00:28
But before I begin, want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I use for my e-commerce store and I depend on them for over 30 % of my revenue. And 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.

00:56
Let’s say 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. 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 Postscope 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. This is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing.

01:27
Text message marketing is already a top five revenue source for my eCommerce store and I couldn’t have done it without PostScript, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose PostScript? It’s because they specialize in eCommerce and eCommerce is their primary focus. Not only is 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.

01:54
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 want 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.

02:23
Now onto the show.

02:31
Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have John Jantz on the show. Now, even though John and I have never met in person, I’ve actually followed his blog, Duct Tape Marketing, for the longest time. In fact, I believe I started reading it in 2009 when I first got started blogging. And his writing was one of the reasons I was convinced that I need to learn marketing in addition to microprocessor design, which was my day job back in the day.

02:57
Anyway, John is known as one of the world’s most practical small business marketing speakers and experts. He is also a famous author with hit books like Duct Tape Marketing, The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur, The Commitment Engine, and his latest book, The Ultimate Marketing Engine. And his books have been translated into 14 languages worldwide. So today, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna talk about his approach to marketing a small business, which is what he specializes in, in the face of increasing competition. And with that, welcome to show, John. How you doing?

03:25
Oh, I’m doing great. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Steve. My next career is going to be microprocessor design. So I was an electrical engineer back in the day. And if you can imagine for me, the transition from engineer to a marketing person was a big one for me. think marketing to engineering is worse, actually, possibly. Really? Okay. Yeah, possibly. I’ve never gone the other way. So I’ve followed you for some time.

03:53
But please give the audience an introduction into your background and how you became an author and speaker. Sure. So I started actually my own marketing consulting firm going on 30 years ago. Can you imagine that, Steve? We didn’t even have the Internet and we were doing marketing. I don’t even know how it’s possible today. That is crazy. I imagine the tactics have changed. Well, you know, they have, but I always tell people fundamentally what our job is. Marketers is has not changed at all. It’s to get somebody to trust us enough to give them their money. And obviously there are.

04:22
platforms and networks and all those kinds of things out there, but fundamentally not really changed that much. at any rate, I, you know, I just, like a lot of people, I jumped in and hustled work. knew I could hustle work. got big projects, little projects, big companies, little companies. Pretty soon I found I got a couple of small business clients that really wanted me to kind of take over their overall marketing, but you know, they’re really frustrating. I couldn’t figure out how to do it in a way I’d been trained. I worked for an edit agency for about five years and

04:49
It just didn’t apply the same process. So I decided what I had to do was be able to walk into a small business and say, here’s what I’m going to do. Here’s what you’re going to do. Here are the results we hope to get. And here’s what it costs. So I created essentially a product out of marketing and, but I needed to give it kind of a producty name. And so instead of just calling it my consulting system, I came up with duct tape marketing. So, so that was really the genesis of the term, uh, duct tape marketing was to describe my approach. Now.

05:15
It really resonated with small business owners so much. I I grew my practice preaching this. started writing about it. I started the blog. I spent a book podcast. I pretty much changed the name of the company to Duct Tape because it really became so foundational to what I did. 25, 30 years later, I’m now writing my seventh book and have a network of independent marketing consultants around the world that are actually installing the Duct Tape marketing system in thousands of businesses on any given day.

05:45
So I’m probably dating myself, but whenever I think of duct tape, I think of MacGyver. And does your approach have anything to do with MacGyver? Well, think it borrows from a lot of what you’re suggesting. I mean, the metaphor of simple, effective, affordable doesn’t always have to be pretty, it just has to work. I think that’s how a lot of small business owners really, especially initially, approach marketing. certainly, I’ve…

06:11
benefited that metaphor, I think is benefited from the fact that least in North America, there’s a strange affection for all things duct tape as well. So a combination of that affection and, and the metaphor, you know, for what it’s like to be in small business, I think actually made that, that that name kind of a kind of a hit. So it’s funny, just listening to your introduction, one of my pet peeves, because I teach e commerce, is when someone wants to start an online business or an e commerce business, and they tell me that they aren’t

06:40
interested in marketing, who can I just pay to do everything? And I would say probably the main thing that I learned from you back in 2009 when I was an engineer is that marketing needs to be a part of everyone’s job, right? Yeah. So true. mean, any way, and form which your business is coming into contact with a prospect or a customer, you are performing any marketing function. So that person that answers the phone, that person that sends out the invoice, that person that fulfills the order or answers a question,

07:09
that a customer has. I those are all marketing functions all across the company. so, you know, I think marketing today is really as much a culture issue as it is a tactical issue. I mean, it’s basically a part of your business that is always going to be there, even if you think you’re going to be outsourcing it. Yeah. Well, and what I tell people, I mean, there are a lot of tactics, especially today. I mean, all the social networks have gotten increasingly complex in terms of their formats and those kinds of things.

07:37
There’s a lot of things like that that you should outsource, but you cannot abdicate marketing strategy. You cannot abdicate who the customer is, what your message is, how you’re going to meet them, and the journey you’re gonna take them on. Those are all things you have to continue to own. Yeah, so John, what I was hoping to do today was to go into depth on the best way to come up with that marketing strategy as a small business owner, because actually, you know, I’ve always been curious, how come you decided to focus on small business before we get into the guts?

08:05
I think it started with, just loved working with small businesses. I had a lot of really big clients and you they go through the RFP process and you’d get paid 90 days after you sent them the invoice. In fact, I have a story that I tell all the time. I was working with a big telecom company and I did a really small, goofy project. was like $1,500 and 12, know, $1,512 or something like that, an invoice. And I got a check for $152,000 and blah, blah.

08:32
from the invoice 90 days later. And I called them up to say, hey, what do I do? And they proceeded to, first of all, scold me for what I can’t remember why, but then also give me like three forms I had to fill out in order to return the check to them. And I thought, man, there’s something really both parts gratifying and terrifying about working for somebody who is

08:59
they’re writing the check and they’re making a decision about whether to pay you or maybe to get Susie braces. And I just really said that that’s who I want to serve. Now, I will also say that at that time when we were just starting on the digital kind of front, nobody wanted to serve. Nobody had any real interest in trying to serve that market because they were very hard to reach. There was no conference, there was no one ad you could buy. And so I think I saw a real opportunity

09:26
to serve a market that was not being served. Okay, all right. So John, so a lot of the listeners here want to start an e-commerce business. And I know the type of business generally doesn’t matter, the principles apply no matter what. But let’s just hypothetically say that I have an e-commerce apparel brand or something along the lines where I’m selling something. How do I form the basis for my marketing strategy? Like what are some of the fundamental principles that you need to be thinking about? Well, the first thing I always advise people to do and

09:55
maybe they’ve come up with some great new thing that nobody’s ever heard of. But that’s rare, right? A lot of people are starting is like, hey, I think I can make money doing this. Or I like, I have a hobby, you know, doing, you know, collecting XYZ. So maybe I could figure out how to sell that knowledge. So I think the first thing you really have to understand is what problem are you trying to solve or are you available to solve or who has a problem that needs solving?

10:25
Because just putting another store out there is probably not going to address anybody’s problems necessarily. mean, you you’re competing now with Amazon, for example, if you’re just doing that. so how can you address some, some need or small, you know, itch that somebody has that for whatever reason, it’s not being served. And, and that is probably advice everybody gives. But it’s, it’s really so hyper important.

10:53
And that continues after you have customers. Cause sometimes people start something and they generate a little bit of interest and some momentum, but they kind of stall because they’re really seen as a commodity. They just happen to be a commodity that advertises or somebody found. And so they make some purchases. So you have to continue this process, always digging in and understanding why people buy from you, why they stay with you, what you do that others don’t.

11:20
So I think since I teach this stuff also, one of the biggest struggles that people have is like, if you’re selling like shirts or apparel or something like that, like what problem are you really solving? Like, do you have like a process for figuring that out? Well, we, I mean, we do a real, you know, exploratory process. I mean, it really has to do with customer discovery. So when, people have customers, we spend a lot of time interviewing those customers.

11:46
When they don’t have customers, we make some assumptions about who they think they can appeal to. And we start trying to collect information and research from those folks. Businesses that do get reviewed. So another thing we like to do is, if you’re just starting out, go find the theoretical competitors or the aspirational competitors, people that are already doing, seemingly doing what you want to do because they’re probably out there.

12:16
If they’re getting reviews, if they’re getting testimonials, a lot of times we can learn some things because people leave reviews and testimonials typically are talking about how their expectations have been exceeded or what this company does, what little things this company does that nobody else does. so you can get a lot of clues in the market, what the market cares about and what the market is really craving by looking at a lot of other people that are doing something.

12:42
similar to what you’re doing. It doesn’t have to be another shirt seller. It could be somebody that is serving maybe the same market. So you brought up something really interesting that for some reason a lot of people have an aversion to, which is actually talking to the customer. So we live in an online world today and you think that you can just sit behind a computer. So let’s say I do have a handful of customers. I’m very curious how you approach asking the customers for feedback.

13:08
Yeah, I think it is funny. One of the things about technology is, is it’s really easy to use it as a shield to automate everything. And that’s one of the beauties, right? I’m sitting up at midnight now with my side hustle because I can, you I don’t have to be there in the eight to five hours to do that. So I, so I get that. But, but I think in today’s world and this is

13:30
You know, we had this pendulum that swings back and forth. mean, I think it was really great. All this automation you could do. then it kind of was like, eh, people want a little more human touch. And I think what we’ve all gone through the last 12 months is really asking for more authenticity, more human touch. And so I really think the opportunity to literally just reach out and say, I want to understand better, you know, what we could do better. I want to understand what we do well. I want to understand what you’re not getting in your life right now. You know, once you have

14:00
customer and you’ve established some trust, I find that some percentage of them actually really like being asked for their views and their opinions. it doesn’t mean that you’re going to now go out and carry red, green, and blue because one customer said so, but what you’re really trying to get at is the stories. You’re trying to get at, when we ask people all the time, what is it that when we’re talking about a client’s clients, what is it that they do that nobody else does? we’ll always almost get

14:29
Well, they provide better service. And so that’s not very useful. What does better service look like to you? Tell me a story about a time when they provided better service. And then we start hearing themes that really show up in our core messaging, that show up in email subject lines, that really give us great blog post ideas. So it’s not just a matter of understanding your customers so you can do more with them. That’s a big part of it too.

14:57
Because once you establish that trust, there’s a good percentage of your customers would actually like to buy other stuff from you or do the premium version of what it is that you offer. that kind of ladder approach becomes much more available, I think, when you’re constantly talking to your customers. But you also get better at attracting more of the same people if you can fully understand what it is you do for them that they’re not getting elsewhere.

15:27
So are you suggesting a phone conversation here? That’s what we do. mean, if the coffee shop of options available, that’s a great one too, but you can get a lot accomplished in a phone interview. But I understand that this is part creative art. This is not research. You’re not checking boxes. asked them these five questions. They said yes or no. mean, you’re really just trying to get at, you’re trying to listen for messages that if you do six or eight of these,

15:56
I can almost guarantee that you will start hearing some things repeated. And that’s what you want to dig in on. You know, it’s funny, and my wife actually was really against this, but I used to call up all of our abandoned cart customers because they started the checkout. I have their phone number. So maybe within 10 minutes after I would call them up and say, hey, why didn’t you buy this? In a nicer way. And then I give them free product, of course. But the last time we had launched an apron line and I called them up and they were like,

16:24
The reason why I didn’t buy was I wasn’t sure if this was gonna fit my child because I listed it ages four to 10 or something like that and that was kind of ambiguous and it was like a large range of ages. So we fixed that, yeah. Yeah, and I think that’s the thing that we underestimate. If there’s a moment of confusion, particularly online, we will probably bail unless it’s a company we’ve done a lot of business with before.

16:52
And so half the time, as I’m sure you discovered, your abandoned cart was really more about confusion than it was about, oh, I don’t like this or I changed my mind. Yeah. So let’s say I’ve interviewed a bunch of people and I know I have a pretty good idea of who buys my product. What is the next step after that?

17:10
Well, again, it’s not just a matter of knowing who buys it, but knowing why they buy it and what message appealed to them. Because, you know, again, the two greatest opportunities are to do more with your existing clients and to understand, you know, who your ideal client is so thoroughly that you can go attract more of them. So we’re going to use what we learn in this research in messaging, in all the forms of messaging that we put out there.

17:38
Um, another great use of doing these interviews is you will probably have an opportunity in the right, uh, instances to generate some, uh, some content from them. Um, you know, the form of a testimonial or in the form of a review of a product or something, you start doing this outreach and you probably found this, Steve, uh, you start people are like, Oh, a real person is behind this website. And all of sudden they get more attachment.

18:04
to that company and they’re more willing to maybe talk about the good experiences they’re having in a public way. That’s certainly what you want to do, I also find that, I use an arbitrary number, but I try to help companies identify their top 20 % of their customers with the idea that some percentage of them would probably do 10 times the business with us if we gave them the opportunity or we understood where the opportunity was for them.

18:32
And some even smaller percentage might do a hundred times more business if we gave them, if we learned from them and gave them the opportunity and, and, know, scaling with your existing customers is so much more profitable generally than going out and just constantly running ads and trying to get a return on your ad spend. It’s funny you say all these things, John, because so we sell wedding hangers. I I’m pretty sure you’re not familiar with what we sell, but most people they get married just once. Right. So the chance of repeat business is not so hot, but

19:02
we were getting these customers who were buying large quantities of our handkerchiefs. And so one day we called them up and then it turns out that there’s a lot of wedding and event planners that were buying our stuff for their clients. And then that just opened my eyes. And so that’s part of our strategy today. We’re trying to find those. We call them whales at my company. And yeah. Well, the wedding, you know, the nice about the wedding industry is that’s an entire ecosystem. You know, because people go through that, like you said, only well,

19:33
only what is it 2.7 times average in their lifetime? Yeah, the divorce rate is quite high. yeah, but so so you know, there’s the flowers and the invitations and the events and the caterers and the music and I mean, so there’s just so there’s a whole strategic partner network that that you know that that industry presents. Yeah, for sure, for sure. And I know you mentioned content. And I remember when I first started my blog back in the day,

20:01
can’t remember exactly what you said before because it was so long now. But I remember I was determined to just make content part of the strategy. Today, the ecosystem is a lot or the world is a lot different than it was back then. It seems like everyone and their mother is doing content now, right? Yep. Yep. So it’s a lot more competitive. what is your what are your views on content today? So my views on content have evolved from remember when we used to say content is king. Yeah. And then it became, you know, for me, it became air. Right. We decided, oh, we can’t even

20:31
play in the digital space without some focus on content. Today, I call it the voice of strategy because you’re absolutely right. There’s so much content out there, but part of the reason is so much content is being consumed. So much content is needed because of the way that people buy today. Like that’s probably the greatest thing that’s changed in marketing is not all the tactics and the platforms, but the way people choose to become customers is probably the biggest change because

20:58
the way they go out and search, what their journey looks like today. A lot of those stages are really out of our control to some extent. So I call content the voice of strategy, meaning that instead of just focusing on like so many of us did more and more more, let’s look at the stages of our customer journey. And we can talk about this in greater depth if you want to, but we have for a long time, use something we call the marketing hourglass as our customer journey tool. And our marketing hourglass,

21:28
Of if you think about the hourglass shape, it borrows from the funnel, but a lot of people, that’s where marketing stops is sort of when somebody drops out of the funnel as a customer. And for us, that’s where the opportunity really expands. And so if you think about the upside down funnel or the bottom half of the hourglass is to me, that’s where the real opportunity and focus should be. So our seven stages are no like trust, try by, repeat and refer.

21:55
And I use those terms because I think they reflect the behavior that our customers or any customer really wants to participate in with the companies that they do business with. And you can use your own kind of buying experience to sort of validate that idea. And our job as marketers is, you know, what if we thought about the fact that our customers questions and objectives and process for research, you know, changes.

22:23
at each of those stages. So when I don’t know about somebody who can solve my problem, I’m just out looking for who’s out there. You who’s got what I’m looking for, who can solve my problem. But as I move further and start finding some people, now my questions change to, will this work for me? Or can I trust this company? So if we thought about our content as not as a dumping ground for more and more and more, but as a tool to drive every one of those stages.

22:51
we start looking at what content do I need to know when some, or what content do I need to produce to get somebody to know me? What content is going to make them say, okay, I like what I’m hearing here. What content do I need to produce to get somebody to trust? What content do I need when somebody wants to try me out in some fashion? What content do I need when they buy? And that includes like orientation and onboarding content.

23:16
What content when I want them to repeat? And then finally, what content will I need to help generate referrals? And I think that if we take that focus, it allows you to actually produce less content, but be far more focused on the usefulness of that content in guiding the customer journey.

23:34
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.

24:03
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 copywriting 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.

24:32
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. So I know it still sounds a little overwhelming to me, because you have to think about the types of content you just specified in addition to getting leads. So how do you prioritize? Because I know you talk a lot about SEO also in terms of content, right?

25:00
and then there’s social, the whole bunch of different places. Well, here’s what I would tell a lot of people. You probably have produced a lot of content that’s not producing any results for you because you got on the blog bandwagon and you woke up on Monday and said, Oh, what do need to write about? And so you just wrote content. And the good news is now you have 247 blog posts, but they’re just out there in the ether, unconnected, disconnected to anything useful.

25:24
So one of things we’ve been doing for the last three years is going into people who have done that and restructuring their content into what we call hub pages. So content around a particular service or around a particular idea. Now, if you Google the term guide to local marketing, you will find a, I think HubSpot beats me out on some days, but you will find the duct tape marketing guide to local marketing either in the one or two spot. And what that is,

25:52
is simply a restructure of content that I’d written for years about various aspects of local marketing. Google AdWords, or I guess Google Advertising as we call it today, Google My Business, citations, you all the various things that go into local SEO. But what the Hub page does is it structures that content almost like a table of contents for a complete guide. So if somebody’s trying to figure out how do I do local marketing better, they could come to that page and find

26:20
what’s effectively 30 or 40 blog posts or links to 30 or 40 blog posts structured around some of the subtopics about local marketing. And some of most of them will be on my site, but others will be some other good resources in other places as well. And all of these pages, which used to be just individual blog posts, all linked to each other and then all linked back to the hub page as well. And so what we’ve done is repurposed

26:50
a tremendous amount of content that we’ve written, some of which was very old, into a very useful guide that we use in sales that we promote. Now there’s also a lead capture device there when people come there, but we promote that in ads and in Facebook ads. And because it’s so useful, people share it, they linger on it, they click around to three or four different pages. so…

27:15
that content that we really wasn’t doing that much good for us now has become a real magnet for potential leads for our business. And it’s mainly because we’ve turned existing content into a utility. So that’s one of the things that I would do with many, many people that we work with who have been producing content for years, but they’re just not getting that much value out of it from a lead standpoint. But that content also works

27:43
in a lot of other stages in the journey, because it builds trust. So people get our SEO playbook that is there. It really allows us to dump them into a sequence that is going to nurture them and give them further calls to action. so we’ve taken content that we use for lead generation and now are able to use it to really help guide the journey along. Can you comment on like all the different mediums to choose from today? I mean, it’s

28:11
pretty overwhelming like where to start. Back in the day, it was basically just written word, right? Content marketing. Now there’s like YouTube, TikTok, social media, all these different things. How do you wrap your head around it when you’re advising a company on where to go? So we’ve put pretty much everything into a number of channels. I mean, to me, the website content in SEO has risen to the strategic level. I mean, that’s part of planning our website structure, our content, how we’re going to optimize that content is really one of the first things that we work on.

28:42
building that foundation. then obviously email marketing is huge. Social media is huge. Reputation management for a lot of businesses is huge part of that. And then obviously all of the paid search. And then, you know, let’s round it out with the analytics because that’s the part that a lot of people sort of forget about. We build this whole system, but then we use analytics and goal tracking to make sure that what we’re doing is getting the most impact.

29:08
So those are the primary buckets that we put everything into. And then it’s really a matter of, your strategy is going to be driven or your tactics, should say, are going to be driven by your strategy. it’s very appealing for a lot of people to say, like you mentioned TikTok. TikTok is really hot topic right now. lot of marketers, a lot of e-commerce folks are saying, how do I crack that nut? How do I figure that out?

29:37
It may be the place that you should be playing. However, what a lot of people do is they get so scattered that they’re really not able to master anything and they’re not able to really get any momentum. mean, it feels like a waste of time because they’re throwing stuff into TikTok and into Instagram stories or reels and they’re just, you know, they don’t feel like they’re getting any for it. And a lot of times it’s because we’re just, you know, we’re just dabbling, you know, to places.

30:06
And so what I try to get people to do is to really lock in on what they think is going to be their best opportunity to go deep. Because one of the challenges I think a lot of people have with social media today is, because there’s so much competition between the platforms, they’re all getting far more complex in terms of the formats and things that are available. So it’s very hard to…

30:32
create one little video and think, oh, I’m going to put this in all, you know, all the social channels because it’s, know, it’s just not going to work. So my advice is to pick one or two and learn it, pick the, pick the one or two that you enjoy, that you get and learn them and go very deep and focus on them and get some traction there before you start thinking about, oh, here’s the next new one. And I know a lot of people just feel like, oh, I’m missing the opportunity. You know, clubhouse was

30:59
was, you know, giant for about six weeks. Yeah, during the pandemic. Yeah. And so many people were like, I’m missing, I’m missing out if I don’t get there. And I think that a lot of what we do is we spend a lot of time helping people understand what not to do. Right. Yeah. I think that’s the biggest challenge. There will always be more to do or more that you want to do than you can do. So let’s prioritize. So maybe I’m old school, John, but, you know, social media requires posting so many times.

31:28
Whereas YouTube and just SEO in general, it’s almost like you put your efforts in in the beginning. And once it gains traction, you get that traffic for a long time. What is your philosophy in general on just the mediums? Yeah, I’m not gonna argue with what you just said at all. mean, we have blog posts that I wrote probably in 2005, 2006 that are still getting hundreds of views a day.

31:54
So, you know, that’s pretty hard. That’s pretty hard to replicate, as you said, in any kind of other platform. I think that it really all comes down to your strategy. I mean, if if you’re selling a fashion item, let’s say you’re selling purses or something, you know, social media is where a lot of people are going. Yeah. For that. Now, if you can over time dominate searches for product, but good luck because you’re

32:22
competing with Google and you’re competing with a lot of people. It’s tougher. mean, that’s the golden goose, right? Is that you’re showing up for product searches, specific product searches for stuff you sell. But that’s the competition there now has gotten so brutal that I think a lot of people are realizing that social media still gives them the opportunity to reach certain markets if they’ll hustle and work that. But you’re right. The challenge is

32:52
you got to do it every day. It doesn’t. It doesn’t. Other than the fact that you might build a large following that you then now have access to on an ongoing basis. You certainly have to keep reproducing your efforts every day. want to revisit repeat business because I feel like it’s something that most businesses don’t think about that much. But there’s been so many studies. think Bain had one where a 5 % increase in retention was something like 75 % more revenue. And

33:19
It’s not as sexy, right? You’re not getting new customers. So I’m very curious how you advise your companies on how to increase the repeat business front. Well, you know, there are two variables, repeat and retention. So there are lot of people that are selling. I actually sell a membership to a consulting program or a consulting network. know, we very much the growth of that business relies on us getting new folks.

33:46
but it also relies on us retaining about 85 % of those people who continue to pay a fee to stay in there. So really focused, in fact, we probably spend more time on retention than we do on recruitment. That’s partly because just our time and resources are limited. But for us, we find the value in not only keeping those folks, but finding what else we can.

34:12
This sounds so coarse, but finding what else we can sell them is because they because in some ways and again, this this sounds probably too bold, but in some ways they will buy just about anything we have as long as we continue to deliver the value we have delivered in the past. And so, you know, our job a lot of times is to think of what how else can we serve them in a way that that’s going to continue to bring value that they are willing to pay for? That gets a lot easier than going out there and saying, how can we

34:41
do a campaign to bring in new people who maybe have never heard of us before to buy something. You do need both of those, but if I was given the option to prioritize, I would prioritize in that instance retention. Now repeat business for a lot of folks is a form of retention. You get people to come back and buy again, especially if you have something that’s a consumable. So obviously that’s a, just staying top of mind, continuing to communicate.

35:09
making sure that they’re happy. Because a lot of times what happens is people start seeing this, this erosion of repeat business and you’re just not sure why people just, they’re just not coming back anymore. Don’t know why. So obviously keeping your finger on the pulse of exactly what’s happening, you know, over communicate surprise people in some fashion, do something they weren’t expecting. Like you said, you were doing those calls and giving people free product. I remember one time I bought a pair of shoes and

35:37
running shoes online and I got some socks and energy bars in the box. I was like, wow, you know, I’m going back there. Yeah. You know, that was really cool to get that. So those kinds of things, I think you just have to be intentional about. but also the the the the crime, the criminal thing act that I see happening so often is, you know, somebody will have a customer and that customer will be talking to the customer or customer say, oh, yeah, we just we just added such and such.

36:06
to our thing and just like, wait, you know we do that too, right? So not failing to communicate all the other ways that you can help somebody who becomes a customer. They come in one door, they buy from you, you give them what they bought, give them the service, provide the service, whatever it is, but then you’re not kind of immediately on the lookout for continuing to educate them on what else you could do for them. And that, know, those…

36:34
Those two things I see as one of the easiest buckets to fix. That idea of staying top of mind with your existing customers so they come back, communicating with them so they come back, and then continuing to educate them and cross upsell on what else you could do for them are probably the two easiest sort of layup opportunities for many businesses. I just wanted to let you know that tickets for the 2022 Seller Summit are now on sale over at sellersummit.com.

37:03
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 is deep in the trenches of their own e-commerce business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods,

37:30
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, 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.

38:00
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. more information, go to SellersSummit.com. Once again, that’s SellersSummit.com or just Google it. Now back to the show.

38:17
Yeah, there’s a couple of things that you just said that I just want to highlight here. And basically this is for the Amazon sellers out there. But you know, once you have, and you’re talking about retention, once you have this reputation, and this is often bolstered through content and which content leads to authority, people will tend to buy whatever you have to sell. Like I have friends who will buy any Apple product as soon as it comes out. Right. And likewise, I’m sure you have fans who will just buy any book that you have coming out, right? Regardless of what the topic.

38:46
I mean, you could be writing about apparel or something. People would still buy that book. And that’s what you’re missing when you’re using a marketplace versus your own store where you can actually create these relationships by communicating with your actual customers. And I’m sure you’ve seen this, because you’ve been doing this for a while that I think that’s one of the greatest ways to stand out in the online world is to actually provide some human touch, let them know there’s a real person. I mean,

39:13
I get some things every now and then and somebody will slip a note into it that says, Hey, this is really a pleasure for me to pack this up for you today. Let us know if there’s any issues, uh, know, rusty. And I’m like, wow, maybe there’s a rusty, maybe there isn’t, it felt good to get that because, know, we’re just so used to the, the sort of robotic ordering of things now, uh, that, that any company online company that I think adds a little human touch, that’s a great way to stand out.

39:41
You know, it’s funny, John is like everyone who’s a small business wants to act big. And I feel like every large conglomerate wants to act small. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Whereas I always like tell everyone who’s small is just embrace being small and just do all those little things. Like I remember when I first started, I did a lot of these little things that I stopped doing now and I’m kind of revisiting them now. Cause like, why did I stop them if they were working? We get busy and yeah, I think we got it all figured out.

40:10
It’s just something I struggle with. I don’t No, you’re not alone. think, I think any, you know, one of the, one of the challenges is, is you, you know, you meet a level of success with it and it’s very common. stop a lot of the things you did in the beginning to hustle is because you were trying to, know, you were trying to get on the radar. Uh, you get on the radar and sometimes it’s easier to, uh, to let some of those things slip. So John, I wanted to also talk about the ultimate marketing engine. What, is this book about? I haven’t read it yet.

40:38
So, so it’s, uh, the subtitle maybe helps a little. It’s called five steps to ridiculously consistent growth. Um, it is essentially a strategy book that, talks about, basically sum it all up in this one sentence. The ultimate marketing engine is a successful customer. One of the big premises of this book I’m trying to suggest is what if we looked at our customers, uh, less as a transaction and more for the transformation that they were looking for? So in other words,

41:07
Maybe our initial relationship is they come to us wanting a certain thing. They come to us in a certain stage in their life or their business. What if, what if we look to our business and said, how can we take them from where they are today to where they ultimately want to go? So it’s about growing with your customers much more than it is about, you know, what are, what’s some new Facebook tactic. So in the context of, guess, some of your memberships, can you just give me some concrete examples?

41:38
Yeah, so in our consultant network, we have what we call a consultant maturity model. We have a lot of folks, a lot of consultants that join the Ductype Marketing Consultant Network. We really attract a lot of people jumping out of corporate. I think a lot of my point of view is sort of old school about marketing and very systematic about marketing. And to be honest, it’s not necessarily an e-commerce side hustle kind of marketing.

42:06
Our focus is really a lot of traditional kind of businesses. And so we attract a lot of what I would call traditional marketers jumping out of corporate, to, want to start their own gig, but they really want to have, um, you know, a roadmap kind of to, to, run on. And so we, we actually have stages and each of those stages have characteristics and we know that, you know, we know what the consultant looks like when they’re in a startup mode. know the challenges they’re going to face and we know.

42:33
that the promise of moving them to the next stage, what they’ll be able to do with their business. And so we actually have five stages and each of those stages has a list of milestones that we know if we can get them to accomplish this list of milestones. if they’ve accomplished this one, we check it off. If they haven’t, here are the tasks to help them accomplish that milestone. And our ultimate goal is to move them.

42:59
through the stages to the point where they not only have a successful business, but they have built a business that gives them a lot of opportunities, maybe at some point allows them to certainly scale that business wherever they want to go. Some people want to stay small intentionally, but we get them very stable. Some people actually want to scale to the point of hiring employees or maybe even exiting that business. And so we have that roadmap pretty much planned out for them.

43:25
And can you know, we’ve really becomes the mission of our business of that particular training business, not just to sell them a membership and say, here’s what you get, but but to actually move them through these stages. So I know you probably have a lot of customers. How do you maintain like that human touch despite the fact that you have a lot of customers? What are some things that you do? One of the things we try to do, I won’t say that we’re the best at it by any means, but.

43:54
We really try to make sure that everything that we write, everything that we produce, all the videos that that feature me are very humble, very down to earth, very practical. we’re not, uh, you know, we’re not hypey. We’re not salesy. It’s probably, uh, cost me millions of dollars, uh, because I don’t do some of the checkout, um, and three upsells. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds spammy. Yeah. Yeah. That’s just been my point of view. Maybe it’s.

44:24
You know, it’s, it stems from who I am also doesn’t hurt that two of my employees are daughters. And so they’ve seen me do that for, for many, many years. I think that’s probably the biggest thing. It does get harder as you get bigger. mean, I, know, I get hundreds of emails a day, people asking for stuff. And we respond to a lot of them as best as possible. We’ve gotten to the point where we respond to a lot of them.

44:53
with canned responses. That’s not fun, but at least they are the friendliest, nicest canned responses you’re get, even when we’re saying no to something. Well, let me ask you this, John, like a lot of things have changed since both you and I started with content. If you were stall over today, where would you start? You know, a of people ask that question, Steven, I hate it because I’m tired. I thought I was starting over again.

45:21
I love what I’m doing. so the, you know, I don’t know if I can, I’m not going to give you a very satisfying answer. mean, I would, I would probably start in something that a content or a content topic, or maybe even a store or online store or something that was maybe wasn’t even, I couldn’t even think to myself.

45:43
Yeah, I’m going to make a money doing this, but it would be a topic that I would enjoy. I’m I live in Colorado in the mountains. I love the outdoors. You know, if I were to start over again, I would start something, some sort of educational element about some aspect of nature and outdoors and being in the outdoors and being active in the outdoors. And like I said, that’s probably not a very satisfying answer because it’s not, it’s not like, yes, if you dropped me in this town and I only had $5 and I had to start all over again, here’s how I would build my empire. But it’s, it’s.

46:12
I think what I would focus on is at this point in my life is just stuff that interests me. Yeah, you know, it’s funny, Joe. I get asked that question probably not as many times as you do. But my answer is always this. I would just start creating content on something that I’m really into. And if you think about it, everyone’s into something. Yep. Right. And I would just start writing it without even the intention of making any money on it. Just pour my heart into it that’s my hobby. Yeah. And then good things just happen. Yeah.

46:41
It’s, it’s funny. There’s a book I’m reading right now and I recommend it highly to anybody that will listen. It’s called 4,000 weeks. And it’s, it’s a quasi time management productivity, but it’s completely backwards. mean, it’s not, there are no hacks in this book. It’s really, it ultimately comes down to almost saying, you know, give up, you can’t manage time. You know, here’s what, here’s how you have to think about the short, you know, life that you have on this planet. I know I’m, probably underselling the book, but one of the things he talks about is, is

47:11
the distinction between a hobby and a side hustle. A lot of times people, um, if you’re not embarrassed to talk, uh, just a little bit embarrassed to talk about your hobby, it’s probably not something you’re passionate about. And he says that the, that that’s the difference. A lot of people call something a side hustle because they justify the fact that they’re doing it because it might have some monetary gain. Uh, but I, when you just said that, I think that you’re absolutely dead on something that you really call a hobby and it’s

47:39
crazy like you pour 10,000 hours into building little mini toy train, you know, tracks or something like that is probably the thing you should be writing about. You’re right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, John, where can people find you online? Where can they get your book? Your latest one? Yeah. So, you you can find anything I’ve been doing for the last couple of decades at ductapemarketing.com and that’s just D-U-C-T-T-A-P-E marketing.com. This newest book has its own companion websites called The Ultimate Marketing Engine.

48:10
And if I don’t know when the show will come out, but the book itself comes out September 21st. So. Pen upon when you’re listening to it. But if you want to get a jump and you’re hearing this before September 21st, there’s actually a companion course that you can get for free. So if you pre-order a copy of the book, you can go back to the ultimate marketing engine.com and you’ll see a big banner that says, get the companion course. And it’s six video lessons of me talking about some of the concepts as far, as well as some of the resources, the forms and tools that we actually use.

48:39
related to the topics in the book. I love that. That’s a tremendous value. And we did see you on video. That’s right. Cool. Well, John, hey, I really appreciate you coming on the show. It’s a great conversation. Well, it’s my pleasure. you know, congrats to you. You’ve been doing doing this for a while showing up and it’s and it turned out to be a great gig for you. Cool. Thank you.

49:06
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now it was an honor to have John on the show and if you’ve never read his book, Duck Tape Marketing, I highly recommend it. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecoderjob.com slash episode 387. 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 du.

49:34
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, a choice for eCommerce 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. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog.

50:02
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.

00:26
Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-commerce and my wife could have job actually, 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 du.

00:53
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T.I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Clavier, who is also a sponsor of the show. Now, are you working around the clock to build the business you 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 Chubby as 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.

01:23
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. 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.

01:51
And then finally, I wanted to mention a 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. Now on to the show.

02:19
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast. 2021 is over. So what I’m going to do today is I’m going to talk about what happened in 2021 with both of my businesses and my family life, both the good and the bad, and give you a sneak peek at what is in store for 2022 with mywifequitorjob.com as well as bumblebeelinens.com. So I want to start with my personal life.

02:44
Many of you who follow me know that my wife and I strongly considered moving out of California for a number of reasons in 2021. California is probably the worst place to start a business anywhere in the US, like literally anywhere in the US. Our rent for our warehouse, just as an example, is ridiculous compared to any other part of the United States. What I pay for a 2,500 square foot warehouse

03:13
literally cost the same as a 20,000 square foot office in North Carolina. I compared notes with a buddy of mine over there. The minimum wage is 17 bucks, which is 70 % higher than Vegas. And the tax rate here in California is ridiculous and is only going to get higher. Now actually don’t mind paying taxes if I believe that the money is actually going somewhere useful.

03:39
but I personally don’t think that it’s being allocated very well by the California government. Now, fortunately for us, we actually bought a house at an opportune time. So we’re pretty much set on housing, but real estate here is now $1,200 per square foot, which again is ridiculous. I don’t really know how any young person here can possibly buy a house. It’s just too expensive. Now I actually want my mom to move out to where we live.

04:08
but the cost of getting a house in our neighborhood is just super expensive compared to Maryland. Anyway, the list of candidates on where we were going to potentially move to were Vegas, Austin, and Maryland. Now, I actually personally really wanted to move to Austin because I think Austin has the best small business environment for, at least for what I do, out of anywhere in the US. Plus there are no taxes, but the problem is is that my wife and mom did not want to move there.

04:37
Now, Maryland, if we moved to Maryland, my mom wouldn’t have to move, and this is where I grew up. I spent 18 years of my life there, and I actually really enjoyed growing up there. Great thing about Maryland is that the schools are amazing. I would say the schools there are much better than California overall, and I still have lots of friends there because I grew up there. But the problem with Maryland is that the housing just…

05:01
doesn’t appreciate there. think my mom bought her house 10 years ago and it’s still the same price. It didn’t go up, it didn’t really go down. The summers are hot and muggy, if you’ve ever been to the East Coast, and it’s cold in the winter. Now my wife, who’s lived in California all of her life, would be in for a major shock if we moved out there. Now right now it’s funny, as I’m recording this episode, it’s actually been raining in California where I live for the past week. And it just made me think, I always seem to take for granted

05:31
how great the weather is here for 10 months out of the year. And what ends up happening is when it rains, I tend to exercise much less. And whenever I exercise much less, it makes me less happy and I’m less productive overall. So I think weather is actually an important factor in terms of where you want to live. Being stuck in the house for the past week has just reminded me of this. so weather is going to be a strong component of where I decide to live. Anyway, that leaves Vegas, right? Vegas.

06:01
is actually pretty ideal because number one, it’s close to LA, which is actually where my extended family lives and where my wife’s family lives as well. There are no taxes and you can get a lot for your money. Now the only problem with Vegas, and my wife did extensive research on this, is that the schools aren’t great except for a very small pocket or you basically have to go to private school. Anyway, ultimately the decision came down to the kids. They have a great friend network here. They have a really good routine.

06:31
We know all their friends and parents. So basically it’s all good. And we don’t want to cause any disruption. Now I’m trying to pretend I’m a kid here, but I can only imagine how hard it is to pick up, switch to a brand new high school, make new friends, and then just kind of adjust on the fly. Anyway, the upshot here is that we’re staying here for probably the next six years, most likely. And speaking of the kids, I just want to say that I believe that I’ve crossed the hump into

07:00
what I call peak parenthood. So what is peak parenthood for me? It’s basically when your kids are finally old enough to play sports with you. My son and daughter have been taking private volleyball lessons for the past year, and they are finally good enough to play doubles with me and actually have it be fun. And in fact, over Thanksgiving, we had an outdoor volleyball party and it was a lot of fun. I mean, we play on the same team, we play with each other and it was a blast. My son has been taking tennis lessons for the past year too.

07:30
and we can finally rally without me running all over the place chasing down balls, which is really exciting for me. Anyway, everything is generally pretty good on the parenting front. And meanwhile, my wife and I are great. And I think COVID overall, ironically, was incredible for our family because we spent even more time together. In 2020, my kids were taking classes at home and literally we’d spend the whole entire day together. All right, on to the businesses. Let’s start with Bumblebee Linens.

07:59
a number of bad things actually happened in 2021. So first off, we got hit by the Google update, which basically shaved off, I would say almost a third of our organic traffic. Now Google search is actually 25 to 30 % of our business. So we knew we had to do something. So the focus of 2021 was actually trying to get back our rankings. And I’m happy to report that not only did we recover our traffic, but we’re actually up 40 %

08:28
since the drop overall. Now I’m gonna probably write up a complete blog post about everything that we did, but I just want to give Jeff Oxford a quick shout out for the help and guidance in the SEO department. Now here’s a short list of what we did. And first off, I want to say that SEO is like a black box and you really never have any idea what exactly caused something to work or what caused something for you to drop in rankings. Basically, you just throw the kitchen sink at the problem.

08:57
and just hope that your rankings improve as a collective. All right, so with that intro, here’s what we did. So first, we did a complete site audit to make sure we were following best practices for our pages. So no website in general is stagnant, it’s constantly changing. And I’m probably at fault for this, but we’ve gotten a little bit careless over the years in terms of meta descriptions, redirects, broken links, and that sort of thing. So we just fixed all that stuff. And then we did an audit of our money pages

09:27
to prioritize our optimization efforts. After all, you probably have hundreds, if not thousands of web pages on your site, and you can’t possibly optimize every page. So you basically look at every landing page and figure out what dollar value each page brings in. You can easily figure this out in Google Analytics. You simply go to landing pages and then look at e-commerce revenue per visitor for that page. Then you use a tool like Ahrefs or Uber Suggest, whatever you want to use as an SEO tool.

09:57
You figure out which keywords you are ranking for to generate traffic to those pages and just basically see where you’re at in the rankings. And then you apply a weighting factor to decide which pages you want to prioritize the SEO optimization for. Now that sounds all complicated, so let’s break it down with an example here. So overall, the goal is to generate a score for every page on your site in terms of SEO opportunity. And this score is calculated

10:26
by the potential traffic that your target keywords can possibly obtain for the page, minus the amount of traffic you’re already getting for those keywords, multiplied by the revenue per visitor for that page. So basically, I’m just factoring the potential gains from ranking a keyword for a page to make sure that I’m putting the most effort on pages that will generate me the most money. So for example, I get a lot of traffic to a page, it’s actually a blog post, on creating a sync skirt.

10:55
and I could get a lot more traffic to that page by optimizing it further. But that page, since we don’t sell sync skirts, generates a very low dollar value per visitor, so I’m actually not going to spend that much time on it. Anyway, once I’ve identified these pages, I then use a tool called Surfer SEO to add content to every page. Now, what does this tool do? Basically, it analyzes the pages that are ranking on the front page and allows you to create a page

11:23
that encapsulates all the content that Google expects to have in order to rank for it. Now, I just want to say this upfront that for e-commerce, it can be difficult to write content for a category page without affecting conversions or the usability of the site. basically what I do is I keep the content below the products. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, just go to any category page on bumblebillins.com right now and you’ll see what I mean. Now for these money pages, I also try to use internal linking to boost that page.

11:53
So basically I’m taking other pages that have strong page authority and I’m just linking to those money pages on my shop. Now recently I also revamped my top level nav to make sure that only money categories are displayed as well. After all, you don’t want to be linking or sending people to like an about us page, for example, when you can just send them straight to the products that make you money. So bottom line, onsite optimization is all about adding content and focusing all of your link juice from your entire site

12:22
towards your money pages with internal linking. Now some other more esoteric things that were done to the site were adjusting the robots.txt file to make sure that Google didn’t go down a rabbit hole when crawling the site. Here’s how Google works. Basically, Google allocates a set crawl budget for every website, so you have to make sure that Google can get to every money page on your site. And in terms of generating backlinks, we created a scholarship program to attract EDU links and specialized discount pages for certain professions.

12:50
But all all, Google traffic is up big time for our shop. Now this year end report would not be complete without talking about the shipping crisis. Now in August of this year, our supplier informed us that he wouldn’t be able to send us our holiday shipment until January. Now these are products that we typically sell a ton of over the holidays, so we actually had to act really quickly. Now normally, I actually ignore most solicitation emails from my inbox, but I just happen to be checking my email one day.

13:19
when I noticed one from Jing Sourcing, which is actually a sourcing company in China. Now I did a little bit of due diligence and I found that they seem legit. So I said, hey, what the heck? Let’s just give them a try. Worst case scenario, I could write a blog post about it. It would be free content regardless. So I hired Jing to find me a supplier for these products to be delivered within just two months. And that two months is actually a very short timeframe. Typically our orders have a lead time of four months.

13:47
I followed all the best practices that I teach in my class, which includes creating a very stringent quality control checklist, getting an inspection done, and addressing all the possible contingencies and pitfalls, etc. And the upshot is that we got our products in mid-October just in time for the holidays. However, we did have to airship everything, which ate into our profit margins, obviously. But we did have product, which was very important. Now, I’m actually going to be doing a full write-up on my experiences with Jing Sourcing and

14:15
Ultimately, they came through, but we did experience several minor hiccups, like nothing ever goes smooth when it comes to sourcing. And here’s just an example. I was careless and I focused all the specifications in my work on the product rather than the packaging, which actually caused a couple of misunderstandings. And in addition, the defect ratio from the factory was higher than we were expecting, but fortunately we negotiated a contingency plan in case there were defects for these products.

14:44
So it ended up being okay, we didn’t lose any money, but we didn’t get actually as much product as we initially expected. In fact, you know what? I’m probably just gonna do a separate podcast on my experiences with this altogether, because I know that you guys who are listening are probably interested in this. 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.

15:13
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. Now, first and foremost, protecting your 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 copywriting their designs,

15:43
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. And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount. That’s EMERGECOUNSCL.com. Now back to the show. Anyway, the year isn’t quite over yet at the time of this recording.

16:13
but we should end the year up year over year for Bumblebee Lens. Now, I get asked a lot of questions regarding the shipping crisis. And the good news is that the shipping crisis has affected everyone, not just you. I mean, we’ve raised our prices across the board in 2021. I personally think that mass inflation is coming. So do not be afraid to raise prices. Everyone’s doing it. And you’re going to be eating into your margins if you do not raise your prices. I’ve also been asked about the Apple iOS changes.

16:42
that have mainly affected Facebook ads. Now, only a minor percentage of Bumblebee Linden’s business is actually from Facebook ads, but I will say this, ad creative is everything, which is why I’ve focused a significant amount of effort in teaching how to create an effective ad in my Create a Profitable Online Store course. And starting in the new year, I’ve actually solicited several student volunteers, and what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna create ads together following these best practices, which should be a lot of fun. I can’t wait to do that.

17:10
All right, so that’s Bumblebee linens in a nutshell. For mywifequitterjob.com, I also got hit by Google and I ended up spending a lot of effort recovering my traffic. Now, my results for mywifequitterjob.com weren’t as effective as bumblebeelinens.com, but I did manage to recover a significant portion of my lost traffic. Now, the type of SEO work for mywifequitterjob.com is actually fundamentally different than bumblebee linens because I’m writing for a much more competitive niche. Not very many people write about linens and hankies, for example.

17:39
Now I’ll probably do a complete write-up of my SEO changes from mywifequitterjob.com also in a separate episode, but here’s what I did in a nutshell. So first off, I revamped all the navigation on the site. There’s actually over 500 posts on mywifequitterjob, possibly more actually, and they were all largely unorganized. So I painstakingly categorized each of these posts in a hierarchical fashion in such a way that only relevant posts linked to each other. So basically, I organized the content in such a way

18:09
to tell Google that I have topical authority in my space by focusing my internal link juice in specific content silos. I also actually changed up my writing style to be much more concise. Over the years, Google has focused on content that delivers the answer as quickly as possible. Now, you’ve probably seen this already when you do a quick Google search, you probably see rich snippets in the search results that basically summarize the answer to your question. So basically now, when I write,

18:39
I try to be concise and answer questions in a single sentence and then expand upon the answer below after that initial answer. And in fact, I’ve actually used this strategy extensively to recover a lot of my traffic. Now, the only downside to this way of writing is that it’s boring. Google actually does not reward storytelling or experiences. They just want the facts. So going forward with my writing, I definitely don’t want to write this way. So it’s basically a balancing act.

19:08
of giving the right answer and making your posts fun and entertaining to read, and most importantly, based on experience. So I also performed the same SEO analysis as with Bumblebee Linens, except using the metric of email subs as opposed to pure revenue. Now, overall, I’m very bullish that I’ll recover all my traffic and more in 2022. E-commerce and business content is just really competitive, but the main difference between my content, and I would say 90 % of what’s out there, is that I actually write about what I do

19:38
instead of farming out content to just random writers who know nothing about e-commerce. And I’m actually hoping that Google improves its technology to be able to spot the people who are just regurgitating whatever’s out there. So we’ll see about that. Meanwhile, both of my courses over at profitableonlinestore.com and profitableaudience.com continue to do great. Profitable Online Store is my e-commerce course where I teach others how to sell physical products online. And Profitable Audience is my course where I teach others how to build an audience

20:07
through blogging, podcasting, YouTube, to sell advertising, digital products, and courses. Now, overall, I would say the pandemic has been very good for both courses since more and more people don’t want to go back to work and would rather work from home on their own terms. Now, outside of my blog, my YouTube channel grew tremendously in 2021. In 2021, I gained about 45,000 subscribers, which brings my total to about 67,000 subs overall.

20:36
And my goal with the channel is actually to get the much coveted YouTube plaque when you hit 100K subs. And I’m on track to do this at the end of 2022. Now YouTube generates me between two and $3,000 per month just on AdSense alone, which is enough to pay my mortgage, but it’s brought a tremendous amount of sales for both of my courses. Now I know that I could make a lot more with my YouTube channel alone, but I’ve pretty much rejected almost every sponsored

21:05
pitch that’s far. Anyway, I launched my YouTube channel in the beginning of 2020 and I’m beyond happy with the results. 2021 was also the year of TikTok and I’m currently sitting at 54,000 subs. After years with the dance lessons and lip sync tutorials, I was finally ready to take the plunge. Just kidding, I don’t do any of stuff on my TikTok channel, but my TikTok strategy is a little different than most. Instead of trying to go viral by making funny videos,

21:32
I’ve decided to focus on teaching e-commerce content. Now, my goal is not to attract as many people as possible, but to attract the right people who want to learn from what I teach. So, so far, I’ve been repurposing both my blog and YouTube content on TikTok, and it’s worked pretty well. Right now, I actually think TikTok is the best way to build an audience because you can go viral pretty easily. In fact, creating a TikTok video literally takes me 10 minutes or less.

21:58
This content can then be posted on YouTube shorts and Instagram reels as well. Now, right now, TikTok is not making me any ad money. I think I’ve made maybe 30 bucks so far, but it has generated core sales. Now, finally, I wanted to talk about the profitable audience podcast. As you know, I’ve been working with my business partner, Tony, for many years now, and it made sense to launch a podcast about building an audience. Now, things started out slow as all podcasts do, but we are now generating thousands of downloads per month.

22:28
and we routinely crack the top 150 in the marketing section of iTunes. Now, if you enjoy my solo episodes, then you should definitely check out this podcast. Basically, I talk about what’s on my mind since we don’t interview any guests on that show. Look up the Profitable Audience Podcast on your favorite podcast app. So let’s jump to some of the highlights of the year. I got interviewed on a CNN special in the middle of the year, I would say, which is due to come out in 2022 about selling on Amazon.

22:57
And recently we were featured on CNBC’s hit show, Make It. And if you haven’t watched it yet, check it out now on YouTube. Just search for CNBC Make It and look for us. We actually filmed this episode for two straight days to produce just an eight minute video. And obviously a lot of details had to be cut. So I actually created a reaction video to fill in the details that were missed during that CNBC video. Now a popular YouTuber, Graham Stephan also did a reaction video, which I made a response video to as well.

23:27
Now this is the first time that I’ve created these types of response videos. So just let me know what you think. I feel like a millennial actually making them. So what’s in store for 2022? Well, for Bumblebee Lennons, we actually held off on hiring for both 2020 and 2021, mainly due to COVID. But we are finally ready to hire in 2022. So if you live in the Bay Area and you want to work for us, email me your resume. Every year when it comes to my businesses, I basically have one objective for every business. So in 2022,

23:57
we are actually going to start a TikTok channel for Bumblebee linens. Now I’m still trying to get my wife on board for this because it does heavily depend on her, but that’s the goal. And for mywifequitterjob.com, I actually have a super secret project that I’m working on, which I’ll probably reveal at the end of 2022, but I’m super excited about it. But overall, the goal for mywifequitterjob is to create more and more content and help my students become millionaires. That’s literally my primary objective with that site.

24:26
And then finally, I’m so looking forward to Seller Summit this year in May. After two straight years of postponement due to COVID, super looking forward to seeing all of you in person again. I mean, seriously, I have not gone to a single event since the beginning of 2020, and this has just got to stop. As of right now, we only have a few mastermind passes left, but join me in Fort Lauderdale in May. I really want to see you guys. But overall, for 2022, I’m going to be a lot more selective on the projects that I’m working on, and here’s why.

24:57
my daughter is entering high school, and I’m really not sure what to expect. Am I going to have to spend more time with my son and my daughter as they get older? Or will they want to have nothing to do with me? It remains to be seen. But I do know that they don’t drive, and the number of activities they have continues to grow exponentially. So for example, just sports for the both of them literally occupies almost every single day of the week. And I’m probably busier on weekends than I am on weekdays.

25:26
which is kind of ironic here. High school is also when grades truly matter for college. And this is all new territory for me, so I’m playing it conservative, leaving a large block of my schedule open for them and just see what happens. Who knows? Maybe they want to have nothing to do with me and I won’t have to spend as much time. But I will say that family is always my priority. And my second priority is keeping up with the latest in e-commerce and keeping my mind active. So here’s to a successful 2022.

25:54
Hope you enjoy that episode, and if you have any questions to start off the new year about ecommerce, feel free to send them my way. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecoupterjob.com slash episode 386. 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 abandonment 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 mywifecoupterjob.com slash KLAVIO.

26:22
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 div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-A-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. Now to 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.

26:52
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
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.