00:27
But before I begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Now I’m super 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 is shopped in your store in 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 I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single 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 own customer contact list.

01:23
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 from my e-commerce 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 e-commerce and that is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows and abandon cart at the push of a button.

01:50
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 U I P T dot I O slash Steve. And then finally, I want to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience.

02:17
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.

02:34
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast. Today I have my buddy, Chase Diamond on the show. Now, Chase is someone who I met at Nick Shackelford’s Geek Out event, and he is the co-founder of Boundless Labs, which is a top email marketing agency with a special focus on CBD companies. Chase lives and breathes email, and he’s helped his clients send hundreds of millions of emails, resulting in over 50 million in attributable email revenue. Now, if email marketing is not driving at least 20 to 30 % of your total revenue for your e-commerce store,

03:03
then you are probably leaving some money on the table. And what’s also amazing is that Chase has secured crazy results for his clients, like sending emails with a 40 to 70 % open rate. And today, Chase is going to teach us how to run email marketing campaigns specifically for an e-commerce store. What up, Chase? Steve, my man, how are you? I’m doing well, man. I’m glad we got a chance to catch up before we actually hit the record button. But before we start, give me the quick background.

03:31
how you got started with Boundless Labs and how did you get into email of all things? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me. So really long-winded, I got actually started in marketing by accident when I was 14 years old. At the age of 13, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and I was essentially sick for an entire year through lack of awareness and basically lack of a diagnosis for this disease. So as a 14 year old, I took it upon myself to do guerrilla marketing. At the time I didn’t know I was doing guerrilla marketing.

03:58
but I basically was taking out ads in the newspapers. I was calling my friends. I was doing walks and restaurant fundraisers, so on and so forth. So from 14 to 16, I dedicated my lives to raising awareness and fundraising for the Crohn’s and Cladis Foundation. And at 16, I actually became the youngest board member of CCFA and spent a six-year board term working with them. And in college, I had to help pay for my tuition. So I had to work.

04:26
random jobs and internships at one point in time. think I probably had two or three jobs and internships at a time while also playing college soccer, while also doing business clubs and fraternities. So through college, I really got into marketing. I did a bunch of different marketing from SEO to email, to pay acquisition, this, that, and the other. And email really was the thing that stuck with me as the thing that was really intimate and personal, but scalable. And what I really mean by that.

04:53
So within an email, right, if I can get you to open the email, it’s just me and you. And I have your attention for two seconds, 30 seconds a minute, dependent upon how great my content is. Whereas with something like social, you know, if you’re running an ad on, let’s say Facebook or Instagram, not that it’s not effective. Obviously it’s super effective, but you’ll see, you know, an ad and you also see a post from a friend, a family member, you know, boyfriend or girlfriend. So there are other descriptions on your screen. So for me, I really liked the fact that I could send an email to a thousand people.

05:22
100,000 people, a million people, but in a way that felt really personal for each person. So from there, I was basically building after college products that served college students documents. And I was building travel series and email was really the core at what I did. And I did it in the beginning of my career kind of on the cold email side. So I was building massive audiences with cold email, essentially aggregating data from Instagram, from SoundCloud, from forums and driving traffic to

05:51
know, newsletters and communities. So long-winded, did cold email for a couple of years. Nick and I have been close friends for about 15 years and he hit me up and he’s like, dude, the stuff that you’re doing on cold email is so cool. However, you know, I foresee a day in the future, we’re going to probably be on the wrong side of the law. This was before like GDPR and California privacy and all these things. Why don’t you come join me in e-commerce? So I’ve now been doing e-commerce for about three, three and a half years. Thanks to Nick. So long-winded, that’s kind of my story of how it got to

06:21
you know, boundless labs and in our structure. Right? Yeah, you guys merged, right? Yes. So about a year ago, we merged. So we were doing exclusively ecommerce, email marketing, Nick’s company was doing exclusively paid social, we’ve kind of come together. So all in, about 45 to 50 employees, and we offer email paid and content. This is random. But did you guys meet through soccer? Because I remember Nick was almost pro, right? Yes. So we actually met through our brothers playing soccer. So

06:49
I played soccer my whole life, Nick played soccer his whole life, our little brothers played soccer together, so that’s how I met Nick initially. And Nick did play, he had a stint with the LA Galaxy, so he played in college and then he went pro for think a year or two. Yeah, I thought there was some connection there. So hey, so Chase, what are some of the companies that we might have heard of, e-commerce companies that you’ve helped in the past, and what are some of your biggest wins in terms of sales when helping these companies?

07:14
Yeah, so one that was really cool for me growing up, I was a big fan of the Chive, like the men’s millennial kind of newsletter site. And they have an e-commerce brand called the Chivory, which is an eight figure e-commerce brand. So I had the opportunity to consult for them on their email program for about a year and a half to two years. I actually only had stopped because I had my daughter and I kind of was cutting back a little bit on the consulting, but I worked with them for a while and I think we increased their revenue year over year by like 50%. So that was pretty significant for a brand that was doing

07:43
you know, a couple million dollars already from email. So that was a cool one. We currently actually work with a brand called Poopery, which is the spray for the bathroom. Yeah, I’ve seen the commercials. look really good. Maybe I saw them from Nick’s feed actually. Yeah, Poopery is awesome. I mean, that’s like a household name that’s in a bunch of stores. Never thought we’d land them. Happened to get them as a client. So that was really cool. And then like one or two others. We previously worked with a protein company called Orgain.

08:13
They’re sold in a lot of you know, grocery stores, Amazon, so on and so forth. So we work with, you know, a couple really big household names like that, but a lot of our brands typically do between about one to about $20 million in annual revenue. Um, so they’re kind of smaller, fast growing, you know, seven to eight figure brands that not as many people know, but they’re doing a really great job. Those are brands kind of like nugs, which is like the chicken nugget alternative, you know, a brand called hydrant, which is like a, you know,

08:42
kind of like a electrolyte replenishment for your drink, your water, and so on and so forth. Sweet, which actually is the actual target demographic with this podcast, so it’s perfect. So let’s start from the beginning, because you can’t really do a lot of the techniques unless you actually have an email list. So what are your recommendations on building your email list as quickly as possible? So what we do, so we kind of are middle to bottom of the funnel. So we are completely dependent on top of the funnel traffic.

09:12
that brands drive. So typically that is Facebook and Instagram. Outside that is the other platforms like Google, Snap, Pinterest, et cetera. There may be some SEO, maybe some affiliate, maybe some influencers. So once traffic hits the page, that’s kind where we come in. And we basically leverage forms to collect emails. So whether that’s a pop-up, a fly out, an embedded subscription, we leverage forms and we kind of optimize these forms to collect as much traffic as possible. I

09:41
my own kind of research and also through some of the research that I have from privy, basically having like some kind of call to action of just sign up, there’s no discount, there’s no incentive, you can expect that to convert between one to 2 % of the traffic. So for every 100 people that visit your website, if you just have sign up for our newsletter to get our content, you can expect about one to two people to give you their email. If you have an incentive, whether it’s 5%, 10%, 15 % off, you can expect about five to 10 % of those people to give you their emails, right? So

10:10
every 100 visits, if you have some kind of discount or incentive, you can expect five to 10 people to give you their email. And what’s kind of interesting is the whole giveaway type thing. So enter your email to have a chance to be entered into our weekly giveaway or monthly giveaway, whatever it might be, some kind of like enter to win. We’re actually seeing that converting in the low teens in terms of people giving us their email. So 10 out of every 100, 12 out of every 100, so on.

10:36
That’s how we’re typically collecting emails is through the traffic that’s coming onto the website. All right. That’s one. Two. Um, there’s not a lot of control that we necessarily have on this one, but other ways that we collect email is when someone starts checkout and whether they purchased or not, as long as they’ve entered their email, their phone number, their address and click next, we will collect their email. And then outside of that, we’re leveraging, you know, giveaways, um, and ambassador programs and referral programs to try to grow the list. So what is the top converting?

11:06
email form that you guys have seen with the clients? Is it the giveaways? Yeah, so it’s, it’s interesting, right? So the giveaways gets you the most number of emails. It’s a little bit longer tail in terms of actually seeing like what that conversion looks like just because, you know, if you’re doing a weekly or monthly giveaway, someone signs up and then you have to wait a week and then you have to announce whether they want or not. And then, you know, some people convert other people don’t. So giveaway helps you collect the most email, the conversion on it’s pretty decent, but the

11:34
The interesting thing is like the incentive or the offer, that’s actually like the most immediate in terms of conversion, in terms of actually someone purchasing, even though it’s only five to 10 % and it’s less people giving their email than the other, you see the ROI there the quickest just because when someone enters their email to get a discount code, they’re typically gonna buy as soon as that discount code either shows them on the pop-up itself after they submitted the form or directly within the email. So that’s kind of like the interesting thing. So it kind of depends.

12:02
And we’re still trying to track an attribute, someone coming in through a giveaway and then converting and how they converted just since attribution is a whole thing in and of itself. Yeah. The reason why I’m asking you this question is because traditionally when I’ve done some giveaways in the past, the email quality isn’t as good, but the way I’ve been running them is like, I hate having to remember to like give out the prize after a week. So I use, I started using messenger to just give out a prize every single day automatically through the bot. And then that way I’m collecting emails, but the quality of those emails aren’t nearly as good as my

12:32
standard coupon pop-up form. So I was just curious, since you work with a lot more companies. Yeah, that makes sense. And that’s really cool and interesting about the daily messenger thing. OK, so you get your emails. How many emails should you be sending per week? Like, how do you figure out the frequency? And what is the right frequency? Yeah, so there’s two different types of emails that we’re focused on. And there’s actually three types of emails in general. So I’ll talk about the three types in general, and then I’ll talk about what each one are and kind of the cadence. So there’s campaigns.

13:02
There’s flows, flows is synonymous with email automation, and then there’s transactional emails. So a campaign is a one-time send to a group of contacts. Think about like a Black Friday sale, a new product launch, a holiday offer. Right? Those are all campaigns. And I’ll talk about kind of the cadence in one sec. The flows is an email automation. These are emails that are triggered off of an event or behavior. So someone enters their email into a pop-up that then triggers the welcome series for non-buyers, so long as they have not converted already. And then the transactional emails, I don’t talk about as much about those.

13:32
Those are very important, but the reason I don’t talk about it as much is they’re typically set up by default within your Shopify or, you know, WooCommerce, so on and so forth. are things like shipping confirmation, order confirmation. So it is definitely important to kind of edit and make those look on brand and do what you can just because those inherently have a really high open rate. Um, but I mainly talk about the campaigns and flow. So on the campaign side, the way that I think about sending, you know, numbers of emails per week or per month is you start with one per week, right? Send one per week.

14:01
Look at that open rates, look at the click through rates. Those are like the positive engagements, right? Look at the conversion and then look at the negative things, right? The unsubscribe, the market spam, the bounces. If all of those are solid, right? So if the open rate is North or at around 20%, you know, if the click through, obviously it’s going to vary depending on the kind of content you’re sending. Is it plain text? it designed? Is it an offer? Is it content? You know, the click through will obviously vary also varies by industry, but as long as those metrics look healthy and solid based off what you’re at and what your industry is at, cool.

14:31
And if the unsubscribes and mark a spam, the balances are all low. Great. Can you provide a guideline? Like what number is considered low? Yeah. So it depends. like, for example, like mark a spam, that one’s really important to keep extremely low. So I believe it’s one out of 1000 people can mark as spam. think anything over that is considered a little bit high. Right. On the unsubscribed side, typically about like half percent or lower is what you want to be. You know, if you’re at like 1 % or 2 % or 3 % unsubscribes, it’s

15:01
a little bit higher depending on the ESP, the email service provider that you’re using. For example, I Klaviyo recently rolled out benchmarks that you can kind of see based off other stores using Klaviyo in your industry, like what they’re pacing out. So I think that part is really solid just to be able to see great, we’re average at the open rates, we’re below average on click through, you know, so on and so forth. So you look at all these metrics, right? And then if they all look good, send a second email per week, right?

15:28
Second email, right, there’s not an increase in customer support tickets saying, oh my God, you send me two emails per week, what are you doing? Right, send a third email per week. And at that third email per week, if you notice like after you send one more in the fourth email, there’s friction. You know that there’s the optimal number of emails you probably want to send is two to three emails per week, right? So again, like you’re trying to straddle on between maximizing the number of times you got to send because that’s, you know, going to maximize the opportunity to hopefully drive revenue. But you also want to minimize the churn, right? You want to minimize people.

15:58
unsubscribing by sending them too many emails. And the way that you can send more emails per week, which I’ll happen to annoy one person four times or five times or six times is by leveraging segmentation, right? So with some of our brands, we actually will send four or five, six times a week, but one person might only receive two or three of those emails. Sure. that making sense? Yeah, it does. I’m just wondering though, let’s say you are sending these people three emails a week. Would you be concerned if each one of those sends resulted in a 0.5 % unsubscribe rate?

16:27
which were within your guidelines, but at the same time, you’re still shedding a bunch of people. Yeah. Yeah. I think it depends on like how much revenue we’re driving, right? Like if we’re selling these and we’re driving a lot of revenue, um, and then we can go acquire new customers for, you know, profitable, right? So I think it really depends on like the, the unit economics of like how a brand and what their LTV is, whatnot. think, know, about half a percent, I’m doing that, I’m making a lot of money. I’m probably okay with it. Um,

16:55
Again, a lot of the list size that we work with are fairly large, right? So not that half a percent isn’t a big deal. Obviously, the larger the list, the more people that is. But we’re focused like really on trying to drive A, the conversion and B, like the repeat purchase and that relationship. So I’m not super concerned if it’s a few emails per week at like half a percent. If it goes to like 1%, 2%, I would be more concerned. Okay. And then you mentioned segmentation. How do you manage that?

17:24
We were just talking about acquisition forms initially where you give out a coupon or something. How do you know which buckets to put your people in? Yeah, so for us, there’s a couple of main ways that we segment people and everything revolves typically around, you know, an engaged segment. So either an engaged segment by itself. So, you know, 30, 60, 90, 120. So people have opened or clicked over the past 30, 60 days, past 90 days, 120 days, whatever it might be. The way that we pick these segments is we want to be able to get that 20 % open rate on a campaign.

17:53
So if you’re getting like a 30 or 40 % open rate and you’re only hitting a 30 day engage, you’re probably being a little bit too strict. You probably can open that up to like a 45, a 60, a 75. And the reason that we want to get a 20 % open rate on campaigns is that allows us to have good deliverability, right? That means, you know, people are open to emails. Hopefully it’s in the inbox, potentially it’s in the promo. When you’re hitting like a 5 % or 10 % open rate consistently, that’s really bad for your domain reputation. That’s really bad for your deliverability.

18:22
So everything that I’ve done, everything that I’ve heard from any ESP, 20 % of that benchmark. So we picked the segment that allows us to hit that. And then other segments that we’ll hit is an engaged plus gender based, right? So within Klaviyo, they have predictive analytics where they can tell you someone’s likely male or likely female, right? So for males, we might show the content for men first and then for females second. And for females, we’ll show maybe the content for females first and male second, right? And just by having like the switch in that cadence.

18:51
does increase engagement from what we’ve seen because it’s more relevant right when they open the email. So that’s one thing we might do for gender. Another segment that we might hit is geography, right? So two examples there. I live in California on the West Coast, right? And it’s like 75 degrees out right now. Someone can send me an email, say an apparel company sends me an email with flip flops and shorts. I would probably buy that right now. Whereas on the East Coast, right? Maybe in New York right now, you would have to send like a

19:20
a beanie, a sweatshirt, and sweatpants because no one else is going to buy flip-flop thread if they’re not in great weather right now. That’s one way we think about geography. Another way we think about geo, a lot of our brands have both domestic and international customers. Say, for example, in the US, we have free shipping. We might segment the US people and send them a free shipping offer while internationally, wouldn’t. That geography is another.

19:49
previous buyers, someone’s purchased product A that’s complementary with product B. So they’ve bought item A, they haven’t purchased B, right? That might be another segment. So those are kind of some of the segments that we focus on most often. And then we could kind of get more granular from their VIPs and so on. So can we talk about the open rate of 20 % as your benchmark? So let’s say your 120 list, meaning it’s opened within the last 120 days, doesn’t hit that threshold. What do you do with those people?

20:18
Do you continue to send to them or like, let’s say you’re reaching like a 10 % open rate on a particular time-based segment. What do you do? Yeah. So there, there’s a couple of things that we do. So one thing that we’ll do is we’ll have a special segment set up for people that typically shop during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, right? And we’ll kind of protect these people. We won’t necessarily send to them too frequently. We’ll send to them maybe let’s say once a quarter and then during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

20:47
be pretty aggressive because what we’ve noticed is there are just people that are on our list that have shopped last one or two years of a Black Friday, seven Monday around the holidays, but they don’t do anything around the rest of the year. we’ll kind of protect these people and keep them in a segment that will exclude from ongoing campaigns. we also want to keep them protected where we don’t suppress or delete them. that’s kind of one thing that we’ll do. But the main thing that we’ll really do outside that small sliver of people is we’ll find, so for example, depending on how many times you send per week and whatnot,

21:17
So I’ll give a couple of examples. So say you send once a week, you want to give people probably at least 10, 15 chances to open. So once a week, that’s four month. So at about, let’s say, three to four month mark, we’ll want to have those people that have not opened all those emails automatically go into a sunset unengaged. So that’s basically a fancy way of saying a breakup series. So we want to find that window of time where we’ve given people enough chances and they haven’t opened, where they’re likely never to open.

21:47
So we’ll drop them through kind of like a last chance, you here’s an offer, you know, do you want to hear from us? If you do great, if you don’t, you know, we’re going to get rid of you. So we’ll send them through a sunset unengaged, they’ll automatically have a property that says unengaged equals true, if you’re using Klaviyo. And then we’ll go through on like a monthly basis and suppress those people. So that way we’re not paying more money for them. That way we’re not accidentally sending to them and causing potential issues.

22:13
Yeah, I’m just wondering what you do for the borderline folks though. Do you just reduce the frequency for those? So for example, let’s say you have them segmented by month, right? Open the last month, open the last two months, three months, four months. Let’s say within your four to five month people, or sorry, like three to four month people, they’re at a percentage that is low, but it’s lower than 20%. Do you continue sending to that segment? So we would, yeah, we would, to your point, we would drop the frequency and we would

22:41
lump that in with like the overall sense. So what I see some people do, right, is they’ll send to like they’re engaged and that’ll get like a 30 % of rain. And then they’ll send their unengaged, which gets like a 2%, right? Like that looks really, really bad. I don’t hear many people talking about this, but like, I believe in a process of blending the data. So that way, you know, ESPs don’t actually know what’s happening. And that sounds kind of like sneaky, but like, it’s just a way to go about it where I’d rather have, let’s say, you know, a 15 % open rate, um, sending to.

23:08
So that looped in group or even the 10 % open rate that you mentioned versus having a 30 % on one and like a 2 % on the other, right? It looks really, really bad. But yeah, I would probably send to them if you’re three times a week, four times a week, maybe once a week, once every other week. And then from there, as those people kind of expand and they don’t open, then they’ll hopefully fall into that unengaged segment, which will then trigger the breakup series. Okay. That’s actually instantly what I do. I was just kind of curious what you do, mainly because Klavia actually sends you a nasty email.

23:39
if your open rate drops below a certain amount. Exactly. And, you know, this might be going too much back into my gray hat days with like the cold email stuff. But what I learned back then and no ESP would ever admit this or agree with this, which is fine. But we basically used to send tons of high quality outbound cold email. Like we were sending millions and millions of emails. And what we actually noticed is like these ESPs and people

24:06
They don’t actually care whether someone’s opted in or not, right? They say that they do, and they said that they don’t tolerate purchase lists. And I’m not telling anyone to go do this, right? This is something that worked a long time ago and you have to be very careful. But what we notice is say we had a hundred thousand people opt in into our newsletter. We could merge, let’s say 5,000 of these people that were completely cold in with this hundred thousand person list. And the ESPs would never know that those people were added and uploaded because the good people would mirror the metrics of the bad people. So I’ve known for a long time,

24:34
blending and the mirroring of the data is something that was really kind of interesting. But anyways, that’s kind of like something I figured out before. And that’s kind of why I still do that practice today. But all the people today are opted in all white hat, you know, none of this gross stuff. 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.

25:02
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,

25:32
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 emergcouncil.com and get a free consult. And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now back to the show.

25:57
I’ve also heard of ESPs putting you on a worse IP or a lower quality IP as well. Like if you send too many emails with a lower open rate, just kind of behind the scenes. Yeah, so you have either like a shared IP or a shared pool or kind of like a dedicated IP or a dedicated pool, right? So they typically group people together based off of size of a list and also engagement and behavior, right? So the great thing about a shared thing is if you’re starting out, you get a

26:27
leverage to some degree, like the shared pool and the benefits that being said at the end of the day, like, you know, one rotten egg really spoils the bunch. So if you’re on a pool where someone is really, you know, doing things that are, you know, I don’t want to say illegal, but doing things that are not best practices, right? It really can hurt you. Right. So a good practice and recommended practice for people is to move to like a dedicated thing. So that way you control your own destiny. But again, it’s, it’s, it’s a little bit more to it than that, but to your point, like,

26:54
Yeah, that’s definitely something that can happen. So you do have to be careful and mindful. If you’re following best practices and you’re getting in trouble, it could be worth looking into, you know, asking who else is on the shared pool. What does that look like? Is there ability to move to a different or better pool? And sometimes too, depending on how much you’re paying the ESP, right? You might be on a preferred pool. you recommend going dedicated IP as soon as you can then? So

27:20
I want to say yes. I, all my own personal stuff, like my personal newsletter and everything that I do, I do do a dedicated one. That being said, like a lot of people that are going to hear this and listen to this probably aren’t following all the best practices, aren’t probably being religious about cleaning the last and doing these things. So I would hate to say yes and get people in trouble. Like if you’re not sure what you’re doing or you’re kind of doing email, even if you’re doing it well, but you don’t know all the things that you don’t know, I think a shared is probably safer. Okay.

27:49
Well, we’ve been talking about open rates for a while. What are some of these things that you do to get these crazy open rates that I’ve seen you get? Yeah, so it’s a couple of things, right? Well, on the automation side, right? Like the open rates there inherently are going to be higher. So on a welcome series for non-buyers, email one, you should be seeing 40, 60, 70%, right? Like the open rates on these automation emails should be really, really high. So you have to take advantage of it. The abandoned cards to customer thank yous.

28:18
So on the automation side, just because someone has taken an action that will then trigger an email, that relevance is what I think allows some of those emails to be super high and engaging. But on the campaign side, again, it’s picking the right segment, leveraging the right content. So basically, talking about the open rates, just going back to that really quickly, there’s four main factors that determine whether someone’s going to open your email. One that you have some control over, but not really, is where your email lands.

28:46
the inbox, is it in the promotion, is it in the spams? You have every power in your hand to stay out of the spam by following best practices. Whether you’re in the inbox or the promotions, it’s really kind of a coin toss. It really just depends. The more things that you do that are personalized, having live text and plain text involved with your emails, the better. Again, that’s not a guarantee. There’s no silver bullet. So where your email lands will have an impact on your open rate. Next is from left to right in your email, you have the from name.

29:16
the subject line in the preview text, right? The from name. So if it’s my newsletter, it’s Chase Diamond, right? If it’s your newsletter, it’s Steve or whatever it might be. My wife quit my job. Right. Do the people, are they familiar with it? Do they recognize it? Are they interested in the content that you sent previously? If yes, great. Then the open rate. think the open rate is the most important thing that you can control is the, or sorry, sorry. The subject line is the most important thing that you can control for the open rate. Is the subject line something that’s interesting, intriguing? it personalized? Is it witty?

29:45
but also has to be related to the content. And then the preview text is that text that you see to the right of the subject line. That’s almost like a second subject line. So you have to use the two hand in hand to make people really have enough info, but also leaves them wanting a little bit more that they do open. So those are kind of like the four levers that you can kind of pull. You have to be running A-B tests on the subject line. After you’ve tested subject lines, you have to be running A-B tests on the preview text, things like that. So those are the things that impact kind of the open rate. Does that make sense?

30:15
Yeah. So how do you run your AB test? Do you just send to a very small segment your, your test? then once you find out the winner, then you send the rest out. Yeah. And it depends on the list size, right? Like we want to make sure that there’s enough significance on the test that is worthy of being, you know, statistically significant. So depending on your list size, right? Like some of the lists that we work with are a million people big, right? So we could send to 10 % of that list, right? Version A and version B, and we have ample amount of data.

30:45
However, if your list is really small, you might need to send to a larger percentage on the testing just to have significance. So if you have a 10,000 person list that you’re sending to, you might need to hit 20 or 30 % of the list in a test. So that way you have at least thousand or 1500 people receiving each variation. But typically, right, a fair split for most clients we work with is a 20, 80. So 20 % of people receive the test and then the 80 % of the people will receive the winning variation.

31:14
And there’s two ways that we run tests. You can only one one away at a time. If we’re running something that tries to get people to open it, say a subject line, we’ll run a test on the open rate. So depending on which open rate has the highest percentage, we’ll then select that subject line. Or if we’re running a content test, we’re only going to have one subject line. The subject lines will be the same, but instead we’re going to be testing the content. So we’ll want to have that test run off the click through, right? So whichever click through has the highest percentage, we’ll send that version. Do you run an A-B test on every single send?

31:44
for the companies you work with? Nine out 10 times we do. The one out of 10 times that we go is when something is so last minute and so urgent that needs to go out that we forgot about, or there’s an emergency, right? So, say there was like a weather or something that affected fulfillment, right? And we needed to send an email out to everyone that’s purchased over the last week or something. And we would just send that out ASAP with our best guess and our best judgment because that’s really time sensitive. So when we have a little bit more time, you know,

32:12
And typically we’ll run an A-B test for anywhere on like two to four hours if we can, right? So two is typically the shortest amount of time that we’ll recommend and then four is probably the longest. Anything past that you’re maybe kind of missing out on kind of optimal send times. So nine out 10 times A-B test, you know, we do. What is, can you give me an example subject line that just kind of killed it for an e-commerce store that had a really high open rate? Just to get, people an idea of what like a good subject line is.

32:41
Yeah. So for, let’s say like a welcome series for non buyers, right? You know, we honestly keep that pretty simple. Um, let’s something like, you know, welcome to whatever, or, know, here’s your 15 % offer or congrats your end, you know, welcome to the family. So, so like, we kind of keep it somewhat simple, like on the welcome series, know, but other emails, you know, we might leverage, let’s say like something in brackets, right? Like let’s say for example, like new in kind of brackets, and then we might have like,

33:11
new, you you don’t want to miss this or something like, so we’re kind of leveraging things like more based on FOMO, like you don’t want to miss this or last chance or going fast or something around time. we’re leveraging like countdown timers within emails. In my weekly newsletter, actually every single Monday that I send, I actually break down the subject line of the week that we send. And I also break down like what the open rate and the click through was. And, you know, even saying that I can’t even remember what the last one was that I sent two days ago, right? Sure. Yeah.

33:41
Yeah. What is your view on single versus double opt-in? Because I know all the ESPs want you to use double, but realistically, I don’t know any e-commerce store that uses double. And so I’m just kind of curious what your opinion is. Yeah, I’d say again, nine out 10 times we’re using single opt-in. The ESP is right. They say that’s best practice. They always push you to do that. Within Klaviyo by default, they actually have double opt-in set up and you actually have to ping their customer service saying, hey, can you please

34:08
unlock the ability for me to go to a single opt-in, they’ll unlock it. Then you have to go in for each list and click that you don’t want it. Right. So not that they make the process impossible, but they do add some barrier and then you add some friction because they want you to leverage it. say for example, like you have a hundred people that enter their email into your pop-up and you have a double opt-in, you you might only get 50 to 70 % of those people actually go into the email and clicking confirm, right? Maybe even less. So you’re missing out on a lot of people that.

34:36
might’ve just missed that first email that could be engaged. So yeah, nine out of 10 times we use single opt-in. The one out of 10 time that we’ve known is if someone has a lot of bounced emails, I don’t know if they got hit with something that’s spam or maybe they have like a spin to win, right? One of those wheel of things and people just keep entering random emails cause they want the best code. Maybe if you’re running Facebook lead ads, right? And you’re not having people, you know, manually enter their email and it’s defaulting their email from when they’re in college, right? That they don’t have access to.

35:03
So in rare cases where like the bounce rate is really high on like a first email, then we’ll switch to a double opt-in for a period of time just to see if that kind of changes it. But yeah, I’m a big believer in single opt-in just because I follow the best practices and I’d rather have more people on my list. And then I’d rather filter them out later by myself versus Clay deal not allowing me to send emails that don’t confirm. Yeah, I I found cases where the double opt-in email doesn’t even get delivered. So you actually have no chance of getting them on your list in some cases.

35:33
Right, that would suck. And I could definitely see that happening, Email is definitely not like a perfect thing. Sometimes emails that are supposed to go to the inbox go to the promotion spam and vice versa. So we talked about some of the default segments that apply to most stores like demographics and opens. What are some of the specialized ones that you create for customers? So one kind of cool thing that we do within Claviy in particular, I’m not sure if you can do this in other ESPs or not. Hopefully you can.

36:02
But within Quavio, you have the ability to create custom tracking links. So I’ll give you kind of two examples. So most companies have like a product navigation, a product header, right? We’ll say something like, men’s, women’s, children’s, sale, right? All these different buttons that you can click. We’ll actually tag each of those buttons. That way when someone clicks on one of them, we’ll automatically add a property to their profile saying, Steve clicked on the males category, right? And Chase clicked on the males category.

36:29
and our wives clicked on the females or the kids category. So we’ll tag the product navigation within these emails. So that way we know not only if people have purchased what they’re interested in, but also basically just off of intent and browse and viewing something, what people are interested in. So that’s one thing that we’ll do. So we’ll have a specific flow or specific segment for someone that’s clicked on the category of men’s. And then we’ll run that against Klaviyo’s predictive analytics of whether they think they’re likely male. We now have two points that say,

36:57
their gender and they’re interested in this, right? So I never talked about gender before, but that’s one thing that we do on that. The other thing that we do is, for example, with the child, the child breed, they sell tons of apparel, they have tons of different categories. It’s almost impossible to know what interests people have unless they’ve viewed or added something to cart. So what we’ll basically do in their welcome series is we’ll pick the top nine categories. We’ll show them in the email, like, hey, here are our top nine categories. Here are funny t-shirts, drinking t-shirts, sports t-shirts, et cetera.

37:27
And we’ll have each of those links and those buttons tagged for when someone clicks on it. So, you know, I like sports. So if I click on the welcome to your email of the sports category, that will automatically update my profile saying, is interested in sports. Then we’ll start sending campaigns to you about sports t-shirts and whatnot. Right. So we’re using like these links to track these different types of things. You also could do a survey within an email, right? Of like, you know, Hey, what are your thoughts on, you know, this versus that? Do you like buying things one time or subscriptions?

37:56
So if we’re working with a brand, Hydrate, that has a one-time purchase or a subscription purchase and someone clicks, hey, I like to buy things one time, all the discounts and campaigns we’re going to run, it’s going be promoting one-off products. However, if someone clicks that they’re interested in subscriptions because they want to bundle and save and not have to remember every month to order, we’ll start sending people offers about subscriptions. So those are some other things that we do that I think are a little bit more advanced that people aren’t really talking about.

38:24
So someone might only get an email two or three times a week, but you have all these segments in there, which really means that you’re doing a lot more sends, right? So you’re doing a lot more sends to different segments. how do you, how do you work out like the amount of work involved in sending to so many segments with, you know, the amount of sales and the segmentation that you can do? Does that make sense? Yeah, 100%. And again, I think we’re at a little different like revenue stage and list size. We’re like,

38:53
some of these slivers of segments are still pretty big, right? We’re working with hundreds of thousands or millions of people list. So for us, like we basically plan all campaigns a month out and we basically build like three, four or five different kind of master templates that we’re going to use for the month. So a lot of this is more like modular, right? So in the case of sending a campaign to men and a campaign to women, it’s more or less the same thing, just the order of swapped, right? So it’s just a matter of putting, you know, women’s first for women.

39:23
and men second, then for men’s, know, men’s first, women’s second, right? So in theory, it sounds like a lot of work, but in something like that, where we’re going to send two different campaigns in a week to gender, it’s pretty easy. In some of these other cases, right? We have a lot of building blocks from other clients, from the same clients that we’ll send three months ago, right? So if we’re to send a UGC email, right? User-generated content email this week, of harping on social proof and kind of just showing people different.

39:52
styles and diversity. We can pull elements that we did from the UGC campaign from last quarter. So we’re really focused on efficiency. And a lot of times because these lists are so big and because they’re so segmented, the ROI and the engagements there, and also too, we’re an agency. So we are getting paid based on the number of emails that we send. Obviously the emails have to be profitable for our clients. it’s kind of like the synergy for us at least. But I think for a smaller store that’s doing it in-house, that has limited resources,

40:22
I think just sending two or three emails a week to an engaged segment, that is better than not sending any emails at all. Sometimes good enough gets the job done. I’m sure people that are listening to this are going to be $100,000 a month, they’re going to be a million dollars a month, they’re going to be $50 million a month. You do have to make sure that the juice is worth the squeeze. I think a lot of people get caught up with not sending enough emails per week. That’s how I would err on anyone listening that is thinking this is so overwhelming is create templates.

40:51
Start trying to plan out a couple of weeks or a month in advance. Leverage as much of the same assets as you can. Just swap in new graphics, maybe new call to actions, but leverage the templates you have. Don’t custom code every single email if you don’t have to. In that example that you gave where you were tagging people based on which links they clicked, what do you do with the people that open but don’t click at all? Are you just dealing with those people who clicked in a separate segment and you’re still sending emails to the people who didn’t click anything separately?

41:20
Yeah, exactly. So the people that open, if they don’t click anything, they’ll just be getting a little bit more like, you know, generic emails since we’re not specific to like what their interests are. They’ll kind of be like in the, the engaged bucket, right. Or like the gender bucket or the geo bucket versus like, you know, the engaged male that like sports, right. So obviously we prefer to be super targeted in laser focus because obviously that’s going to increase open rates, cook through rates, conversion rates. But, but truthfully, a lot of people don’t do those types of things. Right. So.

41:50
I don’t have an exact percentage, right? But for every person that’s opening the email out of every 10, we’re probably only getting like one or two people, potentially three people to give us these kind of interests or these questions or these behaviors. And again, they don’t know that they’re doing this, right? There’s no incentive for them to do it. This is the thing that we’re collecting on the backend. So from what I understand, if you can have a tighter segment, you’ll send specific emails to that segment. Otherwise, they go to this general pool that you’re already sending to people who are engaged with your list overall.

42:19
That’s correct. And also too, think one thing that I should have mentioned before is it really depends on like what you’re selling, right? For example, with the brand Hydrant, they sell basically two different main products and they have different flavors of each. So one product is just like a hydration kind of supplement packet by itself. The other one is hydration plus, was basically just electrolytes plus caffeine, right? They have two different products and then they have different flavors of each. So with them, we can only do so much, right? We can try to learn about someone’s

42:47
behavior in terms of, again, the subscription versus one-time purchase, um, flavor preferences through like a quiz, et cetera. But we can’t do like the gender. We could do geo to some extent, right? Like if it’s really a hot day, we might come up with a last minute sentence saying, Hey, you know, you’re in, you’re in California and make sure that you’re hydrated today. It’s going to be 90 degrees. Um, so it really also just depends on like the number of skews in the category that you’re in things like, you know, apparel and home goods and some of these other categories.

43:15
really lend themselves to doing a lot more of these things where other companies that are a single product store or just a few product stores, you have to be a little bit more crafty and there’s less things that you can do. Right. What is your best advice on escaping the promotions tab? Yeah, the best, again, there’s definitely no silver bullets. I don’t want this to come across like that, but the best thing that you could do is leverage personalization in the subject line and then also in the content. And then basically leveraging as much

43:44
live text as possible. And basically what I mean, right, is there’s plain text, right? A lot of times companies just have plain text that looks like text, but it’s actually an image. Actually having text that you type out within the email provider itself, that’s not behind an image. Having live text is, I think, really important. So I think those are kind of good things.

44:06
The earlier on that you can get people to click an email, the earlier on you can get people to reply to your email, the earlier on that you can get people to hopefully drag your email into the inbox. Those are all other things that you could do, but again, those don’t guarantee hitting the primary. Since you just touched on this, text or HTML based emails? Man, I know there’s such an ongoing debate about the two. And again, I don’t mean to be that guy, but I’m really somewhere in the middle. I think it depends on the brand, it depends on the email.

44:35
A lot of the brands we work with are really obsessed with brand and that’s everything to them. So they come in wanting to err on the side of being more designed and more branded because that’s them. And we’ll slowly start pushing them away from like 100 % design to like 75 % not design, 25 % kind of plain text. So a couple of use cases of plain text that I think you have to test. The first email after someone purchased, customer, thank you email.

45:00
typically coming from like the founder or the community manager, whoever it kind of is, the evangelist of the brand, you know, just sending a thank you and their gratitude, I plain text, maybe even having a signature at the bottom. I think that feels like a good one. Say you’re sending three abandoned cart emails, having that third abandoned cart email basically be like, hey, I my team sent you two emails this week, wanted to check in to see if you had any questions, let us know if there’s anything we could do with you. think that’s a great candidate for a plain text email. I even think sometimes, you know,

45:29
certain campaigns, like whether it’s like, you hey, quick heads up, we’re dropping something new tomorrow, stay tuned. Even a simple plain text email like that, I think is great. So I think it depends on like your audience. think it depends on, but we do send a lot of branded kind of HTML emails for our clients just because we happen to work with a lot of brands that are focused on how they are perceived. sounds like anytime you want to come across as more personal, you might want to go plain text based on your examples that you just gave. Yes. Right. Okay.

45:59
All right, last question. What are some of the coolest things that you were doing in email marketing today right now that most people are not doing yet? Yeah, I think a couple of things. I think one goes back to like the custom tracking, right? The link and learning more about behavior. think that’s one. Two, this is actually something I’ve never talked about, I think on a podcast, but basically what we’re doing. So because we have clients that have such a list and again, because churn is inevitable, people are going to unsubscribe. No one’s really taking advantage of that unsubscribe window, right? So

46:27
happens is you click on subscribe, you say, want to unsubscribe, then you basically get an unsubscribe confirmation on the page. We’re taking advantage of that real estate that says, hey, Steve, you’ve been unsubscribed, but by the way, in the next 24 hours, if you do want to make a purchase, here’s a custom discount code. So we’re actually showing someone a discount code when they unsubscribe on that window because we’ve lost them anyways. We might as well take a last chance to get them to convert. And I wouldn’t say the conversion is high as a percentage, but in terms of the number of people opting out,

46:56
it since that’s so big number of people that are actually converting is pretty large. I wish I could remember the exact numbers, but one of our brands, a bigger brand, I don’t know, they highly had, let’s say 50,000 people unsubscribe over the course of, I don’t know, eight months or 10 months or a year, I don’t remember the exact number. We ended up converting of like the 50,000 people. think we have like 500 or 700 people actually convert. That’s really good actually. Which isn’t huge, right? As a percentage.

47:23
But like that was pretty significant in terms of like 500 sales that were like free money. So again, because it’s so much volume, we’re getting a lot other stores, right? Maybe, maybe it’s lower, but any sale you get, even if you get one sale, 10 sales, 20 sales on people that aren’t subscribing, that’s free money to you. So that’s one thing that we’re doing that I’ve never really seen anyone else do that I’ve never really ever talked about out loud. that’s another.

47:49
One thing that we’re testing, I can’t really talk about it a whole lot yet since I don’t have a lot of ample data, but we’re testing AMP, which is basically accelerated mobile pages, which makes emails behave a lot more like landing pages. So it’ll make emails a little bit more interactive around being able to do like a product carousel. So just like you’re on a website, you can click between product images. You can do that same type of thing within an email. They have this thing called the accordion where you could click on a category and it can expand it out.

48:16
So basically what we’re trying to build is like an FAQ within an email at the very bottom. Now, what’s your return policy? How long is shipping going to take? And it’s kind of all stacked together unless people click it. So those are kind of the things that we’re testing. There are certain barriers, like you have to get approved by the ESP, you have to get approved by Google, you have to be highly technical. So it has proved to be a little bit challenging to kind of roll out for clients, but I’m kind of starting to test this a little bit just on like on my own.

48:45
personal newsletter. So hopefully we’ll be able to send something like that out over the coming months. What about the use of GIFs or animated images in the emails? Do you guys do a lot of that? We do a lot of GIFs. So right now, at least within Klaviyo, they don’t support the ability to show videos the way that you have to be able to, if you want to link out to a video, you either have to do a screenshot of like, you know, the video with a play button, or you can kind of do a, you know, a GIF or whatnot to try to get people to do it.

49:12
So that’s kind of one thing that we do to get people to go to a video if we’re going to do it. We also use GIFs a lot to kind of get around the whole AMP thing, right? If we want to do like a product carousel or kind of like a UGC where we’re shutting off people, we kind of leverage GIFs. I think, you know, we’re probably sending for clients, we work with 50 clients on the email side right now. You know, we’re probably sending, I don’t know, hundreds of emails a week, conservatively. I’d say probably like at least a quarter of those have a GIF. Nice. So Jayce, we’ve been chatting for a while.

49:41
Time has kind of flown. I wanted to give everyone out there the opportunity to find you in case they need your services or they have any questions for you just about email in general. Yeah. So for me, the two places that I’m posting a lot of content in, and they’re both free, is on Twitter. So my handle is Ecom Chase Diamond. There’s no way in diamond. So it’s Ecom Chase, and then last name is D-I-M-O-N-D. So Ecom Chase Diamond, tons of free e-commerce email marketing tips.

50:09
And then on there, you’ll be able to find my free weekly newsletter. Every single Monday, I send a interview, a guide, a tip of things that are working for our clients. So those are my two free resources that I think people will get a lot of value from. And if they need your consulting, I don’t know what the minimum company size that you work with us, but if you wouldn’t mind just mentioning it in case people are looking for those email marketing services. Yeah, on the email side, we’re typically working with brands that are on Klaviyo.

50:37
They have a list size of at least 10 to 15,000 people at minimum, and they’re doing north of a million dollars in terms of annual e-com revenue. Okay. And then also the, I guess the sister side, I shouldn’t call Nick a sister, I guess, but he does the like Facebook ads and paid social essentially, right? Yeah. Client size is pretty typical. They’re around the million dollars or more in terms of annual revenue. So basically we’re focused on paid social, primarily Facebook and Instagram, and then

51:07
We also do have a content studio where we’re a videography and photography for social and also email. Cool. Hey, well, Chase, I appreciate you coming on, man. I’m sure the audience learned a ton about email and we talk about a lot of things that a lot of people aren’t doing. So that’s great. Thanks a lot. Yeah, thanks so much, man. Appreciate it.

51:29
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now if you aren’t sending out emails on a regular basis and segmenting your audience properly, then you are leaving a lot of money on the table. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecoderjob.com slash episode 363. 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.

51:58
That’s P-O-S-T-S-U-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash D-U. I also want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for eCommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandon card sequence, a post purchase flow or 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-O-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-O-Y-O. Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog. And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store,

52:28
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.

00:28
And Andrew, if you’re listening to this episode, let me know what you think. Now, before we 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.

00:55
It’s an inexpensive solution converts like crazy and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Clavio who is also a sponsor of the show. Now, are you working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined? 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 are the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies.

01:24
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. 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. And to learn more about how Klaviyo helps you own your

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

02:35
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Pat Haggerty on the show. Now I’ve been looking forward to this interview for a very long time and we’re all gonna have a good time together today. Now I’m not sure if you remember the very first interview I ever conducted with Andrew Udarian from Ecommerce Fuel when he sold his business, Right Channel Radios. Well, Andrew sold his drop shipping business to Pat towards the middle of 2016 and since the sale, Pat has grown Right Channel Radios significantly.

03:05
And his business selling CB radios continues to thrive today, especially during COVID. So today, we’re gonna have Pat teach us what he did over the years to grow his sales and make Andrew totally regret selling his business. And with that, welcome to show. Pat, how are you doing today? My wife quit her job podcast. What’s up, Steve? Oh, it’s good to catch up with you, man. I had a really good time when I went out to Montana that one time. I really want to go back actually, whenever I can travel again. Yeah, yeah, you got to get out here.

03:35
You gotta get out here with it’s a better place with you here, Steve. That’s for sure. You know what’s funny? A lot of my buddies are moving out there right now. They’re probably driving at the cost of property out there as we speak. Yeah, they’re the worst. We don’t. don’t like your buddies. One that you can come, but the rest of those jerks keep them out of here. It’s thing. I mean, I just talked to actually one of the guys who works dual plane, dual planes, drop shipping software. Yeah. But one of the like my main rep over there.

04:06
He’s coming out here and he’s like, hey, we just sold our place and we’re looking for a place in Bozeman, but it’s really hard to find a home. And I’m like, yeah, it’s your fault. And all the other folks just like you. No, it’s true though. It’s tough to find a home here. Property values have skyrocketed. So I guess my home’s worth a lot more, so that’s fun. But we’re also trying to buy another place and it’s really hard to do that. Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes the next Bay Area over there.

04:33
Oh, don’t say that. anyway. Catch us up. Okay, so let’s go back to 2016. When did you acquire Right Channel and what was the multiple? Do you remember? So yep, closed on the sale of Right Channel radio’s May 31st, 2016. And the multiple is just over three. I think it was like 3.1 something. Which basically means that within three years, provided you didn’t even go at all, you would have gotten your money back, right? Yep.

05:03
And are you still the sole owner of the business? You know, I’m not the sole owner. I do have a couple very minority partners. When it came time to get financing for the business, one of my partners is my parents, which I’m actually thrilled to have them a part of it. But essentially, when I went finance the business, I needed a couple co-signers on the loan that had more assets than I did.

05:30
And then I think back in the day, it was just you and maybe one VA. Is that right? That’s correct. Okay. And then now do you have more employees? Oh, man, it’s been a wild ride. Yes, I do have more employees. And since I’m on the business, I started off with the same model me myself one VA, I’ve moved to I’ve moved to using some contractors in the business. And now I have two stateside employees. these full time employees? Not not full time, not full time to

05:57
part-time employees doing phones and customer service responsibilities. And then I have a contractor who does a bunch of project management along with myself. And so it is the four of us who are kind of deeply ingrained in the business at this point. Yep. Nice. And what is the business model of the store? Has it changed? Is it still pure drop shipping for the most part? We are drop shippers, drop shipping for the win, my friend. Nice. Yeah, the model’s been great. yeah, we…

06:27
Yeah, so nothing’s really changed. We inventory a very, very small amount of product, but not enough to call us anything other than a dropshipper, that’s for sure. Have there been any plans to like private label anything under your own brand or is it, are you planning on still sticking with the dropship model? We will primarily stick with the dropship model until it doesn’t make sense to do so any longer. Yes, I’m going to, the plan is now to just take some very vehicle specific mounts and try to.

06:56
when new vehicles come on the market. Because one of the things we sell for the folks who don’t know, so we sell radio equipment, you need to have put an antenna on your vehicle for a lot of the equipment we sell. And so you need a mount that’s specific to whatever make model of vehicle you have. Sometimes the manufacturing companies for these mounts sort of lag behind with new vehicle, like new vehicle body styles and things like that come out. So we just want to be on the, I guess more on the forefront of building those mounts and labeling those. And so that’s the plan and that’s

07:25
That’s what we’re gonna be moving towards on the latter part of this year. You know what I really like about this interview here is I get a lot of questions just on drop shipping in general, which I’m hoping you could answer as part of running a successful drop ship store. So first of all, a lot of people are worried about the margins. Would you mind commenting on like what your average margins are? Yeah, so I try to keep our margins at 30%. Okay. 30 % or higher. Yeah, it can be tough. There’s definitely times.

07:53
It’s a dip below that. fact, in December, I was closer to that 25 % and we’ve had to bump it up. Shipping has become a real issue. I think that’s been the toughest thing because both because of the amount of volume we’ve done, especially this year, not not we, but I’m talking about us as a whole, like, let’s say America, the amount of packages America’s ordered has caused both UPS and USPS and other shipping companies to increase their rates and do increase their rates, reduce their promises.

08:23
and generally do a worse job of delivering packages. Yeah, that’s for sure. Yeah, no kidding. That was this last year, especially towards the latter part of the year, the thing that has been squeezing our margins the most. yeah, mean, it’s a very, if you’re drop shipping, for anybody who wants to get into it, you want to find a product that you can really add some value to, right? What we don’t do is we don’t just throw a bunch of products up on a page and expect that.

08:50
somebody’s gonna buy them. You have to be able to provide some sort of tangible value to your customer, whether you’re a dropshipping business or any other business, whether that’s with your product, whether that’s with your service. I mean, at the end of the day, you just have to bring value to the customer and that’s why they’re gonna choose to buy Actually, what is your primary value add? More technical knowledge, product technical knowledge, installation advice, the products that we carry.

09:18
aren’t as straightforward, like a lot of them aren’t plug and play per se. So it requires some specific knowledge to know, what parts do I need for this complete radio system for my Jeep? Let’s say they just brought a brand new 2020 Gladiator and they want to, you know, outfit it with a CB system or GMRS radio system. And they’re wondering, okay, what mounts do I need? What kind of cable do I need to go from the mount, you know, to the radio? What antenna is right? And then once this stuff is installed, you know, for CB, you actually have to like,

09:47
you have to tune the antenna. It’s hard in a day where everything is plug and play, right, to imagine that there’s some equipment out there that you actually still have to install and then tune for it to work properly. And so because there’s a lot of complexities around our product, we’re able to answer the questions around those in a way that drives sales and gives customers great experiences. So in terms of pricing then, presumably there’s other people that sell this exact same products that you carry, right? absolutely.

10:16
Would you say you’re on the higher end of pricing or in the middle or low? I try to be on the higher end. However, it’s interesting competing with marketplaces because I was just alerted yesterday by a customer that one of our top selling antennas they said oh man, you’re you’re cheaper than Amazon and I thought to myself I need to raise the price of that You know, I’m like I’m definitely selling it for two less. Yeah, we we try to be on the higher end right because we we bring value

10:45
in ways that a third party marketplace can’t. Or a marketplace can’t. So yeah, we try to be on the higher end. So let me ask you this then, what if I call you up and I get all this advice and then I go and buy it from somewhere cheap? Is there some service contracts that you provide that make me want to buy from you or is it just goodwill? Oh yeah, just goodwill. Presumably you’d want to be a humane person.

11:12
and you wouldn’t do that to somebody. No, I’m just giving you a hard time. I was like, of myself, oh, would I do that to you, Would I do that to you? No, I mean, it happens from time to time. But the truth is, most folks care to buy from somebody who knows the product. the thing is, Steve, it’s not like we’re that much more expensive. talking maybe we’re $10 more, right?

11:40
For a lot of people, it’s worth $10 to do it. Now, if we were $50 more, that would probably start to create some real problems. But I’m talking like, yeah, we’re like maybe $10 over what somebody might be able to piece something together for on their own, but then maybe they miss a part, right? And they have to order it again. That costs time and delays. then if they order from us, if they have issues or if they have questions, they can actually call and talk to a person about it who knows something about it. I mean, you can’t call, you couldn’t call Amazon about.

12:10
You know, Yeah, definitely. mean, what kind of I mean or or anything else by that, you know, so there you go. So that implies then that everyone on your support staff is very knowledgeable about the products that sounds really hard to find, actually. You know, it the products that we have are complex in some ways, but, know, I’m actually just currently training, training a new hire. And this was his third week, and I’d say he’s very close.

12:40
I mean, he’s already had customers comment and say, hey, his name’s Paul. they said, hey, Paul is super helpful. Really appreciated his product knowledge and expertise and just patience to talk me through the process. That happened just a couple of days ago. So, wow, yes, it’s technical in nature. And there are some things that I will always know that maybe my support staff isn’t going to be able to communicate. They’ll be able to communicate 95 % of it, no problem and help.

13:09
99 % of problems. So it works. Do you get a lot of sales over the phone then?

13:17
Good question about. I’m trying to think of what our percentages were last year. It was less than 10 % phone sales. I want to say it was closer to seven, which is pretty actually, which is pretty weak for us. The year before we did more last year, we did just a ton more volume though. We did did also some a fair amount of work on on CR on some conversion rate optimization tactics, creating our.

13:46
making our website a little bit more mobile friendly to bolster our conversion rate a little bit. So I think that that’s also pushed that percentage down a little bit. However, I do feel like we have a handful of touch points with customers when they call us or email us and then they go self-serve purchase online. Okay. And the last time I interviewed you, Darian, about his business, it was obviously before you’d acquired it. I remember him telling me that it was pretty manual.

14:11
I think he said like at the end of the day, he had spreadsheets that he sent off to distributors to have things shipped. Is it more automated now? Much more automated. You know, since that time, you know, there’s there’s been soft drop shipping software developed. And truthfully, one of the things I’m working, spending a lot of time on now is just really getting getting our drop shipping software set up to so so everything is is very automated. It’s very intelligent. I mean, we used to have to back in the day, you know,

14:39
we would have to manually, we were manually inputting tracking numbers. That was one of our VA’s primary jobs. You we would get an invoice, the tracking number, they would go on the website and literally copy and paste it in there. But now obviously all that information is automatically uploaded into Shopify from the drop shipping software we use called Duoplane, which is great. They have a great team over there. Is that Sanaki’s friends company? Yeah, yeah, Sanaki’s former partner, CINNA. I can’t remember CINNA’s last name, but yeah.

15:08
Can you just describe briefly what the software does so that it does it apply to most dropship vendors or do they have to have a tie into it as well? So they they can tie it in. So a couple of my vendors are very low tech and so they have some. Some kind of pretty old data feeds and inventory systems. All that to say what the system does is you know orders come in through us. You know.

15:36
through my website, through Shopify, those upload into Dualplane. Dualplane looks at the orders and looks at the, you know, take a look at the SKUs on the orders. And then the way that we have it set up is it will then route that order, send that order to the distributor that is closest to, that has the product in stock and is closest to the customer to reduce shipping costs and all that good stuff. And then it will ship out. If there’s an issue, then our customers or our vendors would say, hey, you know, we don’t have this part.

16:05
maybe let’s say if there’s something wrong with the inventory feed and, and it shows they had the part and they didn’t, they would communicate that back to us and we would just route it to another supplier. You can split ship, you can create, you know, some different, different rules within, within dual plane, how you want your orders shipped. And you could just choose the lowest cost supplier and have it go that way all the time too. Like I said, we, we choose to go closest to the customer for the quickest, you know, quickest shipment and, uh, you know, quickest delivery time.

16:36
by low tech, let’s say your distributors really low tech, like how would you expect them to connect to Duo Plane? is it like, how do you set, like to your lowest tech distributor, how do you send the order? Or how does Duo Plane do it, I guess? Yeah, so, so Duo Plane sends the order in an email format to them and then they either upload it, if they have an inventory system, then they would upload it via CSV into their inventory system and they would send a file and Duo Plane would.

17:03
grab the information on the CSV, or I even have one distributor where it legitimately pulls the tracking number out of the text of an email. So, an email. they send us the- I mean, it’s, yeah, there’s some real challenges, but if you have some higher tech distributors, it makes it lot easier. So. I see. Okay. So dual planes like glue, essentially. Like however your distributor wants the data or the order, that’s what dual plane does essentially. Yep. And they have a team over there that works to see that.

17:32
you get the information you need. We have had some cases where, you know, they’ve said, we can’t, you know, pull data out of this, this kind of report. But, you just try to work around that and problem solve. Yep. How does the inventory work then for the low tech guys? Do they give you a real time feed of how much stuff’s left? They all have feeds. So they at least have that much, right? So if you have any kind of inventory system, you should have some kind of FTP where you actually

18:02
show what you have. I mean, they’re not only paper. They’re not that low tech where they’re writing everything on paper all the time, but it is still pretty low tech. Yeah. it real time though? Like, you check it before? Like, is it updated in real time on your site or does it sometimes happen where you actually sell something that’s accidentally out of stock? No, I accidentally sell some things that are out of stock. I actually don’t have it set up where it necessarily manipulates the number.

18:30
on Shopify on our inventory numbers. The parts that we carry, Steve, I generally don’t carry things that, well, first off, I have distributors that have very overlapping inventory. So it’s very rare for them to be out of some products. When they are out of those products, we’ll manually list them out of stock because it’s something that we’ll know about. it’s, you know, and also we’re not talking like, I don’t have tens of thousands of SKUs either. You know, I run on around like 500-ish SKUs.

19:00
So it’s not an over. Yeah, yeah, but it’s not an overwhelming amount where you where you lose track of the product that you sell. If I had 20,000 SKUs, you know, it would be different. It’d be different game, right? So sure. Okay. And then if someone orders from different distributors, they might still get different packages or their order broken up into multiple packages, right? Once in a while we do that. We try to avoid doing that. But I’m just trying to get it happens.

19:28
of like when you’re charging someone for shipping, that’s based on weight or dollar amount or? We do free shipping on orders over $75 and then I have essentially like three different shipping tiers for different weights of products. Okay. And then it’s up to Duoplane to route it to the cheapest place or all to one distributor preferably, right? Yeah, what it does is it just tries to first route it all to one distributor and then the distributor

19:58
closest. So whoever has the product and whoever is closest to the customer is how the logic works. ahead. I was going say, you have overlapping distributors for almost all of your products so that there is a way for, so Dualplane actually does some routing. Okay. Exactly. Nice. Okay. Let’s talk about your day to day. I remember before you were working four hours a day on this, this is way back in the day. What are your

20:26
duties now running the store on a day-to-day basis? Oh, good question. Well, I am still way more involved in the business as far as like daily operations than I would like to be. Over the years, you know, we because of the products we sell and what I was sharing before, the kind of nature of our business where we are, you know, are a little bit higher touch. I’ve just, you know, really taken.

20:53
taking pride in making sure that we provide really, really great customer service. Now it’s looked different over the years. When we first started, it was me and a VA and I was doing probably way more than I should. And I contracted some folks out to help specifically with phone calls and some email quotes and things like that. That worked for a little while, but now I’ve just decided I think the best way to do it is to have state-side employees who understand the product, who are happy to talk on the phone and you know.

21:22
answer customer questions and emails. Right now we have two customer service reps, and then I can fill in for like really kind of the higher level questions. And yeah, that’s that’s what it looks like now. I’m currently working on getting another VA hopefully, hopefully I’ll hear back tomorrow about new a new prospect for a VA so we can have whoever that person is, you know, help a little bit with customer service, but also some data and reports and things like that, that we’re trying to generate daily as well.

21:52
Here’s what I got a little bit. I feel like I got a little bit lost in the question. Now would you go ahead? What I was trying to get at is it sounds like a lot of it is automated now, whereas it wasn’t before. So outside of customer support, what work left is there?

22:08
Not a ton. The only other thing is we do have situations like right now we’re dealing with some shortages in raw materials. So we have some popular products that have now become out of stock because, for instance, one of our main products is a fiberglass antenna. Well, the company that makes this antenna ran out of fiberglass. And so we’re really starting to feel some of the

22:35
some of the effects of sort of like the interruption in the supply chain system due to COVID now. And so we’ve had to be a little bit more creative about solving like, you know, when we have like a primary product that’s in a lot of our packages come out of stock, you know, solving, you know, what are we going to, what are we going to substitute in here? How are we going to communicate it to the customer? How are we going to, you know, work with different distributors and how are we going to find some more of these antennas?

23:04
things like that. I’ve been doing more of that. beyond that, mean, that’s about what it is other than, you know, just, I guess, planning, creating more content. you know, but by and large, that’s kind of the precipice I’m sort of on right now, Steve, is I finally have the hands to start taking care of the customer service where I was just really involved with that more. And so I’m really just kind of extracting out of my, I’m in the process of really extracting myself from that world.

23:36
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24:04
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24:34
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 it sounds like you’re kind of looking for new products. That’s like one of your primary duties. Let me ask you a question then. What is stopping you from just carrying a whole bunch of stuff since you don’t have to carry inventory?

24:59
You mentioned you only have 500 SKUs, right? Why not carry a thousand? Good question. I think you just really want to be focused on what makes sense for your niche. If there are products that make sense for us to carry, and we are expanding out into some, I hope to have maybe a thousand SKUs maybe a few years down the line, but they will all be around high quality radio equipment, coax cables, things like that. We’ve branched out in the past and sold

25:27
You know, some like LED headlights, like high-end LED headlights and other products like that. And they just haven’t done well because that’s not what folks are coming to our website for. know, all of our traffic for the most part is organic. You know, we do really do well with, you know, long tail search, things like that. And so when folks are landing on our page, they’re not necessarily looking for LED headlights, you know, they’re looking for radio specific equipment. So I suppose we could, and I could, you know, litter the site with a bunch of coax, you know, connectors and

25:56
all this other stuff and maybe to be profitable but also sometimes carrying those more obscure products creates a lot more questions than it does profit. And then you spend time trying to work with hobbyists to figure out some random system than you do just kind of focusing on the bread and butter and what really makes money. Yeah, that makes sense. If the support costs exceed the potential profit, then it makes sense not to carry.

26:23
Yeah, but there isn’t a lot of stuff we’re saying no to. A lot of the products we sell, I mean, we sell very much, you know, we sell, we sell CB radios, you know, and so it’s a very mature product. There’s not a whole lot of new ones coming onto the market, you know? And so on some level, it doesn’t make sense to add a bunch more, but we, but recently we have expanded into, you know, other frequency radios. I’d mentioned GMRS.

26:48
mobile radios that that’s something that’s become really popular. So we’ve expanded probably 30 skews into that and we’ll be creating some more and we’re building content around that this spring as well. So, okay. mean, we’ll grow in that direction and in some hand equipment as well. But yeah, that’s what it looks like. Also, I think that you want to know your products well. So just littering the catalog with too many things, I think can be a little bit of a

27:17
Right, dilutes your expertise in a way too. I see. It could. It really can. Okay. Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about what changes you made with Right Channel now that you didn’t have you, Darien, weighing you down. I mean, that guy probably weighed you down like a ton of bricks, right? Oh man, the burden was lifted. You know, I think once I bought the business, it became the only thing we were doing, right?

27:46
I was working half a day on Right Channel Radios before I bought it. And then I just went into, we just made ourselves a lot more available to our customers in virtually every way, more available on the phone, via email. When you turn the switch, and I love Andrew and I loved working for him when I did, but when you flip the switch and you start seeing that money go from

28:15
or we start seeing the money from your sales come directly into your bank account, that definitely in my mind at least flipped a switch and man, I was doing anything I could to get anybody who called or emailed us, I was working as hard as I could to get, convert any of those sales. That’s funny how that happens. It’s the truth, know, it’s the ultimate, it’s just the ultimate ownership, you know, when you start seeing that come when you do pay also.

28:42
I also took out a huge loan and so that’s motivating. So I want to make sure my kids get to eat. So there you go. give us some numbers, Pat. Like how much has it grown? And let’s talk about your most recent years growth also. So how much has it grown since you bought it? uh, yep. Just did the calculation here. So it’s 47 % up. So we’ve grown 47 % since I purchased this, purchased it, uh, 2016 almost five years at this point, just under five years. Yep.

29:10
You made your money back after three and these past couple years plus the growth has all been gravy. So sounds like it’s a win win all across the board for you. Yeah, that and I mean, we’re doing because we’re doing significantly more revenue as well. I mean, I think that if we ever did want to sell down the line that both bolsters the multiple quite a bit. And so it’s been it’s been quite nice. It’s obviously had some some challenges, but yeah, 40 percent, seven percent up. And then we just closed the

29:39
The books on our biggest month ever in January, were, yeah, we did. I don’t know, Eudarian Mike. Do we want to make Eudarian jealous? You don’t have to say if you don’t want to. I think we just got to say, so we did, we just did our first month over 200K in January. Oh baby, I can’t, I couldn’t believe it. Congratulations, man. Yeah, thank you. And I am just thrilled and it’s been a wild ride. It’s been great to you.

30:08
I know you, Darren, have never seen that kind of money before. No, sorry, sorry, friend. mean, you know, that’s why I had to move from Bozeman to Tucson. So there you go. So let’s talk about what you did after the acquisition that grew the sales actually.

30:24
After the acquisition, like I think the main thing Steve was really just focusing on that customer experience and bringing a lot more value to the customer that that came in that did a that did a handful of things. I saw our return customer rate go up pretty, pretty significantly. You know, did to boost that. I think I think honestly, it was just as simple as being more available to the customer, being very responsive to.

30:54
You know chats. Well, we we added chat. I don’t think we we I think we might have done it there for a little bit But anyway added did everything from adding live chat to the website Which is funny to talk about or even think that we didn’t have that at one time But I guess five years somewhat on some level. It’s kind of a long time ago I don’t remember you expanding your phone hours, too Yeah, Yeah, because we only we only did you know, we’re only available half the day, which is kind of weird, you know when it

31:23
business is only available on the phone for four to five hours a day as opposed to eight to nine. So yeah, we absolutely expanded all that. And then we’re just more responsive the email. And I think I mean, that that was about as simple as it was was just being more available to the customer. There was no secret sauce or anything like that or anything that that we did that was super strategic. So how do you most of your sales today? Is it still the same as it was?

31:51
No, well, I mean, we drive a lot of organic traffic. However, we’re significantly more active with our email marketing. We send emails every single week. We’ve, we’ve developed a lot more, um, a lot more customer flows for different customer segments, you know, between like, you know, win back campaigns, retention campaigns. And I think that our content overall is just better, but we send very, very regular emails to our customers. So we’re communicating with them a lot more. You guys using PlayView? Yeah.

32:21
Oh yeah, sweet. I it’s, yeah, it’s the thing to use. Was Andrew using Klaviyo back then? I’m trying to think. That was a long time ago. Was he? Oh yeah. Yeah, man. You know what? I used to have, this is when Klaviyo first launched. We used to use Skype or not Skype. No, we used to use Skype. Yeah. We used to use Skype to talk with each other. And I had Ed, what is it? Ed Halen? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ed Halen and Ed Edward.

32:48
Had them on Skype and I would call them up if I was having an issue way back in the day No jokes, and we were like really early adapters to clay vo I still have the same account still using it. So nice. Yeah, we never use we never use anything else at this point can’t understand Yeah, why why we would ever ever go but so it’s been great I remember clay view at the very beginning and when they’re you know templates weren’t really that great, but now they’re awesome And and I don’t make any of the emails myself. So it’s even better

33:17
So there you go. So you mentioned a lot of your traffic is still organic. that imply that you’re constantly, cause you’re getting new products in all the time, right? So does that imply you’re constantly churning out more content or updating the existing one? Yeah. So we are creating more content in the way of technical resources and blogs and things like that. But it’s, it’s far less than you would think. I think that we’ve just done a good job creating content in the past. You know, most of our project pages.

33:47
product pages have very in-depth descriptions. We have video content. We have our own photo content, things that just really set us apart from the competition who’s selling the same products that we have. But recently, man, we published this blog about just CB frequencies. I talked about what frequencies CB radio uses and what those frequencies are typically used or what those channels are typically used for. it’s, man, that thing’s been

34:17
You know, that thing is blown up. It’s it’s it. think last month had more hits than our SWR tuning article, which was our, you know, or our intended tuning article, which was our, highest performing articles. And now, you know, we just launched this new piece of content and yeah. Also recently the, the, uh, recent Google algorithm updates, the one in, I think it was December 3rd and the other on January 7th and eight have both been very kind to us. And so I think that.

34:47
As we’ve created content over the years, we’ve created content for humans primarily while obviously putting, using some keyword, you know, targeted keywords in our product, just made a descriptions and tags and things like that. Anyway, I’d like to say it’s been, it’s really paid off. remember that was Euderian strategy. That was one thing that you guys did really well back when he owned it. And it’s nice to see that.

35:15
I mean, a lot of this stuff takes time, right? So it’s great that, you know, finally it’s just decide to explode, like Google decided to explode the traffic. So you did a good job laying the foundation. Yeah. know what? He, you know what he did. Way to go, Andrew. Yeah. Let’s give him some credit for that. Hey, there you go. Give him a pat on the back. Yeah, he did. And I think, you know, from the beginning, uh, I think he even explained it in a way to me about how, how he went about creating content that

35:45
really sunk in. Yeah, we’ve never tried to game the search engine by any way, shape or form, you know, by keyword stuffing or anything like that. And so we’ve just always written for humans and it’s working out now. That’s for sure. Cool. And then are you doing anything paid at all? Or is it the reason why I asked that is because I know the margins are lower for dropshipping. mentioned you try to maintain 25 to 30, which is kind of borderline, I think, for advertising. So yeah, just kind of curious.

36:15
Yeah, so I do very, very little paid traffic and I probably should do more. Right now I have an AdWords budget that is embarrassingly low at around like $500 a month, it yielded, I should probably, I’ll just say that it yielded enough in sales. I should probably look at scaling that up a little bit. Yes, it costs to bring that traffic in, but when you’re spending as little as I am on that paid stuff, I should probably start.

36:45
Hey, there’s, I mean, you only have certain amount of things to focus on, right? Sounds like content’s working for you guys and you’re just putting the pedal down on content. So. Well, that’s, that’s, that’s every entrepreneur’s thing, right? Is there are a hundred other things that I could be, you know, focusing on or, man, this should really require some attention. It’s like, yes, at the end of the day, it’s about like, what’s your capacity to do that? You can’t do everything, you know? So, and you can’t also manage.

37:12
a thousand contractors doing everything for you either then you just end up in the hole. So there you go. Can we talk a little bit about your lifestyle and what this running this business is like? That’s kind of why I was getting that earlier on what your day to day was like. Is your lifestyle pretty free? It it has ebbed and flowed. So yes. In the in early days, I would say, you know, it’s very focused. And then I got these contractors and they were

37:40
you know, doing a great job on the phone. And then my lifestyle became very free. And I really wasn’t, I wasn’t really needed at the office a lot. And the thing is though, I, so I had these contractors and they were, were doing a pretty good job on the phone. And then I had this VA and she had been with us for a really long time at the beginning. She was awesome, but things started to not go quite as well. And details started getting missed and, it was about December of 2019. And I just,

38:08
I was just really getting this sinking feeling that, you know, I had a very free lifestyle, but it just felt like I wasn’t present enough in the business. And it seemed like, what’s the word that I’m trying to say? Disconnected? I no, I just maybe disconnected the word. just felt like we were doing about 80 % as good of a job as we could have been doing. Like we’re doing a good job. not doing a great job, you know?

38:36
And the thing is in our niche, we exist to just provide like the best recommendations, the best experience. And so I made a change. I let the contractors go, the phone contractors, let them move on. I let my VA move on somewhere else. so this, this was, this was a, well, you know, it was what it was, but for a while there, I was just kind of like setting the groundwork for what the business was going to look like next, getting ready to bring some more people on.

39:05
man and then COVID hit and then our business exploded and it was just me for, no joke Steve, like six months. And so yeah, from about March of last year until August, had, mean, what was my life? My lifestyle was not great. I still got out and I biked and I speeded with the kids and stuff like that. But man, I worked more in 2020 than I have in quite a few years. So I’ll just say it.

39:34
I feel like the lifestyle thing ebbs and flows. Generally speaking, I’ve kept like a pretty good lifestyle and a very nice lifestyle of the business. I’m out biking quite a bit, know, multiple days a week in the winter. You know, like I was telling you, you know, before we started this, I’m taking these kids up to Bridger bowl. We’ll get up there about three days a week. And so it’s, it’s been good. I’m not very, very rich lifestyle, but there was a solid six months there where I didn’t really have much of a life at all. I was in the worst shape. I’d been in, a long time.

40:03
and I was just working like a dog every day. I mean, when the sales are exploding like that due to COVID, man, that’s, I mean, that’s, it’s a good thing. So, well, yeah, it’s a good thing. I mean, you were packing boxes at one time. remember. Oh yeah, I do that. I mean, it was bad for us because we couldn’t hire anyone because we didn’t want to interview anyone. Yeah. Right. So I was in there packing every day during the holidays. Yeah. I remember that. I remember seeing, I remember seeing that. Yup. Got to do what you got to do. it’s your business at the end of the day, man.

40:31
If you, you know, at some point, if you don’t go into it, it’s not going to get done. So there you go. was going to ask you, what do you do about returns? Do they get sent straight back to the manufacturer? Do they come back to you? I try to have them know I have them all sent back to the distributor. Okay. And so yeah, I, I, our return policy could use some love, but the way that I have it now is if anybody receives a defective product, we just immediately replace it, send them a return label and get the other one back.

41:01
Very hassle free the thing is that they want to return a like brand new product. You know we have an ra system in place It’s on them to ship it back to us I am working on a system where they can get they can essentially pay for a label to toss it on there That would be a lot more customer friendly so working on that now But that’s what it looks like and then it goes we we we get an ra on one of my distributors I can generate my own ra the other one we need to get an authorization, but it normally only takes a couple hours and

41:29
We try turn those around pretty quick. Okay. So you don’t actually handle the return product for them. I don’t. Okay. No, I just remember back in the day, I think you guys had a lot of product returned directly to you. I think that’s changed, right? Yeah, that’s changed. That’s changed quite a bit. Yeah. We’ve cut down on that. I’ve one of the ways that you cut down on a product just showing up at your house is you just try to make sure that your address isn’t anywhere that your actual address. So I’ll have like Bozeman, Montana.

41:58
listed but I will not have the street address listed. I must say really, really dig for it. But all that to say, I mean, I have a solid, probably like $2,500 to $3,000 worth of CB gear in my garage if anybody wants to come buy some. There you go, come on over. So are you worried about Amazon at all? Just kind of, because in theory, a lot of this stuff can be found on Amazon for cheaper. You mentioned a couple cases where it wasn’t, but.

42:26
Are you worried at all about Amazon kind of undercutting you on price? You know, that that’s always that’s always a concern. Yeah, it’s definitely something to be cognizant of. The edge we have over Amazon is that when somebody wants to order the products that we sell, they don’t need just one thing. Typically, they need a variety of things, and it can be confusing and hard to find them all and know that they’re all going to be compatible with each other.

42:55
And so when you look at ordering via Amazon, which I’m sure they’re, I’m sure they’re selling more revenue and TV equipment than we are. mean, that’s to go, it goes without, goes without saying, but am I worried about Amazon? I mean, at some level, after all the nightmare stories that I’ve heard, you know, from our other customers or from other resellers being on Amazon, it makes me really happy that, that we don’t depend on any marketplace. I hope.

43:23
Well, I don’t know. I think it would be really hard for Amazon to get to a point where they can really compete with us in the realm of service. But, you know, don’t underestimate those guys for the time being. think we definitely edge them out in a lot of ways. Maybe somebody can find something a little bit cheaper over there. And if they want to do that, fine, that’s not a customer though. So I think after talking to you now, I think in a lot of ways your product is

43:50
pretty ideal for drop chipping. It’s kind of complicated. There’s a lot of moving parts that might be incompatible with each other. So I’d feel much more comfortable. I would just go up to you and say, hey, this is what I want to do. Just tell me what to buy, right? Exactly, exactly. And that’s what we have customers do all day every day is they just, call up and they say, hey, I’m a newbie at this. We just need some help. Show us what to buy. And the truth is most of the time when they say that we already have a pre-existing kit for what they need, they just.

44:19
Maybe they weren’t able to find it on the website. But the truth is a lot of times people just want to call and they just want that reassurance that this is the actual right thing that they need. know, right. So the million dollar question, I guess then is, would you recommend dropshipping as a model to other people? I think if you’re going to drop ship, you have to have just like, just like any business, you need to understand how you’re going to bring value to your customer, throwing up a website and putting products on it.

44:49
You know, and just, that’s not gonna work. Or at least I think it would be very hard to make that work. You have to have some specific value that you can bring your customer. And as long as you are bringing value to your customer, then I think you’re gonna do fine, whether you’re dropshipping, whether you’re selling a branded product. At the end of the day, I don’t think that matters quite as much. Now, obviously, if you have your own product and brand, you can enjoy some margins, but.

45:19
Yeah, I mean, what I recommend drop shipping. If you were in my shoes, if you are in my shoes, the same shoes I was in when I bought the business from Andrew when I was working for him, where, you he wants to sell this business and we have all these super happy customers. I’m getting emails every single day where folks are saying, wow, we love you guys so much. You were so helpful to us. Absolutely. I would not discourage you from buying a business just because it’s a drop shipper.

45:47
because that’s already evidence that you’re bringing value. If you’re just starting up from scratch, I think it’s gonna be significantly harder, but I do think it can be done if you can bring value to the end customer, no doubt about it. I’m just wondering if like the traffic from your content just all of sudden dried up. What is like the backup plan? Good question. I mean, you your email lists obviously, right?

46:12
Yeah, yeah, no, we have our we have our email list. We have paid traffic. We get a lot of direct traffic to Steve. So even if let’s say, let’s say we stopped getting organic traffic tomorrow, about I want to say like 20 to 25 % of our traffic right now has been for last month was direct. And so that’s just people typing in for those that don’t know that just people typing in right channel reviews.com and coming coming direct to our business past customers. We would you know, we leverage up our email really high.

46:42
Come to think of it, you said 25%. 20, maybe it’s closer to 20 Steve. No, mean, it’s still really high. That’s pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. That’s not bad. It’s because on some level we have built a brand for ourselves over the last handful of years. you know, we’ve been, this is our 13th year in business. Andrew started the business in 2008. So, you know, we’ve been around for a minute. I would really do something that I probably should be doing right now.

47:11
is I would really start reaching out and doing sales calls to people who I could see being larger corporate clients like, you know, mines and construction companies and other commercial companies that use our equipment. And then I would start writing a lot more content. That’s the other thing. I would just turn on the content creation, or turn the content creation switch. I’d probably recreate content that we created in the past, create more video content.

47:41
do some more, you know, product photography, the things that I believe really turn, you know, or really move the needle. And, you know, it would take a while to recover. There’s no doubt about that. But at the end of the day, you know, the nice thing about dropshipping is I don’t have like, this, you know, exorbitant amount of inventory that I’m sitting on, or I have, you know, most of my fixed costs are all in, you know, SaaS products, things like that.

48:08
So it’s not as crippling. And if it all dried up, that’s one thing about a business like this, right? It typically doesn’t just go to zero. If things get slower, I mean, that can definitely happen. Margins are getting squeezed, but it would be very unlikely for us to go from where we’re at now to just go to zero. That would be quite unlikely. I mean, I think it only has to go up at this point, actually, given the interest in that particular area.

48:35
Maybe next time when you hit eight figures, we’ll have you back and make you dare and feel really bad. Man, I just feel good. I feel good to be on such a distinguished podcast. I’ve been on e-commerce fuel a couple of times, but it’s not, you know, my wife quit her job is just, yeah, I know it’s not the same. Yeah. You know, I mean, I’ll be daring the other day. Give him a hard time. I mean,

48:58
last two podcasts have just been him monologuing. He’s having a hard time getting people to come on the thing. you know? you have any thought on this or what? He’s having problems getting guests these days, you know? So he’s forced to do those long drawn out monologues now. Just a long drawn out monologue. was like, man, what’s going on over there, buddy? Just joking, Andrew. We love you, bud. Yeah. So Pat, just in case, know CB radios are really popular now, especially post COVID.

49:25
Where can people find you, your store, and if they have any questions about that area at all, where can they find you? Yeah, so you can find us, of course, on our website, rightchannelradios.com. We have a Facebook page for Right Channel, of course. We have an Instagram, Right Channel Radios. You can find us there. And then we have a pretty cool Facebook group that we started called Overland Coms. And we’re just about to hit the thousand member mark over there. That’s been kind of a cool thing that we did start up in the midst of.

49:53
all the craziness of COVID, they started that Facebook group for people who are into this and have assigned a couple just interested members as moderators and they’ve just been doing a great job. yeah, Overland comms Facebook group. And then of course our website, rightchannelradios.com, all our contact information is there if they want to check that out. And then we have the same for Instagram and Facebook. They want to look us up on either of those channels. Nice. know those social channels are new since you, Darren also, I don’t remember him having any social channels back in the day.

50:22
We had a Facebook page, but we put not very much into it to save lives. Cool man, hey Pat, appreciate you coming on. I had a great time. I’ve been looking forward to this interview for quite some time. Thanks Steve. It’s great to talk to you and I just appreciate you having me on. Thank you very I can’t wait to head out to Bozeman again. Maybe during the summer, right? That’s the best time to go I think.

50:50
Freezing negative eight today. I’m in the office I had to come to office because trying to do a podcast in my house when I have five kids running around Isn’t the quietest environment so I’m at the office and man. It’s nighttime and the temperatures are just dropping I’m feeling every every degree go down. Oh man, you know We might who knows we might try to get a property out there and drive your property prices further higher

51:16
Please do. Yeah. I’ll start sending you some of the listings I’m looking at. If you guys could start bidding on them, really appreciate that. I’m like, Pat, isn’t this your address? Yeah, isn’t this your address? you should send some returns this way too, all right? Cool, Pat. I appreciate you coming on. And take care, man.

51:37
Hope you enjoy that episode. And if you ever see Andrew, ask him about this episode with Pat. More information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 362. And once again, I want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, 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.

52:05
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 next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

52:33
Head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free 16 mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:29
And between the two of us, we’ve seen a lot of mistakes, believe me. So enjoy the episode and be sure to check out the unofficial Shopify podcast. Now, before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Postscript is my SMS or text message 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.

00:58
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. I also want to thank Klavia 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? Do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it?

01:26
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 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.

01:56
To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And then finally, I want to mention a brand new 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.

02:23
So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcasts on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:37
Kurt Elster, what is going on? It’s been a while since I’ve spoken to you. It’s been a bit and I regret that. That’s my fault. I should really be following up with someone as fabulous as Steve Chow. Well, it’s funny. Last time we hung out was at the Klaviyo conference and we recorded one of these podcasts. Awesome. It a lot of fun. I was going to say, as soon as you said the last time we hung out was at Klaviyo and the first thing that popped in my head was that was so much fun. Like when I think about that conference, that’s really the memory I have is

03:06
recording with you and you Darian and Tony in that like cool and but weird little recording booth set up they had. It was a ton of fun. And what I remember is you guys like busted on me the entire episode and yet I still publish that one. You know sometimes you just have to speak truth to power. All right so Kurt today’s a really exciting episode we’re going to be talking about common mistakes that store owners make and

03:34
Let’s start out with your number one pet peeve. What is that? Obsessing over page speed and now as of today, Core Web Vitals. Yes. So actually, can you talk about Core Web Vitals first and what they are even just in case the listeners don’t even have any idea what that is? Okay. So originally we, Google said, Hey, you got to look at your page speed. And they had like this arbitrary. What I feel is a largely arbitrary metric that much to its detriment.

04:03
gives you a score, grade, it grades your website. And it’s based on what I think is fairly flawed data. And the implication was always, if it doesn’t perform well, at some point, you’re not gonna rank on Google if you can’t get a good score. And the reality is like that, that is an overstatement of what is really happening. It’s a reason, as of now, coming out a Google update is around the corner or maybe like about to publish.

04:33
in which they’re going to take into consideration three metrics from the larger Google PageSpeed score called Core Web Vitals. And probably the most important one there is first content paint. So really it’s like, long does it take? Not necessarily like how long does the entire website take to load? How long until I could see it and use it is really what Core Web Vitals looks at to like simplify it. Right. Because you could be on a website, it starts loading and you can start using it and scrolling.

05:01
before it’s finished, like stuff can load in the background, that’s fine. They don’t actually care about that part. It’s how long until I can use the darn thing? And so people naturally freaked out. And the reality is when they, what’s really going on is if you look at like the fine print of the description of what Google’s saying they’re gonna do, it’s, they’re saying, hey, if we have two sites that rank for the same placement, the one with the better Core Web Vital rating will take priority.

05:30
We’re going to use it as a tiebreaker. OK, so speed is important, but it is not the be all end all lose sleep over it thing that I think it’s being presented as and people are treating it. And really, my issue is I’m so sick of the anxiety and the hair tearing out that’s occurring with merchants needlessly because of page speed. That’s my problem. You know what the problem with it is? It gives you a letter grade.

06:00
zero to a hundred and agents everywhere are trying to get a freaking hundred percent and it really can’t be done without jumping through a lot of hoops and I think I think it was was it your podcast or one post on Facebook where you actually looked at some of the top Shopify stores and all of them had page speed scores under 20. Yes, yeah, yes, yeah. Shopify is making effort in trying to get people to make to have more performant websites and as part of that

06:28
They said, hey, you could see in your store, like here’s a page speed grade. And it’s a little better than like the regular page speed grade because it’s an average of like a homepage, a product page, a collection page. It’s a little more accurate. And then in my partner portal in Shopify where I could see like these are the stores I have access to. These are my client stores. I could rank, just sort them all and see what the scores are. And what’s interesting is very few people get above 30.

06:57
And the stores I have that get above 60, they’re stores that we built like five to 10 years ago and then really haven’t changed. They just worked and that was the end of it. And so I thought that was interesting. So I know part of the issue here is like, is app JavaScript. We’ve done the research here and discovered largely it’s JavaScript, it’s apps, and it’s not deferring the load on that JavaScript that creates the problem. in our like our seven, eight, a couple nine figure stores, all of them.

07:27
are in the low double digits, like 12 is a pretty typical score. And Shopify will tell you like, oh, you score the same as similar stores. So we know for the highest performers, the teens, so like F minus minus if we’re applying a letter grade is the typical average score. You know what’s frustrating about this is that since I teach e-commerce and teach SEO,

07:53
Like I felt like I had to do it for myself. So all my sites are in the nineties now across the board, but it took me three weeks to do that. And I had to jump through hoops and get into the code in order to do that. And I can’t expect a non-technical person to possibly do that, which is ridiculous. Like Google cannot expect you to do this stuff. Right. Would you agree? Yes. No. And the, I just don’t understand. I don’t understand the initiative. I don’t understand the why this has become a priority all of sudden.

08:23
Like I would love to know internally at Google, what is going on here? Is it some altruistic desire to make the internet more accessible to slower devices? It’s got to do with ads. Probably not. Yeah. Yeah. Like I wonder what the real objective is here. Well, here’s my take on that. You know, one of the core web bottles is cumulative layout shift, which is basically whether your website shifts up and down when it’s loading, right?

08:49
Have you ever gone on one of those sites where like you’re trying to click on the next button, but then the ads all of a sudden appears with a next button and you click on an ad by accident. Yep. I think they’re trying to reduce that and click fraud. That’s their motivation. Oh, wow. I like that theory. Never would have occurred to me. And that’s pretty brilliant. Like if you look at how they generate their revenue, that makes a lot of sense. And also this page speed, like if it loads faster,

09:19
That’s more ad clicks. Oh man, you cracked the case. So that’s what I really think this is for. And so they’re trying to automatically algorithmically take out those people who are just trying to scan the system for AdSense. Hmm. This is really good. That’s my take. That’s my take. All right. I love it. So I think the other interesting thing is Brian Dean from Backlinko published data yesterday where they looked at something. It was like 200,000 sites, something nuts.

09:46
And he said there was very little correlation, if any, between UX metrics, which I think they measured. It sounded like they measured in page views and Core Web Vital scores. So obviously, stuff that was way screwed up, it would correlate. But for the most part, it really did not have an impact on UX. I don’t think the rollout has fully happened here. I think they delayed it till like next month, I believe. So we’ll see what happens. But I suspect you’re right. It’s probably not going to happen.

10:16
of effect. It’ll have a similar effect as to what PageSpeed did when it first got announced. So tell me sir, what PageSpeed is clearly the thing that makes me crazy. That’s my big one is every time someone brings up the ghost of PageSpeed I’m like oh here we go. What drives Steve Chow nuts? Okay you know what drives me crazy is when someone comes up to me and says I tried Facebook ads and Google ads and it didn’t work and then I go over to their site to take a look

10:46
and they’re driving paid traffic to a site that just isn’t ready. And we can expand upon this, because I know this is part of your pet peeves too, but how many times has someone said that to you? You go over their site and it’s just terrible. But yeah, but then Facebook ads gets blamed. You can’t blame the traffic store because your site doesn’t convert. Right. And they spend all their time on the copy and all this stuff where they’re just driving it to something that has poor copy. It actually doesn’t even make sense to me.

11:16
Yeah, often the disconnect there is frustrating. really, how often have I been on, or have you been on, I like Instagram, I’m a millennial I suppose. So I like Instagram, I go through my Instagram stories, and then I’ll see an ad for something that looks interesting, I’ll swipe up on it, and I just end up on, either they send me to the homepage, in which case I’m just clicking out, heaven forbid, do not send anyone to your homepage, or,

11:44
I just end up on like an entirely standard unoptimized product detail page with like a one line description. And I’m like, what did you think was going to happen here? And of course it just bounds. Well, you know what my pet peeve is since we’re talking about product descriptions. My biggest pet peeve is when I see a product that has zero likes, zero shares, zero everything, zero reviews, and they didn’t even take the time to hide the zero part. Cause when I see zero, that indicates to me that

12:11
no one’s buying anything and it’s a brand new site. social proof is what you just advertised. Exactly. That’s negative social proof. It is. It actually causes me to leave because that means no one’s bought that product before, And that’s, funny that product reviews apps don’t know to hide themselves, especially like the review stars widget, if there are zero stars. And that’s for most of these apps, that’s a pretty easy customization that we have to go implement. It’s not hard.

12:39
that should just be an option built into them. Because yeah, zero reviews is just like a red flag. If I’m a brand new visitor. Actually, you know, that’s really interesting. So you actually have to muck with the code to fix that? Yeah. Interesting. And then same goes with social proof, right? Like Facebook likes and shares and that sort of thing you you physically go in. I almost don’t you know what I

13:03
almost always scrub those social share buttons because what are the chances that you actually get someone to share a product page to their Facebook feed? That’s a tough sell. agree with you, actually. I had considered removing those altogether because I know from my own site very few people click on those. However, I will say that people do click on the Pinterest button though, since I guess since I’m in the wedding industry. What have you will say, yeah, for some industries, the pin it button, that’s a win.

13:33
But you need to be in the right niche, and Wedding is perfect for that. But beyond that, like, oh, a product page, I’m gonna share this to my timeline. No one’s doing that, it’s just not gonna happen. Interesting, so do you take away those social buttons, actually, for your clients? I do, yeah. At this point, I just strip them out, and then if there’s pushback on it, I say, well, we can heat map it or split test it. I said, but if I heat map your best-selling product,

14:03
you will get flip a coin one or zero clicks. And sure enough, that’s what happens every time. And it was so consistent that I don’t even think about it anymore. I just strip them out, unless it’s in a wedding, in which case, just give me a pin it button and that’s the end of it. What’s tricky about this is the default Facebook buttons always have the number next to it, right? So unless you know how to manipulate the code a little bit, it’s actually kind of hard. I had to code up my own button to do that, to remove the Oh really? Yeah.

14:32
Yeah, most of the time it’s yeah, it’s just like Facebook share and it doesn’t have the numbers. I mean, if people are actually sharing it more social proof, that’s always going to be my priority. If the question is, should we add more social proof? The answer is yes. I don’t think you could do enough. And here’s like an obvious pet peeve. Like it’s intuitive to me, but sometimes I’ll land on the site and I’ll have no idea what the heck they’re selling or why I should buy from them at all. Oh, the story.

15:02
and the description and the positioning and those are the fundamentals. swear to God, all of the fundamentals are in copywriting and that’s including the social proof. Like you got to nail those before you worry about design and page speed. I think that’s my other issue is like, you know, sites with one line descriptions that in no reviews and like we’re worried about our page speed score. You got bigger problems. Actually, you know, I’m actually curious since you work with a lot of clients, what is your hierarchy of

15:32
priority when you land on a site or what you work on. Okay, so a hundred percent. Number one, it needs to be clear. The positioning or the tagline needs to be clear. Cause you said like, I land on a site, I got no idea what they’re doing, why I’m here. That’s a big problem. And if like you saw it, everybody else did too. So when I land on a site, need within seconds, I need to know

15:57
what they sell, why, or at least you’ve been able to spark my curiosity. know, like I land on doglawyer.com and they’re like, oh, that’s not a real site. But certainly like a name like that, I gotta know more. So like sometimes you get lucky and you can get away with not having more of a story initially. But for the most part, like you gotta have a tagline, a headline. You need something to orient me as to like why the heck I just got dropped in here and what I’m supposed to do next. And so I really like the absolute.

16:25
cornerstone of everything is knowing and nailing and communicating that positioning statement. And that needs to be above the Yes, usually it’s like, all right, I want your logo and can we put a three to five word tagline underneath it? Oftentimes, that’s a great way to do it. Maybe you get lucky and the brand name has what you sell and it is obvious. Like, Harney and Sons Fine Tea Company. I’ll give you a guess what they sell, right? So that one, you get lucky. But yeah, I want a

16:54
a tagline, want a headline, I want something that’s gonna make it really clear to me above the fold what you sell. Alright, and then that makes it easy for me as a visitor, as a customer, to go, alright, I wanna know more. Or this isn’t for me, one of the two. But either way, we’re separating the wheat from the chaff. And then from there, okay, tell me a story. I like stories, tell me a story! I want that brand story. And it’s even like in a product description, you still wanna be able to tell a story.

17:22
on an about page you’re telling a story, on the home page you’re telling a story. If you’re not storytelling throughout this journey, you’re leaving money on the table. Like that is the next fundamental. And that really comes down to, right, all of this falls under copywriting. We’re not talking about design or development. This is just, you gotta type on the keyboard and make it make the click clack noise, right? Nobody wants to do it. It feels like homework. So it gets pushed to the bottom. So our mutual friend, think Michael Jammon, he runs Twirly Girl.

17:51
And they sell kids I love Michael Jammin. Girls dresses, very commonplace, very saturated. But their story is so amazing. It was about how his wife was abused as a child and she just wants to express all the… Of course I’m not doing a good job of explaining this. But she wanted to create these dresses to make girls really happy. And he has just really clever videos on his site that clearly express this amazing story. I’m not doing it justice. And that video makes almost all of their sales.

18:20
It’s on the about page, it’s on the front page, it’s an amazing story. Every time I watch it, I want to go buy a dress. They have, well, there’s quite an unfair advantage there in that Michael Jammin is a actual honest to goodness Hollywood screenwriter who wrote for King of the Hill and Beavis at Butthead. mean, guy, it’s just brilliant and hilarious. And he applied, he knew what Hollywood storytelling worked, like what that looked like, what that process was and when it worked. And he turned around.

18:49
and just applied it to copywriting on this website. And the results are million dollar videos. For most humans though, like you should work on your About Us page a little bit. Tell a story, just something about yourself that’s a little bit more personal. Because you don’t want to appear as like a big faceless, big large company, right? You want to be, you want to play off the mom and pop aspect because people want to shop from mom and pop stores. Well, yes. And especially now the, I think in

19:17
the last two years we’ve really seen the rise of conscious consumerism where people want to know who’s getting their dollars and why. Like why should I care? I have at this point I now have what feels like infinite options for just about anything I want to buy. So being able to tell that story that’s the competitive advantage against Walmart, against Amazon. They can’t compete with that. They’re not a person. They’re, you know, Jeff Bezos richest man in the world.

19:45
going to sp- like the guy feels like a super villain at this point, right? You’re not, you’re a person, you could be their neighbor. If they can relate to you and relate to their story, your story, then you are going to get those dollars. People are gonna vote with their dollars and say believe in what you’re doing. And if you keep your mouth shut and never share your story, you guarantee that that’s never gonna happen.

20:10
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.

20:38
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.

21:08
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 dot com. Now back to the show. So a common misconception is that people don’t even look at your About Us page, but I guarantee you, and this is for our store, the About Us page is probably the second or third most trafficked page on the site. Because when you’re shopping at an unknown boutique, people actually want to know the people behind the store. Yes. Yeah. Well, think about it. It’s like…

21:36
If somebody jumped out of a parking lot, hey, give me your credit card number. I’ve got these t-shirts. You want to buy them? Give me your credit card. That’s insane. But that’s functionally what a lot of online direct-to-consumer stores do. And so I need to know who it is who’s asking for my credit card number. And that’s why that About Us page is so important. And if you run screen recordings on a site, it’ll probably be true for just about everybody’s. As you’ll see, a fair number of people will add to cart and then go check the About page.

22:05
and then you can see whether or not they’ve made a purchase decision on if they go back to the cart and proceed to checkout. Here’s what I actually like to do. So usually when you ask your friends for an opinion on your site, they’re your friends, right? So they’re going to say, oh, it’s great. It’s great. It’s going to do great. But they’re probably lying to you because they don’t want to hurt your feelings. So what I like to do is I’ll use a service like PickFu. It’s basically like a polling service. You can get 50 responses within like 15 minutes. And I did it with my site maybe a year ago and

22:35
You’ll get real unbiased comments like, Hey, I hate the pop-up. I hate this. I hate this. Hello. No, I would not shop there. You just ask a simple question. Like if you landed on this site for the first time, assuming you like the products, would you buy from here? Simple question like that. And you’ll get a lot of answers. How do you spell pick food? P I C K F U. Um, maybe in the show notes, I actually have a 50 % off coupon off of that. Say if you want to try it, it’ll be the best 25 bucks you’ll ever spend. I guarantee you. Sweet.

23:05
No, I know this works because we’ve used, I’m not familiar with PickFu, but I’ve used Hotjar, which will let you do, they call them incoming surveys. Same concept. There’s a lot of companies that do similar things. Yeah. Yeah. lot of like, I don’t use it, but I know a lot of Shopify merchants like Lucky Orange. I think it can do it. Oh really? Okay. I’m not sure. You know what? I shouldn’t say that. I really have no idea. Well, so the students in my class, I have them do it before they submit, before they asked me to critique their site, basically I asked them to do it.

23:35
Ah, and it’s eye opening. It’s eye opening. Well, so this brings me to one of my other pet peeves, not talking to your customers. Yes. Nobody talks to their customers. It’s like, well, in oftentimes you ask, like, oh, why do your customers buy? And they’ll have an answer. And then I’ll say, how do you know? Oh, we just know. So what you just know. That means you that means it’s a best guess and that you might be right. But until you ask, it’s still just a best guess. And that’s what I love about talking to your customers. And one of the best ways to talk to your customers and pick up the phone.

24:05
Call your customer, use phone.app, it’s the best app. Call your customers on the phone and talk to them. And be like, hey, why’d you buy? What’d you hope to get out of this? Tell me about the experience. mean, just talking to a few people’s really enlightening. know, the same, it will have a similar effect to asking your friends. They’re not gonna tell you your face, like, well, it kinda sucked. They might, but they’re less likely. Whereas that instantaneous pop-up, like you’re getting that immediate reaction unfiltered.

24:35
Man, people will tell you the craziest stuff in those pop-ups. But it’s so, it’s incredibly helpful, especially when it’s like, all right, I got a few weirdos, but eight people all kind of said the same thing was their initial impression and it wasn’t great. Oh, all right, so now you know that’s a thing you need to address. You know what I do every time I release a new product? And it’s actually driving my wife crazy. I have an abandoned cart script on my site where if they abandon, like I get emailed saying, hey, this person with this phone number abandoned.

25:04
and I’ll call them up and I’ll say, hey, we just noticed that you tried to check out but you didn’t complete the process. Was there anything wrong and is there anything that I can help you with? And more often than not, they’re actually willing to talk to you and tell you what’s wrong. And then usually what I’ll do is at the end, I’ll give them a big coupon or sometimes I’ll just give them the product for free after that to just compensate them for their time.

25:30
It’s really hard to do this. It’s really hard to cold call. It’s technically not cold calling, right? Because they were on your site and they gave you their It’s not cold calling, but no, okay. But it’s awkward. Who wants to pick up the phone and call a stranger and be like, you tried to buy from my website and you bounced and I want to talk to you about that. Like the first several times you do that, I’m sure was nerve wracking. It is actually, you know what, if you want to make it a little bit more comfortable, what you can do is you can lead to the offer. You can just sit, you can lead with the offer and say, hey, you know,

25:59
We noticed you didn’t check out and don’t worry, I’m gonna compensate with your time with a big coupon or give you the product for free. But I just like some honest feedback on why you didn’t make the purchase the first time. And do you represent yourself as like, I run this site with my wife. Like, do you make it very personal? say, hey, I’m the owner of this business. I run it with my wife and we just launched this product and we just noticed that you tried to check out but you didn’t finish it. And we’re just wondering if you’d give us some feedback on the process. Something very straightforward like that.

26:29
I would say seven times out of 10, someone will probably be willing to talk to you. Interesting. And so, oh, I love this idea. And so when you call them, what kind of objections do you typically hear? They’re like, well, because they’re going to tell you’re essentially saying like, why didn’t you buy? And so that you can then bust that objection for other people in the future. And then you seal the deal with, hey, I’ll give you the thing for free. And now you’ve got a customer for life or like, here’s 50 % off. I’ll just give it to you at cost.

26:58
Right. So I can tell you this because maybe a couple of years ago we launched like a new apron line and sometimes you’ll get a question, you’ll get an answer like, hey, I was on my mobile phone and it just wasn’t convenient to check out, which could be a problem in itself, right? Like maybe you need a better mobile payment system so you don’t have to enter in all that stuff. Like you’re not using PayPal OneTouch or, or. I was going to say, like you need, if you, if you hear that objection and you don’t have an express payment option, now you know what the solution is. Right.

27:27
But so in this particular case with the apron, what ended up happening was the woman was like, know, I, so we sell a mother daughter apron set just to kind of give you some background and there’s sizing for the adult and then for the kids, we just have an age range like two, I can’t remember what the age range is now two to four and six to 10 or something two to six or six to 10. Anyway, the problem was, was that the person wasn’t clear what the size, the exact sizing was for their child because they have,

27:56
like a child who’s larger percentile wise and they weren’t sure that the apron was gonna fit. And we didn’t do a good job of conveying that. And so after talking with her, I was like, hey, so what information would you need? Because we actually have the measurements there, right? We had the measurements in the product description, but what she would have liked to see was like, if my daughter is five foot six or something like that, like a height scale. And so that was something that- Yeah, they want like a table. Exactly.

28:26
Yeah, based on height, not necessarily age because age is ambiguous. Yeah, I don’t like age. You know, like all of my children are tall, but my daughter is in the 98th percentile for height at age four. So people are always like, she’s four. Well, when sizing stuff is based on age, it’s really hard. I found for all of my kids, like just add, you know, plus one or plus two, depending when they use those age sizes.

28:51
And this might be common sense for apparel, but this was the first apparel item that we actually ever carry in our store. So we didn’t know, right? I was okay, because I was gonna say with apparel, the number one objection by far is sizing. Yep. Like will this thing fit me? And then the follow-up objection is, well, if I buy it and it doesn’t fit because this sizing is ambiguous. So I really, a lot of people feel like I’m gambling when I buy apparel online. Still to this day.

29:16
And then so you need to be really upfront with here’s the returns and exchange process if this doesn’t fit. And I flat out like put it in there as what happens if it doesn’t fit? Hey, we’ll pay for the return shipping and we’ll send you a different song. Here’s the rub on this though. So we do personalized aprons. So you can’t return them, which was a further objection. I mean, these are all things that we learned and this might be common sense to people to sell apparel, but we weren’t experienced in that. So these are all things that we learned just from cold calling people.

29:46
Yeah, no, like you, you know, no matter what you do, you don’t know what you don’t know. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, and that’s why we’re hammering on. You have to talk to people because otherwise you don’t know. All right. Is it my turn or your turn? Was that yours or mine? I feel like we had the same peeves pet peeves. I have no, I don’t know anymore. All right. Well, so we, made some app recommendations and that leads me to the other issue that I see. And this is like, especially with Shopify stores.

30:16
is people, I call this app roulette and you know, the number, regardless of what platform you’re on, there are apps, plugins and scripts and like tools and there is no end to the amount of really cool stuff you can use on your site. And these are shiny toys and I call it app roulette because it’s like, well, if I just get the right combo of tools, if I have the right tool stack, you know, my conversions will explode. My average order value explode. I’ll make more money. I totally get what’s going on here, but

30:45
I mean, it just becomes detrimental where you end up, you could see the sites that are doing this when you land on it and A, the site takes a while to load. So like, you know that page speed score is tanked. And then it’s like, all right, spin to win, punch the monkey, enter your email. Like I see someone who is familiar with punch the monkey from the 90s. Those 90s flash banner ads, really ages me. And you know that’s what’s going on. Is there like, well, if I could just, you know, more.

31:14
throw more widgets at it, more shiny toys, we’ll fix it. And it isn’t the case, you know, it just, it looks cluttered, it’s confusing. And then, you know, and then on top of it, when they go to exit, my hot jar exit intent survey pops up and they’re like, not another effing pop-up. That’s a real thing that I see when I run those on sites that have a lot of stuff. They’re like, why there’s so many pop-ups? So you probably see this a lot more than I do, but sometimes I’ll open up a student site and I’ll see like 40 apps installed and some of them don’t do

31:43
anything except like install like a small piece of code in there because they don’t want to like touch their theme files and whatnot. Like it literally just inserts a piece of JavaScript. Yeah. Yeah. I edit my theme. Oh my gosh. That’s, know, you may as well it’s like pop the hood and adjust the timing on your distributor. Like it’s a scary thing if you don’t know what it means. So I get why those apps exist. There’s a lot that’s just like, you’re right. It’s just, it, jacks one line of JavaScript code and now you’re paying $8 a month for the rest of forever.

32:10
I do want to say something that I’ve seen and maybe you have more experience in this since you work with a lot of clients, but I’ve seen people uninstall apps thinking that it was clean, but in fact they leave a piece of JavaScript in there and whenever you have a piece of JavaScript in there, they can literally track everything about your site if they want to do that. Right? Have you seen that? Yeah, if they’re in cities. right. So Shopify specifically, when you have an app installed, when you click delete on that app,

32:40
or I think it used to say uninstall, I think it says delete now, but either way it’s a misnomer. Really what it does is it just immediately severs the app developer’s connection to your store. And it’s a security thing, that’s all right, you want these guys out, they’re out, the end of it. And the problem with that is depending on how the app works, some add theme code to the theme. I have four apps and all of them, we just put theme code in the theme. And we do it because

33:09
That’s the most performant option. But as soon as you delete the app, guess what? All that stuff’s still there. we’ll get, our solution is we fire off, immediately we fire off an email, a transactional email to the merchant that says, hey, we saw you uninstalled our app. A, tell us why. So we’re looking for that objection. And then B, okay, if you didn’t remove the theme code, here’s exactly how to do it and you have to do it. And if you don’t want to do it, just hit reply, we’ll do it for you. Like I just, you I don’t,

33:39
want to be part of the problem when it comes to performance. And so we do that. But so you have seen this. You don’t know what your certain apps. Oh, OK. Yeah. Oh, nonstop. And so like when people are called my site slow, former CTO of Shopify, JML said websites get slow slowly. And it’s because of exactly what you described. It’s cruft. It’s barnacles to a ship. It’s this code just accumulates over time. And even though it’s not doing anything.

34:06
You know, the web server’s not smart enough to figure that out, and the browser’s not smart enough, and so it just like, every new site load has to load all this old garbage that you’ve like completely forgot about from two years ago. So let me ask you this, I have students that, like I’ll see this in students’ sites, is there an easy way for them to do it themselves without actually having me step in? Yes and no. you, almost all of this stuff is gonna be sitting either in the

34:35
the beginning or the end of theme.liquid. This is specific to Shopify. So it’s like, I’m just looking for the header and footer that loads in every page and that’s gonna be in theme.liquid. And most of these apps, there’s either gonna be a comment on it or it will be evident from the name what it is. It’s like, well, I installed Acme Widget Popup Builder. And you’ll see a line that says include, single quote,

35:02
Acme widget pop-up builder single quotes. So you know like, oh, okay, that’s that app I don’t have anymore. And so you just safely comment that out or delete the line. A lot of people have theme editing phobia though. They do. But knowing just a little, like you don’t have to be a theme developer, but if you know enough to be dangerous, and that’s the camp I put myself into. So you just know like basic HTML, which is not complicated, and maybe like a little bit of liquid in theme structure.

35:31
you immediately are way better off. There is just so much more you can do that you didn’t realize, especially for like day to day stuff like, you know, add and remove tracking code, verification codes. Like a lot of people recently had to verify their domain with Facebook. So suddenly like you that’s the kind of thing that you would be very comfortable and confident with. Yeah. And there’s plenty of free classes out there like Skillshare has got a ton of stuff you can learn. Just like here’s the basics of how a theme is set up.

36:00
and like I could go learn basic HTML and CSS and you will be in such a better position. Like think about it. You’re a web professional. Think if you are a merchant, whether you want to think of yourself that way or not. And your theme is very much like the face of your business. It’s your full-time salesperson and you want to be able to speak its language. And so if you learn those things, that’ll like, you’ll be able to do this stuff yourself and you’ll be able to talk, uh, have better relationships.

36:27
communication with any theme developer you may hire. You can’t be an online professional without being willing to learn something about the internet or websites. That’s my philosophy. 100%. And like, whether you like it or not, you’ll end up figuring some of this will sink in over time. All Here’s my biggest pet peeve. Going for revenue over profit.

36:52
I once had this student show me their Facebook ads account and they were generating sales, but the return on ad spend was terrible, but they were getting the sales, which was making them happy. But it wasn’t return. Has it happened to any of your clients? I don’t know. Yes, but I think they were more, when it’s happened, they’re more aware of it. They’re like, okay, we got it this far where it’s like, this is a loss leader and we’re gonna make it up on subsequent sales.

37:21
Right? Like, we’ve acquired them as a customer at a loss, which is what like the big DTC brands do, because they’re spending other people’s money. You know, they’re not bootstrapping it. And then, all right, on subsequent sales, we’ll make it up. Or like drop shipping businesses where margins are razor thin and they’re like, well, just revise, revise. We’ll keep iterating. We’ll dial it in. But it’s like, well, all right, how much time do you give it? And I don’t know what the answer is. Well, I think I’ll just tell you story from my store.

37:49
So we’re in the wedding industry, so you would think that we wouldn’t have that much repeat business, right? But 12 % of our repeat business, 12 % of our sales is repeat business, but it actually makes up 30 % of our sales. But here’s the kicker. So our average order value is about 60 bucks, and 50 % of our customers spend less than half of our AOV. But they represent the bulk of our customers. Whereas I think only 10 % of our customers spend 2X of our AOV.

38:19
but they actually make up 50 % of our revenues. So we’re a small business, we’re very small. We have a couple of employees, my wife and I. So where should we be focusing our time? We focus now on those big, we call them the whales. And it turns out that after doing some analysis, that a lot of our cheapie customers were coming from Facebook and we only have a little bit of finite amount of time. So we now focus actually on the big repeat customers that we have in our

38:48
It just made life a lot easier for us. So you’re applying the 80-20 rule, Pareto’s principle there, right? Yes. It’s not quite 80-20 though, but yeah. Right. a similar idea. I love that you’re doing this. I think you could apply that same thinking to all manners and areas of your life. But tell me, when you’re doing that customer analysis where you’re segmenting them, and it sounds like maybe you’re getting to RFM model,

39:18
How do you do that analysis? How are you identifying these customer segments? So we, I can’t remember exactly how we came up with the idea with half the AOV, but we started with the average order value, right? What our average order value was. And then for our business, actually, a good portion of that 12 % that I mentioned are event and wedding planners, right? And as soon as you said we had like 12 % a repeat with a higher AOV, immediately in my head I I bet they’re wedding professionals. And so what ended up happening is,

39:47
We start now looking for anomalies in our sales, and then we pick up the phone, like you said, and we’ll call them up and we’ll say, hey, we noticed that you ordered a lot. Are you a planner? Are you going to order in bulk? I tell you what we’ll do is we’ll give you a special coupon code and a representative from our company that will handle all of your transactions and make sure they arrive at the destination on time. We’ll give you a hand holding, essentially. And after that call, once we have established face

40:16
some rapport, they continue to order from us over and over and over again. And they’re basically a customer for life that orders in bulk. They don’t complain about anything. It’s like the best customer ever. essentially, this is brilliant. So what some people do, they say, all right, I want those wholesale accounts because they have high AOVs. And so they’ll set up a wholesale program, but it’s just like a link on the site and they expect people to go sign up for it. You are proactive about it.

40:41
you’re identifying these people that are wedding professionals. And these are your like, really, these are your ideal customers who have the biggest lifetime value. so, and then, so once you identify them, you call them up and say, Hey, we, we see you and we want to help you. So here’s your lifetime discount code. And we’re going to really like their big fear is a wedding is a mission critical event. So you’re saying, Hey, we’re going to make sure you get yourself. We’re going to look out for you.

41:08
And then as soon as you do that and you were so proactive, I imagine that you just have customers for life with them. The phone call is actually pretty important in this case. Again, real contact. It’s that phone call. it’s like you’re no longer, it’s no longer a brand. It’s, it’s Steve. Steve’s helping me out. Another pet peeve is making a guess at who your real customer is and then writing all your copy to.

41:36
account for that imaginary person when you don’t have any data. I don’t know if that happens. It’s usually like they’re thinking about themselves. Most people, their first customer, they are their own best first customer. And so they’re writing to themselves. The only reason I can talk about all this stuff is because I made all these same mistakes, just to be clear for anyone who’s listening. Yeah, I’m sure we’ve both done some boneheaded things I got an example on this line too. I assume that all our customers are wedding customers.

42:06
The reason I found this out is I was looking at my Facebook demographic data and I noticed that a lot of our customers were over the age of 55. And I’m like, there can’t be people over the age of 55 getting married, like a whole bunch, right? Yeah, this was an outlier. This was an outlier. But it turns out like a lot of those repeat customers are people who just like to collect handkerchiefs, believe it or not. Oh, what? Yes, right? Just like you like to collect old cars. I do.

42:34
Kurt just got a Volkswagen Beetle, 79 Beetle, which is pretty sweet. There’s people who collect handkerchiefs, or they’re crafters, and these tend to be older women who do these things. Huh. And so you had this customer segment that you were not aware of. Did you, once you knew that, was there any like actionable info there? Well. Or anything that you like, you changed? Yes, actually. So in the old days, every single page was about weddings.

43:03
Every landing page was about weddings. And so now we have a special section for weddings now, but the rest of it is just talking about either embroidered blanks for crafting or some of these older ladies who like to collect them. Like the copy has changed, basically. Okay. And so initially, well, we talked about, like you said, the big pet peeve is people just assume they know what the customer’s like, and then they write to that customer.

43:30
What’s the correct method? What should they be doing instead? The correct method is you’re not going to know from the beginning. So you can start with some assumptions. But again, you have to, as you said before, talk to the customer. We have a survey in our post-purchase sequence that asks them what they’re using it for and that sort of thing. And then based on the survey data, we make adjustments. We actually don’t call those customers. I guess it would be just too many. We only call the whales. But yeah, we’re constantly trying to get data about our customers so we can

43:59
do things appropriately. So for SMS, for example, sometimes we’ll ask, what would you like us to carry in our store and what would you use it for? Something like that. And what would you use it for? think that’s the critical question. you like, hey, you’re trolling for product suggestions. Hey, what do you want us to sell? But then like, what, why is really, is the, I think the follow-up question that most people miss. You need to scratch a little bit deeper and figure out what the intent is.

44:28
because that really adds so much, so much info and tone to why they’re making that request. A perfect example of this is my buddy Neville, he used to run an e-commerce store a long time ago and he used to sell rave supplies. So there’s this one product that he sold which were fingertip lights and I don’t really go raving, but supposedly like you twirl these around and you know, whatever. But yeah, I know what you’re talking about. I can picture this. He found that plumbers were buying this.

44:57
these fingertip lights. they could, you know, when they’re under the sink, they have lights on their fingertips. So it’s convenient and they can see what they’re doing. That’s pretty smart. So he wrote, he started writing copy to plumbers and it ended up converting really well, stuff like that. That’s great. Yeah. Oftentimes like there’s things don’t necessarily have to stick to their original purpose. Like you mentioned, oh, Kurt’s got a 79 beetle.

45:24
I have been using, trying to find the perfect mirror to fit behind in this like tight, hard to reach place where I’m adjusting a carburetor. And you know, I bought an automotive mirror, like from an auto parts store, didn’t work. The mirror I found that worked, I’d be using my wife’s compact. I have stolen her compact and that’s actually a much better mirror, it’s much more useful. So that’s like, that’s clearly not the intended use there, but that’s what ended up working.

45:52
Not that I’m gonna go like remarket compacts, like automotive, know, looky-loo mirrors. So you said post purchase survey. What are some of your favorite post purchase survey questions? I’m trying to think. Well, mainly what they’re using it for. then here’s the kicker for ours. This is specific to our business. We asked them if they are a professional in this business. are they buying it for business or pleasure or as a gift? And if they say business,

46:22
then we call those people. That’s actually our primary They have raised their hand as a whale. That’s actually our primary purpose for the survey, actually, for our store. That’s pretty bright. Everyone else has different uses, obviously. But yeah. So I guess sometimes we’ll ask them if they like the product, and if so, we’ll ask them for a review or a testimonial, or have them take photos for social and that sort of thing. That’s what we mainly use it for. Do you do any split testing? No, actually, I was going to talk about that.

46:52
don’t do a whole lot of split testing, mainly because split testing takes forever. It mostly fails. It’s mostly inconclusive. So I’m curious to see what you have to say about that actually. Okay, so you’re right about both things. Any test, like minimum, needs to run two weeks. And that’s a frustratingly long time to wait. And during that time, you know, you’re like sitting there refreshing it, checking it, and you’re…

47:19
your probability to be best just keeps flipping back and forth between the two. So for a lot of stuff, that’s true. really, turns out, I think the conclusion with split testing is for many split tests, design is way less important than we think. The copy and the content and the offer and the quality of traffic, those really are the much more important factors to conversion. And with split testing, I think a lot of people just use it to split test design changes. And that’s why they end up with inconclusive results.

47:49
or either they’re calling it too early or they’re starting them too early where like you just don’t have enough traffic. So one of things that we do is like, I’ll usually use revenue as my primary goal as opposed to conversion. Cause at least now I’m factoring in average order value and conversion by doing that. And I think I’m getting a better signal to noise ratio by using that. I think that helps. Let it run long enough, like two weeks.

48:14
and really try to limit the number of tests you run at once or like the number of variants. Otherwise then the thing really takes forever to get anything conclusive. But for the most part, I think a lot of stuff, you know, really is just like very subjective and that it doesn’t have, you’re just, you need to use common sense on it. But for other things like, man, should we do this? Is this a good idea? Like one phenomenal split testing thing we’ve done is

48:42
figure out what your free shipping threshold should be. And this is a tough one to do. I found an app that’ll do it called Ship Scout and you have to be on Shopify Plus to do it. So it kind of limits who can do this. But it’s really cool where like you’ll, the banner across the top offering free shipping, that threshold will change. And then once you’re in the checkout, the shipping rates will change. And so you could figure out through data, okay,

49:11
Here’s like whether or not you’re leaving money on the table with your free shipping threshold. So like stuff like that, absolutely split test those offers. Cause that’s going to have a real, real difference in revenue on the business. How much traffic would you recommend to even think about split testing? Personally? So our, our sake, I think it’s about 50,000 visits a month. I don’t even think that’s enough to complete a split test unless I do a whole site wide split test in a couple of weeks. Yeah, it’s gotta be, um,

49:39
Well, think the traffic is an issue. And then on top of it, you also need the conversion. So if it’s like a high, moderately traffic site with low conversions, you’re probably not a good candidate. like, yeah, once you get to 100,000 visits a month with at least a 1 % conversion rate. All right, now we’re cooking with gas. And you should be able to split test just fine at that point. I can see the free shipping offer working because that’s like a generic conversion.

50:07
But if I was trying to test some UI change on one page, that one page would have to get a lot of traffic, right? Right, and that’s the issue we get into. I’m running some split tests now, and even on a site that gets, that’s in the 1 % of websites as far as traffic goes, running a split test on an individual product page, it’s never gonna get, it’s never gonna happen. It will be years before I have a statistically significant result. So even on these huge sites, if you make the test too specific,

50:37
you run into issues. So I would say, and you can agree with me or disagree with me here, if you’re running a smaller site, think something like PickFoo is probably better than running a real split. You’ll get results in 15 minutes from people, from random people. 100%. I also find heat mapping. Yes. Where it’s like heat map, scroll map, click map, not click map, movement map, where you can see like where their mouse goes on desktop. Those are very valuable, even on sites that have less traffic.

51:05
Like that, there you go, that’s a heuristics analysis tool you can use way before split testing starts to make sense. And here’s an example of just something, why heat maps and scroll maps are useful. There’s this one student I had which was dead set on keeping their sidebar. Dead set, even though it didn’t look good and it was like compressing like the size of the images on the category pages. And so was like, okay, let’s just run a test and.

51:34
we finally discovered that no one is clicking on anything in the sidebar. No one’s even looking over on the sidebar. And so finally, with that data, they removed it. That’s, yeah. And like we were talking about social buttons earlier. That’s like, that’s a thing that you could very easily use a heat map to figure out like, people messing with this thing or not? Yeah. Well, the heat map says no. Dude, Kurt, we’ve been talking for 50 minutes about pet peeves. You got anything else to add before we wrap this up? You know,

52:01
I think ultimately my pet peeve is not starting. I think you need to get out of your own way sometimes. Ask yourself, what would someone smarter than me do? And then go, turns out you already know the answer, then go do that. I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, the biggest stumbling block is not any of this stuff. It’s just taking action and moving forward. So even if you’re out there making mistakes, that’s great. At least you’re doing something. My pet peeve is not being willing to do like,

52:30
the legwork, the dirty work. got it. Yeah. need to the work. create an online business and think they could just do everything online, but doing stupid things like picking up the phone or actually talking to someone face to face or being a little bit more personal. I mean, these are things you got to do. It’s just like a regular brick and mortar business in that respect. A hundred percent. Mr. Steve Chow, where could people go to learn more about you?

52:54
Yeah, if you guys are looking to get married, can hook you up over at bumblebillins.com. That’s my e-commerce store. But if you want to learn more about e-commerce in general, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com. I offer a free mini course from beginners. It also covers advanced people. If you want to create content, sign up, and that’s a free mini course right there. Fantastic. Thank you, sir. This has been a ton of fun. All right, Kurt Elster, this was a ton of fun. Where can people find you online if they want to learn more about you?

53:23
Oh my gosh, well, I’m best known for my show, The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, or head to curtelster.com. That’s got plenty of links to where you can learn more about me.

53:35
Hope you enjoyed that episode. And once again, if you haven’t already, go check out Kurt Elster on the unofficial Shopify podcast. More information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 360. And once again, I want to thank Clibio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows, like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO.

54:03
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. Now I talk about how I these tools in my blog, and if you were interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com

54:33
and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:29
that I use for ecommerce and it is crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for 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 Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

00:58
I also want to thank Klaviyo who is also a sponsor of show. Now if you’re working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined, 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. Now 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 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 to any business, the relationship between you and your customer and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. Now, to learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And finally, I want to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony.

01:58
And unlike this podcast where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:23
Today I have got my friend Chris Mercer on the show. And Chris is someone who I met at social media marketing world where we both spoke and I was really impressed by his talk. Now Chris is the founder of measurementmarketing.io and he specializes in website analytics. Now analytics may not sound like the sexiest of topics, but I do know for a fact that most people are doing it wrong. Most people don’t know how to use Google analytics and most shop owners have no idea what metrics to focus on in their reports. So today,

02:54
I asked Chris to teach us the right way to gather and analyze your data for your e-commerce store. And he promised to make it sexy at the same time. with that, welcome to show, Chris. How are doing today? I will do my best, man. See, appreciate you having me. And you know what? One day you will start calling me Mercer as all my friends do. I can’t, you know, it’s yeah, maybe once we’re tighter, I’ll call you Mercer. How’s that? Done. It’s a deal. We haven’t hung out enough yet. Then you can call me too. There you go. There you go. Looking forward to it. So Chris, I,

03:22
Mercer, I’ll call you Mercer here in this podcast. How does one decide to make a living teaching measurement and marketing? Like what’s your background? The origin story. Yes. Oh yeah. So the way we started, I actually started teaching people how to develop WordPress sites with a, just a membership site that showed people how to use WordPress. That led into very quickly, as you might imagine people saying, Hey, this is a lot of work. How much for you to build sites? So I started building sites and you building a little agency that that did that. We wanted to differentiate ourselves because everybody was doing that.

03:52
So we said, oh, we’re gonna do websites, but then we’ll help you optimize those websites, right? Make them perform better. So in order to optimize something, you must first measure something. And that’s where we started learning Google Analytics because we thought that’s what everybody else was doing. So we learned Google Analytics really well and then started, know, experimenting with other tools. We started showing clients of ours like, oh, here’s what your goal is in Google Analytics. And what was funny is really quickly.

04:16
the client conversations changed from, let’s talk about the split test and what the website looks like to, okay, go back to the analytics thing and show me where the goals are again. And how do I pull this information? Oh, you can do that. I you could track a button click. And it was like all this stuff. And then we would start getting referrals from our clients, sending us other people who wanted to talk about not websites, because they had website development, but they didn’t have measurement. And so that’s when we realized as a company, okay, we’re going to pivot into helping people understand these tools.

04:43
because there’s just a lot of misconceptions with them that make things a little more complicated than they need to be. So let’s say I have an e-commerce store. I know for a fact, so I teach a class on e-commerce, and I know for a fact that people just open up their analytics and they look at how many visits they have, and that’s pretty much it, right? Right, right. So what should people be looking at? What needs to be set up, actually? Set up is probably the hardest part. It is, because it’s such a great point, because that’s the part that is the fastest thing that is skipped over.

05:11
because there’s a misconception that when you put the code on your pages or when you turn on that Shopify integration or whatever the thing is that lights up Google Analytics, that that is the setup, but that’s not that literally just turning it on. Then you have to actually set it up to get some real usefulness out of it. And that’s where, you know, in the terms of Google Analytics, you would do things like creating. They have the thing called views back there where you can do multiple views and you see different, different, uh, you know, e-commerce settings and all of that stuff. You have to get your goals set up.

05:41
and you basically tell Google Analytics what you want it to be able to report back for you. All so let’s start from the beginning here. So I started a Shopify store and I’ve enabled e-commerce analytics and everything is set up so that Shopify can tell me what people have bought and when people have made a purchase and track all the revenue and that sort of thing. What else needs to be set up? Is there like a list you can provide us? You know what? I am, but I’m gonna give you a formula if I had to think about it. Okay.

06:09
The letters to write down, we always call this QIA, but it’s Q-I-A. And this is the first thing that everybody should be doing. First thing is you go, what questions am I wanting to get answers to? Questions about my store. So questions, for example, might be how many people are purchasing, right? How many transactions am I making? What’s the average dollars per transaction? How many people are seeing my product detail pages? How many people are starting to check out? How many of those people?

06:38
don’t check out, right? Those are examples of questions where you’re just trying to figure out is the site working like it’s supposed to, right? So write down all these questions. Next to those, kind think this in three different columns. The first question, first column is all the questions you want to know. In the beginning, don’t worry about right questions or wrong questions, just any question. You will get better at this. It’s a skill. Like you build a muscle in the gym and you don’t get a big muscle right away after a couple of reps, you got to do that consistently. Same thing with this. So write down

07:06
any question that comes to mind, there are no bad ones. So what if my question is, why aren’t people buying? Perfectly, perfectly fine question to ask. Okay, perfectly fine. Write it down. Write down all questions, right? Next to that, there’s another column, that column is going to be the I column. So QIA, the I stands for information. And here you’re going, okay, what information do I need to be able to measure, right, to collect, to be able to answer that question? So if we go back to the example of, oh, well, how many transactions, one of how many

07:35
many sales I’m making per day, the obvious answer is, okay, I need to be able to measure the number of transactions that are coming. If I need to know the average dollars per cart or how much I’m selling per transaction, I need to know my total revenue that I’m making that day and then how many sales I had that day and I can divide those two out to figure out that answer. So the information is kind of like the how I’m going to get my answer is what you’re doing, but it’s always the behavior, the thing that you’re trying to measure for. So if you go back to your question, you said, okay, well, why aren’t people buying?

08:04
what information would you need to collect in order to do that? And at a certain point you might go like, I’m not sure what I would need. At that point, that’s okay. Leave that question off to the side right now. Go answer the ones you do know how to do first, right? Because that one, what’ll happen is you’re just not quite ready for it yet. It’s kind of like building a house with a foundation. have the foundation first, then you put up the walls, then you do the drywall, right? That sort of concept is what’ll happen with these questions. Because not all questions can be answered immediately.

08:34
because you might need to do some a little bit of homework, right? And and some, understanding more of the foundational levels of how your store operates before you can answer the more advanced questions like that. Does that make sense? Yeah. So given that, mean, that, that’s like the million dollar question I asked, right? How do you, how do you get to that point? So let’s continue the process. So we have the question, we have the information, and then this is the most important part of this Kia process, this QIA model. You have your question, you have your information, you have action. What

09:03
action will I take based upon the answer I get? And all of this happens before you dive into analytics, before you go into your store, before you take it, you’re just doing this on a piece of paper, a whiteboard spreadsheet, notes, docs, whatever, QIA, question information action. So let’s go back to that transaction. Could we say, okay, I’m gonna have the X amount of transactions coming through. I need to know if I’m, or what my number of transactions are. I’m gonna be able to measure that because I’m recording number of transactions through e-commerce or whatever else it is.

09:33
the actions I will take if it’s less than 10 sales a day, I’m going to do this. If it’s more than 10 sales a day, I’m going to do that. And it’s always in that format where there is a number associated to it, some sort of action that’s associated to that number. Okay. So given our store, how do you come up with that number? I guess let’s say typically on average, I get three orders per day or let’s let’s use round numbers, 10, 10 orders per day. So would that number be 10 then? Yeah, exactly. Right. Keep it simple, right?

10:02
Now, as you decide and we’ll kind of walk through the process to get to like your million dollar question. As we decide, we’re like, okay, 10 a day. If it’s less than 10 a day, I’m going to look at my traffic sources and figure out if there’s a particular traffic source that’s not working properly. Maybe my Facebook campaign that I thought was going to bring in those sales didn’t bring in the sales. Maybe my email didn’t go out like I thought it was supposed to go out that morning. It didn’t go out. Right. That sort of stuff. And we look back and we go, okay, here’s why that didn’t happen.

10:31
Now I’m going to go take a different action, you know, and to make it happen tomorrow. So it’ll be there. Right. Now, eventually you get to a point where you say, okay, 10, we’re hitting 10. Cool. Now I know we can hit 10. I know that’s sort of our baseline, our benchmark to your point, the average of what you can expect. Now I want it to be 12 or 13 or 14. And the reason it’s going to be 12, 13 or 14 is because I brought on a new affiliate and they’re going to mail for me, or I have this new traffic source that we’re opening up with Google ads and we’re going to send Google ads. Google ads is going to kick in a few sales. And so.

11:00
Now what’s starting to happen is, and remember you’re doing this before you really look at everything, you’re of planning out in your head. It’s like a role play. Right. But you’re understanding how you’re going to use your Google Analytics and how you’re going to use any analytics platform, Google Analytics or otherwise could be just the reports in your e-commerce platform. But now you understand how to start using them. have context now, they have usefulness. So instead of just jumping into them and kind of like seeing what you can see, which is what a lot of people do initially.

11:28
which is what we call going into analytics unarmed, right? Because it’s just going to batch you around, right? And so you’re going to be frustrated and overwhelmed and be like, okay, I’ll come back to this in a few years. But if you go in with a question, right? You go in armed with a question with this KIA model. You have your question, you know the information that you’re looking for to get the answer. You even know what actions you’re going to take based upon the answers that the platform gives you. It’s a lot easier to use the platforms. And pretty soon, if you can imagine doing that process with transactions, you can imagine doing that process with average order volume.

11:56
Okay, well, my average cart value should be, you hundred bucks. Well, now we just did an order bump. I want it to be 125 bucks. And I want to make sure the upsells that we just put in place, so the related products, which is that I just added should make it so it’s $125. If it’s not, I’m gonna go back and see if that widget’s working. If it is, then I’m gonna, you know, figure out some maybe other related products that might be higher ticket that I can do to make it even go and hire, right? And you just keep rinse and repeat this whole process. When you keep doing that,

12:24
Think about that question. Imagine if you’ve done that for a week or two even, right? Just on a consistent basis for a week or two. Now, when you ask that question of what do I do? Like, why aren’t people buying? You already kind of know that answer because you did all the bricks, right? So that question of like, why aren’t people buying? It’s kind of like looking at the wall or the whole house and like, why isn’t it working? But because you’re in these other questions, right? These questions that are sort of below that question, underneath that question, you’ll know why. Cause you’ll say, oh, that

12:53
that related widgets thing didn’t work or the related products thing didn’t work or the email didn’t go out or the ads, Google ads campaign that we thought was going to do this, didn’t do that. You’re going know exactly what it was that was causing. I want to bring this up real quick. I was going to save this for later, but these days, you know, people might take multiple paths to a purchase. Like they might click on a Facebook ad and then later on kick on a Google ad and then maybe find you via search before making a purchase. How do you distribute all the credit?

13:22
for all those things like you mentioned before, like what if Facebook ads aren’t converting as much for that given week, right? So how does the attribution work? So I’m gonna go in a little bit in marketing heresy. Okay. But I think honestly, I’m just a truth teller when it comes to this. And the short answer is you can’t. So stop trying. Because everybody has this multi-touch attribution question, right? But if you think back and if you Google,

13:52
If you watch videos from the 1840s, like everyone’s been asking this question for a long, long, long, long time, which implies it does not have an answer. Right. No one’s figured this thing out because it’s not able to be figured out. And the reason that it’s not able to be figured out, right. And don’t get me wrong. There was multi-touch attribution models where I could say, Oh, Facebook is first touch. They get all the credit or Facebook is last touch. So they only get the credit if they’re the last traffic source before the thing.

14:21
problem is time. so if Facebook, if I click on your ad on Monday, and then I become a lead on Wednesday from after doing a Google search and coming to your site, and then on Friday, the email closes the deal, right? Was it Facebook that caused that direct purchase? Right? It’s not, it’s the email that caused the purchase, right? Whatever that messaging was. Did Facebook have something to play in it? Absolutely.

14:48
But if Facebook’s job, and this is where you have to get brutal with your ads, if Facebook’s job was to sell me on that day, it did not do a good job, right? It didn’t do a good job. Just like if you think about it when you manage it, if you have a sales team, if you have three different salespeople, and I’ve got Facebook as a salesperson, I have Google ads as a salesperson, and I’ve got email as a salesperson, if email’s constantly closing the deal, and I’m measuring purely for revenue.

15:14
say and then and then we’ll back it up in a little bit because there is there is other place for these sales these other traffic sources but let’s pretend we’re just judging against revenue if email is closing the deal left and right do i pay facebook commission right as a salesperson would that be well i well i also talk to them that’s what would happen and as i say there’s no sales manager in the world that would pay them on that because like no you didn’t you didn’t close the sale your job was to close the sale and this is the key point if that was the job to close the sale there are campaigns and this is this is how

15:43
how we recommend you do it. You definitely need to have multiple touches, right? The whole sexy term is now omnichannel. So you wanna have different traffic sources. You need to have different touch points of different ways that somebody can come and find your store, your presence online. You have to have that, right? Email and Google ads and Facebook and Google organic and everything else that’s out there. So now that we know we need to have that, but not everything.

16:09
in reality. And I know this is hard to think about because everyone’s like, I want to get the sale, I want to get the sale. And you’re right, you want to make sure your store is making sales. But not every interaction with a customer has to be a request to buy something right this second. Sure, right? Not every interaction has to be that. So for example, if you’re doing content marketing and your sort of customer journey for your store might be, oh, we sent them to our blog, which educates them about how to get this product solved, this product, but with natural ingredients and why natural ingredients are so important. And then it’s sort of

16:39
warms them up to the idea that we’ve already done all the hard work in our product formulation. And so then they can buy the thing that they want to buy. And maybe some of them do. But that Facebook ad, its job is not really to sell the product. Its job is to get them exposed to the brand. And that’s how you judge it. And you don’t say like, yes, it might accidentally sell some at the same time. And that’s awesome. But that’s not the point of it. The point of it is to get people to be aware of whatever the product or service is. Maybe, right? Again, depends upon your customer journey.

17:07
But when you’re trying to measure the effectiveness of that though, how’s that done? Because you think about it in terms of a sales pipeline. when, whenever you’re managing a sales team and I always go back to the, managing a sales team, cause that’s my, my experience kind of in corporate world is that for sure. Managing sales teams and getting performance out of sales teams. So the way that you do that is you look at the pipeline and the pipeline is literally just what some people call sales pedal. All people will call it customer journey. It’s the same thing, right? How many phone calls are made? How many appointments are set? How many of those?

17:36
do you show up to? How many of those do you ask? How many are qualified? And how many of those buy, right? It’s just the general idea of that pipeline, of those stages of the journey. So what you do is you measure Facebook for you and you create ads for specific stages of the journey. And the reason we do this is because there’s less time involved. So it’s easier to measure. Less time has passed between the thing that we’re trying, the result we’re trying to get from that ad and them actually interacting with the ad. So for example, if I wanted to measure Facebook,

18:04
and say, okay, I want Facebook to send to a blog post to educate somebody about my content. That’s my conversion. That’s what I’m trying to get it to. And yes, some people will buy and that’s fine, but I just need people aware first, right? And to sort of mirror that with a sales management, it might be like, I got to get appointment dials. I need you to pick up the phone and set appointments. That’s what I need you to do, right? Set those appointments. And that’s what the job is. So Facebook is like, cool, set appointments. I’m going to do that. That’s all it does. Now, if somebody on that appointment says, hey, listen, I don’t need you to show up. I just want to buy your stuff right now.

18:34
awesome, right? But that’s not the point of Facebook. Facebook is to set appointments. That’s what it does. And that’s how I measure it, right? Against that. Then maybe again, Google ads are organic, whatever else, you know, gets them to, to, you know, show up to the ad or show up to the appointments, so to speak. And then email closes the deal, right? Whatever these, these things are, will measure those traffic sources against, are they doing these specific things? Now, remember, I’m not saying just Facebook is setting appointments. I’m saying this set of Facebook ads sets appointments. Then there’s another set of Facebook ads.

19:03
that can get people to come back to the store or to see a product detail page or something. You actually get them to buy. Maybe there’s another set of ads that then comes back and says, hey, listen, you didn’t buy. You had information in the checkout. So why not purchase today? Here’s a 10 % off coupon. So you can use Facebook at all these different stages, but you should also use all the traffic sources at those different stages. So let me just summarize what you just said. So you are trying to pick the shortest time frame.

19:29
because that provides the most accurate measurement. you’re breaking down each of your different campaigns into specific purposes. So that Facebook campaign for eyeballs onto your content, that’s a very quick and easy way to measure that. And so you should have metrics of conversion just for that little thing. Whereas a separate campaign will be responsible for maybe getting leads or getting conversions. Exactly Exactly right. So you’re shortening the timeframe. That’s exactly right. So it’s easier to measure, which makes it more useful because there’s less time.

19:58
Right? Exactly right. And remember, you’re not just doing Facebook to try to, you know, get, let’s say to the content pages or to become a lead. Google is also trying to do that. Organic is also trying to do that. Your, you know, email or whatever is trying to do that. You have all the other traffic sources trying to do that. But so what starts happening is you start to realize when you’re, you’re, because it’s easy to measure, you can now truly compare traffic sources and say, what’s the best at getting people to become leads? What’s the best at getting people to become aware of us in the first place? What’s the best at getting people to actually

20:26
close and purchase things or to repurchase things or to share our stuff on social media or whatever the thing is you’re trying to get done. At that point, then you can take a step back and you’ll see the entire story start to unfold of like, well actually it turns out Google organic is where they are really aware of us the most. We should keep doing SEO because that gets people to be aware, puts them in our pipeline. From there, it’s a combination of Google Ads and Facebook that really gets them to become a lead. Roughly from what we can sell for every 100 people that are becoming aware of us,

20:55
let’s say 30 % become leads, right? And then you can start to say, okay, well, then of those email, once they’re leads, email is really what’s responsible for closing the deal. So email closes 10 % of those. And now you can start to have a kind of a forecast of how your store operates. you will spell out, again, this is a little bit of practice to get there, but this is sort of the Holy grail where you can start to say, hey, next week, I’m gonna have a hundred people come into my store. Of those 30 of them are gonna add to cart of those.

21:22
10 of them are going to complete a checkout for at least 100 bucks a piece. And that’s how I’m to make X amount of dollars next week. And you’ll be able to measure against it to see if you were right. Did the store operate the way it was supposed to operate? And that’s sort of where, but you level up to that as you get these sort of beginning stages down of numbers.

21:43
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22:11
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22:41
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22:51
But at a higher level, something needs to put it all together, right? So for example, let’s say I gather all these leads super cheap for one of my campaigns, but those leads don’t convert to sales. So whose fault is it? Is it the second stage to the conversion or the types of leads that I’m getting? It could be either. It depends how, again, going, think about it, like get out of it. If you can, the best way that I have found it to answer these questions is get out of the digital world because people make up things that don’t exist in the real world, but they, for some reason,

23:19
They think they work in digital world. They never do. It has to work in the offline world too. So pulled out in the offline world and say, okay, I’ve got a sales person who’s getting a lot of appointments set, but none of these appointments are closing. Okay. Is it because the sales person is getting the appointment set saying, no, no, there’s never going to be anybody that shows up for the appointments. So don’t worry about it. You can just set it up because I get paid a quarter per appointment. Right. Meaning they’re setting up the expectation wrong. Right. Or is it, they’re just faking it. Right.

23:49
AKA bot traffic, right? There’s nothing real there, right? Or is it they’re targeting people who are totally happy to feel like appointments, love the product, just don’t have any money, so it’s targeting, right? It could be any of those, but you would test it. And that’s what you would say, yeah, okay, I’m getting a lot of appointments. I’m not moving appointments into shown appointments, right? Or sales or whatever it is. So I’m getting a lot of leads, going back to digital marketing. I’m getting a lot of leads, but I’m not getting enough of those leads to convert. It’s either.

24:17
Because those people coming in as leads are just not our target audience, but they were willing to take our free stuff, right? Or whatever the thing was that you got to become a lead for. Or there was an expectation that wasn’t matched, right? They were coming in for one thing, but not, something didn’t get fulfilled in that journey. So they didn’t naturally progress forward. And that’s, it’s going to be one of those two things. That’s what I would so what you’re trying to say here, I think, is if the data indicates that this one step is in converting, then that A step in your QIA framework,

24:47
is where you run additional tests to find out what the heck’s going on. Yeah. Cause I would say, if we don’t convert, let’s say I let’s think of opt-in, right? Just, just getting leads, right? Where I want to say an average opt-in rate is let’s say for cold traffic, 25 to 35 % of the people that come to the page should opt in for whatever the thing is, right? That’s generally speaking, what it’s going to be. If it’s less than 25%, I go back to the ad and say, is the ad setting the expectation? So when they come to that opt-in page,

25:15
they are ready to opt in or they’re at least intrigued, right? So for example, if that ad says, hey, get 10 % off during our summer sale, click here to get your coupon. And it comes to that page and that thing says, winter sale going on now, there’s a disconnect, right? And that’s gonna hurt my opt-in rates, because it did not match the expectation. So I would go back to the ad and that would change it, or I would change the landing page to make sure it better matches the ad. Because that expectation, that’s something we call the expectation engine.

25:43
at measurementmarketing.io, we’re always like, you gotta have the expectation engine. The expectation that’s set by step A has to be met by step B. And then it in turn sets the expectation for the next step. And if something’s not working, there’s just not a natural progression that you would expect to be there, it’s probably because the expectation is off somewhere and there’s a mismatch. And when you look at your customer journey through that lens, you see sometimes

26:10
laringly obvious things. And I’ll give you an example of that. We expect roughly 10 % of the people that come to one of our landers, and we’re more of a direct response model in our courses, right? So people come to the membership page and then of those, X amount go to cart. We expect 10 % of the people roughly to go from the offer page to the cart page. We expect roughly 35 % of those people to make it through and actually purchase, okay?

26:37
So 10 % and 35 % are the numbers that I judge that journey on. That’s what I expect to happen. So one day we’re making changes and, you know, thinking we’re trying to improve things as everybody should do, as good marketers would do. And we see the numbers, we measure the numbers. And again, we’re not looking at the pages, we’re just looking at, I’m looking at the numbers. And I see that there is a drop in carts, the people that were completing the cart. So it goes from, say 35 % down to, it was something really low, like 10 % of the people making it through.

27:06
which means 90 % are abandoning. Like that was really high. like, okay, this is, looked at the number instantly. I’m like, this is not what we expect. It’s certainly not how this is supposed to be working. Something’s off. So I go to the previous step. And what I see is instead of 10 % of the people that are going from the offer page to the cart page, it’s something like 30 % of the people that are going from the offer page to the cart page, but a whole lot less of those are completing the purchase, right? So I look at this and I say, okay.

27:36
There are people, so what’s happening in a customer journey, I can look at this and tell you the story just by the numbers. What’s happening is the offer page is not quite doing its job. It is sending people to the cart before they are ready to purchase. So they’re not coming to the cart to purchase. They’re coming to the cart for some other reason, because there’s just too many of them doing it. That’s above that number. So there’s too many people going to the cart. They’re coming there a little premature. And because of that, they’re not purchasing.

28:05
Obviously, because they’re not coming with the intent to purchase to the cart as you would expect. Right. So we go to the offer page. Somebody forgot to put the price on the page on the button. So, of course, that’s what was happening. People were going by now, by now, go and get started. Get started. You click on get started because you can’t figure out how much it is until you go to the cart. Then the cart says, oh, it’s, you know, 100 bucks a month, whatever. Then they go, OK. And they would loop back to the sales page to figure out, OK, now that I know how much it is, how much, you know, how do I do this? And then we instantly saw that in the numbers.

28:34
which led us to look at the offer page with that in mind. How is this offer page? It wasn’t like, how do we improve things? That wasn’t the general, we were asking a very specific question, go back to Kia now, right? We went through this process, we said, okay, if this is lower, the action is we’re gonna go to the offer page and figure out how is the offer page setting the expectations so poorly that they have to go to the cart page to find out something else that the offer page isn’t providing? What could that be? We look, oh, price.

29:03
And was a five minute fix. And then all the numbers come back in line. 10 % go to the cart. 35 % of those complete. We net out more buyers that way. And then we can predictably scale our traffic now because we know how our machinery works. I think in the example that you just gave though, the purchases is what matters. I’m, I’m guessing that the purchases weren’t affected as much by this change, right? Important. What I said at the end, exactly net net, had more purchases doing it that way.

29:31
Right. If it was the other way, you could make a use case for that. But, know, because maybe, maybe that’s the thing is like, but at that point, if I wanted to net that out, I would say, okay, well, that means the cart has to understand and be designed to operate in a way where it realizes there are two types of people coming to this car page. One, people ready to buy at whatever cost because they don’t care. Or maybe they already know the price because they’d been to the car previously. Two, people who are seeing the car for the first time because they’re trying to figure out the price.

30:00
So now the cart has to both sell again, resell, right? And collect payment. So I would design the cart differently to do that. But our cart wasn’t designed to do that. It was designed with the expectation that the, the offer page is doing its job. It’s promoting the value. People understand what the next steps are. They understand what they’re about to do. They know how much it is. They know all that stuff. And now it’s just, let’s facilitate payment and go to the checkout stage, right? Just like you would in an offline store where it’s okay, I’m ready to purchase. And I walk up.

30:29
It makes it harder to measure when you have that one page serving multiple functions to right. 100 % 100 % So Chris, I know you’ve worked with a lot of ecommerce stores. What I’m trying to get out now is what are some of the common questions that you feel like ecommerce stores should be asking? And then how do you set things up initially for like a brand new store? So I’ll give you again, I’ll give you another formula. I frameworks are important. People try to get and we’ll go into some specific specific questions too. But the tendency is

30:59
Because you can Google like, you know, questions every ecommerce store should be asking. You’ll see millions of blog posts that are like seven questions every 12 reports, every ecommerce stores. heard those by the way. Yeah, yeah. Horrible. It’s horrible. Partially because mostly because those all of that stuff was designed by somebody else to answer their questions, right? Not necessarily yours. So that’s why I’m a big believer in frameworks. You have to get your hands in the business and you have to think about your stuff, not copycat somebody else’s.

31:28
But the way to do that, you at the same time, you don’t want to be like left alone in the frigid cold to try to figure it out on your own. So the way to get from point A to point B there is you a framework. So the framework for this is very simple. You need to ask questions about what results you’re getting. And then this is the most important one. You need to then ask questions about how you’re getting those results. And that’s how you come up with your questions. And they will be very basic in the beginning. And that’s okay. So the basic question might be like, how much am I selling?

31:58
Okay, great. How many sales am I making? And then it’s how I’m making those sales. Well, X amount of people are going to the checkout and of those X amount actually make it through the checkout. Well, how are they getting to the checkout? Well, X amount of people are seeing the product detail pages or clicking at the card. Well, how are they clicking the card? X amount of people seeing product detail pages. And you start to see a story unfold that is that sales pipeline, that is that customer journey of how your store operates. And at that point, that’s where you can, you

32:26
go and look at it and say, well, based upon my store, I’m happy with this number and I’m happy with how it’s operating. Now it’s, I got to scale traffic, get more people into the store. If you’re not happy with how it’s operating and you think there’s a step that needs some help, like maybe again, the lead step or whatever you have, if it’s part of your customer journey, if less than 25 % of people are becoming leads, you might say, okay, well, I’m going to focus on that step a little bit before we start scaling out traffic, you know? And then you can move into the next thing. But it’s always led by that results and how.

32:55
framework. You gotta know what your results are. You gotta know how you’re getting those results. How does one know whether they’re doing well or not? That’s a really great question. And it’s a lot easier in you have to essentially you compare yourself to what benchmarks are from other businesses. But the e-commerce can be a little tricky though. So specifically we have there’s stores that are very kind of like a mono product where it’s like we sell rings, for example, and they have 45 different variations of rings.

33:25
but it’s just rings that they sell. And they’ve got lots of different variations of that. They’re going to have very different numbers than somebody who is like pet supplies. And they sell like three different dog collars and two different, you know, styles of dog treats and something else, because there’s more variety in those products. And so the browsing behavior is going to be different. But that said, when you, when you’re, when you’re trying to figure out what your numbers are, the first thing you will do is just measure what you’ve got, right? Figure out what you’ve got. If you

33:51
happen to have a network or group or something like that with a store that’s similar to yours, I think it’s worth benchmarking that a little bit. But benchmark everything. Don’t just say, their product detail pages were 47 % converting and mine were only 10 % because you might find there’s 47 % converts, but only 2 % of the people buy. So you have to look at the entire thing. And that’s where a lot of people don’t do that. People will come up to me and say, oh, well, was that a mastermind or was that a group?

34:18
know, such and such said their checkout, they get 80 % of the people to check out. I’m like, I’m positive they do that because it’s returning visitors are coming with a coup. There’s some reason for that because that’s way obnoxiously high, right? And it probably probably isn’t scaling because the number tells me that. So that’s me because I’ve been doing this for so long. I can just tell. But somebody else would look at their checkout doing 40 % and feel bad. Like they’re not doing a good job, but they’re doing a great job, right? And you can, and you can tweak it. So that’s why you have to look at

34:47
everything in a system. And so yes, I think it’s useful to kind of look at what other stores are. But at the end of the day, that’ll just give you an idea of everything. And to be honest, most stores don’t know all those numbers, right? So it’s kind of hard to benchmark against those. So get your own, and then sort of, I would judge it for yourself in the beginning, especially if you don’t have a group, which a lot of people may not, right? Start with where you are. I do know that there are some basic benchmarks of, you’ll say, roughly speaking, at the end of the day, you say,

35:16
1 to 3 % will close. That’s kind of where the overall is. So however that customer journey is, I would expect 1 to 3 % ish to close if it’s less than 1%. There’s something in the customer journey that’s not quite working well. And that’s where I would look at my numbers and say, okay, well, there’s not a lot people seeing product detail pages. Does that make sense for me? Maybe it does. If you have a million variations of the one thing, that’s okay. But maybe that’s something where you’re like, hmm, I need to…

35:41
Take out some these product detail pages. Maybe I don’t need all these variations. I want just 10 variations instead of 50 variations. That’ll give me more variations because there’s less to browse and get confused on, right? But you’ll see that sort of stuff in the numbers. That’s what I mean, but you have to get your hands dirty. There’s not gonna be a simple 30 second solution to create a million dollar company. That never exists. But you do have to understand the results that you’re getting and how you’re getting the results. And to your point, when you talked about earlier, like at the end of the day, what really matters is sales and you’re right.

36:09
That’s where I judge that overall conversion rate. might say, okay, if I’m getting one to 3%, it’s probably working the way I need it to. I just need to understand how it’s working, kind of what we call trust but verify, but TBV, what that process is and is it working in the way that I expect it to? And again, if it is, now I scale traffic. If it’s not, then I tweak the gears a little bit and try to adjust the pages or the ads or whatever else to get the step operating the way I want it to, then I scale traffic.

36:36
I like what you’re saying here. So with my store, I always think of each page having a single action associated with it. So for example, like a product page, I’m looking at the add to cart, right? On the home page, I’m looking at a product view, and then from add to cart, I’m looking at checkout. So what you’re saying here is try to make the conversion as tight as possible, do the measurements, and then just make the adjustments accordingly on a micro level. And the macro level should just kind of work out.

37:03
That’s exactly right. And it’s eerily scary how oftentimes it does because people question all the time, like, really? It’s you do the numbers and it happens all the time. So but that’s exactly right. Your product detail page, depending upon the format, obviously, but most cases, it’s add to cart is the next step. It cannot sell anything because you cannot give it a credit card. Right. So you click on add to cart. That’s what its job is to do. Everything that it’s there for is to get you to add to cart. At that point, your site has to get them into checkout.

37:32
And at that point, checkouts got to facilitate the process. And that’s exactly, that’s how you judge them. You don’t say, oh, my product detail pages aren’t selling anything because again, they can’t sell. They can influence for sure, but they signal that they’re doing their job by those add to cards. And to your point, it’s a lot easier to measure for that. Right. And ultimately, as you get really good at this, you can start measuring. And again, I do not, you’re not going to, no one starts here, right? But eventually just let you know what’s possible in the world of measurement. You can go to the product detail page and say, Hey,

38:02
know, your job is to get at the cards, but I’m noticing you’re not getting at the cards. What’s going on in my head? And I’m gonna use this example a lot, because this is literally what I do in my head. I treat it like a salesperson that I’m trying to coach, right? Like, okay, what exactly you telling people? Right? And I look, and I’ll, I’ll do this through measurement. And what I’ll do is on this page, I’ll look at it and it’ll tell me, well, no one’s actually looking at the images. No one’s looking at reviews. No one’s scrolling down to get into the details of the product.

38:31
That’s why add to cart’s not happening. In fact, they’re only here for about five seconds and then they leave. And I go, okay. Now I have some specific information that leads me to take very specific actions. Cause I got people coming to this page who are not ready to interact where this page is for some reason, not meeting the expectation, right? Could be the wrong product, could be the headlines off or something like that, that I might want to change. Now, if the page says, well, I got people looking at the pages, they’re…

38:57
They’re looking at the images, they’re checking out reviews, they’re spending like three minutes on reviews, they’re scrolling down, but they’re still not clicking on add to cart. Now I’m looking at the design of the page going, am I accidentally hiding this add to cart button? Oh, look, all my, and I’ve seen this on carts, all there’s like four different buttons and they’re all red and they all do different stuff, right? It’s just hard to figure out where the add to cart is. And we’re making people think too hard. So maybe we change the design a little bit because clearly they’re trying, they’re interacting with the page. They’re just not making it to the next step. So I’m going to help build that bridge again.

39:27
very completely different actions based on the same problem of add to cart’s not happening, but because you measure and you can see the behaviors that are happening on the page, you can take those different actions now. That’s why measurement is so important. So let’s take a step back here and talk about setup here. So we talked about a lot of things. So let’s even take the product page to the add to cart. Out of the box, do you need to do anything to measure the things that you might want to measure? So out of the box, you turn on your,

39:56
The way I’m gonna describe this is the measurement journey, right? It’s how we teach it over at Measure Market IO. It’s all about the measurement journey. When you first start out, and this is important, this is incredibly important. When you first start out, you don’t know anything. You don’t know the numbers. If you do know some numbers, you probably don’t trust the numbers all that much, because you’re not quite sure what anything means or how to use anything. The first job that you have is light things up, right? It’s what we call walking around in the cave. You just bounce around in the cave and you just wanna get a flashlight and get the heck out. That’s your job, light stuff up.

40:24
And if that’s where you are right now, where you don’t have analytics turned on or you have it turned on, but you haven’t opened it in a year and a half, just start getting used to it. That’s it. Start getting used to it. Light things up. After that, you will get into what we call the valley of visibility, where you start to interact with these reports a little bit. You start to see some things a little bit. And then at that point, you level up the implementation. That’s when you make it better. So at that point is where you’re going, Oh, I need to set up some goals in Google Analytics. I need to measure for clicks of add to cart.

40:53
because maybe that’s not being measured right now, right? Some platforms will automatically report something like that, some won’t. So, you know, that’s one of those things where you go, okay, now I have clicks being measured that I can see the add to cart. Cause maybe that was one of those key questions you asked, like how many people are adding, you know, clicking on add to cart, the information you need clicks on that button, but you don’t have it. So you have to raise your implementation level up and you get better at those skills. And then after that, maybe it’s, you know, average card or measuring the value of a customer over a certain period of days. And you constantly sort of,

41:23
you know, change the implementation so that it can answer the questions, the bigger questions that you will ask. If you ask a really big question in the beginning that you cannot get the answer to, it’s just because your implementation skills aren’t there yet. And that’s okay. Just leave that there for now. You’ll come back to it, but answer easier questions, because the easier questions to answer build upon that. So back to your QIA framework, what if you don’t even know what…

41:48
questions to ask, like you can’t get granular. What are some of the common ones that you’ve experienced working with the e-commerce people that you work with? So again, I’d say don’t overcomplicate it because the tendency is there is such a thing as a right question to ask and there’s not. So you start with results and how and everybody can do this. What’s an obvious one? It’s how many sales, how many transactions? Start with the basics. It really is. Like it is that simple. You start with the basics and you go.

42:12
you know, what are the results I’m looking for? It’s this, how many people are going, I want to know how that’s happening. Well, how many people go to the checkout? Okay, I need to write that down. How would I know they’re going to checkout? I wonder how many people are clicking on the add to cart button? Well, I’m not measuring that yet. Maybe I could, I don’t know how to right now, so that’s fine. I’ll put that on a someday maybe to-do list, but at least I can measure product detail views or collection page views if it’s like a Shopify site, because the URLs are all sort of structured the same way. that’s, and that’s, and you will naturally, if you just rinse and repeat that process, you will naturally get to that point. Now,

42:41
key metrics, right? That, that, cause that’s again, everybody wants to kind of shortcut it. The problem is when you give somebody the question, they just try to go out and get the answer, but they haven’t done the setup to get the answer. So they get frustrated. Cause like, I don’t know where to find that. So yes, you want to know transactions. You want to know average cart value, right? You need to, you need to know that stuff. I think it’s important to know the difference between the types of buyers that you’re targeting. That were new, it depends upon your business model, but people that are brand new to your brand.

43:10
versus the returning customers, right? And making sure like, hey, can we send another email to returning customers and just net out a whole lot more if we take care of the people who already buying from us versus going out and trying to constantly acquire new customers, right? That sort of model. So looking at that sort of stuff I think is important. But the big thing that I would suggest for everybody is that they sort of pencil out, here’s how they think their store should be working. And it’s what we call forecasting.

43:38
five pillars of sort of learning to measure market. The first one’s planning. That’s that key out process, right? Question, information, action. Then you do your build outs where you’re setting up the integrations and Google analytics or, you know, other tools like Google Tag Manager or something like that. Then you look at the reports to kind of get an idea of how things are operating. Then you start to forecast and you say, here’s how it should be working. In the beginning, everybody, there’s this huge, massive tendency that they have to be right. You do not have to be right in the beginning. In fact, I bet money you’re going to be wrong in the beginning.

44:07
that’s okay. You need to guess. And then what will happen is you’ll guess at how the store is working and you’ll be wrong. And that’s okay. Cause you’re going to have data. have information coming back saying here, well, now that you’re asking the question about how the store’s operating, here are the answers and you’re to get better at asking questions because you’re going to have now it’ll be based on real data. You’ll get better at making forecasts because it’ll be based on real information. And you’ll, and you’ll feel more like your hands are on the steering wheel finally, because you’ll, you’ll tell by the numbers how things are supposed to operate. And you can tell

44:37
what your actions are gonna be based upon the numbers coming back. It takes practice. It’s not a 30 second solution for sure. But it’s that idea of getting your hands in the business, so to speak, through the numbers that will help to guide all of those actions. Does that make sense? Yeah. So how often are you looking at your analytics? Constantly. mean, I look at it. So here’s how I do it. That’s a trite answer, I guess, like all the time.

45:01
But, but I do, I look, so I have like our marketing team. I have them look at our numbers. I look at my level every week. I will look at all of our funnels. So we track all of our different customer journeys. And I’ve got a thing that shows how many people were aware of that product. How many people engaged with that product journey? How many people actually completed the journey for however, what amount is right. But that is literally, as I’m telling you those numbers, it’s literally because I went, what are my results? How am getting my results? That’s how I came up with those, right? It’s results and how, and I do that across our

45:31
across our different product lines. Then I’ll work with my marketing team and I’ll have them go through and show me, okay, here are the traffic sources that we’re running. And then here’s what we expect. Here’s how we’re measuring this traffic source. So for example, for us, we have offsite brand awareness. So for example, you and I are doing this podcast right now. When this podcast goes live, we will send traffic to it because that makes people aware of our brand, but they’re not on our site, right? They’re on your site. So.

46:00
It’s offsite brand awareness. So we create, have campaigns that are measured by that, right? In that case, by the ad platform, right? Facebook tells us all the, they clicked on the ad to go offsite. Great. That’s how we measure it. And did that campaign do its job? It’s got to get X amount of people a week offsite brand aware. At that point, the audience then moves in through the conversation. There’s another set of ads that comes on and says, okay, now we need to get them on site brand aware, which is coming to the measurement marketing to IO pages, looking at our blog posts.

46:25
interacting with free content we have or something else, because that tells us they are engaging more with us as a brand. Now they’re onsite aware. Once they trigger that conversion, then Facebook adds Switch. And all the apps technically platform Switch, all the messages Switch. To now, it’s, OK, let’s go ahead and see if they’re interested enough in our brand to become a lead. So it might be like the free ToolWox membership or something along those lines that they’ll come through. So that’s the sort of process that

46:52
that we follow. what I’ll work with my marketing team is they will show me the numbers to show me what they’re hitting with that. And did it hit their expectations of how they thought that ad should perform looking at, you know, in our case, CPMs and, and cost per action, whatever the action is we’re trying to measure for. So that kind of gives you an example of how we’re doing it again. We’re, we’re a hundred percent more sophisticated than most people. So I don’t think you start here. We didn’t start here. When I looked at it, I might’ve looked at numbers once a week, cause that’s all I had. Didn’t have a lot of traffic. There wasn’t a whole lot of numbers to check.

47:20
Right? So you start with where you are, but, but what’ll happen, you will naturally evolve into other things. I can’t say if there’s, if there’s somebody looking for good dashboarding software, Google data studio is amazing, completely free. And we have lots of data reports that are built out to show us how our funnels perform so that our marketing people whose job it is to, you know, every day they will look at the numbers and say, okay, well, here’s what happened yesterday. Is that a blip? Cause it was just a weird traffic day or is that a new trend? there something that broke? Was there a change to the site that caused this number?

47:50
you know, if it’s not something that met expectations. And of course, if it is something that met expectations, the goal is always get more eyeballs, right? Let’s figure out how we get more people to do that. Let me ask you this, it seems like a lot some of this can be automated, right? So if there’s like a blip, for example, it seems like software would be able to detect that blip and tell you about it, right? So how much of your stuff is automated versus like you have to actually go in and look? Most of it is automated collection. So once we set up the collections, it’s automated. So

48:17
That’s automated, right? So I look at my reports, the reports are automated, they’re built. They are just there. So I have all of those, but the manual part of this is me going to the reports. And for me, I’m a little more comfortable with numbers than the average bear probably. So some of mine are spreadsheets, because I’m just comfortable in that format. But a lot of mine are dashboards that are just data studio dashboards that are literally cool little funnels that are highly graphical driven.

48:42
just show me, here’s how many people made it through and here’s what the percentages are. And they light up of red, yellow, green, if I’m hitting the mark or not at the different percentages that I want. So it’s like, going back to that journey, we talked about the offer page to the cart. Well, if we expect 10%, but it shows 30%, well, that will be lit up in red. Because it’s like, hey, pay attention to this, this is off. This is a little higher than we thought it should be. Let’s go look at that step and see if… And that’s the part that’s manual, is looking at the reports. But the actual collecting…

49:09
Once you set it up, it is automated. takes a little bit of time in the beginning, but it’s worth the investment for sure. It seems like it’s so you do this for a living. So I would imagine it takes a lot of time for someone like me who’s who has less of a smaller team. I just want to be alerted when something’s an anomaly, right? I don’t want to have to look at the report all the time. Is that that are you just used to looking at it or I, so yes. And I think

49:37
I would recommend that you get more involved with the numbers because you start to see trends and patterns that you wouldn’t otherwise see. You start to find other insights that you didn’t know to look for because you were exposed to that information. I would encourage multiple touch points with numbers, right? As opposed to, just bother me. Now, that said, it depends on the role in the company, right? As the investor in the company, if I’m in the investor role, do I need to be bugged every time a funnel isn’t performing properly? Nope, because that’s not my job.

50:06
But the marketing team sure does. They need to know all the time. So they’re in it a lot more than the investor role of these, right? So based upon the role that you have in the organization. So if your role really is like, man, I just send traffic, that’s all I do, then you just got to make sure that the traffic’s getting into the funnel, it’s going into the next step, and then it’s somebody else’s job to fix it. They are the ones that have to be in the numbers more often, right? And they would only come to you if they can’t figure it out and they can’t make it.

50:34
they can’t make it move. It’s whoever’s job it is to make the number move. That’s the person who should have seen that numbers a lot. that makes a lot of sense. So my final question for you is different platforms will report different things, right? So if I’m running Facebook ads, Facebook always tries to claim credit for sales. Yes. is there some central way that you do things to measure everything? And it really goes back to what we talked about earlier, where we have, we require specific conversions, specific objectives.

51:03
from every campaign. And those objectives are very rarely purchase. They are the micro conversions along the way that results in how. So I can tell again, if offsite brand awareness campaign for us throughout it, whether it’s Facebook or Google ads or whatever the thing is that we’re doing for paid media for that, that campaign is judged solely on offsite brand awareness clicks. How many people interact with the ad and went to the place we wanted them to go? That’s it. That’s all I care about.

51:33
Now, if it eventually comes back and says, hey, by the way, I sold 10 things. go, that’s awesome. That’s not what you’re paid for. You’re paid for offsite brand, where it clicks. What I, what I start to notice is I’ll go, Oh, and it turns out 0.005 % of those people will buy right away. Right. Now I start understanding what should happen next week. So if I have X amount of brand offsite brand, where it clicks next week by the campaigns, 0.005 % probably will also buy. Now I can start predicting out sales from that.

52:02
But again, that’s not the point. This is to get them in the pipeline because I have other ads and other marketing, which again, it doesn’t always have to be paid media. It could be email, right? We have an email that is a re-engagement campaign when people have been on list for a while, but they’re not interacting with the brand anymore. They go into re-engagement. Guess what re-engagement’s job is? Re-engagement’s job is offsite brand. So it gets them re-engaged by saying, hey, all these other people are interested in this brand. You are already kind of here. You might want to get re-engaged, right? So it also, we just measure that by clicks on those emails.

52:31
So we have a very specific way of how our machinery, what our marketing machinery is supposed to do. And because that time element, right? We’re not all, yes, the purchase is the ultimate symptom, right? The results are just the symptom of a system. That’s it. So the sales will come based upon how the machinery operates, which is why you focus so much on the machinery, not on the result. Because that machinery is what’s really important for us. So when I know, when I make a sale,

53:00
I know where that sale came from. know how it happened, whether it’s good or bad, right? Whatever that result is, I know how it happened. So I can do something about it. So I can fix it. The worst thing in the world is what I call a curse of a good offer. It’s those business owners that are out there. They’re like, I don’t care. As long as I’m making money, I’m good. That will work until the day it doesn’t. And normally that’s at a point where you scaled so high that now all of a sudden, for whatever reason, now you’re making, you you, you $50,000 day on Facebook and then Facebook just takes the money one day and doesn’t spit out results.

53:30
And then you go, whoa, what just happened? And you look around the company and everyone’s like, I don’t know, cause no one knew how anything was working. That’s a dangerous spot to be in. Cause in reality you’re in the cave. You just have no idea you’re in the cave, right? Cause you didn’t have to go look. So, you know, it’s almost like people that don’t have offers that are working or in a better spot. Cause they are more likely to really understand their numbers, but everybody should. No, that makes sense to just get a lot more granular is the key takeaway. I think from talking to you today, it’s understanding me, Sherry.

53:59
Yeah, because then you can tweak it. It’s literally putting your hands on the steering wheel versus like, I’m gonna sit in the back seat. Let me know when we’re off the road. Right. Like, well, why do that? Like, why don’t you just, you know, keep your hands on the steering wheel and it’d be better. Or again, find somebody that does. It doesn’t have to be like, cause I get it that not everybody is a numbers person, quote unquote, right? But numbers are just telling you a story of the behaviors happening within the store or on your site. That’s all it is. It’s just a story of behaviors. And you can learn to understand those behaviors and learn to read.

54:28
dashboards and reports, you can learn to read those like a storybook, like a kid’s storybook, where you sort of just understand, oh, this is the journey. This is the tale of how my customers make it through my land of e-commerce, you know, and produce this result. And you will just understand that. And it is a lot easier to do than people think because they check out and they see a number and they freak out. But just remember, the number doesn’t mean anything. It’s the behaviors that that number represents, how people are clicking on your ad to cart, how they’re interacting with your checkout system.

54:58
Right? The amount of things that are adding to the cart, all of that stuff is just behavior. It’s just a story. And if you get really good at understanding that story, you can find people who will help fill in those numbers for you. Right? You can find that stuff, but you have to be good at reading the story. And that’s just the skill just takes a little bit. see this as a process, right? Exactly. Right. It’s a journey. Yeah. You build it up a little bit over time, what you measure and, take action on. then get a little bit better because every, cause you know, would you get an initial question? What’s the next thing you do? You ask a bigger question, right?

55:27
And then you just change implementation. Exactly right. So journey. So Mercer, where can people find you if they want to learn more about this sexy topic of measure and marketing? Yeah. The sexy topic. I would, uh, so obviously, you know, shameless plug over at measurement marketing.io, we’ve got a ton of training and services, um, over there. So, and if you just go to measurement marketing.io forward slash my wife quit her job, we have a, an entire, what we call the toolbox membership.

55:56
that has weekly training videos that are free. So you get a new video each week there. And there’s a ton of tools that will help you get started. So things like how to figure out what a goal should even be that you should measure for. So they would call the ACE model. So we have that back there. There’s a whole traffic tracking toolkit. There’s a dashboard building toolkit. All that stuff is completely free. So just measure marketing to IO for slash my wife quit her job and you’ll see it all there. And for those people who just want to throw it over the wall, like you guys offer those services too, right?

56:24
We do we have different different levels of service. We have do it yourself level training where you can just kind of join the membership programs or take advantage of the free training we have back there. We’ve got done with you training for those that need a little more accountability for their teams. Like if there’s an owners like I want my marketing team trained in this. have instructors that are dedicated that will help get their company trained so they have that measurement marketing culture. And then there’s the done for you where we’ll work with some of our certified measure marketers and help you get things measured if you need it. Right. Well, awesome. Hey, really appreciate your time.

56:53
I learned, I gained a new perspective on measurement and marketing and thanks a lot for your time. Yeah. Happy to help. And thanks for having me. Yep. You made it sexy, man.

57:06
Hope you enjoyed that episode and got a lot out of it because the worst thing that you can do with your site is to draw conclusions based on incorrect data. more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 356. And once again, I want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO.

57:35
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-O-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

58:03
head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free six day meeting course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:28
to quickly grow an e-commerce business. But before I begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Now I’m super excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I use for my e-commerce store and it depend on them for over 30 % of my revenues. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who’s shopped in your store in exactly what they bought.

00:55
So let’s say want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there’s full revenue tracking on every single email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, 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,

01:22
You know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source for my 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 and e-commerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button.

01:51
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 IO slash Steve. And finally, I wanted to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience.

02:17
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.

02:31
Welcome to the My Wife Quitterjaw podcast. Today I have an extra, extra special guest on the show, Eric Strider. Actually, that’s not her real name, but that’s the name that she uses when she sells her products on Etsy. And Eric is only, I have to make sure I remember to say that, she’s only 16 years old. She is a full-time student, yet she has a side hustle that makes over a thousand dollars a month on Etsy. Now I get almost 400 emails per day.

03:00
And a large percentage of those emails that I get are actually from grown adults who claim that they can’t make any money online, that it’s impossible and that they’ll never be able to succeed. And it’s actually quite depressing sometimes for me to hear some of these stories to be quite honest, because I know for a fact that everyone has the potential and they just don’t realize it. So enter Eric. And the reason why I asked her to be on the show is because Eric has no experience running an e-commerce business prior to selling on Etsy.

03:29
She started with no audience and it’s not like she spent years building up some huge email list either. But she has a very straightforward strategy that has allowed her to make over a thousand dollars selling possum pins over at Opossum Rot Studio on Etsy. And with that, welcome to the show, Eric, how are you doing today? I’m doing fantastic, how are you? I’m good. So first of all, Eric Strider, how’d you get that name? Or how’d you come up with that name?

03:56
You know, I chose it, I think it was three years ago that I chose that name and I’ve just been going by it ever since. Okay. Strider is actually this video game that I used to play when I was little. Any correlation? I have never heard of it now. Oh, okay. Okay. So tell us about what you sell. And to me, it’s kind of random. So I’m very curious how you, you know, decided to sell possum pins of all things. Yeah. So my favorite animal is a possum and it’s been a possum for a very long time, but

04:25
Possums, they’re a very small niche, but the people in this niche are so passionate about possums, they’re almost willing to buy anything that you give to them because there’s not so much product out there for possums right now. Yeah, I mean, that’s for sure. I didn’t know, would you consider yourself one of these possum fanatics? Yeah, I’d say so. So do you buy possum products yourself in general? I have a taxidermy possum, but I don’t have

04:54
really anything else as of right now, I haven’t really found anything much. Okay. And I’m just curious because I’m a dad and I have kids that are younger than you are. What made you even want to make your own money with the business? Like, I know your mom told me that it was entirely your idea. You did all the work like she did nothing. And it’s very rare to have kids that just naturally want to do this. So what inspired you to to want to sell online?

05:19
Yeah, so I’ve been doing I’ve been selling things ever since I was so young. I first started out with a child’s entrepreneur event. And I won first place for most profitable. What’s the event? Is it nationwide or? I think it’s local, but I can’t I don’t remember the name of it. Okay. And then I, I used to have a deviantART account. And I used to take commissions on there. But

05:47
something happened with the algorithm and they moved to something called Eclipse, which was this big startup. And everybody was so mad about it because Eclipse essentially, it made smaller artists harder to find on there. So let’s back up a little bit. Let’s talk about your contest first. How did you win this event and how was it structured? It was so long ago, I can’t even remember, but I do remember that there was booths and

06:16
We had, I think it was two to three months to figure out a product. And I remember we made, I think it was chocolate covered marshmallows or something like that. And that was before that those things were even popular. Right. And so how old were you? Do you remember when you entered this contest? Ooh, I think I was like six maybe. Oh my God. So young. this, cause I want to sign up my kids for this. mean, it’s, did it, was this event, what started you off in entrepreneurship?

06:44
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, it was very fun. loved it. My thing is I really loved packaging these things and making everything look pretty. So. And then after that, man, six years old. OK, that’s really young. And so you win this contest and then you decide you want to just make some money on the side. Do you get an allowance at home? I do not. You do not. OK, so everything that you spend, do you have to earn it around the house? Can you rephrase that? don’t. Meaning how do you get your money if you didn’t have to make it?

07:15
Let’s see. Oh, so well, I started up with doing commissions, which I draw things for other people and they pay me for that. Okay. This is the DeviantArt? Yeah. How does that work? Exactly? How does that site work? So DeviantArt is a place where mainly digital artists go to show off their artwork and what they can do and

07:40
The platform is a little bit weird. There’s a lot of different people on there. And I wouldn’t say it’s the most friendly site. But essentially, I posted a Google Doc of my prices and people can contact me through there. How do they find you on DeviantArt? Is it like a search engine or? Yeah, it’s it’s pretty much a search engine. Yeah. Okay. How did you even find out about that in the first place?

08:05
So my sister actually, she has been on DeviantArt for a while and she invited me onto it when I was younger. And you’re not really allowed to go in there unless you’re 13 years or older, but it was under her supervision. I see. And then people license your art and then can they use that on their own stuff? Is that how it works? So I don’t really, so there’s a small niche of people that just really, they have their own original characters and they really like.

08:33
to see art of their own character. So I don’t really sell the license to the art, but they just buy it to see their character in my art style. Ah, interesting. And just art is something that you’ve always enjoyed since you were young? Oh, yeah. OK. And what made you actually think to sell your art? mean, usually, like for my kids, I know like they want to buy something, right? And they need their own money to do so. And that provides them the incentive. What was your incentive?

09:03
So I, in this community, there’s so many people selling commissions and I actually started off, I was really inspired by that and I just thought it would be fun. I wasn’t really thinking of it for a profit. I honestly started my sales off of what’s called points on DeviantArt and one point is one cent on DeviantArt and it’s its own little currency there. But I used to only sell my artwork for like maybe

09:32
two or three points. So I was only getting like three cents and then I started to grow and as I grew I hired my prices and then I went from points to making actual money. So the points can be redeemed for actual money is that how it works or? Yeah. Okay and then how did that lead you to Etsy and selling pins? So it’s recent news that DeviantArt is pretty aware of its

10:01
audience and they don’t like it. There’s very, there’s smaller artists on there and there’s some people who are just trolls and they really don’t like that. So what they did was they changed the algorithm completely. They changed the layout completely to something called Eclipse. And what that did was it made smaller artists very hard to come by. And with that, I was getting, I used to get maybe 200, 300 likes on my pieces. And then I got

10:32
only 10 after Eclipse hit. And that’s what it was very discouraging. I went into a very low time when that happened. And I was like, I got to move to somewhere else. I was trying Instagram, I was trying everything else, but nothing else was working. So I found Etsy would be a very good thing for me because I really love to package and stuff like that. So I that would be a good fit for me.

11:00
So Eclipse is like, guess, DeviantArt’s search engine or ranking algorithm, I guess, so to speak. Yeah, pretty much. And then just kind of overnight, you lost all of your traffic and guess your sales. OK. And then you tried, you said social media and stuff and it didn’t work, you said, right? And then you found Etsy, but still with Etsy, it’s still hard to get discovered, right? Oh, yeah, definitely. So how

11:27
How did you get, so first of all, how much are these pins? How much are you selling them for? So I’m selling them for $10 each right now. Okay, so that’s actually a lot of pins in a month that you’re selling. So how does one get traffic to an Etsy site when you have no audience and presumably you don’t have a social media following either, right? Yeah, so what I did was I went on Facebook groups and specifically for the audience that I’m looking for in this case, it was Possum’s.

11:56
So I went to some possum groups and everybody loved the pins. And at first I was only like, hey guys, what do you think about this design? I’m thinking about manufacturing it. Would anybody be interested? And there was a lot of people, probably the most attention my artwork has ever gotten in quite a while. They’re like, oh yeah, I would totally buy this, maybe even two. Let’s take a step back. So how do you search for possum groups? Do you literally just go on the search part of Facebook and type in possums?

12:26
Yeah. Okay. And then are there a lot of possum groups? There is about maybe, I’d say four really big ones with, I think it’s 20,000 people in them. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Okay. So four groups of 20,000. And so do you, are they closed groups? Do you have to apply to get in or? Yeah. Most of them you have to apply to get in. What’s the application process like?

12:50
So it’s pretty basic. They just ask you, you know, do you like possums? You know, do you agree to our group rules and just simple stuff like that to make sure you’re not a bot going in there to sell products that are unrelated. Right. So I would imagine that they get a lot of spam in there. People may be trying to sell stuff, right? Oh, yeah. OK. So you go on there and presumably you didn’t just start posting your art, did you? Or what was your strategy to kind of ingratiate yourself into the community?

13:19
So I didn’t really present myself as a advertiser because that can be a big turnoff to people. So I went in there and I was like, hey, I’m new to this group. I’m really new to Facebook. I’m a small digital artist. And I was wondering what you guys think of this art. Okay. And then you weren’t asking for anything. You were just asking for an opinion and that’s it, right? Exactly. Did you go in as a, as Eric or your, or your real name? I went in as Eric. As Eric. Okay. And then, so presumably

13:49
You didn’t use your picture either, right? So it’s just a completely different picture. Well, my picture on Facebook, so I haven’t been on Facebook at all. My mom encouraged me to go there specifically for this, but my Facebook picture was a picture of my cat. Okay. All right. So you go on this group. And so that’s your first post. Yep. Okay. And then you just posted some of your possum art drawings. Yeah. And then what happened?

14:16
And then so many people were wondering when are you going to get these manufacturers? You know, when can I buy one? And that’s when I started manufacturing. So is that technically selling on the group then or no? So I only asked for opinions. And then once these pins were actually getting manufactured, I asked permission from the group admins to be like, hey, can I give these people this link to go pre-orders?

14:47
I see and they gave you permission to do so? Yeah. Did they know how old you were or just completely anonymous pretty much? No, I actually have my Facebook. My Facebook age is higher than I actually am. Okay. All right. So they think you’re an adult essentially. Yeah. Okay. What did this strategy work for all four of the large possum groups? It did actually for a good majority of them. I posted in not only those four, but also I said I have posted in maybe 15 other groups. Oh, wow.

15:16
there that many possum groups? Yeah, there’s 30 in total. Okay. Is that all you do possums? Because I’ve seen your drawings. They’re really amazing. Is that the only animal that you do? So no, I do a very variety of things, you know, it can. It’s, don’t really have one set thing. If there’s something I like, you know, I’ll go for it. Alright, so you know that people want to buy this. Can you just give me an idea of how many people wanted to buy before you even started manufacturing?

15:45
Yeah, I think there was only like 20 or 30 comments.

15:52
Okay, on that post, okay. Yeah, on that post. But even with 20 or 30 comments, I still would make a profit from selling 20 of these pins. Right, right. Did you gather their emails or did you when you’re ready to sell? Did you just post it on the group again? how did it work? I replied to these people saying, if you want to purchase one, you can find them here. Okay, did you gather emails? Or did you just tell them where they were after the fact after you made them?

16:21
No, I didn’t gather emails, but I am thinking of doing that currently. Okay. So let’s talk about the process of even producing pins. Okay. So, you know, there’s demand. Why did you decide on pins? Number one. And then how did you get them made? So enamel pins are extremely big. They’re one of the top selling things on Etsy right now, actually. And they’re just really small. They’re nice to put on your backpack and they’re really nice accessories and they’re cheap.

16:50
They’re cheap to manufacture and they’re just really convenient. Okay. And so you knew ahead of time that you wanted to make pins? Yeah, I’ve seen, I actually have a few enamel pins myself even before I started manufacturing. Okay. And then you knew on the group, like when they were offering to buy it, did they specifically ask for pins or did you suggest that you were going to be making pins?

17:13
So I suggested that I was gonna be making pins, but they were also like, ooh, this would look good on a shirt or a mug and such like that. Oh, okay. So are you selling any merchandise outside of pins right now? Not right now. I am thinking about it for the future and I’m building up funds for that. Okay. So how does one create enamel pins? Is this sourcing the US, China or?

17:35
So I started out with mine. did not know anything about pins and I went to a middleman. I did not know it was the middleman at first, but after learning a lot more about it, there is no manufacturers here in the USA because I think I’ve heard some rumors that it’s because the same machines that make enamel pins are the same machines that make counterfeit money. they’re banned. Is that right?

18:03
Yeah, they’re in here. Interesting. So how did you even find the middleman? Actually, did you just Google or? Yeah, I use Google. And there was plenty of sites that came up and I just chose the one that was convenient for me. Okay, so can you walk me through that process? So you find something on Google, they might not be legit, right? So how did you figure out whether they were for real? So

18:29
There was this one pin manufacturer or I guess middleman now, but I found them and then I looked at their they had a pin gallery on their page. I looked at that and then I also saw they had an Instagram. So I went to their Instagram and I saw all of these pins and I was making sure these are from actual people and artists and all of it pretty much checked out. OK, and then when you’re buying it, can you buy them in like onesies twosies or do you have to buy them both?

18:59
So I believe that the minimum order quantity for this one was, I think, 50. You had to order at least 50. OK, so not a whole bunch. Not a whole lot. And then what’s the process like for just getting your design and working with the company? So you emailed them, I guess? Actually, they have this little form set up on their page. And I got to pick what type of enamel I wanted, like hard enamel or soft enamel, how big I wanted it to be.

19:28
and then I submitted my art piece to them. then once I submitted about a day or two later, they had sent me back another image file of the exact dimensions and the exact colors, because with enamel pens, there are colors that you have to choose from because those are the only enamel colors available. Oh, I see. So you had to go back into your design and then choose specific colors. Yes. Did that limit your palette like

19:56
if there’s a limited amount of colors and when you’re drawing, does that make your design look a little different then? So not too much, but it can alter the color by a little bit, not nothing extraordinary. Okay. And then is there any protections from your art when you’re submitting using this form? So you, I’m not too certain about that. You worried about that basically though, right? No, I wasn’t. Okay.

20:23
I mean, you’re the producer, Supposedly, I guess you could just continue to produce other ones if they were copied, I guess. Yeah. Okay. So how did you decide on pricing? May I ask how much you paid for that initial batch per piece or you don’t have to share it if you don’t want to. Yeah, no, that’s fine. I believe I paid about $230 for a hundred of these pins. They were one inch pins with, believe, four colors. Okay. Yeah. So two bucks a piece and then you were selling them for $10.

20:53
Yes. How did you come up with $10? So I looked at the other listings on Etsy and what other people are doing and it seems like the most reasonable price was $10. There are some that list them at 13, which I think that’s what I’ll be doing for my future pins because they’re bigger and more expensive to produce. But I thought 10 was a pretty good one for this size pin. All right. And how long did it take you to get your first batch made? So I think it was about

21:23
I think it was a month. It wasn’t that bad of a wait. A month. Okay. So walk me through this process. Did you just make one design for your first batch or did you do a variety of designs? Yeah, just for my first one. So there’s something called, I think it’s a base that they have to make and that’s what costs the most. So with these minimum order quantities, you can only have one design.

21:48
Okay, and then $230 was your initial, did you just kind of have that money lying around from DeviantArt or? Yeah, I had a bit of startup money from commissions I did a little bit ago. Okay, and so you get this and were you confident that these first how many pieces of 50 pieces would sell right off right off the bat? So I was a bit worried, but I just had some faith in it. And it’s really not too much money. It is a little bit but it’s it’s worth the risk.

22:16
Yeah, I mean, for a teenager, that’s actually a decent amount of money. Yeah. Okay, so you got them in hand. And then did you post on the Facebook group once you got in? Got them in? So I posted on Etsy first to make the listing. And then I told everybody that yes, they were available. Okay. And then people just you just drove people straight from the Facebook group over to the Etsy listing. Yep. And did you create a new thread? Or was it did you just kind of post in the existing

22:44
I replied to their comments with the link, but I also did get permission to post another post saying, I have these pins available if you’re interested. Okay. And then how quickly did they sell out? I’d say it was a little bit slow in the beginning, but it started to pick up. Okay. And then, so you sold out of that 50 in what timeframe? So I

23:10
I sold and maybe the first week, I ordered a pretty fast actually. Okay. When did you reorder? So I didn’t actually reorder just yet. I believe I have about 15 of these pins left, but I don’t think I’m going to continue this design. It’s very small. And it’s made of soft enamel, which is a cheaper.

23:36
cheaper option of enamel and they are still nice but I am currently manufacturing another possum pin.

23:46
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.

24:14
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.

24:44
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. Okay. And then did you go through the same process? You just kind of posted on the group. Do you guys like this design? Same process? Okay. That’s amazing. So people will actually tell you that you know ahead of time that they’re going to sell essentially. Yep. And have you developed kind of like a fan base at this point?

25:12
Um, so I think I have made a relationship with the people in the group. thank them for, I made a post and thanking them for all their support and how much they put into my small business. And I believe I’ve made a connection with that group. And you said you really like packaging. So are these packaged in a special way? Yeah, I, um, I have, I send out a

25:38
handwritten letter with all of them saying thank you for supporting my business and those things along that along that line. my goodness. Okay, so what’s the response been like for that? So I’ve gotten I think it’s about 18 reviews now and they’re all five stars. So I haven’t had anybody disappointed with their order. Oh, yeah, I know. But I’m just like the handwritten letter. That’s actually quite labor intensive. Yeah, I mean, I spend a lot of time on my orders and I

26:07
As a high schooler, I have a lot of time on my hands, so I think I should take advantage of it while I can. I was just about to say when I was in high school, I didn’t have any time. OK, so in terms of the manufacturing, then you mentioned that they were a middleman. Does that imply now that you’re looking for manufacturers in China? Yeah, so I actually have a manufacturer in China that I actually just put in my first payment today to make these new

26:36
possum pins. Oh, okay. And how did you find this manufacturer? So it took a lot of research, I would say I contacted about 30 people from China. I’m very wary about people from China, because not only is there commons, and, you know, you just don’t know what’s reliable, I made sure that they had everything that I needed as a business and

27:04
I also made sure that they were reliable through asking other people in these enamel pin groups what their experience was with this person. I see. Did you find these people in Alibaba or were they referrals? So actually, there is a ton of people on Facebook who are manufacturers and if you post one post asking if there’s any manufacturers, I woke up to about 20 messages. Wow. And these are people in China? Yeah. Okay.

27:34
How’s their English? It’s it’s pretty decent for the most part. Most of them. Yeah. Okay. And so you basically sorted through those 20 people that responded and you chose the one that you wanted to work with. Yeah, I am I gave them a form to fill out my game. Okay, walk me through this form. What’s on this form? So basically, I was asking them for a quote, like what

27:58
if they offer 50 % payment upfront and 50 % after some manufacturing. And then I showed them my design, how many I wanted, the length, the type of metal I wanted, how many colors there were, if I wanted one or two back pins. And I just went through all of the pricing and who seemed more reliable. Oh my goodness. Okay, so there’s a lot to this then, right? You have to know what metal you want. And so presumably you gained all that experience from that first batch, the first couple of batches that you made. Oh yeah.

28:27
The groups on Facebook help out a lot. I’ve been posting, asking so many questions and the people there are very helpful. Okay. And then how did you sort out, like what makes like one manufacturer reliable versus the other? So that was what I was struggling with upfront. I didn’t really know how to determine, but I just saw how many people had ordered from them from the past, how many pins they have manufactured.

28:56
And I was looking for a more experienced manufacturer. you get any samples made? I did not. You did not. Okay. So this first batch actually that you just placed an order for is kind of sight unseen, right? Yeah. Okay. And then how did you have to order a lot more? So for some reason, in China, there is no minimum order quantity. Like I have all of these people that have contacted me, they said there’s no minimum order quantity, but I assume

29:25
that I would still have to be paying for the base price plus the quantity price. So typically for enamel pins, there’s like a $50, $60 base price because they have to make that mold. And then the pin quantity is about like maybe three cents to a dollar. Can you give me an idea of how much it’s cheaper? How much cheaper it is going with the Chinese manufacturer versus in the US?

29:51
So with these pins that I’m manufacturing, these are hard enamel and they are 1.75 inches. And I looked and compared it to these from the USA middleman and their prices were about 400 where this one that I’m ordering from was about 180. Okay. So half the price basically. Yeah. Okay. Wow. And then there’s no minimum order quantity. In theory, you could just order 20 if you wanted. Yeah.

30:20
But you still have that base enamel price or the base pin design that you had to pay for upfront. Yeah. So the more you order, the less each one is going to cost to make. Did you negotiate price at all? I did not because this one was actually the lowest price I’ve saw and the most reliable. Okay. And then are you doing more than one design or is it just one design right now just to test the waters? So I did actually put in two designs. There is one design of the possum pin and another

30:49
that I actually had a Kickstarter up for. Oh my goodness. Okay. We have to talk about that too. Okay. But okay. So you, you placed two designs and then did you invest the same amount of money? A couple hundred bucks or? Yeah, pretty much. And that includes shipping and everything? Yeah. Okay. And what’s the turnaround time difference? So they said it would take about, let’s see, I think they said two to three weeks to manufacturer and it would ship in five days.

31:19
Right. Okay. So they’re doing air shipping basically, because he’s a small mind. Okay. That sounds right. All right. Let’s talk about this Kickstarter. So I didn’t know you could put possum pins on Kickstarter. Yeah. So this one was actually a chicken pin, a chicken pin. Okay. Is that a different Facebook group then? Actually, I didn’t use a Facebook group for this one. People on Kickstarters are very, very passionate about enamel pins and a lot of people have enamel pins up on Kickstarter. Really? Okay. So you

31:49
Walk me through this Kickstarter and how you sold. What were you trying to go for and how much money did you end up making? So I posted this Kickstarter when I was with the US middleman, so I thought it would be about $400. So I put my goal for one pin up to $400 and it made about $550, I want to say. Amazing. So why did you decide to go Kickstarter when the Facebook group was working so well?

32:19
So I looked at chickens in the Facebook groups and there was some, these people, chickens are more popular than possums. So it tends to be like there’s so many product out there for chickens already. They’re so picky about it.

32:38
Okay, so that strategy that you did with the possums did not work in the chicken Facebook groups or? Yeah, it didn’t work as well. There were some people like, yeah, I want this, but not as well as the possums groups. Okay. And so with the Kickstarter though, you kind of have to drive your own traffic, don’t you? In a way there is people that just browse Kickstarter just because, but I also did post these on my social media. I would love to have a link to this Kickstarter. Did you do a video for it as well?

33:08
I did not know. You just posted your artworks on there. Yeah. Did you have the pins in hand so you could take accurate photos of what they would look like? No, so that’s what Kickstarter is about there. You create images to represent what they will be, but Kickstarter is all about funding the projects to get them manufactured. Okay. And then how did you get the sales on Kickstarter? So I don’t really know too much, but there are people that I just

33:38
saw the income start coming in from it. So Kickstarter doesn’t actually give you the money until it’s completely funded. So everybody who is a backer on the Kickstarter, they’re safe. So if the Kickstarter failed from when I started it to the end point, they would get their money. Like they don’t actually send it to me until the Kickstarter is fully funded.

34:06
Did you promote the Kickstarter at all? Yeah, I did on my on my Instagram and such like that. Okay. Is that it? I mean, what were the different methods you use to to promote the Kickstarter campaign? So I did post in some Facebook groups, but instead of like going directly to these chicken groups, I did go to some Kickstarter groups. There are some Kickstarter groups that people really love to fund and help these small businesses make these products.

34:37
So this is a Facebook group you mean, right? Yeah. Is the strategy the same? I’d say so. I basically just put in the link and I said, hey, I’m making these pins. And that’s pretty much it. And then a link directly to the Kickstarter? Yeah. So that’s legal, I guess, in these groups, right? Because they’re Kickstarter groups? Yeah, definitely. All right. OK. So moving forward now, so you have this traffic source of Facebook groups.

35:06
What if Facebook changes their algorithm and all of a sudden, like these groups aren’t as visible? Do you have like a longer term strategy in mind? So I do not actually, I do have a not too much of a following on my Instagram, but I could use that as a backup. I am starting to try to grow my social media, but right now I just started this, this Etsy up like a month ago. So I don’t have any longterm plans as of right now. Okay.

35:35
And are there any plans to move to your own website, perhaps? I have thought about it, but Etsy is working out for me really well right now. I think that’s something I’ll do once I grow a little bit larger. Like how much money do you have to give Etsy?

35:52
And what are like the parameters? From what I understand, you actually get emails and addresses. Obviously you have to ship it to the customer, right? Yeah. So for every listing you post on Etsy, I think it’s like you have to pay 20 cents a month for your listing to be up. But other than that, can’t think of any other expenses as of right now. Okay. And then do you know if you have repeat business?

36:20
I do. I do have a few customers who have ordered from me quite a bit. Yeah. Okay. And then I imagine they really value the fact that you do a handwritten letter each time. And I imagine that’s why they come back because they love your products. And I think so on Etsy, there’s a little star by the order that says, Hey, this is a repeat customer. So I make sure to have a lot more gratitude in the note saying, Hey, thank you so much for being a repeat customer. Nice. So how do you balance all this with school?

36:51
So I’m doing online school right now and it’s pretty nice because I’m able to work while I’m in class. Like most of the time, yeah, we’re not doing much, much anything important. There is some times where I really have to pay attention like in geometry or stuff like that. But in classes that I’m in, like I’m in a graphic design class and typically I already have all my work done for that class. So let me ask you this.

37:21
Do you plan on getting a full-time job or is entrepreneurship something that you want to pursue full-time just like your mom? So I’m hoping, I’m really hoping to pursue this as a job, but I am prepared to get a full-time job if I really need to be. Okay. But you would prefer to do this? Oh yeah, most definitely. Okay. And I kind of, this is kind of funny, but I do get tons of adults that claim that they can’t make any money. They can’t make any money. So.

37:50
As a 16 year old, want you to give these adults some advice on how they can get started, how they can figure it out, how they can get customers. So I would say when I first started, I was really anxious. I really didn’t think that I could do it. And I really didn’t know how cheap it was to start up like.

38:12
I was running off of that $230 that I made and it turned into a lot more and that money that I made, put into more product. And I think the key is finding your niche, finding your people and directly coming to them and kind of displaying your way is not being so much of an advertiser, but more of like a friend. Right. I mean, you never really tried to sell anything in the group. People are just asking you, right?

38:41
for your product. That’s what you want. And would you say that you had a big advantage here because you went so niche? So I mean, would you advise that people go as niche as possible? In some cases? Yes, I think that could work. Definitely work for me. I possums, presumably you chose those because they had demand as well, right? Not to mention that you love them too. Yeah, I haven’t seen too much product. So they definitely had a bigger demand.

39:10
Okay, and then the chickens, which were larger, did you have as much success with that as the possums or? So these are just now being manufactured, but I’d say they were pretty successful given we have reached our goal and made even more off of that goal. So what are your plans moving forward? Are you going to focus more on the possum niche or do you got other animal designs coming up?

39:34
So I think I’m going to focus on enamel pins because they’re really big and people love to collect them from smaller artists. So I think I’m going to do a big variety of pins. And right now I’m thinking of for a future project, I’m thinking of doing like cryptid pins. like Mothman and all of these cryptids. know, I’m going to actually make my kids listen to this episode because it seems like you’re a go getter.

40:04
Like most people aren’t going to go through the wouldn’t think of going to trouble posting the Facebook group, asking questions and going out and finding manufacturers. What kept you going this whole time? And are you just like a naturally driven person? So I do think I am very self driven. I really like being independent with even with my schoolwork. But I think this is something that I’ve always wanted to do. You know, I go to conventions and I see these booths set up with all of these

40:34
amazing products and I’m like, I wish that was me sitting in that chair at that booth and selling my product and feeling so confident in what I do. So I think that’s really what made me want to keep going in this and someday I really do want my own booth, something like that. Did anything go wrong in this entire process? I can’t really think of anything that went necessarily wrong. I do think I also sell things like stickers and those things aren’t

41:03
so popular as the pins, I still have them on my shop. But I think it’s really just a learning experience. Okay. And then last question here is where can people find your store on Etsy? If they want to check it out. So you can search Possum Rot Studio with the uppercase O, uppercase R and uppercase S and you can just find me through there. So just to be clear, it’s

41:39
O-P-P-O-S-S-U-M-R-O-T-S-T-U-D-I-O. Opossum Rot Studio. Yeah, I think there’s only one S in possum though. Oh, is there? Okay, you would know better than me. I guess I spelled possum wrong. Yeah. But Eric, hey, thanks a lot for coming on the show. This is really inspiring. And for even the adults who are listening, I mean, the process that you laid out, especially the one key piece of advice that you gave was to find where your people live. Right? It seems obvious.

42:02
Yeah. But most people don’t think of that, right? They might build a generic social following, but you went to where your people were, which was these possum groups. And these fanatics wanted to buy your products. Yeah. And they have been so passionate with everything that I do. And presumably they’re loyal to you as well. Most definitely. Yeah. Man, great story, Eric. Thanks again. Thanks again for coming on. Thank you so much.

42:32
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now every day I have 30 and 40 year olds complain to me that it’s too hard to make money online, that they’ve tried everything under the sun or that they don’t have enough money to begin. And then here comes 16 year old Eric who simply finds out where her customers hang out and make sales run away. It’s not rocket science and this strategy can be executed by anyone. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 355. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce.

43:02
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. I also want to thank Clivia, 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.

43:29
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. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:30
So in this episode, you’ll learn how Andrew grew overlander.com to a $1 million run rate within six months. But before we 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.

00:59
It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, who is also a sponsor of the show. Are you working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined? 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? Do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories, do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies.

01:28
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, 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.

01:56
To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And then finally, I wanted to mention a brand new 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.

02:24
So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:36
Welcome to the MyWifeQuarterJob podcast. Today, I have my good buddy, Andrew Udaring, back on the show for, believe, the fifth time. Andrew is the founder of the incredible e-commerce fuel forum and community, and he is also the brainchild of ECF Capital, where he invests in e-commerce companies as well. Anyway, I haven’t had Andrew back in a while because, well, he’s been e-commerce-less for the past several years, and I started to wonder if he had any e-commerce skills left in the tank until now.

03:06
Andrew just completed a six month project where he launched overlander.com and he grew to nearly a one million dollar run rate within that time frame. And today we are going to learn how he did it. So with that, Andrew, how you doing, man? I’m doing well. Thanks for having me on, man. I like how you slipped that you know, that just little subtle dig in the intro. Game on. You know, we were just saying before we hopped on the mic, I showed weakness and gave you a couple.

03:34
compliments and a couple like confidence boosters on some of your work. And I was like, what am I doing? I’m getting preparing for like airtime here. And of course out of the gates, Steve hits first. So well played Steve. Just when I thought you had no skills left, you go and you totally redeem yourself. But no, it’s fun to be back. Thanks for having me on buddy. Yeah. So did I get the numbers right? You grew to almost a $1 million run rate within like five months. Is that right? Yeah. We launched the process. We kicked it off like first day of anything. We had no brand or, or

04:04
We just had kind of a concept, high level concept started July 1st. We launched the day before Thanksgiving, kind of came in skidding, but got it launched. And we, by the end of the year, so kind of that trailing just slightly over a month, we were just shy of that million dollar runway. So crazy. Can you explain to people what overlanding is actually? I don’t even know, but it’s right up your alley. know. Yeah. So overlanding is, I think there’s a lot of definitions about it, but I think it’s probably it’s the

04:36
vehicle-based exploration in remote or international areas is probably a way to best think about it. So if you’ve seen, there’s a lot of people who would argue over this definition that are kind of in the, you know, deep within the niche. yeah, if you’ve seen pickup trucks with like rooftop campers or rooftop tents rather, big, big, know, big tires, light bars, those kinds of stuff, those are kind of oftentimes overlanding rigs. So it’s, we have Jeeps and things that just go to, you know, rock crawling is like, if you have just a really, a very beefed up

05:05
rig that’s designed just for off-road stuff, the craziest off-road stuff you could ever encounter. That’s not really overlanding. It’s more about trying to explore kind of remote wild and international destinations with your vehicle. Would you consider your West Falia like an overlanding vehicle or no? Yeah, I think it would be it’s again, some people in the niche would maybe take issue with this. I’m going to forward this to them right after. I just come out of this whole world for six months, know, so it’s I gotta be careful.

05:32
I would say yes, just because we’ve it’s I’ve done a lot of modifications to it, you know, for off-grid living solar, you know, kind of increased improved suspension and lift ground clearance. It’s a four by four vehicle. So yeah, I would say so, although it’s probably not one of the more kind of traditional overland. I’m going to post on the overlanding forms after this. You daring claims to be the ultimate overlander.

05:55
in his Westphalia. you can also do it like you can also do it in a Subaru, right? Like, you know, or it’s more about I think it’s less about one thing overlanders love is they love geeking out on their their vehicles and their build kits almost as much maybe as traveling, sadly, myself very much guilty here. But I mean, you can you can overland in a Subaru. It’s more about, you know, getting out exploring and traveling and seeing places than building, you know, the sickest race.

06:20
So how did you come across this project? Cause it was from scratch, like you said, and then that run rates just incredible for such a short period of time. Yeah, normally I don’t end up doing kind of consulting projects. I haven’t done one, I think, since starting the business, but it was a collaboration between two people. One, Drew Sinaki, who’s a good friend of ours, who’s the CEO of Auto, anything they had wanted to get into the overlanding space. And then I went to college with a couple of good folks over in Bozeman, Clay and Rochelle Croft, and they’ve built over

06:49
the last 10 years, this really great overlanding YouTube series called Expedition Overland. And so they were partnering up to launch this. Expedition Overland was bringing the audience and also bringing the kind of the creative and the expertise and a lot of the vendor relationships. Auto Anything was going to do a lot of the logistics and the customer service and the shipping and things like that. they were joining forces and they needed somebody to…

07:17
kind of run point on getting the project off the ground. so, yeah, originally just kind of was joking with Drew about it as just kind of a joke, but then he kind of came after me hard and pitched me on it. And I thought, you know, like both these people, I like the space. I’m really tired of Steve giving me a hard time for not actually having an e-commerce project in the works for the last couple of years. I mean, just to get him off my back would probably be worth it alone. so was this considered like one gigantic influencer project kind of? No. So the, the part, I mean, the big roles for me was

07:46
My responsibility was developing the brand. what was, how were we positioned? You know, what would our, was the brand identity, know, logos, colors, unique selling propositions, voice, things like that. Picking out, you know, kind of helping define the catalog and what we were going to sell. Kicking off a private label, a series of private label products. So we ended up, we haven’t got them on the site yet, but they’re, they should be in pre-production or almost very close to that at this point. Probably, you know, about 10 different private label products, helping with kind of the marketing phases.

08:16
and marketing strategy with to kind of help the auto anything team kind of get that launched. And those were those are the big kind of silos that I was and then also the website development. So working with ended up had the chance to work with Kurt over ether cycle to build out the website. So those were kind of my five levels of responsibility. Actually, you know, the site kind of reminded me of right channel. Yeah, it’s it’s it’s you know, it’s almost like it was architected by the same person. It’s crazy.

08:43
Hey, can we talk about product sourcing real quick? how did you get so many products up? I mean, there’s a ton of products up there. How’d you get it up there in such a short period of time? Yeah. How many are there first of all? I think we ended up with like 12. It was probably 1500 to 2000 skews. Right, that’s crazy. Yeah, it is crazy. one of the, you know, we wouldn’t get into this, but.

09:07
Yeah, I mean, definitely there’s a lot of stuff on there. I’d still love to beef up in terms of the product listings and the, the, some I’m not even talking about that. I mean, just getting the sources and the suppliers for that. Yeah, it was, you know, some of it was nice because AutoBuddy thing had existing relationships with maybe half of the vendors. And then the other half we kind of had to had to go out and kind of court, which was sometimes super easy because of existing relationships with the Expedition Overland team. And sometimes it was having to call them up and pitch them and convince them. And so, yeah, but it was,

09:36
It was, uh, and it wasn’t just me doing it. was doing a lot of the vendor identification and the product selection, but then there was also people over on the auto anything team that were able to pick up the ball and run with those relationships. I how do you decide what to carry in this space? Or do you just say, Hey, we may as well carry as much as we can. No, that wasn’t so it was part of shaping like a big push. The brand was thinking about how do you, how do you stand out in this space? And the vision for it was a couple of things. One, be a place where you can go to really.

10:06
long, know, can the intermediate vision is be a place where you can go to get most of the quality items you’d want in the overlanding space. So like a backcountry.com for overlanding, because overlanding the market right now, there’s a lot of little niches like these people do storage really well, these people do bumpers really well, these people do suspension really well, but there’s no destination where you can get a lot of most of what you need from one spot. So that was a part of it. The other big part of it was to focus on quality items. From a perspective of, if I go to the site,

10:36
and I buy anything on the site, I know it’s not going to be garbage. So a pre-vetted process was a big part of the brand selling proposition. And so a lot of the stuff that we have is stuff that Expedition Overland has actually used over the last decade and really can speak to well. Like, hey, we’ve used this in, you know, super long expedition trips. We know it’s fantastic. You can count on it. And we actually put a little star, a little Expedition Overland approved badge on that stuff. surface it to the top. So.

11:03
it’s kind of an automated process. So every category you land on, the stuff that they use and like the most automatically rises to the top based on kind of a filtering algorithm in Shopify that we put in there, or Kurt put in there rather. So, and then everything else, even if it’s not though something that that team has used and maybe it’s something that I just saw, I thought looked like it was interesting and I put on, I decided we want to put on the site, it still meets a certain quality threshold. There are certain brands in the space that I’m not gonna throw under the bus, but just they’re not great. Like they’re cheap, they’re not super well designed, they’re…

11:32
They’re kind of ginsy, right? And that’s the kind of stuff that we just aren’t going to put on the site. that was the filter. Those two things were kind of the filters that we used on building out the product line. So the value prop basically is a curated set of products endorsed by, I forgot who the influencers are, but basically you’re not going to get any sort of junk if you go on there. You have that guarantee in there. Yeah. The tagline for the whole site is proven gear you can trust. Right. Nice. Nice. Okay. And then, are most of these products drop shipped or do you guys carry any inventory at all?

12:02
Yeah, combination of both definitely more drop shipping, but there are some items that the auto anything is is is stocking and shipping as well. Okay, so you keep mentioning auto anything. So auto anything is Drew Sinaki’s company. Yes. And are the resources kind of shared then like he has warehouses for certain things? Yep. Yeah. So they have a warehouse three PL that they use. And it’s a very managing kind of supply chain or fulfillment, all that kind of stuff. So yes, it’s and there’s kind of a there’s a big

12:32
there’s a kind of a split of responsibilities between what both parties do, know, Drew’s Company, Auto, anything, and Expedition Overland. But yeah, they both have kind of their roles and some of that is, you know, like marketing is overlapped. They’re both trying to help on marketing. But yeah. Can you comment on the decision whether to drop ship a certain item versus carrying inventory on a certain item versus even private labeling? You mentioned that in the beginning. Yeah. So, I’m going to private label first. So we looked at the items that the items we want to private label are ones that are

13:01
fairly universal. If you want to be able to build out your own line of suspension for vehicles, that is tough. Because, you know, even in a limited universe of overlanding vehicles, let’s say there’s only 20 vehicles there as opposed to the hundreds or thousands that exist in the automotive universe, that’s 20 vehicles over 20 years, 400 different variants potentially, maybe let’s call it 50 if the body styles don’t change as much.

13:30
But that’s just a lot of skews you have to build out in different unique products based on how things work. So compare that with like a rooftop tent that you can mount on a vehicle that maybe you have a few different configuration of mounting bars, but more or less it’s vehicle agnostic. Those are the kind of products that we try to gravitate towards on the private label side. So that was how we determined, and then just also stuff that people can use on a regular basis. And it is not insanely technical.

13:57
We didn’t want to get into suspension because suspension is insane. Like there’s no way, unless you spend a ton of time in R &D and suspension, you’re going to make something that’s going to rival what people have out there. that’s how we kind of thought for private label. private label is for more broad based items, basically. Yes, definitely. then all super less, know, that are less complex as well.

14:20
For dropship versus inventory, sometimes it would depend on the vendor. Sometimes the vendors would say, we just don’t dropship. So if you want to sell our stuff, you got to stock it. So that’s a no-brainer. just go that route. you comment on what the minimums are? these are expensive items, right? For the most part. Yeah, they are. It depends on the range. I mean, we sell cook sets that cost 30 or 40 bucks all the way up to suspension kits that cost $4,000. So yeah, they kind of run the gamut.

14:48
But in terms of how much they make you buy in terms of minimums, it usually, I mean, is it under like hundred units or? Yeah, we could definitely, there’s definitely some orders that we were able to buy for well under a hundred units, you maybe even, and the more, the higher, I found this the higher price point, the lower the minimums tend to be too. So I didn’t personally wasn’t involved with buying any, and I don’t even know if we’re buying any suspension stuff either, because again, that’s high price point.

15:16
most of the things we had to buy, most of the brands we stocked were on the lower side of that price threshold. Because I think, and I found this in my experience selling higher end electronics in the past as well, the higher price point and the more, the wider the skew base, the more likely a supplier is to let you drop ship. Because it doesn’t like, going back to the suspension thing, how would you expect any dealer to carry 50 skews at

15:44
or $3,000 a pop unless they’re enormous, you national distributor. Like that’s just a tall ask because you’re getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars just to carry one product line. either that or you specialize in a specific vehicle or something on your site, right? Exactly. Yeah. I’m just kind of curious and maybe you weren’t involved in this, but how do you know how much to carry of each thing? I mean, we’re talking like thousands of skews here. So, and each one has to be scrutinized. How do you make that initial order? Yeah. So we, you know, we definitely

16:14
again, so we’re drop shipping more stuff to begin with versus stocking. so that was that made that made it easier. But I will say a couple things. One, it helped a little bit with my industry expertise. I don’t have nearly as much as like expedition overland guys, but I’ve done it enough to have a rough idea of maybe what’s going to resonate more with the audience. So early on, it was partially guessing like saying, Hey, you know, we’re gonna, you know, order these three or four

16:40
coffee kits or mess kits. think this one probably based on my own experience of camping and overlanding has a better fit. So let’s order more of these. Part of it was I would go on amazon.com and I would see what products had the most reviews and seemed the most popular and had the highest sales rank. And that can give you a sense too of like, Hey, okay, this one’s probably going to be more popular within the line. Let’s maybe double, know, double or triple the amount that we order here versus the other ones. And then also part of it’s just guessing. Like it’s, you don’t know when you’re ordering for the first time, you’re

17:10
you’re taking a guess. And when we got to the point where we were considering some reorders, it was nice because you had a sales history, but part of it also is just taking your best guess. also, airing more towards getting data versus trying to make the most money upfront. when I was talking to our buyer, the guidance I gave was like, hey, let’s air on the side of caution early on. I would rather, even if there’s price bakes that aren’t, you

17:38
the price banks are huge, that’s one thing, but if they’re not enormous, let’s just plan on reordering again in a month and get a sense of how this is working versus placing a huge order and being stuck with a hundred of these items that we can’t sell because we were wrong. What about pricing? Are you guys kind of like on the higher end in terms of pricing or are you priced like everyone else? No, kind of. It’s reselling existing items at this point online and I think it’s hard if you have a

18:07
a really premium price, I feel like price parity, especially for for selling existing items is is kind of table stakes for for a lot of niches. And also a lot of the products that we do have minimum advertised pricing guidelines in place. So which actually is nice if you’re trying to compete on quality, having that map pricing if it’s enforced well is a good thing because then you don’t have to it’s not a race to the bottom. So usually we’re in line, I’d say with with most places. Okay.

18:34
All right, so the main value prop really is the influencer aspect of it and the curation. Yeah, main value prop is the curation, the influencer aspect, and also the guarantee. One thing we have is a 60-day trail-tested guarantee. So kind of like REI, if you’re familiar with them, they’re really good about taking stuff back. so same thing, like if you order something, it doesn’t meet your expectations. And even if you use it, you know,

19:02
we’ll take it back for 60 days. And so it’s a little bit of a risky gamut or bet rather, but the thought process that went in behind it is like from personal experience, people pour unholy amounts of money into these types of vehicles, like just insane amounts. And if you can become a source where when you buy from us that you know the stuff is gonna be good and we’ll stand behind it, you maybe you lose $500, you know, on an air compressor that

19:31
technically nothing was wrong with, but people didn’t like it. But if you can gain that trust and that trust to the end consumer, I mean, the chance for lifetime values in the, you know, 10, 20, $30,000 over the of five years is… mean, it’s people spend… I mean, it would be, I think for people not listening, Steve, I mean, what do you think a decked out, if you took a brand new Jeep and decked it out with a lot of overlanding stuff, you could spend $50,000 on the Jeep. You could easily spend…

20:01
$30,000 just on the overlanding upgrades. So you spend more on your Westphalia alone, right? Not quite, it’s, mean, it’s a, people get, it’s like a lot of things. People spend more money than you would, than you would expect.

20:21
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.

20:49
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.

21:19
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. No, yeah. So I just, just to be clear that you’re drop shipping a lot of these items and what are their guarantees? Are they 30 days? And obviously it can’t be used, right? If you return it to the manufacturer. Yeah. And to be honest, that’s, that’s a good question. And that’s not something I, that is not something that I think it varies. I think most places, they don’t have the same level of guarantee.

21:49
So there’s definitely gonna be times where we bring things back, we can’t sell them and that’s gonna be part of, to be honest, kind of, part of my role was to come in, build the concept, architect things, get it launched off the ground, get the ball just moving and then hand it off to somebody shortly after launch. I kind of stepped away about a month after the launch. Right, for the logistics. Yeah, I understand. But Auto Anything, from what I understand, had an infrastructure for some of these things already.

22:15
Yes, yeah, they did. So I think the taking the stuff back on the 60 day time period is probably, I don’t think they had that in place. And I’ve chatted with kind of the new leader over there that took the reins from me. And were talking through some options. But I think yeah, I think potentially doing kind of, you know, used gear sales one off, or contests or giveaways or you know, there’s a lot of options you can do with it. But yeah, it’s gonna, there’ll be some creativity required for some of those things coming back for sure. Okay, let’s shift gears and talk about sales.

22:43
How does one get that insane run rate in such a short period of time? So it’s I mean a big a huge part of it was Having access to auto anything’s at least from the from the beginning their email list So they’ve got you know, they’ve got an enormous email list and the hundreds of thousands and so we were able to go through and pick We were able go through and pick all of the you know vehicles that were very relevant and target those people

23:11
So there’s a lot of immediate crossover there. you just start? This is just I’m just thinking myself how I did this. Can you just start emailing as Overlander? That was so we this is something that I didn’t think through as much as we should have. What we did early on, yes, but what we did is we co branded it. So we sent it from the auto anything address and said, hey, auto anything is proud to present this new brand overlander.com. And so we did that, but it came from auto anything. But we were able to do that for two or three times.

23:41
But after that, it gets harder to do that over and over. We had to start moving more to an overlander list. And we lost a lot of those because I think we were starting to, the email team at Auto Anything was starting to talk with Klaviyo. And you can’t do that, no. So we can’t just move the email addresses over. so that was a part that kind of slowed down our growth after our initial launches because we thought we were going to have access to 100,000s of contacts. But we ended up with a much smaller list.

24:09
Why couldn’t you continue to email as auto anything? Like what were you seeing that caused you to believe that you couldn’t do that anymore? Well, I guess we could, but I mean, to really build an identity, you kind of want to have it be its own site as opposed to always piggybacking off something else. There’s also a fairly, you know, the auto anything email calendar is pretty packed. there was a bandwidth issue. So it was really nice to kind of for that initial push out of the gates, but, yeah, it was.

24:36
it was a little tricky to, it was not quite as seamless as taking all the addresses and emailing them over for the new brand. So how do you move such a large quantity of people over to a different domain? Do you have them opt in again? Yeah. And you know what, to be honest with you, that was something we were kind of in the middle of when I stepped away. I don’t, part of it was looking at, yeah, you have them opt in again or have something very clear where they say, hey, click this link or sign up.

25:04
to be able to reenter your email address or run contests. So we were kind of in the middle of trying to figure that out. We definitely had some opt-ins. We had a list we were building from the opt-in page. We had a contest that we ran when we launched it that was generating a lot of emails. We’re a good number for at least for a new site. So it was hard. We had some ways to do it, but it was, yeah, it was tricky. Yeah, I’m just trying to think. I mean, you can’t like send them to a form again, right? You’ll probably lose like the majority of your people.

25:33
You will. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s it was slower going building that dedicated list than we had hoped. Okay. Yeah, I didn’t I didn’t answer your questions. The way we were doing it or thinking about doing it, kind of a mix of both. Having people click links in an email that was very clear, like, hey, you’re signing up for this list was one having people re opt in was another one having a contest that we gave away kind of like a overlanding trip in Montana was another way. Sales, of course, were one that piggybacked off of the

26:01
emails to the larger lists. But yeah, it’s a lot harder than just, you know, kind of piggybacking off an existing list. So that was a good source of sales. mean, was that a large percentage, would you say? I would say, yeah, I would say probably, I’m just guessing here, probably not as on track with the analytics as I should have been, but I would guess probably 30 to 40 % of the sales were from email, but that’s just a guess. So kind of like on par with what a typical store gets from their email.

26:31
I think that because we had such a large list to blast from the beginning, I don’t think the typical store gets 30, 40 % from their email. If I hear somebody doing 30 to 40 % of their revenue from their email, to me, that’s an outlier. And I think the only reason we were able to do that is because we had such a large list and we were starting from zero. Do you get 30 to 40 % of your sales from email from Bumble? Yeah, actually it’s 30 for me. then think Mike, back when he was running Color, it got like 50%. Wow, well, that’s Mike and Jen.

26:59
Oh wait, did I say that out loud? I’m What was I going to ask you next? What about the influencer side? What were you most involved in actually on the project in terms of getting sales? Yeah, so it was kind of a little bit of everything on the marketing side. The influencer side was harder than I thought. It just took longer than I thought. There was a couple of people I reached out to and it just was trying What about the main influencer?

27:25
Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yeah. So they were they were great. That part was not harder than I thought. They there’s a number of things we did with them. They have an email list already and a great presence in the space. So they sent out multiple emails to their lists. They were really active on social. They promoted a contest that that I put together that was kind of like a become a team member for a day. And so I mean, they these guys have been they have a great following a lot of people follow them. And I was like, Well, how could we incentivize people to sign up?

27:54
for our contest. So was like, well, if these people could fly out to Montana and hang out with these guys for a day on a real overlanding trip, like actually join the team for a day or two, like that would be pretty sick, I think in a lot of people’s minds. Oh yeah. Okay. I was about to say, I hope the contest wasn’t to hang out with you for a little bit. No, no, no, not to hang out with me. No, that would have generated zero, zero interest. So yeah, was, so they, we put this contest together and there’s, we used gleam.io to run it. Nice. Yeah. And so like the way you, the ways you enter our

28:23
you know, visit their YouTube channel, go to Instic, check out their Instagram, sign up for, know, make a purchase, subscribe to the email list, all this kind of stuff. And so get some good traction that way. The big ones were their email list, the contest, and then social media were really the big three ways that they helped promote and launch and push the brand. I’m thinking about this more from like in the future, maybe it makes sense to partner with some influencers. Do they actually have equity in this company? They do, right? So I’m not going to speak to there just between

28:53
Okay, they definitely have a partnership where they’re they they both have a, you know, their partners in this. so I don’t feel like can speak to the other I don’t need the numbers. I was just kind of curious, like if I’m to go all out and promote with my email and all that stuff, I got better have a piece of the company is what I was thinking. They definitely have a they definitely are aligned in interest in terms of Yeah, they both share the upside. I can say that. So okay, I mean, this is actually a really interesting model then, right? If I want to launch a store, it might make sense to just go up to like,

29:21
famous influencer to say, I’ll handle all the ecom stuff. You take a piece of the company, you just help promote. It’s interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think you think about the future of ecommerce and how, you people talk a more about communities these days talk a lot more about, you know, these, you know, the big companies, three or four companies with a big stranglehold on on traffic and, and attention and eyeballs. And yeah, I mean, they’re, they’re almost like tiny little micro platforms with huge amounts of trust and authority.

29:51
Right? Yeah. So yeah, I mean, think it depends on your structure and depends on you got to make sure you have a good working relationship. And it’s always one thing that I have learned from this project, from the ECF capital deal we did from just from, you know, other things in the past, or just this last six months is that anytime you start having multiple parties come together on a business, you just need to think a lot more carefully about incentives and how people are compensated and

30:18
It just gets more complicated. You gotta give a lot more time and thought to it. But if you can set up a structure that works well for everyone and there’s a good working relationship and like people bring unique things to the table, yeah, it can work well. So yeah, maybe I’ll have Sanaki come on and talk about actually how to align those incentives. That sounds really interesting. Yeah. What would you, what were you saying? That was a struggle with other influencer marketing. Oh, it just, it just takes, you know, so there’s a lot that I was trying to do, especially on the home stretch to get this thing launched. And the, just reminded me of how

30:48
I was trying to do the influencer outreach apart from our main influencer, we just kind of similar influencers, trying to do that manually. And there was two or three people that I took a run at to try to do that. One of them kind of worked out, but it took longer than I thought. The other one we got halfway down the road and then things fell apart because they realized that some of their other sponsors weren’t happy with it. it just, it took longer than I thought and I was trying to do it manually. And so it just, was more of a, you it didn’t go as faster as.

31:16
wasn’t quite as productive as I mean, is there a more automated way of doing it? I always think of influencer and stuff is pretty manual in general. Yeah. And that’s what I was trying to think. And I know there’s some platforms where you can go and like pick, you know, pick a bunch of influencers and, and post your offer and people can bid on it and stuff. And I have no personal experience with that. And so maybe it does work really well, but I just for a small niche market like this, where you want to get good results and you want to have a personal relationship. Like I would personally rather have

31:43
three to four really strong long-term relationships with very on-point influencers in a niche, then have like 20 people tweet something, or post a couple of Instagram posts for something and then to collect $400 and then that’s the end. I just feel like that, I don’t know. You know this too. I model is pretty much dead actually. Most influencer relationships now are a little bit more long-term. Think about us, right? The sponsors for our podcasts.

32:11
Both of our sponsors are long-term prospects that like I would continue to promote Regardless, you know just because I’m a big believer of the product I mean that I think that’s just where things are are going towards No, I think so too like, you know, Clavio the sponsor even a long time sponsor of the ECF podcast and the event and stuff I mean, it’s that was something that Yeah, I mean that took a couple years to really cement that relationship and you know, they’ve been sponsors for you know Three or four years now. So it’s I don’t know when I look back at my business

32:40
career and history online, the real big wins, both both it’s not in the volume, it’s in like two or three or four really deep relationships. So yeah, no, totally. mean, Clavio, Postscript, Emerge Council on my end. mean, I’ve been with those guys for multiple years now, and I feel a tremendous amount of loyalty to these companies as well. Yeah, agreed. So I’m just curious, did the Overlander guys, did they have any contacts? I mean, I imagine they’re they know a lot of people.

33:10
Influencers also. Oh, yeah, they were they were I mean they were great and so I probably again I probably did not tap them as much as I should have on the influencer side Just again because I was trying to do do the marketing. It seems like you had like a huge broad range of responsibilities There’s a lot right? No, I mean to the point where did you have a huge staff under you or we had yeah I mean between and I was so I kind of dropped in and was coordinating with There was a lot of people in the auto anything

33:39
side that we’re doing stuff. mean, all in all, people that were working on this project that I was, yeah, I would say probably wasn’t directly managing, but they were involved. And I was trying to either work with their team leads or manage directly, probably 20 plus people at, you know, when you counted everybody. So, yeah. So you were like the glue that held everything together in a way. Is that accurate? Like the

34:04
kind of non-sticky duct tape that tried to keep everything together. So you’re like Draymond Green on the Warriors. No, no, I don’t want to be related with any kind of relation, any kind of analogies between your Warriors, man. Well, OK, let’s switch gears again a little bit. I want to know what you learned and if anyone wanted to just have some sort of partnership with an influencer and start an e-commerce store this way and kind of ramp it up. What did you have to deal with and what did you learn from this project?

34:33
So I’ll hit a lot of the kind of high level things that I learned and then we can dive into any of these more if you want. I did a whole episode maybe be kind of to link up to do that kind of goes into these. Yeah, we’ll link that up. people really want to, you know, are up for the kind of in-depth story. But I think the things I learned were, I think it’s amazing what you can get done in five months when you have to like Steve, you and I have been doing this a while. You kind of get into a cadence, you get into a rhythm and when…

34:57
you have a limited time frame to execute on something and there’s a level of like, okay, we really have to ruthlessly prioritize. We have to get this launched by this time. A lot of people are depending on it. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be decent. Like it’s amazing what you can get done. So that was cool. I think of you as a perfectionist, is that accurate? Yes. Okay. So this must have been really hard for you. was very, it was that aspect was very challenging for me. Yes. What were some of the things you dropped on the floor? The, know, looking at the site when we launched the quality of the listings.

35:25
was not where I had hoped it would be. And that has to do with a number of things that don’t just have to get into, but like you’re selling existing products. It’s really important to have some kind of informational ad, like really good, rich media, great descriptions, details about that overcome objections to people buying with this fit. How will it fit? What vehicles is it great for? And there was some of them, some of the products, especially the ones that we worked with our influencer partner on exhibition overland were really great. They had custom media photography, stuff like that.

35:55
but a lot of them were not where I’d hoped to be. we just, there’s no way we were going to do that for 2000 products in five months with coming up for the brand from scratch. So, so I was going to ask you then, so you took all of your own photography and everything, right? No. So for some of the products we did for a small section of products that were in that kind of upper echelon of recommended products, we used a lot of photography from the influencer, a lot. would say the majority of products have. Oh, that’s what I meant. It’s not the manufacturer’s photography. It, it, well on a lot of products it is. Okay.

36:24
How do you decide which ones to really focus and hone in on versus just using the manufacturer’s photos? Yeah, it’s, mean, it depends on what the kind of going back to that curated approach, the stuff that the influencer had used in the past, like those expedition endorsed product, XO endorsed products, the ones that we were, know, we knew were popular were industry staples, and that they had a lot of experience with. Those were the ones that we kind of dedicated the time.

36:55
to get photography, shoot photography, shoot videos, things like that for. Does the 80-20 rule apply here? Like, did you mostly sell those influencer products? Yeah, I would say it definitely, it helps out there. Another part, yes, I would say generally, yes. I would say this holiday season was a little bit of an anomaly too though, because we had huge supply chain issues. This is another thing I learned is like, okay, doesn’t matter if people want your product, like if you can’t sell it, like it was challenging about Black Friday, because we were putting together some of the big mailers for like Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

37:25
there’s a lot of stuff we wanted to sell that just we couldn’t because the vendors didn’t have it. So we had to go through and like rejigger the products that were on sale a couple of times. And then also there was map pricing on a lot of items too that we couldn’t undercut. So to be honest, like that Black Friday sales email was tricky for both of those reasons. So let me ask you about like being in stock and that sort of thing. Is it all tied electronically like through EDI? In a perfect world. Okay. There were

37:54
That was another part of the process too, is getting this thing launched up and running quickly. The systems were, Auto Anything has some existing systems for being able to manage what’s in stock, what’s out of stock. But we also had some stuff we had to work through, especially launching a new brand on a new platform and tying it into their systems in terms of showing stuff when it was available, when it wasn’t. So we definitely had some kind of road bumps that we had to figure out there the first week or two of launch and had to manually track things more. my goodness, for thousands of SKUs.

38:24
Yeah, there’s some challenges in there. So I’m just curious, what’s the procedure? Like you get a bunch of orders and they’re out of stock. You had to manually contact each one of those people, right? It was for the, especially for the first couple of weeks when we launched where we didn’t have as good a visibility into it as we thought and the systems weren’t kind of where we’d hoped they’d be. Yes, we did. We had someone who was a running point on customer service who was awesome. he was kind of doing a double check manually, reaching out to everyone if it was out of stock to talk.

38:53
get some better, some better stuff launched within a couple of weeks that gave better information pre purchase about how long it would take to get something, especially if it was backwarded for those first couple of weeks. The one thing too, like we talked about a million dollar run rate. It’s and it was, or almost that we didn’t quite hit it, but almost there. The other thing too is like, you’ll give it the other thing that’s nice is, you know, when you’re selling higher end products, a lot of times it’s, you if you’re selling

39:22
Selling $80,000 of Sporks, titanium Sporks, that’s one thing. You got to move a lot of product. when you’re selling $1,000 bumpers or $500 air compressors, it’s not as, when you have a higher AOV, it’s easier to hit that, which is nice. Sure. Sure, I guess. But the expectations are a lot higher also, I would imagine. That’s true. Yeah, there’s a higher threshold to purchase when you’re dropping $1,000 versus $30 for something less expensive.

39:50
So let me ask you this question. Obviously, I don’t know the entire situation here, but given that the 80-20 rule held firm and you said earlier that the majority of the products were influencer products, why did you feel like it was necessary to launch all those extra products? That’s a good question. You know, if we had gone back, that’s a good question. I think if you’re trying to position yourself as the back country of overlanding,

40:18
which was part of what we wanted to do and part of the high level vision. We actually had the guy who ended up coming up with, I worked with him on the logo concept, which is one of the things I’m most proud of, of the whole project. It’s a cool bear and it really has a cool distinct mark. He actually helped do the backcountry logo. If you’re trying to do that, you have to, and you launched with just, let’s say 50 products that have a lot of depth.

40:45
And that’s a great start, it doesn’t kind of, you don’t come out of the gates projecting what you want to project, which is the brand image of you can get a lot of a large selection of products here. Um, so I think that was a part of it. We wanted to be able to come out with a, it didn’t have to be the world’s hugest offering, but it needed to be a somewhat robust offering across all parts of the catalog. And so I think that was one of the reasons why we wanted to have a larger product line from watch. Is this kind of like right channel where you kind of sell them something and then there’s a lot of upsells and accessories that go along with it?

41:13
I would say there’s yeah, there’s some fairness in that for sure. I think the lifetime value possibilities for Overlander is much higher than with Right Channel Radios. Right Channel Radios, people would come back and buy, but if you buy a CB radio, unless you’re like a mining company in Nevada or something, the chances of you needing another one, maybe you’ll need a new one in 10 years when yours breaks, maybe you buy another Jeep. But the lifetime value on a CB radio is much less than on an Overlander. But yeah, I mean, the number of accessories, Steve.

41:42
We gotta get you a rig man, cause I know that you have been Yeah, I’m sure my wife would love if you. Well, we’ve had this like behind the scenes. for those that don’t know, I came over in my van to Steve’s house. I played a song for his wife to try on my guitar, to try in my van with her there to try to convince her. So Jen, if you were listening, I hope that that song has stuck with you. Steve is a good man. He’s a good husband. He’s a good father. You should let him have.

42:09
let him have his adventure. And the whole time Jen was probably like, uh, Andrew, could you move this van to a different neighborhood? Not, not park in front of the house. I saw your neighbors come over and they were like looking in and, actually I should have just camped out there and like, you know, start, I could have, I should have had a lot more fun embarrassing you in front of your neighbors. I don’t know what the correct term with it for this is. It might be cognitive bias, but after, I didn’t think that anyone had these vans before, but once I rode in yours and we went on that road trip,

42:39
I started seeing them all over the place. I think because I’m paying attention to it now, but they’re really popular. Yeah. I mean, well, you live in California. California is like ground zero for these types of vehicles, especially the VW kind of van. it’s the you are you’re in the epicenter of it. So you probably get more of them than most people. So we talked about email retention sourcing. Did you guys run ads and that sort of thing? Were your margins high enough to run ads? They probably would, I would imagine.

43:09
They were on some items, but long-term the ad spend.

43:16
in and of itself was not enough to be able to kind of keep the brand going. it’s at least without kind of proving out that lifetime value, I think a little bit more. yes, did short and long answer is yes, we did run ads, but we were also trying to focus on a lot of other things as well. Okay. So and then we keep talking about lifetime value. Did you already get an idea in that short time frame what that could be? No, impossible. And like in five weeks, it’s really hard to know. So I think I think that’s something that will probably play out over the course of a year or two. Just

43:45
knowing from personal experience, like, if I think about vendors, I have purchased stuff from for my rig, I have probably placed, I can think of one vendor, well, let’s say across two vendors that sell specialty items for my vehicle. mean, I’ve probably placed 20 orders with them over the course of a five year period that are probably there, you in the, you know, they’re over $10,000 for all you know, so it’s so yeah.

44:13
personal experience, I know it’s there, we just five weeks is a short time to be able to get through it. So, but I had three or four more quick lessons if we have time to go through and I’ll just again, I’ll give you a high level and then you can dive into them or not as you see fit. I think it amazed me how having good creative, how much having good creative helps with building a brand. So being able to steal the…

44:38
steals around, we’re being able to leverage the assets, the digital assets of exhibition overland that they’ve built over a decade of overlanding, landing on the website, creating the crop, the category pages, the video assets, the photography, it just brings so much depth and authority and, and to a brand that I have, I’ve never had that access to do before. So I thought that was super cool. And I think in the future, if I build a brand, I will at a minimum, invest heavily into that, that facet up front.

45:06
It kind of reminded me of that one video where you have like on right channel where you drove over and then you put this antenna on just on steroids You know what I’m talking about? Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. You know, what’s really funny. Guess who shot that video for a symposium? I have no idea. Was it the expedition overland? It was the expedition overland guys like that was like seven years ago and they were doing this and so we hired them to do that then so it’s the exact same people. Ah, okay. Makes sense. It kind of looks similar like that first front splash. Yeah, it does. So

45:36
Anyway, creative, super helpful. Outsourcing good writing is possible. Like I don’t know about you, Steve, but I’ve always struggled and been very skeptical about any time that I’ve tried to outsource writing more almost always it’s ended in tears. And this is, why did I think I could outsource good quality writing? And I actually found I didn’t find one of the team members at auto anything had had some writers that did a really good job. So that gave me hope that like, hey, it’s possible to outsource stuff and have a decent level of quality. You just sometimes have to dig through a lot of

46:05
have to dig a lot. So that was cool. Were these writers, I mean, these writers would, I would imagine be a lot more difficult to find. It’s so niche, right? Oh, yeah, it’s super niche. But okay, no, one of them. One of them traveled like was overlanded in Botswana and knew knew about overlanding was a great writer and had a, you know, tied in like historical quotes and did a great job. So I thought that was cool. And then finally, this is my last one. And then I’ll kind of turn it back to you. But I think

46:32
anytime, Steve, you’ve done this too, like, I’ve probably been responsible for, I would guess at this point, seven or eight major either site redesigns or migrations in my career. And every time you get to this point, we’re like, you, you get close to launch either your launch deadline, or you’re at a point where like, you’re getting past it. And you have to decide, like, should we push this live? Or should we make it a little bit better, a little bit better. And I think like you every it always, you always

47:01
always makes sense to launch just a little bit earlier than you think. Because if you wait until you feel ready, you’re going to push it out, you know, three, four, five, six, seven, eight weeks takes longer. And it’s obviously you don’t want to put something crappy out into the world. But you learn so much from getting it live. That’s just the start, you can start marketing it, you learn a lot of it’s a great way to start testing and tweaking some of the small bugs. And if you wait until it’s ready completely, it’s just, you know, your timeline is just going to get stretched so much further out. And I have found to

47:29
A lot of times I’ll have a punch list of post-launch fixes. I realize once the site gets live, I often don’t go back and actually fix a lot of them because in ultimately they’re not that important. So I don’t know if you found this too, but I think launching as soon as you meaningfully can and start marketing and interacting with customers like err on the side of launching a little early versus a little late. Yeah, it’s funny. We have kind of opposite personalities. You’re more of a perfectionist than I am. I’m all about just launching. Maybe it’s because we’re

47:59
I was in engineering and you just launched something and then you fix it. So that’s always been my mentality. Like for example, this course that I launched with Tony a year ago, we launched, I wanted to launch with nothing. And she’s like, no, no, no, no, wait, let’s at least get a couple of modules in there. And I was like, no, let’s just do it. And so we compromised and we launched with just a couple of modules. Oh, that’s see. Yeah. We are very different personalities. I am much more like everything buttoned up. Let’s make sure like it’s good. Like I, so that was, you alluded to this earlier, but that was

48:28
It was a good thing for me because I think I tend to err on the side of perfectionism, which is good if you’re a watchmaker. It’s probably not great if you’re trying to launch a project with 20 people. I think as an engineer, you expect to launch with bugs always. So as long as it’s working. But you’re like your background is like in chip engineering. Like if you have make a little error in one of those chips, doesn’t it hose everything up? Like you kind of have to be a perfectionist. Is that why you’re not in the chip space anymore?

48:57
Actually, the real question, Andrew, is why you aren’t still working at Overlander and why the contract was such a short one. Drew and I, we were talking about it afterwards. was like, yeah, you know, it was just a safer way of proposing it. And we didn’t give, we wouldn’t want to give Andrew any equity, you know, because weren’t sure it was going to be a long-term thing. Andrew goes up to one for about two seconds and strikes back.

49:20
I just pulled that one out of my butt too. Well, you know, I think you did a great job. The site looks amazing. Actually, it’s like right channel on steroids, I want to say just because all the videos and everything that you had on there. well, thanks. Big shout out to Kurt and Paul over EtherCycle for designing it and putting a lot of work into that. also for just again, it’s mostly the creative assets from Clay and Rachelle and the team over at Exhibition Overland. if I mean, if that’s what I think.

49:49
gives us that, like I was talking about earlier, it just makes such a huge, huge difference versus trying to have to, you know, not have those professional assets. So thank you, I appreciate it. But I mean, it’s those two teams that are responsible for almost all of it. I did want to ask you this one question. And I was kind of curious about the entire time. Like, what made you take this project? Because you have all these successful businesses. And this one wasn’t for any equity. It wasn’t a long term contract. Like, what made this project attractive for you?

50:18
Yeah, I’ve been asked that a lot of times. So it was it was not for the money. And especially, you know, after the fact, I it was just the answer. The big big question or the big answer is like two, threefold. One, I liked the people involved known and you know, been great friends with Drew for a long time. I wanted to I thought growth was the biggest growth and learning were the biggest reasons.

50:44
I wanted to, I’ve never done something like this with this big of a team. I wanted to see how I could do, how I liked it, how I could grow, what I could learn. I liked the space. I also wanted to see what it was like launching a brand in a space that I really am passionate about deeply. know, and so it’s, know, CB radios and Trilling Motors had zero interest. I was very much a mercenary in those niches. I was like, is there opportunity here? Yes, let’s sell them. Great. And this is very different. So I want to see how that, you know, how I liked, how that changed things.

51:12
Can I ask you a question real quick before you go on? How much was the passion part of it really important? Because I’m not passionate about my products. And did it add a completely different dimension to this? You know what’s interesting is for the first couple weeks it was cool and after that it became just like any other project. And I don’t say that in a way to disparage the project at all. it did help, I will say this, it did help with the learning curve quite a bit. when I’m thinking about products and do we, is this a good fit for the site? Is it not?

51:39
that was much more evident to me. Whereas when I was like launching, you know, CB radio, I was like, I don’t even know what this thing does. Is this thing great? I just, the learning curve was much steeper. But that being said, once you kind of get into the weeds of it, the fact that you’re selling, you know, cool overlanding gear when stuff gets hard, doesn’t really make a difference. You know, it’s still, it’s, so it helped in the first early couple of weeks with the learning curve, but, long, I would say it made less of a difference than I thought.

52:09
Yeah, I thought you would have done it for like some free gear. I can picture your West Folly now with like big tires and like a camper on top of it or something. I don’t know. Yeah, I mean, it’s I’m sure I haven’t actually it’s funny. I haven’t really ordered anything meaningful from the site. I’m sure I will in the future and definitely have some discounts there, which is nice. But but mostly it’s about growth, you know, learning, getting in, you know, like you said, like you said earlier, you’re giving me a hard time about not having an e-commerce project for a while. And it’s true. And a big part of that is been focused on, you know,

52:39
running the community and some of ECF capital stuff, which you can’t do everything well. ultimately I have to, sometimes you gotta decide not to do things. It’s hard to do everything well, but I also did wanna get my hands dirty again with e-commerce from a growth perspective. And also I like the people involved. So the other thing too is like ECF live, we didn’t have an ECF live this year. So I had a little more bandwidth to play with. So yeah, it was kind of all of those reasons. The short answer is growth, trying to learn to grow and be able to get better.

53:07
The short answer is you did this so I couldn’t make fun of you anymore. Well, like I said earlier, that’s a big one. Although I don’t lay awake at night too much about all your jabs, Steve. mean, occasionally, but not too often. Hey, so cool. I’m going to link up. I know you have like a series on this, uh, on your podcast too. So if anyone’s interested in learning more about, guess, the psychological and the more in-depth nuts and bolts of this, uh, I will link up, uh, your episodes that you.

53:36
put out on Overlander. Cool. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. And we should, we’ll have to do another van trip at some point. That was for people who don’t know, did a, Steve came out to Montana and we did a, I don’t know, was it three day, four day kind of like exploratory van trip around Yellowstone and the area there and visited some very, some beautiful high altitude kind of sand golf courses, which was really nice. was, uh, was, it was we’ll have to do that again.

54:04
Definitely, definitely. Well, hey, thanks for coming on and sharing your experiences and congratulations on no longer being e-commerce-less. Thanks, Steve. I appreciate it. All right. Take care.

54:19
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now if you’re a seven or eight figure e-commerce store owner, you should check out e-commerce fuel, the bedded community for experienced store owners. It’s a great community and you can get fast, knowledgeable answers to your most pressing business questions. So go to ecommercefuel.com to learn more. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecoupterjob.com slash episode 354. And once again, I wanna thank Clabio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign.

54:48
Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. 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 button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is 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-C-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

55:19
Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away. Thanks for listening.