00:27
And Klaviyo helps you build more personal connections with each customer based on the things that they really care about. Send more relevant emails by tailoring every experience based on individual preferences and shopping behavior. With top-notch targeting and best in-class segmentation, you can unlock the full potential of your e-commerce data and create email marketing moments that keep shoppers coming back well past the holidays. Just ask Living Proof, Tipsy Elves, Huckberry, or more than the 50,000 other brands growing with Klaviyo.

00:55
And because Klaviyo was built for e-commerce brands of all shapes and sizes, there’s no better marketing platform out there. And you can get started now 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. If you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing.

01:20
SMS, or text message marketing, is already a top five revenue source for my ecommerce store, and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript.io, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in ecommerce, and ecommerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too, and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers.

01:49
So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-C-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now onto the show.

02:15
Welcome to the My Wife Quarter Job podcast. First off, happy new year. I personally am so glad that 2020 is over with. It’s been a very rough year for both Bumblebee Linens as well as MyWifeQuarterJob.com. So today I’m going to do a solo episode to recap the year for both of my businesses and then discuss what lies ahead in 2021. Now, if you look back to the beginning of the year, things were going actually really great for my e-commerce store as well as my blog in January and February.

02:44
But when March hit, when COVID-19 hit, my business was hit really hard. In fact, my revenue was sliced by more than half when the coronavirus first hit the United States. And as all of you who have been following me for a long time know, my primary products from my e-commerce store are handkerchiefs and weddings for special occasions. In addition, I sell personalized and monogrammed napkins for parties, hotels, airlines, and basically my store was just hit.

03:13
hard everywhere on practically every single front. And because of the coronavirus and the shelter in place rules, no one was getting married. No one was having parties and no one was traveling or staying in hotels. And in addition, a decent sized piece of our business caters to real estate agents as well. But real estate sales stagnated as well during the crisis, which was mainly in March and April. And on March 22nd, my business reached a low point.

03:40
And that’s when my wife and I started to panic a little bit. I remember thinking to myself, okay, if the sales are like this for an extended period, then, you what are we going to do? Should we move the business into a cheaper location? Right now we’re in this warehouse that’s costing us, I think almost $5,000 a month, which is really high. And so, I mean, all these things were going through my head, but then in April, my wife had the idea of selling masks. And so to test the waters,

04:09
What we did is we published a tutorial on how to turn one of our handkerchiefs into a face mask without sewing. And then we started giving away these free handkerchiefs with every purchase along with the tutorials. And this promotion turned out to be a huge hit. And so what we ended up doing is we decided to import a bunch of masks and these masks started selling like hotcakes. And I completely owe this to my wife. She thought of a really great pivot for our products.

04:37
which weren’t being used for weddings right now. So why not just turn that same material into something that people actually want. And those masks sold really well. And then we followed up our mass sales with a line of quarantine gifts. So what are quarantine gifts? Quarantine gifts are, for example, like our monogram cocktail napkins. In the past, they were for weddings, but we decided to embroider them with funny sayings like quarantiney and some other inside COVID-19 jokes. And

05:06
people at this time, I remember because people weren’t seeing each other, they wanted to give each other gifts. And so these, these products in our stores started selling really well. And what ended up happening is that these quarantine gift sales actually got us through April when morale for our business was just about as low as it has ever been for our company. And to make matters worse, while all this stuff was happening in March and April with our e-commerce store,

05:37
I had to cancel our annual e-commerce conference, the Seller Summit. And that period was really stressful for me as well because in a matter of just two weeks, my partner and I, the conference was already sold out at that point, right? My partner Tony, I had to give a bunch of refunds for the event and what was particularly painful is we had to fight with various vendors to get our money back and turn the entire conference virtual.

06:06
easily one of the most stressful business situations that I’ve ever had to deal with. And I remember there was just one vendor and you got to remember at this time, everything was shut down and locked down. And we had this one vendor, which I will not name, purposely charge our credit card after refusing to give us a refund, even though the entire state of Florida was shut down at the planned date of our event, which was in May. So we had to file a charge back for that. We ended up getting our money back and we ended up negotiating with the hotel to postpone our event.

06:35
But still, when everything was up in the air, I was looking at maybe taking a loss in the mid to high five figures, if things didn’t go right. But fortunately, we got our money, we postponed the event, and we ran a virtual event that went surprisingly well. I didn’t know what to expect, because I’d never run a virtual event, but we threw that thing together in a matter of a couple of weeks, and yeah, it was great. It went better than…

07:05
I could possibly have imagined it would go. But even today, obviously what we did is we gave everyone a free ticket who already had a ticket to the virtual event as well as a ticket to the next event. But even today, in the beginning of January, the live event planning still remains in limbo. I know a bunch of people have been getting the vaccine or the vaccination process has been happening already, but from what I’ve been reading, the whole vaccination process has been kind of largely bungled.

07:34
in United States. In order for us to get herd immunity, it’s probably going to take a while for everyone to get the vaccine, let’s just say. I’m very confident that there will be a seller summit this year, but both Tony and I still need to figure a bunch of things out. And even if we do set a date, you we still have to get the speakers and tickets and that sort of thing. It’ll probably happen, but it’s probably going to happen much later in the year when it’s safer to do so. But anyways, after the lows of March and April,

08:04
when I felt like I was getting bombarded from all sides, both businesses, you know, with the Seller Summit and the e-commerce store, things ended up taking a dramatic turnaround. And starting in May, e-commerce just started taking off like crazy. I think because people were stuck at home and brick and mortar stores were closed, everyone just started shopping online and it was crazy. Even my mom, who I talk to every day, my mom is pretty tech agnostic. I mean, she doesn’t like tech, let’s just say.

08:34
and she had long resisted buying stuff online, but all of a sudden during the pandemic, she didn’t want to go to the grocery store and that sort of thing. And so, you know, we showed her how to buy stuff online and she started getting her groceries, her clothing, everything delivered to her doorstep and she loved it. And in fact, you know, even today when stores are open now, obviously she’s probably never going to go back to the old way of physically going to the store. I mean, my mom is getting up there in age and you know, she doesn’t like to drive either.

09:04
and now she’s adopted this online shopping mentality. And this is incidentally why I’m just so bullish on e-commerce in 2021. I went and pulled up some stats. According to Statista, e-commerce as a percentage of retail sales shot up from 11.8 % to 14.3 % in Q3 of 2020. And Q3 of 2020, this is after the stores had already reopened for the holiday season as well.

09:33
And so I sincerely believe that e-commerce is going to skyrocket even further in 2021. And that 2021 will truly be the best time to get into e-commerce. And if you’re already in e-commerce, it’s going to be a really good year. But I do want to clarify that when I talk about e-commerce, it’s not just any type of e-commerce. And here’s my personal take on the situation since there’s many different ways to sell physical products online. But first off, because many people are going to be embracing e-commerce, marketplaces like Amazon,

10:02
will continue to get more competitive and the evil seller activity from what I’ve seen has shown no signs of lessening. And if you listen to episode 332 of my podcast with Amanda Wittenborn, she actually had many of her most profitable listings shut down for copyright infringement when she’s the designer of her products. I she owns the copyright, yet her listings were constantly getting taken down by people accusing her of copyright infringement.

10:27
You know, even after a prolonged battle with these malicious sellers, she still continues to have problems today with these exact same listings, which at the time were bringing in the bulk of her revenue. So what is her strategy today? Well, her Amazon strategy today is to release a bunch of new products and basically try to stay under the radar with their products, because this is what she said. And you can listen to that podcast episode for yourself. As soon as your product hits the best sellers list, it’s ripe for malicious activity.

10:58
So it’s in your best interest, ironically, to not be the best selling item on Amazon. It’s just to kind of make your money, diversify across many different products and basically just stay under the radar. I mean, the fact that you have to go to those lengths, it’s just one of the unfortunate aspects of selling on Amazon today. Because still, even in all through 2020, it’s just way too easy for a malicious seller to take someone down. And things haven’t changed much in 2020.

11:26
And I actually do not foresee many changes in 2021 in this department. And this is why I believe more than ever that having your own brand and your own platform is the way to go in the foreseeable future. Now it’s fine to sell in as many marketplaces as possible to proliferate your sales, but it’s important to not rely on a third party platform for all of your sales. Now, for example, during COVID, Amazon refused to take shipments into their warehouses and over the holiday season, warehouse space was really scarce.

11:54
So people couldn’t send in as much product as they would have liked either. And in fact, Amazon, the way they calculate the amount of inventory you can send in, it doesn’t account for the bursty period over the holidays. so Amazon didn’t let us send in as much as we’d have liked. And we ran out of stock over the holidays and we were forced to go merchant fulfilled. And if you’re an e-commerce store that doesn’t have a fulfillment, a way of fulfillment on your own, then you were out of luck. And if all of your sales were

12:24
during this period when Amazon actually refused to take shipments, then you were completely out of luck. And you know, on that front on owning all of your own stuff, even platforms like Shopify actually started banning people from selling certain products in their shops. And just as an example, an acquaintance of mine selling hand sanitizer was actually shut down by Shopify because Shopify deemed that his prices were too high. They basically thought that he was gouging everyone for hand sanitizer when everyone was on the lookout for hand sanitizer. But in fact,

12:54
He actually was not trying to gouge anyone. His costs had risen dramatically and he was forced to raise prices basically to remain profitable. All right, so if even a platform like Shopify can call the shots on what you can sell, I mean, that’s just a problem right there, right? And I preached this all along, but you need to be in as much control as possible over your business as you can, which basically brings me to my next point.

13:21
Out of all the marketing platforms at your disposal, you should be focusing on your owned marketing assets. And owned marketing assets are platforms that you own, like email, SMS, and to a certain extent, Facebook Messenger. I put an asterisk on that one because kind of technically Facebook controls that platform. But during COVID and the height of the pandemic, both Facebook and Google actually prohibited the advertising of masks online. And when my wife came up with that great idea to sell our own masks,

13:50
we were actually forced to use our own channels to market our new product line. And as I mentioned earlier, during this period, Amazon also suspended shipments of non-essential items to their warehouse, which prevented us from restocking our sold out goods. And without our customer list, our business recovery would not have been possible. And we would have been in deep trouble if we relied on only Amazon for our sales, for example. So if Amazon’s bringing in most of your sales, you have to pause and take a moment to consider playing the long game.

14:21
Now starting your own site and building your own traffic will take longer to ramp up and your sales initially will definitely be less than Amazon. But unless you start at some point, something drastic and beyond your control will eventually happen with your Amazon account. And that’s something that actually I can actually guarantee. What you need to do is you need to plant your seeds now and dig your well before you are thirsty. Because success in e-commerce in 2021 will hinge on your ability to make sales and retain your customers

14:50
for repeat sales.

14:54
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.

15:22
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.

15:52
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show.

16:02
So how do you build a lasting customer relationship and increase the lifetime value of your customer? One, you can segment out who your best customers are and treat them like royalty. One thing that we always do is at the end of the year, we go through our customer list, actually usually once a quarter, we go through our best customers. These are people who buy a lot and often, and we reach out to them and we offer them special perks, like special releases of products, or we’ll give them a special coupon code, or we’ll give them…

16:30
like a dedicated representative take their orders. Make them feel special so that they’ll buy from you again and again. We also send emails and texts to our existing customers regularly. So if you’re not sending email out at least once a week, then you’re missing out on a lot of sales. And if you haven’t implemented some of these basic flows, like a pre-purchase flow or an abandoned cart flow, a post purchase flow or a win back flow, look those up on my blog if you don’t know what I’m talking about. You definitely have to implement those with your site.

17:01
You also want to try to increase your average order value. Some of the things that we did this year for our store was we focused a little bit more on bundling certain items, trying to just boost the amount of money that people will spend. Another way to kind of artificially do this is to set a higher free shipping threshold. So by setting your free shipping threshold a little bit higher to entice someone to add an additional item, you can increase your average order value in your sales as well. One thing that I completely redid in the beginning of the year,

17:30
was our cross-sell strategy. So we use Klaviyo, and depending on what someone has purchased, we send them now different post-purchase sequences that cross-sell them complimentary items. So for example, if someone buys cocktail napkins at our store, that sends them down a special email post-purchase sequence that tries to cross-sell them dinner napkins and lunch napkins. And we are also running Facebook Dynamic Cross-Sells as well. Facebook has knowledge of what everyone’s purchased at your store and what they’ve bought.

17:59
And Facebook has a pretty good idea of what products are bought with each other. And so you can actually have Facebook automatically create ads with products that it thinks people are likely to buy once they bought a certain product. It’s called Facebook Dynamic Cross-Sales. It actually works really well. You can also implement a loyalty program. And this is something that we implemented with ManyChat for free. There’s a post on the blog. Just do a search for loyalty program and you can see how I implemented that for free.

18:26
The bottom line, right now, over a third of our business is from repeat customers, and just having these repeat customers establishes a solid foundation for a business to grow every single year because we have that solid base. Now, one thing I also want to mention is that there’s going to be some really big changes on the horizon for Facebook and Google advertisers. That’s worth mentioning, and this all has to do with Apple. Starting in iOS 14, Apple is going to flash a pop-up

18:56
Whenever someone visits your that will ask Apple users for permission to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies. I’ve seen a picture of this pop-up. It’s really obstructive. And just the verbiage that they use, you know, do you give this site permission to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies? I can only imagine that most people are going to opt out of tracking for privacy reasons. And the implications for opting out are really massive.

19:25
in the online advertising world. Because if a user opts out, that means that you can no longer track their activity on your site. This means that you can’t tell if they visited your site, if they added an item to their cart, if they viewed a product, or if they’ve made a purchase. As you know, Apple users represent a pretty big chunk of online devices, and not being able to get conversion data for these customers will greatly reduce the effectiveness of your ads. So this means you won’t know

19:53
that if you’re running an ad, whether it made a conversion, and as a result, your audiences might be grossly off as well. And this is just developing right now. This is relatively new, but as it develops further, I will report back with more. But one of the main ways to fix this right now is to use the Facebook conversion API with your site going forward. Basically, I’m gonna get a little bit technical here, but basically instead of using cookies, which is the way that it’s done now.

20:21
you will actually have to have your server transmit conversion data directly to Facebook via an API call. Basically, instead of relying on cookies, which are little files that are stored in the browser, you will actually have to have your website send the conversion data directly to Facebook or Google. Now, don’t worry if this is over your head. Just be aware that support for your shopping cart for these APIs are coming soon and that you need to implement this as soon as you can if you plan on advertising going forward.

20:50
And you will have to do this separately for Facebook and Google or for whatever advertising platform that you use that currently relies on cookies. Now, regardless of advertising, however, the best way to build sales and traffic is by creating content. All right. It doesn’t matter what you choose, whether it be through blogging, podcasting or video content attracts people who you can then convert to sales. Okay. So let’s sum things up for 2021. Since I talk about a lot of different things here.

21:18
I know that there are listeners of my podcast at every level. And so I’m going to try to address each group differently. So if you already own or run an e-commerce business and you’re still only selling on Amazon, I think it’s time to diversify. I’ve just heard too many horror stories in 2020 for you to put all of your eggs in one basket any longer. And even though our Amazon sales continue to grow every year and Amazon still is a really good moneymaker, those sales from Amazon.

21:47
are not only the least satisfying, but they are the most stressful sales as well. Because you might wake up in the morning, one morning and notice that your listings are suspended or Amazon has done something else to your listing or change things up. And you have to cater to all of Amazon’s whims and the support is terrible. It can easily take you several days just to even get them to respond to you. So as you are diversifying with your own site, which you should do in 2021, make sure that you focus on your own marketing channels.

22:17
So most of you are probably on email already, but I know for a fact that a lot of you are not on SMS. So SMS should be your next target for sure, without a doubt. It’s actually killing it for our store right now. I’m using Postscript.io for my SMS marketing for e-commerce right now. Now, for those of you who have yet to get started with an online business, 2021 is probably the best time to start an e-commerce just as it begins to skyrocket. And if you don’t know what you want to sell yet, then just putting out content

22:46
is probably gonna be your best bet. Produce content on topics that you’re interested in, build an audience, and just let your audience guide your way. And to put out content, actually doesn’t cost much money at all. Starting a YouTube channel is free. Starting a podcast can be as little as five bucks, and starting a blog will cost you as little as $3. Now you gotta realize that starting a business is mostly mental. And I know many of you are probably hesitant to pull the trigger because you might feel

23:16
that you don’t have what it takes to succeed. But ask yourself this, what if you do have what it takes? And in case you think that you don’t have the skills to succeed, here actually is set of skills that everyone has that actually doesn’t require any knowledge at all. One, you can be on time. You can set a schedule to just work on something and just show up. You can also put your best foot forward. Try as hard as you can and just don’t give up.

23:44
on something that you’ve put your mind to. You can have energy and passion for what you’re working on. You can get excited. Find something that you’re excited about and just put out content on it. And once you build that audience, the money will just come. You can actually have a consistent work ethic. Just make sure you show up. Set aside a time in your calendar to work on your business and make it a part of your routine. And it’s important that as you’re working on your business that you have the right attitude.

24:15
Don’t keep telling yourself that this is too hard or that you’ve tried everything. That’s actually one of my pet peeves. Whenever someone tells me that they’ve tried everything and nothing’s working, there’s no way that you’ve tried everything because if you’ve tried everything, that means that you would have found something that worked. So have an open mind, have the right attitude, go into this believing that you’re gonna succeed. And have an open mind, be coachable. If someone is telling you that you’re doing something wrong, don’t make excuses.

24:45
Just analyze and look at what you’re doing and find out ways or find out problems that you’re doing and try to improve on what you’re already doing. And finally, be prepared. And this is very similar to putting your best foot forward. You have to try your hardest to do something and don’t give up. You got to give everything at least three to five years. Don’t start a business thinking that it’s going to be successful in year one. You got to have a long-term mindset because things just take time to grow. Things take time to sink in.

25:13
If you’re taking a course, if you’re trying to learn something, don’t expect to be an expert at it right away. I remember when I was taking this one engineering class in college, was easily the hardest class that I’d ever taken. And when I first reviewed the material, I didn’t understand a thing. And I didn’t understand a thing throughout the entire semester. It was only that last two weeks of the semester did things finally sink in and I ended up doing well in the class. But it took a very long time. Running a business is the exact same.

25:42
So if you have the right attitude, good things will happen. And for 2021, I know that I’m going to be doubling down on content. In fact, I have a couple of special announcements to make in the next couple of episodes on my next content endeavors that I’m really excited about. So here’s to a prosperous 2021 for everyone. And I look forward to hearing what you guys are up to. So I hope you enjoyed my recap of 2020 and what is in store for 2021.

26:11
And for more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 336. And once again, I want to thank Postscript.io, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at Postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. I also want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants.

26:40
You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned 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 KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Now I talk about how I use both these tools on my blog. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

27:09
Thanks for listening to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitterjob.com.

00:29
but the content in this episode is worth it. But before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your customer contact list. And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. 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.io, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce stores and e-commerce is their primary focus.

00:58
Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too and with the holiday season rolling around, SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo who is also a sponsor of the show. If you’re behind on planning for Black Friday and Cyber Money, then Klaviyo is here to help.

01:28
Klaviyo is the ultimate e-commerce marketing platform for online brands of all kinds and all sizes. With email automation, SMS marketing, list growth tools, and more, you’ll get everything you need to build a strong relationship that’ll keep your customers coming back. And with the holiday season right around the corner, there’s no time like the present. Get up and running quickly with Klaviyo’s lightning fast integrations, pre-built marketing automations, and beautiful email templates. So whether you’re a billion dollar business or just starting out, Klaviyo is the e-commerce marketing platform for growth during the holidays and long after.

01:57
So get a free trial over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.com slash my wife. Now onto the show.

02:22
Welcome to the My Wife Quarter Job podcast. Today I have my good buddy Mike Jackness with me. He’s actually sitting right across from me right now. And what ended up happening is I just took a road trip just kind of out of the blue. think, did you invite me or did I invite myself? We’ll call it a little bit of both. A little bit of both. So Mike just moved into this incredible house in Vegas and he mentioned that he had this extra room in the back and I was like, sweet. I’ve been itching to get out of the Bay area. And Mike said, why don’t you come on over?

02:52
I don’t think he thought that I was going to take him up on that offer because I have kids who are in school, but turns out everything is virtual now. So it doesn’t really matter. And here I am. We’ve been here. I’ve been here for the past week. And while I was here, we may as well record some podcasts. Absolutely. We’ve gotten used to being hosts when we lived abroad for a while for a total of four years, between Costa Rica and the Cayman Islands, like all your friends, like even people you hadn’t heard from in like 10 years, want to come visit. And so it trained us to be,

03:20
to be good hosts and now we kind of love it and we have friends all over the country that we don’t get to see very often. So when they come visit it’s a pleasure. I this place is literally like a hotel. I’ve been calling it Jack Nis Lodge. Like it really is decorated like a hotel, like a fine hotel actually. And then the pool is out back, the kids love swimming. It’s been great. I’m glad you guys are having a good time. I’m glad you think so highly of our place. So what’s funny is this podcast almost didn’t happen even though we are both podcasters, Mike, podcast for Ecom Crew.

03:49
We could not get the mic set up. We’re used to having people remote and we literally spent like 30 minutes getting the sets We were play some circus music right now but we couldn’t get the licensing for it. All right, so it’s actually rare. Actually, you know what? When’s the last time you came on the podcast? It’s been a long time. It’s been a while. It’s been a long time. So I don’t wanna say it’s rare but I guess it is rare that you’ve come on. Mike always speaks at Seller Summit and he helps run the masterminds usually so everyone knows Mike. I think it just, you people get busy and…

04:19
as podcast host, you don’t really want guests repeating a lot, which becomes more and more difficult with every episode to find new people out there that you want to have on your podcast. So maybe we’re just getting desperate for guests at this point. All right. Well, I wasn’t going to go down that route, but it’s a real treat to have Mike here today. I thought holiday season is rolling around and I thought we’d just talk a little about e-commerce. Mike just recently sold his, one of his e-commerce brands, Color It, for a seven figure sump.

04:48
Is it disclosed? just or it was low seven figures. We were asked not to talk about the details. Okay. We’ve been respectful of that I mean when someone gives you seven figures and that’s all they ask you it’s Not that difficult to just kind of but you still have several other brands, right? We do we have a hot and cold therapy brand that we’ve owned since 2015 we have a offshoot of that in a way, which is Stuffed animals with hot and cold packs in them that also have a scent

05:18
They’re geared towards kids. It’s called Wild Baby. We have, I think, 12 different SKUs there, just different designs like a fox and a bunny and a dog or whatever. And then we also own Tactical.com, which I’m very excited about because it’s a content site that’s been ramping up very nicely lately. mean, our traffic is up almost 10x this year. I think we can do the same next year. And we have a brand, a tactical brand that kind of goes with that. And so one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about

05:48
over the last couple of years is how am I going to continue to compete in the world of Amazon when I don’t want to do black hat stuff, you know, and everyone else around me is doing black hat stuff. How do I compete with these black hat type people in a white hat way and gaining an unfair advantage through, I mean, we’ll say unlimited, but it’s not unlimited, but a huge amount of organic traffic that continues to come in every day is a huge leg up and that’s what we’re going with.

06:16
So I don’t want to promote black hat tactics, but I’m just kind of curious of because you belong to MDS. MDS, Million Dollar Sellers. It’s a great group. If you are doing over a million dollars on Amazon, I highly recommend checking that group out. There’s a lot of really good people in there and lots of great tactics and everything’s discussed in there from the white hat stuff to the black hat stuff. And so it’s really opened my eyes up to the things that are happening in the world of Amazon.

06:45
kind of makes me hyper aware and also a little concerned. some people there are doing black hat stuff. I’m just kind of curious if anyone has gotten caught yet. Oh yeah, there’s people that get shut down all the time. Oh, for black hat stuff? Yeah, well it’s funny. I wouldn’t say this is funny because this is obviously serious, but often, I I would say at least once a week there’s someone in the forum saying that they got suspended. This happens a lot. it reminds me of that line out of Shawshank Redemption, like everyone in here is innocent.

07:12
I don’t know if you ever saw that movie, everyone’s in here is it, it? And so that’s typically the line, right? I didn’t do anything wrong, but I got suspended. And then people start asking questions and it kind of comes out that maybe they weren’t so squeaky clean anyway. But the thing that really worries me is there are people that are legitimately squeaky clean and they’re still getting their accounts suspended. And the way that’s happening more and more often is through like false IP complaints and things like competitors are able to do.

07:41
to get an account shutdown. And it’s actually really unnerving that I can send an email as basically an anonymous person and get anyone’s account shut down pretty much overnight. They’ll probably get it reopened, but at least for a couple of weeks, you’re in a rough spot. And then there’s also people that were doing other types of black cat things where it becomes progressively more difficult to get it reopened depending on how bad your sins were. Yeah, actually recently one of our friends, Amanda Wittenborn, she’s on the podcast.

08:10
She had 1300 top skews shut down and she’s the designer. That’s what’s scary about this. And there’s just one email about trademark infringement and everything went down and she still hasn’t gotten them back yet. It’s ridiculous. And here’s a mom with several kids at home and work from home now with her mom or herself and her husband. This is like their livelihood and it didn’t come easy to them. And these people, they were on five minute pitch. So we got to know them from that.

08:38
and they’ve worked their rear ends off. now some, can’t use this word on the podcast, so fill in the blank, person has, you know, shut them down with no good reason. You know, it’s like they’re saying that they copied their designs when we know that Amanda created this stuff herself, like she does everything herself and it’s ridiculous. so, but I mean, this is what you sign up for when you sell on Amazon. And if you think that you’re going to be different or immune to this stuff, you’re kidding yourself.

09:07
and it’s probably going to progressively get worse. so again, for us, we’re just constantly thinking about how can we prevent the worst from happening? How can we continue to compete in a white hat way? I think that when you have attention at a different source, if Amazon were to implode on us in some way, then we are able to redirect that traffic to our Shopify store, to Walmart or something else. always, traffic is always going to be money on the internet.

09:36
So I have my answer to this question, but in regards to just the black hat stuff, like your philosophy, I know my philosophy is I actually did some gray black hat stuff in SEO a long time ago and it worked for a long time. And then Google cracked down on it and I lost everything. For me, I don’t do any black hat stuff anymore because I’m thinking long-term. you the same way? Have you gotten? I’m slow. I don’t seem to learn my lessons very quickly.

10:04
I’ve been involved in multiple Google penalties and for us they were pretty tragic. I these were sites that were generating five figures a month in profit, so nothing insignificant and or were domain names that were worth mid five figures to well in the six figures. I you know I’m a domainer and so I’ve had what I would say are very expensive domain names punished as well and didn’t learn my lesson the first time, didn’t learn my lesson the second time when Penguin and Panda happened.

10:34
I really learned my lesson because it was just like a complete Armageddon for us. you know, the thing that’s, you know, I was younger and you learn as you grow up. And the thing that’s just so annoying, like if I could have just sat myself down and been like, instead of playing these games where you’re like just trying to cheat your way to the front of the line every day, and every day you’re trying to find like the new way to do that, instead of spending all your time and energy doing that, if I just spent my time and energy doing what Google ultimately wanted to begin with.

11:03
and didn’t worry about all the noise of the people that are around me that were doing certain things and complaining about how that wasn’t fair because they were getting away with it. If I just focused on producing really great content and running my site that way, mean, the same thing would have worked 20 years ago or 15 years ago as what works today. And so now we’re squeaky clean. And I look at the fact that we have 16 employees in the Philippines, one in the United States. You know, my life would kill me if our…

11:30
livelihood was turned upside down. So I think about these things and make sure that we’re doing things in the most white hat way possible. We have yet to request a link or get a link on tactical.com. been very, we probably have underdeveloped the site compared to what we could have done. And the same thing goes with Amazon because it’s binary. Like what you’re saying is like it works until it doesn’t. And then the day that it doesn’t, it’s not like, oh, business is down 25%, business down 50%. It’s like, you’re just out of business.

11:58
I and in the affiliate business that I was in before, as miserable as it was, it wasn’t like I had a million dollars of inventory that I’m now stuck with. And so the stakes are even higher in e-commerce because you have a warehouse full of inventory and it’s even more fun when you sell on Amazon because that warehouse full of inventory is an Amazon’s warehouse. And if you don’t get this rectified with the next amount of time, they’ll destroy your inventory and will hold onto your money. And so you just gotta keep these things in mind. Yeah, yeah.

12:26
So these days actually when I teach, both Mike and I, teach a class too. I actually advise everyone just to kind of validate on Amazon and then start creating content for their site. And this is the approach that you’ve started taking for Tactical, right? Yeah, and this is something we decided a little bit over two years ago to get really serious about. And it was easy for me to do that because we have a background in it. I was doing it since 2004 and I don’t know what happened. I wish I can go back again. It’d be fun to be able to go back and talk to your former self.

12:56
about all kinds of topics. But I’d like to sit down and be like, Mike, what were you thinking in terms of you got into e-commerce and just leave all these other skill sets behind as if one doesn’t work in harmony with the other. It was just like, oh, I’m in e-commerce now. I’m not gonna work on necessarily building content sites around my e-commerce sites. We had treadmill.com and we started selling treadmills online and didn’t really focus on content too much. And when we got ice wraps, the same thing kinda happened.

13:24
By the we were doing Colorate, I Colorate ranked really well for a lot of terms. We were focusing on content, but we didn’t have like a separate content site. And I think that’s important in some way. It’s more work. That was more a social media play, right? Colorate? Colorate had social media, but we also ranked for like adult coloring books and colored pencils and gel pens and why the benefits of color. We ranked for a bunch of stuff and the site still does. But as an e-commerce site, there’s a differentiation.

13:52
when it comes to content because it’s much more difficult to do link building. Google tends to trust the content slightly less. It looks like from e-commerce sites because they have an agenda, right? Or your competitors aren’t going to want to link to your e-commerce site. And so like how am going to get Crayola, for instance, to link to colorit.com? would never happen. How am I going to get a prominent like 511 Tactical type brand to link to tactical.com? Well, that’s probably easy, but to my…

14:20
or easier, it’s still a big brand, but I can get them to link to Tactical.com where I wouldn’t be able to get them to link to my e-commerce site. Wait, I thought Tactical was both a store and a… It’s not. We’ve actually made a freestanding content site. Oh, I didn’t know And we have our e-commerce brand and site separate from Tactical.com. Oh, you… What is the It’s called TacNiner. Tac… Oh, I see, I see. Okay, and you did that on purpose. We did it on purpose, yeah. Because I think that in…

14:47
mean, it was a unique situation. Tactical.com is kind of the category killer domain name, right? And Tactical is not a brand. Like I thought through this quite a bit. Like I can’t call my e-commerce brand or my physical product brand Tactical. I can never get a trademark for that. It doesn’t make any sense anyway. And so what made sense to me was, what could have also made sense was to make Tactical.com an e-commerce store that sells like a wide variety of tactical products.

15:17
But I didn’t want to get back in the drop ship game or I really didn’t want to get back into the game of selling other people’s products. And I didn’t want the conflict of interest of me selling my products alongside of theirs, kind of like Amazon does and some of these other things. And so after thinking through the whole thing, I thought that, know, tactical.com is a freestanding property that people that are into prepping and survivalism could come to and, you know, get on our email list and really kind of follow us from a social perspective and get the support of other e-commerce brands and.

15:46
in the niche and then have socially distanced e-commerce brand alongside of it kind of made the most sense for us. Interesting. So would you advise other people do that? Because if you put it on the same site, it’s building domain strength, right? Yeah. I mean, I think that there’s a lot of idiosyncrasies here, right? And it’s like hard to say that anybody should do A or B just carte blanche. I think it depends on like what type of domain you have. You know, for like color, right? We put it all together because

16:12
I didn’t want to necessarily go off and buy coloringbooks.com or something that, I like a lot of keyword domains or coloring.com or something like this. If I owned that domain name, my thought process might’ve been different. And so we were kind of, it was like a circumstance thing. We already owned a tactical.com. It wasn’t like I went out and bought it specifically for this. It was one of the domains that we had already purchased. And at some point, I like, I need to start using some of the assets that I have. And that’s how the whole thing kind of came together.

16:41
And then on color, was it blog.color? Was it on a subdomain? It was not on a subdomain. was on Shopify and it was, you know. Shopify’s blog. Shopify’s blog, which is not the best, but. I get this question asked all the time. I’m just curious what your opinion is. WordPress or Shopify blogging platform? Yeah, so I think that this is another one of these. I think that you want to look at, I a content site first or am I an e-commerce store first? And there’s a pretty big distinction. You know, it’s like if you’re.

17:09
If you’re a content site first, you’re gonna be focusing on this different type of content and it’s what people think of you first. They associate you with content first. And so in that case, I would have a WordPress blog at mycontentsite.com and then shop.contentsite.com as my Shopify store. I would actually separate them out. It would be the way that I would do it. your shop.contentsite.com

17:37
isn’t going to rank as well for the category pages and your product pages, but that’s okay because again, you’re a content site first and you probably aren’t looking to rank that category page as highly in Google. People are coming at you from a content perspective first. The best example that comes to mind, like I’m prepared and thinking about this, is someone like Alex, the girl we met. Yeah, travel fashion girl. Exactly. So she’s a content site first.

18:05
and she made some products. so people, like she makes packing cubes and things like that. She’s not necessarily looking for people that are searching for packing cubes that like land on her product page and buy that. know, it’s, if she’s going to rank for packing cubes, she would have a much better time ranking for packing cubes on her actual content site. And then sending people off to, you know, hey, buy them here. And then it goes to shop. And so like, and you could also do this with WooCommerce and have it all integrated, but I’m just personally a fan of Shopify. And so.

18:34
That’s just the way that I would set it up. And again, if you’re a product company first, then you have two options. For Color Right, we are a product company first, and then you could either, if you know you’re gonna be prolific with content, you could have blog.colorright.com and put your WordPress site over there. We just chose to keep everything integrated with Shopify, and that was more just.

19:02
It was 2016 when we made this decision. didn’t really think, we were really more just at the, mean, it’s hard to think back to that point. Four years seems like 40 years in e-commerce, it’s just because we buy so fast. But we were just like, is this even gonna work? And we were creating these products. We were like trying to do some market research. Are people gonna even feel like the things that we were doing with our products, were they good enough or better and differentiated in a way that people would wanna buy our product? And by the time we had that answer,

19:31
we had already ran some content and it was like, we’re not gonna now change over. And so we kind of were stuck with it at that point. So let’s talk about the content strategy for Tactical then. So how do you use that to drive traffic to Tech Niner? Yeah, so where we went wrong to begin with there, it’s another podcast for another day, but we launched Tactical without, I had thought through the fact that like, I own this domain name, I know I to make a content site.

20:00
This is like a bottomless pit of content. I’ll never run out of things to talk about. And we just started writing about tactical stuff and that can include like camping and fishing and hunting and survivalism and prepping and First of all, are you an expert in this subject at all? No. No. That’s another struggle, but no. And so what wrong is like we were just like all over the place for the first kind of like the first year that we were just throwing some content up there. We were a little bit all over the place and didn’t really think through like the branding and direction that we really wanted to go.

20:29
unfortunately. But I think it’s important to get started. We had started working on building a team of content writers and stuff in the Philippines. And think there’s something to be said about the fact that we just even got started, started writing content, started training them to write better content and how to rank. And at a certain point, we’re like, you know what? We need to focus on what the heck we’re doing here. We need to come up with a brand strategy and mission for what the site’s going to be. And the marine that we really came up with, where we wanted to go,

20:58
even as disjointed as what we started off was. Why did it matter that it was so disjointed actually? Because you can’t rank for everything on Google. Google won’t allow you to rank for everything under the sun. You’ve got to be concentrated in something. And we end up choosing to be concentrated in survivalism and prepping. That’s still a very deep, wide swath of content. I’ve never run out of stuff to talk about. But at least it’s focused on something that Google’s going to draw a circle around you and say, this is…

21:27
a survival site, it’s hard for them to draw a circle around you, because the circle’s so damn big around tactical. it’d be hard, there’s really probably no site out there that ranks for hiking and backpacking and fishing and survivalism and hunting. there might be something out there that’s massive that I’m not aware of, but very few things in Google these days are able to rank for everything under the sun. They’ve really penalized sites that try to do that.

21:54
Because typically they’re not writing really great content. They’re just writing content to write content. And it’s also hard to have a message and a direction and funnels and flows. So what kind of lead magnets and stuff are you gonna use on your site to get people to wanna sign up? And so because we’re focused on prepping and survival, all of our messaging is cohesive around those things. And so our lead magnets download our prepping and survivalism guide for a disaster.

22:22
be ready for earthquakes or be ready for a hurricane or be ready for the zombie apocalypse or whatever it might be. I’m like, can continuously have messaging around those things because people are most likely already coming, well, not most likely now, definitely coming to the site for subjects in that genre. You they’re looking at freeze dried food or how to like build a homemade mosquito trap or how to build an underground bunker or like what they should have in their bug out bag or how to build a fire on their own, like all these different types of topics that are surrounded or related to.

22:51
survivalism and prepping. And so it’s easier for us to convert more of these people into customers because we know where we’re going. And so they’re just kind of being all over the place. You’re not gonna sell a survivalist and prepper like an ultra light backpacking bag that’s for a five day backpacking trip that, you know, it’s just not, it doesn’t make sense. They want like an ultra rugged, you know, sack for three days of prepping and like having things organized in a way where it’s just, you know, it’s for things to survive.

23:20
and not just be lightweight. There’s some subtle differences that really make a difference. So when you’re writing about these topics, given that you’re not an expert in that subject matter, is it just something that you learn as you go along and become an expert over I haven’t written a word on Tactical.com. you haven’t? Okay. Let’s talk about that. That’s interesting. It isn’t necessarily me being a subject matter expert. It’s the people that we’ve hired to be the writers. And for us, I’ve chosen to do this all in-house. I like the control.

23:48
I like the fact that we’ve been able to incrementally train and improve our employees and build a team slowly but surely that’s gotten to where we’re at now, which is an amazing spot. I we’ve really, really hit our stride and we do this in a way like, and we’ve trained our team. like, first of all, like when I sit down with the team, we definitely know that we have to write at a level of expert to like, cause people that are searching for this stuff.

24:17
like they’re ex-military people or like they’re actually like really into prepping and survivalism. And these people are like really, really fanatical about like their craft or like their prepping and being ready for things. And so you can’t fool them. You can’t be S a BSer kind of is like the same, right? Actually that’ll ruin your credibility too, right? 100%. And so what I’ve talked to them about is first of all, like when someone searches for something, there’s gonna be a question that they’re asking. How to build a mosquito trap.

24:45
how to build an underground bunker, how do I do these things? We have to answer the question. If someone clicks back and goes to the next result, we have failed. And so that’s the bar that we’re writing to. And so if we’re going to write an article, there isn’t like a word count that we are aiming to get to. The word count is like, we’re going to exhaust every bit of information that we can on this page, or if it’s too big of a subject, we’ll break it up into separate pieces and make multiple.

25:13
We’ll make like a silo for it and kind of break it off and have like a header type article. We’ve done this like on ice wraps with shoulder pain, for instance. And so one article will be about the anatomy of a shoulder. The other will be like, how do you rest and recover for a shoulder injury? How do you like do PT for shoulder? And then it’ll be like one main article that’ll kind of like talk about all the different components of that. And so we’ve done that a couple of times on Tactical as well. And so again, the whole point is to not let someone hit back.

25:42
Now how do you get, and I’m not being sexist here, just the fact that all of our writers happen to be women, but how do you get these Filipino women that have never spent a day out in the woods to write about these subjects, that’s difficult. And so what we’ve done is, mean, first of all, we give them time to do research, which is really important. They aren’t expected to just start writing. We give them time to research and figure out how to write an article. We also look at ourselves more as curators in a lot of ways.

26:12
And so a lot of the content that we’ve done will reference other people’s YouTube channels and their videos and we’ll embed those in there, obviously give them credit, but a lot of it is just a roundup type stuff of the articles. So we can write, know, we have, watch those videos by the time they’re done watching a couple of hours of YouTube content that we’re going to embed in these articles, they now know enough that they can write an article in an intelligent enough way to keep them captivated, show on video, write some more.

26:39
And then we’ll go create our own infographic to embed in the article. And then we’ll show another video. Google loves this because our time on page is like 20 something minutes. And we’re also providing value for people. We’ve actually answered their question on how to build a mosquito trap or how to start a fire without gasoline in a match. And the contact Blowtorch works well. Blowtorch works well as well, which I brought with me on my West Coast Trail hike. so in my prepping, some of those skills end at I’ve done a few

27:09
multi-day hikes and so I’m kind of prepping and survivaling for those things. We do prep and a little bit of prepping in our own home, but I’m not off the scale in terms of being prepped for the end of the world.

27:24
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.

27:52
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.

28:22
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. I think you might have had Jeff Oxford on your show too, right? Mm That’s the other guy. He told me when he came on that most blogs that he’s encountered do not generate any revenue for the store. And so.

28:46
Sure, you might be ranking for a lot of these survivalist terms, but how do you get them to actually buy stuff on your site? Yeah, so that’s an interesting question as well. So we have also, like all of this content is, know, right, serves a purpose of attracting backlinks, attracting people to get on our email list, just attracting influence and just building traffic. Eventually we will put on like Medivine type ads and that’ll probably generate mid four figures, maybe eventually get us to low five figures a month.

29:13
And which is not insignificant and that stuff adds up. It pays for the content team. I’m kind of, that’s what I’m kind of shooting for as a bar is like to be able to just be able to generate enough revenue off the blog specifically to just to pay for the content team. Cause it’s not set up. But the real secret sauce to all of this whole like medieval plan that I have or Dr. Evil plan maybe is also we write articles on products. And so we’ll.

29:40
reserve those to be like one out of 15-ish articles that we put up will be, what is the best tactical flashlight? What are the best tactical gloves? What is the best entrenching tool shovel? What is the best fire rod starter, et cetera, et cetera. And we’re ranking for a lot of this stuff now. As of recording this, we rank on the first page for tactical gloves. We rank number one, I believe, for entrenching tool, entrenching shovel, best entrenching shovel. Well, it just happens to be that we sell those products and ours are rated number one.

30:09
And so what we do is we will write these articles in anticipation of selling something. And so for instance, we anticipate selling a fire starter probably in 2021. But I didn’t know that we were going to want to sell that necessarily until I had the information to want to sell that. And so we’ve written these articles and the way that we do it, first of all,

30:34
We’re unique in the fact that we actually buy all the products. We don’t write BS reviews. We legitimately go out there and buy 10 to 15 of what seem to be the best selling fire starters. We’re making a leap of faith that the best selling ones also include some of the best actual product. That’s kind of hard to know. We do some research. try to look at, maybe we look at some rankings. Maybe it’s outside the top 15, but it’s a little bit higher price and we’ll buy one of those too.

31:03
We ship all that stuff to the Philippines and then back before COVID, every now and then we would send them out on a company paid, sponsored camping trip. And it was a lot of fun for these guys and they go out for the weekend, like the whole team, even people that aren’t on the tactical team, they’ll go camping and do like a little survivalism thing and they’ll test out the shovels and the fire starters and all the freeze dried food and like.

31:27
It becomes like a kind of a fun project for them and they bring a camera crew with them, there are employees, and they take pictures and film video and they do all this basically once a quarter. And so they’re actually, we’re getting original photography of all the products, we’re physically trying all the products and taking notes, we’re getting video content of all the products, and by time we go through all that, we actually know what the best fire starter is. Because we’ve actually tried them all and we know, and we’re taking notes along the way of like,

31:55
well this one broke at this point because like we put pressure on it and the thing was wood and it snapped and we’re taking notes about all this. Well meanwhile we rank for best Ferarad and best Firestarter now. believe both of those terms on the first page and we also have affiliate links for all those products and now I know that we’re selling X number of Firestarters every month and I can basically know with almost 100 % confidence that when I go launch a Firestarter we’re gonna do well.

32:23
Like it’s not like a guess any longer, right? Like we have flipped the whole script on this. And yes, this is like a very long- It’s a long-term plan. It’s long-term plan. was not, you know, I explained this in 20 minutes, whatever we’ve been talking, but this was years in the making, literally, to be able to pull this off. And now that we have a bunch of traction, it seems like we’re geniuses and it’s really easy, but it wasn’t and it isn’t, you know, it’s like it continues to be a lot of work. But now after investing this time and energy,

32:50
When we launch products, they just work. again, we are, as a recording this, the seventh best tactical glove on Amazon. It’s not an accident. We rank for tactical gloves on Google. People are reading this article. We made a good product because we looked at all the other stuff. We innovated the product and made it better, produced some decent packaging, and put out a good product. And we have traffic that’s constantly flowing through.

33:16
And Amazon loves outside traffic, like disproportionate. Like that seems to be one of the, and maybe they’ll change their algorithm in the future. That’s fine. But for right now, it’s working really well. And even if we just sold the number of products that are going through our links, it becomes significant at some point. And when you then add on to the fact that now the thing’s ranking on Amazon and all the people that are using Amazon as a search engine and buying our product. And it’s again, legitimately, it’s a four and a half star product. It’s a good product. And it’s working very well.

33:46
How much would you say it cost you to put out that piece of content, like best ferro rods, for example? Well, again, that’s like looking at it in a vacuum because it isn’t just that piece of content. As I said, we only really produce about 1 in 15 pieces of content that are these product review type things because we don’t want to become, in Google’s mind, a product review blog because I think that they penalize that and they kind of frown upon these product review sites.

34:14
they know the game that affiliates are playing out there and we don’t want to get grouped in that bucket. We also are using the other content, again, as a very long game thing where people are coming to our site, we’re pixeling them, we’re getting their email address that has some value. So the actual one post, depending on what it is, we have to go out and buy 10 or 15 Ferro Rods, we’re only gonna probably rank between five and seven of them as our top products, the ones that suck we’re not even gonna mention.

34:41
This is a relatively cheap $10 product, so it doesn’t really cost us that much for the product. The shipping to get it out to the Philippines probably cost more than the actual I’m just thinking, you can do this because you have this team in place, right? If you were to just hire one writer or something to do this, it sounds like it would be expensive. It is. We’re spending a couple thousand dollars a month on content writers and a team to do this. It adds up. But now we’re getting to the point.

35:10
where I think our revenue or benefit from it is more than the cost. For quite a while, we were just kind of spending money and I have to, again, have a leap of faith. It’s a long-term investment. Luckily, mean, this is what life’s all about. One of the disadvantages of being in my 40s is that when I get out of bed in the morning, I sound like a box of Rice Krispies. One of the advantages is that- I’ve heard you right when you get up. It’s not pretty.

35:38
Well, the advantages is that I’ve been doing SEO for 15 years and I know without a shadow of a doubt if I start writing content and never stop and put, my wife quit her job is like a really great example of this. I mean, when you first started writing, like no one was reading it, but maybe your wife and your mom, right? And you, mean, maybe- Not my mom. Not even your mom. Like they can’t even get that. you know, it’s just, it’s a lonely world. And you probably at some point were like, I don’t know if it’s worth it.

36:05
I’m not making really any money from this, I’m putting a lot of effort into it. Eventually, all of a sudden you start getting traction and it’s absolutely worth it. But to begin with, it’s hard to get over it. Most bloggers give up before they hit this inflection point of success. And for me, because I’ve been through it before and I know the formula of just keep doing it and keep your head to the grindstone. And luckily, again, we have other businesses that generate revenue and we can invest in this.

36:35
Yeah, I mean it’s just a matter of trusting that you can put out good content, that Google’s gonna wanna rank good content, and I don’t know that that form is gonna ever change. So I’m gonna ask you now the number one question I get at least once or twice a week. Oh gosh, okay. Content, how long would you expect to start getting traffic? Well, I mean you might get traffic in the first month or two, like right? It’s gonna be like a visitor. Right. Or two visitors. know, meaningful amounts of traffic, I think you have to suspect.

37:06
expect at an absolute minimum, like if you’re the best at your, like nine months, like that’s the absolute minimum. Realistically, it’s like 18 months, like to really start seeing a meaningful amount of traffic to where like you can upgrade from the shared hosting plan, know, to like something that like might make a little bit more sense. mean, it takes time, but it will be parabolic. Like you look at our traffic growth curve right now and we’re in the par, we’re like on the parabolic phase. I mean, it took a couple of years.

37:34
But now it’s just like every time I like log in a troughs, it’s just like, holy crap, it’s another another huge jump. Do you building or is it? We have not been doing any link building. Nice. We are starting. We’re actually about to hire a full time link builder. OK. And that will be very white hat. But, you know, eventually it becomes parabolic and we’ve hit that phase and it’s exciting. Let me ask you this. So you have all this traffic now. Are you driving them to Amazon or your site to Amazon?

38:02
To Amazon, Yeah, it’s 100 % to Amazon, yeah. So why is that? I just, value, again, I’m thinking big picture, right? I send them to my site, I sell one fire starter. I send them to Amazon, I actually sell maybe 10 fire starters or 20 or whatever the number is because Amazon’s like a flywheel platform. So by launching a product that immediately has traffic that’s going to get initial sales in traction during Amazon’s honeymoon period,

38:31
which will generate some reviews, which will generate some rankings, which will generate some more reviews and more sales. It helps like get that platform, that inertia going on the flywheel. And even afterwards, like just having that extra traffic and constantly pushing, I think it gives me just this ultimate unfair, again, white hat advantage over all the competitors. And as the traffic continues to grow and tactical, the more and more difficult,

39:01
products we’ll be able to go after, like the more and more competitive products. We’ve started with things that are a little bit less competitive, like tactical gloves are competitive but not to the level of a fire starters, for instance. And the gloves we launched, that’s kind of a long story of what we ended up doing. No, is the trenching shovel is a better example of where like it kind of fits the mold of what we’re looking for. It’s a niche product, not really all that competitive. We were able to launch and be competitive in that space because we rank for that term.

39:30
And so, sending the traffic off to Amazon, again, thinking big picture, it isn’t letting me just get that one sale. It’s letting me eventually get, lets me take advantage of what is 55 % of e-commerce search traffic. Amazon has surpassed Google as the number one e-commerce product search engine. These people are never going to go anywhere else. They type in entrenching tool or tactical gloves or best fire starter or whatever they’re typing in Amazon.

40:00
It isn’t like they’re gonna go, you know what, I’m not finding what I’m looking for here. Let me go search Google now and go find it on takniner.com. That’s not what’s ever going to happen. Of those 55 % of people that are searching on there, like 99.99 % of them are going to make a purchase on Amazon, like either that day or sometime in the future, because they’re already Amazon Prime members, they already have their credit card in there, they already trust Amazon, and they’re just going to buy there. They’re going to find what they want there. And whether it’s my Firestarter or, you

40:30
the other competitor’s firestarter, the person just looking for a darn firestarter, they’re going to buy the product and be done with it. And so I’m thinking about those searches. At the same time, I’m also thinking about how Amazon’s a really difficult platform and they treat us like crap and there’s a bunch of other negatives, but in the meantime, you can’t ignore the honeypot. And so it’s a very difficult, like the jekyll to hide on my shoulder, like…

40:54
know, pulling me into different directions. disagree with you there because if you sell something on your own site, you have that information and a lot of those people are, you can cross sell them other stuff that you sell. So how do you balance the two? Like, do you even send any traffic to Tech Natter? No, not right now. Okay. I think eventually, you know, the way that I look at it is again, I already kind of explained my thought process of, you know, if something really bad ever happened over at Amazon, the thing that I love about the strategy, which I mentioned earlier is I can always flip the switch or turn the dial.

41:23
So it’s such a point of time where like, know what, like now it makes more sense to send them to my store. I can do that. But right now, you know, we only have a few products. really just, this project’s still kind of getting off the ground. There really isn’t that many cross-sell opportunities. These are not consumable products. like, know, color it was a much more difficult decision as we were talking through this because here’s a brand where everything’s a cross-sell to everything else. You buy one book, like now you’re a customer. gel pens, a whole bunch of other books. Everything, and it’s all consumable.

41:51
Like every time you sit down and use one of our products, like you’re a fraction of the way towards becoming a customer of ours again. And that’s difficult to like give to Amazon because you can’t market to them in a way that you just talked about. You 52 % of our revenue for color rate was email marketing. Just repeat customer purchases for the most part. Tactical, we don’t really have that yet. And eventually we will, because I’ve been thinking a lot long and hard about this, we eventually will.

42:19
have consumable type products or things that we can’t cross market. As a recording this, we rank number two right now for survival food. Now there’s something that we can potentially develop at some point that is consumable or people do make repeat purchases of even though a lot of it goes in the garage and is there just for an emergency, a lot of people accumulate. They’ll buy a five day supply and then they’ll get like another five day supply. They’ll get a pallet of it. Then they’ll buy another pallet of it or whatever it is.

42:47
And ranking number two for survival food and emergency food and freeze-dry food, you’re for all this stuff now, makes me think long and hard about potentially making a product that sells those types of things. Let me ask you this. So is Tech Niner an affiliate site then? Meaning do the buy now buttons go to Amazon or do you still have check-in on Amazon? They do right now. They do right now. Eventually that will change. mean, again, the thought process is right now, the thing I’m really still focused on is just building traffic on Tactical.

43:17
And these products are there just as placeholders in a lot of ways, just to start checking metrics and seeing how much of this affiliate traffic that we’re sending from Tactile.com over to Amazon is converting. We’re doing some other things like kind in the background, we’re doing some free plus shipping offers and building our list and some other things and that’s why we have the Shopify store there. again, realistically, someone who buys a pair of tactical gloves isn’t necessarily gonna be in the market for a multi-tool shovel.

43:45
They’re not gonna necessarily buy a tactical flashlight. These are things that you typically buy in the moment that you need them. Like you don’t just see ads or just get an email and all this, and go, know what, I’m gonna go ahead and buy those. So we need to develop products that trigger those emotions and those buying habits. And those products exist in this space. It’s just a matter of like, we’re going to launch them at a time when it gives us the biggest chance of success. And so we just wanna bite off. It’s like, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time?

44:14
What you’re saying is you’ll get there. We’ll get there. So let me ask you this. You’re driving all this traffic to Amazon and at the same time you’ve gotten attacked. We’ve shared some stories. How do you fight the bad players? This one’s tough, man. I I think the way that I’ve done this is to let someone else deal with it. That’s the only way that I can survive stuff like this. do you mean by that? I have someone else on my team deal with it. I don’t even want to know about it.

44:44
I tell them, unless it’s an emergency, just don’t even tell me. I don’t want to even know what’s happening because I take it so personally and I get so spun up. Nothing can ruin my day faster than hearing about how some bozo got our listing suspended because they checked you sold as new or whatever. I lose control. take it personally. But the thing is, when I’m talking about it right now, I can be very objective about it. I realize that Amazon’s like this 800 pound gorilla.

45:14
Like they don’t care about any individual seller because there’s plenty of other people online. If they don’t buy my tactical gloves today, they’re gonna sell another pair of tactical gloves, you know, under another brand. The customer’s gonna be happy. Amazon gets their 15%. They’re happy. They don’t really care about me. And I get that. I get that environment. I mean, I’m not happy about it. I wish they were better with this. I also get the fact that like their support’s awful, but like they’re not really incentivized to make it any better. And it’s just kind of like…

45:42
It is the way it is. It is what it is because it’s just the way that it is. can’t make it better because you want it to be better. if I don’t like it, then I should just stop selling on Amazon, which I don’t want to do because again, that doesn’t make sense. And so if you can’t deal with this stuff happening, then don’t sell on Amazon. And so I know this right now in this moment, but then as soon as I would get the email, your listing has been suspended.

46:12
Then I get like, really mad. I mean, it evokes these emotions. So, literally it doesn’t go into your inbox then? It does not go to my inbox. It goes to someone else’s inbox and they just deal with it. Like, our team’s really good. And they’ll get it reinstated just as quickly as I will. And they’re just as upset about it as I am. like, they’re not, they don’t get personally upset about it. You know, they just want to get their, they want to do a good job for us and for me and the team. But, you when I hear about this stuff, like I really lose it. Like I was telling, like there’s a couple of things that I do get notified about. And one of them was like,

46:41
Someone attacked our listing by adding keywords into it. Like they put cross-contamination in there, which got it suspended for being a pesticide. And they want us to go through a pesticide course now, like Amazon does. And the only reason I really even found out about this stuff, because you were asking me a question, anecdotally heard about this in some communication in the company. So I knew that we were fighting this listing, but again, just removed myself from it.

47:07
And then Stephen asked him the question and talk about it the other night. was like, gosh, darn it. Like, well, I didn’t even want to know about this because I’m sorry. You know, it’s just like, pisses me off to my core. know, again, I just, let someone else deal with it and then, and I’m just happy. Like I just, you know, like I know that, you know, certain percent of our business is going to be affected every year by this. And it just, it’s a cost of doing business on Amazon. That was my next question. Actually. Do you kind of factor this in? I do. Okay. Yeah. And I just expect that like our best selling listings going to like have this happen. And like a couple other listings, you know, throughout the year.

47:37
And it’s just kind of a cost of doing business. And as long as we respond to it and get it back up as quickly as we possibly can, you know, it’s just a matter of the way that it is. And I prefer to not have to be involved with it or know about it if I don’t have to. Because again, I’m lucky enough that I have a good, and we have 17 total team members. They can deal with this stuff. I don’t need to be involved with it. Me being involved with it isn’t gonna make it get done any quicker. Like I can send an email just as well as they can, get on the phone just as well as they can.

48:07
yell with them just as well as they can except that like I don’t sleep when it happens. And so like I’d rather get a good night’s sleep and just not even know about it. the exact same way. it’s tough. So we’ve been chatting for like 45 minutes. I’m just kind of curious for anyone who’s just kind of getting started in e-commerce, what would you say to these people? Well, I still think e-commerce is an incredibly exciting and fruitful and lucrative place to be. I love being on on Transitor.

48:37
almost certainly gonna continue to go up. You don’t wanna ever be in a business that’s a shrinking market. And I learned this lesson in the online poker days. Like when we were doing online poker affiliate marketing, it was great when we were on the uptrend, but as we were trying to continue to grow into ultimately what was a shrinking market, it’s just a very, very difficult place to be. Doesn’t matter how good you are, like if the pond around you is slowly losing water and drying up, it’s tough. Well, the e-commerce pond is continuing to fill up.

49:07
And none of us have a true crystal ball, otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting here recording this podcast. be on our yacht or Well, we have been eating quite extravagantly. We have, yeah. There’s been an adverse effect of that too. But look, mean, let’s be realistic. mean, people aren’t gonna all of sudden go, you know what? Like I really miss going to the mall. Like, going to Walmart and like standing in line or whatever. mean.

49:33
Obviously there are people that enjoy going shopping in a retail environment. I am not one of them. And there’s lots of people that I know that feel the same way. Now you couple this with the pandemic and it like kind of magnifies the fact that no one really wants to go out shopping if they don’t have to. And so, and e-commerce is still a very small portion of, it seems like it’s hard to imagine. Cause like in my life, like e-commerce is like 95 % of what I buy. I don’t understand how what’s only like.

49:59
15 % of the retail market. Well, it’s supposed to be like 18 or 19. Okay, so it’s up to 18%. Yeah. But still that means that like four out of five dollars that are spent in this country are spent at a retail establishment, which I still won’t even understand like how that’s even possible. And so like that has to continue to grow as you know, as the older generation dies out and they’re replaced by people who are already used to buying things online. It’s just going to continue to grow and

50:27
I think as delivery methods get even better, like we’re gonna probably have drones dropping things off same day. There’s already Prime Now. There’s like even Shopify’s getting into the local delivery game. I think a lot of things are gonna continue to get purchased online. It just makes sense. There’s very few things that I wanna go buy in person. And most of them are like clothes, like things that require like trying them on, like shoes, like are kinda awkward to buy online, because what do you buy like the nine and a half, 10 and 10 and a half and…

50:55
see which one fits. be fair, Mike, you don’t even like to get up to flip the switch. So Mike has his completely on Google Home. So he says, Google, turn up the volume. Or he doesn’t even move from his Google, turn off Steve. I’ve been trying that one for the last few days. That doesn’t work. I think e-commerce is exciting place to be. I completely agree. But there’s always a but, right? The days of, and this is what

51:23
frustrates me and I know this frustrates you too, like being in the guru space, clinical guru space as well, it’s perceived, a lot of people talk about like how easy it is, like how easy e-commerce is and like all you gotta do is like just find something on e-bob and throw it up on Amazon and you’re gonna start making millions of dollars. Well, those days are like long gone, right? And so like if you’re gonna be in e-commerce, you gotta differentiate in some way. You gotta have a product that’s better, substantially better in some way than everything else that’s out there. And so this is the things that we’re talking about.

51:52
like all the time, right? Like, and this is what we did with coloring. This formula is not that complicated. It isn’t like we invented coloring books. Like those have been around since I was a kid, which was about when dirt was invented. And so like, you know, we just made them better. We put a hardback cover on the book. And so it’s like easy to color in your lap and it protects your artwork. We put a spiral binding on the book. Like when you’re coloring, you don’t want to be fighting the book closing on you. You want it to lay flat and just be easy to color.

52:19
We know lots of people will rip out the pages of their color, the drawings that they did and frame them or give them the friends or family or just look at them or whatever. So we made perforated pages. We know that when you were like coloring on the book with markers that it bleeds through the back and ruins the other side. So we didn’t print double-sided, we printed single-sided. And then we also included a blotter that you could put in between the pages. I barely have a high school degree and I figured these things out. This is not that difficult. It was just like I looked at other coloring books. I looked at other reviews.

52:49
And I made a better product. I’m not an inventor. Again, I’m I mean, I’m street smart, but I’m not like, you know, a college of KAD, like, Rhodes Scholar kind of guy. I mean, like, you can just look and use some common sense. And we did the same type of thing with our gel pens. You know, people were buying gel pens that had no names on them. And they want to like, there’s 17 different colors of red in a pack of 100. Well, we have crimson red and like bright red and whatever reds, you know, and.

53:15
That way they can pick up the same color when they’re the next day and make sure that their rose petals like the right color red. People with color like care about this stuff and we’re the first ones to do it. We also included a carrying case and made it like a nice presentation. Included some refills so you don’t have to constantly throw the pens away and buy new pens. You just buy refills. It’s a lot cheaper. Made them the number one best selling gel pens on Amazon and they were twice as expensive as the next thing on there. So it isn’t price. It just and it isn’t again.

53:45
I’m not Thomas Edison. These are all basic things. If you just sit down and start doing some research and put some common sense to things and don’t just expect it to be easy that anyone can do. And if you do those things, I think you can be wildly successful in e-commerce. think that if you, everybody does something in their personal lives that they’ve already done the Mac and Gladwell outliers 10,000 hours thing, right? Like for me, it’s like, like playing tennis. I’m not very good at it, but I put my 10,000 hours in.

54:15
I like playing the guitar. I like scuba diving. I mean, I like traveling. These are things that I’ve done in my personal life. Those are great. I like playing poker. That was another really successful business that we started. These are things that you can take your personal experience, start a content site, start getting traffic, start doing what we’re talking about here, and then work on developing a product, and basically guarantee yourself success. As long as you want to put in the effort and the work, it’s actually easy. It’s just that a lot of people…

54:46
they want easy money and if it was that easy, wouldn’t do it. easy, quick money, actually. Easy, quick money. the thing that’s funny about it is it actually is easy money years down the road after you put the hard work into it. We’ve both been in this position where we’ve put a lot of hard work into stuff in years past and it seems like money just kind of falls out of the sky in our last. And it kind of does in some ways right now.

55:14
compared to the amount of hours of work to get that money now, but a lot of effort went into planting the seeds and tilling the garden and laying and watering it every day. Now it seems easy, but you have to put the work in. And no one can sidestep this. You can maybe for a short amount of time with black hack tactics, but over the long haul, that isn’t what wins. And so I still think, again, there’s basically unlimited opportunity in e-commerce if you’re willing to…

55:43
to do it the right way. I completely agree. Actually, we usually agree on stuff. That’s maybe why we’re It doesn’t make for a good podcast though. Well, Mike, thanks a lot for coming on, man. And thanks for letting me stay in your cast of Jack and Sludge. The Jack and Sludge.

56:11
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 KLAVIYO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base.

56:40
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 C R I P T dot I O slash Steve. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog. And if you were interested in starting an own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife, quitter job.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. Thanks for listening to the my wife quitter job podcast.

57:07
where we’re giving the courage people need to start their own online business. more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitterjob.com.

00:29
And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source for my eCommerce store. And I couldn’t have done it without Postscript.io, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in eCommerce stores and eCommerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too. And with the holiday season rolling around,

00:59
SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, who is also a sponsor of the show. Now it’s safe to say that most of us have been doing more online shopping lately. And if you’re an e-commerce brand, that means you might be seeing more first-time customers. But once they make that first purchase, how do you keep them coming back? That’s what Klaviyo is for. Klaviyo is the ultimate email and SMS marketing platform for e-commerce brands.

01:28
And it gives you the tools to build your contact list, send memorable emails, automate key messages, and more. A lot more. That’s why more than 50,000 ecommerce brands like Chubbies, Brooklinen, and Living Proof use Klaviyo to build a loyal following. Strong customer relationships mean more repeat sales, enthusiastic word of mouth, and less depending on third-party ads. So whether you’re launching a new business or taking your brand to the next level, Klaviyo can help you get growing faster. And it is free to get started. So visit klaviyo.com slash my wife to create a free account.

01:56
That’s KLAVIO.com slash my wife. Now on to the show.

02:18
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Alex Beller on the show and Alex is someone who I was introduced to by my friends over at Gorgias because I was looking for an SMS provider and I’m really glad that they did. Alex is the founder of Postscript.io, which is the company that I use for my text message marketing and they specialize in e-commerce, which is what initially attracted me to them and they’re reasonably priced and very easy to use. And since I’m a geek, I like how they have an API so I can do some more advanced stuff.

02:48
Anyway, I brought Alex on today to give us an overview of SMS marketing, how it works and how you can use it to grow your e-commerce business. And with that, welcome to the show Alex, how are you doing today? I’m doing great. Thanks for having me, Steve. I’m excited for this conversation. Yeah, I appreciate your patience. So what ended up happening this morning is I rebooted my Windows PC and all of a sudden it decided to install like 30 updates. And so I had to scramble and switch over to another computer and Alex was very patient. So I appreciate it.

03:18
No worries. So Alex, give us the quick background story and tell us how you got started with SMS marketing and how did you decide to start Postscript? Cool. So this goes back to the fact that I’m an e-commerce person. So before starting Postscript, I worked in e-commerce on the brand side for six years. And most of that was spent at a company called Stack Commerce in Venice, California. And what Stack Commerce does

03:48
is they’re an e-commerce platform that owns and runs and operates storefronts on behalf of digital publishers. So the way to think about it is like the Mashable store or the CNN store, Companies like that, that they depend on advertising, but they’re getting more and more interested in commerce revenue. That company, Stack Commerce, builds and operates branded storefronts and does all the sourcing and the fulfillment and the customer support. So it’s like a new revenue channel for those online publishers.

04:17
And so I got exposed to e-commerce through that. And it was very hands-on, very tactical, lots of like time-spending Google Analytics, optimizing marketing channels and things like that on behalf of these clients. And when I was there, a few different things happened. So the first was, because this was over the last like eight or nine years we’re talking about, it really became clear that every single year, mobile traffic as a percentage of

04:47
e-commerce traffic was just increasing. Every single year, the mobile share was getting larger and larger. And at the same time, we were seeing email performance, not decline by any means, but more just sort of plateau. It’s at that point, such a used and established channel. And so me and my now co-founder, who also worked with me at StatCommerce, I have two co-founders, but one of them, one you know, Adam, we were curious about like, what is the mobile first retention channel?

05:17
What is email for our phones? mean, this is the new platform that we’re spending all our time on and acquisition is huge there and Instagram and Facebook mobile ad programs are like huge sources of customers. But what’s the retention channel for it? Is it email or is it something else? And then that’s all the context. But then a friend of Adam’s who ran a lifestyle business on Shopify was complaining to him one day that

05:46
he didn’t have an easy way to text his customers. And so that seemed like a very specific problem for us to potentially solve, which is a good thing. I mean, you’ll relate to this because you if you like, you’re an entrepreneur and you think so much in terms of entrepreneurship. When we were getting started, the thought process was we want to make a product that we can sell to businesses. We want something with organic distribution, which in this case would be the Shopify app store.

06:15
a way to get our first customers just without paying for it or without chasing them. And the third was we wanted to be able to get our first customer within 90 days of starting to build the product. And so we didn’t know exactly what we were doing and we weren’t that familiar with this e-commerce ecosystem with all the platforms and the huge amount of entrepreneurship going on. But we immediately saw installs and customers. And just every single month it slowly grew to the point where after about three months,

06:45
We applied to Y Combinator and we got in and we went through that route and we went full time on what we originally thought was just going to be like a small side project that would be like a niche offering. And the reason is because it was more than just us thinking about mobile retention. And over the last two years since we’ve launched, which was in September of 2018, we’ve seen SMS go from like,

07:12
an idea that people are very skeptical about to what’s becoming a, still very early, but what’s becoming like a mainstream marketing channel in e-commerce. And so there’s lots of different ramifications of it, but it’s been really exciting to watch us go from the like skeptics phase into the early adopter phase where, you know, best practices are getting established and there’s just all kinds of interesting stuff going on.

07:36
So let’s talk about the skeptics, because I would say maybe last year or maybe a year and a half ago, I was one of those skeptics. And I’m pretty sure that there’s a lot of people in the audience that are skeptics. So let’s start from the beginning here. SMS text message marketing, people usually get texts from their friends and that sort of thing. And I’m sure there’s a lot of people listening to this thinking to themselves, I can’t imagine getting marketing messages in my SMS inbox.

08:05
What are just some typical response rates for text messages when consumers receive them from a company? Sure. So there’s a bunch of data around this. So response rates tend to be really high, but there’s still a lot of noise there. So even if you see 5 to 10 % responses, people texting back on an SMS campaign, not all of them are going to be

08:32
the most cogent things because people just were so comfortable sending texts. It’s not like an email that we perfectly format. So the funny thing is a brand will probably see a wide spectrum of texts from people saying, wow, this is awesome. I love this to, Hey, who is this? I’m driving. I’ll call you later on to like, you know, stop, which is how users unsubscribe. But the more interesting thing for me is the difference we see brand to brand. And this part’s a little predictable.

09:02
But if a brand is kind of approaching SMS, which is this new high engagement marketing channel, if they’re approaching it with their customer interests at the forefront, and if they’re using a personal voice, and if the brand is something that people feel loyal to, maybe because it’s high quality products or they have a great voice, we run sentiment analyses on the background on SMS responses. And brands like that, their users are replying in much, much, much happier ways.

09:32
So the example I’ve been using lately, there’s a company called Bloom, B-L-U-M-E. And they do really creative stuff with their SMS program where I’ve been on their list for maybe six weeks, their post-script customer, and twice they’ve sent out a campaign with a Starbucks gift card so that anyone that they’re sending it to can go get a free drink at Starbucks. they’re running, I saw because I was talking to their team,

10:02
currently running a book club with some of their users through SMS. Like there’s like 40 or 50 people that they’re like all like reading together. And so that’s like a very, very non spammy way to think about the channel is like, how can we just engage and retain and like be authentic with our brand voice to our most valuable customers verse the email first approach of like sending a 10 % off code.

10:29
four times a week to your entire list. That just doesn’t work with SMS. What does Bloom sell? Bloom sells, I want to get the exact right wording, it’s like feminine self-care. So it’s everything from like razors to skin products to acne oil to I think like feminine hygiene. Interesting. So they’ve just started a community, I guess is what it sounds like. Yeah. And that’s certainly one extreme, but

10:59
even more in the middle, like taking an automation heavy approach using campaigns or broadcasts, using them sparingly, writing texts so that they’re like in the voice of a human, maybe even personally coming from like the founder or figurehead of a brand. All of those are ways to just take a more targeted, more tailored approach than what’s standard in email that people like because they don’t want to hear from a brand four times a week via text. But

11:27
they might want to hear about really relevant things through text because they’ll actually see it. I know for myself personally, I only have maybe like a handful of companies that I let text message me. Can you just kind of comment on the differences in behavior for email versus text from the point of view of a consumer? Yeah, that’s actually a pretty insightful comment because we have this theory where there’s going to be a cap. So we don’t know it’s.

11:54
It’s still sorely in the channel. We don’t know where it’ll happen yet, but we think to your point that people will probably top out at a certain number of brands that they like welcome and sign up for via SMS, right? Maybe it’s five, maybe it’s 10, maybe over the next couple of years it’s 15. It’s certainly not the 200 different email lists I’m signed up for. So with that, we also think there’s this like first mover advantage in this space where people who are working on building their channel now,

12:23
and are taking care of those users and not just driving unsubscribes, they’re gonna have an advantage in the long term. So can we talk about, I guess, strategy for a little bit? So let’s say I have an e-commerce store and I have email, I have SMS, and let’s say I have chat as well, or messenger marketing as well. How do I grab those? Since everyone you said has like a limited attention span for SMS, how would I run these differently than an email campaign? Yeah, so the omni-channel question varies brand to brand.

12:53
But the best practices that I’ve seen come up change a little bit based on stage. So here’s what I mean. If someone is collecting subscribers in different ways and they’re just getting started with SMS, there’s a pretty good chance that their subscriber lists across different marketing channels may not be identical. Right? So that’s the first thing. Like if you’ve been collecting email forever and then you suddenly start collecting SMS, you may end up with like new people on SMS that aren’t on email and most your email list won’t be on text.

13:23
So that’s the first thing. The second thing is like realizing the power of omni-channel and timing. Like I’m more likely to watch a Netflix special that they just launched if I see a billboard for it, if I see a YouTube ad for it, and if a friend tells me about it, then I am just one of those things happens. And I don’t want all three of those things to happen to me at the exact same moment. That’d be weird. But I think a similar approach here, and that’s what the data is showing us. When people run A-B tests on

13:52
like post-purchase upsells. If they run it where they just send email, they just send SMS, and then they send email and SMS with staggered timing, that third option sees about a 15 to 20 % lift in revenue. So what we recommend is, look, you’re going to send emails many times a week. Instead of that for SMS, think about what’s the most important message you have coming up, what’s actually relevant for a text. Then do a little digging, see if there’s overlap between your lists.

14:21
and maybe just stagger the timings that email goes out Wednesday, the text goes out Friday and the text goes out to anyone who like hadn’t purchased yet. And so there’s ways to be a little bit more targeted, but in general, the data shells that tells us that omni-channel approach is a good thing. You just don’t want to be too simple with it. Interesting. So you advise to lead with email or would you rather text the message first and then follow up with email? I’m a little biased here and I try not to be biased.

14:50
I think it really just is situational. think email is incredibly important. I’m not one of those people who thinks it’s dead. And like, if you’re starting off and you have 10,000 people on your SMS list and 150,000 people on your email list, you know, there’s just not that much overlap. like, sending both out at the same time makes sense. However, with something like a flow, like an abandoned cart flow, the SMS will be higher engagement.

15:19
But I kind of think it’s smarter to lead with email because email is so much cheaper. Like you only want to fire that text if someone didn’t open or didn’t click or didn’t buy from that email. And so because text costs a lot more than email, you might as well save that money and go email first. The way I was thinking about it is that, and we can talk about this in just a little bit, but delivery rates, like for email, you might get like a 20 % open rate. I think that’s like the average. Whereas SMS, it’s like in the nineties, right?

15:49
Yeah, so from my perspective, at least when you send out a text, it seems like almost everyone’s going to get it. Whereas with email, you’re only going to get like a fifth of your people. So can you just kind of comment on that? Yeah, I mean, your stats are your stats are pretty much like dead on from what we see and on the click rate side of things with text, we see anywhere from like 7 % click rate up to like, I mean, people see like 40 or 50 % click rates when they do like

16:18
a new drop that users were excited about. I think what you just said makes sense. I’m personally try to avoid being too pushy of like an SMS only or an SMS first narrative just because that’s what people expect from me. But I think what you just said makes sense. And I think what it comes down to is like, is this promotion, is this message something that is very important and that you want users to see? And if it is, that’s a great use case for a text. If it’s more,

16:47
The same sort of thing that’s happening week to week. Maybe that should be either a more targeted text or that should be led with an email. I guess if we put numbers behind this, it makes it easier to understand. How much does it cost to send a text? So about about one cent. Okay. So about a cent and whereas email is significantly cheaper than that depending on it. Okay. So I understand. So just by sheer numbers, you probably want your SMS.

17:15
marketing messages to be a lot more focused, a lot more targeted, a lot more, you want the revenue per subscriber to be a lot higher. Yeah, that’s what I think. Because the other side of it too is that like we were talking about earlier, sensitivity and sensitivity to the channel and that people won’t subscribe to tons and tons of channels. So in my mind, if users or if stores take a little bit of a more cautious approach to SMS, not only will they keep their costs lower, but their unsubscribed rates will stay low.

17:44
And so their list will build much faster over time. So you mentioned abandoned cart earlier. And one of the things that you can do with Postscript is abandoned cart messages, similar to what you’d have in email. So would you advise someone with an e-commerce store to actually have, like there’s abandoned cart for Facebook Messenger, there’s abandoned cart for email, and now there’s abandoned cart for SMS. Do you advise that people have all three going? Yes. If you have a subscriber on all three channels, which I would expect,

18:12
The vast majority of subscribers would be on one or two channels. I absolutely recommend to have all three firing. And I would just say stagger the timing and have them cancel if the user buys. So if a user, if it goes email SMS, then Facebook, if the email goes out and the user doesn’t buy, then you send a text a day later and they do buy have the, have the Facebook automation watching that purchase completion so that it cancels if the user completes their purchase before the like third day.

18:39
Okay, that makes sense. Then you’re hitting them on all channels and hopefully one of those messages we’ll get through. Yep. And can you talk about frequency? Like how often are people sending these messages out? Yes. So totally decent framework for this is thinking like there isn’t really a cap on relevant automation flows. So things like targeted welcome series, abandoned carts, post purchase upsells, post purchase customer support check-ins or

19:08
shipping and tracking notifications. I recommend people go hard with all of those because users will find them timely, really build out an advanced automation strategy. For brands with subscription, application, there’s all kinds of other flows they can build as well. On the like campaign or broadcast side of things, I say slow it down. The best way, it’s not a hard number. It’s not like once a week to your whole list. That’s not it. Instead it’s like, what is our marketing calendar?

19:37
and when do we have something that’s relevant for a text. If you have a great piece of content one day and an amazing promotion one day and then a new product drop another day, that’s probably worthy of three texts in a week. But if all you have this week is another 10 % off coupon to try to drive purchases, that is like few and far between. So if someone is getting hit with a text once a week from a brand, I think that’s palatable and okay. If someone’s getting hit with a text three times a week, I think that’s over the top and

20:06
you’ll see a lot of unsubscribes. Can we talk about this welcome series? Is this welcome series that you’re talking about very similar to the email welcome series? Yeah, a lot of times it’s very similar. But to your point before, like the the engagement rate will be so much higher. And I view welcome series is actually one of the like underutilized things in e commerce, even though everyone does it. Because I think it’s the it’s someone has signed up, they probably haven’t purchased yet. And so they’re just waiting there halfway warm to be converted.

20:36
And that’s the opportunity to like build brand connection, educate them, overcome some of their like pricing, not pricing, some of their purchase concerns. And so doing that through a channel where people see it, you know, 95, 98 % of the time, that’s an awesome spot to overcome some of those objections and to build a little loyalty. And so I like to see brands doing it with a little bit of founder or a little bit of personal voice and then.

21:03
we see and subscribers feel a little bit more attachment, like interest in continuing to learn more. I’m sure because of running your company, you’ve probably encountered a whole bunch of welcome series. Can you just kind of maybe go over some of the more successful ones and how they’re structured? Yeah. Cause I know for my email sequence, I initially email very often in the beginning and then it kind of tapers off to once a week. I would imagine that for an SMS welcome series, you don’t want to be texting them like every day or every other day in the beginning either. Right? Correct.

21:33
Yeah, so I’m pulling up that other launch we had recently, Really Good Text. That was a shameless plug, but you can sort by Welcome Series on there. Well, so ReallyGoodText.com is a place where Postscript.io is posting all the great text messages that all its companies are posting. So if you want to get an idea of what other companies are putting out, then you should head over to this site. I’ve actually used it extensively for my store, but you guys actually had the data behind it too, so that’s why I thought I’d ask.

22:02
made by our friends Alicia. yeah, one of my favorite welcome series, this is spring, something up is from Judy. So Judy is a disaster preparedness brand. Um, so they sell like disaster kits, but what they use SMS for and what comes across in their welcome series is they take a more localized approach to awareness. So they sell these disaster preparedness kits and they’re, it’s very DTC and well-styled.

22:28
but they aren’t just trying to like shamelessly endlessly convert you with the welcome series. Instead, it’s a little bit more brand building and education. And what they then do over time is they’re tracking where everyone is by zip code. And then they’re sending out disaster alerts via text whenever something happens. So if there’s a tornado warning or if there was an earthquake or if there’s like a hurricane coming in, that sort of stuff. And so

22:54
setting the context for that in a welcome series and then asking for a purchase later of one of their kits, I really like that mix of content and conversion. So that sounds very interesting. Do you have a more generic case of just consumer products, maybe in the beauty or apparel space or something like that, where you don’t have something like disaster relief that someone actually really wants to get alerts for, for example? Yeah. So, right.

23:22
That’s kind of a funny comment. People want disaster alerts. That’s reasonable. Yeah. So we have a couple of welcome series templates that get prefilled in folks’ accounts. And the often split we do is one flow for if this is a new user that’s never purchased before, and one flow for if it’s a returning purchaser who this is just their first time signing up to the SMS list. Because SMS is new.

23:52
And because of compliance, how you have to start from scratch, we see a lot of that. And so both of these are three message templates spread out. It’s one message the first day, then it’s one message the fourth day. So three days later, then it’s one message a week after that. And the third one is for returning customers is when there’s like a call to action to buy. And the first two is like education and context setting. And then a little bit of just like a branding, sometimes a customer review gets included like

24:22
Check out one of our five star reviews on this product, that sort of thing. I see. And how long is like the average welcome series? Not sure about the average. I see them run anywhere from two weeks to a month, just depending really on like how high the bar is for a product. If it’s a stick of deodorant at a low price point, maybe only a couple of weeks. If it’s, you know, hundreds of dollars on a set of sheets.

24:50
I’ve seen Welcome Series run several months.

24:55
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25:24
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25:53
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s EMERGECONSCL.com. Now back to the show. I see. So in two weeks, that’s really only like three or four messages, right? In terms of the content of the messages, is it product focused or is it, which messages tend to work the best describing the brand story? Cause you have to be a lot more compact with SMS, right? So there’s less information or you have to be a lot more selective about what you convey.

26:23
What have you seen from the brands, like the exact sequence of what they’re sending out and how they’re compressing all this information in just a couple of sentences? They’re compressing it by really only tackling one topic per message. So maybe one message is like introduction, context setting, link to learn more, right? Just context setting for how the brand is going to use SMS. Maybe the next message is walking through all like the great features of their hero product.

26:51
Maybe the third message is validation, right? So customer reviews or including a quote from a customer or including an MMS GIF of a bunch of different quotes and like great reviews of the product. And then the fourth message is just a straight up like a call to action with a purchase incentive of 10 % off. So by tackling one thing in each, as opposed to trying to cram lots of different stuff in every single message, which you don’t have to do because people are reading every text.

27:21
Unlike an email where I may only catch, you know, one out of five of the welcome messages you send, the text I’m probably going to read every single one so you can break it out more. Interesting. And you mentioned earlier that you don’t want to be broadcasting to your entire list. So what should be your strategy for just broadcasting campaigns once you have them on your list? Yeah, relevancy. So everything comes down to relevancy and the framework of like, is this worthy of a text? know, just less is more here.

27:51
So to get specific, what that looks like is if you’re thinking about sending out to your entire subscriber base, it should be for something so relevant and worthy, right? It should be for a new product drop or a new collection. It should be for a substantial promotion of some kind. It should be for a piece of content. Or if you’re taking a more targeted approach, we like to see segmentation based on

28:19
user behavior or past purchase data. So what that can look like is like if someone has bought product X and you and your data show that product Y tends to go really well with product X, creating a segment of people who bought X but not Y and sending them a more targeted broadcast about product Y. Or doing a new product launch to people who bought last year’s version.

28:47
So segmentation of purchase behavior is a big thing. And then the other is just SMS engagement, where sometimes we hear from folks like, hey, I really only want to send to my most engaged users. How do I do that? So the other version is, if someone’s been running their SMS list for a few years, maybe they create a segment of people who’ve clicked in the last six months and hold back on sending to users who it’s been over six months since they clicked a message.

29:15
Are there penalties for sending to people who haven’t opened in a long time, like email, or does everyone pretty much get the message? Everyone gets the message. There aren’t penalties. It’s really just about unsubscribes. So you can’t send to anybody who has replied stop or replied cancel or unsubscribe or end or any of those things because of like a legal compliance angle from the TCPA, which is the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

29:40
But as far as deliverability goes, it’s different than emailing that like a message sent is a message delivered. You know, one thing I just noticed recently, like literally just the other day was I now have a spam SMS folder on my phone. Yes. Yes. I noticed this too. This is, it turns out it’s something that I think Apple did. Do you have an iPhone? No, I don’t. I’m on Android actually. Interesting. So there’s an iPhone one as well.

30:05
and it’s not spam, but it takes unknown senders and breaks them out into a separate folder. Is that the same on Android? No, this one’s literally called spam. That’s pretty cool. Yeah. So we are expecting, as with email, eventually inboxes to be broken out and feature we’re working on right now that will be live soon is called contact cards. And so what that will allow is for you, for example,

30:33
to send out a text, especially in the welcome series, that includes a contact card that’ll be saveable with like the name of your store and an image and things like that. And so that way we’re gonna see brands start encouraging their subscribers to like save us as a contact so that once those inboxes start happening, messages won’t go there. Interesting, this is a similar principle to email, right? Where you’re adding them to your safe senders list essentially. Yep. Right. Interesting.

31:02
Okay, so what about a post purchase sequence? Can all these things be automated? Like if someone bought this, I want to send them automatically a text message with this product that’s like a cross sell after a certain period of time. Yes, absolutely. That’s a great use case. Okay. And so a lot of these things that I’m doing with email can be done with SMS and a lot of the segmentation principles, and correct me if I’m wrong, are very similar. So for example, if I have someone who signed on who hasn’t purchased yet and I’m just trying to get them,

31:30
to buy for the first time, I might send them a different message than someone who has purchased from me many times, for example. I think that’s right. just the frameworks are often correct. The difference is that SMS should be just even more targeted and sent even less often. Right. So this is not only from an economic perspective, since it costs more, but also from a unsubscribe perspective, right? Because your rate of unsubscribes are going to be higher as well.

31:59
Correct. It’s for both those reasons and the third, we call it for like NPS, right? Where it’s just easier to annoy end users through text messages. So even if they don’t unsubscribe and even if they still buy from you, it may change, it’s such a potent channel, it may change the outlook towards your brand if you’re sending them four to five texts a week. It might just feel that the brand’s a little annoying. Right. Actually, I’m already kind of annoyed at once a week.

32:27
for some brands actually, but I stick on because they send out like good promotions from time to time. I don’t wanna miss them. So, but one thing I wanted to ask you also are just some guidelines on what metrics to expect. So when you send out a broadcast, like what is a good unsubscribe rate or typical I should say. Yeah, so the mean unsubscribe rate for a campaign is 0.7 % that we see.

32:56
So that’s just like completely average across everything. The highest unsubscribe rates exist on welcome series and abandoned carts because that tends to be the message, like the first message a user has got, right? If they sign up from a pop-up or something or landing page, or if they opted in a checkout and then got an abandoned cart. So that’s pretty common where for abandoned carts and welcomes, you might see a two to 3 % cumulative unsubscribe rate because people like got the first message, got the code they wanted.

33:26
and then opted out of the list. Interesting. What you just quoted is significantly lower than some of the numbers that I’ve gotten from other SMS consultants, including myself too. But I assume that I’m not doing everything correctly yet since I just got started. But 0.7 % just sounds really low. So that is the completely overall aggregate number from all the postscript, which I know because…

33:54
We are working on benchmarks lately. Yeah, I’m sure you have the numbers. But that changes quite a bit by product category, which is interesting. let’s see, beauty and cosmetics and food and drink have lower unsubscribe rates than it seems home goods are the highest at 1 % for campaigns. Yeah.

34:23
So let’s talk about acquisition here. And I know just getting SMS subscribers is a little bit different than email, for example. So what are some of the best ways to actually get people on your list? So this is the spot that we’re seeing a lot of creativity. Obviously, the tried and true methods of get opt-ins at checkout, get opt-ins through a pop-up, those make sense. And we don’t want users to compromise their email collection. So what we recommend there is either focus

34:53
on email collection on desktop and SMS collection on mobile when it comes to pop-ups, or collect both. Maybe make a two-screen pop-up where first you collect email and then you ask for SMS or vice versa, have SMS as an optional field. That works really well. If we work with a brand who only wants to collect opt-ins at checkout and doesn’t want to do a pop-up, we will honestly say, hey, you know what? You’re probably not ready then because

35:22
We’ve seen that be a huge delta for success because you can’t have an opt-in box pre-checked at checkout. It has to be unchecked. So because of that, using pop-ups and other forms of collection is really important if it’s going to see any scale at all. But beyond that, we’re starting to see really interesting other forms of acquisition where, you know the keyword opt-ins, like text post script to 30303, that sort of thing? We’re seeing people start to include inserts in all their packaging that’s going out.

35:51
whether or not the sale came from an SMS user or even their e-commerce store. We’re seeing people include just keyword opt-ins in all their packaging as a means to, if they have a retail presence, get their retail buyers to become direct e-commerce subscribers or just to grow the list in general. That’s one cool method. Another cool method we’re seeing is for brands that have a nice large organic or influencer-led social media practice, we’re seeing people include keyword calls to action

36:21
on like their Instagram profiles, put them on Instagram stories, also include one click opt-ins on Instagram stories, like swipe up to subscribe. And then we’re seeing the paid side of this. So we’re just starting to see brands use Facebook lead ads as a way to gather compliant messaging. And the last and coolest thing. for the lead ads, sorry. So you’re at, people are actually physically typing in a number as opposed to using the keyword automations. Correct.

36:50
They’re typing in their phone number or if Facebook already has their phone number, Facebook can like pre-fill it and the user just essentially gives agreement. So we’re seeing some Facebook lead ads. We’re seeing Instagram stories and some Instagram ads with the click option as well, not the pre-fill that you mentioned. But probably the coolest form of opt-in that I’ve ever seen that I saw last week was a brand

37:19
worked with lots of influencers and they had one of their influencers talk about the keyword sign up. That was the call to action. The brand was trying to get those influencers subscribers to, or the followers to become direct subscribers to the brand. That was cool. But then I saw the same brand work with a TikTok influencer and the TikTok influencer made a screenshot video of him texting back and forth with the brand.

37:48
And it was a very funny conversation. The brand was like engaging really fast and that video went viral on TikTok. And so the brand saw tens of thousands of signups just from that. Interesting. Okay. So in general, like you mentioned the Facebook ad and just the different ways with the keyword automation and just typing in the number or click to subscribe. Which one do you find the best? Like for me, I know I would much rather text a word to a certain number than

38:17
type in my number, for example. Which form is like the highest converting one is basically what I’m asking you. Yeah. Your intuition is correct where the one click opt-in that like pre-fields a message or just calls to action on keywords, like text this to this, those convert higher than a form fill. Okay. And I know my best way of attracting subscribers right now is like right in the banner on every single page of our store, we have

38:44
text BBL to this number and you get a free product essentially. That’s smart. Yeah. I think that it’s still early in terms of just using like call to action banners like that, or even like collection on product pages, maybe like opt-ins for when a product is back in stock or opt-ins like wait lists via SMS. Those things haven’t really started yet, but I think they’ll start soon. Interesting.

39:10
I do want to touch a little bit about compliance since I’ve gotten questions from people where, oh, great, why don’t I just take my whole list from Klaviyo or whatnot and just start messaging them? So can you talk about, like, if you already have a bunch of numbers, like, how do you legally text message them? Yeah. So this is the most important thing we’re going to cover. SMS is different than email. You cannot do that. You cannot send a text to old customers.

39:39
who you happen to have their phone numbers. Unless they explicitly opted into SMS marketing, which means with the proper language, they like sent the first text or they checked a box at checkout or they put their phone number in knowing that they’d be signing up for SMS marketing. Even if you have their phone number, they are not eligible to be sent text to and the penalties for it are very high. 500 to $1,500 per message sent.

40:08
gets automatic class action status inside the US. So there’s this whole industry of lawyers who, what they do full time is they go around and they like try to find people who got a text accidentally and then they send a demand letter and they file a lawsuit. So if you have a big list of numbers that you’re exporting from Klaviyo or from Shopify or whatever, do not send them unless they are actually SMS opt-ins. And like with Postscript, Steve, we actually don’t have a way for users to…

40:37
just upload a list. They can submit it to our compliance team to like go through with them to ensure that these were proper opt-ins, but we put that in place. It’s not self-serve uploading just to try to prevent, you know, customers from getting themselves in trouble. So let’s say you have this list of numbers. What’s the best way to get them to opt in? You cannot send them a text to do it. The best way is if you have a list of phone numbers, it probably means they bought from you. It probably means that you have their email addresses too.

41:06
So what I recommend to brands is maybe send a couple part email series trying to get them to also opt into SMS. We have brands who send an email once a month or every quarter promoting their SMS list. We have brands who include a call to action to their SMS list passively in every single email, like at the bottom, right? Text this to this to sign up for our VIP list. So you can use their emails to send them an email.

41:34
You can use their emails to build a lookalike audience, to pay to get them to opt into your SMS list, not a lookalike audience, but to build that audience, but you cannot text them directly. I know for my store, I just kind of make an effort to cross pollinate everything in general, but I don’t think I’ve gone the other way yet. Do you know of any companies that have the phone number, but not the email and go for the email? Like send it, you mean send a text saying, hey, sign up for our email list here. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I really haven’t seen it yet. Yeah.

42:04
I guess maybe it’s, I haven’t done that either yet. When I was doing Messenger, I used to cross pollinate my Facebook Messenger and my email all the time. But for SMS, I haven’t done that yet. think maybe it’s because my perception of SMS is it’s the holy grail of communication right now. Meaning like no one can take this number away from me and it’s pretty much a sure thing for correspondence. Granted, it costs money, but yeah, I just thought I’d bring that out because I wasn’t sure if any other brands were doing that. Really not seeing it yet.

42:33
This is kind of like more of a future looking question. How much longer do you think SMS has until marketers kind of destroy it? Like, yeah, so here’s what I think as an e-commerce marketer, email has had a 20 year run and it’s still going really strong. I think SMS is most similar to email because it’s an open protocol, right? Nobody owns the email platform.

43:01
There’s lots of different vendors. It’s the same with SMS. It’s an owned marketing channel. And that’s a little different than messenger or WhatsApp or Instagram, which is there’s rules governing it set up by Facebook. So I think we’ll have a very, very, very long run. think it’s, I mean, it’s clearly the dominant communication method of the next 10 years at least, but the norms will change. So when you say ruin it,

43:28
What I see is even more of the version I’m talking, I’m preaching already, right? Five years from now, but we see so many brands and some other platforms take an approach of like, send your whole list twice a week. Just, just blast them. I don’t think that’ll be happening in five years. I think it’ll be still heavily used, but a much more tailored approach, very targeted messages, very targeted automation flows. And also I think responses will get bigger and bigger. Right now we have a lot of our.

43:58
are customers that also run support through SMS. So if users reply with questions or had an issue with their order, the brand will manage that out of the help desk. And I expect we’ll see more and more of that, just the channel becoming more two-way, less broadcasty. Yeah, actually, I was just about to mention that. So I have Postscript hooked up to Gorgias. And one thing that I do for the post purchase, because you have to send them when they opt in a message, right?

44:27
And so I say, Hey, if you have any questions about your order, just reply and we actually get replies. And oftentimes we can actually even upsell during this conversation, which makes it sound a lot natural, a lot more natural. totally in that respect, I see it a lot different than email because they get an instant response. Yep. It’s like live chat that your customer takes with them everywhere they go. That’s pretty potent. Yeah. And so in that respect, it’s a lot more effective than email in my opinion, at least.

44:57
So Alex, I know you wanted to talk about this new certification that you have and we kind of touched on compliance. What is this all about? Yeah, so what it’s about is that this is a new channel. It’s new for marketers, even if they’ve done email forever. It’s new for e-commerce people. So we get the same questions over and over and over again when brands are looking to start out with SMS. They need to understand compliance. They want to know best practices. They want to know how to build an omni-channel strategy.

45:26
They want to know what best practices are for list growth and acquisition, how they should manage responses. Really a lot of the stuff we’ve covered today. And so what we decided to do is we took everything we’ve learned over the last few years and we boiled it down into the SMS marketing certification, which it’s live on Postscript.io. If you go over the learn tab, you’ll see the button. It’s completely free. It’s a several hour long video course and there’s some videos and then there’s some quizzes and

45:56
And if you, even if you fail the quizzes, we give you another chance to study up and take them again. It’s totally free and we’ve been testing it for a few months and we’re getting really, really good results and really good quotes back where we think it’s just going to lay the foundation for marketers to understand the dynamics of the channel and how to think about the channel and what are some initial best practices so that they can then really tailor it to their brand. And so we made a general one and we also launched what we called the Postscript

46:25
partner certification. And this one is, very similar, but it also includes some sections on like, how do I position it in cell managed SMS services? That one’s really made for agencies or other technology partners. But the general certification, that one just came out on Tuesday. It’s been getting just some like great engagement and feedback. There’s hundreds of people that are already taking it. And we’re just excited about like similar to really good techs.

46:53
providing another resource for the community to just learn about the channel. And the one last thing about it, I’ll say, is this is not meant to be Postscript specific. It’s really for anyone even not using Postscript that wants to better understand SMS in e-commerce. Yeah, and I know when I first got started using Postscript, there’s actually a lot of rules that you need to follow. There’s also stuff that you need to add to your privacy policy in your terms and conditions.

47:21
You know, I had a question in my mind, have you known any really large companies that have been sued for breach? Because I still get random text messages on my phone. And there’s clearly spam messages. Are they enforcing all this stuff? I hope there is an enormous amount of litigation here. Okay, if you like Google TCPA lawsuit, I mean, there’ll be millions of results. So yes, there are lots of stories within e commerce. There’s also some stories of like,

47:50
There’s a story of a very, very, very big brand that we work with who long before PostScript was created, I mean, back in 2010, they took all the phone, they didn’t know any better. And they took all the phone numbers of people who checked out at their retail locations and they started sending them texts and they were sued for a hundred million dollars and they settled for $10 million. And that one is public. That was before we existed, but that’s kind of just like the scope of things here. But the other thing is politicians and

48:19
and political fundraising, that’s where so much of this kind of texts come from, right? You didn’t sign up, but you just are suddenly getting texts from all these different candidates. And the way that’s working is because there’s a carve out in the law. When politicians pass the TCPA, they put a carve out in there for political fundraising and political communication. So they aren’t subject to the same opt-ins. Okay. Convenient. Yeah, actually come to think of it, most of the spam has been political.

48:49
Well Alex, this was very helpful and I hope and I just want to tell the listeners out there that I’ve been using text messaging for maybe half a year now and it is a fantastic channel. I’m probably gonna be posting my results. I actually don’t even have all the functionality implemented yet and it’s already become one of my top five channels for my e-commerce store. So if you guys aren’t on it yet, it’s probably the next own marketing platform. It’s not performing as well as email for me just yet because I have so many more email.

49:18
subscribers and I do text but per subscriber it’s it’s worth a lot more than an email subscriber based on my limited results here. So yep, awesome. We’re seeing the same thing. Well, thank you so much for having me. This is a great combo. Yeah, thanks for coming on Alex really appreciate it.

49:38
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now if you are not doing SMS marketing for your online store, then you should start right now. Seriously, it works so well and it’s probably 5x more effective than email at least. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 325. And once again, I want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for eCommerce 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.

50:06
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

50:33
Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog. If you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and it’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.