurity hat back on because I did spend a few years in that industry and it was, it was eyeopening to me as a marketer and

35:59
The thing that I wish marketers cared more, there’s a lot of data these days that points to the fact that marketing departments have bigger IT budgets than IT departments do in many companies because of all the software we use. Like I said, at least we think we own our websites, but certainly in terms of responsibility within a company, we’re generally responsible for the website. I do think marketers should care more about this because

36:27
It really affects our ability to do our jobs well, and it puts us at risk if we’re lazy or we’re not careful about the code we put on our sites. It can have massive ramifications. So I would imagine you guys just came out of beta, so you’re probably only targeting larger customers. Like what can the little guy do on a low budget to prevent these practices from happening? Well, and I will say we’re not necessarily targeting enterprise. mean, we’re…

36:55
very mid-market at the moment where we came out specifically targeting Shopify plus users, but we’re on the cusp of broadening it pretty dramatically. And so if this is something you’re interested in, go to the site and check it out and we can put you on a wait list and let you know when we expand. beyond that, I’m not here to say our product is the only solution at all. think there are a number of ways that retailers can tackle this. The worst solution, but it certainly is one, is just stop using coupon codes.

37:24
I wouldn’t recommend that. think that that ties your hands behind your back in terms of how you go to market. But it’s an option. I think the middle ground is what I like to call practicing good coupon hygiene. And a lot of what you talked about that you’re doing for yourself falls into that category. It all starts with a couple of things. Number one, have a single source of truth for the codes that you are using. You would be shocked at how many retailers I speak to.

37:54
who, when we start to report to them on the codes that are being attempted, they come back with, wow, I didn’t even know that code was active. And it’s because they’re using, they might be using their Shopify instance plus a Clavio, plus an SMS plugin, and they’re generating codes in all these different places. And it might be different people who are generating them. So this is as easy to solve as just creating a spreadsheet where you make your whole team enter any codes they create.

38:21
And you take a note of when the date they were created. And so then you have a process in place for going back to check on what’s happening with them and understanding when they should be expired. That’s number one. Number two is what we talked about earlier, which is getting in a regular cadence of looking at your data. watching coupon redemption patterns is really important. And I would suggest people do it weekly so that if something does happen, if your code leaks, that you’re able to

38:50
identify that quickly and take steps to fix it, either by contacting the company that it leaked to and seeing if you’re successful and appealing to have it taken down, or if that doesn’t work, canceling the code yourself and taking steps to reissue a new code to whoever’s using it. And then I guess the third thing would be do use single use codes wherever you can.

39:15
in your email marketing, your SMS marketing, et cetera. There are a lot of good resources for that these days. So if you’re able to do that, do it. There might be cases like we described earlier where you’re not. And that’s when that good coupon hygiene, those regular check-ins and looking at the data is so important.

39:35
I just wanted to let you know that tickets for the 2022 Seller Summit are now on sale over at Sellersummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker that I invite

40:02
is deep in the trenches of their own e-commerce business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets will sell out fast and in fact we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year in revenue,

40:29
We are also offering an exclusive Mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 4th to May 6th. And as of right now, we’re almost already sold out of Mastermind tickets and we’ll be raising the price every month leading up to the event after Cyber Monday. For more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s sellerssummit.com or just Google it. Now back to the show.

40:55
You know, it’s tough because I considered going with dynamic codes, but there’s an overhead with doing it that way. So I’ve always, like in my pre-purchase campaigns, I issue a static coupon that I rotate periodically, like maybe once every quarter. recently, and by recent I mean maybe in like the last year, those coupon codes get out right away. And that causes even more overhead because I got to go and switch up the coupon and the sequence, the emails that actually give out that coupon.

41:24
So I was thinking about what I described earlier, because I noticed a pattern when these coupon sites, like people will try like two or three of them, and they fail until they find the right one. In a lot of cases. So if you can just somehow just automatically deny every coupon after they failed twice, I think that might solve the problem. Or do everything that you said.

41:50
My recommendation personally would be to issue less coupons in general If you guys go go do a search for Kevin Steck on my podcast We actually ran the numbers it it sounds like math and it sounds boring But it was actually eye-opening like how much margin you’re losing by giving out these coupons if you’re gonna give out coupons only give them on special Occasions to make them more valuable. Otherwise you have that bed bath and beyond syndrome as well where people won’t shop at your site anymore unless they have a coupon so

42:18
Yeah. And I would add there are little UX tricks you can, you can use like instead of having a box at checkout that people see and can enter a promo code, have a link that they need to click that then opens the box. Ah, yes. That’s yeah. It’s little things like that, that, you know, the people who legitimately have codes, who you’ve sent a code to, who’ve come to your website because of that code, they’re going to hunt that link down. They’re going to click it they’re going to enter it in. And that’s great.

42:47
But for others who are what I would call more opportunistic kind of coupon extension users, they’re not going to go through all that because they’re relying on the convenience factor to get them the discount. That’s a good point. I remember a long time ago, I think I wrote a blog post on this. Like if you have your coupon code, like right next to like your credit card field, like my natural inclination is just to go straight to the web and look for a coupon code. Yep. But if you put it in more like an out of the way place, like you just mentioned,

43:17
Like someone who has a code is going to look for that box, but someone who might not necessarily have a code isn’t going to necessarily look for that box specifically. That’s exactly right. And there’s actually research that shows that if people see a promo code box, it makes them feel like there is a valid code out there. And if they don’t have it, it incents that behavior. So you’re spot on. Yeah. There was another thing, but this is like a really old blog post, like renaming it coupon to like voucher or something like that. Also was another.

43:47
So when you give out a coupon, say, look for the voucher box, but someone else who wouldn’t have gotten that email might not necessarily be looking for that box. That’s great advice. Yeah. So Kathleen, this has been great. I have not talked about this for a while. It’s actually not like a topic that I often talk about, though, or people talk about, even though it’s a widespread problem. Like I hate it when I see someone use a coupon code, especially a larger one.

44:14
that shouldn’t have gotten out. And I have a pretty good idea. Maybe it’s because I’m a smaller shop, but I know like what the codes are associated with everything. Like I don’t have multiple people handling coupon codes aside from my wife, I guess. I’m sure like all the shop owners who are listening to this, just check your coupon redemptions. I think you’ll be surprised at how many coupons have leaked. Yeah, definitely worth looking at the data and do it regularly because

44:41
You might not have a problem today, but it doesn’t take long. Or do what I do. Like not everyone’s going to have time to look at it regularly. Just, just have yourself get notified whenever some weird activity happens or whenever there’s a special coupon. So this is what I do. If I have a high value coupon out in the wild, like out there, like I’ll just have it email me whenever that coupon is, is tried to be used or used. So I’m just aware of when it happens so I can just, you know, make a note of it.

45:10
Cause I know for a lot of these larger coupons that I give out, they’re not meant to be used all the time. Like if I get more than like a couple of redemptions a month for that coupon, something’s wrong. Cause these are coupons tied to specific customers that are larger customers of ours. Yeah, that makes sense. So Kathleen, where can people reach out to you if they have any questions or anything about related to your company and your technology? So the company is clean.io, which conveniently is also our website address.

45:39
And the product is called Clean Cart. We do offer a 14 day free trial. So if you go to the site, you can sign up and test it out. And I’m happy to also answer any questions. I’m really active on LinkedIn. And so if you have questions about this, if you want to talk, or if you have any feedback, I’d love to hear it. Just connect with me, Kathleen Booth on LinkedIn. Okay, great. And right now, just, just to be clear, it’s only for Shopify plus customers, or is it

46:04
for just shop. That’s right. And I would say if I had to guess within the next month to month and a half, we will be on more platforms. So definitely if you come to the site, you’ll see there’s a button in the hero of the product page that says not Shopify plus question mark join the waitlist. I just encourage you to hit that if you’re interested, fill it out and we’ll ask you what platform your site is built on and then we’ll notify you as soon as we are live on that platform. Okay. Well, thanks a lot, Kathleen for coming on.

46:33
This is very interesting. Thanks for having me. This was a ton of fun.

46:39
Hope you enjoyed that episode. And if you have a coupon sharing problem like I do, go check out clean.io. For more information about this episode, go to mywebquaterjob.com slash episode 384. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywebquaterjob.com slash KLAVIO.

47:06
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also want to thank Postscript, 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 dv. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash dv. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog and if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com.

47:36
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.

00:27
Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store and it depend on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well, Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week, boom. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake.

00:56
and there’s full revenue tracking on every single email sent. Now Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them 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. Now if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your customer contact list. And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing.

01:22
SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source for my e-commerce store, and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider. Now why Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce, and e-commerce is their primary focus. Not only is the tool 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.

01:50
So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. And then finally, I want to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app.

02:19
Now onto the show.

02:27
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m really happy to have Parth Kukreja on the show. Now Parth is someone who I met at Nick Shackelford’s Geek Out event and he is literally the first person that I met at the event. I was sitting down alone answering emails on my phone and Parth sat down next to me and we just started chatting and I’m really glad that we did because this kid is a genius and I use the word kid because he’s 19 and he started a seven figure business selling pup rings online.

02:55
We’ll get into exactly what that is in just a sec. But Parth is open-minded, constantly learning, and most importantly, he’s willing to try any strategy and keep at it until he gets it working. Now, his success is not accidental, and today we’re going to talk about how he grew his jewelry business to seven figures while in college. And with that, Parth, welcome to the show. All right, thanks for having me, Steve. It’s a pleasure. So Parth, I actually want my kids to be just like you. I want to know how you got into entrepreneurship at such an early age.

03:24
and how you came up with the idea of Pup Rings. So I got into entrepreneurship just because I’m going to be 100 % blatantly honest with you, high school was not a walk in the park for me. I didn’t really have many friends. I went to a private high school with only like 30 people per grade. So I didn’t really have much to do. And I was like, you know what? Making money sounds like a cool thing. And like not only just that, but building. I love building things. And the other question that you asked was how to like

03:53
How do I get into Pup Ring? So explain what Pup Rings are first of all. sure. Yeah. So Pup Ring is this cute little dog company which I run where you get like your dog’s name engraved on a ring. It’s a super cute personalized product. And most of you are entrepreneurs or everyone who’s listening probably has a business. Personalized products 100 % is the way to go in 2021. So do you own a dog? Like how did you come up with this idea? I don’t. You don’t have a dog, right?

04:21
I run a dog company without a dog. It’s funny. Right. So how do you come up with this idea? So I’ll be honest, I working as a web developer at the time and this guy comes up to me, he’s like, hey, Parth, can you design a website for me? And I was like, all right, go for it. Design him a nice website, work on his store. And at the end of the day, guy’s like, oh, I can’t bring this product out of China. I don’t know what to do. Because he’s parent, he dropped shipping the product at time. And I was like, dude, this is winning. I looked at the store, I looked at the details. was like, dude, this is a winning product. You can’t pass this up. He’s like, no.

04:51
I pass it up. I’m going to go do other things. It’s a cool starting point. And I was like, you know what? I can’t allow this. I can’t allow this at all. So I was like, if you’re not going to continue with this product, I have to do it. And he’s like, go for it. So I got his data. I just launched the product myself. And the first thing I did after I could verify the product sold and everything, I moved it over to the US. And everything from there is history. Wait, so he just gave you the business? So it was an AliExpress product. So the listing was public at the time.

05:21
Now it’s not. Now I actually have like a private supplier and a patent pending. So, Oh, he was selling. He was a, he was a seller on AliExpress. Yeah. It was a drop shipping initially. And then I eventually ended up moving it to the U S got an engraving machine in my basement. Parents weren’t happy about that one and went from there. Okay. Wait, so before we get into the details of the business, I I’m just from my own knowledge. So the key to your success is like, you don’t have any friends. So I should restrict the amount of friends that my kids have.

05:50
Is that where I should make them bored? My inner workings honestly, I don’t know, man. I just tried a lot of things. Like I started seven businesses before pupperin. Like if you want one takeaway from this, I’d say be persistent because while the entire world tells you no, you have to know in your heart that this is what you want to do. But motivation wise, like what made you motivated at a young age to do these things? Was it just the fact that you had all this time on your hands?

06:20
So I have this really pure motivation that I think a lot of other entrepreneurs have. Okay. I like money. Was that something your parents instilled in you or is it just, do think you were just born with it? Uh, so the, the like of money is something that I’ve always had, but no. So my parents immigrated from India. I was trying to make a joke. Sorry about that. No, no, no, it’s fine. No, it’s cool. My parents immigrated from India and I’ll be honest, I was not a good student at all. think I told you this.

06:48
I didn’t do my homework at all. was not what you would think would be someone who’d be successful. I was just one of those people that was just like, oh, that kid, yeah, he’s not going to do anything with his life. but you’re my interest now, right? So yeah, I’m returning back. I’m taking two classes to see if I can handle the work life balance. I’ll be honest. It’s more for my parents than anything. OK. OK. All right. So back to pupperings. So you took

07:16
this guy’s business from AliExpress. Did you take his inventory or? No, no. So have you heard of like drop shipping before? Yes, of course. Yeah. Yeah. So this is is drop shipping at the moment. So the Chinese supplier was actually engraving the rings and all that stuff for us at the time. I only did like 100 or 100 orders and I had a joke I made with my my partner, Alex. I was like, our first our 500th order is going to arrive before our first order.

07:41
because our 500th order was when we had everything in the US and we moved our systems over. And our first order was back when we were doing it from China. The funniest part was it’s actually true. That person in the first order, that person did not like our company that they had like 40 days to the ring. However, the 500th order, that person, that’s when we had systems built out. That person got the ring within probably like two weeks. So you found a different manufacturer than the one that was dropshipping for you?

08:08
I know. here’s the exact thing that I did. I took the blueprint for the product. OK. I basically took the listing, got the design files from the AliExpress supplier. And I basically went up to our guy, just the guy who was also doing similar products. I like, hey, can you do this mold? They were like, yeah, we can make the mold for you, problem. So I made a few adjustments in the mold to make the ring easier to see, because engravings were small, especially the ones that they were drop shipping. Yeah. Very, very small.

08:34
Can you me an idea of what like the mold cost? You had to make a mold from scratch? Yeah, mold, overseas, the molds are a lot cheaper. I think it costs like 70 bucks. Oh, that’s it? Yeah. Yeah. It was like 70 bucks and it was like, we had what? Nine different sizes. So yeah, 70 divided by nine math is math is hard. That sounds really cheap. Cause like molds, at least for plastic are like in the tens of thousands of dollars depending on the size, right? Really? Yeah. What kind of molds are you doing?

09:04
Well, no, for plastic in general, Huh. So that’s why I’m curious that the metal molds are so much cheaper. So I’m not in no means like a mold expert, but what ended up what they told me about the molds, from my understanding, is there’s a few different types of molds. The one that they do is like a clay mold. Basically, put the liquid in there. problem with clay molds is they break and the rings aren’t always going to be 100 % accurate. So we like to use the term handmade with our rings because they are.

09:32
Each mold is poured individually and each ring is made by hand. That’s why the lead time from here, like from start to end of making the rings takes 30 days. We have to keep that in mind when ordering inventory, but you know, us engraving that only takes a few hours. So can you describe like the design process? Like you made modifications to the mold and were you making drawings or was it just kind of verbal? It was drawings, lots of drawings. Okay, so did you use like a…

10:00
Do you have any experience in this when you were doing this? No, so the only background I ever had was I networked with a few different entrepreneurs early on in my life. No one too crazy, no one too serious. Not like you, I’ve seen a lot of people on your podcast there, they’re crazy. Neil Patel, by the way, I love that guy. I was watching your podcast with him before. Yeah, he’s a great guy, really knowledgeable for sure. Yeah, honestly, I’d love to meet him eventually. Maybe later down the line when I become just as successful as you are, everyone else.

10:29
See, this is what I like about Parth. He’s so modest. I mean, you’ve accomplished more than a lot of people will ever accomplish in their lifetime. already, right? Stay, you usually talk too highly of me. I’m just a kid that got lucky. Well, see, I know you sandbagged because I remember one of our conversations was like, I’m just so uncomfortable approaching people, but you approached me at the event, right? Not the other way around. And you were approaching everyone and just making conversations. Well, I mean, I was learning from you.

10:59
Alright, so for context, I went to Nick’s event. I didn’t know where I was going, so I walked straight into the baseball park first. I was so lost, was like, oh, this is a very scenic area. I walked back around, go into the event, see everyone’s talking, everyone’s like, shit, who am supposed to talk to? Which is how everyone feels, by the way. Yeah, and I went to go get coffee. I don’t even drink coffee. I literally got coffee because I was like, oh, could be a social point. And eventually I was like, you know what, screw it, I’m just gonna go sit down.

11:29
And I happened to see Steve sitting by himself. was like, you know what? I’m going to talk to Steve. Steve seems like an interesting guy. So I talked to Steve. Turns out I was right. He is an interesting guy. And then from there, you know, they had lunch in the events for everyone who wasn’t there. And it was cool because, you got another opportunity to socialize and talk to people. I was just kind of following Steve talking to Steve and Steve did the school thing where he just walked up to this group of people standing at a table. just sits down. He just, he stands next to them. He’s like, Hey, do you mind if I join you?

11:58
and I kind of just joined there and didn’t really say anything. But it was cool because I was just taking notes mentally. All right, so back to Pup Ring. So we were talking about you already validated your product because you’d already had this dropshipping business. So you already knew it was going to sell at that point. I’m curious though, back when it was a dropshipping outlet, how did you actually get the sales? I think…

12:24
So the cool thing is, guy who was doing the product before, he gave me all of his data. So he had $30,000 worth of data that he gave to me because he was a really nice guy. Wacy was an amazing guy. I love that guy. I haven’t talked to him in a year, but if he ever talks to me again, I’d love to sit down with him. But Wacy, he spent like 10,000, got 30,000 in revenue off the product before I ended up saying that customers are too unhappy. I ended up using that data, put it into Facebook, made it look like audience based off of that, and then launched ads for maybe like a week.

12:54
And at this point I had no money to my name. I was broke as heck. Okay. So yeah, I’m just kind of curious. So he gave you his customer data, but how was he generating sales? Was he running ads? Yeah. He was also doing ads. was doing, um, he had one creative. tested one creative that lasted him a long time. Okay. And then, so he turned that over to you and then you ran ads can, and where those ads profitable wrath about when you started running them? Uh, yeah, because we’re looking, we’re using lookalikes. Um,

13:24
They were profitable straight off the bat. Actually, no, no, no. I’m trying to remember because this is about a year and a half ago. No, they were breaking even when we first started out. And you know how like ads are. Initially, you lose money. And eventually, once you refine your testing and figure out what happens, you eventually make money. For us, we had a very small learning curve since we already had a lot of data. So we were maybe red for maybe like one day, if even. But most of the time, it was just break even.

13:49
So I know we went to geek out just now and we learned a lot of principles about how to create high converting creative and that sort of thing. Can you kind of just describe the ads that work with you, that work with your company? That are converting ads? Right now, our biggest problem, funny enough, is creatives. And that’s something we’re actively working on fixing. Right now, we barely have any advertisements. We only had like a few handful of TikToks that we’re using. And by the way, we use TikTok as a main advertising platform. Yeah, we’re to talk about that in just a sec. Yeah, for sure. For the bulk of this interview.

14:17
But we’re getting there. want to talk about like the early stages first. So Facebook. Yeah, of course. Were they video creatives? Were they just image or? It was video. was a really, really stupid video creative where it was like some weird retro music and it had like the image of a ring zooming in and another image of a ring zooming in. And it would just, I don’t know how this creative worked. All right. Me and Alex, we were like, this creative is terrible, but we’ll test it anyways. Fun fact that creative we used for about eight months. I don’t know how it worked.

14:47
but apparently it resonated with the audience of 45 to 65. And now that’s what we thought our demographic was at first. And then eventually, know, in January when everything happened, like iOS changes, were at a terrible point in the business. I’ll talk more about that later. We decided to go on TikTok and hit the younger demographics. And that’s kind of what we’re targeting now, younger demographics. And that’s kind of where you need to have more creatives, more images, a lot more testing done there. Whereas older people, you can have an older style creative and it’ll work.

15:15
which I didn’t know at that time. At that time I just got lucky. Now I understand that because I’ve done a lot of learning. It’s funny, like for my Facebook ads, like we’re targeting 55 and above and that’s like the demographic that converts well for me on Facebook. Really? Yeah, I think just people on Facebook are older, right? Just like you said, it sounded like people over the age of 40, right? Where you saw your most success. Yeah, 45 and above because there’s a 45 and above.

15:44
So it sounds like you started out maybe for like the first six months or so you were on Facebook to get most of your sales, but then things started blowing up once you went to TikTok, which is mainly what I wanted to talk to you about today. Can you talk about your TikTok strategy? Let’s start with organic first and then go to ads. Sure. Let me talk to you about mindset first before we get into TikTok. Basically to set the stage right now, this was December of 2020. We just finished Black Friday heading into the first of 2021.

16:12
It was a crazy month because we did our most profitable quarter. We sold like 60K that month. Not profitable. We sold our most in that month. We only sold 60K. Well, after doing all the numbers and all the math, we realized we only made 5K profit from Facebook ads just because we weren’t profitably doing a lot of our ad stuff. There’s a lot of stuff we had to learn at that point. And that kind of broke me and Alex down. We were at a point where we were like, shoot, we don’t know what to do anymore. We were planning on selling the business for less than we paid the engraving machine.

16:41
Gary Meeseen, we paid like five grand for it. So we were planning on selling it for like four, just so someone could take it off our hands. And Alex decided, you know what, I’m going to do some TikToks. We went viral on TikTok initially. And this is the crazy part. Our fourth video, it went viral. We didn’t even have a link. We didn’t have an Instagram link. We didn’t have anything linked to it at all. People literally went onto their Google or their Chrome or whatever search engine they had. They just typed in Pup Ring. First thing that popped up was our brand and they went to go purchase the like that.

17:09
And within those first two days of going viral, we hit 50 grand revenue in two days and it was crazy. Just that one TikTok. Just that one TikTok. It got, I believe, a million views. Did you mention the word Pup Ring in the TikTok? No, I don’t think Pup Ring, the name was mentioned. think people just searched our name, like the TikTok name Pup Rings, Pup Ring. And then they eventually found the website like that.

17:38
So the key thing to realize here is that, and I think I mentioned this in a prior podcast episode, when it comes to social media, like they don’t want you posting your URL or even mentioning it or whatnot because they’re driving traffic away from their platform. But if you just create content that people want to see, if they’re interested in what you have to sell, they’ll just go out and find it, right? Yeah. or however. And that’s exactly the key point. The funniest thing about this video though, which actually made me and Alex laugh. Alex, my business partner, for those who don’t know that don’t know.

18:08
The funniest thing about this entire thing was the video was literally called, I’ve heard TikTok made businesses go viral. And basically he just shows like some product photography of the Pup Ring, you know, showing it around. Nothing too crazy. Like it wasn’t like a complicated, overly edited thing. It was just, oh, I’ve heard that TikTok makes small businesses go viral. And it did. And yeah, that’s where we’re at. That’s, that was literally the video. That’s why I laughed so hard looking back at that first TikTok video that he ever posted.

18:36
So is that like some sort of strategy by saying something like that? It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy? Kind of funny enough. But here’s the thing, you don’t want to overdo it. We were doing this like a testing thing. From there, we learned a lot of lessons. It’s, the customers, don’t want to be feel like they’re selling, being sold something. You want to build a brand environment around it. So now our TikToks are more trendy, more following what people are doing. Initially, that was kind of like, we’re just testing things out, seeing what’s stuck. Now we’re focusing more on

19:05
branding the TikToks, looking towards following a lot of these trends, being like, oh, hey, what’s the latest trend? I’m not too much of a TikTok person, to be honest. I’ve been mainly focusing on the business side. I don’t use it as a consumer, funny enough. So let’s just walk through that. So number one, let’s say I have an e-commerce store and want to use TikTok. What are some things that you have done that have been successful? And what have you learned from doing this? Don’t be afraid to like…

19:33
put yourself out there. Because a lot of entrepreneurs like me, like we do our businesses online, right? And there’s no, there’s no reason to ever go out of your house. You can do everything from your basement or your college dorm or wherever you’re working from. one of the things you got to be a little bit more comfortable with is just putting yourself out there. Like TikTok is videos where you’re going to put yourself as the owner. You’re to have to let people know that, Hey, I am the owner of this business. This is kind of what I do. These are the products I’m selling. And if your idea and your prospect is unique enough, people will start gravitating towards you.

20:02
People will be like, wow, this is a cool idea. I either I resonated with it or I don’t. And that’s just kind of a risk or a chance you have to take. A lot of people like me aren’t really the most comfortable people. for me, it took a lot of energy to go to a geek out and all that stuff. Like when I was boarding the plane, I was like, oh, I don’t like this. Or I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it. Or I had lot of hundreds of things, hundreds of reasons of why I shouldn’t do it. I ended up doing anyways. And it’s kind of the thing, mentality you to have with TikTok. TikTok, you have to be prepared to put yourself out there.

20:29
show yourself, talk about your brand, explain what your business is to a lot of different people who don’t know or probably aren’t interested. But there are people that will be interested. Let’s talk about the nuts and bolts. Like how often are you posting? What types of content is working for you? Like what is your flow day to day with TikTok? So day to day with TikTok, ideally the goal is to post every day, but that doesn’t really happen. We try to post three times a week.

20:59
And there’s two different types of posts we go for. We have posts that are made especially to go viral. And here’s the thing, you can’t control virality. That’s just the number one thing we’ve learned. Because initially in our P &L spreadsheets, we tried factoring in virality as a metrics to keep our profit margin all that stuff. Doesn’t work, trust me. What’s sustainable is ads and running that kind of stuff. TikTok, if you go viral, it’s a good icing on the cake. You should definitely shoot for it, but you shouldn’t count on it to build the money for the business. That’s what we’ve learned. But nuts and bolts wise,

21:27
TikTok, do some viral videos. Ideally, we like to do like one or two viral videos in a month. is your definition of a viral video exactly? Basically, here’s what can do. Go follow some other businesses on TikTok. Follow business pages, see what they’re doing right now. And what you can do is you can see what posts of theirs are getting the most views. For example, I was actually watching this TikTok from a cookie company and they had this one creative that was awesome. I showed it to Alex. was like, dude, we need to create this. This is awesome. And one of what the creative was was,

21:56
They were basically showing off their different cookie lineups and like, Hey, we’re doing a cookie drop. not like, you know, they, they’re selling cookies normally, but they’re like, we’re doing a cookie drop. And I thought that it was so special. It’s like, how the hell are you going to mail out cookies to people?

22:11
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22:39
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.

23:09
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. Interesting. Okay. So is there any particular tick tock companies that you follow? I’m to be honest with you. I do not have any on the top of my head. Okay. I, if I remember that one, I, I, I’m trying to remember the name of that tick, that a cookie company, cause that one was really funny.

23:35
So I know for me, and I know you have your partner who actually does the organic TikTok stuff. Like for me, like I feel like you have to like consume TikTok content to really understand like what we’re even talking about here about going viral. For me personally, I’ve found very little, like the patterns are not very clear on when to, like what actually goes viral. Because I’ve had videos where people literally watched 50 % of it.

24:04
like all the way through and those did not go viral. And then I had ones where people watch like 20 % of it go completely viral. It’s almost like TikTok gives you a viral video every X number of videos, regardless of what the content is. I think in some way I agree with that because first off the content needs to be entertaining in some way, or form. But at the end of the day, it’s kind of like TikTok’s algorithm. The best way that I understood this is like it goes through different levels. Like first,

24:33
you it’s going to be shown to like maybe a hundred to a thousand people. And those people, they look at the engagement around that and then they show it to a bigger audience and then a bigger audience. And if the engagement rate stays true, then eventually it just goes viral. They put on the for you page for a lot of different people, which is great for organic reach, but it’s really hard for us to understand it. So the kind of what I’ve been realizing is think about it as Instagram. Like you guys, some of you guys might’ve known like Instagram or done some Instagram reposting for your own businesses.

24:59
If you go on Instagram, you know that there’s videos that go viral. You can literally look at them and you can see that they’re repost like 10 to 15 different times. The idea is to look at not that post and repost it, but figure out why that post went viral and, you know, put that element into your own videos. And that’s kind of what we’re focusing on right now. Okay. So I want you to share why have your posts gone viral? Like I know you’ve broken it down. I know your personality part just from hanging out with you that week. What have you learned? Why do they go viral?

25:28
Yeah, I mean, you just said like, you got to go and you got to look through which ones, like, can you see patterns with the ones that did go viral and have a hypothesis on why they went viral? So I’ll be honest, you know, we’re not, I’m not the biggest person that is TikTok space. My business partner, Alex is the guy who knows a lot more about TikTok. Okay. But for me, if I was to break it down to a science of why it goes viral, I would just say make it make the content interesting.

25:58
Like if people are interested in watching your video all throughout or it’s like grabbing their attention, like it’s the same thing as an ad, right? You have to have your hook. You have to have things that keep them interested. You have to have call to action at the end. It’s a very simple, straightforward, 10 second vertical video kind of ad. And the game plan is from what I’ve seen, my trends that I’ve looked at always, the ones that go viral, they always have a good hook. Like everything that I’ve seen has an insanely good hook. Just something to grab their attention and get them interested in the product. And then.

26:28
The next thing is then you explain the product. Doesn’t have to be like, oh, it’s shipped from, it’s made in Ohio and all that kind of stuff. It has to be something that explains the product or showcases the product in a cool and unique light. And lastly, the part that closes it is the call to action, of course. Tell them, hey, you want to get something, go to Puppering. Or sometimes you don’t even need to have a call to action. But if I was to break down to a thing that you need to look at, it’s follow trends and make sure your hook is good. The hook and the content.

26:56
Primarily the hook is the most important part. Getting people to watch the video altogether is what makes a good content. So I know Parth that you actually focus a lot of your time on the ads and I’ve actually never personally run any TikTok ads. Can you kind of describe the platform and how well it’s worked for you? Sure. So TikTok ads in itself, really cool idea, really great engagement. I’ve seen way better results in Facebook just on TikTok ads, which is crazy.

27:24
because everyone right now is thinking Facebook is the way Facebook you gotta do advertising on. Of course, we’re still doing Facebook ads, but TikTok, TikTok ads are completely different. I noticed that my CPCs, my cost per clicks on TikTok were literally half of what they are on Facebook right now, which I thought was hysterical. Can you just talk about what the differences are? Sure, sure. In terms of advertising, you get less metrics on TikTok just because it’s a newer platform, but it’s ideally a similar thing. Like it’s very similar to Facebook ads. If you can do Facebook ads, you can do a little,

27:54
Snapchat, can do Pinterest, you can do TikTok. It’s kind of the same thing. Ideally, you’re looking for the same metrics. You want a top of funnel, bottom of funnel, a middle of funnel kind of advertisements. Depending on your price range, you might not even want a middle of funnel. You might just want top and bottom. So for you, like what are some of the targeting options and how are they different from Facebook? Like are there lookalike audiences? Yeah, there’s still lookalike audiences. There still is retargeting ads. But primarily for us, it’s more of a creative game. Like we focus less on like the audiences, we focus more on the content because

28:24
What I’ve noticed in geek out and just in general is content is king right now. If you have better content, you’ll have better advertisement returns. are you implying that you just run your TikTok ads wide open? Not necessarily. There’s still some testing done into it. There’s still audiences. We still do lookalikes. There’s still a top of funnel and bottom of funnel. For those of you that don’t know top of funnel is basically just like prospecting bottom of funnels, more of like retargeting ads, getting people who’ve already viewed the content at all.

28:53
view the content, add to cart, initiate checkout, all that stuff, everything leading up to the purchase. How is your bottom of the funnel ads different than your top of funnel and TikTok? So we exclude people in our bottom of funnel ads. We exclude everyone that hasn’t viewed the product before. The only people that see the bottom of funnel are people that have clicked on the product, who viewed the product page, stayed on the page for a little bit longer. Then maybe we go more engaged and we get added to cart, we get initiated checkouts, everything up to the purchase.

29:21
And then sometimes bottom of funnel, you know, then not bottom of funnel, sorry. Sometimes you can also do like repurchase events. For us, we only have one product. So repurchase isn’t something we do on ads. We do that more in email. Right. But how does the creative different? Like you have these two segments, top and bottom. Like how are the creatives different for either? Oh, sure. Creatives. Creatives are different because like initially you have to have a lot more of a flashy. Well, first off, you think about for you guys, because everyone’s different.

29:49
You have to look at it as in why did this person not purchase? Sometimes you can survey your users after 15 seconds of them being on the site of what they’re looking for. Like what information did they not receive that would help them make that purchase? Ideally, what we can do is 15 seconds after them being on your site, have a little pop-up. You can do this in HotShark where it says, did you not, or what’s stopping you from purchasing today? And then have a few options of what you think it might be. If you have another option as well, just in case, because people might have a different reason, and look at that reason. Some people might say,

30:18
not sure about sizing. So what you do is then in your bottom of funnel ads, when you’re trying to retarget to these people, you want to have something that talks about the sizing. Shipping is another big one, because a lot of people are unsure about shipping. They don’t want to wait 30 days for their product. If you have faster shipping, then you can put that as a creative. It’s basically just like top of funnel ads are basically just getting their attention. And, you know, so some people they’ll convert, some people won’t. Ideally, you’ll have like what?

30:47
let’s just say 3 % conversion rate out of people that look on your ads. So people that click on your ads purchase all the way through, only 3 % of the people that clicked on your ads or clicked So I’m just asking you part of like, for your bottom-up funnel, are you just answering questions? Yeah, that’s ideally what it is. It’s basically the reason the consumer doesn’t purchase is because they don’t know something or they want clarification on something. And then eventually they’ll determine if the product’s good for them. So your bottom-up funnel TikTok ads don’t even look

31:15
Anything remotely like a regular TikTok then is what you’re saying. No, they still function as like a TikTok ad, but they’re very niche. Like they focus on different problems that we think the customer would be having. So give me an example. Like you said, sizing was a problem. What does your TikTok bottom of the funnel ad look like for that? Sure. So one of our videos that we have on our TikTok page is actually a sizing chart, how we explain to size the rings. What we do is we do something similar to that and the thing we’re like, oh, hey, here’s your pop ring.

31:43
And then we just talk about the sizing, and then we had the call to action at the end. We basically talk about how they can get their, how we have a warranty to make sure that even if it’s not accurate, they can make sure, they can send the ring back and we’ll get a resize for them. And just other stuff to make them more safe and secure with their purchase. We tell them, hey, you have a 60 day warranty when you purchase a ring. So if your engraving is bad or the ring sizing is not accurate, you can go ahead, you can send it back, we’ll replace it for free.

32:11
no problems, if you want a lifetime warranty, that’s also an option. We give them all these options of just explaining the product, explaining the benefits and just making it a customer focused business. So you said a couple of things just now. Does that imply that your bottom left funnel ad is actually a post on your organic TikTok account? No, no, no, sorry. I was using the post as an example for people to refer to. What you can do is people who are watching, you guys can go ahead, go to Pup Rings.

32:39
on TikTok, go ahead and go watch some of the videos. Those are great examples of what you can do to, you know, take your own business viral and look at what kind of things that we’re running. also said another thing that was very interesting. Are you running a pop-up that asks people why they’ve abandoned their cart? Yeah. So I’m not sure. I think it might be offline right now, but before we running a pop-up, just asking them 20 seconds after, you know, they’re on the site, they’re browsing. Maybe they scroll down. Maybe they didn’t, but 20 seconds.

33:06
on the right side, just a tiny little hot chart pop-up that says, hey, what’s stopping you from purchasing today? If nothing stops them, most of people just close out of it. But if something’s stopping them, yeah, so a lot of people, they look at this, they look at the… So is it kind of like a live chat? How intrusive is this pop-up? It’s just a simple pop-up. It just pops up on the right of the screen, just slides slowly in, just says, hey, what’s stopping you?

33:32
So it’s like a very interrupting one. Does it blank out the whole background and everything? No, no, no, no. It’s very small. So for example, if the page is 100%, this would only be taking maybe 20 to 30. It’s not too big. It’s very small. They can minimize it if they need to. I don’t believe in overlay pop-ups. The only time you have an overlay pop-up is to collect their email. And that’s the only time. I don’t like multiple overlays and all that kind of stuff. OK, so does this happen on mobile also? Yeah, it happens on mobile and desktop.

34:01
All right, so kind of walk me through how this works, because I’ve never used anything like this before. Walk me through it. So you’re asking, what are your main questions on this pop-up? Like, are there buttons, or is there like an open-ended so it’s buttons. So basically what we did was we set up with Hotjar. And Hotjar, if you guys aren’t using it, highly recommend you use it. You can watch what people are doing, fix bugs in your sites. Not sponsored, by the way. Just really love this app. OK. Hotjar basically gives you an option to enable a pop-up.

34:31
at whatever point you want. So for us, I believe we did it around like 20 seconds. Figure on Google Analytics, how long people are staying on your site for. For us, the average time for people to stay on our site, because we do have engaged traffic, I believe is like 30 to 40 seconds, because they’re reading through the product, they’re going through it. So kind of what we look at is we’re like, all right, on an average of like 20 to 30 seconds, we have that thing that says, what’s stopping them from purchasing today?

35:00
Because some people, they just want more information about the product, and your landing page might not have it, or it’s not too available at the top. And the pop-up itself is basically just, at the top, it’s just a small little what’s stopping from purchasing, and then there’s four bullet points with different options. So it’s like, oh, shipping too long. That could be the first one. Second one is engraving too small or something like that, just because our products are personally engraved, so sometimes engraving is too small.

35:29
It basically just asks some different questions. there another button? Yeah, and the fifth button is another button as well. So what happens when they click on one of these buttons? Let’s say shipping too long. Let’s say I click on that. Then what happens? It just says thank you for your feedback. And then we get to look at the person’s hot chart, what they were doing directly. So maybe you know.

35:53
you explain shipping, but it’s like at 75 % in the page. Like you scroll down 75 % and that’s where the shipping is. And maybe that person only scrolled to 50%. So their question wasn’t answered because they didn’t scroll far enough. That kind of lets you know, hey, maybe we should move this information up the page. So that way they see it when they first load it, or maybe we should do something else that makes this information more readily available. Because chances are somewhere on your page, you’re answering the question. It’s just people are impatient. They want to scroll through pages. They don’t really want to

36:23
take time to read unless they’re making a massive purchase, in which case you’ll have multiple retargeting pages and then they’ll have to get familiar with the product. Our goal as marketers is to basically convey the information as easily as possible to the people. And the people’s job is to, you know, purchase and make an informed purchase about the product. They don’t want to make a mistake and they don’t want to purchase a bad product. So it’s kind of like a balance where you’re trying to make sure they’re informed to see if they’re a good fit. Cause some people might love your product, but they might be out of market.

36:52
and some people might be in market but not love your product. Your goal is to try to find someone who’s both, someone who’s in market and likes your brand. Here’s what’s conflicting me about this pop-up. So do you have an email pop-up as well? Yeah, we have an email pop-up. So you run two pop-ups at the same time? Yeah, so the email pop-up shows up around, initially it was instantaneously, and then we had the second pop-up that collects the feedback at around the 20 second mark. Now we disabled the 20 second mark pop-up.

37:21
just because we don’t want to conflict with the email. So right now the pop-up’s not running, but normally we had an email collection that went within like the first three seconds of landing on the page, and then a second pop-up at 20 to 30 seconds that would say, oh, what’s stopping you from purchasing? Since we’ve already collected a lot of data and adjust our landing page, we don’t have that pop-up running anymore. But I highly recommend for people who haven’t done that, do that kind of pop-up. You don’t have to keep it there forever, but just a small time. Did you have a conversion problem that made you want to implement this pop-up?

37:49
Yeah, so we were focusing on all steps of the process. Ideally, from my knowledge, it’s like you’re supposed to get 10 % plus add to cart rate is good. Then in conversion rate, having ideally anything above a three is ideal. And obviously, industry standard is two, so even two is fine. Anything below is two, I would highly recommend. And at that point, we didn’t have a two. So that’s kind why we’re looking at this.

38:16
We’re trying to figure out what systems and what updates for landing page need to be pushed. That way get a conversion rate higher. Let me ask you this, Parth. When it comes to conversion rate, this is always a fuzzy number to me. Because I could have a ton of blog traffic come in. And I know that that conversion rate on that traffic is going to be crap in general. So which conversion rate were you looking at? Overall? Or were you looking at certain types of traffic? No, I was looking at overall conversion rate. Just because I like to look at it as in like,

38:47
Most of the traffic for the people that are interested in the product, they’re not interested in the product. The people that are interested are going to click on the Add to Cart page. And ideally, the point of the Add Cart pages is like the only reason they should be on the product page out of all the other pages is because they want to purchase the product. If they’re on the homepage, you know, they’re on the homepage just browsing, but the product page is just to inform about the product. So that’s kind of why I dive deep into those numbers because the product pages, only purpose is to sell. If they’re looking to learn more about a specific problem.

39:15
That’s not what the product page is for. It’s for- So you’re measuring the conversion rate after they’ve hit a product page then? Yes, after they So that’s a distinction. All right. So right, because there’s always purchase intent if they’re looking at a product page and then that’s when the pop-up only happens on the product page. Yes, correct. Okay. All right. So that’s important to know because you don’t want this thing flying on any page, right? Yeah, you only want it to be on like specific products and then making sure you get the information. How did you know which questions to ask? You don’t know what you don’t know, right?

39:45
Oh, no, to be honest, this isn’t like my strategy. This is like you said, you said I’m a genius before. I’m just a guy that likes to test things. I was actually told by one of the people that I’ve been learning from Deepish Mandela. He’s actually a really good advertiser. He’s the guy who actually he looked at pupper and he recommended this. I’m just sharing this with you guys because I thought this is very helpful for us. It actually increased our conversion rate significantly because understanding your customer is the best way to make ads. OK, wait. So from this survey.

40:14
What did you change exactly? We changed a number of things. We updated the customer photos. We made an engraving text above the product page. right above the product page is, sorry, not product page. What am I trying to say? Basically there’s a manual input where they can type their name in. And initially, they would type their name in. It wouldn’t show in the font that we’re engraving in. It would just show in a regular font. One of the things that a lot of customers were like was like, they want to see what the engraving looks like beforehand.

40:43
I don’t have crazy development tools. Now I do. Crazy development budgets. So I kind of don’t want to create an entirely new system. But I was like, all right, maybe what if we change in the font and they can adjust their name based on all that. So now what it is is it’s in the font that’s going to be engraved in. It’s accurate in terms of that. And eventually we’ll have it so it displays on top of a ring itself. And that way you get the most accurate depiction of what it would look like when they purchase a ring.

41:12
I just wanted to let you know that tickets for the 2022 Seller Summit are now on sale over at SellersSummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker that I invite

41:39
is deep in the trenches of their own e-commerce business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year we cut out ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets will sell out fast and in fact we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year in revenue,

42:07
We are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 4th to May 6th. And as of right now, we’re almost already sold out of mastermind tickets and we’ll be raising the price every month leading up to the event after Cyber Monday. For more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s sellerssummit.com or just Google it. Now back to the show.

42:32
I want to kind of turn back to something that you said earlier. When people buy your product and you just have like one basic product, they buy one and they’re done. So what is your like post purchase sequence look like? How do you get, do you have repeat business or what are your plans on that front? Yeah. So right now what we’re doing is we’re kind of just focusing on pushing the pupper ring. Just the one product right now. Cause ideally we’re barely hitting your potential.

42:59
Last month we did a lot of ads, the month before that we focused on going viral. Now this coming August, the game plan is to push virality and ads both at the same time and make a push like that. Because right now we’re kind of all over the place. Me and Alex are kind doing a lot of the jobs and we’re at the strange point of business because the business is making money, but not enough money to hire out people to do all the other jobs. So the game plan for us is to make a final push, put in the 50 to 60 hour work weeks.

43:29
break above this glass ceiling which we’re at and then try to get to a point where now we have a lot more income coming in, we figured out our traffic channels. And our biggest issue, like I said before, was creatives. So now that we have a lot of creatives we can test, it’s actually a lot easier to above this glass ceiling. How did you solve your creative problem? We were initially going to do photography ourselves, but our game plan is we want to be testing creatives every week. We want to be testing as many creatives as humanly possible. So we worked with a service called Influey. They kind of…

43:57
go ahead, they take the photos for us. We basically tell them what specifications, they reach out to content creators and get us photos and content. And what we do is we go ahead and we approve or disapprove the content and then use it for marketing because we have the licenses for all that after. Interesting, so just give them the product and they go out and they find influencers to create content around your product? Yeah. And then you use those for ads. I know running ads is almost like a full-time job. Do you guys have a dedicated person for that or are you doing most of that?

44:27
So we did have a guy, his name is Andre. He currently does a lot of the ad buying for us, but I decided, you know, with the coming push that we’re doing in August, our game plan is to push the heights we’ve never done before. Like we’re going to go very heavily in August. None of us are ever going to sleep. 20 % Heavy on what, like ads you mean? Just in general, like fixing, we fixed a lot of the problems. So last month, the issue, every month I have a goal. So last month we didn’t have much content.

44:55
So because of everything we on, my buddy was getting married. Alex, congratulations by the way to Alex, just putting it out there on the air. He got married literally a week ago and he was in Cancun. He was gone for the entire month and I was flying here and there. August, everyone just sitting down, everyone on our team is just sitting down hyper-focusing on getting everything ready for a push to new heights we’ve never done before. You keep mentioning the word virality.

45:23
What does that mean exactly? What are you doing to go viral? What is your definition? Basically, it’s just about putting content out there. Like I said, we can’t control what content goes viral and what doesn’t. There are specific ways that you can follow a formula. Look at what works in the past or look at what works for other creators and then try to repeat something. But here’s the thing, that doesn’t always work. We actually tried doing a test where we reposted one of our posts that got 4 million views.

45:52
It went crazy viral and amazing amazing performance on that one video. We tried reposting it didn’t go viral at all. It was actually very very funny You’re talking about on TikTok right? Yeah on TikTok. I found that to be the same case like that’s why I think there’s almost like a random number generator in there. Somehow. Where if you haven’t gone viral a long time like I literally had this video that sucked go viral and it was just like the other ones that around it but it just I think it was just it’s time.

46:21
It’s hard to say. It was the chosen one. It was the chosen one. Okay, so outside, so it sounds like you’re trying to adopt like a be everywhere strategy in August, right? Like just blitz it with content and then get online share for your business, right? I’m taking more of a, like I said, we actually can, we talked about emails like a week ago. I was building up a lot of email funnels that way I don’t have to focus in August. I’m getting all the email systems finished now so that way when August comes, I dedicate my full attention to.

46:49
being the guy who edits content, being the guy who produces content and then runs the ads with it. And then at the same time, we have our media buyer who’s now working more on the TikTok side. I’m going to help him out with the Facebook, just getting content there. Since TikTok is performing really good right now, Facebook is not. And I want to get back on Facebook. We actually haven’t even been running Facebook ads for the last like four or five months. We’ve been focusing mainly on TikTok ads just because the cost per clicks, the CPMs, insanely cheap compared to what Facebook’s offer, especially with these

47:19
the iOS 14 and everything going on, it’s a lot easier to push TikTok ads. Now the one thing that you need to note, and this is super important to take note of, is TikTok, if your ad account gets disabled and it’s linked with your regular account, you will not go viral at all. Your engagement will be, it’s like being shadow banned on Instagram. Your engagement will not go anywhere. Huh. So does that imply that you should do your ads on a separate account? Maybe.

47:48
Maybe you should, but the thing is, is then you won’t be able to push organic traffic. Like our ad buyer was actually talking about how he was running ads for this one account. He got an account from a hundred followers to 30K followers in a month. This is an hour account, by the way, this is someone else’s account. Just by doing different ads on TikTok, linking the account and the ad account has a lot of pros, but you do need to be careful if you’re relying on organic.

48:17
And we got banned four times on face on TikTok, not because we’re doing anything wrong. Okay. But we honestly didn’t even know like we would get banned. We’d submit an appeal. The person would just approve the appeal. Now that we have a dedicated TikTok rep, it’s a lot better because now we’re not getting banned at all. The person’s like overseeing it before they shut down the account and they realized, okay, there’s no wrongdoing. We just get flagged because it’s a personalized product and stuff. Interesting. Okay.

48:43
So I mean, I can’t imagine you doing anything that violates advertising policies. You’re just selling rings. Yeah, we’re not doing anything too crazy. That’s good to know. Are you doing anything else on the other content front, whether it be YouTube, blogging or anything else? So we learned a lot of helpful information at Geek Out. Guys, I highly recommend going to Geek Out. Not affiliated, by the way. Just really love the information that I got. And they kind of showed me a lot of potential with YouTube.

49:10
I really love the YouTube Avenue that they talked about at the event. And I 100 % wanted to do some influencer work, but just not yet. I want to get the ads and everything on a stable footing because the ads are going to, ads are what brings sustainability, right? Like you can predict your CPMs as long as you’re churning out creatives, you have a system built out. You can predict your CPMs, you can build stable and predictable revenue. And that’s kind of what we want. Virality is all over the place. That’s not something we can depend on. That’s kind of what we made a mistake in the past.

49:39
was depending on virality for revenue. Definitely brings in a lot of conversions, and especially since it’s organic, you don’t have to pay any advertising on it, but it’s not something you should be relying on. And that’s kind of what we want to do. We want to build out the systems that way we’re not relying on virality at all. Instead, we use virality to complement our existing system. Because when you go viral, all of your CPMs and everything are a lot cheaper, which is funny. But then at the same time, you’re also getting an influx of traffic because you’re going viral.

50:08
And then eventually once we have a system built out, you I feel a bit comfortable stepping away from the ads. Uh, that’s when I’ll try to focus on like YouTube and influencer reach and then build out our systems, build out our channels. So part for anyone out there who’s listening and I know you’re 19, like what advice would you give them if they’re just getting started? Don’t be afraid to fail. Failure was something that I took a lot of, like it got to the point where my parents literally

50:36
They were just like, Parth, it’s time. You have to stop. You’re going to college. You can’t do the business anymore because I failed seven different businesses before I got a pupper ring. And, you know, whether pupper ring was luck or whether it wasn’t, it only happened because I would continue to persevere. Like I continue pushing forward. So one thing I would recommend is just keep going. Doesn’t matter who’s telling you to stop. Doesn’t matter where you’re at in life. Doesn’t matter if you don’t, if you know, you don’t have the finance, whatever.

51:04
I literally took out a credit card loan. highly recommend no one does this. Do not do this with your own money. But when pupperings started, I maxed out my credit card because I didn’t have the money to pay for ads. was like $1,500 credit limit on my Discover card. I maxed out the card because I was like, I gotta go, I got to do this. You know, it’s funny is like, think having a child like you of my own would freak me out. But at the same time, it does take some amount of

51:33
risk and experimentation to get to where you were, right? Yeah, a decent amount of risk, to be honest. A lot of risks that a lot of people might not be comfortable with. So I highly recommend have a job, have some income. I didn’t. I had a job and my boss is great. It just became too discriminant. I ended up having to leave. right. Well, Parth, I feel like I grilled you for 50 minutes.

51:59
But I showed you no mercy. I treated you like any other seven figure entrepreneur that I on here. I know your personality. We hung out so much during Geek Out. And you just have this attitude where it’s not working now. You’re going to keep at it until it works. And I think that’s the main attitude. That’s how I knew you were going to be successful at anything that you do. You’ve had seven businesses already. I don’t even have seven businesses. And I’ve been doing this longer.

52:28
You know what I’m saying? I just love your attitude. And I want to instill that in my kids somehow. And maybe after we stop recording, I can get the details on what your parents did to get you to this point. Or whether it was just inborn. I’m hoping there’s a little bit of nurture in there. It’s not all nature. Yeah, my parents, I’m going to be honest and with you. If it wasn’t for them, none of this would be possible. I love my parents and I thank them so much for supporting me. Because they definitely push back.

52:57
They were the voice of reason when I definitely needed it. And sometimes I didn’t listen to them. They told me to stop a lot of the times I really didn’t listen, which I’m grateful for. But there are other times when they’ve definitely given me really good advice. Like they were the ones that helped me move the engraving machine into the basement. I joke about it a lot how I kind of just stole the basement from them. But it was moreover, kind of, they started to see the vision that I had. They started to realize, know, hey, let’s let them try it out. And they gave me the opportunity to flourish. So honestly,

53:25
From the bottom of my heart, really just want to say thank you to both my parents. Cool. Well, Parth, I really appreciate you coming on the show, man. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, I appreciate you having me. I realize I’m probably one of the younger people and this might be a little bit harder to listen to just because I was all over the place today. were not. You’re very eloquent, actually. Stop sandbagging yourself. Stop. I don’t know you’re talking about. I was all over the place today. All right, Parth. Thanks a lot, All right. Take care, Steve.

53:54
Hope you enjoyed that episode, and I believe I mentioned this before, but I want my kids to turn out like Parth. The guy is driven, resourceful, and always finds a way to solve every problem. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecoderjob.com slash episode 383. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, 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 Steve.

54:25
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Clibio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for eCommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandon card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now we talk about how I these tools on my blog. And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store,

54:55
Head on over to mywifecoderjob.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.

00:27
Specifically, Andrew and I are gonna discuss what we are double downing on for our businesses in 2022 and beyond. But before I begin, I wanna thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-commerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10X bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce and you can segment your audience just like email.

00:56
It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Claviyo, who’s also a sponsor of the show. Now, are you working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined? And do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? And do ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories, do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies, well.

01:25
They do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers’ needs change. Now these companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information, and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. To learn more about how Klaviyo helps you with your own growth,

01:54
visit claviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And finally, I wanted to mention a podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:30
Andrew Euderian. How are things going? It’s been a while. Good. It’s been a while. It’s good to to chat with you, man. Although I got to say you look a little sweaty over there on the other side of the, as Eric Bandholz would say, the interwebs. I just got back from my tennis lesson and I talked a little trash to my instructor. I had a really good game against my friend over the weekend where I crushed her and I got really cocky. So I told my instructor, hey, let’s play today. Let’s play today and don’t hold back.

03:00
And I actually started out really well. Cause I, you know, to be honest with you, I think I’m in better shape than he is. He’s, he’s a much better player, but like I can run faster. So I wanted the first couple points and then I started talking trash. I was like, yeah, get that shh. Oh, we don’t cuss on this podcast, but I said, get that shoot out of here. And then I started giving them the double guns and everything and then he got pissed.

03:22
This is your coach, right? Like he- coach, yes. We’re friends makes you think, well sure, sure, but he’s someone you’re, you know, were knowing you, you are not someone that would submit yourself to coaching unless someone was much better than you, you know, like any, any coach, right? Like you want it, they should be better than you. So what made you think you could just wall up your coach? The thing is I’m faster than he is. But speed doesn’t matter, apparently, if you’re not, if you don’t have the skills. Oh man.

03:52
I don’t know. So my goal is to just be able to take a game off of them. But after I started talking trash, I don’t think I won many more points after that. Yeah, you said you just stopped keeping score, which is, is anyway, I said, how badly do you get beat? You’re like, here’s how bad he won two points with in between the leg shots. Oh, wow. And he didn’t even have to say he just chuckled after he won those points.

04:20
You sure you’re faster than he is? I mean, you gotta have a decent amount of speed and like flexibility to be able to, you know, do an in-between backward shot. I was running back and forth, back and forth, and he was just standing still most of the game. Could I get his contact details? Would you mind just connecting me with him? think I might. We’re not here to talk about tennis today. You can make fun of me all you want. I get some video of this. That would be wonderful. I would be able to put that to use in many places over the coming year. But we are going to talk about business.

04:50
and what we are doubling down on. And me and you, I think we have different strategies, right? About what’s going on. Yeah, absolutely. I think this is actually really timely. have been apart from podcasting, I’ve been really bad at content the last couple of years for a of reasons, but just haven’t done as good. One thing I’ve always, and I’m gonna give you a rare compliment in public here, which is, know, given our little frenemy feud rarely do, but you, I’ve always been impressed that you do a really good job of consistently like,

05:18
blog post every single week, like bam bam bam bam. You put a lot of great content and I would love to get back to being more consistent on that. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about that, but I feel like it’s changed. I like the landscape has changed significantly in the last two to four years. Yeah, so I think it’d be, and I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how I want to try to, where I want to spend my time, which I think you have as well. So it should be a fun episode. Yeah, I don’t know how you want to start this. I mean, I guess I can start by saying what I’m not focusing on much.

05:45
Why would you be willing to start? Because I have a couple themes that are like informing all of my decisions on this. Do you have any thoughts? Like how do you think what’s maybe we can start with saying what’s changed for you or what have you noticed in the broader macro perspective and marketing online that has changed that’s making you kind of, you know, informing how you’re laying your strategy for content. And I’ve got some stuff from Thoughtstar as well. Yeah, well, let me tell you, I’m going to start by saying like, I never learned my lesson.

06:14
So let me elaborate on that. Back in the day, and I’m just gonna pick on Facebook for a minute here, I spent all this time building up my Facebook page, and then they took away the reach. And then the next thing that happened was Facebook Groups. I was like, oh, okay, the reach was much better on Groups. So I started a Facebook group and grew it to, I think, like 20,000 people, and then they took away the reach there too. And then there was Facebook Messenger. I jumped on the bandwagon for Facebook Messenger, made a lot of money off of Facebook Messenger for the last couple years.

06:42
And then they made it pay to play and a lot harder to get reach. And then that audience kind of disappeared. I keep falling into this trap of spending a lot of money and time on social media. then it gets taken away from me. And I feel like with Apple iOS 14 and 15 now with email, like Facebook is, like the advertising is much harder now. So I think I’m finally gonna learn my lesson and focus on things that I own more.

07:12
Yeah, I love the, this is not a plug for Klaviyo, given they’re a sponsor, but I love the owned marketing. I really wish I’d come up with that theme, because I think that’s super, yeah, I think it’s just gonna get more more important. The things that I’ve been thinking about are like, what are my unique advantages? How can I play in a way that other people can’t? When I think about that, I think I enjoy talking to people, I enjoy the podcast medium. I have a, in terms of kind of running the ECF community with the great team that I.

07:40
that we’ve got have access and have perspective on a lot of different e-commerce sellers, have an ability to like put some proprietary data together on that. So that’s one thing I’m thinking about, you know, making a better use of that platform. I think in-person is really important. Coming out of COVID, people want to get together. Relationships are always super powerful when I think about, I mean, I don’t have to go off on this. think anyone who is in business knows how.

08:06
super important and valuable relationships are. And so that’s something that you can’t, know, that Facebook and Google can’t really steal from you. The other thing that is a theme is I think brevity, I’ve always thought brevity despite the length of this answer has been something I really value and appreciate in other people. And I think that’s only increasing. Like people’s attention span is shrinking. When I think about blogs, I have not, I don’t go out five years ago, I might used to go out and read, sit down and spend.

08:34
10, 20, 30 minutes reading a blog. I don’t do that anymore. Much more of what I do today is much more like I need an answer to a question, how do I go get that information and the answer in as time efficient of a manner as possible. There are very small handful of blogs that I read, but very few. And so I think other people are like that too. think that how long your message is from a contra perspective needs short form, I think it’s going to do better going forward. I think it’s just…

09:00
depends on the nature of what you’re trying to research. Like I still read long blog posts if I’m trying to really get to know a subject. But I like what you said, like you had to focus on your strengths and I’m gonna give you a rare compliment here. Good Lord, what type of podcast is this? Like your strength, and I remember this when I first met you, is that you have a really good way with people. So like everyone who meets you, and I’ve been told this by many people, thinks…

09:27
think that you’re like the nicest guy that they’ve ever met. Have you ever heard that before? I have. I don’t think they know me very well. they hung out with me two or three times, they would probably change their mind. So but yeah, so it’s a skill that you should leverage. And I think events like the community, like you’re really good at building community. I mean, that’s definitely one of your strengths is definitely not one of my strengths. So yeah, doubling down on what you’re good at is always a good thing. Yeah, well, thanks, man. I appreciate it.

09:56
We’ll have to cut that part out. Like note to the editor, please cut that last segment. There was a counterpunch there. There was a joke. was thinking about queuing up at your expense. I was like, dude, I can’t hit him when he’s being so nice to me. What is happening to our relationship, Up is down, down is up. This is not normal. For people who haven’t listened to you long, a lot of you know this, but at ECF Live, I made a couple of jokes at Steve’s expense. He does the same at his conference to me.

10:22
And when we got up on stage to actually do like the Q and A for all the speakers at once, the number one question people submitted that got upvoted was why does Andrew hate Steve Chu? Yeah, that’s right. Anyway, this is, know, the universe is bending here. But anyway, we should, enough of the niceties. So what do you, like, what are you doubling down on? What are you focusing on from, especially from a content perspective, you know, kind of going forward? So let’s riff on what you just said, right? People’s attention spans are getting shorter. That is 100 % true.

10:50
So I actually, I actually haven’t told anyone publicly this, but people know I started a TikTok channel. we know Steve, we have seen the dances, the dad dances. Well, I mean, I took 12 months with the dance lessons just so I could start it. So I’m not going to let that money go to waste, right? Steve, I can tell you from seeing the dancing, you wasted the money. I’m sorry. Oh yeah. Well, what about that 50,000 subs, huh?

11:17
Say otherwise, that’s pretty good. Actually, I know I saw that that’s that’s impressive. So within actually, I would say six weeks, I hit like 20,000. And then I think I’ve been doing it for like seven months now. And I’m at like 50 something thousand, it’s actually really easy to build a following there. And I’ve been interviewing a lot of people on the podcast, e commerce brands that have been killing it on tik tok. So you know how things go in waves, like, you know how I talked about like, my journey with Facebook, I think

11:46
My philosophy now is a little bit different. I think you have to kind of catch the wave on certain things and just ride it for as long as they last. And I think TikTok is just really hot now. Who knows? Once it becomes saturated, maybe it’s not going to be the same. Maybe it’s going to take Facebook’s path. But right now it’s pretty easy to build a following on there. Yeah, I think there’s, I think there’s, I’m surprised we don’t have a word, you know, like growth hackers and things like that, all these, these totally overused words. I’m there’s not a field dedicated to just leveraging emerging technologies for marketing. And I think the people who are smart,

12:15
use it as a way to be able to build up your core community list, audience, whatever it is, customer base, but they don’t bank on it they have a model that’s more sustainable underneath it. What I’m curious on the TikTok side, because I have heard, yeah, I’ve chatted with a handful of people too that have seen real success with it. One actually person that is speaking slash spoke, well, this will probably air after it, at our regional event in Austin, built an entire business to a million dollars in about a year off of TikTok. How…

12:43
But I’ve also heard people say it’s really hard, it’s been really spotty, they haven’t seen a lot of traction on it. So have you seen, you’ve got the audience up, do the awesome dance moves, which is great. But do you actually see that translating into like email subscribers, people signing up for your course, people buying your handkerchiefs, things like that? You do. So here’s what’s surprising. And when I think of TikTok, it’s not like you overly advertise anything, you just entertain people. And when it comes to e-commerce, for example, if they wanna find you, they’ll just Google you.

13:12
Right? Or they’ll click the link in the bio, but more often than not, they’ll just Google and find you. Like it’s not hard to find someone from social media. And I suspect this is the case. I don’t know if it’s a hundred percent true, but if you like mention a URL or displayed on the screen, I think they detect that and nerf your reach. Like there’s been a handful of TikToks where I just experimented with that and none of those ever do well. Like they’re the worst performing ones and people want authenticity, right? It doesn’t even have to be complicated. It could just be like,

13:42
giving them a warehouse tour or something like that. People are interested. Yeah, interesting. So are you, how often are you publishing? Are you doing every day? I started out doing twice a day. Like in the beginning. And that’s not a pace I can sustain. So I’m now down to three times a week. I have a nice system now where I actually don’t use the TikTok app to edit. What I do is I just record something on my phone, throw it overboard to my editor, and then she edits it.

14:10
And we can talk about repurposing content here, but she’ll edit it and I’ll post it on TikTok. And then if it falls within 30 seconds, I’ll post it on Instagram reels, which is what Instagram is making you do right now. And then occasionally I’ll try YouTube shorts. I’m actually thinking about putting my YouTube shorts on a completely different channel altogether. Cause I don’t want it to accidentally ruin my existing channel. I haven’t heard of YouTube shorts. I mean, can guess the image. Why, do you need a separate? It’s why do you need a separate platform for shorts versus just YouTube?

14:39
So shorts, like every platform is promoting their short form video right now. And in the event that you attract a lot of subscribers that are just interested in your short form content, like let’s say I really did a dance video, right? And I attracted like 100,000 people who liked that dance video. Well, those people aren’t gonna be interested in e-commerce. And so those subscribers might actually hurt my channel, right? So if I’m gonna do shorts and.

15:07
And oftentimes when I do these TikToks, sometimes they veer off a little bit more random, right? I try to stick to the e-commerce theme, but sometimes it’s more random. I don’t want those people hurting my channel on YouTube. Yeah, that makes sense. And how long does it take? Last question on TikTok and then we can move on to other stuff. how long, when you’re doing it three times a week, how much time are you investing? Because obviously it’s all that’s on the phone. The production value is intended to be not, this isn’t Hollywood production.

15:34
Is it, is it pretty, are you, do have a pretty good flow down for being able to crank these things out? I can do one in like 10 minutes. Okay. Yeah. But mainly the reason why is because I have a blog of like 600 posts that I can just take a piece off of and turn into a tick tock. Right. Right. If I were coming up with things from scratch, it might take me a little bit longer, but it’s really easy to just pick up your phone and do something I made. So I’m trying to convince my wife to do tick tocks for bumblebee linens.

16:04
Like I had the whole strategy in my head. I just can’t necessarily be the one to deliver it, you know, cause I’m a Asian dude. Hacking handkerchiefs wouldn’t work as well. But maybe we’ll get someone to do them. It’s almost like, yeah. Did you say hacking and handkerchiefs? Is that what you said? No, no, no. I like hocking handkerchiefs is what I said. I know. I know. I’m just giving a hard time. Yeah. Yeah. You just pick up your phone. It doesn’t have to be professional. That’s the beauty of it. You can just pump these out.

16:33
Like if I, I might make it more of a priority actually going forward because I can do them quickly, but I just have a lot of other things going on which I have to prioritize and we’re going to get into some of these other things too. Cause cause you’re getting into them also. Yeah. Cool. So tick tocks one, my first one I’m doubling down on is, I kind of did a podcast previously on this the last couple of months with our new director of events, Audrey Smith, but his events like we’re, I mean, normally we’ve done.

17:00
one event per year, one meaningful event per year. this, in October of this year, we’re do two meaningful ones and next 2022, we’ll probably do, probably close to 10 major events between ECF Live and regional meetups and like adventure trips and stuff like that for our members. yeah. And the reason is like, I think when I look at our most powerful source of…

17:28
referrals to the business and also just value created for our members. It’s always in in-person stuff. Like that’s where people connect the most. It’s where they learn the most for their business. It’s also like word of mouth recommendations is a huge driver for our community. It’s also a great vetting way. Like if there’s someone who’s a great member and they refer someone, we trust them. Then, you by proxy, it makes a lot easier to vet that new member. Yeah. And so just events are really powerful. I also think coming out of COVID, like people are

17:57
Especially on the interesting to talk, we don’t know if we want to go to inside baseball with event planning, given not a whole lot of people listening this podcast are event planners. But you and I both do this, Steve, you have a conference as well. And, like we just signed the contract for our, our car, our event, ECF live this year in Norfolk. And it was a, it was a, it was rough this year with all the COVID stuff and contingency planning. And I think there’s, you know, and also even just think how do you do an event with all the different opinions about COVID and safety issues? Anyway, there’s a big barrier to entry right now.

18:25
But I people really want to get back together. And so I think for people who are willing to kind of brave those super choppy waters now to get a jump on that, I think there’s an advantage to be have. So anyway, long answer. I remember this conversation, but I think the year after, the first year I did Seller Summit, I had a talk with you about just running events. And I remember like our both sentiment was like, why the heck are we doing this? Why the heck are we this? Like, it’s not a whole lot of profit and it’s a ton of work. So for you, it?

18:54
Presumably you’re gonna make a profit off of this also, but I mean are there better ways to I guess you’re thinking longer term, right? This is better for the community as opposed to your profit Yeah, 100 % if we didn’t have a community of of merchants and that wasn’t the court, know the core part of our business then I would not be in the event business like Do we make money on a PNL from from the events that we do? know, you see off live and stuff we do but when you take into account the vast amount of time and energy and stress and work that goes into and the risk you take like

19:24
I mean, we just signed a contract for ECF Live and if we have to cancel the event, we’re on the hook for a significant amount of money. And with COVID, I thought it’d be easier to negotiate, but it wasn’t. Anyway, so you do make money, but there’s a lot of risk you take there. And the amount of time you put into it, no, it’s not a profitable enterprise. If we didn’t have a community that the event was really crucial and important for strengthening and building trust and connections, I would not be in

19:56
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.

20:24
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.

20:54
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now back to the show. And there’s something that you said that was actually really important that I want the listeners to hear is that the barriers to entry are a lot higher. I think in my experience, like the harder it is for to do something, the better off you’re at in the end, if you’re willing to kind of brave through it. Totally. Like for example, never in a million years would I hire an event person and throw like

21:24
would you say 10 events a year? Yeah, it’ll be probably back to me. I would say the barriers to entry for that are pretty darn high for someone, right? Like, we’re not going to just wake up one day ago, okay, I’m gonna I’m gonna launch 10 events in a year. Yeah, I mean, it takes it takes lower. I mean, there’s crazy to do that. I really like the saying if you don’t have a hard part to your business, you don’t have a business right? Like, right? have some I mean, that’s it’s pretty self explanatory. But it’s it’s a good mo anyway, so events are what we’re doubling down on next year is my first one.

21:52
Steve back to you, what’s your second one on the list here? Oh, back to me, okay. So I’ve been experimenting with a lot of things. Let’s talk about own marketing a little bit since we were talking about that. Like SMS is just destroying it for me right now on both fronts. My wife quit and Bumblebee linen. So when I first started this maybe a year and a half ago maybe, I was still kind of lukewarm about it because I don’t like getting interrupted with texts from brands or whatever, right?

22:19
But I think that sentiment has changed in just the last year or so. Now I’m much more open to getting texts from the brands that I really care about, in addition to restaurants, hotels, like everyone is doing it, so it’s become part of the norm. And it works super well. Like it blows email out of the water, probably like 8X, I would say. Yeah, how do you, I still hate getting, I’m very binary, I like.

22:48
I really don’t like business communications or marketing on SMS. hate it. But I think you’re right. We’ll probably warming up to it. How do you, what’s the best way you found to get people on that list? Like, especially for like your, the My Wife Quit job. I mean, the hanky side of the things, Bumblebee Linens, it makes a little more sense. But on your, your My Wife Quit side, how do you, how do you get people onto the list for that? Yeah. So My Wife Quit, I try to get the email first because there’s a little barrier to entry there. And then I offer like a bonus lesson that can only be obtained with

23:18
text. Got it. And then whenever I give a workshop, I say you can’t get any of the free bonuses unless you subscribe via text. On the Bumblebee linen side, what’s worked the best is just giving away free product. So here’s what we do now. And this is something that anyone out there listening can do. We just go to our vendor, our existing supplier and say, Hey, what merchandise do you just want to get rid of for cheap? Right?

23:45
And then they sell us, I mean, they’re happy to get rid of it. And then we just give it away for free. The perceived value is really high. So for example, a handkerchief that we’re giving away on our site right now, the perceived value is like maybe 13, $14. But we actually paid 15 cents per piece. And so we’re giving away that free handkerchief in return for an SMS subscriber who’s then going to buy that free handkerchief. Like you can’t get the free handkerchief without buying something.

24:13
So they’ll go get that and they’ll buy something else and they’ll check out and they’re thrilled because they think they got something really valuable. Yeah. That’s smart. Do you do that as a pop-up before even people purchase or do you do it as a part of the purchase flow in, when people are checking out, where do you do it? It’s actually on every single page of the website highlighted in yellow. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. And what’s nice about text is like we have it set up as a two-tap. So if they click on it, it automatically opens the message app and then they just have to hit send.

24:42
And then they instantly get the link to the free handkerchief. Nice. Yeah. That’s cool. What, um, what are you mostly sending texts about? Because I think like you get it is different. You got to be a little more judicious with the texts that you send, especially in a marketing capacity versus email. So what are you, how often are you just blasting people and what kind of things are you, is it sales? Is it special promos? Is it more like new releases? What’s worked best for you? Cause I feel like being careful with what you send, like you, yeah, you just gotta be much more.

25:11
selective. Yeah, so this has taken a little bit to refine and I can talk about both businesses. So for Bumblebee, we at least text once a week. And usually it’s about like a new product release or a sale. Flash sales work really well. Like every month we discount something like 30, 40%. And it’s usually something that we want to just kind of get rid of anyway. And the flash sale works probably the best out of all the texts that we send. So we just rotate.

25:40
there’s like probably like six reasons that we text and we just kind of rotate them out. And occasionally if we’re releasing a new product, okay, so we just released, actually we haven’t sent this text out yet, but by the time this goes live, it’ll be sent. We just released, we had mother daughter aprons before, it’s like matching mother daughter aprons, but now we have daughter doll aprons. Like where you have a matching doll. So we’re just, would, when we launched that, we’re gonna text everyone who purchased an apron for their daughter.

26:09
And that’s just a natural way to, mean, chances are they have a doll also. And what do you, are you using Postscript or Klaviyo? We use Postscript. Yeah. You do. Okay. I don’t want to get into that since both of them are actually sponsors of the podcast of the differences, but yeah, I’m a huge fan of Postscript for text and I’m a huge fan of Klaviyo for email. Yeah. Awesome. So the next one doubling down is for me is podcasting. And this is one that, you know, I’ve been doing this for

26:39
Can I take some credit for this by the way? Cause you were gonna quit your podcast, you remember? Was I gonna the podcast? You were gonna quit your podcast. I don’t think I was gonna quit it. I took a sabbatical maybe four or five years ago. I don’t think I was ever gonna quit it though. Okay. Well whatever it was, I remember I said, what the hell are you doing? Like you were born with this voice for podcasting and you’re gonna take a sabbatical? Like what the heck does that mean?

27:05
I know, slacker. It’s all in the effects boards. You can get effects boards that make anyone sound amazing these days. yeah, think it’s easy to, I think some things is, I’ve been doing it for, just hit 400 episodes, I think actually more like 450 with some of the mislabellings and been doing it for eight years. I think sometimes it’s easy to, if you’ve been doing something a really long time, to get a little bit burned out on it. But I think what I’ve found is trying to identify, because I’ve been doing it more recently. I’ve changed some things up.

27:34
on the podcasting front that has made it easier to do it more consistently. First one was before I was doing like, I think we’ve talked about this, you kind of do them once a week, once or twice a week. And I’ve changed over to that because for a while I would block out a week and I would schedule like 14 podcasts and I would do them and I’d be done for like three months. But A, the content sometimes would get stale and B, I would just be a train wreck at the end. Like I’d come home and people would be like, hey dad, I’d be like, don’t talk.

28:03
me. I’m down. Right. was rough. But also some other tweaks in terms of being comfortable with asking kind of veering off of just the e commerce stuff. I got some feedback from thank you anyone in the community who gave me some candid feedback on this was helpful to try to get a sense of what people liked what they didn’t know one thing I found that was interesting was people weren’t as excited about the really in the weeds tactical stuff as I thought like

28:32
Which kind of actually makes sense like if I want to set up a Facebook ad campaign I’m not gonna do a podcast about it But if I hear some really cool story I think stories can be overdone on that especially the entrepreneurial front But if you have a unique perspective and it’s niche enough to a very specific audience I you may be like a separate bigger store owner people if it’s done well like that kind of stuff so I think podcasting still it’s much more competitive, but I think there’s still plenty of room for for for building connections for getting your name out there

28:59
And it’s an amazing way to connect with people. When I think about people that find out about me or the community or the business, you know, there’s probably at least a third of them are through the podcast. yeah, continuing, I think trying to take the long ball approach on that and changing things around that are that have been made up kind of hard is been useful. So I mean, I was just thinking to myself, like, who do I know personally, that I interact with on a regular basis, who’s willing to listen to me for an hour? I don’t know anybody, actually.

29:28
And yet here are like thousands of people, right? And those connections are made even though it’s funny, like when we go to events or whatever, people, at least people recognize me for the podcast and they feel like they know me because like the stories that I tell on there and everything, it’s sometimes awkward for me because I don’t know anything about the person I’m talking to, but they seem to know all these small facts. It’s just amazing the connection that you make with a podcast. Yeah, agreed. It’s super cool. So podcasting for me, what’s your next one? We got SMS TikTok for you. What’s your number three, Steve?

29:58
I would say YouTube and I want to get into Twitter at the end for sure, but YouTube, you know how we say podcasting, really deep connection. The problem with podcasting is that it doesn’t, it’s hard to get new listeners. Whereas YouTube’s the opposite. Google does a really good job of getting you new viewers and you have a similar connection as your podcast guests. Just it might not be as strong, but on the other hand, they can see you as well, which might be worse in certain cases, I guess.

30:27
But yeah, YouTube has been really good for me. Like I’ve been serious about it for like the last year and a half. And I built that up to 50,000 sub. That actually brings in a lot of leads and a lot of business. Wow. And do you, same kind of content? Well, I’m guessing you’re doing slightly different content from like TikTok. It’s longer form. Do you have, what do you think has been most effective for you on the YouTube? Obviously you’re doing not the content so much, in terms of, especially like calls to action, do you have strong calls to actions on that? Like kind of use the overlaid links or what do you attribute the most success to in terms of?

30:58
It’s a double-edged sword. It’s just like TikTok, right? If you try to guide people off, that’s going to hurt you. So ironically, and this is counterintuitive, but you want to keep people on YouTube. And if they want to find you, they will. By either Googling or they’ll look at your show notes. So have you seen a pretty dramatic increase in your direct traffic over the last, let’s say, year and a half between TikTok and YouTube then? It’s hard to say, but I do know that for the people signing up for my class, I’ll ask them.

31:28
And a lot of them now say that they found me through YouTube. Actually, they find me in a lot of places, but usually what closes the sale is either a YouTube video or a TikTok video, ironically. How does that close the sale? Like it, like they’re on the fence about signing up, they’re on the fence about signing up, but then they’ll see me on TikTok or some other platform, like a different platform than they’re used to seeing me on. And then that makes them sign up. I can’t explain it. I just know what I, from, from asking people.

31:58
Interesting. Do you find with a lot of your content, and this kind of bleeds over into blogging and the people’s shorter timeframe, like when I was going through on earlier this week and putting together a list of content topics to write on and create stuff for the coming months, and it was exclusively super long tail stuff, which is, mean, anyone who’s been in this game for a while knows that converts really well, but hyper long tail, like stuff that is only applicable to people running seven and eight figure stores. And so I was less concerned with

32:27
Hey, what’s the search volume here? It played into it, but that was not the primary thing. The primary thing was, this something that someone who is a perfect fit for our community would be interested in? For example, how do you pick an ERP system? Not great search volume. 80 % of the people who are gonna be searching that article are gonna be great fits for our community. So it’s much more focused on that. And then also with how competitive, more competitive search results have gotten, it’s nicer to have those shorter, those longer tail results that are keywords that are not as…

32:56
you know, not as top of funnel and people are competing for. But also like questions, like a lot of it was really hyper focused on trying to get answering questions, finding people that are looking for something. That was what was guiding my content approaches. How are you doing that on YouTube? Like, are you taking a similar approach to that? Or are you kind of just kind of looking through your archives, like you mentioned on the blog and just anything you feel with guiding your content strategy? as I mean, I don’t, I don’t have time to create separate pieces of content for each.

33:24
So literally it starts with a blog post that turns into a YouTube video. Sometimes that turns into a podcast that turns into a Tik Tok, multiple Tik Toks. Usually it also turns into Twitter. So, so for me, like I’m different, you’re, you’re, you’re trying to target like seven and eight figure sellers, right? Whereas for my content, I’m trying to attract people who are potentially just interested in e-commerce or they already run their stores, but they aren’t quite hitting the levels that they want. So

33:52
I think your strategy is correct. Like if you go after the ones that you know it’s gonna attract your target audience, it’s probably better. Yeah, because otherwise you might get a bunch of people that aren’t gonna sign up anyways, right? If you’re just trying to build that community. Yeah, you’re talking about podcasting and repurposing and I think, have you given, one thing I thought about for a while was trying to have someone take the podcasts that I’ve done and repurpose them into articles. I even used some services and tried this.

34:20
What I found though is that’s really stinking hard to go from a podcast and make it a really good solid blog post. It’s much easier to work from the blog post than like you’re doing smartly. Kind of create a podcast out of that from that very cohesive, coherent blog post. Have you had any success with repurposing podcasts? Because that seems like a really hard game. I have not had much luck, although I did rank number five for your name at one point. And I was going to use that against you because I could just turn that page into anything.

34:49
I’ve actually learned a tremendous I’m just gonna give a shout out to Jeff Oxford here I’ve learned a tremendous amount about SEO in just like the last six months We’re talking about stuff like digging into like Google patents and how things work. So it’s it’s a different game now and It’s almost this is what I don’t like about blogging as much anymore Like you almost if you want search traffic You almost have to write things in a certain way that Google wants even if it’s not your normal writing style You know

35:18
And then you have to ask the question is, okay, should I write this post because Google wants me to write this post and I’m more inclined to rank or should I write something that I really want to write about that might attract people to read it, but will never rank in search? Yeah, definitely different approach. I feel like it’s, you can do both. It just takes a lot of work to like think about the keyword. One thing I’ve always thought is an art is trying to write.

35:45
like titles for things that are keyword optimized, but also appeal to humans. that is a people that can, if you can do that well, you will have a job anywhere on the planet. Cause it, I mean, I’ve tried to do it and it just takes a lot of time to do that well. see, that’s the only case with blogging. Like with YouTube, like you want the clickbait titles. Like it took me like, it probably took me like a year to discover this, but if I come up with a clickbait title, it always does well.

36:15
Because YouTube is less keyword focused. The recommendations can take your video really far. Interesting. You gotta be a little careful though too, because I agree with you, good title writing is an art. You want some curiosity there, some interest to pull people, it’s copywriting. But if you’re too clickbaity, I think you lose a little credibility with people if you do it too much. If you’re trying to build a brand and all of your articles are clickbaity, yeah, you can kind of burn yourself in the intermediate.

36:43
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, there’s obviously a fine line. That’s what makes it interesting though. I mean, it’s a skill that always fascinates me. Dr. Robert Cialdini, he had a latest edition of the book. I actually just had it on the podcast. It an amazing interview. He talks about all these different situations on how to use these persuasion techniques for everything, whether it be titles, selling products. And I learned a ton from this new edition of his book. So recommend you guys go and get it.

37:12
Yeah, he’s a classic. I’ll have to pick that up. What you mentioned, Jeff and yeah, shout out to Jeff Oxford from 180marketing.com. Amazing guy. He’s actually the ECF SEO expert. He’s guys fantastic. What were the what were a couple of the things that you learned? Because I feel like SEO SEO is one of the things sometimes where people rehash and and change a little bit on the fringes. But you know, really, it’s about like links, good content, usability, like how long people say on your site, there’s kind of some fundamentals that haven’t changed a wild amount.

37:42
Was there anything groundbreaking that you’ve learned from him over the last six months that you were like, wow, this is totally new information or kind of in that vein?

37:52
I just wanted to let you know that tickets for the 2022 Seller Summit are now on sale over at Sellersummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker that I invite

38:19
is deep in the trenches of their own e-commerce business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year we cut out ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets will sell out fast and in fact we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year in revenue,

38:46
We are also offering an exclusive Mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 4th to May 6th. And as of right now, we’re almost already sold out of Mastermind tickets and we’ll be raising the price every month leading up to the event after Cyber Monday. For more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s sellerssummit.com or just Google it. Now back to the show.

39:12
Yeah, some of the things that are groundbreaking is he actually hired this guy. He’s from Turkey. And maybe you’ll have to have him on to talk about this, but basically he’s managed to rank sites with a lot of traffic without any link building whatsoever by structuring the content in a certain way. So I’ve actually adopted some of those techniques, just creating the right content silos and manipulating your existing page.

39:41
or ranked use, I should say, or link juice to the appropriate articles to help Google along and rank. it ever heard about like PageRank sculpting? Are you familiar with that? Like that old school term? I feel like I thought that was kind of a thing of bygone eras. And was this was this a brand new site that he used to rank or was this a site that had something? This Turkish guy has a ton of case studies where actually he just hit go on a site.

40:11
And within like a month, it already has like, I 10,000 visits a month or something like that. It’s crazy. Wow. Yeah. Um, there’s a lot of new things I learned just about like topical authority and I mean, you’re right. SEO gets rehashed and the fundamental principles that we all know about are still true. But if you can establish topical authority in a certain subject, then you don’t really necessarily need backlinks.

40:41
to rank. Interesting. I have to have him on talk about it. Or if you interviewed him, did you have him on a podcast when you look up to your podcast as well? I’m actually doing a case study with him right now where I’m using my sites as guinea pigs. And I’m going to just document everything that we’ve done. And we’ve done a lot. I mean, it’s like, I can’t even remember everything. We had this big master spreadsheet of all the things that we’ve done. And the thing is with SEO, you just kind of do everything. And then you just, you don’t know what you did, did what, as long as the trend is up, it’s all good.

41:11
So let’s talk about Twitter. Yeah. Yeah, this is an interesting one. so Twitter has been something I’ve been on Twitter for probably close to eight years, maybe more. And I’ve kind of come ebbed and flowed with how engaged I’ve been. I noticed recently, like, and shout out to Bill, Bill D’Alessandro. He’s a great follow on Twitter if you’re not following him at Bill D.A. But he would do some of these tweets that he’d write some tweet storms that were just, you know, they got insane traction.

41:42
And recently spent a little bit of time writing one up about kind of the state of e-commerce and added a few kind of stats from the community and a little perspective on a few things, a little opinion, some memes. And I think it was hopefully had some value in it, but it only took a couple hours to put together. Anyway, it got really good traction. It got picked up, people retweeted it. And it seemed in terms of like people finding out about, yeah, myself and the community, was very effective. Anyway, I thought that was interesting.

42:10
Twitter, especially if you’re B2B, is still relatively, it’s not nearly as good as it was five years ago, but it’s still, you can get through to your audience in a reasonable way. Although one exception I actually did try, I was curious, because that tweet did really well. So I was I wonder how it would work if I promoted this tweet, just see if it would, you know, how that would work. Yeah, and so I actually did a little experiment and was planning on spending two or three hundred bucks on it, just not very much at all. But I started promoting it and…

42:39
I thought Twitter would be smart enough to be able to send it to people who are interested in e-commerce and direct-to-consumer and digital marketing and things like this. Not at all. All of the people who liked it and retweeted it and engaged after the organic surge had died down and it was just the promotion, were all 67-year-old farmers in Nebraska or mothers of dog razor kennels in Florida or

43:09
people with like super left or super right political, like nobody, and it just seemed, and I don’t know if it was, I don’t know what was going on, but either Twitter’s algorithm was really bad or it was a bunch of fake accounts or something, but I was pretty unimpressed with the paid reach that in terms of the targeting on Twitter. And granted, I didn’t do like a, there’s different types of campaigns in Twitter. I think the advertising, if you actually put just in a, do an advertising campaign on there as opposed to a promoted tweet, the targeting is much better.

43:35
but yeah, was pretty underwhelmed with you. mean, can comment on that a little bit. Yeah, go for it. So by the way, I was not a Twitter believer. If you asked me this eight months ago, I would have said I’m not a believer. But a couple of things, I can’t remember who I talked to. Eric Su was one of them. He’s like, you need to be on Twitter. He told me that two years ago and I was like, oh yeah, whatever, Eric. And then I talked to Chase Diamond, if you guys don’t know who he is, he’s the master email marketer.

44:05
And he was like, dude, you got to be on Twitter. And I was like, okay, well, I don’t know anything about Twitter. And he’s like, okay, here’s my guy, try him. And I just had this benefit. just to be clear, like I’m doing a case study with this guy also about growing Twitter, my Twitter account, and he’s actually handling my Twitter account. He’s literally, he’s listened to a lot of my podcasts. He has all my blog posts and he’s watched a good portion of my YouTube videos and he’s just forming tweets out of those.

44:36
And what works the best are these, I can’t remember the term for it, but they’re like tweets that are like 10 tweets long. Do you remember what? It’s not a tweet storm, tweet, thread. That’s what it’s called a Twitter thread. And he’s just posting my content just kind of in this mini form and it gets a ton of likes and a lot of leads. There was one, there’s one Twitter thread that he posted.

45:03
that got me like 250 email subs per day for an entire week. It was nuts. Just purely organic? Purely organic. then like I was getting all these DMs, which I’ve learned to respond to, because you’re establishing conversations. On the advertising front that you were talking about, instead of advertising using Twitter, it’s better to just take someone with a huge Twitter following and say, hey, can I just pay you to tweet this, you know, like once a day or something like that? And that works better.

45:33
It seems like it’d be hard to find people. I… It like it’s working really well for you. I would have a really hard time outsourcing my Twitter because I feel like you’re building kind of your personal brand. are… I love Twitter. One thing I love about Twitter is there are people that you would never be able to get to reply to an email to you. But on Twitter, especially if you’ve built up a little bit of an audience or following there, or even if not a lot of times, you can reach out to them in their DMs and drop them a quick note and they’ll get back to you. Like in terms of access, it’s amazing.

46:01
I would feel weird having somebody. But it’s own content, right? It is, but somebody else’s, I guess it’s kind of like the akin to like if somebody is ghostwriting a book for you or not. It’s true. I mean, obviously you would never let me control your Twitter, for example. You know what? We could have a mutual destruction and have a day every year where we flip each other’s, we control each other’s Twitter accounts. That could be fun. So. But I’ve been shocked actually, which I’ve been pleasantly surprised with.

46:32
people on Twitter looking for business stuff. I think it’s a really good avenue for that. I’m not so sure about e-commerce though. I actually don’t, do you know a lot of e-commerce brands on Twitter? I wouldn’t say e-commerce brands. People don’t go there to, like if you’re thinking about like, you’re selling stuff or pushing content for sales. No, I think it’s much more. Twitter’s great for politics, for news, for marketing, for business, for startups, stuff like that. So I know a lot of e-commerce and agency.

46:59
people in the e-commerce ecosystem, owners or source providers on Twitter, the marketing of customers not so much. Yeah, yeah, that’s what I was discovering too. Yeah, you’re right about Bill. I actually follow Bill and presumably he writes his own stuff, but they’re really good. They’re like pithy, they’re really concise and they’re really interesting tweets. Yeah, he does a great job. I think it’s, yeah, think it’s, yeah, he does a really nice job with them. So at BillDA, follow him if you’re.

47:28
Yeah, think the secret to blowing up on Twitter is Twitter threads. to me, I write a blog post a week, you turn that into a thread, and everyone thinks it’s like the best thing since sliced bread. Right? Well, think part of it is because it makes you be concise, right? Like, if, if you can, people don’t have time, people are busy, they want to know that they want to know the forget the 80 20, they want to give me the 2 % 98 here, right? Like, what’s our read you have time for your 2000.

47:54
word blog posts, like what’s the top 5 % of this I need to know. think that’s why Twitter is good, especially if you can be kind of a little snarky, self-deprecating, if you can make it entertaining and like tie those two things together, I think things can do well. So I mean, this, this whole concept bothers me about society today. Like these quick things, like you don’t have time to do anything. That’s just not my personality. You know what mean? Like I’d rather delve deeply into a topic than just give me like the first

48:22
the quick five second version of it. Cause you can’t go into any amount of depth on any like TikTok, Twitter. mean, you’re not going to get any depth. YouTube is different. That’s why I like YouTube better. Agreed. And yes, in terms of commentary on society. Yeah. We should, we could do another follow up podcast about, know, why the systemic problems this may be pointing to. But I do think, I also think there’s something to be said for like from, as an exploratory, if you, if you’re looking to like, get a high level pulse on something quickly.

48:51
Twitter’s great. If you’re looking to kind of get up to speed on the latest news in a topic quickly, Twitter’s fantastic. Or like high level trends, interesting things. Yeah, I think those are great for that. If you’re in exploratory phase, yeah, Twitter’s fantastic. If you’re trying to become an expert, world class expert in email marketing, yeah, Twitter will get you kind of pointed in the right directions in the right places, but you’re not gonna get your email marketing, digital marketing, MBA from Twitter. Yeah, I I think of it as a big funnel like Twitter and

49:20
TikTok are like kind of top of the funnel. You get people interested. You’re a little bit more vague, high level. And then maybe they’ll graduate to YouTube or the podcast. And then once they sign up for your email list, those are like your true bottom of funnel people. Yeah. I’ve got one more here in terms of doubling down on, and this is more of an experiment, not sure how it’s gonna work. Don’t judge me until you hear me all the way out here because if I would have been in the judgment shoes for sure. we are traditionally, we haven’t, we’ve never done any marketing for

49:50
for e-commerce in terms of community members. We’ve always, partially because we haven’t wanted to grow super fast, partially because we’ve generally had a pretty reasonable pipeline of people coming in. But with the events that we’re building up this next year, we’ve selected some cities where we really want to try to invest heavily in the community there, a handful of cities based on just the fact that we have a good group of members there already and kind of a somewhat of a great base to grow from.

50:15
And to that front, like I want to be able to proactively reach out and try to connect with the e-commerce store owners in that city to help our efforts and buffer our efforts. And so for the first time ever, I’m going to try a little bit of cold outreach via email. And there’s a tool that I’ll be testing out called GrowBots. And it’s kind of a database of different direct emails. So you can go through, you can screen it. And it’s nice because it doesn’t just, you don’t just blast it out to a list.

50:43
It’ll pull for you, it’s a very curated list you can build and you go through, you set the criteria, pretty, pretty in-depth criteria on things. And then you can screen each email and each contact first to be like, hey, is this actually someone that I should be reaching out to or is it way off base? And then it helps you kind of follow up with them and maintain a healthy email list and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, gonna be trying that going forward on a limited scale and see how that works. But…

51:08
Yeah, so just to be clear, you’re not broadcasting. You’re literally curating a list and then emailing them individually kind of. Yes. And you mean, you set up some things where you can set up. You can set up some flows that make it a little bit easier, but it’s much more it’s much more customized and much more targeted. It’s not like, oh, hey, I want to be the email list of all of these, you know, all the people who own dogs in North America and you blast it out. It’s much more like a here’s a broad criteria. Here’s a list. can quickly see if if these people match it and then using

51:38
you know, you can email people kind of in a more efficient manner, but you know they’re high quality leads because you’ve kind of scrubbed them at a high level. so if I get an email from you that says, dear Steve, we would like to offer you free contents for your blog in return for a backlink. We won’t be doing that. Those are the worst, worst emails in the entire world. see how that goes, you know, who like chase, maybe you should talk to chase diamond. used to do a lot of cold email. Yeah. Um, and I think it actually works. It’s just,

52:08
hit or miss, right? It’s a numbers game, I think. I think it’s a numbers game, I also think it’s a partially I think it’s also a targeting game and a writing in a psychology game. I think there is a lot of art behind writing good outreach emails. I think people do it really poorly. A lot of 95 % of the emails you get are their cold emails are horrific emails. But it takes into account like if you need to think about psychology, keeping things again, going back to brevity, keeping things brief.

52:36
get to the point in one or two sentences, have a really strong value prop, kind of leave, you know, have some mystery in it, good subject lines. Like there’s a lot to, I love when I get a great cold email, I love it. It’s fantastic. But it happens so rarely that it’s an anomaly. So I think there’s a lot behind, you can do an entire course, I think, or training session, multi-day training session on writing good cold emails. I’m curious though, are you going to use personalization in these cold emails? Like are you going to

53:05
talk about their company? I definitely will test that. Yeah, absolutely. In terms of having some stuff where you look at them and and yes, we’ll absolutely test that. mean, for me, like a good cold email always involves them knowing something specific about me. Yes, that is beyond Steve. I love your last blog post titled exact title. Yeah, it was fantastic. I learned so much anyway. would. Yeah. Yeah. So if you do it like that, I’m sure it’ll work pretty well, actually.

53:36
There was this one, I think the best outreach email I ever got was this dude who just whipped out all these very detailed facts about me that he clearly had listened to a ton of podcasts or watched YouTube videos. And then he, I think he did like a whole case study on my site and how it could improve. And he put together like a video, like it was a lot of work, but it worked. I got on the phone with this guy. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s, mean, it’s hard cause it takes a lot of, you can’t just, you know,

54:05
buying a list and 50,000 people and emailing them, yeah, you may get a couple hundred people respond, but you play the numbers game, you burn that list up pretty quickly unless you’re actually customizing it well. Yeah. So just anyone who gets an email from Andrew at ecommercefield.com, you might want to put them in your promotional folder now ahead of time. Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Steve. oh man, it feels even weird even mentioning this because it’s, know, it’s just like cold outreach. I you’re it like that, personalized.

54:35
I don’t really even consider that spam anymore. You know what I mean? Yeah. It’s gotta be highly personalized and relevant. yeah. Yeah. That takes a lot of work. Well, what any, we’re kind of getting close to an hour here. Any final kind of parting thoughts or stuff we didn’t cover in terms of things you’re doubling down on apart from smack talking your tennis instructor? I mean, if I were to summarize everything, like I’m just kind of doubling down on my personal branding because that’s something that no one can ever take away from me. And even if I decide to do something else outside of

55:04
selling manly handkerchiefs, for example, like just having that personal brand will allow me to do whatever I want. You’re doing something similar. I haven’t, it’s actually funny, I feel like I’m doing less about personal branding as much and more about just like targeted content for, really targeted for our community that is not beholden to other platforms as much. Have you, I’ve never seen you like, I think you need to do some like.

55:30
some modeling slash merchandising of the handkerchiefs. I’ve never seen you do this before, Steve, like a scissor reel of you and the hankies. I think that would be very cool. You know what’s funny? I’ve almost gotten to the point. So my wife doesn’t like doing any of that stuff. So I’ve actually almost gotten to the point where, screw it. I’m just gonna try to be the face of Bumblebee Linus and just see what the hell happens, right? I think you should do it.

55:53
There’s absolutely, there is zero chance I would do any memes or make any kind of, you know, any kind of entertaining repurpose material from this. I guarantee that wouldn’t happen. I would let, will give you as much feedback as you’d like. think that sounds like a great idea. I am going to, it is on my plan. Probably the first of next year, it’ll probably be the year of TikTok for Bumblebee linens. I’ll just put together a strategy. We’ll just probably batch film, kind of like how you do your podcasts in the old days, where I’ll just batch film like, you know, three months worth and then just.

56:23
schedule them out. That’s the plan. Yeah. All right, Andrew, thanks a lot for coming on. You’re right. I think usually we make fun of each other, but I think I’m just tired from my tennis lesson. So I wasn’t really on my game today. But if any of you enjoyed this interview with Andrew, then you should go to ecommercefuel.com and check out his community of seven and eight figure e-commerce entrepreneurs. I know that when I started my online store, it was a very lonely process.

56:53
And so if you want to find a community of vetted entrepreneurs where you can kind of bounce ideas off another, ask questions, share like war stories, I highly recommend the forum. I believe I was one of the charter members. Is that right, Andrew? I think you were actually. Yeah. I’ve been with it for long time.

57:13
Yeah, you haven’t logged in though recently though, because otherwise you would have noticed that your account has been restricted due to inactivity and general bad behavior. But I mean, I’m sure when you were in there a year ago, it was great. So obviously, you know your friends aren’t in your community when they don’t mention it when you ban them. And then Andrew also runs a bunch of events. Like the flagship one is going to be in March in Norfolk, Virginia. That one’s only to community members though, is that right? It is, yeah, it’s just for community members. Okay, yeah.

57:42
If you become a member of the community, which I encourage you to join, then you can go to this really incredible event that’s held once a year. Uh, actually 10 times a year now, right? But those are regional events, right? Yeah. Our big one is ECF live that we have for community members, but doing a lot more stuff. Most, almost all of our events are for, for community members, because it’s, we’re trying to, yeah, just build a great community of people who know each other and trust each other and can help each other. But, um, yeah, most, almost all the events are for, for community members. So, and if you enjoy listening to his smooth, buttery voice,

58:12
He also runs an awesome podcast over at eCommerce Fuel where he brings on entrepreneurs also. he he talks a little bit, I would say more about the psychological aspects, right? Of entrepreneurship, you’ve been branching out to that as well. Yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s fun to talk about things that a little bit, not directly eCommerce, but like, do you balance family and business? How do you, know, did one recently on like living in two places, did another one about like, did some of the stuff that’s not that entrepreneurs

58:42
deal with as well as opposed to just setting up Facebook ads. Yeah. Well, Andrew, thanks a lot for coming on, man. Always good to have you. Yeah, this is fun, man. Always love catching up and giving each other a hard time. A few people I enjoy ripping on and having rip on me as much as you, so it’s always fun.

59:00
Hope you enjoyed that episode and if you enjoyed listening to Andrew today, go over to ecommercefuel.com and check out the podcast on your favorite podcast app. For more information about this episode, go to myvotequitterjob.com slash episode 382. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandon card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot.

59:27
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. I also want to thank Postscript, 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 can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash dv. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash dv. Now I talk about how I use these tools in my blog,

59:57
And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce 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.

00:25
Always super excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store and it depended on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who is shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy.

00:51
Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers, depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there’s full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them 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. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your customer contact list.

01:17
And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source for my e-commerce 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 e-commerce stores and e-commerce is their only 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.

01:45
Not only that, but it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. 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. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast, which I released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience.

02:12
No topic is off the table and we tell like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:28
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today I’m excited to have John McDonald on the show. And John is someone who I recently met at Nick Shackelford’s Geek Out event in San Diego, California. And I’m really glad that I went. John is the founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization firm that has achieved results for some of the largest brands, including Adobe, Nike, Xerox, The Economist, and more. So basically he understands how to convert customers. So in this episode, you will learn what it takes to improve your conversion rate.

02:56
And today we’re going to talk about the best conversion rate practices for an e-commerce store. And with that, welcome to the show, John, how are you doing today? Great. Thanks for having me. So before we start, John, there’s probably people listening out there who don’t know who you are. Give me the quick background and how you actually ended up doing conversion rate optimization. Yeah. So the long story short is that started the good about 12 years ago, and I have a computer science degree and a visual art degree. did a dual major in college.

03:26
And I decided that I wanted to go into web development. I started working at agencies along the way and then eventually ended up starting The Good, as I mentioned about 12 years ago. We started out as a dev shop building e-commerce websites. Within about 18 months to two years, I quickly realized that that was becoming a commodity. Even back then, Shopify was just on the horizon. You could kind of see it starting to grow.

03:51
in terms of SaaS offerings, Magento was really the king of the Sahara at that point in time, but very few people enjoyed that. What I found though was that our clients didn’t really appreciate the code behind the site. They just liked that it worked. What I did was I built into every single contract a three-month optimization. I called it continual optimization at the time.

04:19
I did that for two reasons, The first reason was I wanted to set my team up for success. No e-commerce site launches without some bugs. I was like, I want to be upfront about that with you as a client and I want you to know we’re going to be here. So many agencies at the time and still to this day follow a launch and leave philosophy. They would launch a site for the client and then be like, hey, you want things fixed, you want additions, you got to pay us to do that. I would just bake that into our contract.

04:48
And then, you know, I realized pretty quickly that clients really appreciated that optimization more than getting the site built, as I mentioned. Yeah. You know, it could have been two tin cans with a string between as long as it processed orders appropriately, they were happy. And we’re talking about some big brands too. And I was just shocked to find that out. So I really went around the country interviewing all of our best clients and said, you know, what, why did you choose to work with the good? And

05:18
All of them said that it was because we had that three-month optimization. They all confirmed to me that development was becoming a commodity. They did not really care about the development quality as long as it worked and was maintainable. They really cared that we were going to be there for three months and that we were doing at the time, which was very early on, testing. A-B testing, were using Optimizely, which was the only tool at the time with their salt.

05:47
And we were doing things like user testing and surveying after we had launched the site. And so all of that really turned into 18 months after starting the company, to me saying, you know what, that’s what people value. Why are we doing anything else? And so we did a hard pivot to focusing exclusively on conversion rate optimization as it’s become known over those years. And

06:11
It’s really been a wild journey to watch it kind of blossom and now it’s a buzzword everyone. It’s almost a commodity to that point. It’s definitely not a commodity. mean, I agree with you like buying a theme these days for any shopping cart like a Shopify or BigCommerce. It’s par for the course. What’s funny though is most of those themes that you see on there, they’re beautiful, but they aren’t necessarily optimized for conversions. So I want to make this episode as actionable as possible for the people who are listening.

06:40
So I figured let’s start with some low hanging fruit. What should just everyone be doing for immediate results, best practices? Well, I think the first thing is talking to your consumers. Very few brands, when they’re starting out, have enough traffic to actually be doing A-B testing. That’s where, when they talk about optimization, that’s often where they go first. Or they start looking at a laundry list of best practices that…

07:06
really is not going to be that helpful because it’s not tailored to them and it’s not addressing the concerns that their consumers are having. So the first thing they need to do is just start talking to your consumers. I’m not talking about putting pop-ups up that ask for survey online. I’m talking about actually emailing every consumer that makes a purchase or every abandoned cart and just saying, can you tell me about your experience? What’d you like? What’d you not like? One thing that even smaller brands could be doing is just

07:36
take a laptop and go to your local coffee shop and say, help buy you a coffee. If while we’re waiting for it to be made, you take a spin through your site, my site and tell me what you’re thinking as you do that. And I’ll ask you to do things like find the right t-shirt for you. Really broad generic prompts from there. to my listen to this by the way, because I actually used to call all of my abandoned car customers. It was kind of like stalkers, but I call them and I would ask them why they didn’t buy. And I bet you learned a lot, right? I did. In fact,

08:05
I’ll just give a quick example for the people listening out there when we first launched our aprons I noticed we had a pretty high abandoned cart, right and It was because we labeled these aprons by age like six to ten I think two to four I can’t remember the exact age ranges But people were it was ambiguous whether people who had larger kids or smaller kids whether they could actually fit in those evenings And so we changed the descriptions around and that fixed that problem, but I never would have found that out had I not

08:35
hauled a bunch of people. It’s funny you say that. We worked with Easton baseball, which you’re not familiar with Easton. They make baseball bats majority of their other revenue and about 99 % of Little League baseball swings are done with an Easton bat. And when they brought us on, they said, hey, you know, we’re having this huge issue with our online sales where we’re getting massive amounts of returns and B, we just aren’t converting as well as we should be.

09:04
So what do we do? We start talking to consumers and we found that it was the Little League players were going on the website and saying, mom and dad, this is the bat that I want. Or the Little League players are going on the website and just being overwhelmed with the choices. If you can imagine you pull up a bat website online, all the bats in the pictures look the same. It’s just a big wall of bats. You have no idea what the difference is between the colors, what the technology is.

09:32
And what we found in talking to people is the parents were even more confused than their children. And the problem was the parents were saying, know, I don’t know what this technology means. And Easton thought they were being, you know, really leading the pack by coming out with all this new technology, which was great, but they were giving it really technical terms. So they would use some branded term instead of just saying, hey, this technology reduces the sting in your hands when you hit the ball, right?

10:02
And so what we found was that we needed a way to guide these parents through the purchasing process. Now, the biggest issue that Easton was having was parents were returning these bats. And the reason they were getting returned is every bat is certified for the league the child is playing in. And parents didn’t know what certifications were allowed. So a kid would get up, would do batting practice and everything with their new bat, and they’d be really excited about it. Then they’d get up to bat and…

10:30
the umpire would not let them swing with the new bat. But it was already all dinged up and parents would get really, really frustrated, call Easton and say, hey, this isn’t a bat that my kid can use. Can I return it? So what we did is we put on the site a bat finder. Pretty simple. based on consumer research and just talking to consumers, we understood that parents need guidance in what bat they should buy their kids. We said, okay, let’s just ask four simple questions.

10:58
What kind of hitter is your kid? Are they swinging for the fences? Are they looking to bunt the ball, just get on base? Who knows, right? That’s going to alter the type of bat. In addition to that, what league are they in? Because then you can break it down by certification. Then from there, we were able to ask about height and weight, and that would help determine what size bat. From a handful of these small questions that are pretty obvious in hindsight, we were able to reduce the returns dramatically.

11:28
and increased conversions by over 240%. And it was just, you know, by doing little things like that, parents felt much more comfortable buying. They didn’t have to go to a retail store and they could whittle down this wall of bats online to three or four options that were different price points. So they could choose based on price, what would make most sense for them. Yeah, no, that’s a great story. So you recommend that anyone who’s just launching, just call the first couple of customers. I interrupted you when you were…

11:57
your thought there. Which questions do you ask exactly? Well, first thing is always just a brief, know, tell me about your experience, right? You’d be surprised is that if you leave it more open-ended, you’re gonna get better answers. Most people think you ask better questions, you get better answers, and well, that’s true. That happens further down the line. You really want to start broad and let people talk. Don’t interrupt them. Don’t, you know, take away from their thought process.

12:24
And this is where things like user testing really come in, where you just say, something broad like find the right bat for you. And just doing that, we were able to understand that they were like, I don’t know where to start. There’s a huge wall of bats here. Well, how do I filter these down? How do I find the one that’s right for my kid? So, you know, that’s the first thing is just start broad, then get more specific based on your products. Okay, now, you know what, you know, you don’t understand what bat is the right bat for your kids league.

12:54
Okay, let’s assume that it’s these four bats. Now what’s your next step? Right? And you just start going through that decision making process. And the whole point here is just to understand, you know, if your website’s a funnel, which most people get that concept, what are the steps in that funnel that you want your consumers to be taking? And then optimize that path by making it as easy as possible. Consumers are only at your website for two reasons. They have a pain or a need and they feel like your site or service

13:22
can help them solve that pain or need. And if they determine that it can, they want to convert as quickly and easily as possible and get on with their lives. So really anything that’s outside of those two is just adding barriers to the process. So you just really want to understand what those pains or needs are and then how to get them to find that product or service and then convert. For that Easton Bat example that you just gave,

13:51
Did they include that survey or whatever the questionnaire, guess, front and center, above the fold? Yes. So the BatFinder was the main call to action of what we put everybody into. In terms of an online survey, we didn’t actually have one online. I find that disruptive to the user flow and your participation rates can be pretty low. And what we also find is when you do an online survey, it turns into more of people asking questions that should be for customer service.

14:21
So the quality ends up being fairly low. Instead, we recommend just doing one-on-one or actually running user testing as opposed to running an online survey. Yeah, so just a quick plug for PickFu here. For $25, you can just ask arbitrary people to go do something and tell you about their experience. So I run this from my store. After every redesign, I say, hey, if you were interested in these products, would you shop at this store?

14:49
And sometimes I tell them to look for product just like you suggested and tell me about their experience. And sometimes they write these really long paragraphs, which are very helpful. Yeah, there’s some great tools out there for that now. the fact that you’re doing that customer research will put you in the top 10 % of e-commerce sites because not enough for doing it. would say out of the brands I talked to, even massive corporations, probably 90 % of them,

15:17
are not actively doing customer research in this manner on a regular basis. 90 %? 90 % we talk to. Even the big guys. mean, we work, you mentioned all those brands we work with. I’ll spare their souls right now, but I would say that the reality is, first thing when we come in is, here, customer research can you share with us? And they’re like, well, we haven’t done any for a very long time in terms of onsite research. Well, that’s good to know.

15:46
So if you guys are listening out there and you start doing this, you can probably beat out a lot of the bigger guys by being small and nimble. Exactly. So what are some of the common mistakes that you’ve seen people make then with the clients that you’ve worked with? Well, think that anything that interrupts that customer journey. So what do mean by that? Well, if I could eliminate two things from the internet, one of them is going to be email pop-ups. I knew you were going to bring that up. So yeah, let’s talk about that.

16:16
Yeah, so here’s the reality. So many brands interrupt the consumer’s journey right away. Now think of your site like a retail store. If I were to walk into a retail store and an associate would jump out in front of me with a clipboard and say, you know, give me your email address. I probably would have a pretty negative reaction to that, right? It’s not the journey I’m looking for. I’m coming to browse the store. I have a pain or need I’m here to solve.

16:46
and you’re interrupting me. Your first thing you’re doing is saying, give me your information. And it’s like, well, I don’t even know if you can help me yet. Why do I want to do that? And so I think that that’s the first challenge is you’re just getting people off of their shopping journey. The second thing is that the quality of emails you’re going to get, it’s going to go down dramatically, which has a long tail effect. It’s going to hurt your deliverability.

17:13
It’s going to start hurting your conversion rates overall. Most people look at these and they say, you know, John, these email signup forms work. And it’s like, well, okay, yeah. Do they collect more email addresses? Perhaps. What’s the quality of those email addresses? What damage are you doing else to your site? Right. Not only that, but most brands then offer discount. They do a dollar percentage off, which is the easy button.

17:40
They hit that easy button and say, I’ll give you 10 % off for your email address. The reality is you are now telling consumers who have just come to your site, have not researched your products, have not found the one that’s right for them, haven’t even seen pricing perhaps. And the first thing you’re telling them is our products aren’t worth what we list them in charge for. They’re worth 10 % less. And so you’re immediately putting people in that mindset of discount brand. And that’s not a sustainable place to play. It just isn’t.

18:10
Am I all for growing email list? Yes, 100%. I know you had Chase Diamond on the podcast and he and I have become good friends. know we all hung out at Geek Out. He is great at these email pop-ups and I agree with him. Emails should be your number one converting channel. It should be the highest revenue earner for you. But that assumes you have a quality email list.

18:36
And so you have to really think about where you’re collecting those emails and what you’re doing in exchange for those emails.

18:45
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.

19:13
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.

19:43
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. So a couple of questions on that. So the average conversion rate is 2%, right? And unless you have someone to bring something to or some way to bring people back, that means 98 % of your people are leaving and probably aren’t going to come back, right? So how do you mitigate that? So what do you recommend instead then? Well, I think that

20:11
you should be really focusing on under, first of all, understand that it’s okay if 98 % leave as long as you convert those 2%, right? It doesn’t really matter if what your conversion rate is, as long as it’s always improving. So yeah, there’s an average out there, but you know, really just focusing on your own conversion rate and saying, what can I do to increase that? You know, day over day, month over month, et cetera. That’s really where you’re going to see gains. But the reality here is,

20:41
It’s okay to collect email addresses, just collect them within the page, right? Have it in your footer on every page. But you don’t necessarily need to have it be a pop-up that interrupts the flow as soon as somebody gets to your site. I’m all for exit intent. I think that works extremely well. know, people are showing intent they’re gonna leave. Okay, hit them up with something. But I would do a promotion, not an offer. So what I mean me an example. Yeah. Okay.

21:08
maybe you have free shipping orders over $50 for everybody. Say, hey, you know what? Give us your email address. We’ll give you free shipping on any dollar value for your first order, right? Doesn’t cost you anything. Doesn’t degrade your brand, but gives them a benefit, right? So it does cost you something, It costs you something. Excuse me. Yes. Very little comparatively, right? Uh, you could do free gift with purchase.

21:32
Right? So you could do something around bundling. So, Hey, if you want, here’s a special price on this bundle. In a sense, you’re giving a discount, but you’re not doing it in the same psychological method as just a dollar percentage off. one thing we do with our site and just, just kind of commenting on what you just said, we offer a free handkerchief for anyone who gives us their SMS number. And that actually works really well.

21:59
You can’t fake an SMS number like you can an email, which is why I’ve been leaning more towards that avenue. Is that generally what you’re talking about here? Yes, exactly that. And I do see the same trend. I see a lot of the brands we’re working with having a lot of success with SMS. And I agree, it’s because you can’t fake it. You could go get a Google voice number or something, but it’s a lot harder to do that.

22:27
then everyone has a Gmail address. Everyone has that extra junk email that they sign up for all this stuff just to get the discount and then never open or read those anymore, which hurts your deliverability, right? So it’s one of those things where really just making sure that you’re offering something that is of value to the customer likely doesn’t cost you any more than what you were doing with the dollar or percentage off. But…

22:56
is not that same psychological trigger. Right. Here’s just my general philosophy on discounts versus giving away free product. When you give away a free product, chances are your margins, like if your margins are pretty good, like the perceived value of that product greatly exceeds what you’re giving away. Whereas if you give away a percentage discount and your margins are pretty high, you’re giving away a lot more money than just giving away a free product.

23:22
Plus a free product just sounds better to me psychologically as well. A hundred percent. That is very, very accurate. I always say that discounting is not optimization. It is margin drain. So many brands default to discounting to increase conversions when they don’t need to and they’re artificially hurting their margins. So do you recommend, okay, so you said Exit and Ten pop-ups are acceptable for you.

23:52
And then emails in the footers, no one really ever signs up there. Like I have one in my footer too. mean, if you don’t use pop-ups altogether, then it seems like the only way to get an email is through checkout, right? I think that card abandonment and getting that email in that way is extremely effective. baking the form into your page where people have intent to purchase or interested in your product is something that can work extremely well for you.

24:22
Yes, I agree, very few people are gonna do it in your footer. The reality is you want it there for those high intent signups. And so that it’s on every page makes it easy. But I agree with you, most people are going to do the exit intent. They’re going to do something where it’s along their journey perhaps, or exactly when they’re leaving. But again, there are lots of ways to grow your contact.

24:49
list, right? You could do it through ads on a specific landing page. Hey, you know, give us your email address, get a free handkerchief as you mentioned, and we’ll, you know, just be very open to what you’re going to do. We’ll email you once a week and we’re going to send you, you know, promotion once a week, or we’re going to send you the latest product launches. Just be really upfront about how often you’re going to email people, what you’re going to email them about, and that you respect their privacy, aren’t going to, you know, sell their email address, et cetera.

25:19
Okay. So that was your first point, which we talked about 10 minutes on already. What was the second thing if you had your druthers? Well, I think that the other thing that I would I would look to remove would be the discounts, which we already talked about as well. pop ups and straight dollar and percentage off discounts. By the way, on the order of discounts, I recommend everyone listen to Kevin Steckos episode on my podcast, we did a breakdown, like if you give a 10 % off coupon, you have to make

25:47
significantly more money to make up for that discount. Like we did the math on that episode. I know math isn’t that attractive, but it was something surprisingly high. Whenever you, what seems like an innocuous discount can really drain like the profitability of your store. It’s impressive when you, when you start doing the math. And I think that’s the thing most people don’t, right? They see 10 % and they’re like, it’s just 10%. My margins are 40%. Yeah, but it’s 10 % off the top. That math really doesn’t work out in the same way.

26:15
So I’m glad to hear you doing the math for folks. That’s awesome. It ended up being a good episode. I don’t want to detract anyone listening from the math aspect of it, but just do a search for Kevin Steckow on my site. He did a whole analysis and you know what he ended up doing? He stopped doing discounts and I think he almost doubled his prices. he like halved his sales, but he ended up much more profitable than he was before. It was a pretty interesting episode. I’ll have to listen too. That sounds great.

26:45
Okay, so I know during your geek out talk, I saw you show pictures of all these tools that you use to help with the conversion process. Can you just kind of talk about your process for your clients and what tools you use? Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a handful of tools that we use. Some are more enterprise level, um, and some anyone can, can really get access to, but there’s really four key types of tools and data that every brand should be considering. Uh, the first is just.

27:15
Analytics right you can use Google analytics But really just want to have a good understanding of the funnel and how people are engaging with your site What paths are they taking through the site most people look at GA and they say oh traffic levels, etc I mean that’s fine But what we use it for is more What are the paths that people are taking through the site and what steps are they dropping off at? That’s really just a high level. Where should we start looking right for optimization?

27:45
Just where on the Google Analytics can you find that information? Yeah, so there’s a great view, and it’s changed a little bit in GA4 that recently came out. it’s still there. It’s just buried now. There’s this great view that looks like it has a vertical column step out of each page.

28:06
And then it makes like a, we call it the octopus view here because it has all of these views that kind of show you how people are going through the site and then where they drop off. So it’s a, I’d have to look at GA4 to figure out exactly where it is now. I’m not in there every day, but that is the best view. it’s, my understanding is it’s a little more buried now, but it’s really just the paths that people are taking through your site. So I know which view you’re talking about.

28:34
but I’ve never actually analyzed that before. So what are you looking at in particular? I’m looking at what steps are people dropping off? Because it shows you the bounce rate from each of these steps, right? And the abandonment rate. So I’m saying, okay, well, obviously homepage is going to be the highest. Always is, you know, that’s where the most people are going to bounce and that’s okay. The whole goal of your homepage though is just to get people to the next step in the funnel. That should be it. Shouldn’t be to convert. Shouldn’t be to even get an email, sign up.

29:04
That could be secondary. Really the whole point of the homepage is just to get people to that next step. understanding how many some guidelines by the way? Like when should you be worried about your bounce rate on your homepage? Like at what level? Well, I think that if you’re going to put a percentage on it, you’re likely going to see upwards of 60, 70 % of your visitors bounce off the homepage. Okay. And that’s okay as long as they’re spending…

29:34
10, 15 seconds on that page, that’s okay. If they’re only spending a second or two, then something’s wrong, right? And the reason is, is we do a lot of what we call five second tests, which is another bit of data we can get into around some of the more, know, qualitative pieces of data. The five second test is where we send people to a homepage, a landing page, product detail page. We show it for five seconds and then take it down and ask a set of questions.

30:04
Those questions are things like, what was the first thing you noticed? What do you recall about this page? Again, high level questions. And then it’s things like, asking specific things. Based on this page, what type of bat was best for you? Just go back to that example. And so then now we’re helping people understand how well are these pages being absorbed? And if it’s not being absorbed in that first five seconds, you’ve likely lost them.

30:33
So that’s a great place to start is just what sticks with people. What are they noticing? We see this all the time on homepages where people are promoting a single product upfront at the top of their homepage, right? That massive banner area, marketing teams get a hold of it. Next thing you know, it’s some marketing messaging about a new product launch or a blog article or all these things that aren’t helpful to the consumer. The consumer wants to know in that first five seconds,

31:02
What pain or need are you solving for me? And how am I gonna, how is it gonna help me? What’s the benefit here for me? And so often that’s not done in one product. Often that’s done more of a branding messaging. What do you offer that is a little bit different? How does it help them? And if you can communicate that in that main marketing area very quickly, you will convert more people and you’ll see your bounce rate decrease.

31:31
because people will continue to scroll and they’ll go to that next step in the process, which is really, again, all you’re trying to get them to do from the home page. So if you sell a lot of different product categories, you’re above the fold. Let’s say you do a really good job of saying what you’re about. What’s that action button? Where should it go to? Typically, I want that to go… First of all, I’m not a huge fan of having a call to action in that main area. Interesting.

31:57
I want people to get the message and continue to scroll down and have some other options. The reality is most people aren’t going to click that, at least not intentionally. And it’s even worse if it’s a rotating banner, because what we find there is that that decreases the clicks dramatically. Notre Dame University did a big study where they found that 1 % of people click those banners and then it decreases to another 1 % of that 1 % for each slide.

32:27
after that. So your odds are really, really low of getting people to click those to begin with. And, you know, there is no, you know, again, what do most people do there? They have a button there that sends them to that one product where they really are limiting how they can help that customer. Cause they click on that, they see that one product that’s not the fit for the pain or need they have. They’re going to leave. Interesting. So what I do is I have a button above the fold. Most people actually click on it. The last time I did a heat map test,

32:57
I take them to another set of categories where they can choose the category and filter their way down. So from what you just said though, it sounds like you want people to just scroll down and not click on anything and continue reading the page. Right. And they will scroll down. People scroll now. We look at hundreds of heat maps a week, scroll maps, and I can tell you that people scroll. There’s no more of this above the fold. We’re becoming a much more mobile society with mobile devices.

33:27
what’s the first thing we do on mobile devices? We start scrolling, right? And so it’s just inherent anymore that we’re used to doing that. But if you have a marketing message that takes up the entire, let’s just say the first frame you see in a desktop web browser, you’re losing out. It really shouldn’t be a massive image. You should just have it be maybe a third of that page at most. So I recommend limiting the size, the height of that.

33:55
and then really getting into the products below. Interesting. So in a hypothetical layout then, so you have your value props and exactly what you do kind of in that first two thirds, it sounds like, of the page. And then what is the rest of the flow on down the page? Well, the rest of the flow needs to be hitting on their major product categories and kind of doing some wayfinding there for people, right?

34:22
And then helping them understand a little bit about the brand, ideally, right? So if people are interested, but they just wanted a little bit more about the brand, they can keep scrolling down for that. And then just go straight to the footer. And in your footer, you really need to have, again, your product navigation on the far left, ideally, some of those help utility links in the middle. And then on the right needs to be all your contact information. And I’m talking a physical address, a phone number, and an email address.

34:50
We call that the trust trifecta. You need to have all three there. The reason being is that a lot of folks were finding are scrolling all the way down, especially during the pandemic. What happened was a lot of people who weren’t ordering as much online were now forced to, right? My parents for one, right? A little bit older generation. They were comfortable buying things online, but…

35:13
They weren’t as comfortable just going to every single direct-to-consumer site and buying things, right? They were more comfortable going to an Amazon, something of that sort that they had some trust in. But now what they’re doing is they’re scrolling down to the footer and they’re saying, okay, is this a legitimate company? And the first things they look for are that contact information. Is this company hiding behind the internet? If they’re not, by giving all this contact information, then they immediately feel a little bit better and they trust that brand.

35:41
I think that the whole point of the homepage is again to help people get to the next category, right? Understand to start filtering their way down and to say, this is how we help you solve that pain or need and you can trust us. If your homepage hits on those three things, people will take the next step in that funnel. So one thing that I remember you saying in your presentation was in regards to the menu, the nav menu. And I remember you saying you recommended removing everything.

36:11
pretty much except for the product Nav. Can you elaborate on that and why? Yeah, so the first thing and especially in Western cultures, right? We look in the top left hand corner and then we followed that F pattern, right? So the first thing you do is look top left hand corner and then you look over to the right and you start seeing that navigation. What we see when we do eye tracking studies is a big drop off in the navigation when brands start talking about themselves.

36:39
So it’s links like about us, our history, our founders, all these types of things that brands love to put up there. The problem is it’s not what the consumer is there for, or it’s not helping the consumer answer those questions, right? How is this going to help me solve my pain or need that I’m here for? So if you focus on the product categories and make your navigation product focused, people get a very

37:05
quick understanding of what you’re selling and are they in the right place. And so then that’s where the branding message that comes right below that in the marketing area can really be a beneficial help to, yes, we sell these products and now I can tell you what makes us different, how we can benefit you. And then you can get down into the product categories again below that. So it does all need to work together. If your navigation starts off with something that just says shop, for instance,

37:34
that doesn’t give the consumer any information about what it is you’re selling, how you can help them. And they’re not there to read your blog, right? So many brands put blog in the navigation. The problem is the blog is great for driving traffic. It’s great for SEO. Horrible for converting, right? A blog is always going to be the lowest converting section of every e-commerce site. But that content could be really helpful on a product detail page.

38:01
right, where you call it out and say, hey, here’s a blog article. has a lot more information about this feature. If you really want to dive into that and click here and read more, here’s a little summary, but it’s not really great for your main navigation where you’re sending essentially people back up the funnel, right? The blog is very top of the funnel. I always would suggest putting that in a funnel above your homepage because it really is going to convert less than your homepage.

38:27
I just wanted to let you know that tickets for the 2022 Seller Summit are now on sale over at Sellersummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker that I invite

38:55
is deep in the trenches of their own e-commerce business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets will sell out fast and in fact we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year in revenue,

39:22
We are also offering an exclusive Mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 4th to May 6th. And as of right now, we’re almost already sold out of Mastermind tickets and we’ll be raising the price every month leading up to the event after Cyber Monday. For more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s sellerssummit.com or just Google it. Now back to the show.

39:47
Actually, my philosophy on the blog is the traffic should be one way. You’re driving traffic from the blog to the store, but they shouldn’t go back to the blog from the store. Yes. And if there’s information there, you should just incorporate that into the product description if that’s helpful. Exactly. What about the About page? I think an About page is helpful further down on your site. It’s definitely helpful in your footer. It’s not helpful in your main navigation. Again, if people…

40:16
understand you can help solve their pain or need, then secondly, they might be interested in who are these people, how can they help me? So is the goal to make your menu just concise or are you suggesting just like literally breaking apart your product categories and replacing some of those other elements with more descriptive product categories in your nav? Well, I think it’s a combination of both and I say that because we really don’t want more than

40:45
five to seven items in a navigation and seven’s really pushing it. When we do eye tracking on these and click tracking, we find that over five and people stop looking at the navigation. Okay. And so we can see altogether, stop looking at the Yep. So they get to that about fifth item and then their eyes just dart right down because they’re like, okay, I kind of get it. I’m going to go down and start looking at the rest of the page. And so…

41:12
Really, if you keep it to five, you’re going to have their attention on those items. And anything that comes after those five is likely not going to get as much engagement. Interesting. By the way, what software do you guys personally use to check all of these things? So a couple of different options. We’re fans of Hotjar. It’s the best data quality out there for heat maps, click maps, and scroll maps.

41:40
For eye tracking, we own a company called VisualEyes, visual, E-Y-E-S dot design. That allows you to do artificial intelligence eye tracking. So it’s a great tool that has about a 95 % accuracy rate, meaning that we have been training and fed that IP and that artificial intelligence for years with eye tracking studies and things of that real eye tracking.

42:10
And what that has done is train that AI pretty efficiently at this point. So you can get an artificial intelligence eye tracking study instantly on a page that gives you a heat map of where people look that is statistically significant for the most part. Is that tool available to smaller companies? Okay. Yeah. Intentionally, we have a price point at, you know, I think it’s like 50 bucks a month.

42:36
something that is extremely reasonable for brands of all sizes. Just to make the distinction in case people are listening out there, what he’s talking about is eye tracking, not mouse tracking. I remember asking you how it worked exactly, but I think you obviously you don’t have cameras tracking someone’s eye, but supposedly you use statistical analysis to determine where people are looking at based on how they’re navigating the page. Is that accurate?

43:00
That’s accurate, right. Yeah, so HotJar will give you mouse tracking, right, which is going to tell you in aggregate where people’s mouses are out on a page. Now, that is great data in the sense that on a desktop, most consumers don’t recognize it, but your eyes are following your mouse around the screen. So there’s some relevance there, right? But it doesn’t tell you how far people are reading on a paragraph.

43:28
where they’re dropping off in that content, how long they’re looking at something, because often you’ll leave your mouse while you’re reading a paragraph, you’ll leave your mouse in one spot. So you’d see a hotspot there for the mouse tracking. Eye tracking will tell us what gets people attention. How much are they reading of that content? How long are they spending reading that content? So it gives you an extra layer of data. it is the way, you you can get actual eye tracking studies that track people through a camera.

43:58
And we do feed that into our algorithm. Quite often we do. We update it at least once a quarter with studies. So we continue to evolve with the trends that are out there. But yeah, the reality here is the goal with the artificial intelligence version is to be able to have those eye tracking studies immediately. So within seconds, you get that back from an algorithm versus having to wait.

44:27
days to weeks to get a true eye tracking study and compensate people and they know they’re being watched. So their behavior is a little bit different typically. You know, the other takeaway that I took from your talk and I’ve yet to implement this on my side, but it’s on my to-do list is to make buttons for every product in every category. Just having the images there, it might not be obvious for some people. You know what the kicker here is? Like as soon as I went to your talk, like literally like

44:56
three weeks before your talk, I had someone come to my site after clicking on an ad and go, hey, I couldn’t find your products or like I couldn’t find prices of your products. And it turned out they were looking at my category layout and they thought those were the products, but they couldn’t find the prices because you’re supposed to click further to find the products. Yeah, it’s one of those things that, you know, I like to say this often, but it’s really hard to read the label from inside the jar.

45:26
Right? We as e-commerce site owners, you’re so close to your site. You’re on it every day. You know the ins and out of your products. You know the pricing. You know the answers to all these things, right? But a new to file customer who clicked on an ad comes to your site, has no clue. They have no context. So to them, it’s a whole new world and they have challenges like that. So while it seems…

45:53
Like, do I really need to put a button on this? They can click on the image. Yeah, I get that aspect because you’re on your site every day. But a new to file customer, you need to tell them where they can click and what they should be clicking on. And the best way to do that is consistent call to actions throughout your entire site. mean, just basically make it super obvious for anything that you want people to do on your page, like super obvious. Yeah, tell them what you want them to do. Exactly.

46:22
Exactly, kind of like what my wife does. Although she makes me think about what I think she wants me to do. that’s different trap for a different answer. Well, cool. John, we’ve been chatting for quite a while and there’s a lot of great takeaways here, which I would say the biggest one is to actually talk to a real human or talk to your customers, I should say, about your products. mean, that’s the best way to get feedback. it’s, you know, what’s funny is like

46:49
When I first started calling abandoned car customers, everyone thought I was crazy, right? But the way I did is I’d call them up and I’d say, hey, I noticed you inserted this item in your car, but you didn’t check out. Would you mind telling me why? And don’t worry, we’ll just send you the free product regardless, right? And by giving away a free product or a major discount, it depends, they’re gonna be more than willing to tell you why and everything that you wanna know. And that’s such a return on that investment too, right? You think about how much that cost you versus

47:18
the information you gathered and you would have had to pay to get that, it’s well worth it. And the other thing I took away is best practices are really not best practices. Like your own store is going to be unique and you got to figure out what your own best practices are going to be. So true. And it goes with conversion rates too. You know, so many people are looking at their competitors and saying, what’s their conversion rate? I think I can do better or

47:44
I don’t need to optimize my site anymore because it’s better than the average. The reality is we work with hundreds of brands and I can tell you that I’ve seen a lot of these brands we work with out there touting what their conversion rates are and their data and then we get in there and I’m like, that’s not really what it is. So you just don’t know what the competition is saying in terms of their conversion rates, if it’s accurate, if they’re looking at the right data and you don’t know if what they’re doing is going to work for you.

48:14
So definitely want to focus on your own conversion rate and the growth of that and the iterative approach of just day over day looking to improve it a little bit. See, I never actually understood the concept of a global conversion rate because it depends on the quality of traffic, right? I did a conversion rate study on my blog many years ago when I did the redesign. And what I did is I only looked at Google traffic because that’s consistent. It’s a consistent conversion rate before. But when people start telling these conversion rate numbers, do they mean like aggregate?

48:43
like including the blog and everything. It was always very unclear to me. Yeah, that’s exactly it. You just don’t know. And that’s what I’m saying that, you know, when the customers come to us, they’re not lying about their conversion rate. They’re just looking at inaccurate data or they’re calculating it way different than we would. And so I’m with you on that. It’s really hard to compare numbers. You just don’t know if it’s apples to apples. Hey, John, so where can people find you online? What types of brands do you work with? Tell me about the tool as well.

49:12
Where can people find you? So the good.com T H E G O O D.com. Great domain by the way. I don’t know how you snagged that one. That’s a story for another podcast that involves a gentleman on a yacht that I kept bothering for months until he gave up. yeah, the, you know, I think the website at the good is, a great way to get familiar with our

49:36
conversion optimization offerings. have products for SMB, smaller side includes things like our conversion growth assessment that will come in and assess three pages of your site, give you video teardowns of those and eye tracking data, et cetera, like I’ve mentioned today, very actionable all the way through our conversion growth program, which is our most popular product that is an ongoing month to month optimization of your site, including things like AB testing.

50:05
Et cetera. So lots of good options there. But if you have questions, feel free to just email me. I try to respond to every email. It’s just John, J O N at the good.com. Cool. Well, John, I appreciate your time and come on the show. I’m sure the listeners learned a lot. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

50:26
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now conversion optimization is one of the best ways to grow your sales because it affects every aspect of your marketing. For more information about this episode, go to mywebclearjob.com slash episode 379. And once again, I’m going to thank Postscript, 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 dv.

50:54
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifecoderjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifecoderjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now I talk about how I use these tools in my blog.

51:22
And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce 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.

00:27
Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for ecommerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for ecommerce and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it 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.

00:57
I also want to thank Clayview, who’s also a sponsor of the show. Now, are you working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined? And do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? And do ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change. Now these companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information,

01:27
and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash mywife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash mywife.

01:53
And then finally, I want to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. Unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:24
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Shep Heitgen on the show. And Shep is actually someone who I met on a panel we were both on for Small Biz Trends, where we discussed how to establish a brand off of Amazon. Now Shep is the founder of Shepard Presentations, and he is a customer service, experience expert and keynote speaker. And his agency works with companies that want to build relationships with their customers and their employees. He’s also a Hall of Fame speaker.

02:50
and a New York Times bestseller and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. He’s got a new book called I’ll Be Back, which is a reference to my favorite movie of all time. And today we’re gonna talk about how you can get yourself off of Amazon and build a loyal customer base for your own brand. And with that, welcome to Show Shep. How you doing? Hey man, it is great to be here. Thanks for having me. Awesome, yeah. I had a really good time at the panel. And as I mentioned earlier, I really enjoyed your presence on that panel and I had to have you on the show.

03:20
Wow, thanks. Well, I appreciate that. Honored and flattered. Not necessarily in that order. Give us a story. How did you get in? How did you get started with customer service? Had that lead to what you do today? Yeah, well, I mean, many of the people listening are entrepreneurs. They own businesses. I started in my first business at age 12 and it was a birthday party magic show business. I was it was great. Twelve years old in my first gig.

03:49
to a bunch of screaming kids. I come home, my mom says, go write a thank you note. My dad says, a week from now, call the parents, make sure they were happy. Ask them how good of a job you did. Were they happy with that? What specifically do they like about the show? Now had no idea that was called customer service or customer experience because it was about showing appreciation. It was about listening to customer feedback. It was about improving the show with that feedback, taking action, process improvement, if you will.

04:17
And that was kind of ingrained in my brain. Now I’ve always been a people pleaser. Even when I had regular jobs, work at a gas station, it’s a self-serve gas station. People pay inside where it’s nice and warm on a cold winter day. But one day an old lady showed up. She was very old. I’d seen her before. It was the coldest day. I went out and pumped her gas. Why? Because it’s the right thing to do. What happened? My manager yelled at me. What? Okay. I know, I know.

04:44
I said, I want her to come back here instead of the station across the street. She’s a very nice lady. And he says, well, she’s going to expect that every time I go with them letter. She’s like 90 and all. it’s like two degrees outside here. Let’s let’s, you know, help her out. So I’m probably aging myself, but back in the day there was like a first full service aisle and all the gas stations that I used to go. Well, there was when I was really, really young.

05:10
I worked at a gas station. My family owns some gas stations and I was like 12 and it was full service. Check the oil, the whole deal. But by the time I was about, well, I was in college and working at summer jobs during high school and in college, it was all self-service. And at one point we actually did go out and reset the pumps manually, but people had to pump their own gas. But eventually, like today, you pump your gas, you go inside and pay for it or you pay for it now at the pump. back then…

05:38
You actually had to come inside. So, but that’s where it started. 1983, I’ve been out of college, actually 1982, been out of college for not even a year. And I start the idea of I’m gonna get into my own business. I’m gonna be a professional speaker, like Zig Ziglar, who I had seen and Tom Hopkins, a sales guy. And I said, I can do that.

06:00
And I, by the way, so I graduated from birthday party magic shows to working in nightclubs and doing corporate events and private adult parties. And it was a regular, you know, thriving business while I was in high school and college. But when I came out of college, I didn’t want to do that the rest of my life. So I started to do, you know, um, I looked at the speaking business and when I went to the bookstore to get research and buy books, there was maybe one shelf of business books, but four or five of them.

06:28
had to do with customer service and experience, which was what I was drawn to, probably because my parents ingrained this in my brain. And that’s where it all started, way back then. I bet that was before you were even born. Perhaps. You young whippersnapper you. You’d probably be surprised at how old I am actually. I know, I know. It’s the ageing genes. I’ve been doing it for a while now, about 30, almost not quite 40 years. And I know I don’t look it, and I know people can’t see me.

06:56
But hey, I’m bald so you can’t see the gray hair. So Shep, what I was hoping to do today was to go in depth on the best way to implement a customer loyalty strategy where you would start. And you know, that panel that we were on, I thought we’d just add a couple more hypotheticals to the mix. Like let’s say I’m an Amazon only shop and I want to focus on my own site and brand. How can I make things memorable? So let’s just start from there.

07:22
Yeah, well, you have to make the experience extremely easy and convenient. I actually about two years ago wrote a book called The Convenience Revolution and we’ve taken some of that and put it into the new book. I’ll be back. And the idea behind this is everything’s streamlined. Everything’s easy. And let’s use Amazon as a comparison. What do people like about it? It’s intuitive. It’s easy. There’s no real hassles. There’s few steps. As a matter of

07:51
If you’ve bought something before, you don’t even have to open up the computer or turn it on and go to the website. just say to your Amazon Echo, I’m not going to mention her name because she’s right behind me. She’ll start talking to me. But hey, I want more toilet paper. And next day or even even sooner than that, you get toilet paper. But the whole idea is any company that wants to compete in the e-commerce world or really any business.

08:20
And I’ll even go as far as saying it’s not just B to C, it’s B to B as well. You have to create this convenient, frictionless experience. And I’ll give you another example completely outside of the typical, you know, let’s sell a product online. Let’s look at the airlines. I love them because everybody knows what it is to fly in a plane. Most people have been on a plane. Most people made reservations, but look at the intuitive, easy process it has when you go online to any of the major airlines and book.

08:49
A ticket. Delta Airlines was the first to do this. And then eventually you checked in online and you printed your boarding pass, but now you just bring it on your mobile device. So this was great. Can you imagine, would you want to do business with an airline that didn’t have the ability to go online and book your ticket? Absolutely not. But it can be hard to mimic the Amazon experience on your own site though, right? Well, I’m going to disagree with that.

09:18
It’s hard to mimic it. It’s not hard to create the convenience that Amazon is. You’ve got to recognize that every time you put a step into the process, you make it harder for your customer. In that book, I mentioned the convenience revolution. I talk about the Wall Street Journal and about how they gained subscribers or didn’t gain subscribers. And one of the things they recognize is that

09:46
every field of information that you ask about your customer, each one had a diminishing return, meaning it was a little less likely that they would get all the way to finally checking out. it could be, boy, I’d sure like to know something that’s not important to the making the sale, but it would be nice to know if they’re male or female. I’m just making this up. It would be nice to know, I don’t know, something else about them. You know, what’s their age.

10:15
That’s information that’s irrelevant to the sale, but it’s great information to have, which once you’ve made the sale, you can go back and ask. Right, yeah. You know what’s really funny about your story just now is I got invited to speak on another person’s podcast, and I’d never heard the podcast before, but they sent me this form that was three pages long, and in the end, I decided not to go on it because I was intimidated by the form. Like, I don’t have time to fill all that stuff out. Right, and by the way, intimidated.

10:45
could sound like it made you back off and maybe because you were felt intimidated. You probably weren’t intimidated by the form, you were aggravated by the form. Yes, that’s probably the right term to use. Like I didn’t have time to fill out, like I have to write paragraphs. And now there are some podcasts like yours that’s so big, huge, wonderful and well accepted that we would be willing to fill out a 10 page form just to be on your show. Seriously though, some…

11:11
podcasts are of that where they wanna make sure that there’s a good fit. And I understand what they’re doing, but at the same time, make it easy on the guest. And a lot of times if they reached out to you, why would you have to fill out the form? Years ago, I wrote a book that was published by Wiley, which is the second largest publisher in the world behind McGraw Hill. And they reached out to me and asked if I would do a publishing project with them. And I said, you know what, tell me what this,

11:39
what you’re looking at, know, give me an idea of, you know, what’s my advance gonna be, et cetera, et cetera. And by the way, the book business has changed, but back then they offered me quite a nice advance. And then they sent me this proposal form for, not for them to propose that I’m the author for them, but for me to propose I’m the author. I need to propose to them why they should use me. And I wrote back, it’s because you called me, that’s all I wrote. And then they wrote back saying, okay, we get that.

12:08
Can you just give us a sample of what we’re buying? So I sent them a bunch of articles, but then I also, they asked for what my platform was, what at least I could give them to make them feel good about giving me this money. And I did give them what my plan was. I told them how many audiences I’m in front of speaking live. I tell them how big my newsletter list is and how I’m going to promote it. And it’s all they needed to put it through, but I didn’t have to fill out that endless amount of questions they seemed to have.

12:38
that most new authors would have as they, you know, want to be considered by Wiley. They were very cool about it, but I also recognize I was very lucky because I would not have gone through that process unless I really wanted to be published by them. Shep, what are some other convenient things that you can do with your physical products brand? With your physical product brand? Well, I mean, let’s talk about the whole concept of convenience to start with. Okay. Number one.

13:07
No friction or low friction. Journey map your business. And this is fundamental to any business. And when I say journey map, that means what does your customer experience from the moment they may find out about you? It could be they see an ad. It could be they do a Google search. They land on your website. They learn about you. They call you. Depending upon the kind of business you’re in, they may come in and see you versus do it all online. What’s the journey?

13:36
Look at every one of those interaction points that you have with your customer. Some of those are people to people. Many of them might be a digital experience, just learning what you have online. Map those out and ask yourself, at any given point, can I make this easier? And figure it out. Also, by the way, internally, what happens behind the scene to drive those touch points that the customers experience on the outside? And there might be some internal processes that you need to manage.

14:05
and make easy for your employees or create a process that’s easy internally to be able to drive a external touch point. So that’s the first step is to create that journey map. And when you start to look at where all these interaction points are, you’ll start to see the friction. I’ll give you the quick six principles. Number two is can technology be built into any of this? For example, I just made an appointment with my dentist and I didn’t have to call.

14:34
That’s so old school. I just go online. I have my log in and I look at their schedule. I look at mine and make my appointment. So easy to do. Number three is can you incorporate a self-service option? Self-service in the buying process? That’s great. Look at what auto dealerships did during COVID. You can go online, create your car, and then the dealership will connect with you and they will bring you a car to look at.

15:01
or it will be waiting for you when you show up. And you did most of everything online. But on a customer service slash support standpoint, do you have frequently asked questions in a knowledge base where customers could go to get basic information? Some of you might have, some of our listeners might have the ability to do online chat. It’s very inexpensive to do AI.

15:23
Infused online chat today, you know years and years ago when I see years or five years ago seven years Would cost a lot of money and would be prohibitive to many people but today You know for a minor setup fee and a monthly fee I don’t know under $100 a month you can you can have you know a chat bot helping your customers so it’s self-service Delivery, can we take it to the customer as we do this interview right now? My lunch has just been delivered. So

15:51
what can we take to the customer and make it easy for them? Number five is a subscription model. By the way, these aren’t necessarily in the exact order, but the subscription model is very powerful. Recurring revenue to the company is always great, but you wanna know what else is great for the customer? To have something show up on a regular basis or to subscribe to a service. We subscribe to magazines and newspapers, but we can subscribe to software.

16:19
That software is a service. We can subscribe to products that we use on an ongoing basis. It can be delivered to us. Companies like Chewy.com started very small, delivering dog food to people’s doorsteps so they didn’t have to go into the pet store and carry a heavy bag of food. Now they’re one of the biggest pet suppliers in the retail world today. And finally, number six is access. You know, if we’re online, there’s 24 hour access to learning about our business. If we’re a business that’s open from nine to five.

16:49
you who are you trying to serve? If you’re trying to serve the public, you’re really only serving the unemployed because you’re the ones who are the ones that come in between nine to five in your store, right? I use a banker’s hours as an example, know, banks are primarily trying to serve the unemployed if that’s, know, but forward thinking banks open their doors a little early and close at six o’clock, have Saturday hours. If you’re a customer service department, are you available when your customers want to call you? If, you know, I remember

17:19
buying a ping pong table from a retailer. Uh, and I had a question about putting it together and I had to call the manufacturer’s number and they closed at five o’clock, you know, Eastern or Pacific or whatever time. you know, it’s not like during the day I’m putting together this ping pong table. No, it’s nighttime and I’m working on this for my daughter, but this is what they had. They said, you know, if you’re calling out of our business hours, please go to Google and just Google the, and you’re having trouble putting it together. This is one of the options. Just Google.

17:49
the model number and the name of the product and a video pops up and that’s what happened. And this was actually on Google, not just their website, I’m sorry, on YouTube. And there was a video about how to put together the ping pong table step by step, all done to music. It was great. So those are the kinds of things I think about when it’s like, how can we be easy to our customers? And you don’t have to have a budget like Amazon to make that happen.

18:18
That doesn’t mean you can’t look at Amazon and try to emulate some of that experience. And by the way, Amazon is who all of us compete with. I don’t care what business you’re in. Maybe you have no online business. Maybe you’re a manufacturer of something. I had a client say to me, I ordered a half a million dollar piece of machinery. It shows up like in the most unexpected time. My gosh.

18:42
Amazon sends me an email to tell me my toilet paper is being delivered. Why can’t this company have warned us that this truck was going to pull up with this piece of equipment? know, look at that. Everybody’s being compared to the Amazons of the world. The, know, who is our competition? That’s who we need to look at. Even outside of our industry, they’re competing for our customers expectation of what services.

19:10
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.

19:38
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.

20:08
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now back to the show. The thing about Amazon is one of the best ways to compete against Amazon is with customer service. Like that live chat option Amazon does not have it. And I know for our store, like if I can get someone on live chat, that’s almost an instant conversion because they have a specific question. And if I can answer it in a timely manner, we got them. Yeah.

20:37
By the way, timely manner is a crucial two words in your explanation just now. I have a friend of mine, I I compete against him in the speaking business. You know, I’m hired to go out and do speeches about this topic. And I know he was the one that was up for consideration and I admire him. And when I talked to my client and said, why did you hire me instead of him? You know what he told me? says, because you call back faster.

21:07
So think about that. Yeah. So assuming that everything is smooth and the customer can check out and get their product on time and everything, how do get them coming back? That’s what I focus on next. I love that. I’ll be back. Yeah. I wonder, you know, someone should write a book on that. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So that new book.

21:30
titled I’ll Be Back, How to Get Your Customers to Come Back Again and Again. That’s exactly what we focus on is what does it take to get a customer to come back? And all the things we’ve talked about so far, creating that frictionless experience. Let me give you a few fundamentals though that I think is, and this by the way is in every one of my books, but we put a chapter just as we do in other books about this. There is something I call creating customer amazement. And in order to get customers to come back, you have to be amazing. But that,

21:59
does not mean it is an over the top, blow me away, I can’t get this anywhere else experience. No, amazement comes, and this is really important, from the predictable and consistent experiences that are just even the slightest bit above average. You just mentioned it a moment ago that one of the reasons you land business is because you are able to respond on that chat quickly, and that is why

22:28
Just doing that gets you business. Is that over the top? No, but this is what you want your customers to say about you. I love doing business with Steve and his company because they always get back to me quickly. The word always followed by something positive is the answer. They’re always knowledgeable. They’re always friendly. Even when there’s a problem, I know they’re always gonna take care of me. So the word always followed by something positive means you’re operating in that zone of amazement.

22:58
hard to achieve. I came up with this idea by listening and studying the Ritz-Carlton back in the 1980s when they won something called the Malcolm Baldrige Award, which would be the equivalent today of winning JD Power Awards for excellence or any other business award. They talked about the little things they do well, the little things, not the blow away things. Sure, you’ve got great stories from the Ritz and many other companies about how they just went above and beyond.

23:25
You can’t go above and beyond for every customer. They don’t give you opportunities to do that. You know, a couple comes into a restaurant, sits down, the server overhears that it’s the couple’s anniversary and surprises them with the little cake at the end of the meal, compliments of the restaurant. To the couple, that’s an above and beyond, but what if the server didn’t hear that? Blow them away with amazing service by simply doing what’s expected, if not a little bit better. So back to the Ritz.

23:54
Horace Schultz, Schultz, depending on what you call, how you pronounce his last name, he said, it’s one thing to say good morning as you walk by somebody. It’s another thing to say good morning, sir, good morning, ma’am. Or if, and by the way, I recognize today the politically correct thing might be just to say good morning in case you don’t know how people identify with themselves. But if you learn their name and you can remember their name and you can say, you know, good morning, Steve, or good morning, you know, just,

24:24
you added a little something to it. That’s that extra little five or 10%. And that’s what Horst says. If you’re 10 % better than average, you’re gonna be successful. So on a scale of one to five, if three is average and you wanna earn fives, do a 3.3 consistently and predictably and people give you a lot more fives than they will anything else. Think about that. Here’s something I noticed with my shop. Anyone who orders from us for the first time,

24:54
We actually sent them a separate email that is from my wife thanking them for their purchase, for their first purchase with us. And then if you have any questions, feel free to just reply to this email. And that one email has gotten a lot of responses. And it’s, and I didn’t think it was anything. It’s actually an auto email, actually. I mean, we don’t tell people this, but it’s, it’s an auto email. And it beautiful. Yeah. Something so simple.

25:18
that can also be automated. It’s an extra touch point that’s positive. Remember we talked about that journey map? Sometimes it’s not just the experience that they currently have, but what can you add to it? And a little touch point. And how about this? again, does, depending on what you sell, you can do this. know, somebody buys, let’s say, by the way, I should be better at this myself, but somebody buys something from us.

25:44
They go onto my mailing list and they see that weekly they get a tip from me. But what if I sent a video, a short video out to them, to all my customers that have bought either this particular book or this particular product and just say, hey, this is automated. It’s been a month since you bought our product. We thought you might like to hear from some other customers how they’re using the product as well. Maybe there’s an idea here that you can use. There’s no selling. There’s telling.

26:13
telling in a positive way that would benefit them. And it’s automated. It’s just an extra touch point. Let’s go to the real estate industry. The average person moves about every seven years. If I buy a home and this real estate agent takes care of me, it might be seven years before we do business again. Do I ever hear from that real estate agent again? What’s happening between that interaction and seven years from now, if I’m the typical person? Most of the time, nothing.

26:42
but the best agents know I’m gonna stay in touch with my clients because they’re gonna use me again most likely. And the renewal process doesn’t start a month before the seven years are here. No, it starts a month after they sold me my home. And it continues with touch points. Maybe it’s a holiday card. Maybe it’s a, here’s some household tips. Here’s some information you might wanna know about the new restaurants that are.

27:09
opening up down the street from you, you know, that kind of thing. And all you’re doing is you’re adding value in the most simplistic way. And by the way, it’s automated. Chef, what are some examples of physical products brands that have done that little extra thing just in your experience of the companies that you’ve worked with? Wow. There’s so many. I wish I could remember the name of the product. I’m a musician. It’s fun. I enjoy it. I go on YouTube. I find.

27:37
music I like, I break it down, I learn it, and I bought this little box. It connects to my computer and it allows me to pause a YouTube video or a Vimeo video, go back 10 seconds, slow it down, and it allows me to keep my guitar in my hands using my foot to push the buttons. I don’t ever have to take my hands off to move the mouse to get it to go back and slow it Anyway, this tool is a great tool to learn music.

28:05
And every once in while I receive an email from them on, here’s an idea to learn music better. know, something you might want to try. I love that. So that’s kind of what we’re talking about. I just bought a view. Oh, actually it was a gift. I bought it and my kids gave it to me for father’s day, but it was the rangefinder for my, for my golf game. So I can find out how far it is. And there’s actually a box to click.

28:35
would you like us to send you tips for your golf game every once in a while? And it asked me, what’s my handicap? So it kind of knows if I’m an advanced golfer or a hacker or a beginner, right? So I just thought, well, that’s brilliant. And there’s no real marketing. It’s just keeping their name in front of me in a positive way. So, Shep, would you say that a lot of this is actually just keeping in contact with your customer on a regular basis so that when they’re ready to buy again,

29:05
They’ll think about your company. Well, isn’t that what we want? And so that’s marketing. What I just talked about. Let’s talk about the actual experience. If you have the opportunity to interact via chat or phone or email or anything, you need to be thinking about what I call the loyalty question. And the loyalty question goes like this is what I’m doing right now, going to get that customer to come back.

29:34
the next time they do business with me or want to buy whatever it is that we sell. And so that loyalty question is focused on the interaction I’m having right now. If a customer calls and they’re upset, am I handling it in such a way that when we’re done with this, the next time they need what I sell, they’ll think of me. So that’s the loyalty question. How do you answer that question, Chip? Well, the answer is, I mean, am I?

30:00
You know, just yesterday I was at my car dealership, a new dealership that I’d never done business with before, and I had a bad experience with them. And I don’t think they recognize that the way they’re handling the interaction right now makes me question whether I ever want to do business with them again in the future. You know, the car’s under warranty, so I’ve got to go to a dealership. I’m just going to go to the closest one they happen to be that way, that close. But they need to understand that every interaction they have with me is planting a seed for what’s going to happen the next time I want to buy another.

30:30
are, okay? It’s that simple. So we’re always focused on the next time every time, because the next time every time does lead to a lifetime of loyalty. When we think of loyalty, we don’t need to think about, what am I gonna do to get the customer to come back again and again and again? We’re gonna have to put together a whole program. Well, you can if you want, but it should start with right now thinking about the next time. The other thing I want you to think about, and we cover this pretty extensively in the book, I’ll be back, is the difference between loyal customers

31:00
and repeat customers, both of which are wonderful to have. One is just a little bit higher level than the other. I want customers to come back to me again and again, but I need to understand why they’re coming back. Do I have what’s called a loyalty program? Like if I’m in the, I buy a restaurant, then you want to come and buy lunch. You every five sandwiches you buy from me, the sixth one’s free. So I give you this card. Is that what’s getting you to come back?

31:28
If I didn’t have the card, would you still come back or come back as frequently? Is the reason you’re coming to my store because I’m logistically closer than the competition? If the competition were to move across the street from me, would you choose them over me? Or if they’re even closer in, would you be willing to pass them to come to me? That’s the difference between repeat customers that, you know, if you’re logistically the reason they come or do they love you and are willing to pass up the competition to come to you, that’s a loyal customer.

31:58
but understanding the reasons why they come back again and again will help you determine what the true loyalty level or just repeat business level. wrong with either one of those, by the way. It’s important to have them. Yep. Do you figure that with surveys? Do you just ask or how do you? Well, and once again, we cover that. Surveys are great, but all they measure is history. How did we do on a scale of one to five?

32:26
give you a five. Oh, thank you very much. That was yesterday. Now we can learn from history to make the experience better the next time or maintain the experience we have. We can learn if somebody’s unhappy and fix the problem if we can identify who it is that gave us that survey. But what we really want to measure is behavior. Did they come back? How often do they come back? When they do come back, how much do they spend compared to if they’re a one-time buyer or even just, you know, what’s the difference between a repeat buyer and a loyal buyer? You can find all this out.

32:56
by looking at behavior, not just reflecting back on your last experience. Okay, give me an example. How would I do that with my store? Do you get a haircut every once in a while? I do. Okay, you don’t need to tell me who you go to. You may go to a salon, you may go to one of these chains like custom cuts or whatever, sports cuts. So what I know is that somebody’s gonna come in here and they’re gonna…

33:25
they typically need to get their haircut once a month. That means they should come back 12 times. And by the way, you can identify customers like, well, that kind of haircut, they’re probably gonna come back five times a year, not four, or 12 times a year. But when you understand that and you start to watch their behavior and watch their buying patterns, you know you’ve got somebody that’s coming back again and again and again. But once again, knowing that behavior is really important.

33:55
I work with some of the companies in this industry and they want to know what got you here and what’s going to get you to come back. And then they watch your pattern and that way they know they’re doing the right job. Not just were you happy with your haircut, where you’re happy with the service. If they keep coming back, you know, you’re doing something right. And again, you want to find out why. that makes sense for something like that, but let’s say it’s an e-commerce product that doesn’t really have a pattern. How would you do that same exercise?

34:25
What is it, if you’re selling one product and out of your business, then, you know, I don’t know what kind of a business that is, but I don’t know what kind of repetition is it’s something that wears out and they come back. But if you’re selling a different, you know, different product lines, different, you know, you want to watch. So I asked me the question one more time. want to make sure I give you the right answer. put some real products. Let’s say I sell apparel. So what are some patterns that I would look at to, to analyze this behavior? Well,

34:55
We know apparel is seasonal, okay? If somebody coming back on a regular basis to upgrade their wardrobe based on the seasons that, know, in other words, we have summer clothes, we have winter clothes, and we can track their buying patterns to determine whether or not they’re buying in the right cadence. And by the way, with enough tracking, enough data, enough customers you’re looking at, you’re gonna start to see patterns emerge to better make decisions that allow you

35:24
to personalize the experience based on different patterns. if, you know, I have a friend of mine, I used to go to a store twice a year when he went on, when everything went on sale, July and January. And I once said to him, you know, you know, I never buy anything via retail pricing because, you know, it’s just the kind of thing you sell is the kind of thing that if I wait just another couple of months, I know it’s going to go on sale. How do you feel about a customer like me? And we were just talking about

35:53
like what you and I are talking about, general customer service. say, Shep, I have a lot of customers that come in and buy, you know, straight retail. But if I could have all of those customers, guarantee they’ll come in on July and January, I would be happy as can be. But we need to understand why customers are coming in, what their behaviors are, what’s behind the incentive for them to keep doing business with us.

36:22
I just wanted to let you know that tickets for the 2022 Seller Summit are now on sale over at SellersSummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker that I invite

36:50
is deep in the trenches of their own e-commerce business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year we cut out ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets will sell out fast and in fact we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year in revenue,

37:17
We are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now the Seller Summit is gonna be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 4th to May 6th. And as of right now, we’re almost already sold out of mastermind tickets and we’ll be raising the price every month leading up to the event after Cyber Monday. For more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s sellerssummit.com or just Google it. Now back to the show. I guess, once you find that information out,

37:46
We’ll just use that example with your friend. I mean, the reason people are coming in is because of a sale, right? Well, true, but many other stores have sales in July and January as well. You know, I was just recently, gosh, over the summer in Las Vegas in July. Can you imagine being in Las Vegas in July? I don’t remember, but the days I were there were the days they hit the record 114, 116 days. And I remember walking into one of my favorite stores. said,

38:16
So I know it’s July, what’s 70 % off today? And the guy goes, oh, I said, I come in here once a year. And he laughed at me. He goes, if all of our customers would just come back once a year, we’d be pretty happy. But I mean, even if it is on sale, of course I didn’t find anything 70 % off, but I found some good value. I guess what I’m trying to ask here, Shep, is like, how do you implement this strategy here? Like once you have the information, what do you do with it?

38:44
Oh, what do you do with it? Learn why and then act accordingly. So you need to understand your customers. Look at what Nike does. And by the way, I keep grilling me and asking me the same question until I give you the answer that you want because I can go so many different directions. Nike, if you join the Nike, I call it a membership program, loyalty program, which by the way is free, you what’s the big perk? They’ll let you know about.

39:10
items before they’re actually released. They’ll give you information about what your interests are, free returns, things like that. But let me tell you, the key here is that they know you buy just running shoes or you buy just court shoes or you buy some other type of shoe and they’re able to segment you into the different areas. so there are, you know, and they know based on buying patterns of people who are interested in this type of shoe, you’re going to need a shoe.

39:39
like this, you’re going to be interested in this type of, and they, they, they give you good information. The sales side of it, it’s, this is all marketing, but they’re not always simply asking for an order at the end of every message they send. That becomes too salesy. Right. Companies that I think are really great at doing this, figure out who their customers are, understand their customers behavior and give them information that makes them, that endears that customer to them even closer. So did I get to the answer of your question?

40:09
Yeah, I’m just so we talked about a bunch of things already like loyalty versus repeat and obviously loyalty is better. What’s kind of confusing about all this is like these loyalty programs. I kind of categorize those in like under repeat business, right? Because they’re buying because. Right, that’s the point. It be called a loyalty program. It’s a marketing program. It’s a you know, Amazon has a membership prime membership. It is some people mistakenly call it their loyalty program. But the reason

40:39
customers are often loyal to it. Although people like, know, why did Jeff Bezos include all these movies and TV shows and Amazon Prime? He says, I wanted to give them a reason to keep subscribing, even though, beyond just shipping, beyond just buying product from us, because there’s a benefit to them getting $129 a year from, I don’t know, how many millions, 70 million customers or something like that.

41:08
It really is good. But here’s what drives some of that loyalty. If I pay $129, I want to get my money’s worth. I want to get all the free shipping I can, know, expedited shipping. I want to take advantage of the discounts that come when I go into a Whole Foods. I want to take advantage of, you know, the movies and TV shows. By doing that, they are separating me from their competitor simply because I paid for the privilege of doing business with them and I want my money’s worth.

41:37
I mean, it seems to me that the best way to get true loyalty is to do what you originally said, which was just be like 0.1 % better than average, right? 10 % better than average. 10 % better. So I guess the question then becomes, how do you figure those things out? Yeah, well,

41:59
Obviously, you do want to take measurements there. You want to look at your customer satisfaction scores. If you do any kind of a survey, your net promoter scores, because it gives you a baseline understanding of what your customers think of you. And if you see deficiencies, figure out where they are and build on them to increase the scores. So you get a score today that’s your benchmark and you recognize opportunities to improve.

42:25
Do look at your surveys three months from now. And if you see improvement, you know you’re heading in the right direction. Can these surveys that you’re talking about, can you just give me some examples of key questions to ask in those surveys? Sure. I love simplicity. So the net promoter score is one of my favorites, although some people are pro and some people are against. The reason I like it is it’s a general sentiment of how the customer feels about you, which is on a scale of zero to 10.

42:53
What’s the likelihood that you would recommend us to a friend, a colleague, family member? Nine or tens are promoters, hence net promoter score. Sevens and eights are passives, meaning you don’t know if they’re happy leaning toward being a promoter or unhappy leaning toward being what’s called a detractor, which are the sixes and the less. Then there’s, you know, general CSAT, scale of one to 10, one to five, whatever. Are you happy? Were you happy with the service? Did you enjoy the product? Did you enjoy the experience? I love.

43:22
American Airlines and Delta Airlines. I don’t know about the other lines, but they said, would you be willing to stay on the phone after you talk to the agent for a one question quick survey? And that is next time you do business with us, would you want to have the same agent? One for yes, two for no. Wow. That tells a whole lot, doesn’t it? Yes, it does. Yeah. And one simple question with a yes or no answer. I always like to follow questions. If you’re doing surveys like this, a simple CSAT.

43:51
or NPS, can do one or two, because literally they take seconds for the customer to fill out. Ask the open ended questions, a final question. Is there anything you could think of that would make doing business with us better? And I always add, this is my take on it, is there one thing you can think of that would make doing business with better? I call that the one thing question. Why did you give us the score?

44:18
If you, certain survey software allows you depending upon the score, that’s the next question you would ask. So if somebody on a scale of zero to 10 gave us a 10 with the net promoter score, you could say, thank you. Is there one thing you can think of that would make it even better? But if somebody gave us a six, that question might be, is there something we could do that would have given us one higher, you know, like one higher number?

44:46
I’m not phrasing it correctly, but you get the idea. yeah. Basically, you’re just trying to get them to prioritize what the one thing that they’d want changed that would make the biggest impact, right? Yep, yep. And by the way, if I get enough customers telling me the same one thing, that’s an opportunity I can’t pass up. I mean, obviously somebody would say, yeah, make the product half price. Well, that’s not necessarily reasonable. Yeah, it’s funny because…

45:13
Pricing is often like something that people will put down for that. Cause we have this survey that goes out automatically for anyone that buys. And we do get that price number all the time, which it’s something that we don’t want to, we don’t want to compete based on price basically. Yeah, I know. And they’re saying that sometimes, you know, maybe they really mean it, but most of the time it’s like, yeah, sell it to me at half price. Yeah. Tongue in cheek, I guess. That is tongue in cheek. And hopefully they’ll say, but seriously,

45:42
And here’s my real comment. It seems like, at least in my experience, like whenever we get someone on the phone or on chat, it’s like an easy sale and people are really happy and they’ll come back. I guess the challenge is adding that human element to an online business on a regular basis and scale it that way. Well, you can do it by doing it real human element, or you can automate as you did with that thank you note from your wife, as you mentioned earlier.

46:10
Do you remember a company called CD Baby? Yeah, of course. I love Derek Sivers. Did you ever buy anything? I never did. I just, know his story very well. All right. I’m 99 % sure it was CD Baby that when I bought something, I received an email, you know, hey, this is Steve, but I’m not a real person. I’m the digital assistant, but that doesn’t mean I can’t help you if you don’t ever, you know, it’s very funny when I read this and, and I go, oh, this is brilliant. Admitting it’s digital.

46:39
but giving you a human experience and making me smile. That’s pretty cool. And so there’s no reason why you can’t do something ongoing as, and by the way, I believe that’s part of what makes us all successful. If we can create a flow of information, you know, know me, I’m a customer service and experience expert. I get on stage and do speeches. We have trainers that go out and deliver my content. We have books that I write and that we sell, but you want to know what I really am? I’m a media company.

47:09
My job is to constantly put out information that’s gonna make my customers and clients wanna keep doing business with me, love what I do, talk about what I do. And there’s no reason a company can’t put out information about what they sell and ways to improve their customers’ lives or experiences with whatever they’re buying on a regular basis in a way that makes them feel they’re connected, even if it’s digital. I think that’s the future. Like Disney owns us, owns my family.

47:38
I remember this, I remember this one experience where I was at a toy store and my, my son wanted a Lightning McQueen and I was like, Hey, look, these matchbox cars, they’re, they’re like 10 X cheaper. I’ll you what, I’ll buy you 20 matchbox cars instead of buying your one Lightning McQueen. But he still wanted the Lightning McQueen because of media, because he watches cars and he wanted to play in front of the movie. It’s that cool. Now I’ll share something else with you. It reminds me of the Disney example that you, that you just did. mean, you know, if.

48:08
I mean, does Disney own you? Well, actually, they own you in another way. If you’ve been to a Disney theme park, that becomes your new expectation. And by the way, if you went to Disney and had a great experience, that’s your new expectation of what all customer service should be with any company that you’re doing business with. That’s why the rock star businesses today are setting expectations and raising the bar that laggards must keep up with or

48:37
they need to fear losing business to these rock stars. And they don’t even have to be in our industry. Why can’t you be as good as that? The shoe repair down the street, they always hit the, when they tell me it’s ready on Thursday, it’s not Friday when they tell me it’s ready, no, it’s Thursday. They always do that. Why can’t you do that for me? Shep, I wanna hear about I’ll Be Back. Tell me about this book. I’ll Be Back.

49:03
So the book titled I’ll Be Back, How to Get Customers to Come Back Again and Again is just about everything we’ve talked about today. And it’s my eighth book and I’m excited about it. Yeah, there’s a little Terminator feel to that term, I’ll be back. But you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger, when he did this in the first Terminator, he came back to blow up that police station. You remember? Yes, of course. Not a good thing. But in the second one, he came back as a good guy. And when he said I’ll be back, it was kind of tongue in cheek with a little wink.

49:33
more or less, and it was a good reason. And he’s used it, that Terminate movie. So while I didn’t start out thinking about the Terminator, I thought, well, why not throw a little Terminator language in there? So I’ve got a chapter in there about why customers would terminate the relationship with you, why they wouldn’t want to do business with you, actually, why you would want to terminate a relationship with them. There’s just a few phrases sprinkled throughout here and there that might bring you back to it. But that’s what it’s all about.

50:01
getting your customers to come back again and again. If that’s important to you, then you should go to Amazon today and pick up the book. I mean, there’s been a lot of studies where if you can just increase your repeat retention rate by like a small percentage, it can lead to like a vast increase in your overall revenue. An exponential increase. Right. The loyalty effect written by Fred Reichelt years ago talked about that 5 % increase in customer retention turns into something potentially huge. 75%, yep.

50:30
Yep, on average. We have a client that when she told me what her problem was, she’s losing millions and millions of dollars in churn because they just aren’t doing things right. And I said, what would it be worth? I mean, how much money would you gain if we reduce that by just like 3 %? She says, that could be worth a million dollars. And I said, can I work on commission?

51:00
Cool. Well, Shep, I would imagine, I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on my list of books to read once it comes out. But once, I would imagine the book is a lot more in depth than what we kind of talked about in today’s episode. Oh, sure it is. And it also will lead you to think about ideas. And there’s questions at the end of each chapter that you can sit down with your team and have a meeting with and discuss. I want this book not to just be read, I want it to be used. Cool.

51:28
Well, Shep, where can people learn more about you in general? Just go to hyken.com, H-Y-K-E-N.com. Okay, and if they want to get a hold of you, there’s a contact form on that page as well? definitely. And if anybody has a question, just reach out. I’m happy to either, one of two things, I will either send you back an email, but if it turns into a small novel that I’m writing, I’ll probably pick up the phone or I’ll send you video or something. Cool. Well, Shep, thanks a lot for coming on the show, man. It’s been a pleasure.

51:55
Steve, it has been my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Let’s do it again. Hey, how about this? I’ll be back.

52:05
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now Amazon continues to get more competitive every single year and you can’t rely on them as your sole source of income. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecoupterjob.com slash episode 378. And once again, I want to thank Klabio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandon card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot.

52:31
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also want to thank Postscript, 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 Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

52:59
Now I talk about how to these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequaterjob.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.

00:28
We are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 4th to May 6th, 2022. And for more information, go to sellersummit.com. Once again, that’s sellersummit.com or just Google it. Welcome everyone. You were listening to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now today I have an extra special guest back on the show, Bernie Thompson.

00:57
and Bernie runs an eight figure e-commerce store called Plugable and he relies on Amazon as his primary selling channel in possibly one of the most competitive niches, electronics. So in this episode, we discuss some of the challenges of selling on Amazon in the current landscape. Now I just want to apologize ahead of time for the audio quality in this interview. Now I considered not publishing this episode, but the quality of the interview content was so good that I decided to publish it anyway. But before we begin, I want to thank Klavia for sponsoring this episode.

01:27
Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store and it depended on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence

01:56
to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there’s full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them 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. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your customer contact list. And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing.

02:23
SMS, or text message marketing, is already a top five revenue source from my ecommerce store, and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider. And why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in ecommerce stores, 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.

02:51
So head on over to postcook.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. And then finally, I wanted to mention a new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this one, where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience Podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience Podcast on your favorite podcast app.

03:21
Now on to the show.

03:28
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today, I’m lucky to have Bernie Thompson back on the show. Now, Bernie is someone who I’ve had on multiple times. The last time was back in episode 230. And in case you’ve forgotten, Bernie runs an eight figure business called Plugable, which is a company that sells USB and Bluetooth devices online all over the world. In addition, he’s built his own tools in-house to manage his Amazon business. And one that he sells is called PPC Ninja.

03:55
Anyway, the reason why I have Bernie on the show today is because he runs such a large Amazon business in an extremely competitive area. And as a result, he’s the perfect person to talk to about the current Amazon landscape. And with that, welcome back on the show, Bernie. How are you doing today? Hey, great, Steve. Thanks so much. I’m glad to be back. It’s been a while. We haven’t had a chance to see each other in person, of course, since the since the pandemic. I hope to see you. I really seen anyone in person in a while, so.

04:24
It’s not just you. So just in case the listeners don’t remember your business, just give a very quick recap of what you sell, how many SKUs you have, and kind of give us an idea of how often you launch new products. Yeah, so Plugable was launched in 2009. I’m a guy who used to work at IBM and Microsoft and so kind of come from this technology background and really wanted to build an electronics company, a better device company. But then

04:52
You know, the time I did that in 2009, you know, doing that and kind of being Amazon focused about that was our choice. And actually it turns out to be a good choice because we’ve had kind of a 10 year rising tide on Amazon and difficult area to get into electronics. You know, I think if I had started this business, even a few years on either side of that, you know, I probably would have failed. But interesting. Why do you say that?

05:22
Well, because if I’d started it a bit earlier, I would have had to build out a lot more infrastructure in terms of logistics and had to get into traditional electronics distribution faster. And I think I would have hit walls there and just would have had trouble scaling the business. And so, you know, would have probably gone through a period of failure. Maybe I could have kind of waited that out or survived that, but probably would have gone through a period of failure.

05:51
It would have likely, given my resources, have meant I would have had to stop. So that’s like five years earlier. Then five years later, so Plumble has never done black hat stuff. We’ve never purchased reviews or, you know, we try to follow the rules on Amazon. So if I had started five years later, that was right in the middle of the Amazon gold rush, you know, 2014 or whatever. I would have just gotten.

06:19
run over by everybody. Because we did actually, we’ve grown every year since we started in 2009, but a lot of those year, those gold rush years, we actually did not grow that fast because we were basically getting black hatted off the platform. But because we started when we did, we had quite a lot of brand momentum and we were able to kind of survive that. But if I had started right in the middle of that, I think I just would have gotten run over. Right. Actually, can we just comment on black hat real quick? Do you feel like it’s

06:49
much more under control these days? Yes and no. think, you know, compared to 2014, 2015, you know, the activity that that’s occurring, you know, is much more muted. It’s much more subtle. It’s much more sophisticated, you know, but because Amazon operates at this massive scale, mean, Amazon’s intent is to create the most competitive platform, you know, on the planet in order to drive down prices in order to, you know, make

07:17
Amazon the place that everybody goes to buy everything and you know that that competitive competitiveness does drive down prices. But it does mean that even the smallest advantage will determine you know market success or failure and you know so all of these techniques you know to to drive up rank and stuff you know there’s they’re still super effective I mean.

07:40
These last two or three years in our area, electronics, has just seen a flood of what we call five-character Chinese brands. They pick basically random five characters, get a US trademark on it, get into the brand registry program. the US trademark office is literally overwhelmed with applications from Chinese companies for trademarks. And I was just reading an article on it and they didn’t mention Amazon. didn’t know why it was, they were speculating about why was this happening.

08:10
it’s easy. Amazon is the one channel for physical goods in the United States that’s dominant. And if you’re going to have an Amazon strategy, you should do Amazon brand registry. And everybody in China knows that. a lot of these brands, have nothing to lose. mean, if they get caught, they get kicked off the platform, they can just come back in another form. Now we’ve had some interesting things happen the last few months where some very large brands have

08:39
have gotten kicked off the platform for activity they’ve been doing for years. And that may provide a little bit of a deterrence effect. Although ultimately, I think because the Chinese companies are fairly unreachable and fairly untraceable even for Amazon, I think the deterrence will be a little limited. But a lot has gotten better. mean, just to pick one of quite a few things that have gotten better, Amazon’s actually shifted to become a pay to play platform.

09:07
If you do any search on Amazon right now, most of kind of top of the fold are ads. guess what? That’s actually kind of good for WhiteHats because at least it’s a level playing field. You know, I can buy ads and I can get that position. Whereas, you know, about four or five years ago with everybody gaming organic, you know, and we weren’t, you we were often, you know, other than our older, more successful products, our newer products were

09:37
getting pushed way down the organic search results, nobody would ever find them. And we had really no way to surface them unless we were also willing to do Black Hat. But now, you can always surface things with ads. So it’s a pay to play platform, but it’s less susceptible to Black Hat. Now, I’ll caveat that with one thing, which is Amazon is completely non-transparent about how much click fraud happens on the Amazon platform.

10:06
And I can guarantee that there’s competitors out there that are extremely motivated to do what in computer security, we might call a denial of money attack. have click farms and be clicking on competitors’ ads and spending their money. And we have no idea how rampant click fraud is on Amazon, but I would suspect it’s quite rampant.

10:32
I think with any PPC platform, it’s always been a huge problem. Actually, that’s why I stopped almost all the PPC platforms except for Google and Facebook, actually. I used to use a whole bunch of these shopping cart platforms. And then one day, I think I spent like 500 bucks in a day on this one item and that was unheard of. And I looked at the logs and it was just obviously a bot. I tried to appeal that and they refused to give me my money back. And they’re out of business today, of course.

11:01
but yeah, I’m sure there’s just rampant fraud going on. When you say sophisticated black hat, can you just elaborate a little bit on that? I’m just kind of curious. Yeah, it’s not sophisticated in the sense that it’s not able to be understood or it’s deep dark secrets or anything. just, it used to be so blatant. I mean, you would have a lot of these brands who were kind of

11:31
giving refunds out in the open for five, you know, very directly for five-star reviews kind of thing. So now it’s, if you are looking in the seller forums, you you see lots of discussion of rebates for launches, but everybody is kind of aware that a lot of the services that offer that have been taken down at various times and

11:59
Sellers who and brands that use those services have gotten taken down at times. And so, you know, like I think a lot of the, you know, the bigger Chinese brands, for example, and probably some of the U S brands, you know, they, for example, one type of sophistication is, you know, the kind of services that are third party services that are offered for rebates, they bring those in-house, you know, where they can control the lists, they control the information.

12:28
And actually the big round of, you know, MPOW and Aki and stuff getting suspended in China, really the origin of that was they had been using some kind of third party service. think it was a Chinese run service. I’m not sure. But, you know, and they had a, they had a breach and all the data got dumped. And so it became extremely apparent what was happening and who was doing it. and, um, rumor was FTC got involved.

12:58
In any case, Amazon was kind of forced to act when Amazon actually historically has been kind of slow to act or perhaps wanting the price benefits they get from these Chinese brands more than they wanted to police their behavior. Yeah. Yeah. And so they were forced to act. so I think the bigger brands who are still doing

13:27
these sort of black hat and gray hat activities, you know, they see this happening and they realize, well, okay, we really need to control what we’re doing. We’re going to kind of bring this in-house into loyalty programs and things like that. Okay. That makes sense. So it’s less overt basically is what you’re saying. Yeah, that’s right. So how has launching new products for Plugable changed? Let’s just talk about even since COVID. Well, okay.

13:53
Well, since COVID, think the biggest story is we’re in electronics and it’s hard to get product. So that’s the big story there. And we can talk about that as a whole separate thing. But yeah, I mean, you as far as launching products in general, yeah, I mean, we’ve just become more more dependent on our skill at using Amazon advertising and being willing to, you know, really sink money into advertising in the early months of a product launch, but have to be, you know, very sharp about how we do that so that

14:24
because there’s really an opportunity there to completely blow everything with advertising because you’re basically, fighting an uphill battle those early weeks and months until you’re able to get the number of reviews up. But on number of reviews, we fought for years with Amazon in terms of kind of selling the idea to executives and things at Amazon to bring Vine over to 3P. And that’s there now.

14:51
And that’s one of the reasons why you really need to get brand registered if you’re going to launch a brand on Amazon is to get access to the Vine program, which allows you to give away in an Amazon endorsed way, you know, up to I think it’s 30 products and get, you know, reviews from the Vine network where, you know, Amazon is choosing the people and there isn’t, you know,

15:18
a brand controlled gamesmanship to it. And so, you know, and it’s an Amazon run and endorsed program. And so that’s, that’s what we use to kind of get over that credibility hurdle at launch. Of course, you know, when you’re, for example, you know, advertising a product and it’s sitting there at zero reviews, you’re going to pay way more, you know, for those sales, you’re going to have a much lower conversion rate. so Vine kind of helps get you over the hump there.

15:46
And then, then it’s just, you know, we’ve always been a kind of a content marketing heavy company and a PR heavy company. And so, you know, between the advertising and then a lot of, a sense, traditional marketing, but maybe non-traditional in the sense that we’re very content focused. You know, that’s basically how we do it. Can we talk about the content marketing? So what specific content do you put out?

16:11
You know, there’s a lot to talk about with most products and certainly with our products. know, electronics, everybody buys a lot of electronics, right? But everybody has that fear that they’re going to buy the wrong thing. And everybody looks at that piece of electronics and goes, is that really going to do what I’m hoping it’ll do? you know, so we have a lot of stories to tell about, you know, why did we do this new dock?

16:38
what, you know, which laptops does it work with and what quirks do I need to worry about? And, you know, will it, you know, give me two monitors? Will it give me three monitors in every case on Windows and on Mac? You know, there’s, there’s, it’s really just product education, but you know, if you, if you take a content marketing mindset, it’s a, it’s a whole bunch of interesting stories, you know, and those stories, you know, have different audiences for them. You know, we do content, video, you know, that’s really,

17:07
that we’re targeting explicitly at Mac owners, of course. And then we’ll do other content that’s targeted explicitly at Chromebook owners. And so there’s really an endless amount of stories to tell. And so we just kind of prioritize our audiences and prioritize our stories by how interesting or exciting they are. And sometimes what’s interesting and exciting is our products, but sometimes what’s interesting and exciting is just the other company.

17:35
products. Apple’s just launched a new MacBook. What works with it? That’s a great opportunity to talk about your products. So outside, think products outside of the sort of kind of compatibility area, it’s still the same thing though. It really starts with who’s your target customer and why would they buy the product? And if you’re lucky enough to have the kind of product that gets people excited, really

18:04
you know, have a chance to speak to that and really, you know, illuminate in either text or video form. And of course, video is becoming more more important. You know, why, you know, all the things about your product that are exciting, that are things that in chair. Are blogging or YouTube? Like what channels are your content being published on? Yeah, it’s both. So we, and email. So, and actually we talked.

18:30
Steve, that was one of your pieces of advice for us. I don’t know if you were one of ones. long time ago, yeah, because you weren’t doing email, I remember. Yeah, we had like a 50,000 email list and we weren’t really using it because we didn’t want to bother people, basically. Yeah. And you were like, Bernie, you’re insane. So I’m less insane now. That’s great. I mean, I can understand your mentality because we’re both engineers. So yeah, that’s just something I guess you had to get over.

18:59
So do you use this email list now to launch products? Yes. Yeah. So we’ve actually done what we should have done. Thank you so much for kicking my butt, and getting me going on that. It took a long time though. That was probably two or three, maybe three years ago you scolded me about that. it took me a year or two to get going.

19:21
Yeah, we use active campaign. We really try to highly segment our audiences. As I was saying, really, we have many different audiences for our products and we want to get as specific as we can afford to because, yeah, that same motivation that I had not to bother people. Well, okay, if I can really kind of segment my audiences down to where I know, for example, that this is a Mac user, if I actually deliver

19:50
Mac specific content to a Mac user, they’re going to appreciate that generally. You know, and so it’s really all about segmenting, targeting, and thinking of us almost as, you know, kind of journalists for these specific audiences, you know, and giving them the content they want to hear. And so, yeah, that’s the strategy we have. I’ve got a full, you know, so Plugable, you know, we’re…

20:17
We’re fortunate to be at the scale where I have a full-time videographer. I have a full-time content writer, you know, and I’ve got a whole team of other, you know, kind of generalists and people around them. And so, because this does take a lot of work to do this, like actually that thing with ActiveCampaign and, you know, really doing that segmenting and really having those targeted, you know, targeted content to each of those segments, gosh, it’s a lot of work.

20:42
If I was just having to do it on my own, that’s part of the reason I didn’t is because of the amount of work involved. But there’s an answer to that, which is you just loosen up a little bit and you allow yourself to not segment so tightly and have fewer, more broad categories. If you can just do even a little bit of segmentation at a high level, that’ll really improve your open rate and…

21:09
you know, conversion to sale rate on emails. So, and then as you grow, can, you know, maybe afford to grow your effort and get your segmenting to be even more targeted. So I’m curious. So last time we talked, you were only on Amazon, Walmart and Newegg. Is that still the case? So for the online platforms, yeah, I mean, we’re forgetting some, but you know, like we were on Google. We actually dropped out of Google temporarily.

21:35
Is this Google shopping? Yeah, Google shopping or actually buy on Google, I think is what they call it now after a fifth or sixth rebranding. But we also distribute through the largest electronics distributors in the US. yeah, it’s not, and that’s been true for a long time. I mean, that’s been five or six years. So, you know, our product is pretty widely available and through those electronics distributors, you know, you’ll find our product all over the

22:04
I mean, pretty much anything detail, you’ll find us and if you’re a corporate buyer or government buyer, you’ll find us. Now, all that said, Amazon still dominates our sales because Amazon has pretty darn near monopoly market share in electronics right now in the United States. The reason why I asked that question was, how did you build this 50,000 email list? the email list, right, yeah, exactly. Well, so some of it comes from customers who have

22:34
signed up for things. We are constantly providing opportunities on the website for customers to sign up to be informed about things. Some of it is that. Some of it is we have… give me an example of sign up for things like, do you give away lead magnets or cool stuff? Funny enough, our best thing is when we’re out of stock of stuff.

22:59
So we’ll have a hot product that we’re out of stock of and we’ll have a, you know, sign up for our newsletter to get notified when we’re back in stock. Funny enough that that little practical thing is, you know, perhaps our best channel. That is a great, you know what? I’m not doing that right now. I’m going to start doing that. Yeah. No, it really, it’s, it’s super effective. Okay. So you’re gathering emails just from people coming to your site, maybe through content of some sort.

23:27
Because I noticed when I was on Plugable just like five minutes ago, all of your links actually go to specific marketplaces, right? You don’t actually take transactions on your site itself. Correct, that’s right. And if you want, can talk about why we don’t, which comes down to a US sales tax reason. Really? Can you elaborate? Yeah. So unfortunately, shops and carts you run yourself right now, all of the…

23:55
Tax regulations here in the US are kind of screwed up for that. So on one hand, have Amazon has taught consumers to expect a one or two day delivery or fast delivery, at least in a lot of segments of products. Well, the only way to deliver that fast delivery is to get the product close to the customer. It’s to use a warehouse network of some kind. mean, obviously, FBA, Amazon’s own warehouse network is the one that…

24:22
that is kind of the leader on this and Amazon has warehouses in something like 40 states. But there’s lots of other really good fulfillment networks that have cropped up and are cropping up. I the other one that we use is Deliver, which we really like. I don’t know how many states they’re in. think it’s, I could look in a spreadsheet, but basically eight or 10 states, like that. Well, every one of those states,

24:50
As soon as you’re using a fulfillment network that has warehouses in that state, that state expects your business to be registered in the state, collecting and filing and collecting, collecting remitting sales taxes, which requires filing, you know, and this, in that registration and filing burden and kind of understanding all the tax regulations of that state, that’s really complicated. get all these service providers that say, Oh, it’s easy. We’ll handle it with software. They, they’re only covering part of the problem.

25:19
It’s not your time that they’re spent. They can’t stop your time from getting spent on all that paperwork. They can do kind of maybe the actual transaction side of it, kind of gathering the transactions and doing the calculations. your signature’s on the line, you’re writing the checks. So anyways, yeah. And so the trouble is that we get caught where we need to use these fulfillment networks. But then if we do,

25:48
you know, we’re expected to collect and remit sales tax and potentially causes income tax nexus too. And if you’re only using marketplaces, this is taken care of for you. So in the last few years, almost all of these states have passed what’s called marketplace facilitator laws that make the big marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, put them on the hook to collect and remit.

26:16
the taxes, is great. So it’s taken off the small businesses plate. However, Shopify is not a marketplace and the same with WooCommerce or any other cart systems. So you’re still on the hook. So basically if you use FBA and you’re not tax registered in 40 States, you can’t really be using Shopify without getting yourself into state tax trouble. someone of your scale, at least.

26:45
Well, you know, it eventually catches up with you because, what will happen is even if you’re smaller, you know, like right now we’ve got this great environment to sell your e-commerce business. You know, there’s an asset bubble in my view, but in any case, it’s really attracted a lot of big funds, you know, that are buying e-commerce companies. Well, when you go to do that transaction, this will all come to roost. They’re going to take all of that tax

27:14
know, that accumulated tax liability in the eyes of these states, and they’re going to take it out of your transaction value at that time, because they’re going to want to clear the decks of any tax risk. Sure. Okay. And so, you know, it really can screw up transactions, and it really can take a gigantic bite out of transactions at that time. You know, if you’re going to hold your business forever, and your business doesn’t grow, you’re probably okay. You know, but even if you hold it and your business grows, it just becomes this

27:44
of unsolved problem that’s always hanging out there. And the states are terrible. They’re just terrible. They don’t let you get out of the problem because if you try to go, you know, just kind of register with the states on a go-forward basis, just say, ah, okay, well, I’ve gotten big enough. It’s actually a meaningful amount of tax I’d be paying the states. Let me register now. The states all want to go back in time and strip and make…

28:10
In theory, sales tax is a tax on the consumer that the business is just on the hook to collect and remit. But actually what the states do is if they feel like you should have been collecting the whole time and you’re not, they’ll go back in time and make you pay this tax that’s supposed to be a consumer tax out of your pocket. And so they put you in a perfect trap where you just can’t get out of it. You can’t afford to do the paperwork when you’re small, but then as you grow, it becomes a problem that grows with you.

28:40
Yeah, so I do think, although it’s a terrible dilemma, it actually is an important dilemma to at least have your kind of eyes open about.

28:52
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29:21
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29:50
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. We’re actually undergoing a sales tax audit right now, in fact, for California. is one of the worst ones. It is. Yeah, we are. We’re registered in California. We’re registered in a bunch of states, even though, mean, if we get to 40 states, you know, then we can turn on Shopify.

30:21
I mean, there’s 45 states with sales tax, 40 right now with Amazon warehouses. Yeah, and my feedback to shop, I don’t have any high level contacts at Shopify, but my feedback to Shopify is you got to become a marketplace facilitator because basically, Shopify is a huge phenomena, really kind of running away with the independent store market. But basically that whole gigantic ecosystem is not tax compliant.

30:50
I haven’t heard news about their app recently, but that’s kind of what that app was supposed to do, right? Turn it into a marketplace. Right. Of all the vendors. Yeah. And a lot of people in the Shopify community are here about them turning into a marketplace. They’re kind of opposed to it. You know, they don’t want Shopify to become another Amazon, but I think that’s a different issue. know, Shopify can continue to be a platform that

31:20
really supports these independent stores and doesn’t do what Amazon has done in terms of diluting brand value and having the marketplace have all the brand attached. They don’t need to go down that road. They just need to go down the road of solving these really gnarly state tax issues on behalf of these millions of small companies. Actually, that’d be a huge value add. Like if Shopify handled all the sales tax for you.

31:49
A lot of people would sign up for them over any other platform if they’re handling it. Absolutely. Absolutely. And we would be there instantly. Because actually, I don’t know if you know this, Steve, you said you went to a pluggable site. Believe it or not, we’re running on Shopify. Oh, I didn’t know that. We just don’t have the cart turned on. Interesting. The other thing I noticed was there’s no pop ups. Maybe that’ll be like every three years is an email tip that goes.

32:16
You’re probably going to pop-ups too, right? Because that disturbs the customer experience. Yeah, that’s right. That is my instinct. you did a good job scolding me three years ago, Steve. Do want to scold me on that one? Well, just try it and see how much more email subs that you get, which you can use to launch future Amazon products and that sort of thing. OK, cool. Just try it for a month and see what happens.

32:43
That’s good advice. And then you can even ask your customers if they were disturbed by the pop-up. Okay. They won’t answer me if I ask them that. Well, you can use a poll actually, like on PickFu or something and ask them if the pop-up bothers them. These are just random that you’re surveying. We love PickFu. We use PickFu all the time. Okay. So I wanted to talk a little bit about like the shipping container shortage right now and how that’s affected you and how you’re getting around it really.

33:10
Yeah, I mean, it’s crazy. We used to be able to count on about five weeks from factory door to Amazon, maybe six if we got a backless exam, an x-ray exam. And you basically have to add eight to 10 weeks to that right now. I mean, it is just insane. We’re losing two to four weeks scheduling the container on the origin side. We’re losing time on the water.

33:38
And then once the ships reach the US West Coast, they’re, you know, especially port of LA, they’re sitting there anchored for X amount of time. And then the goods, you know, reach the port and all of the equipment, you know, the chassis, the truckers, you know, everything’s constrained. So yeah, it’s crazy right now. you know, time is money, you know, all of that time that those goods are spending.

34:08
You know, on the water, stuck on ships, stuck at port, you know, that is impact on our cashflow. Okay. And yeah. And then you layer on top of it for electronics products, you have this much worse issue happening simultaneously, which is this chip shortage. And it is, it is just crazy. mean, yeah, I’ve only said only been at pluggable for 10 years, but I’ve been in the electronics industry for about 30 years and I’ve never ever seen anything like this.

34:38
Has the Amazon inventory rules, like the latest ones, have that affected your business as well? Huge. mean, it’s crazy that Amazon’s inventory rules are hitting at the same time as this massive supply chain disruption. Amazon counts the time goods are, as soon as you generate a label, it starts counting against your inbound inventory. So Amazon has gone through a series of kind

35:06
extremely disruptive and onerous inbound limits to FBA and totally changed what kind and what method they’ve used several times. And so right now they’re at a total number of units per account and it’s broken down a little bit by type of units. But yeah, if you’ve got units that you label at the factory, that whole extra two months or so that it’s in transit from the factory would count against you. And so

35:35
So what that means is that you pretty much need to not label things at the factory. You need to have an in-country 3PL that will do the Amazon labels at the last possible moment. So for us, that’s easy in the US because we actually have our own warehouse here in addition to 3PLs. Oh, okay. That’s the piece I was missing. I actually didn’t know that you had your own warehouse. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Was that always the case? It’s been the case for six years. Oh, okay.

36:04
Okay. All right. Okay. Yep. So, but we don’t in Canada, in the UK, in Europe, in Australia, in Singapore, in Japan. You know, and so, so, you know, we are hitting the, you know, these exact problems that other people are hitting in the US, we’re hitting them in the other geographies, you know, and Amazon is bouncing around those limits, we’ll ship in.

36:27
We’ll have the ability to ship in a thousand units. We’ll ship in the thousand and then they drop our limits by 2000. And so now we’re, you know, we’re 2000 over and our best sellers go out of stock and our slowest sellers clog up all our spots. You you almost wonder if it’s a systemic strategy on Amazon’s part to get brands like us to do heavy discounting, to move through.

36:55
are lower selling items. Because if you have a thousand brands who are all discounting their low selling items, that means almost every type of product is always going to have, you know, kind of desperate fire sale discounting happening at all times. know, so does that imply then right now the inventory goes to the US and then you ship it to those?

37:17
In most cases, yeah, we have some overseas 3PLs that we’re trying to ramp up. But yeah, it puts us at a gigantic disadvantage to the Chinese brands. Brands that are able to hold goods at the factory in China and then trickle them out around the world are at a massive advantage to brands that can’t. And pretty much unless you have a corporation in China, you can’t do that because the tax laws and some of the other regulations

37:47
really force the factories to get the items exported so that they can recover bats, they paid on the bomb and other things. so, yeah, it’s a real… China’s pretty much the only game in town for electronics, right? Pretty much. mean, so we’ve been really aggressive on getting out of China. So actually, we had a goal last year to get more than 50 % of our products by revenue.

38:15
manufactured outside of China and we hit that. Really? We did. Now we’ve walked into a whole bunch of trouble because actually as bad as the shipping disruption is from China, it’s worse everywhere else because you’ve got this massive shortage of both ship schedules and containers themselves. And the one route that everybody can fill the container every time on is the China route.

38:43
Basically, all the shipping companies, they’re trying to get their containers bouncing as fast as they can between the China and the US because that’s the biggest route. So when we’re trying to ship stuff out of Thailand or Vietnam or Taiwan, it’s actually harder to get those containers scheduled. And so we’re out about two more weeks versus when we ship stuff from China.

39:13
Yeah, I for us, I think we’ve been delayed four to six weeks from our shipments, but it doesn’t affect us as much since again, we have our own warehouse here also. So it’s like a little buffer that just kind of tides things over. Curious, last time we had talked, we talked about Amazon creating their own private label brands of your electronics. Is that continuing to happen? And what have you been doing about that? Yeah, it’s, you know, I think

39:42
The case that we talked about was kind of the big one for us because they took our top seller and very directly targeted us. It hasn’t happened quite so explicitly since that case. They’re still launching new products. They’re still in our space. They’re still not our biggest worry. Our biggest worry by far is our own factories and all the brands they’re launching on Amazon, which Amazon has encouraged Chinese factories to launch their own brands. And that’s a much bigger issue for us than Amazon basics.

40:12
But you know, Amazon basics is still, you know, are you going to your own factories or copying your designs? No, it’s it’s the you know, I mean, you know how things work in electronics. Yeah, Steve, you know, you’ve got the IC vendors who are the ones who really are making the big investments. You know, they’re making the multimillion dollar investments in these new chips. And then they’ll produce reference designs. And then the factories.

40:39
and the brands will look at those reference designs and tweak this, tweak that. But really, usually you’re not doing a ground up PCB relay out unless you really, really have to. I mean, you’re pretty much working from the reference designs. So the whole industry works that way. Yeah, so it’s not that the factories are copying our products. It’s that the factories are doing a set of

41:06
very related products, usually based on reference designs for all the brands they serve. And including now in the last three to five years, especially their own brands that are either explicitly associated with the factory and everybody knows it, or are kind of quietly owned on the side by the same guy who owns the factory or whatever.

41:32
and they have the advantage too. I guess the differentiating factor is firmware and software, right? Yeah, it’s firmware, software, choices, documentation. Our motto is better products, better information, better support. And so we know that we can’t get some massive advantage in any one area. So we just try to be better in dozens of little ways across all three of those products, better information.

42:01
Right. mean, marketing also becomes a huge play and then the content stuff and getting, I guess, influencers to use your stuff. Yeah. But the Chinese brands, they know how to do marketing. We’ve got in our space, this company that has just become a model that other Chinese brands have followed, which is Anchor. They’ve just done a great job really nailing Western marketing.

42:30
and then the other Chinese brands, hundreds of them, are kind fast followers of Anchor and then they innovate in their own ways. So is Anchor one of the brands that got banned? can’t remember. No, they’re not. not. know, Steven Yang and I know each other going way back. I kind of spilled the beans on our model when he was doing Laptop Mate before he created Anchor. And we’ve been kind of friends and competitors the whole time.

42:59
Stephen’s a really good guy and while Anchor has done some of the things we’re talking about, they’ve always done it with the customer in mind. They’ve never been, I would say, the way I would characterize it is they’ve never been black hat. They’ve always been, if they did anything, it was kind of gray hat. I would, in a sense, say the same thing to ourselves because earlier on, were, well, we never paid for reviews, we gave out, did we even give out free?

43:28
product for reviews years ago. Anyways, I know, you’re white hat, Bernie. I think you’re the whitest white hat person I know. Right. Yeah. Cause we were always, you know, we’re always thinking that way. Right. I mean, because in the end we were always trying the whole, the whole founding principle of the company is we wanted to be a better device company. Yeah. Kind of did right by consumers. So, you know, that’s always been, you know, that customer focus has been the thing that we, we, we have no reason to exist other than that.

43:58
Yeah. Because it really everybody, everybody else can do other things better. You know, it’s only and so it’s so the good thing is, is 10 or 11 years on, we actually have a huge amount of brand identity and brand loyalty. And it’s taken, you know, it’s it’s it’s almost like this insane patience that’s required to build that, you know, but you know, but I’m really proud that we have. I wanted to kind of circle back.

44:26
to our launch strategy, because I know you have a tool and I know you rely on white hat techniques like PPC and as it gets more competitive and you’re saying it’s pay to play now, so that means everyone’s paying to play. I know you have a tool PPC Ninja that I’m sure you use your own dog food, right? eat your own dog and use PPC Ninja. What are some of the things that you do to differentiate yourself from the competition that’s running PPC?

44:54
So PPC Ninja is both, we ingest all of your Amazon advertising reports, normalize all the data, connect all the data, and allow you to basically pivot and look at that data all kinds of different ways that’s completely connected and also kind of goes back in time. You’re not limited by just like doing a pivot table in Excel on one report for one limited period of time. It’s all reports, all data, all time.

45:23
And so, and then on top of that kind of viewing and pivoting, bids are really kind of time consuming to do, especially if you do it manually, we have bid automation. So we’re, and we do it in a really interesting, sophisticated way, especially when you launch a product, you you really don’t know what is the most effective bid level to be at.

45:47
And one of the things we have is, that’s kind of cool, is we’ve got these bid charts. Like in any keyword or campaign, you can just click and get a chart of any of the metrics of that keyword back in time, including the bid. And so you can kind of see the bid going up or down as we might have changed it at certain points. And then what that did to the sales numbers, to the impression numbers, to the conversion rate.

46:15
any of the other ad metrics. And so we really get to see some really interesting effects. Like one of the things we talk about a lot is, there’s a lot of kind of cliffs and then also on the downside end, I guess you call it on the upside, I what the correct term is for a cliff on the upside, plateaus call it, where- You’re talking about diminishing returns, right?

46:39
Well, you that you might be 90 cents and yet at the 90 cent level, you’re getting a really high percent of the total number of impressions. And then, but, maybe your ACOS isn’t quite to your metrics. so you drop your bid from 90 cents to 85 cents. What can happen with Amazon advertising is your impressions can fall off a cliff. You know, you, you, dropped to 85. Yeah. Your ACOS drops as you intended, but your impressions.

47:08
go to like one tenth the number of, even though you only dropped five cents, know, a little under 5%, your impressions drop manyfold. And it’s just because what ends up happening is even though it’s a second price auction for the bids, and even though there’s quite a bit of kind of rotation going on in the Amazon algorithms, still you might’ve fallen below a pack of competitors who are all advertising on that.

47:35
same keyword in that 85 cent to 90 cent range. And so your impressions drop off entirely. so basically, first of all, you’ve got to be able to see things like that happening. And so our tool lets you see that really easy. Right in the UI, just click and you’ve got these super nice charts. Our bid automation works in a really cool way. So one of the problems when you launch a product is you’re trying to find kind of that appropriate bid level.

48:05
but there’s not a lot of data there, not a lot of history, of course, because you’ve just launched. And so you want to make decisions at kind of the earliest responsible moment. So our algorithm, when this tool was a part of another tool and then basically up until last year, was to just use fixed periods of time. We would look back two weeks and make the recommendations based on that.

48:31
And so the way the recommendations work is every day you have recommendations popping up to adjust your bids up or down on potentially hundreds of keywords. Very easy to just kind of select all and accept all of them or look through the list, select all and then maybe look through the list and remove a few. So, you you would get those recommendations based on that two week data. So our algorithm now though is to have it be based on data sufficiency.

49:01
So as soon as you have enough impressions, clicks and sales where it’s considered sufficient to make a judgment on the effectiveness of that, basically coming down to the ACOS of that, then we’ll make a bid recommendation. So if you have a keyword that in one day will generate a few hundred impressions, 50 clicks and then two sales,

49:29
that will meet the sufficiency requirement and we’ll make a bid recommendation that day to, know, if sales are occurring at a kind of an effective ACOS to increase your bid and kind of get more impressions, more sales. Whereas if you have a slower running keyword, it might take you four weeks to generate that amount of sufficiency. So you will not get, you know, that bid recommendation on day one or day two and have it be based on kind of, you know, incomplete or erroneous data.

49:59
you’ll get it at that four week mark. So basically your fast moving keywords, we very quickly allow you to kind of optimize those bids within days or a week or two of launching your product. And then your long tail slower moving keywords, those will take longer, it’ll be stretched out kind of appropriately as the data comes in. And it basically allows us to launch products and really dial in the ads.

50:28
way quicker than a lot of other tools that use just timeframe based bid recommendations. So is it based on impressions and clicks as opposed to just time essentially? Correct. That’s right. Impressions, clicks and sales. Right. Okay. Cool. You know, I actually have all the tools, like all the competing tools in my disposal. I haven’t actually tried yours yet. You should. Yeah. Maybe I will fire it up. I just don’t like spreading out my API credentials to like every tool in the planet.

50:56
Right. I’ve done that. I guess it’s not a big deal. Well, you we don’t we specifically don’t ask for MWS credentials. So it is it’s just purely add credentials. OK. OK. And we do that again because we don’t want to, you know, create that risk or that fuzziness of why do these guys want our MWS credentials? What are they going to do with those? Those are so powerful. So, yeah, so we are at API only. So it’s a lot easier. OK, yeah.

51:24
I do notice, and I’m curious, maybe I will try your tool after this interview, I do notice that a lot of the analytics is not, it doesn’t show me everything I need to know and the bid suggestions are often like a big black box, which I would imagine for the regular user that’s fine. Or most people just want to pay someone to just do it all, I guess. Right, yeah, and we’re also an agency where they can just have us in.

51:51
Yeah, so PPCNinja is, we’ve got the software product, but then we also have an agency because, I mean, so many people do want the thing just taken care of, but the software allows us to do the agency side of it really efficiently. Okay. Well, cool. Bernie, where can people find you if they have any questions about the tool or your business?

52:14
Yeah, just go to ppcninja.com and we have a 14 day free trial on the software. then, you know, what I really recommend actually for, for a lot of your audience, Steve, is we’ve got a free four week mastermind. So it’s an hour a week, each of four weeks. We typically have a few dozen people that attend each session that we run. And I think there’s a, there’s a signup right on ppcninja.com for that. And it’s

52:42
taught by Ritu Java, who is our CEO and she’s… Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Steve, you know Ritu. I love Ritu. I love her. Ritu is awesome. And people just love this mastermind and it is free, which is kind of crazy, but it’s basically our main inbound funnel. And the feedback that we get off of that mastermind is so positive. Ritu kind of goes over all the basics of how to succeed with Amazon advertising and…

53:10
Ritu and her team are the ones who manage my budget for Plugable, is several basically on Amazon about 1.5 million a year in spend. In total, we manage several tens of millions of ad generated sales on Amazon. So Ritu really knows what she’s doing and it’s actually a really, really fun and effective teacher.

53:34
So it’s a different kind of mastermind that lots of interaction with people and we get people from around the world, but also a lot of great content. So really encourage people to try that out. Cool. And it’s priced right too. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, can’t beat that price. Hey, well, Bernie, thanks a lot. I mean, it’s great catching up with you after all these years and hopefully we can hang out in person again. Yeah, I definitely hope so. It’s a new world, but hopefully it’s a new good world. All right, take care. Okay. Thanks, Steve. Bye.

54:05
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now I sincerely believe that selling on Amazon and more so selling on your own website is still a great opportunity and the current challenges we are facing with inventory are being felt by everyone worldwide right now. But there’s a ton of demand and e-commerce is the future. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 375. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, 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.

54:35
SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash dv. That’s P-O-S-T-S-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash dv. I also want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows, an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifecoderjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

55:02
Once again, that’s mywifecoderjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifecoderjob.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.

00:29
So in this episode, we’re gonna learn how it is done. But before I begin, I wanna thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that eyes for e-commerce, and it is crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce, and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy,

00:57
and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo who is also a sponsor of the show. Now are you working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined and do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? And do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning

01:27
while also evolving in real time as their customers’ needs change. These companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their info, and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash mywife.

01:57
That’s KLAVIO.com slash my wife. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner Tony. And unlike this one where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now on to the show.

02:30
Welcome to the My Wife Quarter Job podcast. Today I’ve got my buddy, Ernest Epps on the show and Ernest is someone who I recently met on a panel for the Small Biz Aid virtual event where we discussed how to compete with Amazon. He’s the founder of high ticket ecomsecrets.com and ErnestEpps.com where he teaches high ticket dropshipping. Now the term dropshipping gets thrown around a lot and it actually has a negative connotation sometimes in the ecom world, but Ernest specifically focuses on higher ticket items for dropshipping.

03:00
And similar to me, he’s not a believer in dropshipping from China, Amazon dropshipping, or any of the get rich quick schemes that you see on the internet. And in this episode, you will learn what it takes to get started with high ticket dropshipping and how Ernest got started with this e-commerce business model. So Ernest, how are doing today, I am spectacular. So Ernest, before we start, give me the quick background story on how you got started with dropshipping, specifically high ticket dropshipping.

03:28
Yeah, so what ended up happening, I was climbing the corporate ladder like I think a lot of us do in our career. And, really, I went that direction because that was the process my mom kind of instilled, right, which was, you know, the traditional go to school, graduate, then go back to school and get a degree and then pray that you get a good job and work there for the next 40 plus years. I like to call that the work until you die program.

03:58
Right. So I I was brought up the same way. Yeah. Oh, OK. Gotcha. Yeah. So I mean, that was traditionally like the trajectory that was kind of going. And then, you know, I was working at a marketing firm and I was a sales district sales manager for them. And I was overseeing seventy seven locations from South Carolina to Massachusetts on a project that we were working on for a multibillion dollar company. And I was helping them crush it. And all of a sudden, the company was going through a restructure.

04:26
And I happened to be restructured out of the restructure. And that personally for me broke my soul. And I say that because I mean, it really hurt me something deep. mean, I cried like a baby. I had never done that before. Right. Yeah. And it was because it was my dream job. Right. Like it was my dream job of

04:48
you know, where I wanted to be. And anyone at that time, they would ask me, I’m like, man, I’m going to work here. I’m going to work here till I die. Like, this is it. I’m to become the CEO of this company. Like that was my game plan. And I just lost it just in an instance. Right. And so that made me aggressively start looking to do something else. And to the point you kind of made early on, I started researching dropshipping. Right. And, know, I seen that, oh my gosh, there’s so many different ways to do this.

05:14
And so that kind of made me really nervous, uh, kind of getting started. And so what I did was I bought a lot of different programs, right? And I learned about the different models of dropshipping. So drop shipping direct from China, retail arbitrage, Amazon, FBA, uh, white label and private label. And I was just like, man, you know, there’s a lot of different ways to kind of do this. But what I wanted to make sure is that whatever it was that I built,

05:40
was gonna put me in a position to be able to have a long-term sustainable success. And what I saw specifically, let’s say for example, the drop shipping direct from China was that your fulfillment times were super long, right? So in terms of products getting to customers, have no control over, there’s no quality control. There’s no enforcement of quality control. If you have to do a return, there’s no way, like no customer is gonna ship their product to China, right? So it was just like, I don’t want this anymore. Send it back to China. Like, what are you talking about?

06:10
So I was just like, man, there’s got to be a smarter way to do this. So what I started doing was really looking at the behaviors of some of like the top retailers online, right? So for example, like the Walmart’s, the Home Depot’s, the Amazon’s, the Wayfair and Wayfair in particularly. And what I discovered was they built relationships directly with manufacturers like you traditionally do in like retail. And they set up accounts with them. And now because the concept of drop shipping is a lot

06:40
simpler in a fulfillment process. Cause if you research the nature of dropshipping, all it is is a fulfillment method, right? Most people can, most people don’t do enough due diligence and understand what the heck it is that they’re doing. All dropshipping is, a fulfillment method that elaborates on how a product gets direct to the consumer, right? So rather than have an inventory and overhead, if you establish a relationship with the supplier, you can actually request a dropship account. So for example, with selling like electric fireplaces,

07:08
There’s a lot of brands that are here specifically in the U S domestically where you can actually give them a call. And as long as you’re an already established business, like with the website, a business entity, things of that nature, they’re really open and receptive to helping you open up an account with them to be able to, uh, to drop ship. Right. So I was just like, that sounds a lot more simpler than, you know, this all overseas China stuff. So.

07:34
That’s basically what I started to discover. And the reason why I got attracted to dropshipping, right? Because again, there’s a lot of different things that you can do from a business perspective, like real estate, stock market. You know, at this time, crypto is blowing up like crazy. You know, so there’s a lot of different models. But for me, the thing that there was, there was one thing in particular that made me specifically look at making money on the Internet and making dropshipping my vehicle was that I heard a quote from Warren Buffett where he says, if you don’t learn how to make money while you sleep,

08:03
you’re going to work until you die. Yep. I love that quote actually. Right. And so I was like, all right, Warren, how do I get this sleeping money? Right. So, and so when I started looking at the different vehicles, right. In the process, again, specifically like online, the thing that made it attractive was that there wasn’t a high inventory, right. Or there wasn’t a high overhead. And so I was just like, Oh, that’s really attractive because

08:29
You know, now there are ways in real estate per se to like, you know, be able to have success, but I didn’t understand any of those concepts. They scared the crap out of me. Uh, cause I didn’t have a lot of money to get the ball rolling. Um, after I had lost my corporate job. So I was like, I gotta find a vehicle that could like, I could be able to have really great leverage and could put me in a position to make money while I sleep. Like, so when I started to do the due diligence, I saw specifically, for example, in the state of Virginia is $12 and 50 cent to register a DBA. Right.

08:57
And I was like, Ooh, that’s only $12 to start a business. Okay. That’s that. like that. I was like, okay, how do I build this website? And everyone’s talking about Shopify. And I was like, Oh man, that’s probably thousands of dollars. And it would have been back in 1990, but you know, we’re in the, you know, late 2000s now or mid 2000s, mid early 2000s. And was like $29. I was like, Holy smokes, $29 a month. All right, cool. So I’m at $12, 29. And then at the time Shopify was doing a promo with Google. If you spend 25 to get you a hundred.

09:25
So was like, oh yeah, so I money for advertising. So basically all in to get started, I’m at, oh, you got to get a domain name too. So that was like 10 bucks. So I’m like, I’m less than a hundred dollars to like launch a real business, right? And I was like, I like that, right? Along with the fact of like the relationships with the manufacturers, not having to purchase the inventory until you actually got a sale. And I was like, that seems like something I could really be in a good position to build some long-term success with.

09:55
Yep. So very low budget. Exactly. Very low feasible budget. mean, literally just if you have 300 to a thousand dollars, like you can start a legitimate drop shipping business and do it the right way and not have to break the bank. So Ernest, would you mind sharing your shop? Actually, I couldn’t find it on your website. And what do you sell? Yeah. So one of the main stores I’ve been running for the last seven years is a is wine stores. So

10:22
That particular site is good wine coolers.com. And so if you go to that, like you’ll see, I got over 5,000 products on it. And the funny thing is most people they’re like, Oh, you know, Ernest, your website isn’t that sexy. My response is, you’re absolutely right. But where the site wins and excels is obviously a really good done advertising in terms of getting in front of the right prospects at the right time. And then also

10:48
My specific product pages are optimized and that’s where they win. It’s because I have very unique offers that I’m able to provide to the marketplace that helps separate me from the competition. So when someone is looking for that 300 bottle dual zone wine cooler and I come up and they start kind of researching and figuring out, okay, if I’m going to go ahead and get this, let me see what other businesses and stuff are out there that I could possibly buy from. They come across for me and they see, man, I get free shipping. Oh my gosh, I get free white glove service.

11:18
And they’re going to give me a free set of wine glasses. I mean, nobody in the entire internet is doing that right now. Right. So I might not be familiar with this company, but I do see a couple of things. I do see that they offer me a money back guarantee in terms of our price matching. I do see that they are registered with the better business bureau. I do see that they have a plus rating with them. And I do see that they have over a hundred plus verified reviews. It’s like they’re pretty legit. So I could see myself spending some money with them.

11:48
And basically, that’s how I’m able to really excel with that specific business. is considered high ticket drop shipping? Yeah, so really, the concept high ticket drop shipping is essentially just focusing on finding, sourcing, and selling products that have a higher price point. So normally online, would be considered low ticket would be between $20 to maybe like

12:14
$100 mid ticket is between like 100 to $200 per transaction. Um, and then high ticket is basically items that have an average order value of, uh, $200 and up for a single item. So that’s what, uh, there’s a high ticket e-comm. So in terms of high ticket drop shipping, what are your typical margins? Yeah. So typically on average, it’s the same, uh, that you would see across the board in drop shipping. Right. So

12:40
Normally after acquisition costs, advertising, you’re usually seeing about 20 to 30 % on average. that’s just starting off. So for example, I have a supplier that I work with by the name of Zline. And with them, I have 25 % margin after everything, right? Nice. That’s shipping, the product. And normally like my acquisition costs for their products is between like 20 to $40 to get someone to convert. So yeah, it has an AOV of $700 for those particular units.

13:10
Oh, wow. Cool. So that’s really high ticket then. Yeah. Yeah. It’s pretty decent. So what does the product research look like? Like, let’s say I’m just getting started with this and I have no idea what I want to sell. How do you find like a good what makes a good drop ship product? Yeah. So really, I like to start at the fundamentals of number one, making sure there’s enough demand for the audience it is that you want to serve. Right. Okay. So for example, like if you were to do research on like electric fireplaces right now,

13:39
you would see on average, there’s about 200,000 people a month looking for their products. Right. And you’re using what, like a keyword tool? Exactly. We’re using a keyword tool. So my favorite public tool to be able to use it only costs like 10 bucks. Uh, it’s called a keywords everywhere. Right. So with that tool, you’re now able to get that data. Like I just mentioned in terms of like search volume. Uh, cause the biggest challenge is where I think a lot of people

14:05
mess up on building their econ business, whether it’s like drop shipping or just selling any type of physical product, as they don’t do enough research, which I’m glad it is that you brought up. Because if you do enough, if you do enough good due diligence on the front end, like by the time you get to like, you know, developing your offers, uploading your products, inputting your pricing, coming up with a unique selling proposition, you know, you will have discovered that stuff on the front end, right?

14:33
And so that’s, that’s one of my favorite tools. And then another tool is a Google trends, which will show you basically like the seasonality of a particular brand. Right. And that’s super important because you don’t want to be, you know, going into a particular, uh, you know, niche and market where, know, you’re heading into like either like the downward, uh, part of the trend or you’re already starting off at the lowest frequency of the trend. Right.

14:58
Um, so, you know, you want to be able to be in a good position. And the biggest, always tell people is that you don’t have to guess, especially when running an online business, because we have these tools that are out there that’ll give us this sort of insight. Right. And then, uh, the other thing is just going on the specific shopping network on Google, which is, uh, when you go to look for any type of physical products. So again, you type in electric fireplace, uh, you click on the shopping tab and then that specifically is its own channel with the inside of Google. Right. So that’s called the shopping network.

15:28
And you you started to do due diligence on, you know, seeing what products and stuff are already actively listed and what you’ll start to be able to see is on basically what’s going to happen is when you put in the generic keywords. So, so again, electric fireplaces, Google on the left-hand side will actually show you specifically how much money people are spending on average. They will categorize the, price points for that particular market. Right? So if you’re someone again, it says, Hey, I want to make sure that I’m selling products to have an

15:55
average order value, potentially $500 and up. So when you put in the particular product and you looked on the left-hand column, Google normally itemizes that into three to four different price points, right? And typically the second and third price structure that they have is normally what people are spending on average, right? And then you could validate that by just looking specifically on the shopping network. And usually I go through like the first three to five pages.

16:22
Because obviously Google is going to show the most relevant things that are selling when you’re putting in like a top of funnel type of keyword for that particular niche and market. So you can see, again, just a quick glance of like, okay, I see that Google is saying most people spend in between $400 to $800. Let me validate that through the actual search results. And so just go through, and you could be able to take a strong educated guess based off of that data that you just got. in terms of, so you mentioned a couple of things there.

16:50
electric fireplaces gets 200,000 searches per month. How do you know whether it’s too competitive to sell that item though? Like the demand is there clearly. Exactly. So I totally negate any type of like organic search results, right? So specifically my focus on my ability to be able to create success with that is seeing how many people on average are maximizing the shopping network, right? Because. shopping.

17:18
Exactly. So Google shopping, that’s exactly. So I’m going to stick there to love to measure the level of competitiveness, uh, because specifically that’s where you’re going to be able to get the greatest return on ad spend when it’s time to start advertising. Like, uh, just comparing apples to apples with like Facebook and Google. Cause those are the two primary places most people start like Facebook you would see typically on average, once you got pretty good, uh, three X return on ad spend. Now you can see a lot higher.

17:44
But again, starting off for the, for the new people, like if you can get a three X, like you’re doing pretty solid, right? Yep. On the shopping network, you’re able to see a five to 10 X return on ad spend with your money that you’re spending on the shopping network. Right. Yep. And that’s starting off again, basic brand new. You don’t know a ton of stuff. And also the thing that I love about Google is that you don’t have to know.

18:05
all the other fancier things in terms of marketing. So you don’t have to know how to write copy. You don’t have to know how to put together different creatives, call to actions in your ads. Google actually does all the creatives for you when your products get indexed in what’s called Merchant Center. And so they control the rotation and call to actions and things of that nature for your products as people are looking on the different assets that Google owns like YouTube, now even Gmail, where your products, when you’re running shopping ads can actually show up in people’s inboxes.

18:35
which is really cool too. So Google like tracks all that. And then obviously their goal is to, put you in front of their process, your prospects, you know, when they’re in the process of searching for your particular products, because you know, when they earn that click and get that click, you know, they get paid. So, you know, that’s, that’s what, so that’s why I started on the shopping network. So as long as there’s not more than 20 people on average, so you can determine that average by looking at the different listings. So when you go to the shopping network,

19:04
you’ll see all the different products kind of itemized. Right. And what Google does is when it has more than one person selling that particular product or brand, it will actually tell you how many stores are selling that. So specifically, I want to go into a market where there’s not more than 20 people on average already currently selling those products, because on the, on the back end, again, once you get to the advertising perspective, it’s going to be much easier to get into the rotation on the shopping network with everyone else.

19:31
when there’s not 40, 50 suppliers. So for example, our stores. So for example, if you were to put in juicers, right? And you go to the shopping network, you’ll see there’s 50 to 100 stores on some of those different listings. And on average, it’s about, I want to say between 50 to 80 stores that are selling juicers on the internet. So something like that is just like, whoa, that’s a lot of competition, which as we know, even if there is a lot of competition, that’s actually a good thing, right?

19:59
But for the new person, what I know is that from an acquisition cost to be able to get that like five to 10 X raw ads, it’s gonna be much simpler going into a niche that has less competition, because then you don’t have to work as hard and it doesn’t cost as much to acquire a customer. So even with just 20 people, presumably you guys are all selling the exact same item, right? Yep. And when it’s just a picture and a price, does it just kind of boil down to price at that point with Google shopping ads?

20:26
So it boils down to a couple of different things. So once you actually get into running the ads on the shopping network, know, price is obviously one of the things that you’re looking for, but also Google is also going to look at the relevancy of like your product title, description, the skew number, barcode, things that nature that you send into merchant center to determine how relevant you are to that particular prospect. And then they’re going to start measuring some of the other data from example, like your CTR.

20:55
to see like, if we put you in front of X amount of prospects, what’s the likelihood that you’re going to earn a click? So the better that CTR is for your ads, the more Google has a higher likelihood to put you into that better rotation. So it’s not like Amazon in a sense where Amazon like, you know, 80 % of getting the buy box is like the price, right? And then you got all these other little things. And so, you know, price is obviously going to be one of them, but they’re looking at all the other keywords, relevancy, and then tracking your data in terms of customer

21:25
customer experience once they get to your site. So they’re going to be looking at your bounce rate, how many pages of view per session are people actually adding the cart and ultimately are people converting. So when you start to have good customer experience in the backend of like running your ads, you don’t necessarily have to even spend a whole lot more to order in order to even rank well. It’ll just put you in a better, higher rotation. And then the other aspect with everyone listing products specifically, again, you go and you see 20 people listed is that.

21:52
Google gives the ability to do two things. One is to actually add reviews for your product. Most people don’t even know that you can do. And it’s actually kind of funny because a lot of like billion dollar brands out here like Walmart, they don’t even have their reviews on the shopping network for their products on their store. Okay. Yeah. Crazy, right? Yeah. So you can actually get your reviews from your store to actually show up on the shopping network. So again,

22:17
for those customers that we know that are doing real due diligence, they’re about to spend $1,500, $2,000 for a product, they’re gonna be looking at reviews on the shopping network before they put their credit card into your website. So if you have reviews there, and let’s say it’s 10 reviews and you’ve got six out of the 10, I mean, it’s like, wow, like, you know, I’m in California, this company here is registered in Virginia, but they seem pretty legit. I think I might wanna go with them, right? And then the other thing that you can do is you can actually run promotions on the shopping network, which once again,

22:45
Most people don’t know that you can do, which is a feature that you can unlock inside of your merchant center account. So now your promotions that you have also are something that’s going to help you stand out. Even if everyone has the same exact price or roughly like right around the same exact price, this will give you that extra competitive edge.

23:03
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.

23:32
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.

24:01
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now back to the show. I guess what you’re saying basically is a lot of these people that are bigger players, they probably don’t pay attention to these PLA ads as much. And if you focus on them and you’re niche focused, you do a better job than the big players. So the next question I have is what about Amazon? Amazon actually buys a bunch of PLAs also.

24:28
Right. And I’m pretty sure they’re doing the reviews and that sort of thing. So how do you compete with Amazon since it’s probably the same item, right? So what’s so funny, and this is going to blow you guys as minds is that Amazon does not focus on listing their high ticket products on the shopping network. Interesting. Okay. And personally, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s actually crazy because you’re the first person

24:54
I think in an interview or speaking setting that’s ever asked me about that, and I’ve been speaking for a couple of years now. So kudos to you for asking that. So there in my, in my opinion, they know they’re obviously target customer. Right. And so in my assumption in this is because again, you go look at those electric fireplaces right now, you can go see like, for example, the Amante brand is listed on Amazon. Amazon’s even doing some, you know, FBA with those, with that particular brand.

25:24
But if you go to the shopping network, Amazon’s not listed for those. They’re not selling the 60 inch, $2,000 electric fireplace on the product listing ads. They’re strategically focused on the lower ticket products. So what I’ve seen is that products between, again, that low, low ticket, mid ticket item. So anything like less than $200, that’s where they’re actually maximizing the product listing ads. everything that’s like, really once you start getting into 500 to a thousand plus.

25:53
they’re not running shopping ads. That is really interesting because the higher your ticket item, the easier advertising gets. So it should actually be the opposite. You would think so. Okay, so just some other questions. There’s people that are selling on Amazon. They’re giving Amazon 15%, right? So are those people stocking the items or are they drop shipping? So you could actually see with the people on Amazon if they’re

26:21
drop shipping the product or if they’re doing, you know, or if they’re, you know, particularly leveraging Amazon to do the fulfillment for that. So really is just when you go to Amazon and you see that particular listing, it’ll say either like, you know, shipping from Amazon or shipping from that particular brand, right? So it’s shipping from the brand, that’s merchant fulfilled, which means that they’re actually drop shipping the product direct to consumer versus Amazon actually fulfilling the product. So yeah, that’s just a real simple way to determine that. Okay.

26:51
So you mentioned competing against no more than 20 other people. How do you even stand out among the 20 people? Yeah, so that’s where again, on the shopping network specifically, you can put your own unique promotions. So outside of being able to be competitive on price. So for example, there’s a brand I work with called VinoTemp and I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’m gonna say it anyways. Hopefully the CEO, India, she’s not listening. But sometimes I violate the map policy just a little bit.

27:21
uh, in order to have like lower pricing, cause I already know I have like the margin to do so. Uh, so if I know I got like, you know, 30, 40 % margin to kind of work with, I’ll, know, with the suppliers, some with mad policy, but mostly the ones that don’t have mad policy, I’ll see how aggressive I can be with the pricing. Cause again, that is a huge emphasis. And so number one, obviously like your pricing, a lot of people want to go with the person that’s the lowest, but not all in all cases, not in all cases where they always go with the lowest person. But you know, you want to try to get to be as aggressive as you can with the pricing.

27:51
while still being able to make a profit. But really the other unique way, especially for suppliers that have a map policy. So one of that I say is like Z-Line, you can’t violate their map policy. Another company, Blaze, they are on top of it. Like they are not messing around. So with them, again, everyone’s going to be selling at the same price. And also if you guys don’t know what MAP stands for, it stands for minimum advertised price. So what’s really unique about domestic suppliers here in the US,

28:18
is that a lot of brands have this policy. So what this does is it does a couple of things, right? So number one, it protects their integrity of the pricing of their brand in the marketplace. So for big companies like Amazon and Walmart that can afford to lose money on a sale, it makes it to where they can’t, right? It also helps you significantly because now when someone sees the product at Amazon and Walmart, you have the same exact price that you’re selling the product at.

28:46
So again, with MAP, it just means the lowest price that you can list a product that doesn’t mean that you can’t list it higher. And so oftentimes when the first thing people are like, man, how do I compete with the prices on Amazon? Well, you just go and work with MAP suppliers and now everyone has to sell the product at that price no matter what. And if Amazon violates, you can actually personally report them to the company because you will have a dedicated account manager. You could snitch on them if you want to.

29:15
Yep. So just a little couple of extra gems with the whole map thing. you know, really, again, with the shopping network, it’s the ability to, again, be aggressive on your pricing, but then also maximize the promotional area where you can do like free shipping. You could give like a 5 % off coupon, something of that nature. I can’t remember how many characters off the top of my head that you can utilize, but that’s where you separate yourself from everyone else too. Cause again, when you go to the shopping network right now, I mean, there’s a lot of brands. know, for example, Home Depot,

29:42
they don’t even run promotions oftentimes on their products that they’re listing on the shopping network. Yeah, no, I can totally see that because they have so many products that they have to worry about. Exactly. What about once they land on your site, how do you convert them? I mean, there’s a bunch of different places that are all selling for the same price. What are your value props for your shop? Yep, so earlier on, I kind of mentioned one unique one with like the 300 bottle dual zone wine cooler.

30:09
So what I like to do, especially on the items that I know that are going to ship LTL, which stands for less than truckloads. So that just means that, you know, a big truck is going to need to come pick it up because it’s pretty heavy or it’s like really weird and obscure. for example, like a paddleboard, it’s like not that wide in terms of like, you know, the width of it, but it’s super long. Right. So something like that would have to go on a, on a freight truck. Right. So if it’s something that goes LTL, what I would like to, what I would do is focus on my

30:38
best viewed products are currently already selling products and look at what type of additional shipping service could I add onto that to create a nice customer experience if they decided to buy from me. So there’s a couple extra tiers of shipping specifically for LTO. You have what’s called curbside delivery, which most people are familiar with. They come drop it off at the curve, keep it moving, right? The next one is a door to door where they’ll actually deliver it to the entry port or whatever door. So garage door, front door, something like that.

31:07
Then you have inside delivery where they’ll actually take it into a room of choice. That’s also another verbiage of it where they’ll bring the product into the home, know, drop it off in whatever room it is. But then like you’re stuck with like, you know, setting it up, unpackaging, all that good stuff. And then you have what I like to call the Ferrari experience of shipping, which is known as a white glove service. Okay. And most, again, consumers that are in the market looking for, you know,

31:35
a product of, you know, big stature, that’s something that’s commonly known as white glove service. So your ability to potentially either weave it into, you know, having to come out of your margin and offering that for free or, you know, being able to offer just a really aggressive pricing on that. Because remember, you’re working direct with either your carrier or the manufacturer. So you’re going to have way lower rates than like the retail. So I can beat any major retailer, whether it’s Home Depot, Walmart.

32:03
overstock, Wayfair, I’m going to beat them like crazy on offering white glove service because I have really good wholesale rates on that. my goal is again, it’s to weave into one or more of these services that I offer, especially for my top view to top selling products to create that unique experience. So if someone sees that I have it, and again, they go to Walmart, they go to Amazon. And the beautiful thing is that we’re small businesses and I want you guys to really remember that.

32:31
Like that’s where the leverage comes in. We can do stuff that corporate is not going to do. Again, I’ve, I’ve worked with like Walmart, like I worked with Walmart corporate, right? If you want to do something unique for a customer, you got to talk to the store manager, district manager, regional manager. They got to run it up to the VP. Like it’s a whole week to get a yes or no. Right. Where when you’re a small business, it stops with you, right? It’s yes or no from you. So if I say, Hey, you know, I want to.

33:01
provide you with a white glove service on this 300 bottle, $2,500 unit, I can do so at the flick of a switch. Yeah. So those are the, that’s one of the unique things. And then also I have a concept of the value of gift giving, right? So there’s a really unique thing that happens when obviously you give people stuff for free, especially a physical

33:27
a tangible, uh, you know, element that they can hold in their hand, right. Along with being able to give something, someone about something of value. So I have a promo on that particular store where if you spend anything over $400, you get a free set of wine glasses. Right. Nice. So now that can’t be combined or used with other promotions, but again, it’s another thing that helps separate me from everyone else. And the wine glasses I give away are super nice, high-end, uh, glasses that actually have a 10 year warranty on them. So.

33:57
It’s like, wow. Like again, Amazon’s not doing that. Walmart’s not doing that. They’re not going to get, that from anywhere else. And so I, I stack multiple type of incentives that I know are still going to be within the scope of my margins and profitability and do that in order to again, give myself that competitive edge. Cause personally for me, my goal actually on the shopping network is never to really be number one, unless I can get there just through like a natural rotation.

34:26
Because the number one spot we all know anyone has done advertising and marketing is expensive, right? That’s the most expensive click is to get to be number one. So my goal is only to be in the top 10. Like I just want to be in the top 10 listings on the shopping network because I want to gain those people that are already ready to make a decision and they’re just going through and trying to find those different businesses that they feel are going to give them the best deal. And so by the time they land on my site, it’s like,

34:55
Holy smokes, like this is amazing. best. Yeah. got this off of basically exactly. I’m, all for driven. So let me ask you this. So with high ticket items, it seems like you need to have like a phone line, right? Oh, absolutely. I think really with any business on the internet, the funny thing is like everyone, again, we want to make the money while we sleep and things of that nature, but having a phone number on your specific website, your funnel,

35:25
anything that is that you’re selling online will give consumers such a huge peace of mind because no, just think about yourself as a consumer. No one wants to spend money, especially with someone that they’ve never bought anything from and not know how to get in contact with. No, absolutely. But I think in your case though, you almost need people who are experts at your items, right? Which are more expensive because there’s gonna be a lot of questions I would imagine. It’s so funny because again, you think that

35:55
but it really, you really don’t. Okay. All right. Really the, the customer service people. So again, when I train people to do customer service for me, again, we’re focused on making sure that we can answer the questions and closing the sale, right? This hell is super important. But most importantly though is just taking the time to just really answer the question. in most instances, again, cause we’re getting a lot of people

36:20
that from a business perspective that are coming through that know what they want already. So remember like the intention, specifically with the shopping network, Google’s only gonna display you for one or two reasons. Either A, someone’s looking for exactly what you sell or B, they’re looking for something extremely similar. So from a education perspective, they’re probably, they’re already somewhat familiarized with the products already, right? And so when someone calls in, usually it’s just a couple basic questions. And oftentimes it’s stuff that’s already on the landing page.

36:50
Like, is it, see that this electric fireplace is freestanding. Is it also built in? And, you know, just scroll through the product description and say, absolutely. Yep. There is it right here. Right. So, um, a lot of the times I want to say there’s a strong 90 % of the time where your question can be answered based off the landing page. And then there’s that 10 % of like, well, what’s the voltage? I’m like, man, what’s the voltage? Like, what is he talking about?

37:15
So, so how we educate or how I’ve educated my customer service people is the response is that’s a great question. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna actually get ready to call my warehouse supervisor and have him answer that for me directly. That way I can make sure I’m giving you the exact information that that you need. Is there any other questions before I give them a call or just place you on a brief hold? Nice. Okay.

37:41
And yeah, most man consumers love, they love stuff like that, right? That you’re gonna take out your time to really make sure that you’re getting a direct answer. And we say warehouse supervisor, in essence, it’s just your account manager at the supplier. Yeah. One thing I also want to touch on is how do you find a supplier? Like if you’re brand new, how can you get like a name brand to drop ship for you? Yep. So really I touched based on this real briefly, but to elaborate on it.

38:10
Um, you know, we’re looking to contact the manufacturer first and foremost, they’re going to want to make sure again, that you are a real business because you’re going to have to fill out paperwork is going to have to go over to the accounting team, most likely to set up your account and put you on file, assign you an account number, things of that nature. So when you’ve decided on that particular niche of market that you want to go to, now what you want to do is you want to brand yourself around that particular market, right? So if I’m selling electric fireplaces, I’m now going to establish an entity.

38:38
Called like electric fireplaces, USA calm, right? So that’s going to be the entity that I’m gonna set up I’m gonna get an EIN number for that. I’m gonna get the business domain Obviously, I’m gonna get a business email and I’m gonna get a dedicated business phone number business email You guys can get from like Google workspace. It’s like five dollars Which is formerly known as Google G suite So but it’s now Google workspace then also for your domain name you can get from like namecheap They also give you free who is protection

39:06
And then for your business phone number, you guys can check out Grasshopper. But there’s tons of business, you know, VoIP numbers that you can get. That’s a dedicated number specifically for that business. Right. So now once you got that stuff taken care of, it’s going to be building out what I like to refer to as a demo store. Right. So basically you’re going to get your logo done. You’re going to build out just a couple of simple collections. Right. So, I mean, about us pays contact us page and just whatever the main two categories is for that particular.

39:35
market that you’re going into. So because we’ve been talking about let your fireplaces, it’ll be, you know, freestanding and built in. Right. So those are your two primary collections. And then you’re just going to upload a few just sample products on there. It doesn’t have to be a whole lot. I mean, like really 10. So when you do have that conversation with your, uh, with the new manufacturer that you’re reaching out to, you can let them know like, Hey, uh, we’re, know, just now entering into this marketplace and you know, we’ve put together a demo store so you can get a good look and feel of how your products are going to look when we decide to work together.

40:05
And that’s how the conversation piece will go. Now, if we kind of backtrack a little bit before that, which I think was your original question is how do you find the suppliers? This just comes through competitive research, right? So is going out and identifying who is already selling these products specifically online and not big box stores, right? So we don’t want to use them as our examples. So not the Walmarts, the Home Depots, the Amazons. We want to go and find other ideally niche specific websites

40:34
that already have those products, right? So for example, there’s a website called Home Square, right? So if you go to Home Square and start to do some research on the website, like seeing, hey, do they have a physical location? Do they mention, hey, come to our warehouse or showroom? Or do they just mention that they’re an online store, right? And so doing your due diligence on that specific site, you’ll see that they’re just an online store.

41:00
So now what that tells you is that any brand that they have listed on their website, guess what? Their drop ship indirect to consumer, because if they don’t have any physical location where someone could pick up their product in person and any business that has a physical location, they’re going to brag about it and they’ll say, Hey, come to our store. And indirectly in my mind, it’s just like, yeah, cause you got all that overhead. Right. But those of us that are just selling online, we, we, you can’t say that. Right. Right.

41:28
So that’s how you can identify who’s already got relationships with brands that are already going to drop ship for you. So there’s a website called electric fireplaces direct. So if you go to their site, you can actually click on their brand section and they actually have all their brands listed. All the work is already done for you. So now, know, like, man, so all these brands that are here, the Amante, Duraframe, Dimplex, all those different brands. If you decide to go into that particular market and niche that you have a high likelihood to get approved with them.

41:58
if you reached out to them to set up a drop ship account. So do you end up buying any of the items that you drop ship? So for me, yes. Man, you ask all the good questions, man. I can’t keep any secrets from you. So I actually do have a warehouse in Virginia. That’s actually where we’re, you know, doing this interview at. And so when I noticed that there’s some. So two things, right. So we just are on the tail end of the covid season with the whole global pandemic. So what I did

42:26
because again, we all have these direct relationships with the manufacturer. So in order to really take control of certain products that we’re selling really hot, I would notice that the inventory quantities are my best selling products. I would buy them in bulk and put them here in the warehouse. And now no one in the entire country could access them except for me. I see. So you bought out all the inventory. Exactly.

42:51
So, but I only focused on, again, my top selling products or products that I knew that was moving at a high volume because with the whole global pandemic, was short staffed, just manufacturing was severely backed up, so forth and so on. So I did that to give myself a competitive edge. And then also sometimes your suppliers and manufacturers, they’ll be, for whatever reason, wanting to move additional SKUs in their product lines. So they’ll say, hey,

43:16
We’re going to discount all the, you know, freestanding electric fireplaces this month. Here’s an extra, you know, 20 % off, but we’re only going to do it if you buy 10 at a time. Right. Right. So in order to maximize things at that capacity, that’s also why I got the warehouse space. So do you ever take your own photos or do you use the stock photos that they give you?

43:38
No, I get all the photos and stuff specifically from the manufacturer. And then oftentimes, again, once you really start establishing like a good relationship, if there’s something unique that you want to have done with the particular product, like, you know, for example, Rich at VinoTemp, he’s the sales manager, you know, I could ask him, hey, Rich, you know, we’re getting a lot of inquiries on this product. Is there a way for us to be able to get photos of it in the warehouse before it gets packaged up just to have some unique things that we can

44:07
ask all for the people as they’re asking these different questions. And again, as long as that relationship is pretty good, which once you start, you know, establishing yourself and stuff, you can ask for certain little things like that. So did 99 % of the time I’m not. And then also another unique thing that you can do is ask the manufacturer from when they do like their trade shows and things of that nature, to send you photos in from their trade show. So, Yeah. What about returns? I would imagine it’s kind of a pain for these high ticket items, right?

44:36
Woo, man. This is one of my favorite subjects about Hightly Beauty Comm, right? So because we work direct with the manufacturer, right? Same thing. Like, again, if you were to get a product from like, you you ordered something from, let’s just say Best Buy, right? You don’t like it. Now, in most instances, they’re usually bringing it back to their warehouse. But when you have the dropship account set up with your manufacturer, they will actually already have it prearranged for returns to go back to their warehouse.

45:03
Nice. So let’s say, for example, is buyer’s remorse, right? Like, oh, you know, I don’t really like this product that changed my mind. Now your policy needs to be clear and really direct in terms of how that’ll be handled. But in most instances and again, it’s the same way from most retailers with, you know, the one different thing is like, you Amazon. the customer will have to pay to return it. Right. They got to get a shipping label in order to get a ship back or contact the carrier in order to get a ship back. Right.

45:31
Especially for anything that’s LTL, like that is more so like a universal policy with like LTL. Most, even with Amazon, they don’t cover the shipping a lot of times with LTL products, if it’s coming direct from Amazon. Like if it’s buyer’s remorse specifically. So, and then with small parcel, small parcel is really easy. Like in most instances, your supplier will even give you a shipping label because it doesn’t cost that much in order to get the product returned. But that’s what buyer’s remorse. Now let’s say for example, the product shows up defective. There’s

45:59
You know, again, you’re selling like a wine storage unit and the glass is broken. As long as the customer just takes the photos of it and you send that into your supplier, again, as soon as the product comes in, they’ll replace the product for you without any hassle. Right. And that’s the other beauty why I tell people to establish domestic relationships with suppliers. So that way you can have all these other things in place and even with like the warranty of a product. Right. So what if the product dies out or the compressor

46:29
you know, malfunctions in nine months down the road. Again, with domestic relationships with manufacturers, they have warranty policies in place for peace of mind for consumers. So all you would do is in this instance, you would just give them their order details and information from which you sent into the supplier and say, hey, when you call them, have them look up this particular order number. So when you send in your orders to your supplier, they’re going to refer to those as purchase orders. So whatever that number was that you assigned from

46:58
your brand for that particular customer. You could just tell them to call up and then they’ll look up the information in their system and then they’ll be able to handle any warranty defects, returns, so forth and so on. Yeah. And then is your website electronically linked to their websites too? So the inventory tracking is accurate or is that necessary? Personally, I don’t have what’s more commonly known as EDI.

47:21
right? The electronic, you know, communication between their systems and ours. And the reason is, is because some suppliers is really hit miss, right? So like some of them are set up to be effective and efficient with having some system of that caliber. And oftentimes, more often than not, they usually don’t. So, but the beauty of it is you can actually get inventory reports from your actual supplier on a regular frequency. So some of your suppliers, it’ll be like,

47:49
Once a month, some might be once a week, some might be every couple of days. So for example, there’s a supplier I work with called SPT. So they’re in California. They send theirs once a week. Our relationship with VinoTemp, they send them once a month. Zline, we have a portal so we can log into our portal and at any point in time we can export all the inventory. then, man, I’m trying to think of the app off the top of my head. I can’t remember it. I might have to log into Shopify to tell you guys. But there’s an app that you can actually take whatever

48:19
the spreadsheet is from your supplier and you can upload it to your store and it’ll modify all the inventory for that particular brand. Nice. Yep. And I’m going look that app up while we’re chatting here so I can give it to you guys. Cause it’s super helpful. You know, obviously cause like my wine store store, got over 5,000 products in that store. So as you can imagine, it’d be really challenging managing all that inventory. I think like they have to format the spreadsheet in the right way, right? There’s actually a number of plugins that do that. think.

48:48
Exactly. My favorite one is one called Stocksync. There we go. Stocksync. Nice. Yeah. So Stocksync. And yes, to your point. And that’s what’s really great about Stocksync because you literally just tell it what columns because again, every supplier is going to be different. Like, know, column A for one supplier might be pricing and then for another supplier, it might be the skew number. Right. Right. So you just tell Stocksync which column reads what for each brand and then you can create

49:14
basically like a little collection of each individual brand on how to read that. And then when you populate it, automatically identifies everything you need to.

49:23
Ernest, this is amazing. You gave a pretty good overview of high ticket drop shipping. If anyone’s interested in this business model, where can they find you? They could just go to my personal site, which is ErnestEpps.com. So it’s E-A-R-N-E-S-T-E-P-P-S.com. I also have a free Facebook group which is Ecom Drop Shipping for Entrepreneurs. And my first and last name Ernest Epps is, it’s the same on every major channel, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, IG, all that good stuff. Cool, man. Well, hey, I really appreciate you coming on the show.

49:53
Absolutely, man. And also before we end really quick, too, I wanted to tell you that I actually studied you guys in the beginning of my journey. You know, I went to like, you know, my wife could have job.com and I studied a lot of you guys as content and material that you’ve been putting out for years, you know, before I actually like, you know, started to really get some success for myself. So thank you so much. And it’s been a huge honor to even be on here because I would have never thought like reading articles.

50:20
and just picking up tips on marketing and strategies one day, I’d be literally talking to like the founders. So this is really awesome. Dude, thank you so much, man. That really means a lot.

50:33
Hope you enjoyed that episode and I did want to say a couple of words about dropshipping. The most successful dropshippers that I know with long-term businesses generally dropship more expensive items online and because the margins are lower it is the best way to make it work. For more information about this episode go to mywifecoderjob.com slash episode 374. And once again I want to thank Klaviyo which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign.

51:01
Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifecoderjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Once again, that’s mywifecoderjob.com slash KLAVIYO. I also want to thank Postscript, 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 Steve.

51:28
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now I talk about how I use these tools in my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and it’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:29
We are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 4th to May 6th, 2022. And for more information, go to sellersummit.com. Once again, that’s sellersummit.com or just Google it. All right, welcome everyone. You are listening to the My Wife, Quartermaster podcast, the place where you bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. And today I have an extra special guest on the show, Dr. Robert

00:58
Chaldini. Now Dr. Chaldini’s book, The Psychology of Persuasion, literally changed my life and I’m thrilled to announce that he’s released a brand new edition featuring 200 more pages and a completely new persuasion principle. But in this episode, we’ll cover how to use persuasion to grow your ecommerce brand. But before I begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store and it depends on them for over 30 % of my revenue.

01:27
Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who’s shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there’s full revenue tracking on every single email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used.

01:56
and you can try them for free over at claviyo.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. Now, 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. SMS, or text message marketing, is already a top five revenue source for my e-commerce store, and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider.

02:24
Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce stores and e-commerce 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. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

02:51
And then finally, I wanted to mention a new podcast that I recently released with my partner Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

03:18
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Robert Cialdini on the show. Now, Dr. Robert Cialdini is known globally as the foundational expert in the science of influence and how to apply it ethically in business. And he’s literally known as the Godfather of influence. So in the event that you don’t immediately recognize his name, Dr. Cialdini is the author of Influence and the Psychology of Persuasion, which is my favorite business book of all time. And I’m not even exaggerating here.

03:48
It is literally the book that changed everything for me. So for 17 years, I was an electrical engineer who sat behind a computer all day designing hardware. And when I was thrust into the world of online business in 2007, because my wife wanted to quit her job to take care of her kids, I had no idea how to sell, market or influence anyone, especially my wife of whom I still have limited influence today. But after reading influence and the psychology of persuasion, I incorporated the strategies in the book to create two seven figure businesses.

04:16
So if you’ve never read this book, it is literally my number one recommended read. And in today’s interview, we’re gonna talk about influence and persuasion in the context of selling physical products online. And with that, welcome to the show. Bob, how are you doing today? I’m doing well and I’m glad to be with you, Steve. So Bob, I know you’re a professor. Do you still teach classes today? Because if you are, I would actually consider going back to college to take one of your classes.

04:43
No, I have retired officially from my university positions. I still have an office, I still do research, and I still go in to write every day. But I don’t teach in the university hierarchy. We do have seminars that my organization, Influence at Work, provides, and I provide instruction within those, but not in the classroom. OK.

05:12
Okay, but the research continues on? The research continues on because I am a curious fellow. So, Bob, I just finished reading the new sections of the latest edition of Influence last night. And I have to say the extra content, in my opinion, could have been a completely different book in itself. The new edition, I think, was like over 200 pages longer than the old one. That’s right, 220 new pages. it was like I appended a…

05:42
another book. I mean, I read the original back in 2007. I think the original one came out in the 80s. Why did you decide to update it after so many years? I’m curious. You know, there’s a couple of reasons. One is that there has been a lot of new research and new knowledge that’s developed within persuasion science that truly deserved place in the new book. And it wasn’t there in the earlier editions.

06:11
Another is the growth and flourishing of the internet in the 12 years since the last edition. It was important for me to demonstrate how these principles of influence have been migrated to new platforms and are enhancing the success of the people who harness those principles in e-commerce.

06:41
And then finally, there’s a new universal principle of influence, the seventh one. The other editions all had six, but I thought there was another one I had missed all these years called Unity. And perhaps we can talk about it during our conversation. definitely are. There’s actually one tidbit in the Unity section of your book that I’ve used on my wife. see. see how I’ll let you know about it once we get to that.

07:10
So that’s the problem. that’s the problem. Like these, these, I know we’re to talk about the ethics also, but like all these powers, they have to be used for good. Right. Right. So I’ve read the book many times at this point, and I must say each time I pick it up, I gained some new insight or a new nugget. And I want to tell you that most of the listeners of this podcast are in the e-commerce space selling physical products online. So what I was hoping to do today,

07:39
is have you walked through some of your latest and most impactful persuasion strategies to convince more people to buy? And I also obviously want to set aside some time to discuss the new principle of influence, unity, and how this principle can be applied as well. So not sure where you want to start with this, Bob. Well, you know, it probably makes sense to briefly walk through the principles themselves and maybe

08:06
emphasize the new one a little bit more since that’s not the one that’s been out there in the information environment. And then talk about any implications of all of that for your listeners. Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s do it. So what are the seven persuasive principles? The first is the principle of reciprocation that says people want to give back to those who have first given to them.

08:35
You know, in every human culture, this rule applies. So if we’ve got customers or clients or even prospects who were not raised in this particular culture, don’t worry. The principle of reciprocity applies in every human society. We are trained from childhood in the rule that you must not take without giving in return. And so what we find is that

09:04
people say yes to those they owe. There’s a very interesting implication of that. It says that, you know, the traditional business model in which we say to others, look, if you will do this first, if you will buy our product, if you will sign our contract, if you will agree to this particular exchange between us,

09:34
We promise we will give back to you everything you expect and more. That’s how we move people by providing this in return. Well, what the rule of reciprocity says is no, there’s another route in which we go first. We give something, we make the first move, and then people feel grateful if we’ve given them benefit and advantages.

10:03
information that’s valuable to them, or they feel obligated to give back to us in return. And so the implication is we, before we try to influence others, we should give them something, some benefit. And online, seems to me that’s information is most easily done and most costlessly done by providing

10:31
a white paper or some kind of a piece of information like the top three mistakes to avoid in this particular arena that we’re talking about today or the top five most effective things to say in a difficult conversation, something like that that gives them a way to increase their outcomes by this rule.

11:00
they need to increase our outcomes consequently. So I think it has a place in online platforms. I’m glad you started with this one, because out of all the seven, this was the actual one that had the most impact on me. And to me, it’s actually counterintuitive. My whole business, my wife quit her job is based on this premise of giving away all this information for free, like all the good stuff. And people

11:30
I get emails every day, people are indebted to me for this information that I’m giving and there’s a small subset of them will just buy anything that I have to sell. So this I would argue is one of the most important ones, at least to me in the online world. You know, there’s one additional optimizer of it and that is if we can segment our market so that what we are giving to our recipients

11:55
is something that is especially relevant to their particular challenges, their particular preferences, their particular needs and so on. That, that supersizes the effect, right? Yeah. In the e-commerce world, can you think of any examples of this? Yeah. So for example, there are organizations,

12:22
that sell, let’s say retail online clothing. And what I’ve seen or even in hotel spaces where there you reserve rooms or air flights and so on, so on. I’ve seen them say, now here is the best options for people with twins, right? Or, know, or

12:52
for people in the early 20s, this is the best thing for, there’s a culture online that will do hotel reservations. And they’ll say, are, this is the best for a romantic weekend. Here’s the best information we can provide you for a business stay. Here’s the best information we can provide you for.

13:19
a family vacation and so on. Oh, well now people feel even more grateful for that piece of benefit that they’ve been afforded. Yeah. So again, it’s the information angle even applies to e-commerce. Right. Yeah. And certainly we can give away free samples of what we offer because that causes people to feel, these, these people want us to really

13:49
try their product without having to incur a cost. That actually always gets me like, oh, so even even our interaction, there’s one thing that you did and you probably realize it, but when you sent me your book, you wrote a small note and that note actually meant everything to me. And I feel like I, I I’m going to do everything that I can to help you out as a result of that. mean, I don’t know if that was intentional, but that was the, that was the effect it had on me.

14:18
Well, I’m glad to hear that, but I’ll give you a piece of evidence that again seems counterintuitive, but really makes the point. There was a study done in a fast food restaurant where for a week when customers came in, a third of them were simply greeted warmly by the manager. And then they went to the counter to order food.

14:47
Another third was given a gift, a very nice little key ring, right? Expensive key ring. That caused those people to buy 12 % more food if they received a key ring before they started to order. That’s just the principle of reciprocity, right? You give back to those who have given to you, but the key was another set of people were given a small cup of yogurt.

15:19
Any economist would say, what? You’re giving people food. Now they’re going to be less hungry. They’re going to be less interested in buying a lot of your food. Those people bought 24 % more food at the counter. Why? Because they got a gift that was personalized to their needs. Why do you go to a restaurant? Because you’re hungry. Somebody gives you free food.

15:48
Now you feel especially grateful to that person for understanding your situation and trying to meet your challenge. So that’s the issue. mean, we need to be sure that we recognize what the challenges are of our potential buyers and be sure that we

16:17
offer them something that’s relevant to those challenges. I know in the example of your latest version, you had an example of McDonald’s giving a balloon out. Is this similar? It’s similar, except that this is about the earlier thing we said about reciprocity is that you have to go first. So in this study, this was done actually in South America, Brazil and Colombia. When

16:45
families came into the McDonald’s, the families in all cases were given a balloon for each child. Half of them were given the balloon as they left each child as a nice thank you for their patronage. The other half were given a balloon as the family came in. Those families bought 45, excuse me.

17:13
25 % more food. It’s amazing. Now here’s the key that I love about this. If you look into the data, that 25 % increase also showed a 20 % increase in coffee orders. The kids weren’t ordering coffee. The parents were ordering coffee. But the key here is

17:42
You do something for my child. You’ve done a personal favor for me. And I’m gonna repay it. So what’s funny is we’ve been experimenting with giving away a free handkerchief with every order, just giving it to them. We put it behind like a text message paywall right now where you have to give a number to get it, but that’s actually been working out really well. I haven’t run the stats. I am curious if it’s increased average order value though, now that we’re talking about it.

18:11
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Oh, I know we got seven to go through. maybe we should just go through them and then revisit. Yeah. I want to focus on the unity one also. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the next principle of course is liking. Nobody be surprised that we prefer to say yes to those we like, but there are two small things we can do to increase the power of the liking rule by getting people to feel a rapport with us.

18:41
One is to locate genuine similarities that exist between us because we like those who are like us. The other is to give genuine compliments to those individuals because we like those who do like us and say so, right? So those two things, if they are offered in an exchange, increase liking.

19:10
and people want to do business with those they like. Next principle would be the principle of social proof. When people are uncertain, they don’t look inside themselves for answers. They look outside.

19:26
and one place they look is to those around them like them. If a lot of people like us are raving about a new restaurant or a new piece of software, new film, whatever it is, that reduces our uncertainty that this is the right thing for us to do. So if we can give people honest evidence of

19:55
movement in our direction, or if a lot of people have given us positive ratings on the internet and so on, we’ll be much more likely to get them to move in our direction, reduce their uncertainty, get them off the fence where they’re diddling around and hesitating, well, should I go or should I get more information? As soon as they hear that a lot of other people have done this,

20:23
those people have beta tested the choice for them and they will then say, okay, I can reduce my uncertainty. I can go ahead and move in that direction. And now the most recent research that my team has done along with some, team at Stanford University is to show, if we can show trends in our direction, it doesn’t have to be just a lot of people who are doing it. Even if we still don’t have

20:53
a majority, even if we’re a startup, we don’t have a lot of market share and so on. If we can show a trend to that place where we are now, even if it’s a minority, that causes a new form of social proof, future social proof, because people project that trend into the future. So that was actually one of my questions. So if you don’t have any social

21:22
If you don’t have enough customers, you can just talk about the trends. And I know in the book you mentioned a subtlety when you’re mentioning trends, which I’ll let you get into right now. Yeah. It’s when you, when you mentioned the trend, you should have three data points. So you should be able to say to people, not just a lot of people are doing this or, or more people are buying our

21:52
this model, you should say more and more people are doing so. That gives people three data points. More says two data points, start here, now we’re up to more. If you say more and more, now you’ve got three data points and that’s a trend.

22:18
And if you have actual numbers, presumably that works better, right? If you have three data points. Absolutely. Okay. You can characterize those numbers by saying greater and greater, better and better, more and more and so on. Are there any other ways that you can increase your social proof if you don’t have like a whole bunch of testimonials and customers? You can use testimonials that you do have and put them

22:48
at the top of your messaging so that that evidence infuses everything you are about to say even before you’re going to say it. You’ve got buy-in from people around you. And the key to making that buy-in optimized is that those should be comparable others.

23:18
to your market. They should be people who others can see as like them.

23:29
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.

23:57
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.

24:27
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.

24:38
And okay, so you have to have knowledge, I guess, of who your target customer is, and then you want to select testimonials. Again, that kind of leads into the principle of unity, right? Does that kind of bleed into that? It does. Right. But we’ll get to that. get to that. I also wanted to highlight one of these studies, which I found fascinating with the McFlurries and McDonald’s. If you want to elaborate on that and how that can be applied to e-commerce as well, that’d be great. Yeah. So

25:07
There was a study, again, in those South American McDonald’s that my colleague Steve J. Martin led. And why is it always South American? I’m just kind of curious. Well, he had a he had a contract from the the marketing of the South American McDonald’s franchise. OK.

25:32
And so they had a lot of McDonald’s locations and they were willing to do some behavioral science research to see how they could increase in this case, the willingness of their customers to buy desserts. Most people at McDonald’s don’t buy a dessert until Steve asked the people behind the counter to say at the end of the order,

26:02
Would you like to try a McFlurry? It’s our most popular dessert. And McFlurry orders went up 45%. So does that imply then that in an e-commerce store, we should just highlight these products and just mention it’s like a best seller? We would be fools of the influence process if we didn’t point to what is already most popular.

26:31
That’s a cue people use to stop getting information and act. Okay, this is the most popular. So you can say, this is the most popular product. This is our most popular feature. This is our most popular payment plan. Whatever we have, you can just point to it and it produces these big effects, costlessly and ethically.

27:00
because you’re not fabricating anything, you’re not counterfeiting any of this information, you’re pointing to something that people use to reduce their uncertainty and act. We kind of glossed over the liking, but this just kind of came to my head, so I wanted to bring it up. When it comes to getting customers to like you, would you recommend just like posting videos of yourself to allow your customers to get to know you as a person? Does that increase your likeability?

27:30
There’s research that shows that. Here’s another piece of research that shows that what you can do online, there’s research to show that having a welcoming letter significantly increases liking and purchases. A welcoming letter is like what you do to somebody who comes to your door, a visitor, come on in, glad that you’re here. Let me show you around.

28:00
Right. You know, there’s an example from my store. I just want to mention. the first email after someone makes a purchase is in fact a thank you letter. It’s written in a very personalized way. We want to thank you for your first purchase from us. Just want to let you know that we’re a small business and we’ll do whatever it takes for you to be happy. And we get, it’s an automated message, but it gets tons of replies. I would take that message and move it at the, to everybody who goes to your

28:29
site before they bought. We’re a small business. We’re very committed to customer service. We’re glad that you’re here. Let me show you around, essentially. It increases conversion significantly. You know, what’s funny is a lot of the students in my class are afraid to put their pictures and be personal on their sites. I encourage it. But if it’s coming from your mouth, that has a lot more authority.

28:59
Well, you know, there’s another place. There’s always an about us section in our on our websites. And when we go there, what we see is the professional backgrounds of people along with a picture. Usually, we should also include personal aspects so people can see connections between ourselves and them.

29:28
So you would include that you’re a Packers fan, for example? I’m a Packers fan. I’m the oldest child. I’m a former baseball player. It’s in high school. All those kinds of things. Yeah. Should we actually just talk about Unity next, since we’ve alluded to it? Yeah, let’s talk about Unity. This is the latest one. And for all of you listening, you probably haven’t heard of this one because it’s brand new to this book.

29:58
This is the one that says that people say yes to those communicators who can convince them that they share an identity, that they are members of the same we group, the kinds of groups that people use the pronoun we to describe. So it would be if

30:26
If I could, if you can convince me to say, know, Steve is like us, that’s good. That’s good. That’s you’ve got the liking principle working for you there, right? We like people who are like us. But if you could convince me to say, Steve is one of us, that’s an entirely different level of willingness to promote

30:56
favor and follow you, Steve. So you mentioned that I’m a Green Bay Packer fan. I grew up in Wisconsin. And a few months ago, I saw an article that described the favorite NFL teams of celebrities. And I learned that Lil Wayne,

31:27
And.

31:31
Timberlake, what’s name? Justin Timberlake. Justin Timberlake are avid Packer fans. Steve, I immediately thought better of their music. And I wanted them to be more successful. Inside the boundaries of we, people say yes to us. If we can arrange for them

32:00
to honestly see us as sharing one of those identities, one of those category memberships, here’s what the research shows. They believe us more. They wanna cooperate with us more. They’re more persuaded by us and they’re more willing to comply with our requests. They trust us more besides. I know that works for me. When I see Asian American film artists

32:29
I’m much more likely to support them and like them because they’re Asian Americans. One thing I wanted to ask you though, is does this work in reverse also? Like if I’m not a Packers fan and you find that out, will that make you dislike me? Not unless there’s an intense rivalry between the Packers and so, yeah. where you, so what I always say is do your homework first, go on.

32:59
LinkedIn, go on Facebook, people are telling us about themselves, all kinds of things about ourselves. When you find one of those connections, then go there. Don’t go to one that isn’t a connection or even maybe a negative one. When you find one of those connections, oh, really, you’re a runner? I’m a runner. You’re an only child? I’m an only child. When you find those things, go there.

33:28
It creates this sense of we-ness and everything becomes easier for the influence process.

33:37
in an online world where you’re not actually having physical conversations and you list some of these things, let’s say on your about page, could that possibly have a negative effect and turn away certain people? It’s conceivable if there’s a rivalry, that’s much more, that’s, much more rare than a connection that people will see. Right. Okay. That makes sense. That makes sense. So how can

34:03
What are some other ways that we can apply? I know you have lots of case studies. Do you wanna just highlight some of your favorite ones in terms of how unity has changed behavior? Yeah. Let me give you two. The first one is sort of about not just business relationships, but personal relationships, especially romantic relationships. And then I’ll provide an example of how that applies to a business relationship.

34:31
but it has to do with a lovely study that was done in Texas where researchers brought couples, romantic couples into an experiment. They had been together for at least two years. And they asked these folks, is there a problem in your relationship, some disagreement that you have that you just haven’t been able to resolve overall this time? And it continues to aggravate

35:01
each of you that you’re at loggerheads on this thing. And they said, what we would like you to do, and they flipped a coin and they said, one of you, we’d like you to be the persuader and try to persuade your partner to move in your direction, right? So come up with one of these problems, the two of you, and then one of you is gonna try to convince the other one.

35:29
And then the researchers left the room. Well, they didn’t really leave the room. They had cameras going and tape recorders running. So they knew what was going on. And they found three kinds of persuaders. One type they called the coercive persuader. They would say to their partner, look, we’ve been at this problem for years and

35:57
You won’t move in my direction. And you know what? If you won’t move now, I’m going to have to do something you won’t like. You’ll be sorry. Right. Not only did that fail to move the partner, it caused the partner to move even further away. Right. Trying to be coercive. a stutter to tell that. That tactic never works. Or never. Yeah. There was a second kind of persuader that the researchers called the rational

36:27
approach, who took the rational approach, they would say, look, if you’ll simply examine the situation more deeply, you’ll see that my position is the more rational, reasonable one. Now that didn’t produce polarization. It just produced laughter. And they, the partner just dismissed that and no change at all.

36:54
but there was a small group of people who hit on a strategy that was costless and the only one that made a difference in causing change in their direction. They would say, you know, we’ve been together now for two years as a couple. I really appreciate it. If you’d move in my direction on this one, I can see how that’s more effective, but I’m curious what the science is behind that.

37:23
The science is they now brought to consciousness the we nature of the couple, of the relationship. And now all the things I mentioned earlier that research shows occur in we relationships, more trust, more cooperation, more persuasion, more compliance with requests.

37:52
all of those now apply to the situation. These people were brilliant. They wouldn’t sit still for the cognitive set that the researchers gave them. Think about a difference between you. Think about something that you can’t agree. In other words, something separate that separates you. These people said,

38:21
maybe there is this thing, but we’ve been together for two years as a couple. And they brought unity to mind, togetherness to mind. And in that category that is now prominent in consciousness, people said, of course, yes, I will. By the way, there was a second strategy that

38:49
some others use that had the same effect for the same reason. They just simply use the pronouns, we, our, and us in making their case for a change. And that was enough. Again, bringing to consciousness the idea of unity. You know what’s funny? As you’re telling me all these things, I’m just picturing your mind because you and your wife are a husband, wife team and me and my wife are husband, wife team.

39:19
I guess the difference is that your wife knows all these principles. So I can just imagine you two going with each other going, honey, we’ve been together for so many years. And I’m just between you and your wife, I’m wondering how it works out. Well, she’ll catch me on this, here’s the, here’s, she is also recognizing, I’m saying that I’m telling her the truth. What I’m saying is let’s get away from this. Let’s get away from this difference here or

39:49
have a context for it, which is the great majority of the space around us is togetherness defined. Now, here’s the other thing that she knows from this research that I described to you. By the rule of reciprocation, what these researchers found was that when the partner moved in the direction of the persuader,

40:16
persuader then moved in the direction of the partner too. And they met in the middle. So you get the rule of reciprocation taking care of both sides by doing this. Someone’s got to take the first step forward. That’s right. And, break the set, the cognitive set of difference. Right? So here’s the, here’s, here’s the business.

40:45
related example. A few years ago, I was preparing a report that had to be submitted the next day. And as I was reading over it, I saw one section of it that wasn’t at all convincing, and not sufficiently convincing to make my point, because it didn’t have some data to really seal the deal. But I knew that a colleague of mine had done a study

41:15
the year before and had collected that kind of data. And so I sent him an email. Let’s say his name was Tim. It wasn’t. I said, Tim, and I described that I have this report. It’s due the next day. It needs the data that you’ve collected. I know you have it in your archives. I’m going to call you and we can find a way to get me that.

41:42
that information in time for me to do this. Well, this guy, Kim, was known as irascible and soured, a very difficult guy in my psychology department, right? So when I called him, he said, hello, Bob, I know why you’re calling. And the answer is no. Look, I can’t be responsible for your poor

42:11
time management skills, Bob. You got yourself into this. I’m a busy man. Also, I can’t just jump and pull this out of my archives, get the data to you in time, right? And before I had read this Texas study, here’s what I would have said. Come on, Tim, I really need this. This thing is due tomorrow.

42:39
He’d already said no to that. So I said, instead, you know, Tim, we’ve been together in the psych department now for 12 years. I really appreciate this. And Steve, I had the data that afternoon. Amazing. You know, it’s funny, thanks to you, Bob. Whenever I read an email or an outreach cold email, I like analyze all the language that’s being used and

43:08
I’ve also found, I mean, I’m gonna definitely use these unity principles now, but I’ve also found that when people talk about me and what benefit that I would get first, I’m not sure what principle of persuasion that is. That works on me. Yep. Yep. Good. mean, that other orientation, right? That I’m not just in it to make a buck for me. I’m actually in it for you to have a good outcome, which I know

43:38
as a side effect will lead to good outcomes for me. Reciprocally, it’ll work. And I also know that when people say, hey, I went to Stanford University just like you did, that works on me too. So that’s unity, right? Absolutely. There was a great study that showed that if researchers put a young woman on a busy intersection on a college campus of walkways,

44:05
asking for donations to the United Way, she got some success. But if she said to them first, excuse me, I’m a student here too. She got 250 % more donations. You know what, I’m just thinking about there’s all these things running through my head right now. There’s this Facebook ad that I run from my handkerchief store that works. And not very many people use handkerchiefs anymore. But the ad was like,

44:32
Am I the only one who use handkerchiefs or message me or, know, if you’re a handkerchief lover and I’ll send you a special offer, that ad works really well. It’s probably because of unity, right? Yes, right. Because if you’re in a smaller unit group, you feel even more intense shared identity. And I’ll give you one approach that think that online marketers can use or

45:02
people who can provide physical items online. One of the things that we have found in the last 10 years that has been a massive success within the marketing community is co-creation of your products and services, right? So what we often do is to get our existing customers, clients, and so on to help us

45:31
create the next version or the next generation of our product. And we ask them to give us input as to what they would like to see and what they would like to be dropped away and so on and what they don’t especially like. And so they co-create with us that product or service. That creates a sense of unity with us.

46:01
because they have acted together with us in this process. And what you find is that you get much greater loyalty and much greater satisfaction from those people who have co-created with you. Even before that new product has come out, they feel of you, they feel one of you. Okay, well, when we do that,

46:30
What we typically say to our informants is, could you give us your opinion on how we could improve our product, you know, that sort of thing. And that’s a mistake.

46:47
When we ask for someone’s opinion, we get a critic. They step away from us. We’re over here and they’re over on the other side of the line between us. If instead of asking for an opinion or even the newest research shows asking for feedback, which is also problematic for the same reason.

47:15
If we ask for their advice, we now get them stepping over the line next to us as our partner. They’re in a togetherness state of mind. And research shows, for example, that in a study that was done online where people received a business plan for a new restaurant called Splash,

47:43
that was going to be a fast food restaurant that focused on healthy food, right? If they were asked for their opinion on this business plan, they were significantly less likely to give it a positive rating than if they were asked for their advice on the same plan. And when researchers looked into it as to why, it was because they felt

48:13
more together with the author of the business plan because they were providing him advice. A lot of things are running through my head right now. So right now I send out a survey to anyone who’s bought. Maybe I should frame it as I need your advice instead of the way I currently have it framed. Steve, that would be my advice. Yeah.

48:41
Yeah, okay. It’s very subtle, but I can see why psychologically that would work. Interesting. Yeah. See, this is the thing I like about this research and I put a lot of it in the new book. The smallest things you can do that produce the biggest impact on your persuasive success, small in terms of effort or time so that you have an enormous return on investment.

49:11
Right? An enormous ROI from changing a word from feedback to advice, you know, or, you know, instead of trying to say, we, I have the better logical position or I’m going to do this. If you don’t move, we just point to something like the extent to which we’ve been working together. I’ve learned that logic never works.

49:40
Over the years, yeah. So it’s interesting. Yeah. Incidentally, that was the thing in the intro. That was the biggest tidbit that I got out of the unity section with respect to interacting with and working together with my wife. Yeah. Right. I can see why. Okay. So we got in the interest of completeness. I do want to just kind of go over the remaining principles of persuasion. So I think we’ve talked about social proof, liking, unity. There’s four more, right?

50:09
We talked about reciprocity. Reciprocity, course, yes. The next one would be authority, which like social proof, serves to reduce people’s uncertainty of what they should do. If we can demonstrate our credentials, our experience, and our know-how in a particular area, people will defer.

50:38
to that, they defer to experts. Sometimes we can borrow that by once again, bringing testimonials from outside of our organization from legitimate experts who can be quoted as saying something either nice about us or about our idea, our vision, our concept.

51:08
If we’ve got that, then people defer and move in our direction. One of the things that I often correct when I see people who want to run an advertising campaign where I give them some advice on it is that they put the testimonials.

51:35
either from similar others or from authorities into the body of their presentation, of their appeal. Those things should go first. In the case of authority, if you see one or two or more testimonials from acknowledged experts, right, advocating what comes next.

52:02
everything that comes next is infused with that authority, with that legitimacy, and it makes it more successful as a persuasive appeal. And if you don’t have access to these experts, I know you mentioned a case study where someone just was dressed as a doctor and they ended up selling more. Is that also? Yeah, it’s that’s so.

52:30
That’s right, but it’s one I wouldn’t recommend because it’s not honest. Why don’t we just stay with the things that make us feel good about doing well? Right. Actually, I didn’t want to touch upon that. mean, your book is basically giving all these strategies that can be used for good and bad. And I know you want to just mention this in this interview. mean, what is that? That’s just your general stance, right? Use these powers for good, not bad.

52:58
Right. And the way to do it is point to them where they genuinely exist in the situation. If you have genuine scarcity, go with that. If you’ve got genuine social proof, go with that. If you’ve got genuine authority, point to it. If you’ve got genuine unity, just point to it. And it changes everything from that moment on. In terms of authority also, I’ve just found that just

53:28
putting out content period kind of just makes you become an authority even though you might not perceive yourself as one. Yes, if you can provide that content, especially in terms of a white paper or an article or an interview that you did with a journalist and so on, and you embed your content in there and people say, oh, geez, that’s great.

53:58
this is somebody I should defer to. This is somebody I can stop getting more sources of information from. I can use this person because he or she is a clear expert. And there’s one last thing about authority that I think is really underused. And that is you get the most horsepower as an authority voice when you

54:28
Don’t just talk about the strengths of your case, but you also mention a weakness or a drawback. That causes people not only to see you as knowledgeable about the pros and the cons, it causes them to see you as credible, as trustworthy, as a trustworthy source of authority influence, right?

54:56
because you’re willing to talk about not just the pros, but also the cons. But you show people how, after you say, know, this may take a little bit longer or this may cost a little bit more, or, you know, this is just, we don’t have a lot of market share yet on this. Then you always say the word,

55:29
and you go to your strengths right there that wipe away the weakness. And what’s left after the weakness is dispatched is a perception of you as a credible source of authoritative information. And they believe more everything you say next. So if I were to advise people in terms of how you present your case,

55:58
All cases have strengths and weaknesses, right? What we typically do is bury the weaknesses at the end or don’t mention them at all. What I say is if you want to know where to put your strongest argument, the most compelling feature of what you have to offer, it should go immediately after you’ve mentioned a weakness and said the word, but.

56:26
to lead into your strength because people are gonna believe that strength now more deeply and more fully than if you hadn’t mentioned the weakness. Is this the same principle as when I see a product online that has only five star reviews, I tend to discount them? It is the same principle that people who are only giving you the positives and not giving you the negatives,

56:56
There’s a study that was done that showed the most effective star rating that produces conversions to your products on your site is not five point reviews. It’s not a five point rating. It’s a range between 4.2 and 4.7. If it’s below 4.2, people are saying, hey, maybe this isn’t such a great thing.

57:25
If it’s above 4.7, people are saying, uh-oh, this might be a phony. These might be, um, you know, manufactured bought, uh, purchased, or, uh, they’re, weeding out the, um, uh, the negative ones. And in fact, I actually never read the five star reviews. only read the two and the three stars come to think of it. Yeah. Yeah.

57:55
Okay, so that’s authority. Here’s a last thing to say about that. If you do get a one or two star review, know, in what people always tell me is that kills me, that irks me because, you know, the majority of them are are much higher. But people look at that one. Here’s what I would say. Always respond to that review and say the following.

58:25
Well, thank you for your response. We’re so happy that the great majority of people have not experienced, have not had your experience with us. So you move immediately to the social proof that’s truly there. You diminish that one by saying you’re an outlier. We’re so glad that the great majority of people have not had that experience, but we certainly regret that you did.

58:54
and we will take steps to make sure that it never happens again. That’s the best way to respond. That’s ingenious actually. In this world of like just Amazon reviews, that sounds like a really great response, especially since it applies the principles of persuasion here and social proof and. Right. Yeah. I think we have a couple more left. I believe scarcity is one of them. Scarcity I want to emphasize because there was a study done of online e-marketing

59:24
uh, uh, and showed that of all of the principles of influence and all six of them, uh, did make a difference, but scarcity was the one that was the most powerful telling people about a limited supply at this price or a limited supply with this feature or a limited supply with a particular inducement or bonus.

59:51
That was the one that had the most power in producing conversions. I vaguely remember in the book, there’s a subtlety there though, right? Well, that works very well. It works better than limited time offers. Limited time doesn’t have competition associated. If you’ve got a limited number,

01:00:20
That means people have to move. They have to get off the fence. If you’ve got a limited time, they can wait until whenever that within that time, they don’t, doesn’t spur them into immediate action. Whereas if you say there’s only five of these left, right at this price, right at this price, I guess, uh, if that’s not true though, you shouldn’t do that. Never, but you can always have an inducement, uh, like a bonus.

01:00:50
And there were only five of them left that have this bonus. Yes, that’s correct. Right. So in my case, like you get a free hanky for the first five people or something like that. Yeah. For the first 100, know, yeah. Yeah. I know, um, on my site, ever since I started putting, like when things get below like 10 units in stock, I like highlight the fact there’s only 10 units left. And I found that as soon as that product hits that threshold, that product sells out much faster. Right.

01:01:20
Scarcity. Yeah, scarcity. It’s interesting. Yeah. So it’s subtle. So limited products versus limited time always works better. And then the last one is commitment and consistency. People want to be consistent with what they have committed themselves to. So if we can arrange for people to make a small step or press an agree button or get to the next stage easily.

01:01:48
then they are more likely to continue to behave in that way in order to be congruent with what they’ve already done. So how can that be applied? Well, so for example, what does it say on your, on the, you know, the thing that you’re a button, right? What it should say is, yes, I want to go on to the next level. It shouldn’t just say yes.

01:02:18
or it shouldn’t just say next, it should give them a commitment that they’ve made a commitment to go on. Interesting. So you’re saying changing that language can have dramatic effects? Yeah. I’ve noticed that on certain things. Yeah. It’s also the case that if you’re trying to get people to subscribe and they have to fill out a long questionnaire, a lot of people are

01:02:45
are reluctant to go through a lot of information. I talk about a study that was done where if you reduce the number of fields that you ask people to complete on the first page of the form, that significantly increases the number who complete it because they’ve gone through the first page easily. And then once they’ve gone through that first page,

01:03:14
they’re more willing to go on to the end. You know, come to think of it, the surveys I’m most likely to fill out are the ones that are one question per page where I keep hitting next. Yeah. Yeah. As opposed to a big long page of questions. principle, right? Right. So that winds up our tour through the 7th. So I just want to tell the listeners out there, I mean, this is an entirely new book. I’ve read the original version many times and this one, as soon as you get it,

01:03:44
It’s, would arguably, I think it’s like twice as thick as the old one. It’s almost like a whole new book. So even if you’ve read this book before the new edition goes way beyond, it went way beyond my expectations. And I’m not just saying that. So Bob, where can people find more about you, the book in just in case they haven’t heard of you before prior to this? The best place is our website. It’s a influence at work.

01:04:14
dot com. Okay, influence at work all one, which is all one word.com. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. As I mentioned before, I’m a huge fan and it is a great honor to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much. enjoyed it, Steve.

01:04:30
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now even if you’ve read the first edition of Dr. Cialdini’s book, you’ll definitely want to catch the new edition. With 200 new pages, it is literally like reading a completely new book and you’ll always get new nuggets every time you read it. For more information about this episode, go to mywebcuderjob.com slash episode 373. And once again, I’m gonna thank Postscript, 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.

01:04:58
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 Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandon card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifecoderjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

01:05:25
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Now I talk about how I use these tools in my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free 16 mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:29
and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce, and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. I also want to thank Clavio, who is also a sponsor of the show.

00:57
Now, are you working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined? And do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? And do ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change. And these companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information, and start creating personalized experiences and offers

01:26
that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And then finally, I wanted to mention a podcast that I released with my partner, Tony.

01:54
And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:19
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Vivian Kay on the show. Now Vivian and I, we’ve never met, but my friend Kurt Elster gave me such a glowing recommendation that I knew that I had to have her on the show. But he did warn me that Vivian is a little bit quiet and reserved. She’s far from that. There we go. Okay, Vivian is the founder and CEO of Kinky Curly Yaqui, a premium textured hair extension brand for black women that she grew to six million without.

02:49
paid advertising, is ridiculous. And what’s even more impressive is that she completely bootstrapped this business from the ground up. So in this episode, Vivian is going to teach us the secrets behind her success. After all, I personally think that it’s unheard of in this day and age to be able to scale business to seven figures without paying for ads. And with that, welcome to show, Vivian. How are doing today? I am absolutely awesome. How are you? I am good. So are you going to be quiet and reserved? Absolutely not.

03:18
With a store name like Kinky Kurly Yaki, like, I don’t think anyone would think that actually. So let’s start there. What’s the history behind that name? Well, so it’s something that I literally just made up. You know, I woke up one morning and made that up, but the words do need something. So Kinky, well, Kinky refers to the kinky coarse texture of afro hair.

03:46
So people who come from the African diaspora, we tend to have coarse curls. And so that’s what the kinky stands for. Facebook sometimes thinks otherwise, but that’s okay. say, I was thinking the other definition of kinky. Yeah, it gets it. We get into a lot of we get a lot of stuff rejected because it’s like, we can’t advertise or do you know, something that’s sexually suggestive. And it’s like, that’s not what we’re talking about. Right. Anyways.

04:12
And then curly, course, that means, you know, just curly hair. And then yaki is what gets people stuck. So it’s sort of an inside joke. So if you’re a black woman and you wear protective styles, then you know what yaki is. But for everyone else, yaki is it’s a texture of hair. So back in the day, they couldn’t mimic black women’s hair straightened like they couldn’t produce it synthetically. So then what they would do is they would get it from a yak from the animal.

04:42
Yak. And they threw an eye at the end and called it Yakky. So whenever you want to refer to black women, black women’s hair straightened, you refer to it as Yakky. So like I mentioned, if you’re a black woman who wears a protective style, so and there’s a lot of us who do that you don’t realize like Beyonce, Oprah, Michelle Obama, like we’re all they’re all wearing protective styles.

05:06
only because our hair isn’t necessarily suited to this North American environment and we need to protect it so it doesn’t strip the moisture from it. And so we do that with braids, wigs and weaves. so Kinky Curly Yakky is just all those texture names all put together and black women, know what that is. so yeah. Yeah. I, this whole time I thought Yakky was something Japanese actually. It probably is. It probably is because you know what? A lot of synthetic hair comes from Korea and Japan. Oh.

05:35
Okay, that I did not know either. yeah. So what motivated you to start this business? Well, Steve, I was running another business. So I was a wedding decorator and I’m in Toronto, Canada, and it’s, you know, one of the most diverse cities in the world. And I was decorating everyone’s weddings. And so I needed to look quote unquote presentable. So for black women, what that means, and you know, just women in general.

06:03
But specifically for black women, means, you know, looking, having straight hair, because having curly hair, curly, tight textured afro hair was seen as unprofessional. Really? I did not know that. It’s still to this day. Like even in the US, there are laws that they had to put in place where they couldn’t discriminate us based on our hair. Right. So a lot of black people wear locks, they wear their hair in an afro, they wear braids, and it’s part of our culture, like

06:33
This is how we wear our hair. But because it’s contrary to that European beauty standard, a lot of us got pressured into straightening our hair. So we were using chemicals that we now know affected our health. Black women have one of the highest rates of fibroids and they connect it to the relaxers. the products that we used to use, the chemical products that we used to use to straighten our hair.

07:02
chemically, when our hair grows naturally this curly. And so I needed something that looked presentable. But whenever I went looking for that, for hair that looked like my hair, it was either buried underneath the sexy, exotic, silkier textures, or the places, the stores didn’t have it at all. Even beauty supply stores didn’t have it at all. So then I thought to myself, huh, you know, whatever. I was trying to solve my own problem, right? So I wanted to find hair that looked like mine and I could protect my hair with it.

07:31
I went to, so I joined haircare forums. joined Facebook groups trying to solve my own problem. And of course, while I was there, I just ended up just being Vivian, right? So, you know, was, was quite, yes, quite a reserved exactly, exactly. And so in doing so, you know, I found the solution to my problem. I went to, you know, I didn’t go to, but I, you know, I reached out to a couple of factories overseas and I kept

07:58
asking for samples and I would order them under different email addresses, asking for the different same texture, but tweak it a little bit just to see if I could continue to get that same quality. So after I finally found something that I liked, I was wearing it and I went to a networking event and another black woman pulled me aside and asked me what my regimen was for getting my hair to look like that and who my hairdresser was. And I was like, girl, this is a weave. And she said, I would buy that.

08:27
And that’s when the light bulb went off. So I thought, well, if she would buy it and I already bought it and I already knew there was a forum, Facebook groups full of women who also would buy it. Then there’s gotta be, you know, it’s got it. There’s gotta be something there. So in the down season of my wedding business in December of 2012, I launched Kinky Curly Yaki on Big Cartel. Big Cartel. Yeah. Big Cartel. Shout out to them. Are they still around?

08:52
I think they are still around because I think I have a student in my class on them and she doesn’t want to switch because you there’s all that inertia. You’re not on Big Cartel anymore right? Oh no. No. over to Shopify in 2015. Okay I bet that was a kind of a pain though too right? It was. It took me a minute. So let’s uh let’s take a step back. I want to talk about the sourcing process here. So you just

09:19
decide to contact factories? Are they in China? Were they in the US or? Yeah, no, they were in China. So you know, this was before Alibaba, right? Or least before. Yeah, at least this was before Alibaba and Aliexpress was really a thing. Sure. Right. So this was just, know, on forums with people had their email addresses listed. Right. Wait, okay, I’m sorry. So you actually found these factories on Facebook groups on a hair on a haircare forum?

09:48
on a haircare for a haircare black haircare forum. So there were forums just dedicated to black hair. But they had they had contact information of Chinese factories on there too. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So they had so they had the factories, they had the salespeople’s names, like they had all that information readily available on these on these Facebook on these haircare forums. Interesting. So were these people on these forums running businesses as well? No, or

10:17
These were just black women who wanted to solve their own problems, right? But they weren’t business, like, you know, they weren’t, I don’t want to, I don’t want to sound like I’m insulting them. They weren’t business minded. Like they weren’t trying to start businesses. They just, we literally just wanted to solve our own problem. And there was nowhere in the U in the U S or Canada that that sold these. So you actually had to go all the way to the factory. Well, here’s the thing. So it’s not like there’s kinky haired girls cutting off their hair.

10:44
in order to create these extensions, right? And so then, you know, the biggest supplier of human hair is India, right? And then the one of the biggest labor forces are in China, right? So what would happen is the hair gets collected in India, and then it goes over to China to get hand processed. So the hair gets collected in India, and then goes over to China for processing because all of our textures are manually made.

11:13
So this, for instance, you can’t tell is a ponytail. So it’s a drawstring ponytail. You guys can’t see it. I’m I took it. Yeah, I’ve taken it off. OK. And what it is is it undergoes. it starts out as straight hair. Uh huh. It starts out as straight hair. And then they they they they hand rod it, the hair around a rod. And then they put it into they put it into like a they put it in some water.

11:43
and then they put it into an oven to bake the texture into the hair. And so it’s not something, it’s such a manually intensive process. It’s not something that, you know, know, it’s not something that can be done in North America. Yeah, exactly. So just in case you guys obviously can’t see what Vivian does, but she literally just took off her hair in front of me. Black women don’t normally do that. So you must be special, So you went to the factory, but you weren’t going to buy in bulk.

12:12
So what did you say to them? Well, at the time, because there weren’t people, I mean, if they were buying, they were buying silkier textures, right? If they were running businesses. So, you know, I asked for a specific texture. I got it. I didn’t. It wasn’t kinky enough for me. So then I would say, well, I need you to do it smaller. I need you to tweak this. I need you to do this. And so they kept doing that until I found the perfect texture. And again, because I was just trying to solve my own problem, like, OK, cool. Yeah, I like it for me.

12:42
That’s it. And there was no communication barrier here. I can, like sometimes I have problems communicating like very simple directions regarding my textiles. I can only imagine like talking to a Chinese person about kinky levels. Well, you just, you just simplify it, right? So all the rods have millimeters, right? So it’s like, so if I wanted, if I wanted this tight curl, I need it to be a two millimeter curl. And so that, and so, and of course you just keep it simple, like, okay, make curl two millimeter.

13:12
Right. That’s it. Okay. And then so you got a sample and then presumably you didn’t buy in bulk in the very beginning, right? No, I would buy for I just bought for myself. Okay. So what would happen is I would buy one, I would buy one and you know, a customer would come in by, you know, two, I would take money and then buy two. So you see that you guys again can’t see this, but I’ve got this bin of Rubbermaid drawers behind me. Yeah, this isn’t the exact one. But this is what I started my business in.

13:42
So I would literally just buy one and then someone would buy two and I would take the money and buy two. And then I would slowly grow my inventory that way. So these factories were willing to just send into you one by one? Yeah. Wow. Well, not one by one, but usually like say, like they didn’t have minimum orders at the time, at that time, right? They didn’t have minimum orders at that time. And so then they were just, they were just willing to sell you three, right? And you would need at least

14:12
three to do your head. Right. Okay. Okay. Can I get an idea? Usually when you get like samples, the shipping is really expensive and the unit is more expensive. So what was like your, I guess I don’t want to ask you what your sourcing costs were, but I mean, the beginning, were you just marking that up like a lot? No, because I didn’t know, like, you know, I wasn’t, I didn’t start the business to do business. Like, you know, I, wanted to solve my own problem and then it just sort of happened to become a business.

14:42
And then didn’t and it snowballed. Right. Let’s about the snowballing. So OK, so you got it. And presumably you posted them in these Facebook groups, I guess. Yeah. Well, you know, what happened was, you know, I got influencers, except at the time they weren’t known as influencers. There were just girls that I knew that also were kinky textures. So I would send it to them and say, hey, girl, can you give me your opinion on this hair? Because I know I like it, but I want to know what you think and how you would manage it and how you would.

15:11
And of course they would take it and go on. This was when YouTube started becoming a thing and people started showing people how to do stuff. And so then that’s what they would do. They would take it and they would wear it and then they would take pictures. And then there was this one girl who did this one spectacularly big Afro. And that’s how it blew up because she said this was the best. And you know, and that was the issue with this type of hair is that it could look good. So you could, and even now.

15:38
You could go to Amazon and buy the same ponytail that I’m wearing for $20. It looks the same, but once you get it, the way it behaves, the way it washes, the way it acts is very different from what we sell, but on surface it looks good. So the fact that, so kinky hair is notorious for being trash after, you know, one wear, but this girl got all this hair and she was able to manage it. That was a big thing at the time. Like, no guys, like this hair.

16:08
really can like this lives up to what she says it is. And that’s because I was my own, like I was solving my own problem. I was my own customer. So I knew what they were complaining about. So I would per if they said, okay, know, kinky hair tangles so easily. Cool. Guess what? This hair doesn’t tangle as easily. And I would show pictures of me running my fingers through the hair, you know, doing all that. And one of the things that I would do to, differentiate myself from other companies was I would wash the hair.

16:36
So the hair doesn’t come looking like this. It comes uniform looking like how it looks right off the rods that I was referring to. Right. So I would wash the hair. So it looked the way it was supposed to look when you’re about to wear it. So then girls would be, well, that’s what I want it to look like. And that was a big problem too. Right. Because you would get them, you know, but one company would say, yeah, it’s this curl. Another company would say it’s the same curl, but when you wash them, they would look totally different. Interesting. So did you have a YouTube channel then? No, no.

17:04
How did you demonstrate all these things? So I, you know, I was one of the first hair extension businesses on Instagram, right? So Instagram launched in like 2011 or something. Right. And I was on there in 2012, 2013. And I was also in these Facebook groups, right? So I would do videos. So I didn’t do a YouTube channel. I just did videos and I would show people. And then I also relied on these other girls that were doing it. And I didn’t even ask them to do it. They would just do it. I’d send them the product and say, girl, tell me what you think. And they would create content out of it.

17:34
How did you find the YouTubers or were they just your friends or? These were just girls in the forums. Oh, okay. The forums in the Facebook groups. Okay. They weren’t YouTube. They weren’t YouTubers at the time. They were just girls who had hair, who had a, who were vlogging or whatever they called it back then. So when you go to one of those communities, like I, I’ve seen it done wrong. Like sometimes people come into my group and they just start saying,

18:03
selling hair extensions. Well, obviously they wouldn’t sell hair extension. But you know what I mean, right? So what was your approach there? Like, how did you come across as not salesy? Well, so the funny thing is, no one knew it was my company. So I was already in these groups, and I was already providing value. I was being Vivian, I was answering questions, even, you know, when it was not hair related stuff, right. And so then this the brand started to get, you know, well known in these groups.

18:32
And so, someone decided that they needed to find out who was behind this company because it’s not like I was like, hey, guys, here’s my company, Kiki Carley. I didn’t do anything of that like that. I was just, here’s, you know, send it to a couple of girls and the girls did whatever they did and then that’s how I grew. And then someone created a fake Facebook profile to out me. So, at the time, me, my cheap butt, my photo butt didn’t buy that who is. That who is privacy.

19:00
for your website. And so then they did the who is search and found my name and then put me on blast in these Facebook groups. But what they thought would be my downfall was actually what helped to create a million dollar company. Because when they found out that it was my company, they were like, oh, well, if this belongs to Vivian, that means it’s black owned. She actually knows what she’s talking about. She were supporting somebody who was in our community all the more better. Boom.

19:30
Business skyrocketed. Amazing. So if you were to do it all over again, would you be more overt about it being your company? Yes, absolutely. Because people don’t necessarily buy hair. They buy me. They buy they don’t buy product. They buy people. So your website though, I guess back in the day, it didn’t look like it does now, right? no. Your face is on it, right? Yeah, it’s pretty obvious that it’s your store. Yes. What was the shape of your website back then?

19:58
Oh, goodness. was, you know, in my Samsung S3, you know, with that, with those crazy filters Instagram used to have, you know, those crazy filters from 2012. those in the show notes. But yeah, yeah. You know, using Microsoft Publisher, you remember Publisher? So the website wasn’t all that, basically. No, it wasn’t. OK, it wasn’t. it’s in the, you know, what you see now is this third iteration.

20:26
Even this, you when I moved to Shopify, was, you know, I did a whole photo shoot I came to, I think it was DC or something, you know, there were the three. these were three bloggers that were up and coming or vloggers that were up and coming. said, girls, can we do a photo shoot? I’ll meet you all at this place in the US and we can all take pictures. And that was in 2016, I believe it was. So you did that on the on the frugal side too, because these are just people in the community.

20:53
Just people in the community who were bloggers or bloggers are trying to be, you know, now they were influencers. Yeah, like 3000 people at the time or 3000 followers. And we did a photo shoot. So, and that was the next version of the website. And of course, started to keep up with the whole, okay, let’s do tutorials and let’s do how to wash your hair. Like all that stuff that’s practically mandatory now was not a thing at the time.

21:21
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21:50
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22:19
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. So when you first went on, presumably these are expensive, right? I mean, you just talking about the labor involved, the fact that it’s real hair and you were just giving them away to people on the groups. How did you know who to give them to? That’s the thing. You think you know, right? And you know what I tried to do was I tried to work with

22:49
girls who I knew were really serious about building a brand. Okay. Right. Because you you could see even now you can see that there’s influencers who are just simply doing it for the money. And then there’s people who are actually looking to really engage and grow their audience. Right. And so I watched them, you know, I have a marketing and branding background. So I would just sit and watch girls and be like,

23:11
know, and I fell for a couple of these people, you know, especially the bigger influencers who were like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, send me some hair and we’ll, and we’ll do something then they did nothing with it. Or if they did do something with it, then they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t tag me or whatever the case may be. So I just chose to work with at the time they weren’t known as that but micro influencers, right? What’s considered a micro influencer to you? To me now, I would say 30,000 and under 30,000 followers and under

23:39
So presumably now you probably have a more structured process. So I’m just kind of curious what your process is now for finding an influencer. You know what? I actually stuck a pin in the whole finding an influencer thing. Did yeah, because the game changed. Right. So these girls that I started with that that had 3000 followers back in 2014, 2015 now have over a hundred K. Right. So now these girls are charging, you know, fifteen hundred dollars just for a post. Right.

24:08
Whereas before it was like, okay, I could give them one set of clip-ins and they would create three, like they would create, you know, I would say maybe 10 pieces of content on that one set of clip-ins. Whereas now it’s like, you give them one set of clip-ins, costs you $1,500. You need to send them more stuff in order to create another piece of content. So it’s just been a little bit different. I’ve used apps like, and this was before it got acquired by YouTube, but I think it was called a Fame. Fame bit.

24:35
So before it got acquired, I used them and that, that helped me launch my, my clip-in. So that was a really good, a really good place to do that. But it’s been, I had to stick a pin in it because what I was finding was, you know, all the apps that I was using, especially Instagram became pay to play. Right. So I could pay someone $1,500 for content, but nobody would see it. Right. Yeah. Right. It’s interesting. So did you ever try paid advertising?

25:05
Oh, yes. Well, it wasn’t until it wasn’t until I had already hit my first million. And I thought, wow, well, I built this. I built this first. I built this business without paid ads. So I so I hit my first million without any paid ads, without email, without email, without email. No email. Wow. No email. No email. So this was just simply word of mouth and repeat customers.

25:34
Well, how did you get the repeat customers without email or did they just come back naturally? They just came back naturally. Once you once you once you have that good stuff. And as this was before the market got oversaturated, right? So you’ll have to I didn’t mention this, but I was I created the niche, the niche did not exist before I started it. So I was the only company who was selling only kinky textures.

26:00
So I didn’t even try and slide in, you know, a silkier, you know, more popular texture that you would see on say, Nicki Minaj. No, I wasn’t selling that stuff. I was selling this stuff that, you know, you’re that girl that works the nine to five at Pepsi doesn’t no one even know she’s wearing extensions because it looks like her hair. Right, right. So the influencers early on that you worked with, were they did you continue to work with them? Yes. I worked with them for a good two, three years.

26:28
And then they just got really big and wanted more expensive. Yeah. So then, you know, even one right now I worked with, just landed a gig. She’s in the Seychelles and she landed a gig with Qatar Airlines. wow. Yeah. So, okay. So, but it’s so nice to see that growth, right? Because these are girls that I worked with. Another one launched a hair product company, right? And so it’s nice because these are the girls that I knew.

26:57
were about their business, not just interested in getting free stuff for the sake of getting free stuff. They were interested in growing their brands. And so I feel like we both grew up together. Yeah. Yeah. You know, in my experience, or just even speaking to my colleagues, I find that the influencers who know what they’re worth tend to charge like way too much. Whereas it’s much better to just target people who have decent size followings, but

27:23
They’re not really thinking about monetization just yet. No, I think that people with the decent size following is also engaged with their audience. Right. Right. And there’s that’s one thing that I’ve learned is that those people who have the smaller audiences, even myself, I engage with my followers. So I know I know who my OGs are. know who my regular people comment and DM and and all that stuff. And I can rely on them to to help me do stuff.

27:51
And so I knew that’s, what these girls could do. Whereas now with a lot of these bigger names, it’s like, they don’t even check their DMS. Yeah. Yeah. It’s probably cause it’s just too many. They’re probably flooded with absolutely. And, know, that happens to me too, but still, mean, social media, social media, that’s what you’re, you’re supposed to socialize. Having a one way conversation isn’t, that’s, that’s sad.

28:21
So how did you go from one to six million? Just doing the same thing I did at one million to get to one million, which is just keep doing it. You just do it at scale, right? You just keep doing the same thing. You do more of it. You do a lot of testing. So it’s like, okay, well that worked. That didn’t work. Like say FameBit, FameBit worked famously. Like I loved how it worked. And so then it was like, okay, so how can I do more of that? But at the time there weren’t other FameBits or at least affordable FameBits, right?

28:50
Now there’s a plethora and it’s like, even now they come to me, as I call myself an entrepreneur personality and I’m like, no, you guys are all garbage. You just want access to my data and that’s it. But yeah, no, it’s a challenge. The times are different. I always like to say that I didn’t start the business to become a $6 million business. I started the business to solve my own problem.

29:17
Right. And and so e-commerce for me has become it’s become kind of gross for me. Wait, what? Yeah. Because you know what? Because I’m not into the cack in the row ass and the this and that’s not the reason why I started it. I started it so that Keisha in D.C. can, you know, instead of crying over her failed twist out at six o’clock in the morning when she has a job interview that morning.

29:46
Keisha could just find a wig or find some clip-ins to accentuate or lengthen or add volume to her own hair. And she can go about her business and do her job without people focusing on what she looks like. And so- Presumably you have enough money already. So what are your motivations now then in terms of growth and- Well, honestly, know, I scaled to the 6 million and then I was like, I don’t like it here. I really don’t. And I admire-

30:14
brands that can do that. And the founders are like, yeah, let’s go, let’s go. It turns out I’m not a very good CEO. a better marketer. I’m a better brander. I’m just a better person, I guess you could say. And I like to say that I started Kinky Curly Yakky to give black women confidence. So I enjoy just giving people period confidence. So whether that be black women or women or entrepreneurs or whatever the case may be, I just enjoy

30:44
that journey. So e-commerce just, mean, selling hair extensions just so happens to be one of my, my, my house, right? But it’s not my why selling hair extensions is not my why. Yeah. You know, I was on your website earlier today and I noticed you have like another kind of business that essentially is what you just described, right? That’s outside of your e-commerce. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah. Well, um, I’ve, you know, what happened was in 2020,

31:14
You know, we all got hit with the pandemic. Yes. And for me, even more so, I got hit with it back in 2019, like Black Friday in that November 2019. Except at the time we didn’t know what it was. Right. We just know China all of a sudden just stops shipping stuff. Yes. Right. And so it was we had a huge supply chain issue because what we sell is human hair product. And all of a sudden everybody stopped going places. Right. And so.

31:43
Um, it was out of my control and you know, my kid was home from virtual school for virtual school. And I had to quickly figure out how to keep cashflow going. And so then I thought, well, what do I, like, what are people doing? Like I had to just sort of sit back and okay, wait, everyone has to go online. Wait, I know how to be online. I know how to set up a Shopify. Everyone, all these brick and mortars and people who used to sell in person are now all, you know, having to open up and do things online. I know how to do that.

32:13
So then I started teaching things like Shopify prep school, getting people just get the essentials up and ready so you can sell whatever you can keep your livelihood and sell it online. So I started doing that. And then I started coaching. people who couldn’t, okay, I have a business. Now they’re at home from their nine to five. Now they have time to think, oh, is this really what I wanna do? No, it’s not. I wanna be an entrepreneur. Okay, well, let me help you do that.

32:38
You know, one thing I forgot to ask you is how do you scale what you do or what made you successful? Because a lot of it is just like talking and interacting with people, which inherently doesn’t scale, right? Yeah. Well, I, know, for the first four years of business, so until 2016, so until June of 2016, I was doing everything myself. So I was customer service, fulfillment, you know, packaging, everything. That was all me. And then in June of 2016, I hired my first employee.

33:08
And even how I hired her was just sort of a roundabout way because I had a partner at the time who was trying to force me to figure, know, put out, put something on monster or, you know, indeed, or whatever it was at that time and find an employee when I was just like, no, I need to really interact with this person. So I went to a beauty supply store and I asked for some help and this girl came to help me I liked the way she did it. And I said, I’m looking for someone to help me with customer service or are you available? She said, sure. I gave her my number. She called me the next day. She’s been my employee ever since the person who answers my, my

33:37
customer service was my second ever customer. So she’s someone who knew me from the forums, who bought my hair and supported. And then she went on mat leave and she’s like, I was like, Oh my gosh, know, customer service is driving me nuts. She’s like, that’s what I do for a living. And I’m on mat leave. So let me help you. She’s been doing that for me ever since. So really it’s about scale for me, isn’t about, you know, having a team of a hundred. It’s just having a small lean team who is really passionate about

34:07
what we’re here to do, right? Which is helping. Yeah, Are you selling on Amazon at all? not. Absolutely not. Okay. No. Is this type of product not good for Amazon because there’s all those cheap knockoffs on there? Yeah, that too. I also feel like I worked really hard to build Kinky Curly up, Yakky up as a brand that I feel like being on Amazon would dilute it. You know,

34:34
Now I realize that being on there is really about brand recognition. So if someone types it in, then boom, okay, well, this brand already has a reputation. If they go to my website, they’ll see I have thousands of reviews. So if I do go on Amazon, would be about brand recognition, but I wouldn’t put my premium products on there because they can’t compete with the $25 ponytail. They can’t. Right. Even though it’s much better quality, you’re just thinking that. Right.

35:04
Okay. Whereas you can do a lot more on your own website to show all of that. Exactly. Right. I own that channel, right? Whereas I don’t own Amazon. Well, actually, what is your primary channel for sales today? Primary sales would be organic, organic organic Instagram or Facebook or organic search, organic search. Yep. So I was up and up on the SEO. So, you know, we’ve got that. So we’ve got that SEO history.

35:33
Right. And so if you type, if you type kinky hair extensions, we’re probably the number one or at least on the first page, number one result. Nice. Can you talk about how you establish those ranks? Like, are you creating content on regular basis? Not right now. So, you know, we were doing blogs back in, I want to say 2017. So we have a bunch of blogs that went up there and they were talking about core things that people back when we would Google. You know, I knew how to SEO all the

36:03
you all the pages and all the pictures and all that jazz. I personally manually did all that because I know what black women are searching for. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and so I did all that. So, you know, and it’s paid off. It’s, know, SEO is not a overnight thing. It’s a long-term strategy and it’s paid off. So even now, when I don’t have any ads turned on, the only thing I have on is email.

36:29
It seems like all those cheap knockoffs on Amazon, they’re probably run by Chinese companies. I’m just guessing. I don’t know for sure, but they obviously don’t know what it’s like to have black hair, right? My hair is straight. I would have no idea. And so I guess that’s your main advantage. Yep. Well, what happened when, you know, in 2014, I found out I was pregnant and had my son. And when I came back, there were, uh, you know, I took a two month mat leave or something. I couldn’t even do that. But when I came back, there were all these Chinese companies that popped up.

36:59
and had black women front the companies. Oh, really? Yes. So really, all I know what happens with these Chinese companies is you just sit on YouTube and just watch the content we produce. And then they create products based on the content we produce. Right. How do you fight that? You fight them by being by actually creating a brand that people can that people that your audience can resonate with, right?

37:27
Like with Amazon or these Chinese companies, can’t be me. They don’t know what my, they don’t have the same experiences I have with same skillset. They don’t know what it’s like to have a failed twist out. I know what that feels like. Right. And I can communicate that better than any Chinese company can. Just wondering though, if they like throw money at other black women. They do. They absolutely do. And it makes it hard for companies like mine to compete. Right.

37:55
Right. They flood the market with their products. They pay them, you know, they pay them whatever they pay them. But, know, to the girl who doesn’t care because she just wants free stuff, she produces that one video and she’s done. She doesn’t care. She’s going to have a bin full of all these trashy hair extensions, but who cares? They paid her, you know, 35 bucks or whatever it was for that video and hair that she didn’t have in the first place. Presumably those are one and done. Right. As soon as you buy that cheap product, you’re not going to buy it again. Right. Yeah. Interesting.

38:25
And then you mentioned Instagram is Instagram a large driver of sales or is that more just for branding? It’s more just for branding. It used to be. But because of the whole the whole algorithm and all that jazz, like it’s it’s you know, we we rarely post on there anymore. It’s it’s actually kind of discouraging to post on there, I find. Yeah. But email for us has been organic traffic and organic search and email for us. And we haven’t even touched SMS yet.

38:52
And so it’s something I plan to do this year. It’s just this these past 18 months have just been honestly, I’ve had my head up my ass. Honestly, and like COVID. Yeah. Yeah. And, you I’m a single mother and I’ve been at home with my son in the first grade. So it’s not like I can just leave him with a computer and he’s getting work done. No, I physically have to sit there with him. So last year was not a million dollar year. This year is certainly not a million dollar year. And I’m OK with that.

39:21
I am okay with that. Are you still active in those original groups where you established? No, no, with a lot of those groups, think of they’ve all sort of migrated, you know, everyone’s sort of grown up and grown out, but I still keep in touch. A couple of them still follow me. Like I, a lot of them still follow me. And so it’s nice to see their names pop up every once in on the shop of my dashboard. like, Oh, that was my, I still remember my very first customer.

39:47
Right. And my second and my third. And so, yeah, they still support, but no, I don’t, I don’t go into those groups anymore. So for everyone who’s listening, wanting to do what you do, what would be, I guess your best advice for someone just starting out? I would say, because you bootstrap this whole thing. Yeah. From zero. didn’t have any outside cash or anything. I would say make sure you’re solving a problem and make sure you’re solving a problem that is, um, that resonates with you.

40:17
because this is going to be one of the hardest things outside of parenthood. This is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. And if you’re not passionate or if you’re not interested or invested in getting in solving that problem and finding the solution, then this is going to be a really tough journey. So I would say one, make sure you’re solving a problem and two, be yourself because

40:46
At first I thought, okay, I would look at the girls who own hair extension companies who had long silky hair and Gucci and Lambos and high heels and all that stuff. And I was not that, I was the exact opposite of that. And at first, that’s the reason why I hid myself. But then as I mentioned, when people actually found out it was me and they knew me for who I was, then they were supportive. And it was like, oh, so I can be myself? Yes, you can.

41:14
And that’s what will differentiate you from the competition. And then finally, I would say study your competition and do something different. So if your competition is selling mugs and all they sell are mugs that are black, then why not sell red mugs, only red mugs and really niche down, niche. So that’s really what I want to get to, niche it down because that’s what’s going to help you get your foot in the door.

41:40
and differentiate you from everyone else doing the exact same thing in the oversaturated market that you’re in, no matter what it is. So once you niche down and you really get well known for doing that one thing, then you can start to expand. You can either go wider or you can go deeper into that niche, but just start out doing that one thing really, really well and get known for it. That’s exactly how we got started.

42:05
We became known for handkerchiefs. And even though I have no passion for those products, I developed a passion for the business part. Right. You know, like the cack and the real ass, right. That you don’t like. That’s actually my wheelhouse. Right.

42:19
And what I like about you, Vivian, just, I mean, we haven’t met before, but now that we’re chatting, you’re just very relatable. And just after talking to you, just want to buy from you. And I think that’s your superpower. Yes, that is right. And that’s the thing, because it’s like, because what I’m, I’m not passionate about selling you hair extensions. I’m passionate about making you feel good about how you are, just you. Right. And I would just buy from you because of you. Right. If I needed hair extensions, I’d be a bonus.

42:48
Thank you. appreciate you saying that. So Vivian, where can people find you online? And I know you have a couple of websites. So yeah, well, for hair extensions, if you’re into that, you can find me at kinkakurlyyaki.com. For myself, I am an absolute pleasure to follow on Instagram, especially in my Instagram stories. I’m known for my Instagram stories. So you can follow me at it’sviviank, that’s I-T-S-V-I-V-I-A-N-K-A-Y-E.

43:18
You’ll see me on the black lady with the crown and balloons. Um, and of course I have a website. So Vivian K.com. So you said that you weren’t doing Instagram. That was for your company, but for yourself or myself doing it. Yeah. that’s how I started to get business that way too. Right. Yes. Because I get high on my own supply. Right. So I’m always wearing my own products. So yeah. So it’s a, yeah. So you’re still doing it. doing it just in a roundabout way. Right.

43:48
Cool. Well, Vivian, it was a pleasure to speak with you. I’m glad that you weren’t reserved and quiet like you normally are. Oh, you know, today was a good day. And I hope this whole lockdown for you lifts so you can get some more work done and all the cat and the rohess stuff that you love. Oh, yes, rohess. Yeah. All right. Take care and thanks a lot.

44:16
Hope you enjoyed that episode and were inspired as much as I was by Vivian’s story. more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 370. And once again, I want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows, like an abandoned card sequence, a post-purchase flow, a 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.

44:46
I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for ecommerce. 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 dev. That’s P-O-S-T-S-C-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash dev. Now I talk about how I use these tools in my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequaterjob.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.

45:16
Thanks for listening.