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

00:51
Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers, depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there’s full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your customer contact list.

01:17
And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source for my e-commerce store. And I couldn’t have done it without postscript.io, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce stores and e-commerce is their only focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button.

01:45
Not only that, but it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P O S T S C R I P T dot I O slash Steve. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast, which I released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

18:45
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

19:13
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

50:26
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now conversion optimization is one of the best ways to grow your sales because it affects every aspect of your marketing. For more information about this episode, go to mywebclearjob.com slash episode 379. And once again, I’m going to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash dv.

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

51:22
And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:27
Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for ecommerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for ecommerce and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19:10
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

19:38
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

52:31
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

52:59
Now I talk about how to these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequaterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

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

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

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

01:56
to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there’s full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your customer contact list. And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing.

02:23
SMS, or text message marketing, is already a top five revenue source from my ecommerce store, and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider. And why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in ecommerce stores, and ecommerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too, and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers.

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

03:21
Now on to the show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

28:52
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.

29:21
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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

54:05
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now I sincerely believe that selling on Amazon and more so selling on your own website is still a great opportunity and the current challenges we are facing with inventory are being felt by everyone worldwide right now. But there’s a ton of demand and e-commerce is the future. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 375. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base.

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

55:02
Once again, that’s mywifecoderjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

23:03
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

23:32
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

51:01
Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifecoderjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Once again, that’s mywifecoderjob.com slash KLAVIYO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

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

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

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

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

01:56
and you can try them for free over at claviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list, and this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS, or text message marketing, is already a top five revenue source for my e-commerce store, and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider.

02:24
Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce stores and e-commerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

08:06
emphasize the new one a little bit more since that’s not the one that’s been out there in the information environment. And then talk about any implications of all of that for your listeners. Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s do it. So what are the seven persuasive principles? The first is the principle of reciprocation that says people want to give back to those who have first given to them.

08:35
You know, in every human culture, this rule applies. So if we’ve got customers or clients or even prospects who were not raised in this particular culture, don’t worry. The principle of reciprocity applies in every human society. We are trained from childhood in the rule that you must not take without giving in return. And so what we find is that

09:04
people say yes to those they owe. There’s a very interesting implication of that. It says that, you know, the traditional business model in which we say to others, look, if you will do this first, if you will buy our product, if you will sign our contract, if you will agree to this particular exchange between us,

09:34
We promise we will give back to you everything you expect and more. That’s how we move people by providing this in return. Well, what the rule of reciprocity says is no, there’s another route in which we go first. We give something, we make the first move, and then people feel grateful if we’ve given them benefit and advantages.

10:03
information that’s valuable to them, or they feel obligated to give back to us in return. And so the implication is we, before we try to influence others, we should give them something, some benefit. And online, seems to me that’s information is most easily done and most costlessly done by providing

10:31
a white paper or some kind of a piece of information like the top three mistakes to avoid in this particular arena that we’re talking about today or the top five most effective things to say in a difficult conversation, something like that that gives them a way to increase their outcomes by this rule.

11:00
they need to increase our outcomes consequently. So I think it has a place in online platforms. I’m glad you started with this one, because out of all the seven, this was the actual one that had the most impact on me. And to me, it’s actually counterintuitive. My whole business, my wife quit her job is based on this premise of giving away all this information for free, like all the good stuff. And people

11:30
I get emails every day, people are indebted to me for this information that I’m giving and there’s a small subset of them will just buy anything that I have to sell. So this I would argue is one of the most important ones, at least to me in the online world. You know, there’s one additional optimizer of it and that is if we can segment our market so that what we are giving to our recipients

11:55
is something that is especially relevant to their particular challenges, their particular preferences, their particular needs and so on. That, that supersizes the effect, right? Yeah. In the e-commerce world, can you think of any examples of this? Yeah. So for example, there are organizations,

12:22
that sell, let’s say retail online clothing. And what I’ve seen or even in hotel spaces where there you reserve rooms or air flights and so on, so on. I’ve seen them say, now here is the best options for people with twins, right? Or, know, or

12:52
for people in the early 20s, this is the best thing for, there’s a culture online that will do hotel reservations. And they’ll say, are, this is the best for a romantic weekend. Here’s the best information we can provide you for a business stay. Here’s the best information we can provide you for.

13:19
a family vacation and so on. Oh, well now people feel even more grateful for that piece of benefit that they’ve been afforded. Yeah. So again, it’s the information angle even applies to e-commerce. Right. Yeah. And certainly we can give away free samples of what we offer because that causes people to feel, these, these people want us to really

13:49
try their product without having to incur a cost. That actually always gets me like, oh, so even even our interaction, there’s one thing that you did and you probably realize it, but when you sent me your book, you wrote a small note and that note actually meant everything to me. And I feel like I, I I’m going to do everything that I can to help you out as a result of that. mean, I don’t know if that was intentional, but that was the, that was the effect it had on me.

14:18
Well, I’m glad to hear that, but I’ll give you a piece of evidence that again seems counterintuitive, but really makes the point. There was a study done in a fast food restaurant where for a week when customers came in, a third of them were simply greeted warmly by the manager. And then they went to the counter to order food.

14:47
Another third was given a gift, a very nice little key ring, right? Expensive key ring. That caused those people to buy 12 % more food if they received a key ring before they started to order. That’s just the principle of reciprocity, right? You give back to those who have given to you, but the key was another set of people were given a small cup of yogurt.

15:19
Any economist would say, what? You’re giving people food. Now they’re going to be less hungry. They’re going to be less interested in buying a lot of your food. Those people bought 24 % more food at the counter. Why? Because they got a gift that was personalized to their needs. Why do you go to a restaurant? Because you’re hungry. Somebody gives you free food.

15:48
Now you feel especially grateful to that person for understanding your situation and trying to meet your challenge. So that’s the issue. mean, we need to be sure that we recognize what the challenges are of our potential buyers and be sure that we

16:17
offer them something that’s relevant to those challenges. I know in the example of your latest version, you had an example of McDonald’s giving a balloon out. Is this similar? It’s similar, except that this is about the earlier thing we said about reciprocity is that you have to go first. So in this study, this was done actually in South America, Brazil and Colombia. When

16:45
families came into the McDonald’s, the families in all cases were given a balloon for each child. Half of them were given the balloon as they left each child as a nice thank you for their patronage. The other half were given a balloon as the family came in. Those families bought 45, excuse me.

17:13
25 % more food. It’s amazing. Now here’s the key that I love about this. If you look into the data, that 25 % increase also showed a 20 % increase in coffee orders. The kids weren’t ordering coffee. The parents were ordering coffee. But the key here is

17:42
You do something for my child. You’ve done a personal favor for me. And I’m gonna repay it. So what’s funny is we’ve been experimenting with giving away a free handkerchief with every order, just giving it to them. We put it behind like a text message paywall right now where you have to give a number to get it, but that’s actually been working out really well. I haven’t run the stats. I am curious if it’s increased average order value though, now that we’re talking about it.

18:11
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Oh, I know we got seven to go through. maybe we should just go through them and then revisit. Yeah. I want to focus on the unity one also. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the next principle of course is liking. Nobody be surprised that we prefer to say yes to those we like, but there are two small things we can do to increase the power of the liking rule by getting people to feel a rapport with us.

18:41
One is to locate genuine similarities that exist between us because we like those who are like us. The other is to give genuine compliments to those individuals because we like those who do like us and say so, right? So those two things, if they are offered in an exchange, increase liking.

19:10
and people want to do business with those they like. Next principle would be the principle of social proof. When people are uncertain, they don’t look inside themselves for answers. They look outside.

19:26
and one place they look is to those around them like them. If a lot of people like us are raving about a new restaurant or a new piece of software, new film, whatever it is, that reduces our uncertainty that this is the right thing for us to do. So if we can give people honest evidence of

19:55
movement in our direction, or if a lot of people have given us positive ratings on the internet and so on, we’ll be much more likely to get them to move in our direction, reduce their uncertainty, get them off the fence where they’re diddling around and hesitating, well, should I go or should I get more information? As soon as they hear that a lot of other people have done this,

20:23
those people have beta tested the choice for them and they will then say, okay, I can reduce my uncertainty. I can go ahead and move in that direction. And now the most recent research that my team has done along with some, team at Stanford University is to show, if we can show trends in our direction, it doesn’t have to be just a lot of people who are doing it. Even if we still don’t have

20:53
a majority, even if we’re a startup, we don’t have a lot of market share and so on. If we can show a trend to that place where we are now, even if it’s a minority, that causes a new form of social proof, future social proof, because people project that trend into the future. So that was actually one of my questions. So if you don’t have any social

21:22
If you don’t have enough customers, you can just talk about the trends. And I know in the book you mentioned a subtlety when you’re mentioning trends, which I’ll let you get into right now. Yeah. It’s when you, when you mentioned the trend, you should have three data points. So you should be able to say to people, not just a lot of people are doing this or, or more people are buying our

21:52
this model, you should say more and more people are doing so. That gives people three data points. More says two data points, start here, now we’re up to more. If you say more and more, now you’ve got three data points and that’s a trend.

22:18
And if you have actual numbers, presumably that works better, right? If you have three data points. Absolutely. Okay. You can characterize those numbers by saying greater and greater, better and better, more and more and so on. Are there any other ways that you can increase your social proof if you don’t have like a whole bunch of testimonials and customers? You can use testimonials that you do have and put them

22:48
at the top of your messaging so that that evidence infuses everything you are about to say even before you’re going to say it. You’ve got buy-in from people around you. And the key to making that buy-in optimized is that those should be comparable others.

23:18
to your market. They should be people who others can see as like them.

23:29
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now, what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

23:57
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

24:27
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show.

24:38
And okay, so you have to have knowledge, I guess, of who your target customer is, and then you want to select testimonials. Again, that kind of leads into the principle of unity, right? Does that kind of bleed into that? It does. Right. But we’ll get to that. get to that. I also wanted to highlight one of these studies, which I found fascinating with the McFlurries and McDonald’s. If you want to elaborate on that and how that can be applied to e-commerce as well, that’d be great. Yeah. So

25:07
There was a study, again, in those South American McDonald’s that my colleague Steve J. Martin led. And why is it always South American? I’m just kind of curious. Well, he had a he had a contract from the the marketing of the South American McDonald’s franchise. OK.

25:32
And so they had a lot of McDonald’s locations and they were willing to do some behavioral science research to see how they could increase in this case, the willingness of their customers to buy desserts. Most people at McDonald’s don’t buy a dessert until Steve asked the people behind the counter to say at the end of the order,

26:02
Would you like to try a McFlurry? It’s our most popular dessert. And McFlurry orders went up 45%. So does that imply then that in an e-commerce store, we should just highlight these products and just mention it’s like a best seller? We would be fools of the influence process if we didn’t point to what is already most popular.

26:31
That’s a cue people use to stop getting information and act. Okay, this is the most popular. So you can say, this is the most popular product. This is our most popular feature. This is our most popular payment plan. Whatever we have, you can just point to it and it produces these big effects, costlessly and ethically.

27:00
because you’re not fabricating anything, you’re not counterfeiting any of this information, you’re pointing to something that people use to reduce their uncertainty and act. We kind of glossed over the liking, but this just kind of came to my head, so I wanted to bring it up. When it comes to getting customers to like you, would you recommend just like posting videos of yourself to allow your customers to get to know you as a person? Does that increase your likeability?

27:30
There’s research that shows that. Here’s another piece of research that shows that what you can do online, there’s research to show that having a welcoming letter significantly increases liking and purchases. A welcoming letter is like what you do to somebody who comes to your door, a visitor, come on in, glad that you’re here. Let me show you around.

28:00
Right. You know, there’s an example from my store. I just want to mention. the first email after someone makes a purchase is in fact a thank you letter. It’s written in a very personalized way. We want to thank you for your first purchase from us. Just want to let you know that we’re a small business and we’ll do whatever it takes for you to be happy. And we get, it’s an automated message, but it gets tons of replies. I would take that message and move it at the, to everybody who goes to your

28:29
site before they bought. We’re a small business. We’re very committed to customer service. We’re glad that you’re here. Let me show you around, essentially. It increases conversion significantly. You know, what’s funny is a lot of the students in my class are afraid to put their pictures and be personal on their sites. I encourage it. But if it’s coming from your mouth, that has a lot more authority.

28:59
Well, you know, there’s another place. There’s always an about us section in our on our websites. And when we go there, what we see is the professional backgrounds of people along with a picture. Usually, we should also include personal aspects so people can see connections between ourselves and them.

29:28
So you would include that you’re a Packers fan, for example? I’m a Packers fan. I’m the oldest child. I’m a former baseball player. It’s in high school. All those kinds of things. Yeah. Should we actually just talk about Unity next, since we’ve alluded to it? Yeah, let’s talk about Unity. This is the latest one. And for all of you listening, you probably haven’t heard of this one because it’s brand new to this book.

29:58
This is the one that says that people say yes to those communicators who can convince them that they share an identity, that they are members of the same we group, the kinds of groups that people use the pronoun we to describe. So it would be if

30:26
If I could, if you can convince me to say, know, Steve is like us, that’s good. That’s good. That’s you’ve got the liking principle working for you there, right? We like people who are like us. But if you could convince me to say, Steve is one of us, that’s an entirely different level of willingness to promote

30:56
favor and follow you, Steve. So you mentioned that I’m a Green Bay Packer fan. I grew up in Wisconsin. And a few months ago, I saw an article that described the favorite NFL teams of celebrities. And I learned that Lil Wayne,

31:27
And.

31:31
Timberlake, what’s name? Justin Timberlake. Justin Timberlake are avid Packer fans. Steve, I immediately thought better of their music. And I wanted them to be more successful. Inside the boundaries of we, people say yes to us. If we can arrange for them

32:00
to honestly see us as sharing one of those identities, one of those category memberships, here’s what the research shows. They believe us more. They wanna cooperate with us more. They’re more persuaded by us and they’re more willing to comply with our requests. They trust us more besides. I know that works for me. When I see Asian American film artists

32:29
I’m much more likely to support them and like them because they’re Asian Americans. One thing I wanted to ask you though, is does this work in reverse also? Like if I’m not a Packers fan and you find that out, will that make you dislike me? Not unless there’s an intense rivalry between the Packers and so, yeah. where you, so what I always say is do your homework first, go on.

32:59
LinkedIn, go on Facebook, people are telling us about themselves, all kinds of things about ourselves. When you find one of those connections, then go there. Don’t go to one that isn’t a connection or even maybe a negative one. When you find one of those connections, oh, really, you’re a runner? I’m a runner. You’re an only child? I’m an only child. When you find those things, go there.

33:28
It creates this sense of we-ness and everything becomes easier for the influence process.

33:37
in an online world where you’re not actually having physical conversations and you list some of these things, let’s say on your about page, could that possibly have a negative effect and turn away certain people? It’s conceivable if there’s a rivalry, that’s much more, that’s, much more rare than a connection that people will see. Right. Okay. That makes sense. That makes sense. So how can

34:03
What are some other ways that we can apply? I know you have lots of case studies. Do you wanna just highlight some of your favorite ones in terms of how unity has changed behavior? Yeah. Let me give you two. The first one is sort of about not just business relationships, but personal relationships, especially romantic relationships. And then I’ll provide an example of how that applies to a business relationship.

34:31
but it has to do with a lovely study that was done in Texas where researchers brought couples, romantic couples into an experiment. They had been together for at least two years. And they asked these folks, is there a problem in your relationship, some disagreement that you have that you just haven’t been able to resolve overall this time? And it continues to aggravate

35:01
each of you that you’re at loggerheads on this thing. And they said, what we would like you to do, and they flipped a coin and they said, one of you, we’d like you to be the persuader and try to persuade your partner to move in your direction, right? So come up with one of these problems, the two of you, and then one of you is gonna try to convince the other one.

35:29
And then the researchers left the room. Well, they didn’t really leave the room. They had cameras going and tape recorders running. So they knew what was going on. And they found three kinds of persuaders. One type they called the coercive persuader. They would say to their partner, look, we’ve been at this problem for years and

35:57
You won’t move in my direction. And you know what? If you won’t move now, I’m going to have to do something you won’t like. You’ll be sorry. Right. Not only did that fail to move the partner, it caused the partner to move even further away. Right. Trying to be coercive. a stutter to tell that. That tactic never works. Or never. Yeah. There was a second kind of persuader that the researchers called the rational

36:27
approach, who took the rational approach, they would say, look, if you’ll simply examine the situation more deeply, you’ll see that my position is the more rational, reasonable one. Now that didn’t produce polarization. It just produced laughter. And they, the partner just dismissed that and no change at all.

36:54
but there was a small group of people who hit on a strategy that was costless and the only one that made a difference in causing change in their direction. They would say, you know, we’ve been together now for two years as a couple. I really appreciate it. If you’d move in my direction on this one, I can see how that’s more effective, but I’m curious what the science is behind that.

37:23
The science is they now brought to consciousness the we nature of the couple, of the relationship. And now all the things I mentioned earlier that research shows occur in we relationships, more trust, more cooperation, more persuasion, more compliance with requests.

37:52
all of those now apply to the situation. These people were brilliant. They wouldn’t sit still for the cognitive set that the researchers gave them. Think about a difference between you. Think about something that you can’t agree. In other words, something separate that separates you. These people said,

38:21
maybe there is this thing, but we’ve been together for two years as a couple. And they brought unity to mind, togetherness to mind. And in that category that is now prominent in consciousness, people said, of course, yes, I will. By the way, there was a second strategy that

38:49
some others use that had the same effect for the same reason. They just simply use the pronouns, we, our, and us in making their case for a change. And that was enough. Again, bringing to consciousness the idea of unity. You know what’s funny? As you’re telling me all these things, I’m just picturing your mind because you and your wife are a husband, wife team and me and my wife are husband, wife team.

39:19
I guess the difference is that your wife knows all these principles. So I can just imagine you two going with each other going, honey, we’ve been together for so many years. And I’m just between you and your wife, I’m wondering how it works out. Well, she’ll catch me on this, here’s the, here’s, she is also recognizing, I’m saying that I’m telling her the truth. What I’m saying is let’s get away from this. Let’s get away from this difference here or

39:49
have a context for it, which is the great majority of the space around us is togetherness defined. Now, here’s the other thing that she knows from this research that I described to you. By the rule of reciprocation, what these researchers found was that when the partner moved in the direction of the persuader,

40:16
persuader then moved in the direction of the partner too. And they met in the middle. So you get the rule of reciprocation taking care of both sides by doing this. Someone’s got to take the first step forward. That’s right. And, break the set, the cognitive set of difference. Right? So here’s the, here’s, here’s the business.

40:45
related example. A few years ago, I was preparing a report that had to be submitted the next day. And as I was reading over it, I saw one section of it that wasn’t at all convincing, and not sufficiently convincing to make my point, because it didn’t have some data to really seal the deal. But I knew that a colleague of mine had done a study

41:15
the year before and had collected that kind of data. And so I sent him an email. Let’s say his name was Tim. It wasn’t. I said, Tim, and I described that I have this report. It’s due the next day. It needs the data that you’ve collected. I know you have it in your archives. I’m going to call you and we can find a way to get me that.

41:42
that information in time for me to do this. Well, this guy, Kim, was known as irascible and soured, a very difficult guy in my psychology department, right? So when I called him, he said, hello, Bob, I know why you’re calling. And the answer is no. Look, I can’t be responsible for your poor

42:11
time management skills, Bob. You got yourself into this. I’m a busy man. Also, I can’t just jump and pull this out of my archives, get the data to you in time, right? And before I had read this Texas study, here’s what I would have said. Come on, Tim, I really need this. This thing is due tomorrow.

42:39
He’d already said no to that. So I said, instead, you know, Tim, we’ve been together in the psych department now for 12 years. I really appreciate this. And Steve, I had the data that afternoon. Amazing. You know, it’s funny, thanks to you, Bob. Whenever I read an email or an outreach cold email, I like analyze all the language that’s being used and

43:08
I’ve also found, I mean, I’m gonna definitely use these unity principles now, but I’ve also found that when people talk about me and what benefit that I would get first, I’m not sure what principle of persuasion that is. That works on me. Yep. Yep. Good. mean, that other orientation, right? That I’m not just in it to make a buck for me. I’m actually in it for you to have a good outcome, which I know

43:38
as a side effect will lead to good outcomes for me. Reciprocally, it’ll work. And I also know that when people say, hey, I went to Stanford University just like you did, that works on me too. So that’s unity, right? Absolutely. There was a great study that showed that if researchers put a young woman on a busy intersection on a college campus of walkways,

44:05
asking for donations to the United Way, she got some success. But if she said to them first, excuse me, I’m a student here too. She got 250 % more donations. You know what, I’m just thinking about there’s all these things running through my head right now. There’s this Facebook ad that I run from my handkerchief store that works. And not very many people use handkerchiefs anymore. But the ad was like,

44:32
Am I the only one who use handkerchiefs or message me or, know, if you’re a handkerchief lover and I’ll send you a special offer, that ad works really well. It’s probably because of unity, right? Yes, right. Because if you’re in a smaller unit group, you feel even more intense shared identity. And I’ll give you one approach that think that online marketers can use or

45:02
people who can provide physical items online. One of the things that we have found in the last 10 years that has been a massive success within the marketing community is co-creation of your products and services, right? So what we often do is to get our existing customers, clients, and so on to help us

45:31
create the next version or the next generation of our product. And we ask them to give us input as to what they would like to see and what they would like to be dropped away and so on and what they don’t especially like. And so they co-create with us that product or service. That creates a sense of unity with us.

46:01
because they have acted together with us in this process. And what you find is that you get much greater loyalty and much greater satisfaction from those people who have co-created with you. Even before that new product has come out, they feel of you, they feel one of you. Okay, well, when we do that,

46:30
What we typically say to our informants is, could you give us your opinion on how we could improve our product, you know, that sort of thing. And that’s a mistake.

46:47
When we ask for someone’s opinion, we get a critic. They step away from us. We’re over here and they’re over on the other side of the line between us. If instead of asking for an opinion or even the newest research shows asking for feedback, which is also problematic for the same reason.

47:15
If we ask for their advice, we now get them stepping over the line next to us as our partner. They’re in a togetherness state of mind. And research shows, for example, that in a study that was done online where people received a business plan for a new restaurant called Splash,

47:43
that was going to be a fast food restaurant that focused on healthy food, right? If they were asked for their opinion on this business plan, they were significantly less likely to give it a positive rating than if they were asked for their advice on the same plan. And when researchers looked into it as to why, it was because they felt

48:13
more together with the author of the business plan because they were providing him advice. A lot of things are running through my head right now. So right now I send out a survey to anyone who’s bought. Maybe I should frame it as I need your advice instead of the way I currently have it framed. Steve, that would be my advice. Yeah.

48:41
Yeah, okay. It’s very subtle, but I can see why psychologically that would work. Interesting. Yeah. See, this is the thing I like about this research and I put a lot of it in the new book. The smallest things you can do that produce the biggest impact on your persuasive success, small in terms of effort or time so that you have an enormous return on investment.

49:11
Right? An enormous ROI from changing a word from feedback to advice, you know, or, you know, instead of trying to say, we, I have the better logical position or I’m going to do this. If you don’t move, we just point to something like the extent to which we’ve been working together. I’ve learned that logic never works.

49:40
Over the years, yeah. So it’s interesting. Yeah. Incidentally, that was the thing in the intro. That was the biggest tidbit that I got out of the unity section with respect to interacting with and working together with my wife. Yeah. Right. I can see why. Okay. So we got in the interest of completeness. I do want to just kind of go over the remaining principles of persuasion. So I think we’ve talked about social proof, liking, unity. There’s four more, right?

50:09
We talked about reciprocity. Reciprocity, course, yes. The next one would be authority, which like social proof, serves to reduce people’s uncertainty of what they should do. If we can demonstrate our credentials, our experience, and our know-how in a particular area, people will defer.

50:38
to that, they defer to experts. Sometimes we can borrow that by once again, bringing testimonials from outside of our organization from legitimate experts who can be quoted as saying something either nice about us or about our idea, our vision, our concept.

51:08
If we’ve got that, then people defer and move in our direction. One of the things that I often correct when I see people who want to run an advertising campaign where I give them some advice on it is that they put the testimonials.

51:35
either from similar others or from authorities into the body of their presentation, of their appeal. Those things should go first. In the case of authority, if you see one or two or more testimonials from acknowledged experts, right, advocating what comes next.

52:02
everything that comes next is infused with that authority, with that legitimacy, and it makes it more successful as a persuasive appeal. And if you don’t have access to these experts, I know you mentioned a case study where someone just was dressed as a doctor and they ended up selling more. Is that also? Yeah, it’s that’s so.

52:30
That’s right, but it’s one I wouldn’t recommend because it’s not honest. Why don’t we just stay with the things that make us feel good about doing well? Right. Actually, I didn’t want to touch upon that. mean, your book is basically giving all these strategies that can be used for good and bad. And I know you want to just mention this in this interview. mean, what is that? That’s just your general stance, right? Use these powers for good, not bad.

52:58
Right. And the way to do it is point to them where they genuinely exist in the situation. If you have genuine scarcity, go with that. If you’ve got genuine social proof, go with that. If you’ve got genuine authority, point to it. If you’ve got genuine unity, just point to it. And it changes everything from that moment on. In terms of authority also, I’ve just found that just

53:28
putting out content period kind of just makes you become an authority even though you might not perceive yourself as one. Yes, if you can provide that content, especially in terms of a white paper or an article or an interview that you did with a journalist and so on, and you embed your content in there and people say, oh, geez, that’s great.

53:58
this is somebody I should defer to. This is somebody I can stop getting more sources of information from. I can use this person because he or she is a clear expert. And there’s one last thing about authority that I think is really underused. And that is you get the most horsepower as an authority voice when you

54:28
Don’t just talk about the strengths of your case, but you also mention a weakness or a drawback. That causes people not only to see you as knowledgeable about the pros and the cons, it causes them to see you as credible, as trustworthy, as a trustworthy source of authority influence, right?

54:56
because you’re willing to talk about not just the pros, but also the cons. But you show people how, after you say, know, this may take a little bit longer or this may cost a little bit more, or, you know, this is just, we don’t have a lot of market share yet on this. Then you always say the word,

55:29
and you go to your strengths right there that wipe away the weakness. And what’s left after the weakness is dispatched is a perception of you as a credible source of authoritative information. And they believe more everything you say next. So if I were to advise people in terms of how you present your case,

55:58
All cases have strengths and weaknesses, right? What we typically do is bury the weaknesses at the end or don’t mention them at all. What I say is if you want to know where to put your strongest argument, the most compelling feature of what you have to offer, it should go immediately after you’ve mentioned a weakness and said the word, but.

56:26
to lead into your strength because people are gonna believe that strength now more deeply and more fully than if you hadn’t mentioned the weakness. Is this the same principle as when I see a product online that has only five star reviews, I tend to discount them? It is the same principle that people who are only giving you the positives and not giving you the negatives,

56:56
There’s a study that was done that showed the most effective star rating that produces conversions to your products on your site is not five point reviews. It’s not a five point rating. It’s a range between 4.2 and 4.7. If it’s below 4.2, people are saying, hey, maybe this isn’t such a great thing.

57:25
If it’s above 4.7, people are saying, uh-oh, this might be a phony. These might be, um, you know, manufactured bought, uh, purchased, or, uh, they’re, weeding out the, um, uh, the negative ones. And in fact, I actually never read the five star reviews. only read the two and the three stars come to think of it. Yeah. Yeah.

57:55
Okay, so that’s authority. Here’s a last thing to say about that. If you do get a one or two star review, know, in what people always tell me is that kills me, that irks me because, you know, the majority of them are are much higher. But people look at that one. Here’s what I would say. Always respond to that review and say the following.

58:25
Well, thank you for your response. We’re so happy that the great majority of people have not experienced, have not had your experience with us. So you move immediately to the social proof that’s truly there. You diminish that one by saying you’re an outlier. We’re so glad that the great majority of people have not had that experience, but we certainly regret that you did.

58:54
and we will take steps to make sure that it never happens again. That’s the best way to respond. That’s ingenious actually. In this world of like just Amazon reviews, that sounds like a really great response, especially since it applies the principles of persuasion here and social proof and. Right. Yeah. I think we have a couple more left. I believe scarcity is one of them. Scarcity I want to emphasize because there was a study done of online e-marketing

59:24
uh, uh, and showed that of all of the principles of influence and all six of them, uh, did make a difference, but scarcity was the one that was the most powerful telling people about a limited supply at this price or a limited supply with this feature or a limited supply with a particular inducement or bonus.

59:51
That was the one that had the most power in producing conversions. I vaguely remember in the book, there’s a subtlety there though, right? Well, that works very well. It works better than limited time offers. Limited time doesn’t have competition associated. If you’ve got a limited number,

01:00:20
That means people have to move. They have to get off the fence. If you’ve got a limited time, they can wait until whenever that within that time, they don’t, doesn’t spur them into immediate action. Whereas if you say there’s only five of these left, right at this price, right at this price, I guess, uh, if that’s not true though, you shouldn’t do that. Never, but you can always have an inducement, uh, like a bonus.

01:00:50
And there were only five of them left that have this bonus. Yes, that’s correct. Right. So in my case, like you get a free hanky for the first five people or something like that. Yeah. For the first 100, know, yeah. Yeah. I know, um, on my site, ever since I started putting, like when things get below like 10 units in stock, I like highlight the fact there’s only 10 units left. And I found that as soon as that product hits that threshold, that product sells out much faster. Right.

01:01:20
Scarcity. Yeah, scarcity. It’s interesting. Yeah. So it’s subtle. So limited products versus limited time always works better. And then the last one is commitment and consistency. People want to be consistent with what they have committed themselves to. So if we can arrange for people to make a small step or press an agree button or get to the next stage easily.

01:01:48
then they are more likely to continue to behave in that way in order to be congruent with what they’ve already done. So how can that be applied? Well, so for example, what does it say on your, on the, you know, the thing that you’re a button, right? What it should say is, yes, I want to go on to the next level. It shouldn’t just say yes.

01:02:18
or it shouldn’t just say next, it should give them a commitment that they’ve made a commitment to go on. Interesting. So you’re saying changing that language can have dramatic effects? Yeah. I’ve noticed that on certain things. Yeah. It’s also the case that if you’re trying to get people to subscribe and they have to fill out a long questionnaire, a lot of people are

01:02:45
are reluctant to go through a lot of information. I talk about a study that was done where if you reduce the number of fields that you ask people to complete on the first page of the form, that significantly increases the number who complete it because they’ve gone through the first page easily. And then once they’ve gone through that first page,

01:03:14
they’re more willing to go on to the end. You know, come to think of it, the surveys I’m most likely to fill out are the ones that are one question per page where I keep hitting next. Yeah. Yeah. As opposed to a big long page of questions. principle, right? Right. So that winds up our tour through the 7th. So I just want to tell the listeners out there, I mean, this is an entirely new book. I’ve read the original version many times and this one, as soon as you get it,

01:03:44
It’s, would arguably, I think it’s like twice as thick as the old one. It’s almost like a whole new book. So even if you’ve read this book before the new edition goes way beyond, it went way beyond my expectations. And I’m not just saying that. So Bob, where can people find more about you, the book in just in case they haven’t heard of you before prior to this? The best place is our website. It’s a influence at work.

01:04:14
dot com. Okay, influence at work all one, which is all one word.com. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. As I mentioned before, I’m a huge fan and it is a great honor to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much. enjoyed it, Steve.

01:04:30
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now even if you’ve read the first edition of Dr. Cialdini’s book, you’ll definitely want to catch the new edition. With 200 new pages, it is literally like reading a completely new book and you’ll always get new nuggets every time you read it. For more information about this episode, go to mywebcuderjob.com slash episode 373. And once again, I’m gonna thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base.

01:04:58
SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. I also want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandon card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifecoderjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

01:05:25
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Now I talk about how I use these tools in my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free 16 mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:29
and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce, and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. I also want to thank Clavio, who is also a sponsor of the show.

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

01:26
that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And then finally, I wanted to mention a podcast that I released with my partner, Tony.

01:54
And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:19
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Vivian Kay on the show. Now Vivian and I, we’ve never met, but my friend Kurt Elster gave me such a glowing recommendation that I knew that I had to have her on the show. But he did warn me that Vivian is a little bit quiet and reserved. She’s far from that. There we go. Okay, Vivian is the founder and CEO of Kinky Curly Yaqui, a premium textured hair extension brand for black women that she grew to six million without.

02:49
paid advertising, is ridiculous. And what’s even more impressive is that she completely bootstrapped this business from the ground up. So in this episode, Vivian is going to teach us the secrets behind her success. After all, I personally think that it’s unheard of in this day and age to be able to scale business to seven figures without paying for ads. And with that, welcome to show, Vivian. How are doing today? I am absolutely awesome. How are you? I am good. So are you going to be quiet and reserved? Absolutely not.

03:18
With a store name like Kinky Kurly Yaki, like, I don’t think anyone would think that actually. So let’s start there. What’s the history behind that name? Well, so it’s something that I literally just made up. You know, I woke up one morning and made that up, but the words do need something. So Kinky, well, Kinky refers to the kinky coarse texture of afro hair.

03:46
So people who come from the African diaspora, we tend to have coarse curls. And so that’s what the kinky stands for. Facebook sometimes thinks otherwise, but that’s okay. say, I was thinking the other definition of kinky. Yeah, it gets it. We get into a lot of we get a lot of stuff rejected because it’s like, we can’t advertise or do you know, something that’s sexually suggestive. And it’s like, that’s not what we’re talking about. Right. Anyways.

04:12
And then curly, course, that means, you know, just curly hair. And then yaki is what gets people stuck. So it’s sort of an inside joke. So if you’re a black woman and you wear protective styles, then you know what yaki is. But for everyone else, yaki is it’s a texture of hair. So back in the day, they couldn’t mimic black women’s hair straightened like they couldn’t produce it synthetically. So then what they would do is they would get it from a yak from the animal.

04:42
Yak. And they threw an eye at the end and called it Yakky. So whenever you want to refer to black women, black women’s hair straightened, you refer to it as Yakky. So like I mentioned, if you’re a black woman who wears a protective style, so and there’s a lot of us who do that you don’t realize like Beyonce, Oprah, Michelle Obama, like we’re all they’re all wearing protective styles.

05:06
only because our hair isn’t necessarily suited to this North American environment and we need to protect it so it doesn’t strip the moisture from it. And so we do that with braids, wigs and weaves. so Kinky Curly Yakky is just all those texture names all put together and black women, know what that is. so yeah. Yeah. I, this whole time I thought Yakky was something Japanese actually. It probably is. It probably is because you know what? A lot of synthetic hair comes from Korea and Japan. Oh.

05:35
Okay, that I did not know either. yeah. So what motivated you to start this business? Well, Steve, I was running another business. So I was a wedding decorator and I’m in Toronto, Canada, and it’s, you know, one of the most diverse cities in the world. And I was decorating everyone’s weddings. And so I needed to look quote unquote presentable. So for black women, what that means, and you know, just women in general.

06:03
But specifically for black women, means, you know, looking, having straight hair, because having curly hair, curly, tight textured afro hair was seen as unprofessional. Really? I did not know that. It’s still to this day. Like even in the US, there are laws that they had to put in place where they couldn’t discriminate us based on our hair. Right. So a lot of black people wear locks, they wear their hair in an afro, they wear braids, and it’s part of our culture, like

06:33
This is how we wear our hair. But because it’s contrary to that European beauty standard, a lot of us got pressured into straightening our hair. So we were using chemicals that we now know affected our health. Black women have one of the highest rates of fibroids and they connect it to the relaxers. the products that we used to use, the chemical products that we used to use to straighten our hair.

07:02
chemically, when our hair grows naturally this curly. And so I needed something that looked presentable. But whenever I went looking for that, for hair that looked like my hair, it was either buried underneath the sexy, exotic, silkier textures, or the places, the stores didn’t have it at all. Even beauty supply stores didn’t have it at all. So then I thought to myself, huh, you know, whatever. I was trying to solve my own problem, right? So I wanted to find hair that looked like mine and I could protect my hair with it.

07:31
I went to, so I joined haircare forums. joined Facebook groups trying to solve my own problem. And of course, while I was there, I just ended up just being Vivian, right? So, you know, was, was quite, yes, quite a reserved exactly, exactly. And so in doing so, you know, I found the solution to my problem. I went to, you know, I didn’t go to, but I, you know, I reached out to a couple of factories overseas and I kept

07:58
asking for samples and I would order them under different email addresses, asking for the different same texture, but tweak it a little bit just to see if I could continue to get that same quality. So after I finally found something that I liked, I was wearing it and I went to a networking event and another black woman pulled me aside and asked me what my regimen was for getting my hair to look like that and who my hairdresser was. And I was like, girl, this is a weave. And she said, I would buy that.

08:27
And that’s when the light bulb went off. So I thought, well, if she would buy it and I already bought it and I already knew there was a forum, Facebook groups full of women who also would buy it. Then there’s gotta be, you know, it’s got it. There’s gotta be something there. So in the down season of my wedding business in December of 2012, I launched Kinky Curly Yaki on Big Cartel. Big Cartel. Yeah. Big Cartel. Shout out to them. Are they still around?

08:52
I think they are still around because I think I have a student in my class on them and she doesn’t want to switch because you there’s all that inertia. You’re not on Big Cartel anymore right? Oh no. No. over to Shopify in 2015. Okay I bet that was a kind of a pain though too right? It was. It took me a minute. So let’s uh let’s take a step back. I want to talk about the sourcing process here. So you just

09:19
decide to contact factories? Are they in China? Were they in the US or? Yeah, no, they were in China. So you know, this was before Alibaba, right? Or least before. Yeah, at least this was before Alibaba and Aliexpress was really a thing. Sure. Right. So this was just, know, on forums with people had their email addresses listed. Right. Wait, okay, I’m sorry. So you actually found these factories on Facebook groups on a hair on a haircare forum?

09:48
on a haircare for a haircare black haircare forum. So there were forums just dedicated to black hair. But they had they had contact information of Chinese factories on there too. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So they had so they had the factories, they had the salespeople’s names, like they had all that information readily available on these on these Facebook on these haircare forums. Interesting. So were these people on these forums running businesses as well? No, or

10:17
These were just black women who wanted to solve their own problems, right? But they weren’t business, like, you know, they weren’t, I don’t want to, I don’t want to sound like I’m insulting them. They weren’t business minded. Like they weren’t trying to start businesses. They just, we literally just wanted to solve our own problem. And there was nowhere in the U in the U S or Canada that that sold these. So you actually had to go all the way to the factory. Well, here’s the thing. So it’s not like there’s kinky haired girls cutting off their hair.

10:44
in order to create these extensions, right? And so then, you know, the biggest supplier of human hair is India, right? And then the one of the biggest labor forces are in China, right? So what would happen is the hair gets collected in India, and then it goes over to China to get hand processed. So the hair gets collected in India, and then goes over to China for processing because all of our textures are manually made.

11:13
So this, for instance, you can’t tell is a ponytail. So it’s a drawstring ponytail. You guys can’t see it. I’m I took it. Yeah, I’ve taken it off. OK. And what it is is it undergoes. it starts out as straight hair. Uh huh. It starts out as straight hair. And then they they they they hand rod it, the hair around a rod. And then they put it into they put it into like a they put it in some water.

11:43
and then they put it into an oven to bake the texture into the hair. And so it’s not something, it’s such a manually intensive process. It’s not something that, you know, know, it’s not something that can be done in North America. Yeah, exactly. So just in case you guys obviously can’t see what Vivian does, but she literally just took off her hair in front of me. Black women don’t normally do that. So you must be special, So you went to the factory, but you weren’t going to buy in bulk.

12:12
So what did you say to them? Well, at the time, because there weren’t people, I mean, if they were buying, they were buying silkier textures, right? If they were running businesses. So, you know, I asked for a specific texture. I got it. I didn’t. It wasn’t kinky enough for me. So then I would say, well, I need you to do it smaller. I need you to tweak this. I need you to do this. And so they kept doing that until I found the perfect texture. And again, because I was just trying to solve my own problem, like, OK, cool. Yeah, I like it for me.

12:42
That’s it. And there was no communication barrier here. I can, like sometimes I have problems communicating like very simple directions regarding my textiles. I can only imagine like talking to a Chinese person about kinky levels. Well, you just, you just simplify it, right? So all the rods have millimeters, right? So it’s like, so if I wanted, if I wanted this tight curl, I need it to be a two millimeter curl. And so that, and so, and of course you just keep it simple, like, okay, make curl two millimeter.

13:12
Right. That’s it. Okay. And then so you got a sample and then presumably you didn’t buy in bulk in the very beginning, right? No, I would buy for I just bought for myself. Okay. So what would happen is I would buy one, I would buy one and you know, a customer would come in by, you know, two, I would take money and then buy two. So you see that you guys again can’t see this, but I’ve got this bin of Rubbermaid drawers behind me. Yeah, this isn’t the exact one. But this is what I started my business in.

13:42
So I would literally just buy one and then someone would buy two and I would take the money and buy two. And then I would slowly grow my inventory that way. So these factories were willing to just send into you one by one? Yeah. Wow. Well, not one by one, but usually like say, like they didn’t have minimum orders at the time, at that time, right? They didn’t have minimum orders at that time. And so then they were just, they were just willing to sell you three, right? And you would need at least

14:12
three to do your head. Right. Okay. Okay. Can I get an idea? Usually when you get like samples, the shipping is really expensive and the unit is more expensive. So what was like your, I guess I don’t want to ask you what your sourcing costs were, but I mean, the beginning, were you just marking that up like a lot? No, because I didn’t know, like, you know, I wasn’t, I didn’t start the business to do business. Like, you know, I, wanted to solve my own problem and then it just sort of happened to become a business.

14:42
And then didn’t and it snowballed. Right. Let’s about the snowballing. So OK, so you got it. And presumably you posted them in these Facebook groups, I guess. Yeah. Well, you know, what happened was, you know, I got influencers, except at the time they weren’t known as influencers. There were just girls that I knew that also were kinky textures. So I would send it to them and say, hey, girl, can you give me your opinion on this hair? Because I know I like it, but I want to know what you think and how you would manage it and how you would.

15:11
And of course they would take it and go on. This was when YouTube started becoming a thing and people started showing people how to do stuff. And so then that’s what they would do. They would take it and they would wear it and then they would take pictures. And then there was this one girl who did this one spectacularly big Afro. And that’s how it blew up because she said this was the best. And you know, and that was the issue with this type of hair is that it could look good. So you could, and even now.

15:38
You could go to Amazon and buy the same ponytail that I’m wearing for $20. It looks the same, but once you get it, the way it behaves, the way it washes, the way it acts is very different from what we sell, but on surface it looks good. So the fact that, so kinky hair is notorious for being trash after, you know, one wear, but this girl got all this hair and she was able to manage it. That was a big thing at the time. Like, no guys, like this hair.

16:08
really can like this lives up to what she says it is. And that’s because I was my own, like I was solving my own problem. I was my own customer. So I knew what they were complaining about. So I would per if they said, okay, know, kinky hair tangles so easily. Cool. Guess what? This hair doesn’t tangle as easily. And I would show pictures of me running my fingers through the hair, you know, doing all that. And one of the things that I would do to, differentiate myself from other companies was I would wash the hair.

16:36
So the hair doesn’t come looking like this. It comes uniform looking like how it looks right off the rods that I was referring to. Right. So I would wash the hair. So it looked the way it was supposed to look when you’re about to wear it. So then girls would be, well, that’s what I want it to look like. And that was a big problem too. Right. Because you would get them, you know, but one company would say, yeah, it’s this curl. Another company would say it’s the same curl, but when you wash them, they would look totally different. Interesting. So did you have a YouTube channel then? No, no.

17:04
How did you demonstrate all these things? So I, you know, I was one of the first hair extension businesses on Instagram, right? So Instagram launched in like 2011 or something. Right. And I was on there in 2012, 2013. And I was also in these Facebook groups, right? So I would do videos. So I didn’t do a YouTube channel. I just did videos and I would show people. And then I also relied on these other girls that were doing it. And I didn’t even ask them to do it. They would just do it. I’d send them the product and say, girl, tell me what you think. And they would create content out of it.

17:34
How did you find the YouTubers or were they just your friends or? These were just girls in the forums. Oh, okay. The forums in the Facebook groups. Okay. They weren’t YouTube. They weren’t YouTubers at the time. They were just girls who had hair, who had a, who were vlogging or whatever they called it back then. So when you go to one of those communities, like I, I’ve seen it done wrong. Like sometimes people come into my group and they just start saying,

18:03
selling hair extensions. Well, obviously they wouldn’t sell hair extension. But you know what I mean, right? So what was your approach there? Like, how did you come across as not salesy? Well, so the funny thing is, no one knew it was my company. So I was already in these groups, and I was already providing value. I was being Vivian, I was answering questions, even, you know, when it was not hair related stuff, right. And so then this the brand started to get, you know, well known in these groups.

18:32
And so, someone decided that they needed to find out who was behind this company because it’s not like I was like, hey, guys, here’s my company, Kiki Carley. I didn’t do anything of that like that. I was just, here’s, you know, send it to a couple of girls and the girls did whatever they did and then that’s how I grew. And then someone created a fake Facebook profile to out me. So, at the time, me, my cheap butt, my photo butt didn’t buy that who is. That who is privacy.

19:00
for your website. And so then they did the who is search and found my name and then put me on blast in these Facebook groups. But what they thought would be my downfall was actually what helped to create a million dollar company. Because when they found out that it was my company, they were like, oh, well, if this belongs to Vivian, that means it’s black owned. She actually knows what she’s talking about. She were supporting somebody who was in our community all the more better. Boom.

19:30
Business skyrocketed. Amazing. So if you were to do it all over again, would you be more overt about it being your company? Yes, absolutely. Because people don’t necessarily buy hair. They buy me. They buy they don’t buy product. They buy people. So your website though, I guess back in the day, it didn’t look like it does now, right? no. Your face is on it, right? Yeah, it’s pretty obvious that it’s your store. Yes. What was the shape of your website back then?

19:58
Oh, goodness. was, you know, in my Samsung S3, you know, with that, with those crazy filters Instagram used to have, you know, those crazy filters from 2012. those in the show notes. But yeah, yeah. You know, using Microsoft Publisher, you remember Publisher? So the website wasn’t all that, basically. No, it wasn’t. OK, it wasn’t. it’s in the, you know, what you see now is this third iteration.

20:26
Even this, you when I moved to Shopify, was, you know, I did a whole photo shoot I came to, I think it was DC or something, you know, there were the three. these were three bloggers that were up and coming or vloggers that were up and coming. said, girls, can we do a photo shoot? I’ll meet you all at this place in the US and we can all take pictures. And that was in 2016, I believe it was. So you did that on the on the frugal side too, because these are just people in the community.

20:53
Just people in the community who were bloggers or bloggers are trying to be, you know, now they were influencers. Yeah, like 3000 people at the time or 3000 followers. And we did a photo shoot. So, and that was the next version of the website. And of course, started to keep up with the whole, okay, let’s do tutorials and let’s do how to wash your hair. Like all that stuff that’s practically mandatory now was not a thing at the time.

21:21
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.

21:50
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.

22:19
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. So when you first went on, presumably these are expensive, right? I mean, you just talking about the labor involved, the fact that it’s real hair and you were just giving them away to people on the groups. How did you know who to give them to? That’s the thing. You think you know, right? And you know what I tried to do was I tried to work with

22:49
girls who I knew were really serious about building a brand. Okay. Right. Because you you could see even now you can see that there’s influencers who are just simply doing it for the money. And then there’s people who are actually looking to really engage and grow their audience. Right. And so I watched them, you know, I have a marketing and branding background. So I would just sit and watch girls and be like,

23:11
know, and I fell for a couple of these people, you know, especially the bigger influencers who were like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, send me some hair and we’ll, and we’ll do something then they did nothing with it. Or if they did do something with it, then they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t tag me or whatever the case may be. So I just chose to work with at the time they weren’t known as that but micro influencers, right? What’s considered a micro influencer to you? To me now, I would say 30,000 and under 30,000 followers and under

23:39
So presumably now you probably have a more structured process. So I’m just kind of curious what your process is now for finding an influencer. You know what? I actually stuck a pin in the whole finding an influencer thing. Did yeah, because the game changed. Right. So these girls that I started with that that had 3000 followers back in 2014, 2015 now have over a hundred K. Right. So now these girls are charging, you know, fifteen hundred dollars just for a post. Right.

24:08
Whereas before it was like, okay, I could give them one set of clip-ins and they would create three, like they would create, you know, I would say maybe 10 pieces of content on that one set of clip-ins. Whereas now it’s like, you give them one set of clip-ins, costs you $1,500. You need to send them more stuff in order to create another piece of content. So it’s just been a little bit different. I’ve used apps like, and this was before it got acquired by YouTube, but I think it was called a Fame. Fame bit.

24:35
So before it got acquired, I used them and that, that helped me launch my, my clip-in. So that was a really good, a really good place to do that. But it’s been, I had to stick a pin in it because what I was finding was, you know, all the apps that I was using, especially Instagram became pay to play. Right. So I could pay someone $1,500 for content, but nobody would see it. Right. Yeah. Right. It’s interesting. So did you ever try paid advertising?

25:05
Oh, yes. Well, it wasn’t until it wasn’t until I had already hit my first million. And I thought, wow, well, I built this. I built this first. I built this business without paid ads. So I so I hit my first million without any paid ads, without email, without email, without email. No email. Wow. No email. No email. So this was just simply word of mouth and repeat customers.

25:34
Well, how did you get the repeat customers without email or did they just come back naturally? They just came back naturally. Once you once you once you have that good stuff. And as this was before the market got oversaturated, right? So you’ll have to I didn’t mention this, but I was I created the niche, the niche did not exist before I started it. So I was the only company who was selling only kinky textures.

26:00
So I didn’t even try and slide in, you know, a silkier, you know, more popular texture that you would see on say, Nicki Minaj. No, I wasn’t selling that stuff. I was selling this stuff that, you know, you’re that girl that works the nine to five at Pepsi doesn’t no one even know she’s wearing extensions because it looks like her hair. Right, right. So the influencers early on that you worked with, were they did you continue to work with them? Yes. I worked with them for a good two, three years.

26:28
And then they just got really big and wanted more expensive. Yeah. So then, you know, even one right now I worked with, just landed a gig. She’s in the Seychelles and she landed a gig with Qatar Airlines. wow. Yeah. So, okay. So, but it’s so nice to see that growth, right? Because these are girls that I worked with. Another one launched a hair product company, right? And so it’s nice because these are the girls that I knew.

26:57
were about their business, not just interested in getting free stuff for the sake of getting free stuff. They were interested in growing their brands. And so I feel like we both grew up together. Yeah. Yeah. You know, in my experience, or just even speaking to my colleagues, I find that the influencers who know what they’re worth tend to charge like way too much. Whereas it’s much better to just target people who have decent size followings, but

27:23
They’re not really thinking about monetization just yet. No, I think that people with the decent size following is also engaged with their audience. Right. Right. And there’s that’s one thing that I’ve learned is that those people who have the smaller audiences, even myself, I engage with my followers. So I know I know who my OGs are. know who my regular people comment and DM and and all that stuff. And I can rely on them to to help me do stuff.

27:51
And so I knew that’s, what these girls could do. Whereas now with a lot of these bigger names, it’s like, they don’t even check their DMS. Yeah. Yeah. It’s probably cause it’s just too many. They’re probably flooded with absolutely. And, know, that happens to me too, but still, mean, social media, social media, that’s what you’re, you’re supposed to socialize. Having a one way conversation isn’t, that’s, that’s sad.

28:21
So how did you go from one to six million? Just doing the same thing I did at one million to get to one million, which is just keep doing it. You just do it at scale, right? You just keep doing the same thing. You do more of it. You do a lot of testing. So it’s like, okay, well that worked. That didn’t work. Like say FameBit, FameBit worked famously. Like I loved how it worked. And so then it was like, okay, so how can I do more of that? But at the time there weren’t other FameBits or at least affordable FameBits, right?

28:50
Now there’s a plethora and it’s like, even now they come to me, as I call myself an entrepreneur personality and I’m like, no, you guys are all garbage. You just want access to my data and that’s it. But yeah, no, it’s a challenge. The times are different. I always like to say that I didn’t start the business to become a $6 million business. I started the business to solve my own problem.

29:17
Right. And and so e-commerce for me has become it’s become kind of gross for me. Wait, what? Yeah. Because you know what? Because I’m not into the cack in the row ass and the this and that’s not the reason why I started it. I started it so that Keisha in D.C. can, you know, instead of crying over her failed twist out at six o’clock in the morning when she has a job interview that morning.

29:46
Keisha could just find a wig or find some clip-ins to accentuate or lengthen or add volume to her own hair. And she can go about her business and do her job without people focusing on what she looks like. And so- Presumably you have enough money already. So what are your motivations now then in terms of growth and- Well, honestly, know, I scaled to the 6 million and then I was like, I don’t like it here. I really don’t. And I admire-

30:14
brands that can do that. And the founders are like, yeah, let’s go, let’s go. It turns out I’m not a very good CEO. a better marketer. I’m a better brander. I’m just a better person, I guess you could say. And I like to say that I started Kinky Curly Yakky to give black women confidence. So I enjoy just giving people period confidence. So whether that be black women or women or entrepreneurs or whatever the case may be, I just enjoy

30:44
that journey. So e-commerce just, mean, selling hair extensions just so happens to be one of my, my, my house, right? But it’s not my why selling hair extensions is not my why. Yeah. You know, I was on your website earlier today and I noticed you have like another kind of business that essentially is what you just described, right? That’s outside of your e-commerce. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah. Well, um, I’ve, you know, what happened was in 2020,

31:14
You know, we all got hit with the pandemic. Yes. And for me, even more so, I got hit with it back in 2019, like Black Friday in that November 2019. Except at the time we didn’t know what it was. Right. We just know China all of a sudden just stops shipping stuff. Yes. Right. And so it was we had a huge supply chain issue because what we sell is human hair product. And all of a sudden everybody stopped going places. Right. And so.

31:43
Um, it was out of my control and you know, my kid was home from virtual school for virtual school. And I had to quickly figure out how to keep cashflow going. And so then I thought, well, what do I, like, what are people doing? Like I had to just sort of sit back and okay, wait, everyone has to go online. Wait, I know how to be online. I know how to set up a Shopify. Everyone, all these brick and mortars and people who used to sell in person are now all, you know, having to open up and do things online. I know how to do that.

32:13
So then I started teaching things like Shopify prep school, getting people just get the essentials up and ready so you can sell whatever you can keep your livelihood and sell it online. So I started doing that. And then I started coaching. people who couldn’t, okay, I have a business. Now they’re at home from their nine to five. Now they have time to think, oh, is this really what I wanna do? No, it’s not. I wanna be an entrepreneur. Okay, well, let me help you do that.

32:38
You know, one thing I forgot to ask you is how do you scale what you do or what made you successful? Because a lot of it is just like talking and interacting with people, which inherently doesn’t scale, right? Yeah. Well, I, know, for the first four years of business, so until 2016, so until June of 2016, I was doing everything myself. So I was customer service, fulfillment, you know, packaging, everything. That was all me. And then in June of 2016, I hired my first employee.

33:08
And even how I hired her was just sort of a roundabout way because I had a partner at the time who was trying to force me to figure, know, put out, put something on monster or, you know, indeed, or whatever it was at that time and find an employee when I was just like, no, I need to really interact with this person. So I went to a beauty supply store and I asked for some help and this girl came to help me I liked the way she did it. And I said, I’m looking for someone to help me with customer service or are you available? She said, sure. I gave her my number. She called me the next day. She’s been my employee ever since the person who answers my, my

33:37
customer service was my second ever customer. So she’s someone who knew me from the forums, who bought my hair and supported. And then she went on mat leave and she’s like, I was like, Oh my gosh, know, customer service is driving me nuts. She’s like, that’s what I do for a living. And I’m on mat leave. So let me help you. She’s been doing that for me ever since. So really it’s about scale for me, isn’t about, you know, having a team of a hundred. It’s just having a small lean team who is really passionate about

34:07
what we’re here to do, right? Which is helping. Yeah, Are you selling on Amazon at all? not. Absolutely not. Okay. No. Is this type of product not good for Amazon because there’s all those cheap knockoffs on there? Yeah, that too. I also feel like I worked really hard to build Kinky Curly up, Yakky up as a brand that I feel like being on Amazon would dilute it. You know,

34:34
Now I realize that being on there is really about brand recognition. So if someone types it in, then boom, okay, well, this brand already has a reputation. If they go to my website, they’ll see I have thousands of reviews. So if I do go on Amazon, would be about brand recognition, but I wouldn’t put my premium products on there because they can’t compete with the $25 ponytail. They can’t. Right. Even though it’s much better quality, you’re just thinking that. Right.

35:04
Okay. Whereas you can do a lot more on your own website to show all of that. Exactly. Right. I own that channel, right? Whereas I don’t own Amazon. Well, actually, what is your primary channel for sales today? Primary sales would be organic, organic organic Instagram or Facebook or organic search, organic search. Yep. So I was up and up on the SEO. So, you know, we’ve got that. So we’ve got that SEO history.

35:33
Right. And so if you type, if you type kinky hair extensions, we’re probably the number one or at least on the first page, number one result. Nice. Can you talk about how you establish those ranks? Like, are you creating content on regular basis? Not right now. So, you know, we were doing blogs back in, I want to say 2017. So we have a bunch of blogs that went up there and they were talking about core things that people back when we would Google. You know, I knew how to SEO all the

36:03
you all the pages and all the pictures and all that jazz. I personally manually did all that because I know what black women are searching for. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and so I did all that. So, you know, and it’s paid off. It’s, know, SEO is not a overnight thing. It’s a long-term strategy and it’s paid off. So even now, when I don’t have any ads turned on, the only thing I have on is email.

36:29
It seems like all those cheap knockoffs on Amazon, they’re probably run by Chinese companies. I’m just guessing. I don’t know for sure, but they obviously don’t know what it’s like to have black hair, right? My hair is straight. I would have no idea. And so I guess that’s your main advantage. Yep. Well, what happened when, you know, in 2014, I found out I was pregnant and had my son. And when I came back, there were, uh, you know, I took a two month mat leave or something. I couldn’t even do that. But when I came back, there were all these Chinese companies that popped up.

36:59
and had black women front the companies. Oh, really? Yes. So really, all I know what happens with these Chinese companies is you just sit on YouTube and just watch the content we produce. And then they create products based on the content we produce. Right. How do you fight that? You fight them by being by actually creating a brand that people can that people that your audience can resonate with, right?

37:27
Like with Amazon or these Chinese companies, can’t be me. They don’t know what my, they don’t have the same experiences I have with same skillset. They don’t know what it’s like to have a failed twist out. I know what that feels like. Right. And I can communicate that better than any Chinese company can. Just wondering though, if they like throw money at other black women. They do. They absolutely do. And it makes it hard for companies like mine to compete. Right.

37:55
Right. They flood the market with their products. They pay them, you know, they pay them whatever they pay them. But, know, to the girl who doesn’t care because she just wants free stuff, she produces that one video and she’s done. She doesn’t care. She’s going to have a bin full of all these trashy hair extensions, but who cares? They paid her, you know, 35 bucks or whatever it was for that video and hair that she didn’t have in the first place. Presumably those are one and done. Right. As soon as you buy that cheap product, you’re not going to buy it again. Right. Yeah. Interesting.

38:25
And then you mentioned Instagram is Instagram a large driver of sales or is that more just for branding? It’s more just for branding. It used to be. But because of the whole the whole algorithm and all that jazz, like it’s it’s you know, we we rarely post on there anymore. It’s it’s actually kind of discouraging to post on there, I find. Yeah. But email for us has been organic traffic and organic search and email for us. And we haven’t even touched SMS yet.

38:52
And so it’s something I plan to do this year. It’s just this these past 18 months have just been honestly, I’ve had my head up my ass. Honestly, and like COVID. Yeah. Yeah. And, you I’m a single mother and I’ve been at home with my son in the first grade. So it’s not like I can just leave him with a computer and he’s getting work done. No, I physically have to sit there with him. So last year was not a million dollar year. This year is certainly not a million dollar year. And I’m OK with that.

39:21
I am okay with that. Are you still active in those original groups where you established? No, no, with a lot of those groups, think of they’ve all sort of migrated, you know, everyone’s sort of grown up and grown out, but I still keep in touch. A couple of them still follow me. Like I, a lot of them still follow me. And so it’s nice to see their names pop up every once in on the shop of my dashboard. like, Oh, that was my, I still remember my very first customer.

39:47
Right. And my second and my third. And so, yeah, they still support, but no, I don’t, I don’t go into those groups anymore. So for everyone who’s listening, wanting to do what you do, what would be, I guess your best advice for someone just starting out? I would say, because you bootstrap this whole thing. Yeah. From zero. didn’t have any outside cash or anything. I would say make sure you’re solving a problem and make sure you’re solving a problem that is, um, that resonates with you.

40:17
because this is going to be one of the hardest things outside of parenthood. This is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. And if you’re not passionate or if you’re not interested or invested in getting in solving that problem and finding the solution, then this is going to be a really tough journey. So I would say one, make sure you’re solving a problem and two, be yourself because

40:46
At first I thought, okay, I would look at the girls who own hair extension companies who had long silky hair and Gucci and Lambos and high heels and all that stuff. And I was not that, I was the exact opposite of that. And at first, that’s the reason why I hid myself. But then as I mentioned, when people actually found out it was me and they knew me for who I was, then they were supportive. And it was like, oh, so I can be myself? Yes, you can.

41:14
And that’s what will differentiate you from the competition. And then finally, I would say study your competition and do something different. So if your competition is selling mugs and all they sell are mugs that are black, then why not sell red mugs, only red mugs and really niche down, niche. So that’s really what I want to get to, niche it down because that’s what’s going to help you get your foot in the door.

41:40
and differentiate you from everyone else doing the exact same thing in the oversaturated market that you’re in, no matter what it is. So once you niche down and you really get well known for doing that one thing, then you can start to expand. You can either go wider or you can go deeper into that niche, but just start out doing that one thing really, really well and get known for it. That’s exactly how we got started.

42:05
We became known for handkerchiefs. And even though I have no passion for those products, I developed a passion for the business part. Right. You know, like the cack and the real ass, right. That you don’t like. That’s actually my wheelhouse. Right.

42:19
And what I like about you, Vivian, just, I mean, we haven’t met before, but now that we’re chatting, you’re just very relatable. And just after talking to you, just want to buy from you. And I think that’s your superpower. Yes, that is right. And that’s the thing, because it’s like, because what I’m, I’m not passionate about selling you hair extensions. I’m passionate about making you feel good about how you are, just you. Right. And I would just buy from you because of you. Right. If I needed hair extensions, I’d be a bonus.

42:48
Thank you. appreciate you saying that. So Vivian, where can people find you online? And I know you have a couple of websites. So yeah, well, for hair extensions, if you’re into that, you can find me at kinkakurlyyaki.com. For myself, I am an absolute pleasure to follow on Instagram, especially in my Instagram stories. I’m known for my Instagram stories. So you can follow me at it’sviviank, that’s I-T-S-V-I-V-I-A-N-K-A-Y-E.

43:18
You’ll see me on the black lady with the crown and balloons. Um, and of course I have a website. So Vivian K.com. So you said that you weren’t doing Instagram. That was for your company, but for yourself or myself doing it. Yeah. that’s how I started to get business that way too. Right. Yes. Because I get high on my own supply. Right. So I’m always wearing my own products. So yeah. So it’s a, yeah. So you’re still doing it. doing it just in a roundabout way. Right.

43:48
Cool. Well, Vivian, it was a pleasure to speak with you. I’m glad that you weren’t reserved and quiet like you normally are. Oh, you know, today was a good day. And I hope this whole lockdown for you lifts so you can get some more work done and all the cat and the rohess stuff that you love. Oh, yes, rohess. Yeah. All right. Take care and thanks a lot.

44:16
Hope you enjoyed that episode and were inspired as much as I was by Vivian’s story. more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 370. And once again, I want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows, like an abandoned card sequence, a post-purchase flow, a win-back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO.

44:46
I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for ecommerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash dev. That’s P-O-S-T-S-C-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash dev. Now I talk about how I use these tools in my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequaterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away.

45:16
Thanks for listening.