Today I’m thrilled to have Daniel Parker on the show, and Daniel’s ecommerce store is pretty unique in that he created an eight figure ecommerce business selling boxed software like Microsoft Office, and he did it with Google Shopping, crazy, right?

But before we begin I want to give a quick shout out to Seller Labs who is a sponsor of the show, and specifically I want to talk about their brand new tool Ignite which helps sellers manage their Amazon sponsored ads. Right now I’m using this tool to manage my Amazon sponsored ad campaigns, and it makes things a heck of a lot more convenient.

So number one I’ve always found it a major pain to generate my PPC reports on Amazon, cut and paste the data over to an excel spreadsheet and use pivot tables before I’m able do any analysis. Now Ignite pulls all that info for you automatically and allows you to easily see what keywords are working and what are not immediately, there is no need to manually create reports or play with excel.

Second of all unless you’re a data geek, Amazon campaign data can be hard to understand, and what is cool is that Ignite makes keyword and bidding recommendations on the fly that can be applied with a few clicks.

So let’s say one of my hankie keywords is bleeding money, well Ignite will alert me of that fact, and I can reduce the bid immediately. So bottom line Ignite makes managing your Amazon’s sponsored ads so much easier, and the fact that they provide me with alerts means that I no longer have to monitor my campaigns like a hawk.

If there are keywords that are doing well, well Ignite tells me to add them to my exact match campaigns. If my keywords are losing money, well Ignite tells me to either remove the keyword or to reduce the bid. So head on over to sellerlabs.com/steve where you’ll find awesome tutorials on how to run Amazon PPC ads and the opportunity to try Ignite for 30 days for free. Once again that’s sellerlabs.com/steve.

Now I also want to give a shout out to Klaviyo who is also a sponsor of the show, and I’m always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store, and I depend on them for over 20% of my revenues. Now you’re probably wondering what makes Klaviyo so special. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores, and here’s why it’s so powerful.

Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the past, boom. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, well that’s piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single email.

Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used and you can try them for free at mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now on the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit her Job podcast; today I’m thrilled to have Daniel Parker on the show. Daniel is someone who I met at the Ecommerce Fuel Live Conference in Savannah, Georgia last year, and he actually taught me a couple of things that I was not doing with my Google Shopping ads that I properly fixed as soon as I got home.

Now Daniel runs mychoicesoftware.com, which is an online store that sells software online, which is an incredibly competitive niche. But he does extremely well making well over eight figures last year, and today what I plan on doing is to pick Daniel’s brain on how he is able to compete in the cut throat space of computer software. And with that, welcome to the show Daniel, how are you doing today man?

Daniel: Hey, pretty good.

Steve: So give us a background on how you got in ecommerce and why box software of all things that you could sell?

Daniel: Yeah, so I came out of an engineering background writing enterprise part systems back in 2007, 2008 writing the backend for AutoZone, and like most people coming out of school I had a lot of student loans, so I ended up having two or three jobs. One of these other jobs was writing marketing software for a music and cancer promotion.

Well, one of the senior leaders in our software engineering company ended up leaving and going into software with his cousin who had been selling software online for a number of years. I got into that business, learned that business, learned that if you added a value added service on top like digitalizing the products for people, or getting the logistics to them faster, you could get huge swerves of people that were willing to work with a smaller boutique firm, that didn’t want to work with the CDWs and the Neweggs of the world where they dealt with large offshore teams or automated response queues, or just people that really didn’t know how the software worked, they just knew customer service.

So jumping into this we took the approach of getting really highly trained people that could speak to these people from a point of interact and explain what the software did, how it worked, how it was going to benefit them, and then gave them expert pricing around that, so I learned that business.

Fast forward a couple of years and a few other engineering jobs, I got an invitation to come work for My Choice Software with my partner now, and we basically focus on the same model. So we took something that was highly competitive with high brand awareness, that had a pretty decent size of reseller market, and we just took really intelligent people on the front to speak to these IT directors, these managed service providers, all the people that were buying for other people.

And we focused on developing those people as part of our marketing approach, our marketing and sales parts. And then through that we ended up building up quit a robust set of ad spend, where today we run about a 15% [inaudible 00:06:38] across the entire board, but we do have 40% return from our customers.

Steve: I was just about to ask you that, so what are the – so just for context for the people listening Daniel sells software like Microsoft Office for example. A lot of these tools from companies that are just well known and well branded, and so Daniel I’m just curious what the margins are like for just selling like just the pure software excluding the services?

Daniel: Yeah, so just the pure software is running right around 20, 25%.

Steve: Okay so it’s basically impossible, or it’s really difficult just to make money selling software by itself?

Daniel: Right, so you’re always trying to up-sell, you’re always trying to sell a service. You’re basically hunting for the people out there in the waters that are going to buy two or more units.

Steve: Okay, and then the way you kind of pitch yourself where your value add is the service?

Daniel: Correct, so we’re adding service on top, we’re adding knowledgeable stuff, short call cues, instant downloads. We’ve done quite a bit to speed up the delivery of these products for different customers so that they can get in their needs bun which ends up – most people these days want to be able to install an app instantly, get it right away. So we’ve done a great deal to alleviate that issue of receiving the box in the mail, installing it and then going through that entire process.

Steve: So just to be clear then like your target customer is not someone like me, it’s someone who runs a company?

Daniel: So yeah absolutely. So we do have a large consumer base, but consumer base in software has a seven year return cycle, so meaning if I sell you Office today, seven years from now you’ll probably buy Office again unless you’re buying a subscription. So we specifically hunt for company buyers that are going to repeat, buy but even more specifically we’re searching for computer repair shops, computer service centers, anyone that has — computer consultants that have a large number of clients where they are doing the buying and purchasing for those customers.

Steve: Okay, and so before this interview I actually went ahead and did a couple of searches for like Microsoft Office for example. And I noticed that in the main AdWords – I didn’t see any of your ads, but you like dominated the Google Shopping ads, and so I was hoping to talk about that a little bit, because I know that there’s just tons and tons of companies selling the same software that you are. And so how do you advertise your store, and how do you kind of convey your value add to the people?

Daniel: Well, that’s kind of a multi point question, is the question…

Steve: Let’s talk about getting customers in the door first.

Daniel: Yeah so getting customers in the door, all right so some companies focus on SEO, some companies focus on straight AdWords. We decided to focus on product listing ads because our target customer was either searching for a skew or they were searching for a full end title, or they were searching for some variation in the title.

So when we went about kind of developing our plan, we decided that we were going to chase down every possible optimization that could be done in AdWords like product splitting by title, different content in the descriptions for different ratings trying to convey all the information the customer needed in the first four seconds of being on the page, and then allowing them to make a snap decision on, is this what they were looking for, and then we use keyword shaping.

But basically our approach was always to try to separate the consumer from the business user. So everything in our AdWord strategy is the first couple of times you search you’ll see us a lot, and then once we learn more about the customer we start to narrow that focus.

Steve: Okay so let’s talk about that process because from what I remember in our conversations what you do is pretty intricate and pretty detailed, so let’s just focus on PLAs for a moment.

Daniel: Sure.

Steve: So what do your sales funnels look like and how do you run your PLA ads to weed out these people who are going to be buying often?

Daniel: Yeah, so the funnel specifically is to reduce the barrier to entry to get somebody and get them on the phone or on chat as fast as possible. So when you hit our product pages, you’re seeing chat with us now, speak with a representative of the office in the United States, just high availability imagery and content messaging to say, “Hey, we are here, we are able to negotiate on price, we are able to set this up for multiple people.”

So the end user – you’ll end up getting a portion of them that will communicate through and they’ll ask some general questions about the product, and we try to include that in the product messaging so that it’s all upfront. And what we’re trying to do is suck up the people that are business buyers, anyone who wants two or more.

So anyone who wants to two or more we pull out by the sales team once they’ve gone through and made a purchase, we solicit them directly, they’ll go into a different remarketing group, we’ll pay more for them, there’s a number of techniques that go into it.

Steve: Okay and then in terms of the number of people who actually take advantage of the live chat and that sort of thing, what percentage is that and then what is your close rate for the people that you actually do manage to get on the phone?

Daniel: So the close rate for people on the phone is quite high, I think as long as – the element of selling software is like selling a toilet seat, right? You know that you are in the market for a toilet seat, but you just don’t know what toilet seat is going to save your fixture. So essentially when you get these people on the phone rarely are they worried too much about price, they are trying to find the unit that’s right for the equipment they have.

So you’re never really having to fight much on price with the basic consumers because they’ve already determined that they want to buy it from you, they like the trust factors on the site, they have a good feeling about it. So the customer service is really getting them the in-depth information that they need, but it scales on complexity.

It’s much easier to say, “Hey yeah this is Microsoft Office we want to install on your computer,” as opposed to, “Well this is how many licenses of this $7,000 SQL Server you need for the cores in your computer with 6 VMs and all of this more complex licensing information.” So our staff for the most part except for the most junior people are trained to answer the simple, this is what will work on your computer, all the way up to, this is the licensing compliance diagram that we need to follow to make sure you’re complaint with Microsoft.

Steve: So does that imply that your Shopping campaigns, you convert well enough on like the first click, or do you do a bunch of things, like I’m trying to get into depth about how you run your Shopping campaigns. So I understand you probably have this broad funnel for keywords, and then you try to grab as many of those people as you can, but like how do you kind of extract out and target just the big buyers with your Shopping campaigns?

Daniel: Sure, so the main thing about the – so there’s two factors. First off we take a whole product approach, we get somebody in with the cheap products so that we can remarket them and re-solicit them because you’ll pay up to the full profit if not more on those preliminary hooked products like Microsoft Office to identify and target a repeat buyer.

So for us, that’s simply just look at their email, look at their website, figure out that they buy more stuff, re-solicit them with a coupon, and then have the sales team call them. On the larger products front, like when we’re selling SQL Server or we’re jumping into a new product line, we’ll specifically go out there, measure the competition, see who is not following the Shopping guidelines. We’ll target them, we’ll build up their entire product base that they’re advertising, and then we’ll block their IP and advertise on top of them and absorb those sales.

Steve: So let’s back up a little bit, the reason why I’m asking these questions is you mentioned before that software only carries a 20% premium, right?

Daniel: Right.

Steve: I mean margin, and so when you are writing these Google Shopping campaigns, you mentioned the hook items, so you’re not making any money at all for example selling Microsoft Office in that case?

Daniel: On a single license of Microsoft Office we make practically no money.

Steve: Okay, and so the key is you’re getting these people in through Google Shopping, and then you’re finding the people who are the big whales so to speak, and then you’re doing a lot of outreach to those people?

Daniel: Exactly, so an example of something that happened this week, a customer that we acquired back in November on a deal spread ended up doing $195,000 deal to do database servers in Haiti. So that one hooked product that absolutely came through our PLA network, got this guy in, got him talking to a sales person, built up that level of trust, and turned into $200,000 deal down the road.

Steve: So let me ask you this, how do you – because that first round of Google Shopping is not profitable per say and you make all of your profits kind of on the backend, how do you measure like the ROI of your campaigns?

Daniel: Sure, so we basically have a benchmark, we basically are picking the positions we want to be on certain products and then measuring those accounts across the longer line. So it doesn’t make sense to advertise heavily on something like antivirus, personal antivirus. It will go on a bargain bin; we’ll basically make sure that we follow all the SEO guidelines, we wrote our own tool to do this called Feed Doctor that optimizes the products for brand position and ranking inside Google PLAs.

We make sure all those details are as good as it can be, and then we look at what we spend on Microsoft Office in a week. So we’ll find that we can spend 15% on Microsoft Office, still turn a profit, look at the total amount collected, and we’ll find that in five sales somebody buys two or more. So if 20% of customers are buying two or more, it actually turns the rollers [ph] on the entire investment into that product channel as a positive return on ad spend.

So instead of being 25% on the line item, we’re looking at a genre of products that lead to further sales down the road, and we’re calculating that as a whole.

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So from what you just said, are you implying then that the two or mores you kind of assign a certain weighting factor to it when you’re measuring the effect of this on your Shopping campaign?

Daniel: Correct, so the conversions are tracked in two ways, we track the total units sold and then we also track the amount of converted clicks, and then we’re weighting those based on a ratio. And there is a factor in price point there too. If you’re too cheap or too expensive it can affect that ratio.

Steve: Okay, so I also noticed that you dominate the Google PLAs, which kind of implies to me at least that you’re spending more money than the competitors, is that accurate or how do you dominate those search rankings?

Daniel: Sure, to a degree, search rankings in Shopping ads are different than any other search rankings out there. The ranking statistics are based on Google’s effected click through rating, and they measure that against their compliance statistics. So if your description is less than let’s say 300 words or you don’t have 1,000 by 1,000 image or you don’t have the brand in title, all of these factors kind of go into how Google assigns your rank, and how they assume your click through rating.
So they basically pick the people that best matched that product search or whatever somebody is searching for and puts that up top. So do not – bidding over top somebody else, you’re just Google’s best pick for what they think people are looking for, and then you validate that with your ability to process those transactions on the backend.

So we’re showing stars, we’re doing Google transit stores, we’re doing promotions, we’re doing sales, we always make sure to show free shipping, promotional text, and as compared to our competitors, they don’t even have the review stars on their products. We aggregate reviews at probably 50 to 100 a day on products. So once you have a certain amount of reviews on products, your product will immediately stand apart in the top Google product search when you have it on the primary screen.

Now when you get into the secondary screens where people are ranking by price or ranking for the buy box there, it is a different set of statistics. In that case they’re typically saying, “All right, these products are the same thing, these guys have a better price, but they meet our bidding and compliance standard.” So there’s actually three different sets of rules, and what we found is before we fixed our data we were paying on average 3 to $5 a click, after we got all our data into compliance, really optimized everything, it was $1.50, and we were getting way more through put.

Steve: Okay so let’s go through all the elements of compliance if you would, at least the most important ones, let’s try to highlight those.

Daniel: Sure, so image size, brand, and title.

Steve: So image size you mentioned it should be a square image of at least 1,000 by 1,000?

Daniel: Well, they say 800 by 800, the minimum is 300 by 300, but they scale these images in different places. So they are going to use these images in dynamic apps, they’re going to use these images in display ads; they’re going to use these images on mobile. So they say 1,000 by 1,000 but sometimes people have 1,000 by 1,000 white cube and a little tiny product in the middle.

Ultimately the image that you pick needs to be attention grabbing, and in our case we’re kind of limited by how many changes we can make because it’s someone else’s brand. But if you have a high contrast image elements that you can convey that set you apart from other people, in a parallel they find the people with children or people in the photos tend to get a better click through rating, and just one of the things that guys at Google told us way back was rotate your product boxes by 30 to 45 degrees and you’ll get a better click through rating with a 3D image than a flat image.

So we went through the process of kind of doing those best practices and then we made sure that all the details that we could sell out were correct, that we had the best image quality, the best descriptions, the descriptions are pretty important.

Steve: Are you allowed to put promotional language in your images for Shopping?

Daniel: You’re not supposed to and you’re not supposed to put it in your actual product description as well. So they are kind of hard on that, but they’re not doing too much visual checking. They are looking at the density of words that they can read from it though it’s not as much like Facebook where Facebook has a 30% policy for text image, in Facebook you’re only supposed to use 30% text.

But PLAs for us, it’s really been making sure the descriptions are great are kind of one tactical play that we look at is we look at the display tab in Google Shopping in AdWords, and we find out that these keywords are generating clicks for these items so that we craft duplicate items with different keyword subsets in the title to closely match someone’s searches.

Steve: Okay, so let’s talk about that a little bit. You’re saying you’re figuring out which keywords people are using to search for your software and then you’re putting those in the title tags?

Daniel: Correct.

Steve: Okay, and are you putting those in the description as well – so you’re duplicating products?

Daniel: Right.

Steve: The exact same product but you’re using different verbiage?

Daniel: Right, and the way that we get around the duplicate products thing is we change the description enough so that it’s changed so that it’s not exactly the same. They’ll have some similar key points like the specifications will be the same, but the writing over top will be different. They’ll also have a different product ID, a different product skew, and occasionally they’ll have the same UPC but it’ll just be a different display of it.

Steve: Interesting, so inventory wise though it all pulls from the same inventory?

Daniel: In some cases, sometimes you have two versions of Microsoft Office home and business and they have two different skews, then you’ll provide both of those skews. But Microsoft took this approach way back, they created a product and then they created 25 different skews for that product. What we did was we took those 25 skews and we keyword shipped around what people would be looking for to get to those.

Steve: Okay, when in reality it’s the same software just packaged differently?

Daniel: Right, and the one thing that nobody seems to understand clearly about Shopping is it’s all keyword driven. The only thing that you can eliminate is negatives, but it’s looking for keywords in your title and it’s looking in the first couple of lines of your description.

Steve: So in terms of your description, does it pay to have a really long description, or is it just as you just mentioned just the first couple of sentences?

Daniel: So it still uses the Google SEO laws, so you’re still trying to get 300 words, and they basically say in not so many words on some documents that I’ve seen that you’re penalized for not having 1,000 characters or more.

Steve: 1,000 characters, okay.

Daniel: Yeah, so they understand the product descriptions and SEO page regulations are different, but they look for 1,000 to 5,000 characters in that description even though they might not display it, they might display it somewhere else later. And really specifically in SEO standard practices, you want the keywords that you’re trying to focus for on the first line, so if you add those keywords that you’re trying to focus on in the first line of your product description, you’ll see them highlighted from the Google Shopping page when you’re in the actual Google Shopping perspective.

So if you put Microsoft Office home and business, and that’s in the first line of your description, that’s going to be highlighted as well as the keywords it matches in your title.

Steve: Okay, just the other day I was looking through my PLA ads and I’ve noticed that some of my products never get any impressions and they’re very similar to the products that do get impressions, and I did follow a lot of the things that you suggested which is doing the structure markup which we’ll talk about in a little bit, and I have alternative images. What other ways besides – so we’ve talked about the image, we’ve talked about the description, what else is there?

Daniel: So you can use back in the titles, but it depends if you get the list view or the grid view. Grid view basically takes all of the candidates that came back for that search term and they put up the candidates that have the best return for them or the best projected return. So to even be considered you have to have the keyword matching in your description, in your title, and sometimes they look at any sort of product typing that you’re submitting.

So let’s say you searched for bed linens and a comforter, you probably will see all bed linens, but let’s say you have a comfortable that goes with that that you wanted to show up in the same thing, Google will look at that taxonomy and say, “Look, these are the products that get the best clicks, we’re going to just exclusively use this taxonomy.”

So later on if you want to show me this example, I can take a look and basically determine on a finite level why it’s not getting searches on that query.

Steve: Sure, I was just asking about your software though, it seems like you have all these different skews, do all of them get impressions like in your feed?

Daniel: So we actually, we scale them on the backend, so after they go through the – we kind of call the checked bucket, we throw them out there, we throw them out on super high bids and we monitor their click through, and then we sort them into a priority bidding scale where we determine they’re either great value, best value or special value, and based on what we see in their performance in click through, based on an advertising subset of one month, we basically determine how much we’re going to pay to bid on those things.

And then we monitor what keywords they’re getting clicks on, what negatives they’re working with them, but we don’t ever want to be in a position where two things are competing against each other. For example we have ten different versions of home and business and they are all different skews, but we found that during our test of home and business, one performs really well.

So we’re going to bid high on that one and then low on the other ones and then grade them across that scale, because you don’t want to end up having two of the exact same product competing against each other.

Steve: Okay, so in the beginning you’re bidding really high for like a month just to gather data from what it sounds?

Daniel: Correct.

Steve: Okay and then based on that data you pick the ones that have the highest click through rate, bid higher on those and then bid lower on the ones that don’t?

Daniel: Right and we’ll also use priority stacking, so something that has…

Steve: Let’s talk about that actually yeah.

Daniel: Yeah so the priority stack is pretty interesting, it seems they got – limited the ability to bid on keywords, you have to kind of negatively shape a keyword and look at the value of that keyword. So for example I don’t know if Skype is listening to us, but it just started showing me Microsoft Office ads.

Steve: Okay, it could be.

Daniel: Off topic there. So with the keyword priority it’s like you want to take your top performers that you want to spend the most money, and put them in the high priority campaign with the keywords that you know are going to generate sales.

Now you might have some broader keywords, and you might want to create a standard priority campaign where you have the same set of products, but you bid less for those products on the standard campaign or the standard keywords that are broad like Microsoft Office. How do you know which Microsoft Office they’re looking for? You don’t, so you are going to take some candidates for that, you’re going to set up bid schedule.

But if they go highly specific you want to bid high, if they are broad keywords you want to bid kind of mediocre, and then you have your bottom bid which is keywords that aren’t truly related, somebody searched for example not QuickBooks software, but they searched for accounting software and it generated a sale after 30 clicks or something like that for QuickBooks.

So we’ll put that in the bottom bid, we’ll eliminate accounting software from a – to high priorities where we’re going to spend a lot, we’ll throw that in the bottom bid, and if they happen to come across this for 15 or 25 cents, then we’ll take the deal, and then we frequency capped the two bottom ones.

Steve: Okay and then how often do you actually reevaluate the keywords and everything, like how often do you look at your campaigns?

Daniel: Everyday.

Steve: Everyday?

Daniel: Everyday.

Steve: Wow, okay so you’re looking at negatives every – do you use software for this or do you do it manually?

Daniel: A little bit of both, so we’ve built our own reports that kind of find where things have gone out of work or out of performance, and we use rules to turn stuff on and off. Like if something – the biggest dagger in product listing ads once you get a high budget is you’ll find something that was performing great and it was performing great, and then somebody came along with a better price of the exact same product, undercut you, you’re still getting clicks but this guy has the exact same product with a slightly better display and all of your sales drop out.

So you have to use rules to basically – rules and reporting to determine if your products on a line item level are still performing, and then that has to be matched against their price points. You need to know when your competitors are doing, so we have charged that point what the competitor pricing is, and there is quite a bit of work that has to go into just maintaining a single PLA set of campaigns with about 2,000 products. It’s a full time job for two people.

Steve: Wow, okay so that implies that your Shopping campaigns like the ads themselves are very granular, meaning like the keywords that you’re targeting are just very specific to individual products instead of like the way I kind of – for example like I do it. I target like broader keywords since we own all of our own brands.

Daniel: Yeah, so it’s specific to products but it’s also specific to what has produced a better yield on the follow up. So if they look at a set of keywords, they are now trying to trace those sales all the way back to, were these consumers, or were these business people? If they’re business people, are they going to come back and buy again from us or should we let them go. So they are then trying to pull this into two sets of campaigns, they’re trying to do a B to B campaign and a B to C campaign, and the B to C ends up feeding the B to B.

So once we find something, a set of metrics that works well for a B to B client, we import those from the B to C into the B to B set of campaigns.

Steve: Okay so what for example would be a good metric?

Daniel: For example we’ve found places where someone searches on a specific skew. When they search on those skews, we’ll have a bucket in the B to B high priority that we won’t have the negatives for that, whereas the consumer one will have the negatives, and the bidding rate in the B to B is about double what the B to C is.

Steve: I see.

Daniel: So we’ve picked out habits and keyword subsets where B to C people – a consumer would never search for a skew or GTIN of a product, a business person looking for pricing on those would.

Steve: Wow, okay.

Daniel: So when those opportunities show up, we want to guarantee that we have the most visibility possible.

Steve: Interesting, so are you also ramping – you’re doing retargeting as well, right?

Daniel: Yes.

Steve: Retargeting at least, so you are bucketing the business customers differently in terms of your remarketing as well, right?

Daniel: Somewhat yes, they get into a B to B emailing queue, we don’t have to as much trying to remarket them as we would just the general consumer, so we leave remarketing pretty flat and then we feed those to the sales guys to go after them.

Steve: So how do you keep track of all this, I’m just trying to think of how I would do it here, so you’re tracking different keywords that lead to higher sales volume like two or more is what you mentioned. How do you make that correlation?

Daniel: A lot of spreadsheets.

Steve: Okay, I was going to ask if it was manual or whether you had something on the backend that kind of…

Daniel: We actually have two very talented data science guys that we picked up and taught them marketing specifically for analyzing these correlation sets.

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Okay, I wonder how many other people are doing this, I mean in your space it’s really competitive, I feel like it’s almost a must, right?

Daniel: Very few people take the approach that we do; most people invest into marketing, find out that their view is that it’s unprofitable and then they turn it off. Our view is specifically if something is unprofitable, turn it down, or relook at the opportunity to figure out if there is money coming out somewhere else. For example if you sell antivirus and then they end up buying Office and a mouse and a desktop and a monitor and all this other stuff, then antivirus is also on your most valuable PLA product.

Without understanding what’s going on in that repeat buying zone, effectively PLAs are just one time sale. So anyone who’s going into the PLA market to sell a single product, it’s dangerous because you really want to focus on the repeat buyer and what you can resell after the fact, because the cost of PLAs are going to keep going up. The cost of selling a $20 knife will probably be $20 within the next year.

Steve: Especially since Amazon is jumping in there, right?

Daniel: Well Amazon has been in there and Amazon’s behavior point was they didn’t have the data right before. So now they’re going to buy the penny buckets on there and hope that their brand and their SEO is going to take over, but that doesn’t stop you from for example if you’re a reseller like we are using our ability to do the SEO correctly on these things.

If we buy a product cheap enough and they’re selling on Amazon for cheaper, we just direct them to Amazon and keep a portion of the profit and have somebody else fulfill it.

Steve: Okay.

Daniel: So if you’re managing the spend correctly and you’re managing the people, like somebody lands on your page, you get their email, maybe you’re not the cheapest price and you can extrapolate that, send them on to Amazon, then remarket them again.

Steve: Interesting. I’m just trying to think, so on the backend can you recommend any software for like people out there who are listening to actually do some of this analysis, or do you literally need like dedicated data scientist people?

Daniel: A really simple software that’s out there Data Feed Watch, a lot of people use it; their analytics platform gives you a nice line item view of what’s working. Also looking into crafting your custom reports on what your click ratios are, what you click throughs are by product ID and taking a hard look at those to see where it’s performing, and then taking a look at what your hooked products are.

We take a lot of the data and sales and we use that pier to throw it in to Google feeds, and then we match, we do a report every week where we match that data, then we just export from AdWords into that to kind of determine what our line item cost per product is. But yeah there’s quite a bit of work, there’s companies like WisePricer that go out there and scrap the data and try to set your prices and do all these different things to try and help you win, but there is no magic bullet that does the profit report.

There is nothing that says, “Okay, here is your analytics data, here is how many people came through PLAs, here is what came back to your site.” You really have to track those opportunities, measure the UTM values when they come in, track that back to the product that caused that sale and the time frame and look at it at a very granular level, and then get used to doing that process three or four times a week to determine what your effective product sales are.

Steve: Okay, I want to leave the readers with stuff that’s immediately actionable – or the listeners I should say. In terms of the feeds – so we talked about a couple of things with the image and the description, any low hanging fruit that you would say that a lot of people are just making mistakes on with just their feed?

Daniel: Yeah, brand in title, brand in title, too many times someone says, “I don’t want to add my brand name in there because it’s not really relevant to the product.” Well throwing your brand in there will get you more organic search, it’ll get you more search in general, so always have brand in title. Like it’s just – it’s one of those things where you’ll never know when a customer will remember your brand and go back to it, and you’ve just gotten free money from it.

So Google PLA has the widest base of customer search for products, not putting the brand in title is like paying an extra quarter on every single click.

Steve: Do you put at the end or the beginning?

Daniel: Typically you put it at the beginning, but if you’ve got a long brand name you can always toss it at the end. I know some companies that are resellers where they’ll take their company name and toss it at the end just so they get that brand authority.

Steve: There is already a field in the feed for brand though, that’s not good enough?

Daniel: Correct, that’s not good enough.

Steve: Okay, any other tips than just the feed?

Daniel: Make sure the first line of your description has the keywords that you want people to search for.

Steve: Okay and we talked about structured markup, any tips there or – actually let’s talk about it, we forgot to talk about that. So why is structured markup important, first of all what is it and why is it important?

Daniel: All right, so structured markup is effectively how you’ve told Google to read your site. So in the case of products, Google is going to scrap your site and they’re going to try and gleam whatever data they can. Unfortunately it’s not a great scientific process for them, like they need to get the GTI end of your product, they need to know what the product ID was in your feed that it’s running against.

They need to be able to cleanly read the images and alternative images, they need to know what the description content was, they need to know how many reviews are on this page, who wrote those reviews, how many reviews you’re getting a day. It’s all really, really important, so structured data is how you communicate that to Google.

If somebody doesn’t have structured data, they’re not getting stars on their organic search, they’re not going to get the stars on their product listing ads, their dynamic remarketing for product listing ads is not going to work correctly. A lot of things will go much, much better on a straight up performance level if Google can read that information.

Additionally if your price changes on your product page and your pricing structure data is not set up correctly, they’ll actually pause your product in your merchant center, and so either your feed updates, or if they’ve taken the time to review and say, “Okay this is the new price.” So having that structured data there is important because they are going to read it every time they send a customer there, and if they have to make an adjustment, you’d much rather communicate that information to them.

Also things like in stock, out of stock, if a product goes out of stock on your site, and you don’t want to market it any more, then you can update that out of stock in your structured data. Google will pick that up when a click comes through, and they’ll mark it out of stock for you so that you’re not spending advertising on it.

Steve: So in terms of the structured data, does that imply that the structured data can be different from what’s actually on the page, like Google doesn’t pay attention to the page that much anymore?

Daniel: Correct, so in the case of products, you might want to have a better structured data that is great content for — in our product descriptions we have lots of pictures, we have lots of tables, we have all sorts of different content which we don’t necessarily want Google to read. So we give Google a optimized bid of description that we feed them into a JSON variable underneath the HTML that’s optimized for what we want to show to Google for when they search our index or page.

Steve: That’s interesting, I was thinking the opposite, like for the structured data I would include like a 1,500 word post or something, but to make the page look okay in the description I would just keep a small paragraph, what you’re suggesting is the opposite of that?

Daniel: Right, so you still want to have whatever the SEO standard is, but you want that to be in a clean readable format so that they just read through it, they don’t have to read line breaks, all of that other stuff, you just give them the structured data and say, “This is the information on the product, read it, go back to business.”

Steve: Okay, cool Daniel, man we’ve actually been chatting for 40 minutes about Google shopping, who would have guessed it?

Daniel: I love Google Shopping man.

Steve: No you are a master at it, it’s crazy the amount of work, I mean I know selling software is difficult, but it just seems like all the extra stuff that you’re doing on the backend is essential, and you are right, I have students in my class, where they try these things and it doesn’t work and then they give up. But they’re just looking at it from the point of like a direct sale.

Daniel: Sure, and it really has to be sculpted over the organization, you need to pick a sacrificial lamb that will get people through the door, put it out there and work hard to retain those customers.

Steve: So would this all change if you had your own branded products, I mean it wouldn’t need to be this intricate then, right?

Daniel: Correct, so if it was a branded product, we would basically state that we would pay 50% or 75% of the first product sale to get them in the door, then we would focus the entirety of our profit generation efforts on the backend.

Steve: Right, okay, so backend meaning like email and direct sales?

Daniel: Email, direct sales, up-sell, down-sell, all of those components because Shopping is getting a lot more expensive and it’s purposely difficult to manage. You need a lot of people to do it, so your effective profit rates will fluctuate wildly; it’s just not a metric that should be used to generate direct profit on its own.

Steve: Interesting, all right Daniel, thanks a lot for your time and if anyone wants to know what you’re up to, where can they find you and I know you got a bunch of businesses on your own, feel free to tell everyone what you’re working on.

Daniel: Sure, so My Choice Software is our ecommerce business. We have the Safe Harbor Group, which is or merchant service business kind of specifically targeting the ecommerce community. Then we have Business Tech Pro which is our software development group that develops apps, websites, marketing funnels, different products for different clients, and then we have Extended Shield which is our new B to B application allowing businesses to sell extended warranties for all of their product offering stuff.

So if you sell diamond rings we basically create a warranty, the tax rate on the end of your ecommerce process or in your store, and you’re able to produce that up-sell afterwards. Then I recently started a new blogging initiative called Sound Decisions where I’m taking all my headaches and frustrations with all of these different businesses and opportunities, and kind of venting them out there.

So we’ve got some interesting stuff about the upcoming changes to Shopify, we have some interesting stuff on how to develop with multiple people on there and then kind of some business driving decision articles as well. So I’m not nearly as good as you Steve, but hopefully one day I’ll be able to quit my job as well.

Steve: Hey don’t forget to mention your Shopify plug-in.

Daniel: Yeah the Shopify Plug-in is a new categories app. We took all the power of standard Magento tree categories and we brought them to Shopify. So it’s absolutely a game changer for anybody looking to migrate to Shopify, it gives you that last element of organization that you’re really truly looking for.

Steve: Yeah, if you have like nested options and that sort of thing, right?

Daniel: Yeah, you can go infinitely deep, you can have 1,000 category depth trees.

Steve: Cool Daniel, hey it was a pleasure having you on the show; I really appreciate your time man.

Daniel: Hey, thank you so much Steve.

Steve: All right, take care.

Daniel: Take care.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode. Selling box software is probably one of the hardest products to sell. Daniel has actually taught me a ton about Google Shopping, and I’ve been able to take his advice and improve my ad visibility dramatically. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode168.

And once again I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Klaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants, and you can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase sequence, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on auto pilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/ K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

Now I also want to thank SellerLabs.com as well. Their tool Ignite is what I use to manage my Amazon pay per click campaigns. Instead of the old tedious way of generating reports and analyzing your ad campaigns in excel, Ignite aggregates all that info for you in one place and allows you to quickly visualize your data to make decisions fast.

So not only does it save time, but it also makes managing your Amazon campaigns so much easier. So head on over to sellerlabs.com/steve and sign up for a free 30 day trial, once again that’s sellerlabs.com/steve.

And if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.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.

Outro: 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.mywifequitherjob.com.

Today I’m thrilled to have Austin Brawner back on the show, and he was a guest way back in episode 65. Recently Austin took over as CMO of a company called Boom Boom, and today’s podcast will analyze Austin’s exact thought processes as he restructures the sales funnels of his company, it’s going to be awesome.

But before we begin I want to give a quick shout out to Klaviyo who is a sponsor of the show. Now I’m always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store, and I depend on Klaviyo for over 20% of my revenues. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not a different provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores, and here’s why it’s so powerful.

Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they purchased which allows you to do many things. So let’s say I want to send an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week, boom. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they purchased, that’s a piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single email.

Now Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used and you can try them for free at mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

I also want to give a shout out to my other sponsor Seller Labs, and specifically I want to talk about their brand new tool Ignite which helps sellers manage their Amazon sponsored ads. Right now I’m using this tool to manage my Amazon sponsored ad campaigns, and it makes things a heck of a lot more convenient.

So number one I’ve always found it a major pain to generate my PPC reports on Amazon, cut and paste the data over to an excel spreadsheet and then use pivot tables before I’m able do any analysis. Well Ignite pulls all that info for you automatically and allows you to easily see what keywords are working and what are not immediately, there is no need to manually create reports or play with excel.

Second of all unless you’re a data geek, Amazon campaign data can be hard to understand, and what’s cool is that Ignite makes keyword and bidding recommendations on the fly that can be applied with just a couple of clicks.

So let’s say one of my hankie keywords is bleeding money, well Ignite will alert me of that fact, and I can reduce the bid immediately. So bottom line Ignite makes managing Amazon’s sponsored ads so much easier and the fact that they provide me with alerts means that I no longer have to monitor my campaigns like a hawk.

If there are keywords that are doing well, Ignite tells me to add them to my exact match campaigns, if my keywords are losing money, well Ignite tells me to either remove the keyword or to reduce the bid. So head on over to sellerlabs.com/steve where you’ll actually find awesome tutorials on how to run Amazon PPC ads and the opportunity to try Ignite for 30 days for free. Once again that’s sellerlabs.com/steve. Now on the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, today I’m thrilled to have Austin Brawner back on the show. Now I met Austin at the Ecommerce Fuel conference I want to say about three years ago and we’ve kept in touch in touch ever since, and in fact I had Austin on the podcast back in episode 65 a long time ago.

Now Austin runs the Ecommerce Influence Podcast and also helps ecommerce companies grow with his site Brand Growth Experts. He is also the CMO of an ecommerce company called Boom Boom Energy. Prior to getting married last year – congrats by the way Austin, Austin was a popular speaker on marketing for ecommerce and helps scale a company from zero to 11 million dollars in 2.5 years with email marketing.

Anyway Austin has a unique perspective because he works with companies so deeply to improve them and today we’re going to pick his brain. And with that welcome to the show Austin, how are you doing today man?

Austin: Hey good Steve, thanks for having me back, I’m excited to be here and to talk again about ecommerce.

Steve: By the way I didn’t mean to imply that like all your speaking went downhill after marriage, I’m sure you know that.

Austin: It’s like he got married, he’s done.

Steve: Now he’s in Thailand, he’s just living on the beach. Yeah so for the listeners who don’t know or remember you, give us a quick background how you got in ecommerce and actually how you ended up being the CMO of Boom Boom Energy.

Austin: Sure, so it has been a while I think since we chatted last time. I first got involved in ecommerce I guess it’s about four years ago or something like that. I was really interested — I was working in this company in Los Angeles, it was a startup, a healthy vending start up, and I watched how we basically grew the business from when I got there, we were doing like maybe 200 grand in sales to 11 million dollars in about two and a half years and we did it through email marketing and really building these automated sequences around our sales team to grow the business with an influx of email leads.

I saw this and we built these really sophisticated email sequences targeting people based on their behavior, and I had a bunch of friends who were in ecommerce and I saw that what we were doing was not being done in ecommerce. So I first started working with a couple of different companies, brought over some of these email sequences that I was using, rebuilt them for ecommerce.

I had a lot of success driving sales, really kind of fell in love with ecommerce here and best marketing, started the Ecommerce Influence Podcast where I interview experts and business owners who have grown ecommerce businesses typically from like a million dollars to ten million dollars plus, and have been involved with this growing ecommerce businesses for the last four years.

I took over as the CMO of Boom Boom Energy about two months ago and have been kind of rebuilding what they’re doing and building it into more of like a structured tracking data jam company.

Steve: Okay since we’re going to be talking about Boom Boom Energy today just give us like a quick five sentence overview of what the company sells.

Austin: We sell the world’s best energizing nasal inhaler. What that means is that it’s a small inhaler that you basically breath and it’s all natural essential oils, so invigorates, energizes you, you don’t actually smell [ph] anything, you’re breathing in a scent that kind of clears your head, enhances your breathing, provides you a kind of a blast of intense reflection, we say it’s like gum for your nose.

Steve: By the way Austin is going to be sending me some of these and I’ll report back on it, I was a little skeptical…

Austin: Steve said it was sketchy, so I said I’m coming to convert him which is basically that’s a big issue that we actually have with the product because it’s a product where people kind of need to be able to experience it. The first time you like breath in the scent you understand immediately why it’s important and why people like it. We convert fans really, really well at conferences or now we’re working on getting that messaging online.

Steve: Does that mean that you guys are doing a lot of free giveaways of your product?

Austin: Exactly, we actually are, we’re working right now on a free plus shipping offer.

Steve: Okay yeah, let’s talk about that real quick.

Austin: So that’s something that we’ve been experimenting with over the last I guess let’s see the last month really is when we realized that we had to get this product in people’s hands. And so we started on Facebook and we had a lot of success with kind of like a rap video, we talk about Boom Boom that became relatively viral, meaning a lot of people are sharing it, it’s got like 1.7 million views at this point.

Steve: Wow, okay. What does a rap video have to do with Boom Boom Energy?

Austin: It tells the story about Boom Boom like what it is. It shows people using it; it shows people getting energized and kind of explains the product. We realized it’s a top of the funnel thing, like people have to have a little bit of an understanding what the product is. So we got that video, we tried a couple of things and we started promoting it, people started sharing it and we got all these views for it.

Steve: So is this like a high production quality video?

Austin: Yeah it is, it is. It’s in the same kind of – we looked at some of the videos that have done very well on Facebook in the past, dollarship club was one of them, beard – what’s the guy’s name, the beard guy?

Steve: Steve Brand, oh beard guy yeah right.

Austin: I can’t remember the name like beard club or something like that, and we looked at those and we created one that was similar, obviously we’re like it’s still a bootstrapped startup so a much smaller production value, but still it’s giving us really good results.

Steve: How much were you paying per click?

Austin: Paying per click per view?

Steve: Oh yeah actually per view and then I assume a portion of those people actually click through, right?

Austin: Yeah a portion of them click through but our focus has been to try to get people to watch the whole video. Looking at numbers in the last month, we’re getting like 0.002 cent views and then we’re able to get people to really be able to view 95% of the video for about 3 cents.

Steve: Okay, wow that’s really good and so then you’re retargeting these people, right?

Austin: Yeah then we’re retargeting these people, so and when I say that we’re able to get them for 3 cents we basically were – if I take the amount of money that this video is generating and I look through the amount of money it’s generating it’s attractive enough. We spent and looked at the number of people that were viewing 95% of the videos; we’re paying basically 3 cents for people to view the video which is really good.

Steve: So let me ask you this, the video probably doesn’t generate sales on its own, does it?

Austin: It doesn’t, not really, it does some but not that many, the focus for us is to open the top of the funnel. So we want to get as many people viewing this video and then we take a look at the people that have viewed the full video or 75% or 95% of the video and then retarget people based off of that. It drives people to our site as well.

So we have basically these campaigns, these free plus shipping campaigns that we’re running to people who have viewed a large like 95% of the video and that converts really well, we get basically like between four and five dollar CPAs on this free plus shipping offer.

Steve: Can we talk about the offer itself, so what are you giving away and how much are you charging for shipping?

Austin: So we charge – we give away a triple pack of these Boom Boom inhalers, they are typically 16.95 on our website plus shipping of 4.95. We give away the free plus shipping offer…

Steve: So they’re paying 4.95 and you’re paying around $3 or $4 to acquire the customer?

Austin: They pay 6.95.

Steve: 6.95?

Austin: 6.95 for shipping, we pay between $4 and $5 to acquire the customer on some of our best campaigns, so we’re basically like — at this point we found that we can basically set these things up where we’re just paying – and also that the product costs us 6.95.

So we’re basically losing like $4 to $5 to acquire a customer but that has been at this point kind of like our goal is to figure out how we could get to a point where we could acquire a customer for between like $4 and $6 because where we’re starting to work on is the backend with the up-sells, because that’s where we’ve realized if we have opportunity for the product like it’s good for us to go out and give away a bunch of products and we go do that at festivals where we’re happily giving away inhalers to people and we just want to be able to do it online.

So we basically this is the way of $4 to $5 loss and then right now we’re kind of dialing in our up-sells. Again we’ve been doing this for two months, so we’re still at kind of like the testing stage right now, but the products that we’re using; we’re actually using Ezra’s Zipify pages. So I drive people from a Facebook retargeting ad to a Zipify sales page and that kind of talks about the product, they learn about it, then they click add to cart.

It takes them to the product page where we have a free plus shipping offer where I basically take in the product and set it up using shipping weights so that the free version they just add to cart and it’s zero dollars, they’re going to pay 6.95 in the US. Then on the back end we’re using one click up-sell Ezra.

Steve: Ezra also aha.

Austin: Ezra as well and we’ve been dialing a couple of offers up-selling. We’ve been testing basically up-selling people in with 30 pack which is a much larger, it’s like an $80 purchase and then also testing a festival pack which is a bunch of [inaudible 00:14:03] lanyards and hats and like a larger group of these products and having some success with that right now. It’s still early in the testing stage for this.

Steve: Okay can I ask you a quick question before you go on, like how did you determine that you want to pay $4 to $6 to acquire a customer?

Austin: Good question, so we looked at the potential up-sells that we had as a business and we broke down an up-sell tree and said, well if we can get between like a 7 and 10% take rate on an up-sell at $80, we’ll be able to – and maybe like a 2% or 1% take rate on a down sell, we should be able to have an acceptable CPA of around $6, and when I say acceptable CPA meaning that we’re going to be able to buy traffic, buy customers at 100% break if our up-sell is taken at that rate and the down sells taken with that rate.

So we looked at it and like well if we could hit this level the CPA we can dial in up-sells and our down sells we should be able to buy traffic at completely break even.

Steve: Okay and then you know that once you have the customer since this is kind of like a consumable product, right?

Austin: It is, it’s typically like use for 30 days, and so we know that there is a lot of people that will come back and make a second purchase. Like for us right now there is a big distribution side of the business and like it’s partly online to try to exposure people to the product online, but for us like getting critical mass and helping in that, it’s kind of like a red bull or like fiber energy [ph] where people look at fiber energy.

It’s hard for us to think back what fiber energy looked at when it first came out, but there is almost a critical mass where enough people know what it’s all about that they’ll buy it from like a [inaudible 00:16:04] counter top, that’s our goal. So getting these new people to try it, convert it over into fans and customers. So if we can buy traffic at break even and then we know that once people are fans of it they’re going to come back and they’ll purchase from us over and over again.

Steve: I see so the idea is just to get it break even and then you can scale it until it has the mind share and then people will just start buying this stuff on their own?

Austin: Yeah people start buying this stuff on their own, people will come back and buy triple pack, a lot of the times people will buy them either for festivals, during December time or they’ll buy them for working and they liked having Boom Boom around. So that’s our goal with the free plus shipping offer. It’s been kind of a little bit of a long route to getting there because showing up when I first started working with them I came in I was like, okay well let’s go step by step and look at the different factors.

You asked about how we figured out the acceptable CPA level for us?

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Austin: When I first started working with them Google analytics wasn’t even set up.

Steve: No way, okay.

Austin: So it was not tracking correctly, there was a lot of like how do you go through and do Google analytics audit, it was actually a good shout out to I think Shopify put together this pretty detailed nice little thing. If you are in a position where your Google analytics, you’re not sure if they are tracking correctly, there is a Shopify tutorial that will walk you through exactly what you need to do, so I set that up…

Steve: How did you know it wasn’t tracking properly?

Austin: It wasn’t tracking.

Steve: Oh it wasn’t tracking, okay never mind okay.

Austin: It wasn’t tracking; there was something wrong with the cart that was installed. So I started going through, did an audit, from there set up online goals that have been enhancing ecommerce tracking and started dialing in. That was the first step to making sure that we understood a lot more about the business, set up something called campus which is kind of interesting, not totally sold on yet but do you use campus by the way?

Steve: No I don’t, you wanted to talk about it real quick or no?

Austin: It’s like – yeah I’ll talk about it because it’s kind of interesting, it’s like an ecommerce dashboard where they help you calculate CPAs from different channels, you can put in your marketing spend for different channels and then it will calculate using Google analytics what your CPA for each channel is which can be helpful.

It takes some time to get set up and it’s not a perfect solution, but if you’re struggling with something like that I’d recommend setting up campus.

Steve: Are you talking about like your CPA across all of your Facebook campaigns because you have your top funnel and then you have your free plus shipping offer, are you talking about calculating the CPA as a whole?

Austin: As a whole yeah, yeah, yeah, so like you can put your email spend and then it’ll track all your purchase that come in through email and give you a CPA of your email channel.

Steve: Okay yeah I was going to ask you that question next actually because you have all these Facebook ad campaigns and you also have a backend email and it’s sometimes hard to calculate your CPA, I mean with all that stuff going on?

Austin: Yeah it is, it is difficult, I think like – and that’s some of the stuff we’re going through as we’re transitioning and trying to move towards a more I can mention like data driven business. It’s how to calculate — our goal – it’s definitely not perfect, there are some sort of like our goal is to drive people through Facebook, capture emails and make sales.

We also have a lot of people that come through with okay we capture their email through our free plus shipping like exit overlay and then they’ll got through the email sequence and purchase from there. So it’s definitely like a branded version.

Steve: Like my version, we’re doing a free plus shipping offer right now too and we actually collect the email on the add to cart. So they go to landing page and you have to have an email address and then the action button is actually add to cart and then actually adds them to the cart, and then I had this whole funnel for that and then I have the up-sell and the down sell. I’m curious what your – so your up-sell is you’re selling a 30 pack?

Austin: Selling a 30 pack yeah.

Steve: Is that after they’ve entered in their information for check out or is it before?

Austin: So with one click up-sell it’s completely afterwards.

Steve: Afterwards okay.

Austin: They’ve completed the transaction, they press purchase, and then a page pops up. All they do is they press purchase and it charges their card again, they don’t want to put any more information in and that is one nice thing about the one click up-sell is they just press the button and it’s charged separately through Strike like purchasing together in Shopify and pairs it for the customer.

That’s one of the big things; I was looking a lot on all these different free plus shipping opportunities like those. If you look at ClickFunnels – what are you using for your free plus shipping?

Steve: I just code everything myself, I have my home grown cart, so I have freedom to do whatever actually. Right now I‘ve chosen to just do the up-sell immediately after they’ve added to the cart, I’ll show them something that’s very similar to what they bought and offer them like an insane discount of like between 30 and 40%.

Austin: Okay yeah exactly so you’ve got it afterwards. If you’re not coding yourself there is a couple of different options out there for you if you want to create an up-sell. There is ClickFunnels, there is CartHook, there is one click up-sell, and looking at the different options the reason why I like one click up-sell is that it does pair the carts.

If you’re using ClickFunnels you’re not going to have combined customer records, it’s going to be done with the ClickFunnel’s cart, and it’s kind of messy. So that’s why one click up-sell works for us, it’s like even though it’s checking out with Stripe and we’re paying a little bit on each one of those things, it pairs in the Shopify back end and so we’ve got the actual information of the customer.

Steve: Yeah it makes sense otherwise you’re trying to combine two different carts, right?

Austin: Yeah it’s annoying exactly.

Steve: Yeah okay, what does your down sell look like?

Austin: So the down sell is our festival pack, so our down sell is 50% off a $59 pack that gives people a hat, a lanyard and a couple more boom booms, and again like right now we’re just purely like a point where we’re just driving people through this thing and like it’s too early to tell if it’s even going to be successful.

I think what’s important for people who are listening is the thought process behind it and if you want to experiment with something like this in the end, we just realized like our goals are a little bit different than maybe some other businesses. We just try to get as people into try it as possible and figure out a way to make something super appealing so we can acquire these customers and that’s working. Acquiring the customer is working whether or not we’re going to be able to dial it in to make it so that it’s at break even, that’s still to be determined at this point.

Steve: Sure, sure, how did you determine the price of your up-sell, like what criteria did you use?

Austin: Well we try to give [crosstalk 00:23:47].

Steve: It’s pretty expensive, right?

Austin: Yeah the up-sell?

Steve: Yeah.

Austin: Yeah so I actually looked at it from – I was talking to Richard from the Funnel Engine who’s been doing some of this type of stuff and we kind of were chatting about different price points, and basically $70 was kind of a range like $70 in profit was kind of arrange in what we thought we would be able to hit if 10% of the people were going to take this thing. I came up with this I’m doing reaching out to other people who were already in free shipping offers and seeing what their up-sell take was.

So I was like, okay if we can get it dialed in at like between 7 and 10%, then the only way it’s going to be able work on Facebook is if we can have a price point at this point because it can be quite expensive to acquire customers.

Steve: Yeah okay, so it’s just mathematically driven based on a few assumptions of your conversion rate and how much it’s costing you essentially?

Austin: Exactly and it’s not – that’s like the keyword like you can’t – I feel like if it’s not going to work for us, it’s not going to work, it’s more an experiment that if it does work out we have a goal to get, if it doesn’t then we’re going to trust the video.

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Okay so you got that going, what other changes have you made since you joined?

Austin: So I’ve been focusing on email marketing because when I work with businesses almost 100% of the time they are under optimized on email and they’re not driving enough sales really on the life cycle of the customer. So I’ve been going in and setting up funnels like follow up funnels for people who come through the free plus shipping offer when they sign up. They then will receive emails following up and reminding them about making this purchase.

Steve: How big is that funnel actually, the free plus shipping funnel like how many emails is it and what does the general flow look like?

Austin: So the general flow is six emails I believe, and the flow is reminding people initially about the free plus shipping offer because they sign up but they don’t take it, then my only goal is to get them to take that offer. So initially the first email is just driving them to the offer page.

The second email is communicating what the product is all about and that’s a big issue for us because people think about snipping something and it’s a big thing when I convey to people, it’s like if you’ve ever smelled menthol you understand, you probably have an idea what the product is like, but it’s communicating this all natural, sharing the brand story, the social proof, so the following email is social proof related.

So we’re going to be sharing with people reviews, other people that have been using the product again to establish credibility, following up with the free plus shipping offer after that and then changing over to like a 10, 20% off offer that escalates from 10 to 20% off in the following two emails. So I call it bio dice sequence and I talked about this a lot on my podcast on different webinars that I’ve been hosting.

This works with pretty much any business. People come in, you give them whatever – they sign up through an email pop up; you initially give them their offer right away, so whatever you use, whether it is free shipping 10% off, whatever. You give that offer to them immediately, then you start hitting people with your brand story, with reviews to your product. You figure out when they’re most likely to purchase, so if they don’t purchase right away like in how many days are they typically going to purchase.

If that’s two days then you don’t give away any discounts until two days. After that then you start targeting people with a discount letter, something that incentivizes the people who’ve passed the threshold when they are typically in the purchase. You incentivize them and help them make a decision and try to grease the wheels to make them become a customer, help them become a customer.

Steve: And what do you do with these subs if they don’t end up buying after the entire sequence is over?

Austin: They’re just tossed into the newsletter sequence and then they’ll receive a campaign from us once a week.

Steve: Okay.

Austin: But that doesn’t happen until they pass through the sequence.

Steve: Right.

Austin: And then if they churn like I’m always – I clean the list as well, it will be like three to six months just for people who don’t open up emails.

Steve: I’m just curious; do you get a lot of people complaining about the shipping cost?

Austin: Help with free plus shipping?

Steve: Yeah.

Austin: We do get some but it’s a pretty like solid free plus shipping offer like typically they look at it from 16.95 plus 4.95, it’s over $20 and they’re 6.95, so the value is there and a lot of people will ask us for free products just on Facebook, I’m sure you get the same thing.

Steve: Yeah, yeah.

Austin: People will be like, oh give us your product.

Steve: I was just curious if you had the same experience we were but yeah, yeah.

Austin: We do get people but it’s like I don’t know it’s like you’re not going to get – we can’t give it away really for free.

Steve: Okay because I might be wanting your testimonials on your second email or whatever, Steve Chou of My Wife Quit Her Job.

Austin: Exactly Steve Chou thought it was sketchy, now he uses it ten times a day.

Steve: Okay so we got that bio die campaign, what other areas of the life cycle do you kind of track?

Austin: So from there the next step in what I look for, for Boom Boom and also for any other companies and I have worked with a ton of large ecommerce companies and we always focused next on what to do after someone makes a purchase. So you’re going to have a post purchase sequence. How I typically target a post purchase sequence is in best actions for people, what would you like your customers to do?

If you would like them to write a review, if you would like them to post a picture on Instagram, if you would like them to refer a friend, whatever type of best actions you want to put in to your post purchase sequence. Also like you want to thank them for making your purchase, whatever you want to do, you put that in your post purchase sequence over a period of maybe like 14 days depending on your product again like it’s all dependent on what – if you’re selling refrigerators it’s going to be quite a bit different than selling energizing nasal inhalers that are consumables.

Then I look at and try to figure out when people typically make a repeat purchase, and depending on your products it is going to be different. So if for your products it’s 45 days or 42 days, then what I like to do is let people go to that point, so the average person is going to make a purchase, let them get to that point and then start – because you want them to be able to make as many full price purchases as possible.

At that point you’re going to focus on incentivizing them to make their next purchase, so that’s where the discount letter could come in where you’re going to be hitting people up with offers and trying to incentivize them to make that second purchase because that’s where your profit is going to come from. I think a lot of times people underestimate [inaudible 00:33:02] and the effect that [inaudible 00:33:04] have on their business.

One of it is I was talking about email marketing is because it’s very toll limited. If you’re going to be reacquiring a customer off of Facebook, maybe they purchased from you already and you pay $15 or something to acquire them for the first time.

If you’re going and you’re reacquiring them on Facebook for another $15, your profit margin is very slim on that customer. If you’re able to get them and reacquire them through email, your profit margin is very, very high on that person because you’re just paying a fixed cost, you’re paying Klaviyo or whatever or MailChimp, you’re paying a fixed cost and it’s much better for you. That’s the focus is to try to reacquire them with incentives when they pass that level of repurchase.

Steve: During this win back campaign are you running concurrent ads on like Facebook and Google display to get them back as well?

Austin: Yes, so one of the nice things about Klaviyo and what they’ve done recently in the last like six months is they started up so you create the customer audiences based on segments that you create within Klaviyo. So Klaviyo if you have customers who come in, it’ll track all their behavior on your website, so if somebody makes a purchase, you can then create a segment of people who have made one purchase and have not purchased again let’s say if the sequence is going in 45 days.

So at that point when people make a purchase and don’t repurchase in 45 days they’ll be added to a little segment of people and you could sync that to Facebook. So you could have that created customer audience and then when people are added into that customer audience they will then be targeted with whatever ad that you’re running if you want to retarget them using that audience. So you can have emails going out, at the same time stack that with retargeting ads on Facebook using the Klaviyo and Facebook integration.

Steve: Cool.

Austin: That also works if you’re going to be passing people through like at 45 days you may have a customer audience at a certain amount and then 60 days it may switch to a different offer, and you can set it so that the audience automatically adjusts and they’ll be now triggered on a different email.

Steve: Klaviyo is going to be sponsor of this podcast I think by the time this episode comes out.

Austin: Oh nice.

Steve: Yeah this is really powerful and all these audiences are dynamic meaning Klaviyo syncs all the different audiences in real time, so they’re always up-to-date which is pretty cool.

Austin: It’s really cool; I mean it’s a game changer, so they came out.

Steve: Okay so we got the win backs, anything else?

Austin: The other campaign that I focus on is a VIP campaign. This one when you’re looking at the people who really drive your business, most businesses are going to be at some variable of like the 80/20 rule where 20% of the customers are going to drive 80% of the sales. I’ve looked at maybe 60 different ecommerce companies; I would say ecommerce in general it’s more like 20% driving between 65 and like 70, 75% is typically what I see.

That means there is a very small limited group of customers who are driving a vast majority of sales and are ultra responsive to your marketing. So what I do is I focus down on about the top 10, 5 to 10% of the customers and I set up a campaign I call it the ‘ask and receive campaign.’ So I’ll set it up in Klaviyo where I look at my customers and say, when people hit $200 in revenue and have purchased three times they are automatically added to my top 5% because that’s where they qualified.

So I set up a segment in there and the moment people hit that it’ll start triggering a campaign that follows up with them and usually about 15 to 20 days later it says, talks about why they’re valuable, how I appreciate them being with us and I’ll give them some sort of a discount on the next purchase. That goes like crazy; I actually got one campaign that’s running with a 97% open rate on this email.

Steve: It’s ridiculous, okay.

Austin: Because it’s targeted to ultra highly responsive people who have all the VIPs. So that drives them, they take this coupon; they make another purchase that’s very successful.

Steve: Let me ask you this question, when those people have purchased like could you have gone away with knocking them a coupon and they probably would have purchased anyways?

Austin: It’s possible, we can give them like not give away a coupon, give that a try, you could just follow up with an email with these people and thank them, they may purchase again. Typically what I do is I’ll send them like a thank you, also like one of the things with this company that I was talking about its 97% open rates, we don’t really discount at all. So it’s like it’s the only thing that we give them and it’s more framed as like a thank you for being a great customer for all these years and so that’s the framing of it.

We also follow up with a survey that comes out — that goes to them basically 10, 15 days later that asks them for their feedback. It’s like a 25 question survey, it takes about five to ten minutes to fill out for these people, but our goal is to get the information from these top customers. We want to know when they found us, what they’re looking for; it’s like a unique insight into our well of customers.

Steve: Interesting okay.

Austin: About 25% of people filled that out for us and it also drive some sales as well.

Steve: So do you then change the copy on your landing page according to the survey answers?

Austin: So we actually – it determines a lot, it determines like what products we bring out, a lot of the questions are related to products. So we found out that this particular company that I was working with — we try to figure out what products to bring out next and like 80% of our VIP customers said the thing that they were most excited about was more t-shirt designs which kind wasn’t on the radar.

So that immediately switched to be in kind of top of the list which is everyone wants more t-shirt designs, and these are the people that are spending a vast majority of the – driving the vast majority of our sales, let’s give them more t-shirt designs.

Steve: Okay this is what the previous company you consulted with, right?

Austin: Yes this is not with Boom Boom.

Steve: Okay interesting, and so you do that primarily for information gathering not necessarily to extract maximum profit it sounds like?

Austin: Yeah this one is mostly for information gathering, it’s like trying to have a conversation with your best customers, they’ll give you email and information, see if you want to follow up and talk to them. The same thing happen like you’ll notice with Bonobos, Bonobos if you go to any guide shop, any guide shop they’re filled with suits.

If go to Bonobos.com, one of the things they’re showing everywhere is suits. The reason is because they did some customer research and found out that their well of customers, the people who were spending the vast majority of their – driving the vast majority of their sales were buying suits.

So even though it’s a small percentage of their actual purchases, it’s the vast majority of their revenue. So they realized that from having conversations with their customers, learning what they’re purchasing and they redesigned their landing pages, redesigned their guide shops to focus on the high ticket items the suits that were driving the vast majority of their profit.

Steve: So let me ask you this, when you’re creating look alike audiences for your customers, do you do the look alikes for the wells [ph] or do you do look alikes for your general customers, like how do you generate your look alikes?

Austin: It’s a good question; I mean it’s tough because we have — typically the wells serve a small percentage in each…

Steve: Of course.

Austin: A big chunk for look alikes. In an ideal world yeah you take your look alikes from your best customer, you take your best customers, and you make look alikes based off of them. So let’s put it this way like if you could go – you figure out what your, the minimum number of the higher percentage customers you have that you could turn into a look alike campaign, export that and make that a look alike campaign. So don’t use the entire audience, use the better part of the audience if that makes sense.

Steve: Yeah so for our store we’re using like repeat customers since most people just buy once for the wedding and then don’t come back unless they get divorced which hopefully doesn’t happen. But there are a subset of people who are actually higher in age that come back for more, so that’s kind of why I asked the question just to see how you guys are doing it.

Austin: Yeah it’s definitely focusing on those the better customers.

Steve: Okay and then are you doing all of this stuff for Boom Boom right now as well?

Austin: So I’m doing this for Boom Boom right now, there is one of like looking at coming into a kind of a fresh business where the opportunity is. It was focusing on top of the funnel with Facebook and then also on the back end with retention campaigns, these ask and receive campaigns, post purchase, the bio dice, so building all those on Klaviyo has been kind of my first step.

I’ve been doing like this consulting for the last couple of years, I had even a marketing agency working with some of the largest ecommerce brands out there. So I’ve been taking that and bringing it to Boom Boom and then I’m also working with – Drew Sanocki and I are also working on kind of a two day intensive where we build all the stuff out for different brands.

Steve: Let’s give Drew a quick plug here nerdmarketing.com if you guys want to check it out. So Austin that’s great, I mean we’ve been chatting for quite a while now and you gave a lot of great nuggets, and thank you so much for giving an insight to actually how you approach like a brand new company and kind of dissect the different strategies and what to tackle first.

Austin: Yeah it’s been no problem in that it’s definitely a learning experience for everyone. I feel like when you come in you’re trying to find opportunities, you’re going to start with the foundation the basic analytics and then get those to set and kind of testing different things and see if you can find one that scales.

Steve: Maybe we’ll have to do a little bit of follow-up to see how your campaigns are doing maybe like six months later and see where things are as well.

Austin: Yeah that would be great, we’d love to.

Steve: Cool, well in the meantime Austin tell the listeners where they can find you online if they have any questions.

Austin: Yeah so the best place to find me would be to go to brandgrowthexperts.com, that’s where Drew Sanocki and I my business partner have our website, we talk a little bit about how to send smart and more profitable emails, and we’re actually hosting an event in March after Traffic and Conversion Summit March 13th to 14th where we’re going to be helping about 15 different businesses, brand owners build out these campaigns. So if you’re interested go to brandgrowthexperts.com and you can learn some more about that and what that looks like.

Steve: Cool, well hey Austin thanks a lot for coming on the show man, really appreciated.

Austin: Hey Steve, thanks a lot, I really appreciate your checking with me every time and yeah I’ll talk to you soon then.

Steve: All right, take care man.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode. What I love about Austin is that he knows what he’s doing and he has this track record of working with companies and blowing up their sales. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode165.

And once again I want to thank Seller Labs. Their tool Ignite is what I use to manage my Amazon PPC campaigns. Instead of the old tedious way of generating reports and analyzing your ad campaigns in excel, Ignite aggregates all that info for you in one place and allows you to quickly visualize your data to make decisions fast.

Not only does it save time, but it also makes managing your Amazon campaigns so much easier too. So head on over to sellerlabs.com/steve and sign up for a free 30 day trial, once again that’s sellerlabs.com/steve.

I also want to thank Klaviyo 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 and a win back campaign, and basically all of these sequences that will make you money on auto pilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/ K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.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 via email, thanks for listening.

Outro: 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.mywifequitherjob.com.