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.

00:27
But before I begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Now I’m super excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store and it depend on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who is shopped in your store in exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week, easy.

00:56
Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list.

01:23
And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source from my e-commerce store. And I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce and that is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows and abandon cart at the push of a button.

01:50
Not only that, but it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P O S T S U I P T dot I O slash Steve. And then finally, I want to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience.

02:17
No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience Podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

24:34
blending and the mirroring of the data is something that was really kind of interesting. But anyways, that’s kind of like something I figured out before. And that’s kind of why I still do that practice today. But all the people today are opted in all white hat, you know, none of this gross stuff. If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens.

25:02
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25:32
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25:57
I’ve also heard of ESPs putting you on a worse IP or a lower quality IP as well. Like if you send too many emails with a lower open rate, just kind of behind the scenes. Yeah, so you have either like a shared IP or a shared pool or kind of like a dedicated IP or a dedicated pool, right? So they typically group people together based off of size of a list and also engagement and behavior, right? So the great thing about a shared thing is if you’re starting out, you get a

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

51:29
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now if you aren’t sending out emails on a regular basis and segmenting your audience properly, then you are leaving a lot of money on the table. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecoderjob.com slash episode 363. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

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

52:28
head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:28
And Andrew, if you’re listening to this episode, let me know what you think. Now, before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-commerce, and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce, and you can segment your audience just like email.

00:55
It’s an inexpensive solution converts like crazy and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Clavio who is also a sponsor of the show. Now, are you working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined? Do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? And do ever wonder how the companies you admire are the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies.

01:24
Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change. These companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. And to learn more about how Klaviyo helps you own your

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

23:36
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24:04
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24:34
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. So it sounds like you’re kind of looking for new products. That’s like one of your primary duties. Let me ask you a question then. What is stopping you from just carrying a whole bunch of stuff since you don’t have to carry inventory?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

51:37
Hope you enjoy that episode. And if you ever see Andrew, ask him about this episode with Pat. More information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 362. And once again, I want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO.

52:05
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

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

00:29
And between the two of us, we’ve seen a lot of mistakes, believe me. So enjoy the episode and be sure to check out the unofficial Shopify podcast. Now, before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Postscript is my SMS or text message provider that I use for e-commerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10X bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce.

00:58
and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution converts like crazy and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. I also want to thank Klavia who is also a sponsor of the show. Now are you working around the clock to build the business you always imagined? And do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? Do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it?

01:26
companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change. Now these companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion.

01:56
To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And then finally, I want to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast, where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

20:10
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

20:38
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

21:08
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. So a common misconception is that people don’t even look at your About Us page, but I guarantee you, and this is for our store, the About Us page is probably the second or third most trafficked page on the site. Because when you’re shopping at an unknown boutique, people actually want to know the people behind the store. Yes. Yeah. Well, think about it. It’s like…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

54:03
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now I talk about how I these tools in my blog, and if you were interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com

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