An eCommerce Podcast Hosted by Brett Curry

In some ways, we know everything and nothing about our customers at the same time. 

We have mountains of data at our fingertips for every customer interaction. 

But we can’t see our customers. 

We don’t really know what they love, why they buy, or what they’re into—even insights into why they bought from us or how they first learned about us are muddy. 

Even when we think we know, our view is incomplete. 

That’s where KnoCommerce comes in. 

Sure, you have a few different attribution tools. They can be helpful but also confusing. 

And they have biases. 

Sure, you know conversion rate optimization best practices, but every brand and every customer is slightly different. 

Getting customer insights through post-purchase or abandon cart surveys can provide clarity into what your attribution or CRO data is telling you…or, more importantly, what it’s NOT telling you. 

The good news is you don’t have to use Kno to get great customer insights. Any survey tool can work. 

In this episode with Kno Founder and CEO Jeremiah Prummer, we discuss the following:

• 40% of your shoppers buy in less than 1 week of learning about your brand. 60% take longer than 1 week. (This probably contradicts what GA and your attribution tools tell you).
• The biases in surveys and how to work around them?
• The biases in the attribution model.
• How abandoned cart surveys can be a game changer in addition to email flows.
• What questions to ask your customers for the most actionable insights
• And More!

Transcript:

Jeremiah:

And so the number one use case on our platform is attribution. It's 80 to 90% of the usage of our platform, to be honest. Well, 80 to 90% of the brands on our platform are using that use case. A lot of them also have other use cases they're addressing too. But I would say that almost all the brands that use our product are doing are addressing attribution in some form or not.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and I am super excited about today's guest and today's topic. This is one of those guests that I met on the LinkedIn. I started following this guy's content. A lot of my friends were commenting on his posts and I'm like, this is a super smart dude. So we connected and then we were talking. I'm like, how do we not know each other already? And so delighted to Welcome to the show, Jeremiah Prummer. Jeremiah, how's it going man? And welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time.

Jeremiah:

Yeah, thanks man. It's really good to be here. Hopefully you didn't oversell it too much, but yeah, it's good to chat. I know we've been chatting for a while on LinkedIn. I don't know, probably like six months. So anyway, it's good to finally get to actually meet, and there's something always different. There's three layers. You've got the text chat layer and then you've got the video chat layer, and then you've got the in real life layer and each one feels pretty different.

Brett:

It does. And you get maybe even before that is the comment layer I'm commenting and sending you different emojis about your posts and things like that. Yeah, exactly. And so where we got to the video chat level in person's going to be next, and so we'll just have to wait for that. But for those that don't know, Jeremiah is the CEO and founder of no KNO commerce and used by a lot of the fastest growing D2C brands. Everybody that uses it loves it, knows it, no pun intended, talked about a lot. And so we're going to dig into some really interesting topics around customer insights and we'll talk a little bit about attribution and talk about just what are the things you need to know to be able to improve your marketing, your product, your customer relationships, and should be a ton of fun. I'm super excited. And so we'll dive right in. For those that don't familiar with the story, tell us kind of the quick background of no, why did you start it? What was the original mission? Yeah,

Jeremiah:

Absolutely. So I'm going to go back a little bit earlier to just kind of give a little bit of context and then start with the actual founding of the business. So I've been in the e-commerce space in some capacity since 2012. I started building WooCommerce extensions, so that was kind of woo

Brett:

Nice. Yeah,

Jeremiah:

Back in the day it was WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento were all kind competing. It's kind of a different story now, but at the time WooCommerce was really hot and it was open source software. So really cool experience. Honestly, it's very different than what I'm doing now I'd say. But I loved that and it was just, there's something about getting to build something that you just are browsing a random website and you see the technology you created being used. It's pretty cool. So I kind of got my first taste of that in that time and then did a few different things. I had my own brand for a little bit, did agency work, and then in 2020 pandemic hits. And one of my good friends, Pearson kras is his name runs an agency called Lunar Solar Group. And Pearson and I had been talking for years about building a tech companies together and I, he'd been a merchant using my WooCommerce extensions back in the day and I'd helped him with website builds at his agency.

So we'd worked together in some capacity for a long time. And so it just made sense. So we actually launched no commerce from within his agency. They had some internal tools. We basically just revamped into a really lightweight surveys product that was kind of our pilot application. And then we started building our platform on the side. So we launched that just so I could get some experience in the Shopify ecosystem and learned a lot over that first year while we were building the main platform. And then we launched that main platform in September, 2021. We split the company out into a separate entity and that was kind of the genesis of everything. So it's really been just over two years since we actually launched the full platform. That

Brett:

Is wild.

Jeremiah:

So yeah, it's been kind of fast, I dunno. So days I'm like, I just want this to slow down a little bit, just get some rest. But it's also fun. So there's that trade off, right?

Brett:

Totally. And no rest for the weary, especially not in this environment, but really, man, I would so much rather do something that I love than to be bored. And so absolutely, as long as you can find little bits of rest in the chaos and speed, then you can probably keep going, which you guys have done. That's wild. I actually did not know that it was just in 2021 really that you started to gain traction. So that's even faster than I expected and pretty amazing. So what was the original mission and the idea? So start with a lightweight survey tool then. How has it progressed since then?

Jeremiah:

The problem ultimately is that it's really hard for brands to understand who their customers are, what motivates 'em. I like to look at it from a standpoint of in-person retail versus online and how different they are. So I grew up in a small business. My parents owned a health food store and I worked in that from the time I was, well every summer from the time I was 10 years old on. But even before that as a kid I was around a lot. And so you see the same people walking in the door and at the time it was nothing was digital, so it was literally just punching the numbers. So we actually didn't know what people were buying necessarily, but

Brett:

You knew a lot about them. You knew what they were interested in and why they were there and you could see them and interact with them. And that's such a valuable data set that we

Jeremiah:

Don't have. You knew about their dietary preferences, you knew about the type of vehicle they drove sometimes, what kind of clothing they wore, what their style was, all these kinds of things that you just cannot see in a digital context. And I don't know that you can honestly ever replicate that, right? It's just different. It's a different context, but is there a way to bring some of that context into the digital world? And that's really been the mission. And I would say, honestly, I actually posted something about this earlier today, but we started with surveys as the foundation of that because the reality is you have to ask people. That's the only way you can actually get some of that data. But the real vision goes much beyond surveys and I'm excited to dive into that more. I think honestly it's just been getting to the point of we got to build a foundation. We have about 3000 brands we work with now, so kind of got to get the foundation in place, you got to know what you're doing and then you can build on top of that. And that's really been the entire approach.

Brett:

That's so awesome. And you really talked about, I read a post recently that you made on LinkedIn, that first ever customer insight platform. We have data, we have attribution tools, we have different analytics, but customer insight platform, I think you've already talked about it, but anything else you would add to that or any other ways you would explain that to kind of shed light on what you guys are trying to accomplish?

Jeremiah:

So there's a lot of really great products out there that are focused around understanding things like lifetime value of your customer. What types of products cross-sell well together? If somebody buys product, if they buy a pair of shorts on order, number one, they're likely to buy a pair of socks on order number three, that kind of stuff, which is all really great information and there's some amazing tools that do that. And so we're not really trying to replicate that. That's not our goal. Our goal is to build a layer of data that enhances that. And so we are, it's honestly a really hard problem. The reality is that if you have every order exactly what somebody bought, the timing of the purchase when their last purchase was, you can see all of that data. There's no question about the accuracy of that data. There's no question about the completeness of that data.

It just exists. Collecting survey data about those same people is a lot harder because you're never going to get a hundred percent response rate. You're never going to know exactly what to ask that person until you have a little bit more context about them. There's so much more nuance there that I think it becomes a really challenging problem. And so we do a decent job right now of helping with that, but I think there's so much more that we need to do in the future to actually fully, we'll probably never fully solve that problem, but actually get to the point where it's significantly more meaningful than what it's

Brett:

Today. Yeah, it's so interesting when you look at a tool like this that really uncovers some customer insights or even attribution tools or analytics, it can seem simple on the outset, like, oh, we're just asking questions. But then as you dig a little bit deeper, it's pretty complex and it's nuanced, and the way you ask a question is important. How do you collect the data and how you analyze it and what did this actually mean? And so yeah, lots to unpack there. I do want to dive in and just understand what are some of your favorite questions to ask, because I think this is one of those things that we talked to a lot of merchants as an agency and everybody's got some sort of attribution tool and they're measuring in platform and things like that, but still, we know a lot of companies that are not serving their customers or not running anything like no in their tech stack. So what are some of your favorite questions to ask and why?

Jeremiah:

Well, so just one step higher level than that. I think the use cases can differ quite a bit, right? And that's one of the beautiful things about surveys is you can kind of do whatever you want to with it. And so the number one use case on our platform is attribution. It's 80 to 90% of the usage of our platform, to be honest. Well, 80%, 80 to 90% of the brands on our platform are using that use case. A lot of them also have other use cases they're addressing too. But I would say that almost all the brands that use our product are addressing attribution in some form or another,

Brett:

Meaning they're asking an attribution related question in addition to maybe other questions, 80, 90% are asking attribution questions.

Jeremiah:

Exactly, and there's some that aren't, but most of 'em are. And so in that context, there's some really great questions and I'll dive into those a little bit more, the set of questions that I feel the best about because we see so much of that, right? Beyond that though, conversion rate optimization is a really cool use case. So asking questions like what motivate not what motivated you? Sorry, what about this product made you want to buy it today? That's a really interesting question. And so brands will ask that kind of a question and that can give you a ton of insight into things like ad copy and what kinds of angles somebody may be interested in looking at. The negative side can be really interesting too. So asking somebody a question, how was your shopping experience today? If they gave you excellent or great, maybe ask them to leave a review if they're a repeat customer or push them to some other thing that they may be interested.

Hey, join our Facebook community, whatever it is, give them some sort of additional way to engage with you positively. And then if it's a negative response, then asking them what about their experience today was not a good experience and just let them give you that open-ended feedback. Those kinds of things are really, really valuable, especially for brands that are having problems with their conversion rate brands that are just getting started and don't quite know if you haven't found product market fit yet and you're not able to just scale ads, there's levels to this game for sure. I mean, some of the brands we work with are spending a hundred million a year on paid ads and they'd consider that a success and others are spending a hundred thousand a year on paid ads, and that's a success for them. So no, I can't give you a specific of what that looks like in terms of product market fit, but once you feel like you're at that point where you can just kind of scale your ads, I think that's when you start looking at attribution.

And prior to that, you're looking at those kinds, purchase motivations, those kinds of questions. So that's all really interesting. Demographic type data can be really interesting too, especially if you're trying to understand personas, who's buying what products, what kind of messaging is resonating with different demographics, that all can be really valuable. So a good example of that, just broadly speaking, we see that men between the ages of 25 and 44 spend a lot of time on YouTube and high rating and reviews of products has a major impact in their purchasing behavior. So if you're showing ads on YouTube, that's probably a good thing to have in the back of your pocket. Okay, if men in this demographic are typically the best audience and they're looking for this type of product, they're spending a ton of time on YouTube, maybe that's where I should start and then iterate from there.

So that kind of stuff can be really, really valuable. And then on the attribution front, so I'll dive into a set of questions that we really like to see brands ask. So question number one, how did you first hear about us? And we actually have a survey template that we recommend here, which gets that question alone, sees about 1.3 million responses per month on our platform, people using that specific question. So question number one, how did you first hear about us? Then usually some follow-up questions. For example, if somebody said that they found you on Google, ask them what they searched for, that can be a really valuable way to get some keywords that you can then go target maybe some longer tail stuff you weren't thinking about. What you find that's super interesting in that context is people will literally type in what they typed into Google.

You can tell just based on the response, you look at that and you would never type that unless you were doing a Google search. So it's kind of cool to see that data. So we'll usually suggest some follow-up questions to that. How did you first hear about us? And then ask, what brought you to our site today? And what we're looking for is the difference between a discovery channel and a purchase driving channel in those two. So discovery channels are the places where somebody is going to find your brand for the first time, Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, word of mouth, retail store. Those are the kinds of things that are driving that top level discovery. But then the purchase driving channels are more focused on, I saw an ad, I searched on Google, I received an email, I received a text message, those kinds of things because your email is not actually a discovery channel unless you're doing email swap stuff, which then add that to your top level question.

But otherwise, that's actually a purchase driving channel and it's a nurture channel. It should not be part of your, how did you hear about us question. And so I think where a lot of brands go wrong in the attribution side is they ask, how did you hear about us? And they don't get specific into those different touch points and it muddies the data a little bit. And so it becomes harder to understand. You're asking the customer to interpret the question when you ask that specific question of how did you hear about us? And the reality is a lot of customers have multiple touch points. So if you split them out, then you're actually going to get a clear better view. And then the last one that we like to layer in there is how long did you know about us before placing your first purchase? And that gives you some really incredible stuff. I think you were saying something about this post that I put out there where we were looking at time to basically the contribution to Black Friday, cyber Monday revenue based on how long a customer knew about a brand before making their first purchase. And this is really fascinating information.

Brett:

Let's dig into a few of those things really quickly and then let's go right to the Black Friday seller money. I love that data. What's so interesting is I remember when I first saw this study as a user and as a shopper, I'm also a marketer, so I get a little different lens here as I look at this stuff, but I'm confident it was a no commerce survey because I remember I looked because I was very interested. I was buying, I think it was a shirt. What I have on here is a shirt brand that I've been following or seeing on social media forever, but just hadn't purchased. And I went through the survey and I thought, when did I first hear about it? Because such an important question. It's all the quality of the answer you get is directly tied to the quality of the question you ask.

And so yeah, when did I first hear about it? So I went back and I'm pretty sure it was Instagram in this case. And then how long ago? How has it been since you heard about it for this one? And we're talking about a T-shirt here. I didn't need to deliberate over this a long time, but as I thought about it, I was confident it was months, it was like three or six months, maybe a year. I was like, I don't know, just didn't need a shirt, wasn't really motivated, but I know that I've been seeing stuff forever. And as I posted that, I was like, man, I'm a marketer. I talk about YouTube ads, Google ads all the time, but this's just a different lens. And it flipped it for me and I was like, dang, look at my own behavior. I had to learn about this brand months ago T-shirt brand before I actually purchased. And so yeah, super interesting

Jeremiah:

Insights. I think, and I don't mean this to be negative at all, but I think of in the marketing world, the platforms have kind of trained marketers to think of things on a seven day conversion

Brett:

Window, right? Yes.

Jeremiah:

Some of that's

Brett:

Being generous. Sometimes people are like, well, I really want a one or three day, but we'll loosen things. We're looking at seven day now.

Jeremiah:

Exactly. And I see we were just talking about Taylor earlier Taylor Holiday, so give shout,

Brett:

Shout out to Taylor Holiday. What's up buddy?

Jeremiah:

So Taylor, I love Taylor and one of the things he's talking about, and actually before I say this, I want to say I really, really appreciate the way he's always talking about profitability first, right? Yes.

Brett:

Contribution margin profitability, dude. It's like it's what people need to hear. Yes,

Jeremiah:

For sure. So coming from that lens, a hundred percent respect to what he talks about in terms of optimizing on one day click. And so I get that angle and that side of things, but at the same time, what we know from the data that we see is that the people who you are getting to convert in a day are either already warmed up to your brands or they're in market for the product that you're selling. Those are the only people who are buying the same day and there's nothing wrong with that for sure. But the risk that if you are in a small category and you are at scale, the risk that you run of optimizing for that is that you're not actually feeding the funnel and looking at the longer tail. And you probably always are to some extent. The reality is that if it shows, if Facebook shows an ad to a thousand people and one of them buys, you're warming those thousand people to some extent.

But this is where we see, I think Connor from Hex Cloud was on a podcast actually with Taylor and I listened to this one, and Hex Cloud's a customer of ours, they're awesome. And they asked these questions and so they look at, I don't want to misquote Connor, but I believe what he was saying is that for TV specifically, they were looking at time to first purchase for people who found them on TV, and they saw that that's months. And so in that context, Connor was saying they know Black Friday, cyber Monday is November, so they started spending heavier on TV in August, September, October gearing up for those purchases that they know are going to come through in November because they have the data to show that it takes people months to purchase. The other thing that we know about asking survey questions is that it's not a hundred percent accurate, and you compare that against Qlik data.

Qlik data is also not a hundred percent accurate. There's problems in every type of data, but it's about understanding the bias of the data. And so the bias of the data in surveys is memory, and that's the thing that impacts most of it. And we've done some studies around accuracy and just looking at the way that people respond. The reality is the vast majority of people try to answer these surveys accurately. And there's ways to help with that too. Don't force 'em to take it, those kinds of things. So we are not so worried about the accuracy. What we're worried about is the memory. And so what we're doing when you ask somebody how did you first hear about us is we're asking them to tell you what they remember as the first touchpoint may not actually be the first touchpoint, but it's the one they remember and that has tremendous, it's the one they remember.

Yes. And so for you, you said Instagram, maybe it was Facebook, maybe it was an article on some website somewhere, but you remember Instagram, and so Instagram had some sort of impact on that purchase. And then what we also know is that people think time is shorter than it actually is. And so there's this idea of I think about something I'll be like, oh yeah, that was last week and it actually was three weeks ago because life is busy and things go fast. And so what we also know to be true is that if somebody tells you, if they say, I discovered your brand and I bought today, that's probably true. They probably remember that they know it was today, not yesterday. If they said it was less than a week, they're probably pretty accurate on that. They say it was less than a month.

Well, it could have actually been two months ago, but they think it was less than a month. If they say it was one to three months, it may have been six months ago, but they thought it was three. And so that time what we actually report to our customers and that the responses that their customers are giving them, we know that the reality is even longer than that. And so that's something that I always try to communicate to brands too is that you're looking at this and you're less than a week bucket. People that say they found your brand and bought in less than a week is probably pretty accurate, but the others are actually going to be a little bit longer. And so it's just about, yeah, surveys are not perfect, but if you understand the bias and the data, then it actually helps you really understand and lean into it more than you would be able to by just saying it's worthless.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. And I think we get hung up, and I made a post on LinkedIn about this not long ago where really the obsession about getting accurate attribution is a bit misleading and it is kind of a false aim that should not be your goal. You want data and attribution insights that are actionable that will help you make decisions because it's all going to be flawed and it's all going to be biased, and that's okay, that's just the nature of it. But if you can learn things that give insight and then you make decisions on those insights that make you more money, that's what you want. I love the way you frame that. Yeah, we do often forget what we do or win or whatever, but understanding that it still sheds tremendous insight because yeah, maybe in this case I did see an Instagram ad in an article and maybe I saw a friend wearing the shirt, but I forgot what I remember is Instagram.

And so we should give more credit to Instagram in that case because that's what I remember. So that's accurate. And then knowing the biases towards the way we view timelines also helps. But yeah, I think that the big eyeopener here is I remember seeing data because we report through a lot of Google analytics and Google ad reports and Amazon and things, seeing this report for fairly expensive, relatively speaking, it was like an aftermarket auto part, but it was kind of expensive for the average consumer. And I remember seeing the report that most of the purchases were in seven days and I'm like, I don't buy it. I just don't buy it. I think this is something you would have to see and see again and talk to somebody maybe and research before you bought it. And I really think it was kind of the bias towards click data and recency and cookies dropping off and other things that led to that insight. I would love to have seen that company run surveys because I bet it would've confirmed what you already see that the timeline is much longer.

Jeremiah:

Well, and I think that's one of the things that I don't know that people know about or can start with Google Analytics is that it's session based data. So Google is telling you based on the session data that they have that this took a day or I mean usually if you look at Google Analytics, it's telling you that most your purchases are happening in 48 hours, which is true for some brands, but it's actually very rare. In aggregate, we see about 40% of people saying that they discovered and bought from a brand in less than a week, and 60% say that that journey took longer than a week. And so again, going back to what I was saying earlier about that timeline, that time, the actuality of that timeline gets longer and longer the further away that person is from the actual discovery event. And so I've seen it where a brand has 70% of people buying a day.

That does happen for sure, and that's where it is actually valuable to ask those questions for yourself. You don't know unless you ask, but a lot of times what they're doing in that is it's usually a commodity sort of product. It's usually trendy and it's usually something that has a viral sort of appeal. That's what allows it to be bought in that sort of timeline. And most companies, that is not the reality for your product or your market or you're not following a trend. And so outside of those types of companies, it's pretty rare that most of your people are actually buying less than a day.

Brett:

And I think the point about it being trendy and that can help feed into an impulse purchase because back to what you said before where really the only people that are buying very quickly are those that know your brand and know you, or they're actively shopping, so they've got education. This has been in their mind or at least in the back of their mind for a while that they want a product like yours. Otherwise it doesn't. It just takes more time. It just takes more time than a week.

Jeremiah:

Absolutely, and this is one of the things about Google that I think is really interesting, and I think we're going to see a lot of this with AI soon too. I just was talking to somebody about this yesterday, but with Google, you are in active problem solving mode. And so when you are searching for something on Google, it's because you're trying to solve a problem. If you're trying to solve a problem, you're likely to buy a product or buy some sort of solution to that problem. And so really at that point, you're just looking for the right fit to solve your problem. I think that's really, really compelling about each channel has its advantages and disadvantages. Something like TikTok, even YouTube actually, if you want to split Google search and YouTube is completely the opposite. If I'm on YouTube, sure, show me that ad, but I'm not going to click on your ad and go buy something.

Right now I'm in the middle of watching my sports commentary video or this gaming thing or whatever it is, listening to my favorite podcast. I'm not going to stop what I'm doing. I may not even be looking at it. Sometimes that behavior's pretty common on Google too. And so in that context, it's very different than somebody searching and clicking and buying and we see the data that we see backs that up. If you look at, I haven't published this yet, but I actually will soon. Cool information. We looked at TikTok specifically, so same set of orders that have a survey response of how did you first hear about us? The percentage that are attributed to TikTok by a survey response is five times higher than the first click data, first survey data response data and YouTube is the same as our behavior. And then as you go, those are somebody called me out on this on social, and this is a fair call out that channels are not necessarily high versus low of funnel, and that's true, but there are channels that lend themselves more towards top of funnel versus bottom of funnel.

And so in the context of TikTok, YouTube, connected TV, even those are usually more of a top of funnel orientation. You're usually oftentimes showing your ad to somebody who isn't familiar with your brand. And actually it's even less about that. It's about the intent of the person at the time that they're being shown the ad that actually is really what matters the most. What is the behavior of that person at that moment? And so at that moment they're in entertainment mode and then you look at that versus a channel like a Twitter or Instagram or Meta, I actually think part of this is just META'S algorithms. They've figured out how to get the ad in front of the right person at the right time better than anybody else, but those are, when you look at those, the click and the response are more closely aligned. And then you look at something like Google and it's actually the complete opposite. Google gets a lot more clicks than the responses indicate, and so they all have their advantages and disadvantages. It's just really about understanding the behavior of each and the people that are on each and looking at survey responses and click data in light of that. And that's kind of what we try to educate people on,

Brett:

And this is really good insight that there's no top of funnel medium per se and bottom of funnel medium, right? Users just use platforms. I don't choose to get on TikTok when I'm at the top of the funnel. That's not a thought. I'm just going to consume content, but the mode that someone's in the messaging and kind of the way we view it as marketers does shift. And I love that data from TikTok because yeah, 100% YouTube is in the same boat and we spend millions a month on YouTube for our clients and it's one of our favorite channels, but people don't click that much. We even saw this report that showed that the click-through rates on Facebook ads are more than double what they are on YouTube because I'm not on YouTube to click your ad, I'm on YouTube to watch a specific thing where on Facebook, maybe I'm just kind of hanging out and so I'm more likely to click and explore and wander and things like that.

I know the same is true for TikTok. And so yeah, we can't measure, and I was just on a call the other day with this really nice brand and they're big and they were talking about last click attribution, and I'm like, guys, so let's unpack this a little bit. How can we hold every channel to the same standard? How do we do that? Yeah, one click works great. Then I'm all searching performance max and shopping, which I know that world really well. So if I'm all last clicked and let's stop Facebook and let's stop YouTube, but then you don't grow. You

Jeremiah:

Can make that look really good too. You

Brett:

Can make, I can shine man, and I'm a Google guy, so I can make that look really good. Yeah. But eventually you dry up, so really good stuff. So let's then kind of click into that Black Friday Cyber Monday data. And I know when folks are watching this, it's past Black Friday, so Monday, but it's either in IT or analyzing it the holiday or we're prepping for the next one. So this is still good data. So yeah, what did you guys learn in the correlation on how much people spent around the holidays related to how aware they were of a brand, how long that relationship had been going?

Jeremiah:

Yeah, for sure. So what's really interesting there is that we saw, so we looked at the data for, we looked at a bunch of different things, but what I thought was most compelling was looking at what we call the consideration window. So asking the question, how long did you know about us before placing your first purchase? And then looking at that by average order value. And so for the week of Black Friday, cyber Monday, I want to say it's 225,000 people answered this question during that week. And so looking at their data, so it's statistically significant and we didn't necessarily break down industry that's going to have an impact. There's some things there that the data's going to look a little different for every brand, and this is why it does help to ask this for your brand and understand Hex CLA looks different than Ali Pop as an example of one of our other customers we work with, right? It's just different. One of 'em is a thousand dollars cookware set and the other one is a, I don't know, I think it's like 35 or 40 bucks to buy a case of soda off of a website. So it's just different. Ali Pop

Brett:

Is, it's the gut healthy soda, right? Or whatever. It's got some probiotics and stuff in

Jeremiah:

It. Yeah, exactly. So it's just different and consideration windows are different. And so what we saw is that the people who said that they knew about a brand for less than a day had basically about a 25% lower average order value than the average of all people who bought for Black Friday Cyber Monday. And then it climbs up pretty well from there. But basically what you see is that from the lowest A OV is that less than a day, second lowest is less than a week, then you got less than a month, it just trickles down. And basically once you get to call it three plus months, there's really no meaningful difference in a OV. And actually honestly from one month plus there wasn't a whole lot of difference. It's really that less than a month bucket. But what's interesting about that is that your, and this is to be clear, this is first time buyers, which is really cool data too.

So it's people that have bought from your website for the first time and how long they knew about your brand. Those people who had a longer relationship with the brands were more likely to spend a larger amount of money, which I think is really interesting data. There was that there was also just the total percentage breakdown, largest bucket of buyers was people who knew about the brand for one to three months and the second largest, and they're almost equal, was people who knew about the brand for less than a day. But when you look at all of it, the bucket that contributed the highest amount of total revenue was people who knew about a brand for one to three months. And so I think that's just really compelling and it makes, if you think about consumer behavior, again, it makes sense. Let's say I find something really cool in September and I'm thinking about it for myself or as a gift for someone else, I might wait to buy that until November because I know that it's likely going to be on sale. I'm actually doing this right now with a mattress. I need a new mattress. I'm not buying it right now. I've wanted to buy it for the last couple of weeks.

Brett:

Are you going memory foam? Are you going high tech adjustable cooling those things, or what are you thinking here? I'm just interested.

Jeremiah:

I don't know. So I actually haven't figured out exactly which one yet, but I know that we're making our decision over the next week or so and then we're going to look to buy in November and we maybe won't actually buy too. That's the other thing is there will be if we decide the price isn't right, and turns out we actually swapped out our mattress with another one that we had from our guest room and it's a few days ago, and we're both sleeping way better. So we might just stick with that. You're

Brett:

Like, maybe this is good, maybe this is enough,

Jeremiah:

Maybe this is fine. But regardless, we're doing our research now. We are looking into all of this now, but we're definitely not buying before Black Friday. That's when we're going to buy. And so that is normal behavior for this time of year. And so you're actually, you're just prepping people. That's the downside of something like a Black Friday is one of the things we don't really know for sure is how much of the demand are we just delaying and then discounting as an entire industry. That's hard to say, but I do think that that's an angle we didn't look at with this research, but we actually should.

Brett:

We've trained people to wait for Black Friday, cyber Monday. It's not going to change. It's ingrained in our minds, our behavior as consumers who will keep doing it. But what's so interesting is looking at those two major categories of people that spent money on Black Friday cyber Monday for first time customers, it was about equal number of people that had known about it. You said less than a day or less than seven days. What was that first

Jeremiah:

Bucket? Yeah, reported less than a day versus reporting one to three months,

Brett:

One to three months, but the one to three month category produced more revenue, more valuable customers, higher A OV and then would likely lead to, I'm assuming, and I'm guessing you didn't really break this down, but probably better and other things like that.

Jeremiah:

And that's actually a good follow-up research on this too. And I actually was just thinking about this morning, I need to talk to a couple of brands we work with and say, Hey, let's study the LTV of your Black Friday Cyber Monday customers based on how long they knew about your brand. I think that's pretty compelling. But yeah, that's not something we have data on right now. And I think it's really interesting, and this is off the top of my head, so it may not be exactly accurate, but I want to say that one to three month bucket was about 35% more revenue than less than a decade and total significant.

Brett:

I think when you understand that, then you're willing to make the right decisions that feed overall profitability and healthy revenue and good customer acquisition where if we get too obsessed with the one day click, we may be tempted to go down a path we shouldn't go down. Where if we realize that a little bit of cultivation of that one to three months actually leads to higher AOVs and probably more valuable customers, it at least shifts the perspective. It shifts our patients for sure it, but it's likely going to shift our media mix just a little bit and may even shift our discounting approach and several other things, but we got to see this data to be able to have that

Jeremiah:

Insight. Yeah, absolutely. And what I hope with sharing these kinds of things too is that a marketer can go to their, especially with the brands we're working with that are say 50 million a year plus in revenue, you got your marketing team, you got your finance team, and they don't always agree on how you should be spending the money. And so I'm always hopeful a marketer can go to the finance union and say like, Hey, check this out. There is an impact in feeding this. You're still making a bet at the end of the day. Maybe it doesn't pay out the way that you expected it to, but usually it helps in being able to make those kinds of betts when you have that kind of data to be able to show.

Brett:

For sure. You also brought up questions around CRO or conversion rate optimization, and I do think this is something that brands are going to continue to lean more into, especially as they grow and especially as the economy remains uncertain or we get into a recession or other difficulties, then we know we got to get the most out of every opportunity we create, every person we get to visit the site, we got to get more from them. Ideally, what are some of your favorite questions or insights from CRO related

Jeremiah:

Questions? So there's kind of a couple different categories of insight that I see come out of there. There's really three, there's the obvious. So you see things like price, so I'll use Ali Pop as an example. Somebody will buying, I think it's like $35 for a 12 pack that's significantly more expensive than a 12 pack of Pepsi off the shelf at Safeway. So when they see somebody, if a brand like that, I actually don't even know what they asked those questions, but in a context like that, a brand will look and they see people saying price was a reason that they almost didn't buy. That makes sense. So there's the obvious category and most of what you see is going to come through as obvious. And then you've got the technology problem category, which I think is really interesting. I see things like your Affirm and I clicked to pay with Affirm and then I couldn't get back and I decided I didn't want to pay in four installments and I couldn't find a way to get back to only pay one off.

So that in a single response maybe doesn't make you change your behavior. When you start to see patterns and things like that, then you look at it and say, okay, people are having problems with navigation or people are having problems with a specific tool we're using, we should make some changes here. So that's sort of the technology side. And then the last piece is the messaging side of things, and I think that's probably the most, it's the one that takes the most research and understanding, but it's also probably the most impactful one. And looking at what is it about your, are people confused about the value propositions? Are they confused about why your product is compelling versus other products in the market? Those kinds of questions I think are probably where the greatest value comes in, or not questions, but those kinds of responses that you see come through are where the greatest value comes in my opinion.

But again, it just takes a little bit more dissecting understanding. One thing that can be great is just throw that into something like chat GBT and just have it help you analyze it, ask chat GBT questions with that data. And we see some really cool stuff with that. So hopefully that answered the question. But yeah, from a CRO side, that's the three categories I look for. And then obviously you can have pretty open-ended questions to get that data, but you can also start to dive deeper into specifics around that if you feel the need to.

Brett:

And you can have follow-up questions too, right? Ask an open-ended question or ask a relatively vague question, then have some follow-ups then based on that answer.

Jeremiah:

Yeah, exactly. You can do text base is a little bit harder. You basically are searching for a keyword and then asking a question based on the keyword, but that's possible. And then starting it off with a, we actually do this a lot with abandoned cart surveys where we'll ask a question, just ask somebody, Hey, is there a reason you didn't buy today? And you give them a few preset options, and that is a really nice one because then you can guide them down a specific path based on what they answer. So you may, one brand we work with, they have to do hazmat shipping, which I think starts at $40 and that's their number one. It's their number one. They're literally selling a $15 product and it's $40 shipping. And so that's the number one issue for them. And they know that's the issue. They communicate it everywhere, but people still have problems with it.

And so what was really interesting for them is they ran an abandoned cart survey. I think they're still doing this, but basically they have that as one of the options of why somebody didn't buy. And then when they click on it, all they do is educate them about why the shipping is the way, and they don't give 'em a discount or anything. They just educate them and then take them back to the website. And that's one thing that you can do with surveys too that I think is really powerful is just find out why somebody isn't buying, find out what it is that's holding them up and then give them an actual solution to their problem. Don't just assume everybody's not buying because the price was too high because that that's only the issue for a fraction of your customers. Yeah,

Brett:

It's so interesting. Sometimes that solution may be offering a discount or offering something to the customer, but sometimes it's not. Maybe it's not really that 40 bucks is a deal breaker. It's that I was not expecting $40 in shipping and that just feels wrong and it will crazy and shocking and it didn't meet my expectations. But if you educate me and show me why you have to do that, why that's required, because it's hazmat or whatever, then maybe I'm like, okay, that's fine. Yeah, now that you explained it, I'll do it. I really want the thing. And 40 bucks isn't a big deal, but it is when my frame of references free shipping or $5 or $10 or something, not 40.

Jeremiah:

And so for that brand specifically, one of the big use cases is gender reveal parties. And so you can go on Amazon, you can find for 15, 20 bucks, you can find a gender reveal smoke bomb, but it's not actually a smoke bomb. It's a powder thing, like a shoot powder in the air. And so that's a good opportunity to be like, Hey, look, this is a real smoke bomb, this is a hazmat, it has to be shipped in a certain way, and there's just nothing I can do about that with my brand. They do a lot of founder forward messaging, which I think is really powerful in that context too. But yeah, that's one of

Brett:

Those environments too where we were doing a gender or a gender reveal, and I don't know if you probably know this about me, Jeremiah, but I've got eight kids, my wife and I have eight kids, which is shocking. A lot of gender reveals. And that's one of those things where usually you invite people and people are there, and so would I be willing to upgrade and of spending 15 bucks, spend 65 if it was really going to make a difference, yeah, that'd be fine. This is a big deal, but I wouldn't do it unless you really educated me. And so that's so powerful about being able to automate that and one, get the answer to why they didn't buy, and then two, either educate or provide some kind of solution. Super smart

Jeremiah:

If that has to go through customer service, they've already bought the thing off of Amazon by the time you get back,

Brett:

Right? Yeah, really good point. So yeah, I think all of those are really great, and I love the use case of using AI to unpack, okay, here's all our results. Let's make sense of this and categorize this and synthesize it and whatnot. But yeah, some of these you're just not going to know unless you ask. And once you ask and get these insights, it's going to trigger all kinds of solutions and ideas in your brain. And so you got to ask, you just got to do it. We are coming up against time, so I want to be mindful of that, respectful of that. What is next for no commerce? And I know some of that may have to be kind of hush hush or closed lip, but what are you excited about?

Jeremiah:

One of the things I really focus on a lot is the problems in our way of solving the problem we're trying to solve. So what are the ways in which we fall short in solving the problem we're trying to solve? And there are a couple of big props using surveys. Number one is you've got a response rate issue. You're never going to get a hundred percent of the people to answer a question. So you've got that issue. You also have the issue of you're limited on collecting data by when you started asking it. So if you want to know about your customers from three years ago and you want to know something specific, even if it's something like demographics, right? It's really hard to go back in time and ask that question. And so there's those. And then the last piece is really it's most brands just don't have the resources internally to be able to put a lot of time and attention into what to ask, how to break down the data, all of those kinds of things.

And so that is really, we've been working on this kind of behind the scenes for over a year now, this new concept called Automated Insights, which is going to be coming out here shortly. By the time this episode's out, it should be available for beta for some of our customers, public beta. It's been in private beta for basically most of this year. So I'm pretty excited about that. The idea is that basically we manage the questions that are run. It's not AI powered. I think there's some pretty big flaws still in ai. And being able to actually, AI doesn't know what to ask and actually have it be meaningful. That's just my honest opinion on that.

Brett:

Yep, totally

Jeremiah:

Agree. So there's nothing wrong with using AI to try to tune questions and do all those things, but we're just not going to go open season on ai. It's just not going to happen in our business. Not anytime soon anyway. But we know based on the data that we have, we have 1.3 million responses a month to how did you first hear about us? That's just one question on our platform in total, we see over 8 million responses a month. And so with all of that insight that we have, we can build a pretty good structured system around collecting data that we can do at scale for brands, and that's really what's coming next. So yeah, I've been keeping it kind of close to the chest. It's still not fully out today, but it should be in a couple of weeks. So I'm excited about that.

Brett:

Automated insights, check it out. And so what are the best ways for people to connect with you? Obviously they can follow you on LinkedIn and I highly recommend that that's how we met, but then how else can they learn more about, no.

Jeremiah:

Yeah, so LinkedIn, myself slash Jeremy Prime, I forget what they all are, but it's just my first last name together. Same with Twitter now X and then no commerce is the same thing. Just K-N-O-C-O-M-M-E-R-C-E. Yeah, so follow me. We also have a bunch of team members in different roles in our company who like to talk about things and share cool findings on LinkedIn and Twitter. So I feel like they're more LinkedIn usually, and I'm more on the Twitter side, so we've got both going on. But yeah, definitely would love to connect with you there. You can send me an email too, just jeremiah@nocommerce.com if you have any questions. I'll be honest, my email is the last thing I'd check every day, so

Brett:

Stick to the socials, be respectful of the inbox. Stick to the socials you get.

Jeremiah:

Yeah, socials and slack is kind of where most of my communication actually happens, and then I get once a day email check, so

Brett:

Yeah, totally get it. Jeremiah primer. Ladies and gentlemen, Jeremiah, this was super fun, very insightful. We'll definitely have to do it again sometime. Really appreciate it. Yeah,

Jeremiah:

Man, really appreciate you. Thanks.

Brett:

Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear your feedback. What would you like to hear more of on the podcast? And hey, check out no commerce, check out Jeremiah Worth the follow. You got to dig in. I believe this was one of those next phases, next steps of growth for D two C brands is getting these deep customer insights that I think only surveys can unlock. So check it out. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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11 Reasons YouTube isn’t Working for You

YouTube offers TREMENDOUS scale opportunities.

Just ask Dr. Squatch, Purple Mattress, Organifi and Masncapped.

But it’s NOT the easiest platform to scale with. We’re one of the top spenders on YouTube ads. We’ve spend more than almost any agency our size on the platform and we’ve leaned what works and what doesn’t.

In this episode I breakdown the 11 factors that determine YouTube success. 

Here’s a sneak peak:

- What has to be true about your landing pages before you can fully accelerate on YouTube

- When to launch a YouTube ad campaign

- How to approach YouTube ad performance measurement

- What creative elements need to be in place

- What role do email, search, and shopping play in your YouTube success

- How to think about remarketing and YouTube

Plus, much, much more.

Transcript:

Brett:

It is time for another spicy curry hot. Take the part of the show when I get just a little bit spicy. If you tried YouTube ads and they have not worked, then I would dare to say that it might not be YouTube's fault. It might not be that YouTube ads just don't work for my brand. It could be your fault. Or more specifically, it could be that you're missing these 11 success factors. Scale on YouTube is possible. It's even probable, but you have to have these 11 things in place. If video ads on Facebook are working for your brand, then YouTube ads should work as well. I'm going to give you the formula. I'm going to break down those 11 things that need to be in place before YouTube works. It's not the easiest to scale on, but it does provide tremendous opportunities to build a brand. So let's dive in to these 11 success factors.

So as we look at YouTube ads, I think we need to first step back and say, is it really true that hey, YouTube just doesn't work for some brands. YouTube doesn't work for my brand. I think that can be true if you sell a commodity item, if you sell a lower ticket item, if you can't absorb CACs or CPAs and the $50 plus range, then YouTube may not be your number one vehicle, but likely if you're a DTC brand and you're driving new customer acquisition on Facebook through Facebook video, then YouTube should work as well. And what we found is for those that are spending 10,000, 20,000, $50,000 a day on Facebook, you should be able to spend about the same or at least half as much on YouTube as you're spending on Facebook. And let's take a look at some of the brands that have really succeeded on YouTube.

Purple Mattress primarily grew initially from YouTube. Dr. Squash grew on other channels, but YouTube was a huge part of their success. Organify, we worked with that brand for a while, and during some of their rapid growth years, they weren't on Facebook, they were advertising on YouTube, and the list goes on and on. And so YouTube is very powerful. Scale is very possible. In fact, there's maybe more scale opportunities available on YouTube than any other platform. It's the second most visited site on the web. It has more scale than even Facebook or any other social platform, but it's not the easiest. And I'll even say, and I'm a YouTube guy, a Google guy, it's not the best place to start to launch a brand unless maybe you're running YouTube organic, then that's a great place to start. YouTube ads, though they're a great accelerator of growth, so you have traction.

YouTube is a great way to accelerate that growth. So let me break down really quickly these 11 success factors, and then we're going to go into detail on each one. This is going to be fast paced, it's going to be inspirational, and at the end you're going to be hopefully motivated to crush it on YouTube. So here we go. What are the 11 success factors? Number one, product market fit. Number two, a site that converts and landing pages designed for cold traffic. Number three, the right creative. You have to be running ads that are designed or optimized for YouTube. Number four, email follow-ups. Do you have email marketing in place? Number five, solid Google search shopping and or performance max campaigns. Number six, remarketing campaigns. Number seven, a full funnel mindset. Number eight, useful reporting. So are we reporting in a way that's accurate enough and is it useful?

Number nine, proper budget. Number 10, adequate patience. And number 11, a marketplace. Read Amazon, but a marketplace strategy that works. Okay, let's dive in. This is not rocket science, it's not incredibly complex, but there's a lot. And you do need to have these in place before you can get really full leverage out of YouTube. So number one, there has to be product market fit. What I mean here is if you're still testing a product, you still dunno exactly who you're trying to reach. You still don't know exactly the best offers, the best angles, the things, the reasons why someone buys. Then YouTube is probably not your first bet, right? YouTube is an accelerant. YouTube is a place to really hit the gas pedal and take something that's good and make it great in terms of scale. So how do we know we've got good product market fit?

Well, I think one of the surest signs is do we have repeat purchases for a specific product? So are we getting repeat purchases? Are people buying again and again? And are they telling their friends? Do we have good reviews on this product? Are people reviewing it and showing that they love it? And then is branded search growing? And this is one of those surefire ways to tell that, Hey, my brand is growing in popularity that more people search for my brand by name month in and month out than that means I'm getting traction. So we do need to know I do have traction. I do know who my ideal customer profile is. I do know why they buy the product. Okay, now we're ready to go. So that's step one. That is the first success factor. Number two, a site that converts and a landing page or landing page is designed for cold traffic.

So we don't have to be perfect here, and there's always improvement. There's always ways we can get our conversion rate up, but we need to at least be adequate. You need to at least not be below average. The average conversion rate for e-commerce sites for cold traffic is one to 3%. If you're way below that, you're going to struggle. If you're over that, you're likely going to do better on YouTube. And so this comes down to do I have good pride detail pages? Is my cart at least not slower than average? And do I have some optimizations on my cart? And then we want to think about, okay, specific landing pages. And a great way to test this is do you have landing pages that are converting cold traffic from Facebook or Instagram or other channels? If you do, likely those same pages will work on YouTube converting cold traffic.

So what are some of the things we need to have on these pages? Well, these pages need to show why your product is unique. So remember, all the video is really doing is it's getting someone to say, maybe it's getting someone to say, this sounds interesting. I want to check it out. They're not fully convinced to buy just yet. So the page has to show why your product is unique, why it's different, why it's better. What is your unique selling proposition? Page has to show that it has to overcome objections. We're all skeptical. We show up on these pages and we're like, yeah, probably not. I'm going to not believe your claims. I'm not going to believe your promises until you prove them. So how do you overcome objections? Are there concerns about will this fit my car or my body if it's closed or will this break after use or will this actually solve my problem?

There are objections people come to the page with. Overcome those, overcome those visually, overcome those with text, overcome those with video images, graphs, anything that will work to overcome those objections. It needs to demonstrate the product, right? And one of the great examples is Purple Mattress where hey, historically we've always bought mattresses by going into the mattress store and laying on mattresses and trying them and seeing what they liked. But purple was like, Hey, we're selling these direct to consumer. You're not going to get to sleep on it until you come in. They overcame the objection by saying, Hey, test this for 50 days or a hundred days, or whatever the case was to provide confidence and hey, here's a guarantee. But they also showed the product, they showed the raw egg test, the big pane of glass dropping on top of raw eggs on the bed, and the purple mattress held those eggs.

They did not break wherever the mattress broke, right? So show the product in action. Flex Seal, right? It's showing, Hey, it'll seal the pots around your house or your gutters or whatever. And it's such a strong sealer. We can spray it on the underneath of our truck and then drive the truck into water and it will hold water. It'll float because of Flex Seal. Show the product in action. We need to give customers confidence. It will work for them in their situation, for their needs. Is this product for you? Your page needs to underscore that. Take away risk, just like we talked about with the guarantee. Try it in your home for X number of days. Money back today, easy returns, no question asked. Exchanges, things like that. How do we take away risks and then make purchase easy? So is it easy to add to cart?

Is it easy to take that next step? All sounds like table stakes. All sounds easy, but we do need to make it easy. Are people having to hunt? Do they have to scroll to be able to find add to cart? You need to make that easy. And then also, are we capturing shopper's info? If they're not ready to say yes yet, because it's not that common that someone sees a YouTube ad for the first time or Facebook ad or anything, and then they click and they buy, right? Then that happens very, very rarely. So if someone does that, do we have a way to capture their information? Do we have abandoned cart flows set up? And I'll talk a bit more about that in a minute. But do we have opt-ins where if they're on the page, they do not buy yet, are we enticing them to leave their email address so we can start following up with them and getting them to purchase?

That is going to add a couple of percentage points potentially in your conversion rate and potentially change the total math of your campaign. So do we have a site that converts and do we have landing pages built for cold traffic? Next, the right creative. So YouTube creative is different. YouTube ads are not TikTok ads. They're not Instagram ads, they're not any other ad, they're not Google Shopping ads. They are unique. The ad, the video ad stands alone, right? There's not really much of anything around it. There's not the block of copy like there is on a Facebook ad. So the video has to stand alone. It has to interrupt the prospect, it has to demonstrate the product, it has to overcome objections, it has to keep attention, and really it works better if YouTube ads are a little bit longer than ads on other platforms.

So what are some of the elements? And we have resources to really dive into this deeply. I'm just going to cover this in a few seconds. One, it has to hook your ideal prospects. And this is important. We're not just trying to hook anybody. If we're selling to middle-aged women, we don't care if teenagers hit the skip button and don't watch, right? We want to hook our ideal prospects. So what are we doing to capture attention? We could do some kind of pattern interrupt or shock and all. We'd have somebody in a gorilla suit, Dr. Squat style or whatever, or we could just be very straightforward and say, Hey, do you have this problem? Are you not sleeping well at night? Is this issue happening in your life? But we have to hook the ideal prospect. If we don't get attention, nothing else matters. If YouTube ads are not working most of the time it's because the hook is not quite right.

We're either not hooking anybody or we're hooking the wrong person, or we're hooking someone in the wrong frame of mind. You want the hook to be relevant to the problem you're solving, right? And so again, going back to Purple Mattress, it would say, what are the signs that your mattress is truly awful? And that's kind of a bit of a, I didn't expect you to say that and now I'm kind of intrigued. Or if you look at it, William Painter, shout out to the guys at Raindrop. It opens with him saying, your face is your moneymaker, and why are you putting cheap pieces of plastic on your face? And it gets right into the message. A bit of a pattern interrupt. Super interesting, my buddy Ryan, at True Earth, there's a witch that opens in one of the scenes, one of the videos about the laundry detergent strips, and it says, Hey, what do you not mix with water?

Well, witches and computers and whatever, and also laundry detergent. And then it gets into the whole pitch. So we got to hook prospect's attention. We need to demonstrate the product. This is video. We need to see the product in action. We need to see kind of daily use demonstrations and maybe a dramatic magic demonstration, kind of like the Flex Seal, where Flex Seal, you can spray it on a pot and it'll hold together, or you can spray it on your truck and make it waterproof. Although not many people do that. We need to overcome objections. Our page is going to do this, but if those objections aren't solved in the video, then someone is not going to click, right? And so they may think it's too expensive or it'll never work, or this isn't really proven or whatever. So overcome those objections in the video show social proof, show people like your ideal prospect, loving, enjoying your product.

This can be reviews, it can be UGC, but show social proof, remove the risk, some kind of guarantee. And then a clear call to action. Click here to learn more. Click here to check it out. It's super easy. You click here, you choose your size, you choose your color, whatever, and check out sounds simple, sounds obvious, sounds like you maybe don't need to do it, but asking someone to take that specific action will increase the percentage of people that actually do it. So way more that could be said. I encourage you to go to omg commerce.com. We got the top YouTube ads, guides, plus lots of examples of ads. Also, this episode has been made into APDF if you want to check that out. And there's also examples of great ads there. Okay, so that's number three, getting them right, creative. So what do we have here?

Number one, product market fit. Two, a site that converts on landing pages that convert cold traffic. Three, the right creative four email, we kind of talked about this, but we need abandoned cart flows at a minimum. That's going to happen a lot where someone comes, they're not really planning on buying, but they'll add to cart and just see what does shipping look like? What are the details, anything hidden here that I need to know about? So have those abandoned cart flows really dialed in? Go back and listen to some of the episodes I did with Nick Flint, OMG email expert on email and SMS campaigns for abandoned cart flows. And then what about new customer offers? So if someone just opts in on the landing page, hey, let's send them that indoctrination sequence telling them why our practice is great, why they should buy it for the first time, and maybe if they delay, delay, delay, you give them some kind of incentive to buy.

So number four is proper email follow up flows. At OMG commerce, we accelerate growth for some of the most loved brands in e-commerce like boom, native, true earth overtone, and dozens more. If your Google and YouTube ad performance isn't where it should be. If you're struggling with Performance Max or if you're not scaling like you'd like on Amazon that we have two ways to help. One, we have amazing resources that are free for the taking like our top YouTube ads guide with lots of examples, our P max checklist or our Amazon DSP roadmap plus many more or hit us up for a free strategy session. So go on over to omg commerce.com and click on Let's talk to request that free strategy session or click on resources and guides and pick the guide that's right for you. And now back to the show. Number five, solid Google search, shopping and or Performance Max.

Now let's talk about search. So what do people do? Someone watches a Facebook video. They don't buy, but they're intrigued. They watch a YouTube video, which is obviously the topic of this show, and then they don't purchase. What do they do next? Well, the next logical thing is they're going to search. They're going to search for you likely on Google. So, hey, I saw that video. Now want to know more? What's interesting is that we saw once we started to ramp up for Boom by Cindy Joseph on YouTube, and this was years ago with YouTube ads, we noticed people kind of searching for stuff they heard in the video, but they couldn't quite remember the name. So it was like pro age makeup or makeup for older women, or boom, by, they would get it all wrong, but because they couldn't quite remember, but they saw the video, they were intrigued, and now they're searching.

And so we need to have good search ads in place. I like to set up branded search where it's separated by branded search for loyalty, branded search for new customers. We want to be set up and we want to even bid on keywords that, Hey, what keywords might be triggered by this ad? If it's purple mattress, say, what if someone types in raw egg mattress because they can't remember the name of it or raw egg test or something like that. So what are some of the searches that someone could be conducting based on watching this video? The other piece is Google Shopping, or most likely you're going to be running Performance Max or maybe all Performance Max. But again, if I'm searching for a product, I'm likely going to do that on Google. And you need to control what that looks like for your own branded keywords, but also related keywords.

We see this a lot. We've helped other cosmetic brands and some that are high priced where someone will see a video and then that leads to a search. But if you're not careful, if you've got lots of other competitors, low competitors, things like that that are showing up, maybe all you're doing is generating awareness for someone just to buy another product. So you need to have good search shopping and for short performance Max in place to feel confident that, Hey, we're going to get full benefit from YouTube because the direct click from YouTube to purchase, that's a small percentage of the impact you'll get, get much more of an impact from branded search lift and people that convert off of search later. That's number five. Number six, remarketing campaigns goes without saying, but we audit hundreds of accounts every year, and we knows a lot of people are not running remarketing campaigns or they're not running remarketing campaigns in a way that's smart.

And so we want remarketing campaigns on Facebook and on YouTube and on discovery and with display. And essentially anywhere you can run remarketing campaigns. And we do want to focus more on recency. So that one to three day audiences, those are the ones we really want to key in on, but you can certainly go longer. So you're not going to get full impact from YouTube if you don't have remarketing in place. That's number six. Number seven, a full funnel mindset. I liked to use the analogy of team sports. I'm a sports guy. I coach basketball, I love football. I like to think about marketing in terms of team sports. Every member of a team has a role. If we look at the bulls of the nineties, everybody had a role. Michael Jordan was obviously the superstar of the goat. He scored a ton of points. Scotty Pipman did everything.

Lockdown defender scored a lot of points. Dennis Rodman, bit of a crazy dude. He was on the glass getting rebounds and just harassing his best players. So we would never look at that team and say, you know what? Dennis Rodman is not doing the work of Michael Jordan. We need to bench Rodman. I love football. I would never look at a football team and say, man, those are offensive linemen. They never get in the end zone. They never score points. You get points by getting in the end zone linemen never get in the end zone, cut the lineman. Anybody that knows the game knows that linemen are the key to an offensive unit success or defensive unit success. So the key there is just knowing what role should a player play and what role should a campaign play knowing that YouTube YouTube's greatest strength is at the very top of the funnel.

It's creating awareness, it's creating interest, it's getting someone into your funnel to convert. And so we got to have that mindset that, hey, we're building a team of campaigns. I don't need every campaign to generate a three row as I need my campaigns to collectively get a three row As. And so we need to look at that from a full funnel mindset, understand the shopping journey and understand how you need to influence that. I like to think about being an offensive coordinator. So how do I dial up the right plays? How do I get the right players on the field to achieve what I want them to achieve? But here's the cool thing. Your competitors don't know how to use YouTube. If you learn how to use YouTube, it's going to give you an edge. It's going to allow you to scale more quickly. But YouTube is a unique player on your team.

Don't measure it the way you measure search or shopping or even Facebook. Number eight, useful reporting. Now, what's so interesting to me, and this is one of those debates, there's attribution debates. Do I use third party tools? Do I just use Google analytics? Do I look at the metrics in my platforms? What numbers do I use? And I think the quick answer is you need to probably use a little bit of all of those things. And I think you need to obsess over being directionally correct and don't obsess over being 100% correct because you'll never be 100% correct. Even shoppers don't know why they buy what they buy. I just got to speak to some high school students and I talked to them about, Hey, what's something you bought online recently? And they would give examples. I'd be, well, why did you buy that? Well, because the most comfortable pair of shoes or whatever, well, yeah, but what triggered it?

Well, and sometimes we can't even remember, right? We don't even remember what we clicked on or what we did. And so attribution is never going to be 100% accurate, but we need reporting that shows impact. And so really all we should care about as a marketer from a top level perspective is am I driving financial outcomes? Am I building my brand, building sales, building profits, building my EBITDA through my marketing campaigns? Because now what can happen is if you're a multichannel, which I hope you are, someone can see a YouTube campaign and then go buy your product in store. Or someone will see a YouTube campaign and just go buy your product on Amazon. We'll talk more about that later. And so really want to be able to see holistically, how are sales growing? We want to see directly attributable conversions to campaigns, but we also want to begin to isolate and see, okay, when I spend more money on YouTube, when I spend more money on Facebook, is that causing Lyft and other channels way more?

We can unpack there, but do we at least have clear reporting where we can start to see Lyft? And then I would recommend running a brand lift study through Google, but more importantly a search Lyft study as we spend more on YouTube, how is that driving more branded search? Because I think branded search is one of the clearest indicators that your marketing efforts are working. Nobody just wakes up with an epiphany of your brand name in their mind. The only way they search for you by name is if they see an ad and if they're compelled by it. Number nine, proper budget. So the good news is you don't need to spend a fortune. And this has shifted some in recent years used to we'd talk about, Hey, you probably need to spend like 15 grand a month to really give campaigns enough volume to begin to see what's going to work.

Now, I would still say that the YouTube takes a lot of experimentation. You're not going to nail it the first go round. You're probably not going to be profitable month one, month two, or maybe even into month three, but you should be gaining learnings as you go and getting a clear picture of, Hey, here's a pocket of an audience and a creative that actually work. And so ideally, we're going to be able to spend at least a hundred dollars a day to begin with on YouTube so that we can at least measure engagement, interaction view rate, click-through rate, things like that, and then begin to see, okay, is this driving a lift in branded search? And are we seeing conversions? And really though, you're probably not depending on what you're spending on other channels. If you're spending 500,000 a month on Facebook and then you do a $10,000 a month test on YouTube, what are you really expecting to see?

Right? That's not going to be enough to create any kind of meaningful lift. But if you need to test small to see what content are people engaging with, what are people clicking on, then you can definitely do that. But then to be able to see lift, I want to see things like, Hey, am I causing a 10 to 15% lift in overall traffic from YouTube? If so, I should be able to see a lift in branded search and a total search and shopping volume. One thing we've seen a lot is once a brand gets to like 50,000 a month in YouTube spend, we start to see a 30% plus lift in branded search. And often a 30 to 80% lift in overall search and shopping performance depends on the brand of course, but getting that meaningful spin level is great. You can start small though to test.

That's number nine, proper budget. Number 10, adequate patience. If I'm turning on branded search where I'm turning on Google shopping, or if I'm running sponsored product ads on Amazon, I should be a little bit impatient, right? This should work almost right away. It won't be optimal right away, but I'll make sales right away. It's going to work right away. YouTube takes some trial and error, right? We're going to potentially find more audiences and more ads that don't work than those that do in the early stages. But once we find stuff that works, we can scale and we can like to scale for a long time. One of the things I love about YouTube is if we find an ad that works, you can probably ride that horse for a year, maybe two years. We've seen that with several large brands on YouTube where once we find a creative that works, we can run that for a year to 18 months to sometimes more.

So 10, we got to have adequate patience. Number 11, a marketplace strategy, AKA and Amazon strategy. Now, I don't believe you have to be on Amazon to be successful, but I believe you've got to be strategic about this decision. Over 50% of all purchases in the US online are done on Amazon. All of your customers are buying on Amazon in some form or fashion. Doesn't mean though, for sure have to buy your product on Amazon, but a lot of people only want to buy on Amazon. One interesting statistic, and I'll go back to an episode I did with Jordan Pine on infomercials. This guy was in the infomercial business, still is helped a lot of the greats, a lot of the recognizable brands that then products that have sold through infomercials. Here's what infomercial producers know right now. If they launch a new infomercial product, they know that 20% of those sales are going to come by phone, especially if they're targeting an older demographic.

Still, people pick up the phone and order these products, not younger people, but people. 50 plus for sure. 30% of sales are going to come from the website. So people looking at the product, googling it, finding the URL, finding the whizzbang potato peeler.com, clicking on that buying, 50% of the sales of an infomercial are going to come on Amazon. That's if they don't even mention Amazon, right? People see a product on an infomercial, they become intrigued. They say, nah, just lemme buy it on Amazon, right? Amazon's got my payment information, my address I can get in a couple days likely. Lemme just go to Amazon. So a full 50% of infomercial purchases take place on Amazon. Why should we expect anything different if we are running ads on YouTube especially, but also Facebook, you're driving searches to Amazon, people are going to Amazon to look for it.

And here's what I believe. If someone sees your ad and they're convinced that that's kind of a cool product and maybe my needs and maybe just for me, but then they go to Amazon and they see other competitors that maybe have more reviews or maybe a different price point, then they're likely to potentially buy someone else. So especially if you're not there. However, if you do a good enough job telling why you're different, why you're better overcoming rejections, maybe making it seem like there's nobody else that does exactly what you do, then even if you have competitors that looks somewhat similar on Amazon, you'll still be able to capture enough of those customers to make it work. So we got to think through our Amazon strategy, and when we look at Amazon, we built a course, smart Amazon e-Commerce with Ezra Firestone, smart Marketer. Our agency helps with basically full channel management on Amazon. But we got to think about this. How are we merchandising our products on Amazon? Are we optimizing all of our listings on Amazon? Do we have search ads built on Amazon sponsored products and sponsored brands and sponsored brand video? Do we have a smart approach to Amazon? Because any top of funnel campaign is going to also drive traffic to Amazon.

So let's do a quick review here. What are the 11 things we need to have in place on YouTube? Well, it's not just a good video. It's a lot of other things. It's one product market fit. It's two a site that converts and a landing page built for cold traffic. It's three the right creative, creative built for and or modified and or optimized for YouTube. It's for email follow-ups. It's five solid Google search shopping and performance max. It's six remarketing campaigns. It's seven full funnel mindset and approach. It's eight useful, directionally accurate reporting. It's nine proper budgets so that we can actually see what's working and what's not. It's 10 adequate patients. We can't give up month one or even month two. We got to be willing to test to find something that works. And then 11, it's a marketplace strategy that works. So my advice to you, if you want to learn YouTube more, again, we built a course with smart marketer, Ezra and the Gang on smart Google Ads, and there is a whole section that talks about YouTube ads success.

If you want to do this on your own, you have an in-house team, get that course, go to omg commerce.com, click on courses. There's links to all of that there. Or you check it out at the Smart Marketer site. Of course, at OMG Commerce, this is what we do. If you are a growing D two C brand, if you've got traction, if you're spending over a hundred thousand a month on paid media, then we should talk and we can talk about potentially how we can help you scale on YouTube. So with that, hey, let's make it a priority in the coming year to make YouTube a viable customer acquisition source for your brand. And to do that, you need these 11 things in place. With that, this has been so much fun. Thank you for tuning in. If you like this show, please share it. Please rate it. Please leave us that review. We really, really appreciate that. Thank you for all the love that I experience when I go to events and hear from loyal listeners. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Few DTC brands have been as polarizing or as successful as Chubbies.

The Chubbies story is a wild one. It started with humble beginnings, selling shorts one by one in parks around the Stanford campus, leading to an IPO.

Four Stanford college students had 3 things in common: 

1. They were tired of working for the man. 

2. They didn't fit the "Abercrombie" fashion mold of the late 2000s and 

3. They loved shorter shorts - BEFORE the short shorts trend. 

And so, Chubbies was born.  

This is a deep dive with Co-founder Preston Rutherford on what Chubbies got right, what they got wrong, and how to think about building a brand.

Here's a look at what we cover:

• Feedback loops. This started when the co-founders were selling their shorts in person. They could immediately read customers' reactions and hear what they liked, what they didn't like and what needed to be tweaked. As the company grew, this shifted to digital and online feedback loops tied to ad creatives, social posts, and user experience.
• Downplaying vanity metrics. We all want to brag about ROAS and revenue. But, these metrics can be misleading. If you maximize ROAS, you sacrifice long-term growth for a sale today. And you get into a trap that squeezes profits and becomes hard to break. 
• Obsessing over core metrics. We should focus on metrics like contribution margin, total profits and branded search growth (as a sign of a growing, healthy brand).
• Building a brand. Want to have a big exit? Want to charge a premium? Want to drive consistent demand? It's all about brand. 

Transcript

Preston:

Why do you build a brand in the first place? Well, it's so that people seek you out without having to prompt them with a conversion ad basically. Or when people are in market, they think of Che's and they come and they go to Nordstrom, where they go to Dick's Sporting Goods or they go to Amazon or they go to chubby.com, but ideally unprompted, and that becomes a conscious or subconscious learned behavior. Those are the dynamics that we're trying to create, not this Pavlovian. And I see a product offer urgency ad in my feed, and I click and I buy because it's 15% off. And I had to get that because the discount expires in two hours. That's not what we're trying to build.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we are talking about really just an iconic DTC story, an amazing success story, an amazing brand. Talk to one of the co-founders of Chubbies, and we're going to talk about brand building and how to think about growth and how to think about brand. And I just can't wait to dive in. And so my guest today is Preston Rutherford. He is the co-founder of both Chubbies and Loop Returns. And so Preston, welcome to the show. Thanks for taking the time and how's it going?

Preston:

Awesome. Yeah, Brett, thank you. Great to meet you. Great to chat with you and really look forward to this conversation today.

Brett:

It's going to be good, man. And so I was telling you before we hit record, well two things. One, you and I met on LinkedIn, so I've been following your posts. I don't know, some friends of mine commented or shared or whatever, and I'm like, dude, this guy's smart. He's got some fresh takes on brand building and how to think about stuff like ROAS and who you are as a brand and growth and things like that. And then I also met Kyle, one of the other co-founders of Chubbies, about a year ago. We spoke at the same event in Los Angeles. And what a cool guy. And so when I saw you posting, I'm like, dude, got to get you on the show and we got to talk about this. So let's do this first. I think a lot of people are interested. First of all, what is chubby for those that don't know? And then what's the origin story? How did you and your co-founders start this brand?

Preston:

Totally. Chubby's is a lifestyle apparel brand. Basically if you think about what you want to wear on the weekend, it's our job to provide that apparel net lifestyle. And in terms of how we got it started, it was, gosh, it was over a decade ago now. We were friends from college. We had been working for the man for a while, four or five years and just thought we would love

Brett:

Working for the man. Nobody wants to do

Preston:

That long term. Exactly. And we just weren't a fit for it. And at that time, Shopify was just becoming a thing, a platform that existed. And we realized, oh my gosh, it used to be so much harder, more expensive and slower to just be able to sell something online. And some of these tailwinds were making it ridiculously easy. And we also thought there was a product gap in the market for some reason or another. All of us really liked shorter shorts. Two of us played soccer, one of us played rugby. Another one of us just spent a lot of time growing up in the southeast where shorter shorts were more than normal.

Brett:

And you were the rugby guy, right?

Preston:

I was the rugby guy, yeah.

Brett:

Nice man. Rugby from the time you were a kid, this is a sport that fascinates me. I think you can make the case that there may not be a tougher athlete out there than the rugby player, but how did you pick up rugby?

Preston:

A good friend of mine freshman year in college, he played it in high school. He just asked me to go out for tryouts, and I really loved it. I grew up playing soccer myself. Wasn't good enough to play at Stanford, like some of my co-founders, but I liked running around. I liked the team environment and the culture just seemed awesome, really fun thing to be a part of. And again, with rugby as with chubby, fun and community were at the core. So it drew me to it.

Brett:

Yeah. Now wait a minute. So now you started playing rugby with a guy who was on the college rugby team, or you just decided, I'm going to go out for the college rugby team, and you made it

Preston:

A guy who was already on the team. He knew what he was doing. I had no idea, but he knew that I liked playing sports. I like running around. Maybe I'm fast, who knows. And he asked me to come out and try out, and I was blessed enough that got on the team.

Brett:

That's insane. And was this at Stanford?

Preston:

Yep. Yep, it was at Stanford. So it's a club team. It's not D one, it's not varsity, it's club team, but lot of amazing athletes on the team.

Brett:

Yeah, I've been around club lacrosse teams at the collegiate level. I mean, it's still collegiate sports, man. Most people don't just decide, yeah, I'll learn the sport as I go. I'll learn at the college level and then I'll go. So anyway, that's super impressive. Hats off to you. Your first experience was at the college level of rugby. Holy cow. I appreciate,

Preston:

I appreciate that, I appreciate that. So yeah, that was a little bit about who we were. And at the time, if you remember back late 2011, the Abercrombie and Fitch vibe different from today, but back then it was very guys with six packs standing at the door spraining with cologne, like the NCE music playing. And if you weren't that vibe, you didn't even feel like you could walk in the place.

Brett:

Dude, I was so not that vibe ever in my life, and I resonated with that. I'm like, I can't even buy this stuff.

Preston:

Yeah, exactly. And then just at the time, it was very much serious and exclusionary and there wasn't a lot of humor and we just thought, well, let's just flip it on its head. Let's have some fun here. Let's create a vibe that is the vibe that we wish existed. That hearkens back to the retro days of shorter shorts, barbecues, fun, welcoming humor, creativity, and let's just have a go. And so nights and weekends while we were doing our normal jobs, we just started trying to make some product first made it for ourselves and then just started making it for our friends. And then this was also at the time when the square card reader came out where you could actually transact with the credit card in person. So we just put product in our backpacks and went out and would do the weekend thing at the park or at brunch or whatever, and there'd be just a group of us wearing these bright tiny shorts and people would either love it or hate it. And we loved that polarity existed. There wasn't apathy. It was either you love it and you want to be a part of it, or you're just like, this is clearly not for me. And I think these guys are idiots. But that's kind of what you need with a brand that is what you need. Because

Brett:

The worst thing is apathy. The worst thing is that I don't really care that polarity means that there's a group out there that they fall in love with it and they want to be associated with it. And so that's perfect.

Preston:

Exactly. It was clear what we were and clear what we weren't, and that was just authentic to us. That was our story. That was who we were. And people would come up to us, people who liked it, they said, where can I get this? And we said, well, oddly enough, we've got some in our backpacks you want to try 'em on. And then people would just be buying. And so in-person sales was huge for us. There was such a tight feedback loop. Now it's tougher. You've got this meta and Google middleman in there, but it was awesome to just have that hands-on direct connection with folks at the beginning.

Brett:

Now I know the trend, and we're actually just talking about this with some of the guys that work here at OMG. We're talking about how shorter shorts are the thing. And a couple of guys that work for me are runners and they love the short shorts. And I am more of a child in the nineties. I played basketball in high school in the late nineties, and that was the era of the giant shorts. I have no idea why this was a thing. But the Fab five in Michigan, I mean you look at now and you're like, how did we move? How did we do a crossover between, I was a post player, so I didn't do any crossover between the leagues, but how do you do that with the long shorts? I don't know. But were you guys very early on in the short trend? Do you feel like you helped helped that trend, or were you kind of riding the wave?

Preston:

Oh my gosh, we were early, super early. We looked like idiots for the first number of years in terms of what we were doing because the vibe was the longer the cargo shorts with 20 pockets

Brett:

Cargo shorts,

Preston:

The tight ed hardy shirts, that was the vibe. So yeah, we were not riding tailwinds at that time. Now, I would hope that we were a part of creating these tailwinds and this change, but that's something out of our control. We were just focused on the inputs and what we felt was a missing piece of the market. But at the beginning it was just very polarizing and very different. But we knew we were a customer and we knew there got to be people like us out there. And it wasn't a top down sort of men's fashion tam and then men's bottoms, if you did that analysis, you wouldn't have started chubs because the tam totally addressable market gets really small real fast. That's why a post I did was basically no MBA in the right mind would've started chubby because it's a tiny tam and people generally want to attack massive tams. But we didn't care. It was just let's make a product for ourselves and let's just see

Brett:

What happens, make a product for us and then see where it goes. Yeah, it's so great. And so I want to skip ahead to kind of the ending because I think a lot of people don't know this. And then we're going to get into lessons learned that I've got some great topics, again kind of inspired by your writings, but you guys were acquired by this what became the solo stove kind of platform, which iPod, and there's a lot to that. But what was that exit and was that process, were you involved in that process? Did you leave the company prior to that or what was that like?

Preston:

It was a whirlwind. I mean, first of all, a huge blessing that anything like that even happened. And

Brett:

You had to go from selling in parks in around your college campus or whatever to company that had an IPO. That's just wild. It's just crazy.

Preston:

It's totally wild. It's mind boggling, and it is crazy to think about it in that way. But yeah, I mean, it was wild and a crazy, crazy process. And yeah, you're exactly right. It was a bit of a rollup. So it was the solo stove brand and then two other brands. And then very quickly after the acquisition went public, which was its own crazy whirlwind, so many learnings and things like that. But yes, so that was gosh, about a decade after starting the business. So my takeaway is these things take time. Consumer brand building takes time. And our hope is that this is just the beginning, right? That this is a multi-generational thing, like a brand that transcends and that's the hope. So we view it as sort of the Jeff Bezos quote of day one, and it's amazing to see that the brand continues to grow, the resonance continues to strengthen. And I was just in Dick's Sporting Goods last week looking for a golf club, and I saw this massive chubby set up there. I almost started crying because it was just amazing to see that something like that could happen after, again, just walking around San Francisco selling one short at a time to people who would just walk up to us. So

Brett:

Were you tempted people walking through the aisles of Dick's Sporting Goods? Hey, hey, I'm one of the founders of that.

Preston:

My wife does that. I'm so embarrassed to do that kind of stuff, but my wife does that sometimes. Then I get really red and blushing and kind of look down. But no, it's such an amazing thing to just see all the UGC, for instance, thousands and thousands of things that have been created by just people living their life, having fun, kind of reflecting back at us, what we hoped to put out into the world. And it's things like that that gosh, just kind of floor you and fill you with humility. It really just kind of shows you, gosh, left a little bit of a positive mark on this and what a joy to be a part of that.

Brett:

Yep. It's so cool. And yeah, I think most overnight success stories, unquote, this was about 10 years in the making and lots of blood, sweat and tears along the way that eventually led to roll up in that IPO, which is amazing. Let's dive into a few things. I want to unpack several lessons you guys learned along the way, and one of those is I think we learned a lot from failures or missteps. So what are some of your favorite lessons learned at Chubby's from what you guys got wrong?

Preston:

Geez, so maybe to start, we made all of the mistakes in the book, I would say. So anything that I say or anything that I write about, if you read any of my stuff, is all coming from a perspective of starting with humility and having made all the mistakes, not I know this is right sort of thing. So just a couple of things that pop into my mind. One is around changing the view, having more learning, humility around channel expansion. So for the longest time it was the trend of I got to sell everything through my site. I'm going to own this customer, own this transaction, get this email address, and I'm just going to, it's mine. You get all the data, blah, blah, blah. What we realized is a e-comm is a very small sliver of overall retail or commerce, what, 20%, maybe a little bit more growing fast, but still very small.

Amazon owns half of that. So we're fighting for 10% of this broad sort of pie, yet spending a hundred percent of our dollars on that pie. So that to us started to make less sense over time. So I think one thing we got wrong was holding onto that digital D two C for way too long, have a little bit of humility that even if someone really loves your brand, they're busy and you want to be where they're buying and you don't want them to necessarily have to just type in ch.com, be where they are. So big thing there, maybe start going multi-channel, exploring multi-channel earlier. Now it's hard to do that before you actually build an association in people's minds. So you've got to do those things, those basics, but be where the customer is.

Brett:

And a couple things to piggyback on that, because I 100% agree with you, people are strapped for time. It's not easy to just buy in one place. And I think a lot of people mistakenly believe that, Hey, if I don't have someone's email address and phone number so that I can follow up with them, or I don't have their address where I can mail to them or whatever, then they're not my customer. And while in an ideal world, yes, we would want all of those data points, that's not necessarily true. We can all think about our favorite brands, whether that's Nike or particular kind of jeans, or my favorite hot sauce. I'm a hot sauce guy, I am a customer of certain brands, and I may buy those brands in a variety of places. Maybe it's on Amazon, maybe it's D two C, maybe it's through their app, but yeah, maybe it's just at a retail outlet. And so I think we over romanticize having full control of the customer experience when it'd be a lot better if we just put our products where people are, because another reason, a lot of people may find you in a retail store and then become your customer online. So it can work both ways, and I think we forget that or are just a little bit too shortsighted about that.

Preston:

Totally. And there's fear. I mean, on Amazon, is Amazon going to duplicate my product and put me out of business or will the same thing happen

Brett:

When it comes to brand? They can't do that, right? Amazon's not, I mean, okay, maybe they could at some point, but you guys had this brand going for which I think that's the key. And Amazon's not just going to recreate that brand overnight

Preston:

A hundred percent, but we have these, now I can call them irrational fears, but at the time, very real. You're trying to do the right thing and I get it, but that was a big lesson for us and big growth drivers now that we're able to be in more of the places where a consumer already is. Another one is how to spend our marketing dollars to better drive the outcomes that we actually want. And so what do I mean by that? For the longest time, it was very much, and this starts to get into the roas, short-term ROAS conversation, but it was very much, I feel like I'm doing a good job if my ROAS is a high number and not really thinking about what that means in terms of business fundamentals. And so starting to think a little bit longer term, my primary goal is not to buy short-term revenue pops. My primary goal in building a brand and building a business is to generate a machine that generates sustainable sequential increases in profit dollars over time,

Brett:

Which

Preston:

Allows me to create jobs, which allows me to make more great product, invest in great product and build great content, create great content that brightens people today. So let's create a machine that actually does that rather than give me whatever, 8.3 x roas that I can then screenshot and tweak. And so that was a big shift because we thought we were amazing media buyers. We thought we had cracked the code. We would constantly look for these little pockets of arbitrage, short-term arbitrage, but we thought we were killing it, but we weren't really generating any profits at the end of the day. And so shifting a little bit to, okay, what are we trying to do and then how do we think about getting there? And so a little bit about what does it mean to be strengthening a brand? Why do you build a brand in the first place?

Well, so that people seek you out without having to prompt them with a conversion ad basically. Or when people are in market, they think of Chubbies and they come and they go to Nordstrom or they go to Dick's Sporting Goods, or they go to Amazon or they go to chubbies.com, but ideally unprompted, and that becomes a conscious or subconscious learned behavior. Those are the dynamics that we're trying to create, not this Pavlovian. And I see a product offer urgency ad in my feed, and I click and I buy because it's 15% off, and I had to get that because the discount expires in two hours. That's not what we're trying to build. Not that we shouldn't do any of that. Of course there's a balance. But shifting the way that we thought about, okay, what am I buying when I spend a dollar? And getting a little bit more of an understanding of that was huge, was huge for us. Let's build these.

Brett:

Yeah, I love this so much.

Preston:

Yeah, let's build these resilient bases of revenue and then let's build a layer cake rather than just a pop. And then you have to do it again. And then because you're reaching an ever increasing pool of people, the LTV to CAC ratios just get funkier and funkier over time, and CPMs go up, CACs go up, and you kind of get in this upside down position where they're just insurmountable headwinds or you're starting to sell multi-channel and the old playbook didn't work for us. So you just have to make these shifts and I think start to think a little bit more long-term, like how is my percentage of new customer revenue coming through owned and organic channels? How is that changing? What am I doing there? Fundamentals.

Brett:

Yeah. And I think what's really interesting here is that of course, we want all of our marketing dollars to be productive. Of course, we want everything to work in our favor, but on what time horizon and what does that really mean? Because we can all become ROAS obsessed. And if you think about it, the only way that you truly maximize ROAS is by making mistakes or doing things the wrong way. If I want to maximize roas, I'm just going to go for search and branded search. But where does branded search come from? You got to generate that in the first place. Or going to, if I only want to maximize ROAS today, then I'm going to stop organic content and I'm going to stop prospecting on Facebook and I'm going to stop prospecting on YouTube and I'm going to stop doing some of those things.

But that kills your brand in very short order. And so I love that being able to spread out the time horizon and think, yes, I want this to be a maximum return, but over the long haul, right? Because I want to be able to charge a premium forever, and I want people to associate with my brand and share my brand and talk about it and to seek me out and all those things. And you don't get that. You don't build that by just running discount ads and by just creating that discount death loop. And so I'm so glad, so glad you brought that up, but sometimes you have to learn that, right? We all get addicted and even as an agency, and we run a lot of Google ads and YouTube ads and stuff, and I get it, we want to be able to show those impressive ROAS numbers and put 'em on case studies on your website or brag about it on social media. But it's pretty much a vanity metric, and it really only tells a sliver of the story, not the whole story

Preston:

Vanity metric. Yeah, I mean, I think for us realized vanity metric revenue we found for us was a vanity metric. I mean, optimizing around revenue, you're missing a whole bunch of stuff. Start thinking about contribution, contribution margin, things like that. Letting that drive everything we do, at least on the demand driving side of the business was also huge. So yeah, just learning about these vanity metrics took time. You get there, but then can we start to spread that message a little bit more broadly so that people get there a little bit faster without having to struggle through it for 5, 7, 9 years?

Brett:

And one thing, sometimes we kind of push aside lessons from bigger brands because we think I'm not that big. I can't do that, right? I'm not Apple, I'm not Nike, I'm not Procter and Gamble, but one of my favorite lessons I actually heard from Procter Gamble, and we'd already thought about it this way, but hearing it from them was validation. Then one of the key success drivers they look for in ad campaigns, what they're doing is, does this lead to branded search? Does this lead to branded search? If it does, then it's probably working. So if we're running a TV campaign, it's maybe hard to measure exactly, but is it driving branded search? Are these other campaigns driving branded search? That is a huge component of brand building, and that's kind of a shift in mindset that gets you to think, and that's where the big profits are is I do want to double click on something since you brought it up, and we'll kind of talk about this for a minute, and then I want to hear some lessons from some of the wins and some of the stuff you guys got. But you mentioned contribution margins when we talked about vanity metrics. So what metrics did you start leaning into? And let's start with contribution margin and the way you guys viewed contribution margin.

Preston:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, an example, maybe it's helpful to think about an example. So you could, as you know, get a really nice roas, but what's happening is you're selling shorts that are 15% off, and so you're still spending the same amount as you were when your shorts were full price. It looks like ROAS is going up, or you're just driving a bunch of conversions. And ultimately the dollars that are flowing through your p and l are dramatically reduced. And so then at the end of the month or at the end of the quarter, you look back and you're like, I thought I was killing it. And then you realize, wow, I generated no cash from this. So then we started to think, okay, gosh, what really matters here? And then how do we look at things on an apple to apple basis? Then it allows you to compare to things like wholesale and things like that, and it starts to incorporate things like the amount of dollars you're spending and the discounts that you're running.

And so for us, just that change and then ideally trying to, and I know Bennett True classic talks a lot about this of daily contribution. It's one thing to get a number from finance at the end of the month once you've chewed everything up, but that's far less actionable on a day-to-day, we're making these decisions on a daily basis like budget allocation, channel tactic, creative decisions. We need this daily feedback loop. So yeah, very much getting away from revenue because revenue can be tricky and can, I mean you can gain short-term contribution, but looking at long-term sustainable sequential increases in contribution dollars that your business machine is generating for us was huge. I mean, it just totally shifted how we thought about things and how we gold our team and things like that.

Brett:

And just for those, I think a lot of people listening are very familiar with contribution margin, but for those that aren't, can you define it really quickly?

Preston:

Sure. And I think people have differing definitions, but fundamentally it's just taking into account sales less all of the things like your cost of sales, which incorporates your marketing costs, which incorporates your product, gross margins, but then also all of these other costs like diminishing returns maybe in terms of where you are in your business. But once you become relatively sophisticated, you start to incorporate things like per skew, returns per skew, CX tickets, and all of these other sort of associated costs. Getting down to incorporating shipping one little aside here, we started doing, one of the things you want to do is drive basket size, drive your ALV, and we didn't have $200 shorts, but we could do bundles, and I think a lot of us have tried bundles. The thing about bundles is that you hit a shipping size threshold where you might go from an average of five bucks to ship a package to 10, and you didn't take that into account.

You didn't know you hit that threshold. Maybe you scaled shipping costs linearly and you're like, wow, this is way off. So having that sort of sophistication where you're incorporating both shipping costs as well, especially as you run these different promos becomes very important. So then you get this sort of nut of cost associated with selling your goods. And I mean, you're not incorporating fixed costs. This is all your variable costs, so you get to effectively your variable profit. So it's not incorporating things like your rent or your headcount, things like that, but nearly everything else. So then it helps from the perspective of, okay, I'm the marketing team. I'm the demand driving side of the business. What can I truly control? I can't control the whole p and l, I can control revenue, but that's not really driving the fundamentals of my business. I can control effectively down to, and obviously there are other teams that are taking into account product gross margin and CX ticket costs and things like that. But from the demand side, driving demand side of the business, what are we able to really affect here and help drive the business and get just closer to the bottom line effectively? It's just more of a tie to what the business is actually producing at the end of the day.

Brett:

It's so good. It's so good. And yeah, when you realize that rose is a vanity metric and revenues a vanity metric, and even percentages, margin percentages can be a vanity metric, it's more about what is the contribution margin? How am I getting closer to the bottom line with each sale and getting those daily feedback loops so I can adjust marketing efforts and adjust merchandising to really get there. And so it's so smart. It's great. I love it. Let's talk then about what did you get, and I think sometimes people confess we're definitely this way in the building and scaling of our agency. Sometimes you get stuff right on accident, you did this and you're like, oh, holy cow, we were spot on here and that was an accident. And then sometimes you're very intentional about it and you end up being right. But what are some of the things you just got right early on?

Preston:

Man, I think a lot of this was wasn't an accident or things we stumbled into, but we did try to be very thoughtful around the things that we did. So I think first and foremost, no ad spend can compensate for substandard product. So I mean, you got to start there. Your product has to deliver, has to be unique, it has to meet a need that's currently unmet, and that's relatively obvious, but with how easy it is to create a product and then just start running met ads against it and being able to sell some stuff, there's somewhat of an issue there in my opinion. And obviously you'll get feedback and you can iterate over time, but fundamentally, that's why I'm such an advocate of in-person sales at the beginning because you see that look on people's face, you see if they'll just walk up to your thing and be like, eh. You get so much feedback that

Brett:

You can read the emotion and you hear the language and they're like, there's so much rich feedback there. Yeah, I love that too.

Preston:

It doesn't show up in clicks or sessions. I mean some of it does, but that's one of the things I think that we really focused on. And I think it started because we made the product for us. We were the first customers. The second I think is the fundamental approach that we had to the relationship with our customers. So because we were making product for ourselves and our friends, this was sort of easy, but generally what we were seeing out there that we thought was fundamentally problematic was companies, this corporate entity communicating with faceless customers. And that drove the communication, the communication style, the content that was put out, and we just kind of fundamentally decided to take the opposite approach. We are not a company first, we're just group of people first, and we're developing friendships with other people, and that's it. So then how does that govern what we do and how we behave and how we communicate?

We're trying to build a relationship. So then when you internalize it and you think about, okay, how do I behave in my friendships? What are the things that I do that drive deepening of friendships? What do my best relationships look like? I'm giving, I'm investing. I'm there, I'm dependable. I'm building trust. I'm honest, I'm transparent, all these sorts of things. Whereas if you're a company talking to customers, you don't care about investing in the relationship, you don't care about giving a hundred x more than you ask for, so you can just feel good just throwing an ad in someone's feed that's like, yeah, buy this right now. I don't care who you are. And not that we never put ads in front of people that we're telling them about our product, but it was just fundamentally different approach and it just guided everything that we did, and it really kind of permeated the culture of the org. So I think that was something that really helped because it really helped in building a community. People felt like they were in it with us, they were building it with us, and they felt like they knew us. They did. They really did. And that I think led to a level of closeness and loyalty and trust that you just can't really manufacture if you're doing it another way.

Brett:

Yeah, it's the stuff you can't hack, you can't shortcut, you can't get there in sneaky ways. It just takes time and you just got to do it the right way. Yeah, absolutely.

I want to talk a little bit now about content creation and we will talk ads and inorganic. We can talk about both, of course. I'm going to quote a post you made on LinkedIn recently because I thought this was great. You said that, Hey, there's three parts. There's a three part playbook for infinite video success, part one roller blades, part two, Nerf footballs and part three my favorite mullets. And so this tied into a specific piece of content you guys created, but it was so great. It was so fun. It was so funny. But my question is how do you create content that is on brand but still impactful, where people want to watch it and want to share it, want to comment on it? You guys did that so well, you do that so well at Chubby. So what's your approach? Talk about your approach there.

Preston:

Yeah, I mean, appreciate it. So yeah, obviously that was me being somewhat facetious, but

Brett:

For

Preston:

Us, what we learned is, and it'll be different for everyone's brand, but it's about an approach. So the only formula we really have is making sure we have a tight feedback loop where the learning can take place, and that's all that matters. And I think that's the thing that's universally applicable. And so that's relatively obvious. So then what does that mean? It's having that deep process in place. So what is the quantifiable goal you're trying to achieve? You mentioned one metric that is branded search, or you could even take it a step further and talk about engaged sessions from branded search, right? Because a lot of totally and bounces. So what is getting to two page views or collection view or whatever it might be, however you want to define that, but there's a quality there that we found matters, but what is that quantifiable?

What are you driving for as it relates to brand video content? And it's not that it necessarily cannot have any kind of ACTA or anything like that, but for us, we found that it wasn't necessarily short-term revenue. That was the way that we would measure the success of this stuff, but have that quantifiable metric and then use your gut to come up with two or three different ideas and then just start the learning process. But you have to know what you're going for. And once you have that, you can start the beautiful process of looking at the data, coupling it with your intuition and doubling down on what's working, doing less of what's not working, and just build that machine. And it doesn't cost a lot of money. I mean, you probably saw some of our videos. Production value was effectively one of the things we found was that production value was inversely related to success of the video.

So it was just very much like let's make something that's authentic and that resonates, and that allowed us to have the fast feedback loop where you didn't have to pay up front 50 K to just get one idea to explore you, to explore a lot of ideas very quickly so that the feedback loop could happen. So I think that was the key for us is just having a feedback loop and you got to have that dependent variable that you're optimizing for, and it has to be very clear. Everyone has to know what it is. And then you got to have a method for to the best you can connecting what you did to that metric. And that's it For us, it was rollerblades and nerve footballs and mullets for you, it's going to be something else

Brett:

That's not going to be universally applicable. I mean, maybe

Preston:

That formula,

Brett:

Who knows mullets could work anywhere probably. So let's talk a little bit about, you were saying that, or maybe we talked about this before we hit record, but your brand statement, what you focused on, what drove and inspired everything you did was chubby equals weakened. Now was that something that was just kind of baked in and part of who you were when you started or did you have that crystalline focus in the beginning or did that kind of evolve over time? Talk about how you got to that chubby's equals weekend, and then how did that impact everything you did?

Preston:

Sure. The way we thought about it was that the core is fixed and then around the edges or the narrative evolves over time. And we didn't necessarily know that at the beginning, but the notion of weekend, the way we kind of summed it up was that Friday at five feeling was there from the beginning. We graduated college in 2008, global recession, very stressful. It was hard to get a job

Brett:

The worst time, the worst time possible to graduate college.

Preston:

Yeah, I mean, it was a time. And so there was all this stress around work and getting a job and holding onto your job and feeling nervous about whatever, that whole thing. And so for us, it was just kind of like, man, that's rough. And what can we do there? How can we contribute on that front? And it's, gosh, it's that moment where you leave the cubicle, you change into your weekend where you relax. It's Friday at five, that's the trigger, that's the switch, that's when things turn on. And we just wanted to capture that feeling and that was the kickoff for the weekend. That was the time when you were making memories with your friends, when you felt in control of your time and where you just kind of felt free. And so it was that feeling of freedom that was associated with Friday at five with the weekend and all of these things that were the story that we wanted to tell. And then that just very nicely tied into a lot of the charitable things or the cause things that we decided to associate with around mental health because this stuff matters. It's all a consistent story because ultimately that's what we were trying to is help us have a different approach to life and stress and our work and what's important. So yeah, that was there from the beginning. And with that comes an irreverence, comes a humor, comes a levity that we can

Brett:

Not taking seriously.

Preston:

Yeah, it's the weight that we add to our lives that in a lot of ways can be changed if we just bring a little bit of levity and take ourselves a little bit less seriously. And that's what we were trying to do, the story we were trying to tell, and we knew it had to be a tight story because people are busy. Again, back to that note, humility around the fact that you are not the only thing people are thinking about. You get a quarter second and then they're moving on. So are you going to tell the same story over and over? Are you just going to continue to build that mental availability, that mental association around one very simple thing? You're going to monopolize that niche in someone's mind. It's got to be tight, but it can't be boring. So it's finding that balance. That's the infinite balance.

Brett:

And I think it's one of the fundamental marketing mistakes that so many people make is assuming people are paying attention to you or assuming that people are more interested in you than they really are, and in the beginning they're not interested in you, right? In the beginning, they're not thinking about you. You really got to work and you got to be both succinct and interesting and funny if that fits your brand and all of those things. Now, I saw some videos, and I think this was you guys, but it may not been the videos of the guy on the Zoom call and he's got the green screen behind him, so it looks like he's in his office, but he's really on the golf course where he is riding his bike down a busy street. Was that you guys?

Preston:

Yeah, yeah. In partnership with one of the most awesome TikTok creators. But yeah,

Brett:

So where did that idea come from, and can you talk a little bit about the success of that? Because one that I was just remembering and I watched the other day, which was so great, was a guy's on a Zoom call and he's got a headset on. He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but he's actually lining up a putt. He's on a green, and then he sinks the putt and he's like, yeah, exactly. Everybody else on the zoom call is whatcha excited about, but that really captures that weekend vibe. Where did that come from? Was that you guys? Was that this TikTok creator? Was it a collaboration? I'd love to hear the story.

Preston:

I mean, we've been doing videos, making fun of work from the beginning. We would make videos where we would just get dummy laptops and do flipping the tables or throwing our laptops out the window. But again, it all kind of speaks to what is the video, what is the content that you want to see when you just got out of that performance review and you're just feeling like, what am I doing? I just want to flip the table, throw my laptop out the window and just go fishing. And so that was a lot of the stuff that it is such a blessing to be able to even spend time making content like this. I mean, we were the luckiest people in the world to be able to do this stuff. But yeah, just bringing fun and levity to work. I mean, we talked a ton about just the shackles of the cubicle and all these sorts of things.

And so what's the opposite of that and how do you think about, gosh, this is exactly what I want to be doing when I'm looking at this content. And again, that was one of the consistent themes that ran throughout and it's just fun. It's just fun to think about because so many of us spend so much time sitting looking at a Zoom screen, and so then to be able to just sort of say, okay, what is the most creative approach you could take there? Because it's just something we all resonate with and generally sucks. And so how do you turn it into something that is like, oh, this is awesome. This is super fun. I wish I was doing this.

Brett:

Yeah, we've all been on a Zoom call where we desperately wished we were on the golf course or riding a bike or doing anything other than being on the Zoom call. Totally on brand and totally worked for you guys for sure. So other just, and I know there's a million, I know we could talk for hours and hours. I want to also talk about Loop, which is kind of your newer venture, just a second. But any other lessons or takeaways, some of your favorites from the building of Chubby that you want to share with entrepreneurs that are listening?

Preston:

I think one of the realizations that was really helpful for us was just an understanding that 95% of your audience is not in the market for your product at that given moment. So then what does that mean? What are you going to do with that information? And that kind of blew our minds. We were just sort of thinking, man, as long as my CT A is good and I can tweak this language a little bit and I can run all of these variants, and it was kind of like missing the forest through the tree sort of thing, or playing just fundamentally the wrong game. And once we realized that stuff and we're able to start thinking a little bit longer term like, Hey, this is a marathon, not a sprint. We're trying to drive this machine that is this ever increasing percentage of new customer revenue coming through, owned in organic channels and just create this layer cake of resilient based revenue.

I think that's the mindset shift. And I'm not being prescriptive in terms of what you actually do to do that, but just how can we think about our businesses like that? That might be the one thing I want to leave people with because when we were changing our mindset and changing our approach to these sorts of things, and there were a set of tactics that worked for us as we kind of waded through, stumbled through most of the stuff that didn't work, but that really was one of the big things that drove this unlock in not only growing top line, but bottom line profit generation as well. And having gone from a business that wasn't really doing that to doing that, that's all I want to contribute to the ecosystem is how do you do more of that and what are these fundamental approaches and mindset shifts that we think we learned are more aligned with better way to run our business?

And just because it's not as popular or talked about on Twitter or whatever, doesn't mean it's not right. It's harder. It takes longer period of time. The feedback loop is less well measured in platform, but it's the stuff that lays these foundations that helps us build the business we're all trying to build. So I think that's maybe the main thing is just that mindset shift and I'm exploring it myself because it's something that to be silently articulated so that people can understand it, internalize it, and then operationalize in their business. So that's the fun of writing and having a conversation, Brett with you, is just figuring out how to talk about this stuff in a way that actually makes sense to people.

Brett:

And I think we just, a lot of people are trying to solve the wrong problem. They're trying to solve a short-term revenue problem rather than obsessing over long-term sustainable revenue, or they're trying to optimize towards the wrong metrics, roas in revenue versus contribution margin and some of these more sustainable healthy things and trying to drive sales instead of trying to build a brand and building long-term demand. Then of course we got to meet cashflow needs for today and things like that. But shifting the mindset there, it's so good, and if you can successfully do it, you'll be happier. You'll have more fun in business. If you want that exit one, an additional and eventual IPO like you guys, then that's really about the only way to do it. And so really enjoy that. That's awesome. Love it. Let's talk a little bit about loop returns. That's a newer venture. So what's the idea behind that and what is Loop returns?

Preston:

Yeah, I mean this was something that we built for ourselves while at Chub's, oddly enough, and we had no idea

Brett:

Noticing a theme here, right? Building for ourselves first, which is a brilliant way to start a business.

Preston:

Well, thanks can really, I mean, what it has turned into is absolutely fantastic. Jonathan Palmer and the team amazing in building this thing into a great, great company, growing very quickly and really helping the Shopify ecosystem. And then more broadly, non Shopify ecosystems really provide much better customer experiences around this truly bottom of funnel, these experiences that used to be really bad. So I mean, we had a habit of just building software tools, software experiences that solved their problems internally. I mean, if you remember, I don't remember exactly when it was 20 15, 20 16, the returns and exchanges process was rough. I mean, you just think about the back and forth.

Brett:

It was so rough that that's why a lot of people didn't buy online. And apparel being the most challenging, really good shot, this isn't going to fit. And that would just deter. It was so painful to deter people from purchasing,

Preston:

Totally emailing in, say, I want to do a return email back. They send me a photo so I understand you didn't violate the return policy. They send the photo, then you check the policy, then you send back a manual PDF of a shipping label, just so broken. And then the realization, so many returns could have been exchanges and just that the material difference that that can have on your p and l if you're converting a return into an exchange. It just sort of seemed obvious to us that there had to be a better solution. So we built it for ourselves. And then other brands came to us saying, we want this experience. This is so much better than what we have. And we were just like, I don't even know how to think about this. This was for us. Are we a software business? Are we not?

So we stumbled into it and it seemed like it was solving a need that wasn't unaddressed elsewhere, just kind of like what happened with Chubby's just in a different context. So yeah, I mean, put together, spun up a new entity, put a team in place, and they have gone and built an amazing business. It is awesome to see, so proud of the team, and I think a lot of customers are having much better experiences with a ton of brands, thousands of brands because of this. And that's humbling and awe inspiring to be a part of in some small way.

Brett:

So making returns less painful for both shopper and merchant. Such a needed, needed thing. Where can people learn more about Loop returns?

Preston:

Loop returns.com.

Brett:

Easy enough, man. So we'll link to that in the show notes as well. And I do want to underscore, if you've enjoyed this podcast, which I'm confident you have, you need to follow Preston on the socials. That's how he and I connected. I was reading his stuff on LinkedIn. The post about ROAS just got me teary eyed and I was crying tears of joy as a marketer, but your content is really, really good, man. So where all can people follow you? I know I saw you on LinkedIn, but where else are you posting regularly? If anywhere else?

Preston:

LinkedIn's the place, man, that's where I'm trying to do it and spend time and invest and try to get better at it. So just search Preston Rutherford on LinkedIn. There's a little shorts emoji in between Preston and Rutherford, so you know that this is the one you're going to select and follow. But yeah, LinkedIn would be awesome to interact with you, comment on my stuff, give me feedback. I mean, this is a learning process. I'm not here to just dictate stuff. It's searching for truth and trying to learn together. So would love to follow, would love the comments. I mean, let's learn together.

Brett:

And your teaching style, the style of your posts, the style of your education is very chubby esque, right? It fits the mode and the ethos of Chubby, which is fantastic. I really like to hear that what you said, you're focused on LinkedIn. That's what I'm doing as well. I kind of, for a little while I was like, I'm going to try posting on Twitter and I'm going to on Instagram and all these things, and TikTok, which I'm never on TikTok as a user, but I was like, this is ridiculous. I like LinkedIn. That's where I'm going to connect with other brand owners and stuff. So I'm just going to go kind of all in on that and then I may add stuff later. But I think there's a lot of wisdom in that. Preston, this has been an absolute joy, an absolute blast. I have to do it again sometime. Thank you so much.

Preston:

Would love it, Brett, thank you. So grateful to do this with you. It was really fun, super fun conversation. And yeah, I'd love to do this again sometime.

Brett:

Awesome. Keep up the good work on that content and I will keep reading and sharing, and I know other people will as well.

Preston:

Appreciate it, man. Thank you.

Brett:

And as always, thank you for tuning into the show and we'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? If you'd like this episode, share it with somebody that will enjoy it. And if anyone is thinking about being an entrepreneur or they run AD two C brand or they're a marketer, they're going to love this show, Preston Rutherford. So please share that. Until next time, thank you.

‍

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”

‍

“The definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results.”

‍

Not sure where I first heard these quotes, but they definitely apply to this week’s episode.

‍

I firmly believe that to grow like no one else is growing, you must do what no one else is doing.

‍

In this episode, I walk through 5 growth opportunities that you’re likely under-leveraging or completely missing.

‍

This is the recording from a recent talk I gave in Austin, Texas, to a group of 1,200 eager Amazon Sellers and DTC brand owners, where I unpacked these 5 growth opportunities.  

‍

While there are a few cases where seeing the video might be more helpful (watch it here), the audio should still be helpful! 

‍

I hope you enjoy it.

Transcript

Brett:

At OMG Commerce, we accelerate growth for some of the most loved brands in e-commerce, like boom, native, true earth overtone, and dozens more. If your Google and YouTube ad performance isn't where it should be, if you're struggling with Performance Max, or if you're not scaling like you'd like on Amazon, then we have two ways to help. One, we have amazing resources that are free for the taking, like our top YouTube ads guide with lots of examples, our P max checklist or our Amazon DSP roadmap plus many more, or hit us up for a free strategy session. So go on over to omg commerce.com and click on Let's talk to request that free strategy session or click on resources and guides and pick the guide that's right for you. And now back to the show.

For two hours they ran out of lemonade, they made 200 bucks. Now I was impressed, but also like, man, does this set these kids up to fail? Are they going to think everything is this easy? And so anyway, now my entrepreneurial juices are flowing. I'm like, Hey, we should make cookies and muffins and let's double production. And so all this stuff, and I overheard Sophia, the success had gotten to Sophia's head a little bit, and so she's talking to her siblings and she said, guys, dad is trying to give us business advice. We make more money than he does. And so love Sophia, but her siblings were like, Hey, maybe dad knows a thing or two. So anyway, they kept it going and the success was quite impressive and quite fun.

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today's episode is different because this is a live recording from an event I did in Austin, Texas in front of about 1200 DTC brands and Amazon sellers on five untapped growth opportunities that you are likely missing. This presentation was a lot of fun. I got rave reviews. I hope you enjoy it. I'll talk about three big marketing mistakes that are holding you back. We have the privilege of auditing hundreds of DTC brands, Google and Amazon and YouTube accounts every year. And so it gives us really clear insight into what separates the best from the rest. I'm going to talk about that also. Sure. Kind of a fun and humorous and insightful story about my kids' lemonade stand. As many of you know, I do have eight kids.

I dive into that a little bit. But we get into Performance Max. We talk about a way to look at branded search campaigns that you're probably not doing now. We talk about how to tap into Amazon's number one traffic source and their number one source of new customers and lots of other good stuff. So please enjoy my presentation on five Untapped Growth Opportunities Seller Con, what is up? Hey, I think we should do something really quickly. How many of you guys are enjoying Mimi? Isn't that guy full of energy? Give it up for justice. Mimi. Love that guy. Love that guy. I want him to do all of my intros forever. That guy is fantastic. So I love what Matt Clark said yesterday that just one idea, one strategy, one connection, and I really encourage you to focus on that can add millions of dollars in sales to your business and can change their trajectory of your business.

So my goal is I hope to give you at least a few of those ideas right now. My guess is of these five strategies, these five untapped strategies, you are likely missing possibly all five. Or if you're using them, I bet you're only using a few and I bet you're not fully leveraging them. So I believe to grow like nobody else is growing, you got to do what nobody else is doing. And so that's what I'm going to help you do today. As Justice said, I do run an agency team of 73, 1 of the top spenders on YouTube ads. We manage about a hundred million a year in ad spend. So I got a lot of data, got a lot of data to pull from as I share these ideas and these strategies. Got a full Amazon department, so I'll talk mostly about D two C growth, but I'm also going to mix in some Amazon growth as we go.

We do Amazon DSP, one of the fastest growing agencies there, and so we're going to get after it. I also work with some great brands like Native deodorant and Overtone Boom, my city, Joseph Organify, a bunch of others. And so I had the privilege of working with some pretty great folks. But in addition to running a large agency, what I'm also known for is just having a whole bunch of kids. So this is my wife and I. If you don't have the time to count, thank you. Yes, thank you. Yes. Do you have a lot of kids? Okay, kids are great. Kids are great. So we have eight and not a blended family, no adoptions, just old fashioned growth. And so if you want to learn how to scale a family or scale a business, I'm potentially your guy, so I'll talk to you. But people always look at this picture and like, oh man, your kids are adorable.

And I'm like, yeah, that's because you don't know. But in all seriousness, we love it. We wanted a big family, then we just overachieved. And so this is what we ended up with would not change. It would not change it for anything. It is chaos, but it's beautiful chaos. And I think that's what it's like being an entrepreneur, running a brand, managing all these things, inventory and ads and all this crazy stuff. Employees and emotions and stuff. It's beautiful chaos. And so that's where I live. I want to tell a quick story to get us started, sets the stage for where we're going to go, and it's kind of cute and entertaining. So that's my daughter, Sophia. If you're thinking she's a little sassy, you are correct, you have a good keen eye. She gets it from her grandmother. That's my mother-in-law, Tammy. And so a few years ago, the kids came to me and they said, Hey dad, we're going to open a lemonade stand.

Now we don't have the worst spot for a lemonade stand, but it's not the best. We live on five acres. We do have neighbors. The road in front of our house is relatively busy. People don't slow down for our driveway unless they're coming over to visit. But I'm an entrepreneur. I love the life lesson. So I'm like, yes, let's do a lemonade stand. Now, this is not a picture of the lemonade stand. I was so uninspired by the lemonade stand that they did produce that I did not take a picture. Apparently it's like table and an umbrella and handmade signs, cute lemonade stand stuff. So I remember doing stuff like this in my neighborhood and I don't know if I just had all the realists in my neighborhood, but they're like, Hey, we can't give these kids expectations too high. Here's a nickel for your lemonade.

We made like 50 cents or something. So my kids get started on the lemonade stand and two minutes in they set up a shot for two minutes. Sophia comes running in and said, dad, someone gave me a $5 bill and didn't ask for change. I'm like, cool, alright, well that's probably your day, so that's good. Get after it. She comes back a little later, dad, I got a 20. And then in one change I'm like, this is interesting. What are you guys, what does the sign say? What are you advertising here? And then later it's like 40 bucks. And this just kept going for two hours. They ran out of lemonade, they made 200 bucks. Now I was impressed, but also like, man, is this setting these kids up to fail? Are they going to think everything is this easy? So anyway, now my entrepreneurial juices are flowing.

I'm like, Hey, we should make cookies and muffins and let's double production. And so all this stuff, and I overheard Sophia, the success had gotten to Sophia's head a little bit. And so she's talking to her siblings and she said, guys, dad is trying to give us business advice. We make more money than he does. And so love Sophia, but her siblings were like, Hey, maybe dad knows a thing or two. So anyway, they kept it going and the success was quite impressive and quite fun. So the reason I share that story is I believe as we unpack these five strategies, you could take Sophia's approach and be like, eh, I'll just kind of do what I'm going to do and you'll achieve some success. Or you could go all in on these things, really absorb the advice. And I think you can take it to some pretty impressive levels.

So we're talking mostly about YouTube and Google and some other related stuff, but want to take just a minute, set the stage. Talk about how we've never seen anything like Google in the history of marketing. So every day, a billion shopping experiences across Google. So that includes YouTube display, Gmail, search shopping, all of that, a billion shopping experiences every day. 86% of people touch Google in their shopping journey. Even if they're going to buy on Amazon, they still often touch Google on the way. And let's talk YouTube for a minute. 90% of the US population watching YouTube talk to your kids, talk to your parents. They're all using YouTube. And what's really crazy is that the average session duration is about 42 minutes. So people are spending time on YouTube. It's a great place to interrupt and share your message and drive new customers. And primetime is becoming really personalized.

How many of you guys watch YouTube on tv? Not YouTube tv, but the YouTube app on the television set? Yep. Yep. So that is the fastest growing platform. So I bet if you observe your kids, like my teenagers, if they're watching TV in the evenings, they're usually watching one of their YouTube favorite YouTube creators. So that's the fastest growing platform. And more people watch YouTube during prime time than any cable network. About 70% of people say they bought something that they first learned about on YouTube, and about half of people that are on YouTube are bouncing back and forth between YouTube and search. So they see something interesting on YouTube now they've got their phone and they're searching for that and exploring a little bit more. So the two paired together really nicely. Now, quick case study, I'll share more as we go, but Boom was largely a Facebook driven business.

So mostly acquiring new customers from Facebook. We launched YouTube top of funnel, really beefed up what they were doing on Google and grew top line 30% and achieved about 200% growth on Google. Now the combination of Google and YouTube is their number two source of new customers and it continues to grow the brand. So before we get into the five tips, I want to talk about three mistakes that could absolutely trip you up, hold you back, squash all of these five strategies from working. So three mistakes, let's dive in. First one, forcing campaigns or channels to work outside their strengths or expecting channels to work outside their strengths. So every channel is different. YouTube is not search, display is not shopping. They're all different and they have different strengths, but on occasion even as well-meaning marketers, we can end up like this guy. Now, I don't know what this guy was thinking.

I don't know if he just convinced himself this is okay to do with a Lamborghini. I don't own a Lambo. I don't pretend to own one on Instagram either, but I know there's some Italian sports car lovers that weep when they see this picture. This is not okay. And so I don't know if he just overextended himself and he is like, I got to make this Lambo pay for itself. But that doesn't work, right? That's not cool. Let's talk about YouTube and Google shopping for a minute. How many people are running ads on Google shopping? That's actually not very many, so that's good opportunity for you. So Google Shopping is to Google what sponsored products are to Amazon. They just work, right? This is like the Toyota truck of advertising. You mistreat it, you don't change the oil, you don't care for it. It's just going to work, right?

You can optimize and make it better, but it's just going to work. Now, YouTube on the other hand, is a little trickier. It's like the Italian sports car. You got to really take care of it. It's going to need some maintenance. You got to love it a little bit. You can't treat it like a Chevy Silverado like the guy in the previous image, but it can unlock scale and speed and growth. Give you a couple examples. Some buddies of mine ran all the media for Purple Mattress and they grew to over 150 million in sales top line largely from YouTube. And they were not VC backed. They did this all on their own. Dr. Squatch love this brand. They grew from 3 million to 150 million a year run rate, largely driven by ads. I know the agency that does their Creative Raindrop agency, shout out to the guys there, but huge growth there.

We helped with YouTube there, but they grew over a hundred million in sales largely from top of funnel ads. Okay, mistake number two, not understanding that campaigns work together. This is a team sport. I love sports, I coach basketball. We want to look at individual statistics. How are individual players? How are individual campaigns performing? But the collective performance is what matters. It's a team sport. So if we look at the shopping journey, someone goes from trigger to now they're shopping and evaluating, trying to decide what to buy, whether they're exploring, looking at all their options or evaluating going deep on something, we've got a chance to interrupt with the right message at the right time. But all of these things work together, so know that it's a team sport and measure accordingly. And then number three, not getting the proper mix of AI plus smart humans.

So we're not going fully auto, not fully black box where it's like we're just trusting the machine to do whatever it wants. But we're also not saying fully manual as well, because when you've got the combination, you've got smart humans driving good strategy, you got more leverage, more speed, it just works. And the cool thing is Google has had the best AI scientists since 2015. So the backend of their smart bidding and their targeting and their in-market audiences and cool stuff like that, AI is powering that and it's really, really good. So let's dive in five untapped growth opportunities. We'll go quickly, but we'll still spend enough time. First one is performance Max. Show of hands, how many of you guys are running performance Max ads? I see Seven hands or something like that. Okay, great. This is a pretty divisive topic. I'm in a lot of e-commerce forums and I hear people call this performance meh instead of Performance Max.

And so up to date, we've spent about five to 6 million on this platform and with almost overwhelmingly positive results. Now, when I first learned about this platform, I actually, I hated the idea. I'm a Google fan, we're a Google partner agency. I go to the Google offices frequently. I talk to people there a lot. I'm very transparent with my feelings. I said, I hate this I idea. So basically what it is, all seven of these channels, search shopping, Gmail, display discovery and maps. If you're local all in one campaign. So usually you'd have to set up seven different campaigns to reach these channels. But with this, you give Google your assets, your ads and your headlines and things like, and they'll run ads in all these channels. So when I first heard about, I thought this is terrible. I thought this is going to be no control, no room to be creative.

It's just not going to work. But to my surprise and delight, there actually is a lot you can do with these campaigns. A lot. You can manipulate in a lot of ways, you can be creative. And so we'll break that down. So why did Google create this? I believe it's primarily for these two reasons. One, this is the perfect environment for AI and machine learning to go wild because now the machine can do all that it wants to do across all these channels and across all these shoppers, and they'll find you new customers. Also, Google has a lot of unsold inventory. I know these are pictures of boxes. I'm actually talking about unsold ad inventory. So the Google Display network covers like 90% of the web. YouTube has basically unlimited inventory. And Google is saying, Hey, you don't really know how to utilize YouTube and you don't really know how to utilize the display network, but we do.

So give us your assets and we'll take care of the rest. However, you can't just say, oh, here's like a sloppy headline, or here's kind of a lean video and machine. You're magic. You can find people, people will buy. No matter what I say, that is not true. So it requires your best assets. So on the left there, that's true Earth Laundry detergent strips, we helped them launch on Google and on YouTube, that video scaled to over a hundred million profitable paid views and just continues to drive new customers. But in the middle, even the og even search search ads that a lot of people forget about because they're not sexy and they're not new. Those work. But you got to have a good headline, a headline that grabs people and a description that makes people want to click. And so you've got to still have good assets and if you want to succeed on the display network, you got to have good images.

But most of Performance Max is actually this Google shopping. So 60 to 80% of your spend will be in Google shopping. And so you want to optimize your images and kind of the way they look. That's pretty appealing, right? That's overtone, coloring, conditioner makes you want to click. Alright, couple of results. So this is a subscription product, large LTV, great stick rate. So they were getting just right about a two x return on ad spend that may sound low to you. That was great for them. We quickly scaled performance Max from zero to about $10,000 a day and they were thrilled finding new customers, automotive client, automotive accessories, big shopping client spent a lot of money on Google shopping. So when we switched to Performance Max from their old shopping campaigns, we improved impressions and clicks and volume and improved roas. So more sales at a more efficient return.

Now this part's a little bit nerdy. I'll go kind of quickly through this. If you're primarily growing on Amazon, you can't run feed traffic or Google Shopping traffic to Amazon. You can search, we'll talk about that in a minute. But you can actually remove the feed from your performance Max and then you can use Performance Max to grow directly on Amazon. That's more advanced. I wouldn't suggest you start there. A couple of bottom line things, if you're running Performance Max and it's not a top campaign for you, then something's wrong. If it's not driving the most conversions and likely the best row as then something is wrong. And so it ultimately comes down to these three things. Success on performance max, right Audiences. So Google knows who to target, who your ideal shopper is, the right assets, the right creatives like we talked about, and then the right campaign structure.

Now we could spend all day, we could do an entire course on Performance Max, but here's the good news. I actually did make a course and you get it for free. And so that's something that we are giving to everybody. So if you're like, I don't even still understand Performance Max. So we do like a three hour training, we sell it for 400 bucks, that's not like a made up price, that's what we actually sell it for and you get it for free. So it's going to be emailed to you afterwards. There you go. So Performance Max, I'm telling you it's the future of Google Ads. You got to dig in. So enjoy the course at OMG E-Commerce, we accelerate growth for some of the most loved brands in e-commerce like boom, native, true earth overtone, and dozens more. If your Google and YouTube ad performance isn't where it should be.

If you're struggling with Performance Max or if you're not scaling like you'd like on Amazon, then we have two ways to help. One, we have amazing resources that are free for the taking like our top YouTube ads guide with lots of examples, our P max checklist or our Amazon DSP roadmap plus many more or hit us up for a free strategy session. So go on over to omg commerce.com and click on Let's talk to request that free strategy session or click on resources and guides and pick the guide that's right for you. And now back to the show. Next one, Google to Amazon. A lot of people don't know this, but Amazon's number one source of traffic is Google and Google's largest advertiser, the company that spends the most money on Google ads is Amazon. And so if Amazon is spending money on Google ads and you are not, then that means they know something that you don't, right?

Which is this their millions of people every day that search for products on Amazon, but they do it on Google. It doesn't make any sense really, but that's the way it works. A lot of people think the internet begins with Google. That's just where they start. That's where they go to make a search. And so this is just a snapshot of people searching for mattresses. Mattresses, Amazon, over a million searches there. Now, a couple of benefits. If you send Google search traffic to Amazon, we know that Amazon loves external traffic. Amazon loves it when you send traffic that wasn't already on Amazon to Amazon, especially if it converts. Now if you're like us where we're running sponsored products and sponsored brand and sponsored brand ads, we're running DSP for remarketing, then you put Google to Amazon in there, it just makes everything better. So Google to Amazon is a very effective little addition to what you're doing.

Now I want to show an example. So this is the Google search suggest. So I type in protein powder and then I stopped. And you see the number one suggestion is protein powder. Amazon. That's what Google thinks. I'm probably going to type next protein powder on Amazon. Now, if you were to click on the ad, if Amazon was running an ad for that keyword, which they usually are, and you click on that ad from Amazon to an Amazon page, where would you land? What page would you land on? Well, you would land on a page kind of like this, a page that's littered with ads, right? All these sponsored projects. So Amazon's playing a brilliant game, guys. They're paying for clicks on Google, then they're sending people to a category page where they're running their ads and they know people are likely to click one or two or maybe multiple ads are getting a lot of their money back.

But the issue there is your traffic's going to a page where all your competitors hang out. So if you control the ad, if you run the ad, which you can do, and then you can send people directly to your storefront or directly to your product listing, now you've got the chance to really sell that shopper. Now, this may not be a complete game changer for your business. We have some brands that spend a couple thousand a month on Google to Amazon and it's like a nice little incremental bump. We have other brands that spend a hundred, 150 a month on Google to Amazon, and it works, right? It grows ranking, it grow sales, it just works. So Google, Amazon, a great strategy. Strategy number three. This is one that's gotten a lot of bad press lately. Again, I hear a lot of people getting angry, getting upset, getting visceral about this one.

But branded search, some people saying, I will never pay for my own brand name. I've already earned that. So I'm not paying Google, I'm not paying Amazon for my branded keyword. But I think there's maybe an alternative perspective. Love this quote. This is from Mark Pritchard. He's a guy from p and g and he said, Hey, one of the best ways to measure our success is by the number of people searching for our brand. And when that happens for you, when you're no longer just converting sales off of sponsored product ads, but people are looking for your brand name, they're keying in your brand to Google or to Amazon, that's a really special time. You're no longer just selling stuff. Now you're a real brand. And that's where real value comes in later, bigger exits, bigger momentum, lots of good stuff happened, but I don't think you should just go nuts on branded search.

So how many of you guys think branded search is a waste? Like, well, I'm not going to say that now. How many think branded search is maybe just the necessary evil? Okay, how many? You don't want to raise your hand. Sweet. Okay, awesome. So this is the way we do it. I don't know any other agency that does it this way. This applies to Google. We like to separate brand. So we like to think about, hey, if someone's never done business with us, if they've never bought from us, never shopped from us, we're treating that like a new customer. So even if they're searching us for by name, searching for us by name, they saw a YouTube ad, they saw a Facebook ad, they're searching for us by name, but they've never bought before. I want to make sure I'm showing up for that person because there's no chant, there's no guarantee they're going to buy from you.

You're not Nike, right? There's no guarantee you're going to close that sale. So for new customers searching for you by brand, we want to target them. If it's someone who's shopped with you before or they've bought from you before, maybe we don't bid at all or maybe we just bid for efficiency, but we do want to show up for branded search. It is a bit of a necessary evil. You also want to watch that branded search grow as you do cool organic things. You run YouTube ads or Facebook ads, you can see that branded search grow, which is really important data. So we like to separate the two. Alright, growth strategy number four, remarketing and loyalty campaigns. Remarketing. This is something that everybody is doing, but everybody is pretty bad at. We audit hundreds of accounts every year and remarketing is usually there. It just usually sucks.

And so what we recommend here, and I'm going to quote Dan Kennedy again, Devin mentioned this yesterday, but it's a really good quote. The company that can afford to spend the most, not the least, but the most on ads wins. Now the reason for that, this is not advice to just start blowing money or spending recklessly or just spend baby spend, that'll all come in. But the idea is, are ad costs going up or down? They're going up. Is competition going up or down? It's going up. The strategy of let's spend less overtime on ads probably isn't a good strategy. Probably isn't a good long-term way to build a company. But if you're better at remarketing, better at closing people that visit your store or visit your detailed pages on Amazon, then you can be more aggressive at the top of the funnel. And if you're better at getting people to buy more and more often, you can spend more at the top of the funnel.

So a few things we like to do, reorder campaigns, that's where we look at, hey, if someone should buy every 30 to 60 days and they haven't, let's remind them. And so here's an example, live bearded, awesome brand. So if they haven't bought their beer product in 30, 60 days, we're going to run an ad across Google encouraging them to buy. I also love this bought X, not Y. So if someone has bought our moisturizer but they haven't bought our mascara, maybe they don't know what we offer, maybe we emailed, maybe they didn't see it. So we're going to run an ad for them promoting our mascara. If they've purchased moisturizer, this is usually one of the most cost-effective campaigns out there. Highly recommend it if you bought beard products, but not a beard trimmer. We'll say the beard trimmer. Alright, number five, we're going to wrap up right here.

So YouTube, top of funnel. I love YouTube ads. I've been talking about YouTube since 2017. Quick show of hands, how many you guys are running YouTube ads? Not YouTube organic, but YouTube ads. Okay, yeah, that's like the fewest hands of anything yet, which makes sense. YouTube is a little bit different. It's not the easiest nut to crack. YouTube ads are just slightly different. A couple things. One, you have to say enough in your ad. So it's not like Facebook where maybe the video can just be the scroll stopper. And then you've got text above the video to really do the selling and convincing. With YouTube, the ad has to do everything right, the ad has to carry the day. We found as the sweet spot, like the ideal link of a YouTube video if you're trying to get conversions is a minute and a half to three minutes.

Now we've seen as low as 45 seconds work. We've seen as high as seven or eight minutes for an ad work, believe it or not. One exception is YouTube shorts and we're seeing a lot of success on YouTube shorts. Those have to be under 60 seconds. But in general, that's the sweet spot. Important thing to keep in mind is that the story, what you say, how you say it, how compelling are you, how interesting are you? What's the pace of your ad that's more important than the production value. So you don't need to go out and spend 20, 30, 50, a hundred grand on an ad. We like to tell people, dial in the message first. Make sure that you've got the right hook, the right offer, you're targeting the right audience with a simple ad and then you can begin to iterate. But what's really, really cool, so YouTube is maybe hard to dial in, but once you find it, once you find the combination of ad audience campaign structure, we've had the same ad, we've seen this for native, for boom bunch of others.

A winning ad can run for a year or more, same ad. And a lot of that's because Google's audiences or YouTube's audiences refresh all the time. But this isn't like TikTok and I'm a fan of TikTok, but it's not. YouTube isn't that creative hungry once you find things that are working. So I'm going to show you a couple of ads, won't play all of them, but I want to show you a couple ads that have done really well on YouTube to illustrate the point. So this is overtone color depositing conditioner. Let's give this a watch.

Brett:

Here we go. This is insane. This is so bright. It doesn't really matter what your hair type is. A product like this is going to work for you no matter what. Today I am dyeing my hair for the first time with overtone. It's a semi permitted color depositing conditioner. It's a vegan, it's moisturizing. It's really, really easy to use. I'm going to put my hair in like six sections. I applied it on my dry hair. You want to make sure that you are fully saturated.

Brett:

Okay, so that's good. So let's talk about that for a minute. One, I love the energy. It starts with the girls saying, I'm going to color my hair today. It shows pictures of guys and girls with the product in their hair, pink, green, blue, whatever you're looking for, you can go gray or brown too. And so if you're thinking I'd kind of like to do that, now you're seeing people excited and you're seeing people doing it. It shows that it's easy. It shows that it's healthy for your hair. It shows it's vegan and cruelty free. It just makes it seem like I could do that. And then it shows a quick walkthrough of how to do it. Now that did have some production value, but those were mostly real customers and those were mostly influencers. And they were able to get those videos, chopped them up, add some fast-paced music, add some fast-paced cuts. And that ad is cranking. Now this one's a little simpler. This is for live bearded. Live bearded has some higher production quality videos that we run to, but this one is super simple. So I'm going to show a little bit of it. You could recreate something similar to this. So here we go.

Brett:

Without products, with

Brett:

Products before, products after products,

Brett:

My beard without products, my beard with products

Brett:

Without products, with products,

Brett:

Without products with product. If you're considering trying look beard at products, I want to take just a couple of minutes to walk you through these products. Demonstrate first.

Brett:

So super simple in that basically you you're just seeing before and after. So without product, with product, how simple is that? But it illustrates the point. They look better, they look put together with the product in their beard. And then Spencer, he is one of the owners, he just shot that in his bathroom with an iPhone. Here are three ways to adjust your beard care, your beard grooming sequence, simple ad and it works. And we've been running that ad forever. Now, a couple case studies, they got a free bonus and then we'll wrap up. So a large haircare brand, we worked with them. They were a large six figure spinner on Facebook, did TV ads, could never get YouTube to work. And so we worked with them, we helped them modify the creative, we revamped the campaigns and then grew that into their number two source of new customers.

So outpacing everything except Facebook. Now we had another brand, and this is where I want to tie in a couple things related to Amazon really quickly. So we had another brand and they were a large spender on YouTube, but when iOS 14 hit, they paused YouTube because they had to figure out tracking and stuff. And we were also running all their Amazon. And so when they did that, when they paused YouTube over the coming weeks, we saw that branded searches, searches for their brand name on Amazon dropped in half. And we since have gotten them back. They're running things are great. But during that process, YouTube went down. Amazon went down because Amazon, Google, YouTube was driving Amazon business. Now I'm a big fan of infomercials. I don't know what it's about. I love 'em. I remember the Ginsu knife commercials from the early, I think they're actually from the eighties, but I actually did a great podcast with my buddy Jordan Pine and he's like a veteran of the direct response TV industry.

So we talk about this, but if you've ever wondered how do those products work, what's the math behind these products? Because these products, whether it's like a potato peeler, like the tack light, you run over with your Humvee or whatever it is, Ginsu knives that cut through bottles and stuff, how does that work? Because pushing the phone number, like, hey, call in and get this whizzbang offer, or they mention a website or whatever. This is actually the stat. So only about 20% of people call in. Makes sense, right? Need millennials out there. Of course I'm never going to call, but you're probably not going to buy from an infomercial either website. Only about 30% of people do that. But 50%, and this is not mentioning Amazon, this is just running an infomercial. 50% of the sales will come from Amazon. Quick stat, we noticed this with true Earth laundry detergent strip. Once we got to a little over 50 KA month in YouTube spend, we started to see everything else. Lift shopping went up 300%. Search and remarking went up 80%. And so the direct click and buy from YouTube was quite small, but it lifted everything else. And so if you're running YouTube, you are going to see Sales Boost on Amazon.

Last thing, I think the best way to learn is to watch other great ads. This is a guide I put together some of our favorite YouTube ads. I break down why they work and kind of the formula behind it. This does not require an opt-in. This will get you right to the PDF with links to the ads so you can watch those and learn from them and be inspired by them. And with that, that's my podcast, that's my email address. I'll be around. I would love to chat. You guys have been fantastic. Thank you so much.

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How can you make the most of the Cyber 5?

It all comes down to strategy, planning and execution.

Ideally, you’re planning all year and working on the perfect strategies to attract new customers and inspire existing customers to buy more. 

But planning is only part of the success equation. Making adjustments and tweaks based on what’s working and what’s not is also crucial.

On this episode, I’m bringing on a star-studded cast of OMG experts. We talk about Black Friday and Cyber Monday success from essentially every angle. 

We talk about successful email and SMS promotions. We cover do’s and don’ts for maximizing Amazon profits and share insights for getting the most from Google, YouTube and other channels. 

My guests:

• Bill Cover, Google Strategist
• Nick Flint, Email Strategist
• Trenton Bodenbach, Amazon Growth Strategist

What we discuss:

• Top BFCM mistakes merchants make.
• What you need to plan ahead of time and lock in vs. what you can change on the fly during the Cyber 5.
• Or favorite Cyber 5 growth strategies.
• Protecting margin while still driving purchases from customers who expect deals. Can you make a 10% off deal irresistible?

I believe in the who, not the how, for more business problems and opportunities.

Want to grow faster?

Need to solve a nagging problem?

Rather than thinking about how to solve it, you might want to start with who.

But that only works well if you have strong leadership skills. As your business grows, you’ll be doing less and leading more. 

My buddy Peter Awad joins the show today. He’s an eCommerce vet. He launched his first online venture in 2000 and co-founded Mission Meats, an online snack company, in 2015.

Now, Peter’s passion is coaching and building great leaders. 

I’m a big believer that culture and leadership will trump strategy any day of the week.

Here are a few of the things we discussed:

• What’s it like on the other side of me?
• Knowing yourself first.
• Radical candor or ruinous empathy.
• The nothing to lose, nothing to prove, nothing to hide approach to discussions.
• The fact that the life you want, the business you want, is on the other side of a few hard conversations.
• How to lead vendors, freelancers, and agencies better.
• How to have better meetings.

Transcript:

Peter:

If you walk into a meeting, whether it's going to be a tentious one or not, doesn't matter, or this conversation we're having right now, and you repeat that to yourself and you believe it, I've got nothing to prove, nothing to lose, nothing to hide. You show up completely differently. You show up authentically you. And one of those things for Johnny in this example would be like, I don't need people to like me. They don't have to like me. I would like them to like me, but I don't need to worry about losing my likability. What's more important is that I do what's best for the business and do what's best for this person across the desk. For me,

Brett:

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. What's up? It's Brett Curry here, CEO of OMG Commerce, host of eCommerce Evolution podcast. And I'm so excited about the show today because we're talking about improving your leadership. I do believe that culture is more important than strategy because even the best strategy, if poorly executed or if you've got a toxic culture, you won't be able to execute on what you want to do. And I believe culture is totally driven by leadership. So you want better growth, you want more profits, you want to have more fun doing what you do than you need better leadership. You want better vendor relationships, better agency relationships. You need to improve your leadership. So my guest today is Peter Awad. He's a friend of mine. He's the co-founder of Mission Meets an online snack company. He also started his e-commerce group back in the year 2000.

That's right, the dawn of the internet. He started his first e-commerce gig. Now he's the founder and head coach of Whitestone Coaching. And so we get into what does it mean to lead better? How do I lead myself better? How do I know myself to lead myself better? How do I lead better meetings? How do I lead vendors and others? We get into lots and lots of good stuff because here's what I believe. As your business grows, as my business grows and I've got a team of about 70, you're going to do less and lead more. And so there's going to be some effective cools, some tips, some strategies here that I think are really fun and really helpful. So please enjoy my interview with Peter Awad. I'm here with Peter Awad of White Stone Consulting Group. Peter, what's up my man? Thanks for coming on the show and I think this is round two for us on the podcast.

Peter:

It might be so you didn't learn enough the first time,

Brett:

A slow learner man, you had to come back and you keep trying to drill it into my thick skull.

Peter:

No, no, I meant more so you didn't learn the first time to not have me back. That's what I meant.

Brett:

I think either one of those could be true, right? So yeah, I like it, man. First of all, just a good friend, love chatting with you, love hanging with you. Any chance that I get Love your e-commerce background and then also what was you're doing now in terms of coaching. So we're going to talk today about being a better leader and to kind of set the stage for that. I think that's important. A lot of times we get tactical on this podcast. We'll get a little bit tactical today too, but I'm a believer, especially as my business grows, but I think this is true for anybody as their business grows, the answer to any problem, any question, any issue is often more about who than it is about how. So instead of solving how do we come to a decision here or solve this issue, it's more about who do we bring in, who do we consult with? Who is going to be the one to lead this or solve this? And so that really all pivots back to us as leaders. How do we grow and become better leaders? And that's what we're going to talk about today. But first off, we'd love to just talk a little bit about your e-commerce background. You'll be able to connect with people, they'll realize, Hey, Peter is my people. Talk a little bit about running an e-comm brand, the challenges and anything in that that led you to the current path now where you're so passionate about leadership.

Peter:

Yeah, I mean, just quick backstory, I started e-comm in 2000, the actual year 2000. So I'm like the old man in the room. Yeah, started in automotive parts, did a bunch of other,

Brett:

The dawn of the internet.

Peter:

The internet was around then. Yeah, it was around then. So I think that doing that and then starting Mission meets D two C snack food brand in 2015. So just had a lot of experience around e-comm and just the life of an e-commerce owner, which I think is unique in many different ways. But what led me to this is just realizing that I didn't know what it was like to be on the other side of me. I think a lot of times as founders, we find ourselves in a leadership position. We didn't plan to get there. You start typically you're one man band or one woman band, and then you add a couple of people and then before you know it, you kind of find yourself in this leadership position. Maybe you don't call it that, and you're severely outgunned. You don't have the tools or you don't have many of the tools that you need in order to figure out how to lead effectively and efficiently a team or a group of people.

And so I just got off the phone with a new client just right before this call, and he's 57 years old and realizing, man, I've been running a business for 20 years, an e-commerce owner running a business for 20 years, has a fairly large team, and is realizing I don't have the tools that I need in order to lead these people effectively. I've just been doing what I'm doing and it's kind of morphed into what it's turned into and I'm defaulting to certain behaviors and tactics that maybe aren't the most effective. And so that's kind of where I found myself at. And it's a really hard mirror to hold up. Like, wait a minute. I thought I was great. I thought I knew what I was doing. And then you realize like, oh man, I kind of don't look so great some of these days and it's not physically looking great. It's like I don't communicate that well or I'm not communicating effectively or efficiently. And so that's what led me down this path to learning more about leadership, learning more about myself as a leader, learning where I was missing the boat and then improving upon that.

Brett:

It's so good. And I love that perspective of seeing what it's like being on the other side of me. And that's one of those statements that can be a little bit scary, a little bit scary sounding, what is it like to be led by me? And a lot of us, and myself included, we've been leading companies or we've in the executive position, president, CEO, founder, whatever for so long, it's pretty hard for us even to put ourselves in the shoes of someone who's being led. And there's been a few situations recently where I've been talking to groups and I'm like, I wonder, do I ever show up like that? Or is this what it feels like to be led by me? And it's one of those things that it's kind of hard to have that real objective perspective on what it's like to be under your own leadership. And so really enjoy this process. And I'm a big fan of Craig Rochelle, Craig Rochelle leadership podcast, but he says, everyone improves, everything gets better when the leader gets better. 100% agree with that statement. So let's maybe start here. Let's talk about what's the difference between a really good leader and just a mediocre leader?

Peter:

I think that it goes back to not knowing what it's like to be on the other side of you. And big part of that is understanding what you're strong at and then particularly what you're weak at. What's the shadow of your strength? Because you're a hard charger and you have a huge bias for action and you can get things done if that's your personality. A lot of times you steamroll people in the process. I'm talking about myself. I'll steamroll people in the process or I won't slow down long enough to hear what they have to say and understand why the ideas maybe not so great. So we put people through an assessment through our program called Giant as part of Whitestone, and it's called Five Voices and everybody's got the five voices, but they can be in different orders. And so I'm a pioneer connector.

And some of the terminology we use to give you some context is we have triggers and weapon systems. And so a trigger is something that somebody will do or say are the types of people that will then cause you to deploy your weapon system. So my weapon system is a grenade launcher, meaning I will just blow up a situation, person, place, whatever, not physically, but you understand. And then triggers. My triggers are time wasters, people threatening my vision, people perceived as incompetent people threatening my competency. And so it was so revealing, Brett, for me to learn that like, wait a minute, if you're like, Hey, Peter, pump the brakes, I don't know about that idea. I would feel like you're wasting my time. You must be incompetent. You didn't understand the vision the first time. You're threatening my incompetence telling me that I need to slow down and then I'll just blow you up.

And so that's the difference between a good leader and a bad leader. A good leader will know, okay, I have a tendency to do that. And so when you tell me to pump the brakes and you're a guardian, which means you like to dot i's and cross t's, I'm prepared for you. I'm going to bring an idea to Brett and I'm going to be prepared with more data. I know he's going to ask me some really hard questions. And it's not because he's threatening my vision and it's not because he's incompetent. He has a different skillset and he's going to protect the business and protect the vision. And he's actually not an adversary. He's an ally. He wants this to succeed. And because of that, he's going to ask the necessary questions. Now that is an effective leader, I know what your personality type is, and I know mine and we can now work it together.

And this ties back to true ROI of learning this stuff. Most orgs are barely over 50% efficient. Why? Because I might spend an hour arguing with you and really treating you. You're an idiot, and I've done that when instead I'm prepared for you. And we can cut through all that and I can share the data that I need to share so that you can understand and so I can understand where you're coming from and maybe we won't do the idea. It turns out it's actually stupid idea, which is usually the case. And so that's a difference between a good leader and a bad leader. Just one example,

Brett:

This is so good, Peter, because to have a successful organization, you need people with different personality profiles, different ways of attacking the same issue, and finding ways to work together. Because let's face it, if everybody was like Peter, if everybody was like me, holy cow, it'd be a wreck, right? Organization would be a wreck because for me, and I'm more a visionary, high level, pretty fast in a lot of things, but not great with details. And so certain details would just get dropped, missed, it would be a mess. But if we don't understand ourselves, we don't understand the people on our team, then that's going to lead to issues for sure. A couple things that I'm curious, I haven't gone through your test, so I don't know some of the terminology, although it's totally resonating. Have you done Peter Lencioni's, five Working Geniuses?

Peter:

I have not, yes. Have you heard of that? Yeah. Pat Lencioni. Yeah, I have not. I've heard really, really good things. Have you?

Brett:

Yeah, it's really good. And so he's got these acronyms, I'm sure it lines up pretty closely to what you are talking about, but it's an acronym that spell widget, but it's Wonder Inventor, discerner, galvanizer, enabler, and then Tenacity. Anyway, as you look at those, and it's kind of the same thing where you got one or two strengths and you got some competencies and you got some things that you're kind of deficient at. Probably for me, I'm a wanderer and a galvanizer, so I do like to wonder. So it's more like if you're solving a problem, you're like, Hey, what if this might actually be really cool? Lemme think about this big picture thing. I enjoy doing that, but I also enjoy rallying the troops. And what's interesting is sometimes when you face a problem, you just go back to those strengths. If there's a problem, I want to reinvent things. I'm like, Hey, we wonder about this. Lemme wonder about that. And if someone's really just a tenacity person, let's just get stuff done. Problem shows up. There's one charge through it. So kind of understanding how you operate and how your team operates, man, it's a game changer. Game changer, because you go from communicating in a way you're wrong as how we might lean into that to be like, Hey, this is a different perspective and we need this perspective.

Peter:

That's right. You're exactly right, man. And I think that it's so incredibly powerful because just like you said, a whole group of Peters, a whole group of just Bretts, it's going to be disaster. You're going to be running through walls as fast as you can, but they might be the wrong ones. And then a whole group of guardians, the people that are maybe, I don't know the terminology in the six working geniuses, but someone who's going to dot i's and cross T's very, very safe, very, very safe organization going nowhere. And so you need both. And when you see everybody as an ally and understanding that you need all these different personalities at the table in order to do something really special, it just changed the organization, it changed the way you lead. And then also understanding that they've got some weaknesses that got to maybe pick up and you have some weaknesses that you got to pick up. And so together you're just making each other better. And so it's a totally different organization.

Brett:

Yeah, absolutely. And so let's talk about this in any practical tips or suggestions. So it'd be great to use a tool, some kind of personality tool to kind of see how your team operates. I think everybody's got their favorites. I love the way yours sounds. And so once you kind of do that, then how do you create this unity amongst your team? And how do you allow those different voices, different perspectives to be shared, but then also to get stuff done and to move forward?

Peter:

So one of the tools that, because I know that maybe most people are listening and not watching, and so just visualize an X in AY axis, and the top right corner is a liberator. And so the Y axis is support, and the x axis is challenge. So if you're high support, high challenge, you're a liberator, bottom right corner, low support, high challenge, that's a dominator. Top left corners all support, very little challenge. That's a protector. And bottom left, low support, low challenge, that's an abator. And so the reason I'm bringing that tool up is because when you calibrate, and that's a very specific word, and I'll tell you why in a minute, support and challenge to that person knowing their personality, you can bring them effective support and challenge so they can be liberated. Now, calibrated means when you know that person, each person's going to need different sorts of levels of support and different levels of challenge, different types of support, different types of challenge.

So you start to understand what it is this person needs in order to succeed in their position. So that's calibrated to that person. Now, what does it mean to liberate and what does support and challenge even mean? This is the sticking point. This is I've found really, really fascinating, Brett, is that most good leaders that are also kind, which is most of us, they actually lean more towards a protector. They're going to protect that person from maybe not so great in interaction. You're like, ah, John, Jenny, you didn't really perform that well. We're going to avoid that. It might make them feel bad, it might be awkward, it might be awkward for Brett, it might be awkward for those people. And so you're going to protect them. You're going to bring them support, a lot of support, but very little challenge meaning like, oh, I'm sorry you missed the Friday deadline.

How about Monday is Monday, but then that develops a lot of mistrust and why does it develop mistrust? Brett's going to come in over the weekend and just get it done. It really actually needed to be done on Friday. And then they're going to come in on Monday and be like, wait, why'd you do it? You told me Monday was okay. You're like, yeah, it wasn't actually okay, but I didn't know how to bring effective challenge. And we don't have that terminology now why is that? It's because most people have not been modeled what effective challenge looks like. A lot of times we hear that word or we think about a negative interaction where somebody didn't perform well, an interaction or a situation where somebody didn't perform well, we think about it as negative. We think like, oh, there's going to be yelling, crying, cursing. It's going to be stressful. Somebody's going to quit, somebody's going to get fired, they're going to feel bad. There's going to be all kinds of excuses. And so we just try to avoid those. We avoid those situations. And so another podcast that I was on, I was saying this story, and you probably know him, Brett, and he has almost a billion dollars of property under management, $1 billion.

Brett:

Dang,

Peter:

It's crazy. This guy is a real estate. Ty Khan, a real estate guru, and he just starts laughing, why are you laughing, dude? He's like, Peter, I am the deal in this industry. He goes, and even when I come in and there's been a remodel or something's happened and I see all the things that are wrong, I'll then look the contractor in the face or the general in the face and say cash or check. I don't like those situations. I don't like telling somebody, well, yeah, you did a great job. However, there's one thing you got to do a little bit better. So that's him protecting them, but it's also him protecting himself. He doesn't want to deal with that sort of situation. Now, what's the downside of this man? What's the downside of this? You're robbing yourself in many different ways. One is they didn't do the job and that sucks.

You're robbing them because they now don't get to do a better job and come back and be your a-player contractor, your a-player vendor because they didn't know to do better, and so they're going to keep delivering you mediocre work or you're going to have to go find another vendor because you didn't give them a chance to improve. And so you're robbing the business and all the relationship in all the situations in every way possible because you didn't spend the time and do the hard thing to bring effective support and challenge calibrate to that person so they can be liberated and be your A player that's your contractor for the next 20 years. So amazing and know exactly how Brett operates. And so that's just an example of bringing that support challenge, liberating a person so that they can become effective for you. Now, there's people listening right now, I guarantee it. They're like, well, I shouldn't have to do that. They're the specialists, they're the drywall, they're the Google ad specialist. They should be able to do that. I shouldn't have to tell them maybe, but you're the one that's dictating and you're the one that's the drumbeat of the organization. If you want it done a certain way, it is your responsibility to communicate that and give them a chance. Now you give 'em a chance and they don't perform fine, get rid of 'em. But you'll never know until you become that liberator leader.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. And I heard a quote recently that I really like. That's the life you want, the business you want. It's on the other side of a few hard conversations. And if you are stuck, it's because you're unwilling to have those hard conversations. And I really like the way you position that, that it's not just cheating you, it's cheating the other person if you're not sharing that feedback. One of my favorite books in this genre is called Radical Candor by Kim Scott. Do you know Radical Candor?

Peter:

Yeah,

Brett:

It's so good. And she talks about ruinous empathy versus radical candor. And I believe in a lot of ways, I'm a protector. I don't want to make people feel bad. I think I'm very conscious of the way people are feeling and their emotions. I think I'm pretty in tune with that, and I hate to ruin someone's day or make them feel bad. So I would have a tendency to not give radical candor. But the thing is, people want it. They may not want it in the moment, but ultimately they want it. They want that candid feedback. They want to be able to improve, and they certainly don't want to, not if you're upset, they don't want to be sitting in the dark. And I remember one great story about Steve Jobs, and I think we can obviously clearly a genius and one of the great business leaders.

I don't know that we want to adopt all his leadership styles, but obviously a genius and very effective. He had a conversation with Johnny, ive, and of course Johnny Ive is a famous designer that created all the products we love, iPhone, iPad, Mac and all that stuff. And so there was this time when Steve was like, Johnny, why don't you talk to your team about making these improvements? This is not good enough needs to be improved. And Johnny's like, well, there's stress. I don't want to upset them. I don't want to do this or that. And Steve said, no, Johnny, you're just being vain and you want people to like you. He realized, yeah, that's actually a big part of it. And so understanding that too, that part of why I don't want to challenge or give this feedback is because I want people to like me and I'm being vain, but I'm just hurting myself. I'm hurting someone else. And so I've got to give that feedback. So I think it'd be good to talk about how do we get better at leading ourselves? I think that's something we got to do, right? If you can't lead yourself, probably can't lead other people. Then I've got several specific questions I think will tie into our e-commerce owner friends, but also any business. But how do we get better at leading ourselves?

Peter:

So we have a phrase, know yourself to lead yourself. And a big part of it are these voices. A big part of it are like this, you just said this about Johnny, the understanding that you want to be liked and how that's impeding your growth as a leader. And so we've got a phrase, nothing to lose, nothing to prove, and nothing to hide. And it's so interesting, Brett, because if you walk into a meeting, whether it's going to be a contentious one or not, doesn't matter, or this conversation we're having right now, and you repeat that to yourself and you believe it, I've got nothing to prove and nothing to lose, nothing to hide. You show up completely differently. You show up authentically you. And one of those things for Johnny in this example would be like, I don't need people to like me. They don't have to like me.

I would like them to like me, but I don't need to worry about losing my likability. What's more important is that I do what's best for the business and do what's best for this person across the desk for me. And so those types of tools that we teach, they allow you to lead yourself in a way that is authentic and in alignment with who you are. If you think about those three questions and you say them to yourself, do I have anything to lose, prove or hide? And you walk into a meeting, it's pretty crazy because if you even use it on your next one, Brett, and you'll find yourself about to say something, you're like, wait a minute, why would I say that? Oh, I don't lose the argument. Or I need to prove that I know what I'm talking about. Or I need to hide the fact that I made a mistake. Then instead just being like, oh, I don't know. I guess I made a mistake or that was wrong. Yeah, yeah, you're right. It's a bad idea. It's so powerful to see. That to me is leading yourself right down the path that you're supposed to be on. I dunno if that's answering your question.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really helpful and insightful. I do have a couple of questions that to kind of follow up on that. So how do we do that? And it totally makes sense. If you go in with nothing to lose, nothing to prove, nothing to hide, it's just going to go better. It at least strips out the chargey side of emotions that could lead you to make a snap decision or to fly off the handle or do something you're going to regret. But what about situations where it's a pretty tense situation and you do have something to lose, client's going to cancel or customer's going to leave a bad review or somebody might quit. How do you frame that? I'm sure still saying those questions is going to help provide the right frame of mind, but what do you do in tense tough situations?

Peter:

What's so interesting about that question? I've been thinking about it a lot recently. You're walking into a meeting and you're like, man, I'm going to lose this client. You probably feel exactly what that feels like right now. You're like, yeah, I remember this was a month ago at this meeting with a big time client, huge retainer. And I'm like, man, I don't think they're happy. We call it making the implicit explicit. So I'll just walk in and be like, Hey, hey guys, I know we're definitely not making you happy. This has not been working out. We have not delivered on what we were supposed to deliver on or the way that we were supposed to deliver it. So what should we do? And speaking explicitly, everybody knows the elephant in the room, just call it out. And the other thing is on losing the client or the employee is I lean on the fact that maybe that's the right thing.

Maybe the client's not supposed to be your client. Maybe they're making your life hell, you're making their life hell or you're just the wrong fit. And so again, nothing to lose walking in with just being like, man, I don't want to lose this client, but maybe it's the right thing and let's just call out the elephant in the room. Let's make it explicit. Hey guys, we haven't delivered and I'm sorry, what should we do about it? Or with the employee, this situation hasn't been working out. I know it's been contentious for you, it's definitely been contentious for me. What should we do? And just calling it right out, and maybe they're not the right fit. It's crazy examples where you've held onto a client or an employee because you really didn't want to lose them. And you look back, you're like, dude, we should have just cut them loose.

That was so stupid. Why did I fight for that? That was just a bad fit for us. So that's my mentality. Maybe it feels a little bit naive, and maybe it is, but it's like that's how I'd walk into those situations without trying so desperately to hold onto it. And I think it's an andreesen quote, you have to Google it, but strong opinions loosely held comes to mind where it's like, yeah, I feel like this is the right idea or this is the right employee or this is the right client, but I'm okay being wrong. I'm open to being wrong. Maybe I get some more data. And it's just like it's not the right move for us.

Brett:

Yeah, strong opinions loosely held. It's so powerful. And it kind of ties into that the mindset of this is my position until I learn different data, this is what I believe about this topic, this ad campaign, this product launch, this person who's an employee, this is my belief. Until the data changes, then, so I've got a strong opinion, but I'm willing to change if the data changes. And I do think it's 100% the right mindset that you don't need any one deal or any one customer or any one team member to be successful. There are some of those changes that could be right. You lose a key team member, your partner bails, you lose the largest client you have. Some of those things are legitimately painful, but they're not usually life threatening, right? You're going to make it. And I do believe, like you said, most of the time you find out that, dang, it's actually good.

It's probably good that this happened then I should have made a change sooner. And one of my favorite quotes comes from Peter Drucker. He talks about, you look at a situation, so this team member, this vendor, this client, if I had to go back, would I do that again? Would I hire that person again? Would I hire that vendor? Would I take that client on? If the answer is no, then why do you persist, right? And so I love that. Why do you persist if you wouldn't, knowing what you know now, if you wouldn't have done it, why do you keep doing it now? Why do you persist? And a lot of times I think we're holding on because of fear or something when probably if you go in with kind of that mindset of nothing to lose and then you make the implicit exploits like you talked about, then you're probably going to be okay if that thing ends or that relationship ends, and you may find it's better anyway.

Peter:

You know what else, Brett too? You said it's painful. It's painful in the short term because you're letting go of a client and maybe he's a big partier revenue. I just had a friend of mine that he's a freelancer and he just cut loose. His biggest client, big part of his income, he couldn't afford to lose him, but he knew two things. One was making his life hell. And second, if he didn't let them go, he wouldn't have any room to bring the right client in. And so he knew, he's like, man, this is a chicken the egg thing. I got to cut them loose to relieve the pressure from them, but also to make room for him to do the business developing he needed to do to bring the right client in.

Brett:

And it's painful, but I think deep down, we typically know, we know when it's time. We just allow some of the other louder voices of, no, hold on. It'll get better. You can fix it, they'll change or whatever. We allowed that to crowd in and we don't make that change. Well, we've already kind of talked about this a little bit, but I want to go deeper. So how do we use some of these tools or some of the tools that we haven't talked about yet to lead vendors better or to lead agencies better or freelancers? So we've got these other relationships that aren't just people on our team. How do we lead them better?

Peter:

A lot of the same tools, man. I think really a lot of it comes back to me in support challenge. So I don't know how many vendors that we've held onto as our company, I won't speak for you, where I kind of smiled and nodded and I'm like, I don't know. The data they're providing just doesn't make any sense, or I'm not really seeing the results. But they're nice people. They're nice people, and I feel like maybe if I hold on a little longer, things will work out. And instead in the very beginning, understanding what metrics to measure with the data you have now, iterating on those accordingly. And then asking the hard questions, just saying, Hey, how long do we persevere? Or, Hey, this data doesn't line up, or, Hey, I need a different report. I'm not really confident in what you're saying is not really lining up with our expectations.

So again, calibrated support. Challenge those people so that you in the end can do both. Do your business as service, but also them as service and cut 'em loose if it's time. Or they can iterate and they can find that gold coin or whatever you want to call it in your marketing space or in your supply chain or in raw material. And so I don't know, there's a lot of times where I've sat in a meeting and someone, a vendor has said something and I just smile. I'm like, oh, okay, sounds good. But then I get off the call and I'm like, that didn't make any sense. I didn't understand that

Brett:

And

Peter:

I don't want to look stupid. I didn't want to be like, Hey, I didn't really understand what you said. Can you repeat that? And now it's kind of a fun game for me to just ask the dumb question, Hey guys, sorry, dumb it down to a fifth grader. Talk to me. I'm a fifth grader. I don't understand what you're saying. I don't know how this pertains to us. This doesn't seem to be working, but you're telling me differently. What do you mean by that? Help me to understand. And so bringing that support challenge to a vendor or to a contractor in a way, it's the same thing. It's like the example of my buddy in the real estate. It's like you got to be able to do that in order to lead those folks better as well.

Brett:

And from an agency perspective, and we consult with clients, work with clients all the time, and sometimes clients come to us and they just say, man, my Google ads are a mess, or Amazon's a mess. I just need help, man. I just need help growing. Or I know I'm not scaling quick enough. Can you help me? And that's always fine. And we can dig in and we'll ask the right questions, we'll uncover things. We'll get to clarity around goals and objectives and how to support your business. But I always appreciate it. I always love it actually, when a client comes in and says, Hey, this is what we need. We're really, we're trying to reach this objective. We want to get to this top line, this bottom line, because we want to sell in three years. And so our golden metric is we need to acquire new customers at this CPA if we can do that.

And if we can do that on a consistent basis, we will be here forever. If we can't, we're going to have issues, we're going to have to make a change. Or sometimes we've had clients come to us and they say, Hey, in three to six months, we want to build an in-house team potentially or keep you guys on for consulting. But we help build things. And I love that transparent upfront conversation because then we as an agency know how to calibrate with that, and we know how to effectively launch a plan to meet those objectives. And then those conversations are easier too. And I think the same is true with an employee. You hire someone on to run to be a sales rep for you. You clearly say, we expect this kind of inputs and outputs. We think you should make this many calls and be able to answer this many emails and have this many discovery calls. And you just map all that out. This is what we expect, and we will be measuring it and talking to you about it and helping you improve and things like that. That clarity, I think the right team members love that too. And so yeah, I think just being very clear and then measuring against that, man, you almost can't go wrong if you do those things.

Peter:

And you know what else is crazy, Brett, is that there's such a gut rot around not knowing if you're doing a good job. And so the vendor or the employee, if they don't know and they're constantly wondering like, oh, is Peter mad at me? I'm not really sure. I don't know if I'm doing a good job. I feel like I'm doing okay, but he just asked for more, better, faster. And there's no way to put that in a spreadsheet. Yeah, we more better, faster. You want a specific number of what you're trying to hit versus the goalpost just keeps getting moved more, better, faster, more, better, faster. And then as the owner not knowing exactly what you wanted to begin with is foolish. And so for that client to ask you like, Hey man, this is what we need from OMG. We need this, this, and this.

Okay, great. Now we know exactly what you want. And guess what? We can report on that. And guess what? We'll know we're doing good or we're not because you told us what you were measuring. And then you quoted Peter Drucker, my favorite Peter Drucker quote is What gets measured gets managed. And so that falls right in line with just being explicit and support challenge here. There's no need to wonder, this is what you need. We need the CPA. Great. Awesome. This is what we're trying to do. What's an example of the absolute worst client that comes to you, Brett? What's that look like?

Brett:

Yeah, it's usually when things are really, really unclear. And then I love the more, better, faster. Well, what does that mean? What does more mean? And what does faster mean? What does better mean? And like I said, we're pretty good at asking questions and getting there. But what's also kind of funny is we always have these discussions around budgets, right? Because budgets are kind of like a fluid thing with a lot of e-commerce brands. And so the initial growth rep will hear one thing, and then there's another call and there's something different, and then there's the kickoff call and something totally different. And we're like, I don't think this person knows what their budget is. Or sometimes the CPA changes. And it's like we just had to really get way better at asking the same question about three or four different ways. Or you can just tell sometimes someone comes in, they're just buttoned up and they know exactly what they want and that's great. But if they don't, then you just got to keep asking questions and that's all fine. And I think it's one of those things where a good employee, a good agency, a good freelancer, they're going to take it upon themselves to, as Jocko willing talks about, lead up the chain of command, right? I'll try to lead the client better. I'll try to lead my boss better by asking good questions. And if it's not clear, I'll make sure it's clear. So yeah, I think that's important as well.

Peter:

It's so good. I love extreme ownership. That's where that quote comes from. I think on the leading up,

Brett:

It does. It comes from extreme ownership work.

Peter:

And I think that's a really great point, man. For anybody who's listening, who's on the other side of it and they're dealing with their contractor or their vendor and they're dealing with a customer that's asking for their services to know and help them understand what it is they actually want and how to measure it. And so that everybody knows what success looks like. I mean, that's a huge point.

Brett:

So good, man. We've covered a lot of ground and we are about out of time. I do want to ask one more thing before we talk a little bit about your coaching biz and how that works and get a lot of people to get in touch with you and stuff. Yeah. What about leading better meetings? I think this is a real pain point for team members, for vendors, for freelancers, meetings that should have been emails or Slack messages or whatever. But any quick tips on how do we craft better meetings?

Peter:

Yeah, I'm going to lean on EOS and traction for this. For us, having a level 10 meeting and then understanding scorecards and who's responsible for what and what seat do they own and what metrics they're, and then understanding what is it, identify, discuss, and solve. Is that what IDS stands for?

Brett:

Yes, that's correct.

Peter:

And so to drop things in that can wait until the next meeting to drop it in the IDS, and you can go through that and actually solve it on the meeting. And I love the idea of not leaving open loops. We have too many open loops emails that go out and you're not really sure if the person got it done, that's an open loop versus them replying back and we're like, got it done. There's just way too many open loops. And so if you can identify, discuss, and solve on the meeting and have it done and know what the next steps are, that to me, those are my favorite meetings. And so I think that they need to have a clear agenda, who's responsible for what metrics they're reporting on, and then understanding what the issue is and discussing it and solving it on the meeting when possible, not always possible. We follow that level 10 meeting structure. It's my favorite.

Brett:

It's so good. Yeah, understanding who owns this meeting, what's the objective, what are we trying to accomplish in the meeting? And then those other pieces you identified so important because I think in some cases, a meeting is the most efficient use of time you can have if you've got the right group, solving the right issues and talking about the right things. Meetings are fantastic if you're missing some of those components. If there's not a clear objective, not a clear owner, you're not really working towards something, you're just kind of chatting it up or trying to figure out where to go. Meetings are such a waste of time. And then everybody loses energy and then they don't want to go to the next meeting. And so yeah, we spend so much time in meetings, we got to put in the effort to lead better ones. If you do, it's like a breath of fresh air, a boost of energy, a shot in the arm organization. And so you need to make that happen.

Peter:

Yes, for sure. And one last thought on that, think about what you can do asynchronous. Could you have just sent a Loom video? Somebody asked you a question, let's not have a meeting. I'll just send you a loom and it's done.

Brett:

I do love the Loom idea. Love loom videos. The asynchronous is really great. Awesome. Man. This has been fantastic, Peter. I'm motivated. I've always loved leadership stuff, but I want to get better. You're challenging me and inspiring me, which is super great. And so for those listening that say, man, I kind of want to understand those triggers and those weapon systems that Peter was talking about, and I want to really know myself or see myself to be able to lead myself and others and some of those things. Talk just a little bit about your coaching practice and then how can people get in touch with you?

Peter:

Yeah, for sure, man. We do some one-on-one and group coaching. It just depend on what you need and if we're the right fit. And so typically we'll do a discovery call and just figure out what it is that you're trying to overcome and whether we're the right fit or not, and whether you need some one-on-one or whether you need group. We have both of those going on and there's a lot of accountability associated with it, A lot of learning. I like to say we're not just inspiring, we need to be transformative. Otherwise, this is just that conference that you went to and you're super excited and you took a bunch of notes and then you put 'em on the shelf and you forgot all about. You had a lot of email that day. I do not want to be that ever. And so what you're going to learn, it's actually going to take root and then it'll just inject itself in your company culture and you'll start seeing it everywhere. And so that's what we're doing. I do have a free resource for your listeners. They can just go to whitestone coach.com and they can download a free resource. And there's a lot of those tools that I talked about. They're in there, they're free, and they can check them out and hopefully learn something. And if they want to get in touch with me, they can just email me, peter@whitestonecoach.com,

Brett:

Peter@whitestonecoach.com, or go to whitestone coach.com to get those free resources and tools. Peter, I would, ladies and gentlemen, Peter, you crushed it, man. And I knew you would, and you're a podcast pro. You've done this stuff, man, but so good. And we got to remember, everything's going to improve. Everything's going to get better when you lead yourself and when you lead others better. So thanks for the time, man.

Peter:

Thank you, Brett. Appreciate it, man.

Brett:

And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of or less of on the show? If you found this helpful, then I'd love that review. I'd love that. Share. If you know someone else in the e-commerce space or, Hey, this episode applies to about any entrepreneur, if you found it helpful, share it helps other people improve, and everyone's going to thank you for sharing a good resource. So with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Are you dabbling with generative AI or using it to gain a competitive advantage? 

Are you getting better at using AI or staying the same? 

If you're like some professionals I know, maybe you've gotten frustrated with only slight gains using AI, so you've moved on.

I'll admit, I'm still just dabbling compared to my buddy Fred.

Fred Vallaeys is one of the smartest dudes I know. His perspective on AI is inspiring and sure to get your wheels turning. 

But first, take a peek at Fred's resume! 

• One of the first 500 employees at Google
• He was on the team that acquired Urchin, the precursor to Google Analytics 
• He was on the original Quality Score team
• He was one of the original 6 people who built the AdWords editor

Now, he's the co-founder and CEO of Optmyzr and the author of 2 amazing books.

Here's a look at the taste AI morsels we chew on in this episode:

• Practical ways to use Generative AI that you might be missing.
• How to ground the AI so it doesn't "hallucinate."
• Understanding the best LLMs and how they impact generative AI.
• How generative AI is different from Machine Learning.
• Embedding, vectors, and chain prompting

Ready to step up your AI game? I am!

Transcript:

Fred:

The machine continues to learn. And so the answer it gives you today is not going to be the answer it gives you tomorrow. It basically gives them a function, a python function, to calculate some probability of next month's budget. And it's like, oh, great, it's able to do it. So now they come back every week and they plug into new numbers and they ask the GPT system to do it again and again and again. But it's not because it wrote to the correct Python code last week that there's a guarantee it's going to do so again or do it better this week. So every time you use generative, you kind of have to fact check, and that's to your point. I mean, wish I could go sit on the beach, but no, I keep having to validate what it's saying because if I don't, I'm going to get into a lot of trouble.

Brett:

Today we're talking about how to unlevel the playing field with generative ai. We don't want to level playing field. We want to slant things in our favor. Now, my guest today is one of the smartest dudes that I know, Fred Valets. Take a listen to this resume. One of the first 500 employees at Google, the team he was on acquired urchin. Urchin was, it's the U in UTM parameters by the way, but Urchin was the precursor to Google Analytics. Also, his team designed quality score. Quality score is like one of the early innovations that set Google Ads apart from all the rest that awarded ads for their good quality and quality score, so legendary. Also, he was on the team of six that invented ad Words editor. Now he's an author of multiple books, one called Unlevel The Playing Field, and the other called Digital Marketing in an AI World.

And in this episode we talk about how to understand the difference between generative AI and traditional ai, how to use it in very practical ways for your business, where people get it wrong, how to get the AI to stop hallucinating if it is, plus some really nerdy things like embedding and vectoring and chain prompting. It does get a little bit nerdy, but it's also super fun and super practical. So please enjoy this interview with Fred Valets. I'm here with Fred Valets talking generative AI and how to leverage it to grow your business, improve your PPC and do other wildly cool things. So Fred, man, how's it going? It's been a long time. Welcome back to the show, and thanks for taking the time.

Fred:

Yeah, thanks for having me back on, Brett. It's been too long indeed. It's been a weird couple of years and just got back on the road seeing a lot of the industry people. So good to see you again as well.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so fun to get back in person more and yeah, and I used to see each other probably at least once a year, right at a Google Marketing Live or something. And of course that has all dramatically shifted over the last several years, but getting back out there, just thrilled to have you here. And so I love the topic of ai and you literally wrote a book on ai, and so why don't you tell us a little bit about that book?

Fred:

Yeah, I mean, so it's funny because I wrote a book called Digital Marketing in an AI World, and this was published in 2019, and this was after I'd been writing on search engine line in 2017 on the topic of how AI would change the landscape and the P P C professional's job and the digital marketer's job. But that AI that we were talking about back then is so different from the AI that we're talking about now, the generative ai. So I wrote a second book, which is called Unlevel, the Playing Field, and the premise was to take that concept to the next level. So if you believe that the human is still necessary to produce better results, even in conjunction together with the ai, what are some of the techniques you can put in play to make your team perform better? Because as an agency, as an in-house marketing team, sure you can use all of Google's automations and you can get average results.

Now, anyone can get average results, which is really cool because before it wasn't possible for everyone. But if this is your job, if this is what you do, then average is not good enough. You got to prove your additional value. And that's sort of what the book is about is how do you take these really cool technologies and how do you make them your own? And then when it comes to generative, I think it's hugely misunderstood, used in many incorrect ways. And so I'm kind of on a quest right now to teach people how is it different from traditional ai? What does that mean? What's it good at? What's it not good at? How could you use it, and how do you get it to basically get a promotion as opposed to get fired because someone else used it better than

Brett:

Ted? And that's the topic of today, really understanding what generative AI is and understanding how we can use it to unlevel the playing field in your advantage. And I'm still the mindset that it's better to have AI plus smart humans. We're not wanting exclusively one or the other. We don't want to give the stiff arm to AI and say, no, no, no, just smart humans. That's all we need. Scared of the ai, but we also just can't turn things over to the machine and then go hang out at the beach. It's more about how do we leverage AI to do more, to be more strategic, to get more leverage out of what's going on. And so really excited to dive into that topic. We'll certainly talk about a few of the things that we're doing on our end as it pertains to ai, but I'm more, and I kind of this before we hit record, I'm more in the observing, learning, watching dabbling stage. I know you're going really hard into the generative AI space, so can't wait to get your perspective on that. But yeah, talk about what is generative AI and why is it different than traditional? How is it different than traditional AI and where does that trip people up?

Fred:

Yeah, I mean, so when you think about traditional ai, it's really been about machine learning. And we've been using that for a very, very long time. And when I say, I mean everyone listening who advertises on Google, you've had quality score for your keywords, and that has been artificial intelligence. And that thing has existed for over 15 years. So I joined Google in 2002, fairly shortly after I came there, Google started looking at ad rank as C T R was a factor of it, but then it was like, we're not just going to use historical C T R, we're going to use predicted C T R and how do you get predicted C T R? Well, that was a big machine learning system, and it was crazy because these machine learning systems back then, they took months to train, we'd feed the data, and it wasn't months, but it was like weeks.

And then so the machine be learning, and then eventually we'd get something out of it and then we'd be able to go and have the humans validate that the machine predictions were somewhat valid and then we deploy it. And nowadays you do the same thing in minutes, but that's sort of the traditional machine learning, pattern detection, feed it a bunch of your historical data and make predictions about the future outcomes of similar things. Generative is about you start with a blank slate and come up with headlines, come up with keywords, come up with songs, make videos. What's interesting is generative ai, the way it does this is super mathematical and it is based on machine learning. It's based on predicting the next logical word in the sequence. But it's not about giving you the number, it's about giving you the text, the verbose, the beautiful description of something that happened.

So that's a big difference. But then sometimes people think about it and they're like, Hey, well it seems like I can go to Chad g p t. And by the way, when we talk generative and Chad, g p t, it's often interchanged, right? But Chad, g p t is just one of the vendors in that space. But you can go through it and you can give it a mathematical question, and then sometimes you get the right answer. And if you get the right answer, you're very lucky. Lemme tell you that because it's a prediction, it's not an actual mathematical equation that it's solving for. It's just like predicting what's the likely next word. And if you're lucky, it sends your question to the actual arithmetic and then you get the right answer. But there's no guarantee of that. So that's one scary thing because I've seen people go to it and be like, here's a list of keywords. Can you tell me the predicted cost per click for these? It's like, it's just guessing. It's not telling you anything actual from a database.

Brett:

Yeah. And so I think that's really appreciate that breakdown there. And we have been using traditional AI for some time, even going back to the quality score, which kudos to you and the team that developed quality score. I believe that was one of the original innovations that really made Google what it is today in addition to measuring backlinks and stuff like that in the really, really early days. But this idea of giving ads a quality score and then rewarding good ads and the whole ad rank quality score system, brilliant game changer, I think changed the industry for the better. And then of course, as we look at smart bidding, target return ad spend, target C P A, even Performance Max and all the things that are in there that still leans more machine learning and predictive ai. But I like how you laid that out. I've heard that even generative ai, it's still predicting, it's still predicting what should come next in a sequence of words, but it does, it shows up different and it functions a little bit different.

Fred:

Exactly. I mean it's all based on the transformer technology, which by the way, was not invented by OpenAI, it was invented by Google Brain. And then OpenAI, which was a nonprofit, took that technology, did really well with it, and then all of a sudden they were like, Hey, we're going to become a commercial company. And then Elon Musk, who was part of it, he got so pissed, he was like, oh, I'm not doing this anymore. So he left and now he's building his own version of transformer generative ai. It's all fascinating if quality score hadn't existed.

Brett:

So just to double click on that, so transformer that's sitting at the core of OpenAI, that was actually developed by Google.

Fred:

So it was Google Brain that did the academic research that developed that, like you're saying, right? I mean it's all very mathematical and prediction driven models. So I can't explain this because it's way beyond my capabilities, but again, in the sequence. So if you give generative AI a very simple phrase like the cat in the most basic example of generative ai, it's trying to complete your sentence. You basically are saying continue writing from this point forward. And so now it says, well, I could put in the word meows or barks, but how does it know which one is the better option? Well, it uses predictions and it says, well, when I've looked historically, and this is a large language model, so when we say historically, it means all the historical text that it's considered to learn, is it more likely that the word meows appears close to the word cat, or is it more likely that the word barks appears close to the word cat?

And so obviously now it says, well, it's 85% likely it should be meow and only 25% that it's barks. So it's going to say the cat meows, but it could have equally well said, the cat purse. That's another fine answer. And so that's fine when you're talking about being creative, writing headlines coming up with keywords. But if you're saying one plus one equals, well, likely it's seen two appear very close to that combination of words in the past. But again, it's guessing. And there's this fascinating study that came out of Stanford that was done recently, and it basically talks about the concept of drift in ai. And so what they did is they said, is the number 17,077, is that a prime number? It is a prime number. But they asked G P T four in March of 2023, and it was about 84% of the time it got the answer correct. And then three months later, by June of 2023, it was down to around 50%. And that's interesting, right? Because it used to be really good at answering that or quite good

Brett:

In theory, it should get better if it was at 84%, then several months later it should be getting better. Ideally you would

Fred:

Think, but this is what's happening. So they call this the concept of drift. The machine continues to learn. And so the answer it gives you today is not going to be the answer it gives you tomorrow. And that's quite scary because then I've talked to digital marketing professionals and they say, oh, I've been using the advanced analytics capabilities and G P T, and we can talk more about exactly what that is, but it basically gives them a function, a python function to calculate some probability of next month's budget. And it's like, oh, great, it's able to do it. So now they come every week and they plug in the new numbers and they ask the G P T system to do it again and again and again. But it's not because it wrote to the correct python code last week that there's a guarantee it's going to do so again or do it better this week. Every time you use generative, you kind of have to fact check. And that's to your point, I mean, wish I could go sit on the beach, but no, I keep having to validate what it's saying because if I don't, I'm going to get into a lot of trouble.

Brett:

Yeah, totally makes sense. We can't be totally unplugged and unengaged and you got to fact check and you got to spot check. So how can we use generative AI from a marketing perspective? What are some of the ways you are using it now? What are some of the clever ways you're seeing it used? Let's get practical for a minute.

Fred:

I mean, so there's the basic stuff in P P C and search marketing, which is give me some headlines. We have a responsive search ad, so we're being asked to provide a whole bunch of different headline variations, and as humans, we get bored and we sort of run out of steam. And so we have our 10 headlines and it's like, Hey, G P T, can you suggest five more? Kind of like this? So it's really good at stuff like that, and that makes sense right now, one thing to keep in mind is most people, again, they use chat, g p t and chat, G P T is like this one interface where you can have a conversation, but there's not that many tweaks and settings and things that you can control. Once you start deploying these solutions at scale, you're probably going to look at some a p I capability or a plugin for Google Sheets or a plugin for Microsoft Excel. So yeah, one thing that I think is really interesting, especially when you're thinking about creatives and headlines and how creative or non-creative you should be. Like say you're in a regulated industry and you can't really make stuff up or the AI can't make stuff up

Brett:

Finance or health related or things like that, you got to be really buttoned up.

Fred:

Exactly right. And so now you have this factor called the temperature in generative AI that you can control. If you are using a sheets plugin or you're using the A P I, you actually have access to this. And so you can say the temperature is zero, which means the model has to be very deterministic, and it can only say things that it's heard somewhere before or seen somewhere before. Or you can set the temperature all the way to one which is the highest, and that says, just be as creative as you want. And maybe in the example of the cat, it's going to say at some point, sure, the cat barks. Let me try something new and see how that lands. So that's basically one of the things people can do there.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really interesting. We're using chat GBT in a couple of ways. Of course, we run a lot of Google ads, and so we've got specialists that are writing headlines, and now there's kind of the generative experience inside of Google ads, which is pretty exciting. But we've been using it for a while to, as you said, if we're trying to write 20, 30, 50, a hundred headlines, that becomes difficult. If we're running a thousand headlines, that becomes difficult. And so utilizing Ative AI for that is great. I'm writing copy for the podcast and bullet points, and I, I'm creating other content. I found that when I want chat G B T to rewrite bullet points for me or rewrite headlines for a podcast or headlines for an article or something like that, I'm only using the suggestions a pretty small amount of the time, but it's still right, even if I only use 10% of what it's giving me, sometimes it sparks a thought or sometimes it leads me in a different direction or it is just a lever. It's a way to not start at zero. It's a way to jumpstart the next idea. And so yeah, it is generally quite helpful.

Fred:

It is. And I think the more that you start using it and the more you use capabilities like custom instructions and you start doing prompt chaining, it is going to give you better results, right? Because I find the same thing. If I give it a pretty simple prompt, I often have to rewrite it extensively because it might use words that I don't really like, even though I say write in my voice, but maybe I don't like my own voice, I want it to be different. So I've started using these custom instructions on G P T. So if you don't know what that is, it's basically under settings, you can say, this is my context, this is who I am, this is how I'd like you to respond. So as opposed to me having to have that interaction every time I start a new chat, it already knows this about me. And so one song that my kids are listening to a lot right now is A, B, C, D, E, F U.

Brett:

Yes,

Fred:

I've heard song, that song. And yesterday, my son's playing a variation of that, which is actually A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H I love you.

That's kind of interesting. Somebody took that song and what if I took something and did P, P C related A, B, C, D, E, F, and then P, P C, right? So I'm like, I'm going to go to G P T and I tell it, I like this song and I want you to write something like it. Are you ready to do this? And I'm thinking, I'm going to have to give a follow-up prompt, which is like, what is the starting the seed word that I want to start with? And before I even do that, it's like, oh yeah, here's a chorus. And because it knows my custom instructions, it knows that I'm super into P P C. And it wrote me a chorus right there about P P C. I was like, wow, that's spot on.

Brett:

We should share, we should drop that chorus into the show notes. If you're able to share it, that would be super.

Fred:

Right now I'm working on producing the, so I have the lyrics, I have the full lyrics. They're quite good, I think. So

Brett:

You're produce the

Fred:

Song, I have to figure out, yeah, I'm going to produce this song. And so this is not a P P C example of course, but from a marketing perspective, yeah, that's kind of cool if we can put a video out and do something cool along those lines. Now, I'm also, so I'm a Captain America fan.

Brett:

I see that.

Fred:

So I'm trying to produce a comic book with some superheroes about P P C. And again, I'm not a good artist. I can't really draw, but I figured out ways to get generative AI to draw characters in a certain style and to draw images in a certain style. And so a lot of what I'm working on these days is make this generative your own, make it follow your brand guidelines. And that's really cool, right? Because once you get it to that point, now I could imagine you, as opposed to only getting 10% of the headlines and saying, these are good, what if we could get that to 20%, 30%? And that's again, that's the playing field because you're using really cool technology better than anyone else,

Brett:

And it really makes sense. And so you, you're taking your ideas that maybe you previously couldn't execute on either efficiently or maybe even at all, right? To use the art example, got this idea for a comic book, I'm an artist, I can't draw it, but I can explain my ideas to generative AI and it will create it for me. And so yeah, I love that love finding those little improvements and ways to go from 10% to 20% to 30% can be a real game changer. We're also using generative AI to review, do competitor research and look at, hey, this is a product that we're competing against in Amazon. And so we feed all the reviews to the AI and say, Hey, what do people like about this? Not about this synthesizes to me in the top five, top 10 topic thing. And then we can also use it for landing page copy, product detail pages, things like that. So all of that, again, stuff you could do on your own, but unlevel the playing field and gets you to a great place much faster.

Fred:

I don't want to get too tactical, but these are really great examples that you're putting out there. But I think a lot of advertisers or marketers, they kind get stuck at the level of how do I input, where do I even get these reviews? And then once I have the reviews, how do I give it to the machine? Because every time you talk to G P T, you put in a long blob of text. It's like, oh, sorry, I can only read the first 2000 words or whatever. Now you have to figure out chunking it up. So I've done sequences where I'm like, I'm going to sit here on chat and I'm going to give you 10 sections, process each of these and then give me the output. So a lot of the time savings are kind of lost in me having to give it that many examples.

I've been using Claude from tro, that's a Google backed llm claude.ai. What's really cool about that one is you can do five uploads with every chat that you have, and each of these uploads can have 10 megabytes of text. If you think about 10 megabytes of pure text with no formatting, not a P D F, that's a lot of text. This is really good. And then I've even there had conversations. One thing that I like to do in terms of blog production, a new topic comes out and I want to write about it. What I do is I turn on my iPhone, put in my AirPods, go outside for a walk around the block, 15 minutes, and I'm just rambling and recording myself the whole time. I'm like, oh, well here's what I think about it, and it's really cool that this new report includes the cost metric.

And then I'm like, oh, wait, does it include a cost metric? So I paused my recording, I go on Google, I'm like, oh no, it doesn't include the cost metric. So I turned my recording back on. I'm like, scratch that. It doesn't actually include cost, so that's not that cool, so don't mention that. But here's the other things that are cool about it. And then I take that voice recording, I transcribe it. There's a lot of transcription software that doesn't cost a lot of money nowadays, and it's really good. And so you get this transcript of just my stream of consciousness, which by itself is useless, but I give it to Claude and I'm like, what was I talking about? Summarize? It does a really good job. And even the points, the cost thing where I misspoke it understands that I misspoke and it doesn't make that part of the final summary.

And then I'm like, okay, well, so that's what I think, but now here is the article, the help center article from Google about the topic, or here's the blog announcement from the actual place that built this thing, what they say. And then maybe there's like, here's a couple of blog posts from other people who've talked about it and have validated that the blog posts are good, they're factual. And then I'm like, okay, so on what I think and the factual nature of this, propose some bullet points for a blog post, write me an outline. And then it's kind of that chain, that chain of prompting or the prompt chaining that's really worked a well for me.

Brett:

Yeah, it's almost like having a personal assistant, personal writer, researcher all roll into one. But again, it's so relying on your prompts and your direction and your input, it looks fascinating. So Claude, c l a u d.ai. So claude.ai, fascinating. I'll have to use that voice recording idea because that's something I actually, I'm an audible processor, I think better as I'm speaking sometimes. And I do like to be outside, so I've heard some people talking about that. Never use that myself, but I love that. Just pick a topic, start talking. I could see then using Claude to help you write a blog post or write social media posts or whatever. Just lots of options there.

Fred:

Exactly. And the one thing for people to keep in mind too is we've all had voice dictation for a very long time, and it's quite good. You can go into a Google Doc and you can start speaking and it writes your blog post. But I think where I always get stuck on that is I can't process in a logical manner what I'm going to speak. So that's why I prefer writing because I can go back, I can take a pause,

Brett:

You're chasing rabbit trails, you're looping, you're coming back. It's pretty convoluted. And sometimes when you're just speaking, and I think Google is better at this than Siri by a mile, but you start talking, then you're like, oh, wait, no, you didn't get that right. Well, okay, so lemme stop. Lemme correct that. Then lemme get back to it. And then now you've kind of lost your train of thought, right? So

Fred:

Exactly what I'm saying is don't do any of that. Just speak into your iPhone, into your voice memos and then transcribe the whole thing. And then don't even read the transcript. If there's mistakes in there, like G P T is good, they understand the context of what you were talking about and then sort of the same grammatical correction that Grammarly would do by looking at that word in context and knowing it's misspelled. Well, G P T does the same thing. It knows, oh, you probably meant C P C as cost per click instead of C, B, C with like B as in boy, which may be the transcripted, right? It doesn't matter. It picks that up and it's going to fix it for you.

Brett:

Really, really cool. Super helpful. You'd mentioned something before, you talked about drift with AI and how sometimes you can just start progressively getting worse in certain areas. How do you ground the AI so that you can get better results, better results for you?

Fred:

Yeah, I mean, so the easiest way to do grounding is what I just talked about, right? It's chain prompting and feeding it in. Here's the actual thing that I want you to transcribe, or here's the article I want you to summarize. Then it becomes sort of focused in that area. Now, one project that we did as well, so I took the two books that I've written and we wanted to build a chat bot around this, and we also wanted to bring a sidekick into optimizer. So where you could start asking questions about how is my account doing? And maybe we say, well, your budget is not fully spent, but your results are good, but you have budget available, so what is it I should do next? Well, in that case, we would recommend that you maybe increase your bids a little bit, or you find new keywords for more coverage so that you more fully spend that budget.

So that's the advice that we want to give. So how do we ground it, right? Well, there's a couple of ways of grounding. So the first way of grounding is in G P T, there's a thing called function calling. So keep in mind G P T by and large, the data that it has is from a couple of years ago, and then anything specific to your account or your situation, it just does not know. But what you can do is you can say, here's the structure of an A p I call the J ss o n to do an a p I call that's going to give you back the information that you need to do a good job. So if you go and say, tell me something about the budget, it will know, oh, I have a function which allows me to query for the budget for this account.

And so it constructs the J ss o n, the Js O then gets sent on to whatever a p I needs it. The j ss o n comes back with the answer, and now you've grounded it by saying, this is the actual budget, or this is the actual amount of money that you've spent. Make that part of the answer. And then it can do its construction of, okay, well it seems like you spent less than you wanted to and now it needs to give advice. Okay, so how do we give advice? And this is where we get into embedding. So embedding is this kind of advanced concept of vectors where basically the question that you ask is turned into a mathematical number and then that mathematical number is compared to every page of the book. And how do you get mathematical numbers for every page of the book?

Well, you have to embed the book, and this is actually not that hard. So if you look at open ai, they have an a P I that's called embedding. So you feed it one page of the book and you say, give me the mathematical representation of that one page. And then you store these mathematical representations in a vector database. So Pine cone is one example. They have a free plan available, so you put it into Pine cone, and now what happens is if the user comes to my chat bot and wants to have a conversation about their account or advice from the book, we take their question, we turn it into the mathematical representation through OpenAI, they do that for us. Then we compare that mathematical number in the vector database and then it says, well, here's five pages that seem to be similar in the mathematical representation.

So these five pages come back, get given to the large language model, and now the large language model construction response from those five pages. And so what comes out of it is not based on all of the text that the model's ingested, but it's based on five pages in my book. So it is grounded, it is factual through function calling, and that is a way to make it your own. And of course there's many marketing applications to this as well. So you could build a model that says, here's my style guideline, here's every page on our website and how we describe products. So when you go and make ads for these products, it's grounding it in how you speak.

Brett:

Dude, that is next level. That may be one of those we're have to pause back up the recording a little bit, listen to that again, start making notes. There's a lot to that. Super, super interesting. And it really interesting, I think for a lot of people, and I confess this to you before we started recording, I'm more in the learning phase with ai. You are getting after it, and a lot of this is next level stuff. So super interesting. I want to talk a little bit about large language models. I know you talked about Claude, which is kind of backed by Google, and you talked about transformer, which was part of Google Brain. So what do we need to understand about these large language models? Do you have preferences on which ones are better? Which ones are better for different circumstances? What do we need to understand here?

Fred:

Yeah, I mean, so large language models have bias is sort of the first thing because they've been taught based on a certain set of text. And one fascinating example to me is if you ask a large language model a question about gun control, you're going to get a liberal sounding answer. And if you ask that same large language model a question about religion, you're going to get a conservative sounding answer. Why is that? Does it have a political affiliation? Well, no, it doesn't. It's just because more liberals have written about gun control and more conservatives have written about religion. So it takes that tone of voice, it mimics that. So the question that becomes about can I build a large language model that maybe it doesn't talk about the things we don't want to talk about? So could I build a large language model just based on my corpus of data? So the books that I've written, the FAQs on the optimizer website, the support questions that we've had. So the answer is no, you probably shouldn't because you're not going to get to the volume of text to teach a good large language model. That's

Brett:

Not a large language model at that point. That's just too small of a set of data.

Fred:

Exactly. It's pretty small. And there's pretty interesting studies that show there's really like an inflection point and it needs to be a very, very, and we're talking about on the smallest side. So meta has a large language model, which is based on 70 billion parameters, 70 billion parameters, and that's small. Five times bigger is Google's model, which is called Palm two, so that's about 340 billion parameters. And then five times larger is G P T four, and it's split eight ways. But basically when they combine this all together, it's five times as large. So it's in the trillions of parameters, it's 1.4 ish trillion and we're just not going to get there. So we have to look at these different models. So Metas is good. It's called Lama Lama two. It is free for commercial use. So it's not the biggest model, but it's free, which is really appealing. As with anything from Google, I think it's a little bit too factual. It lacks creativity in my mind. That's always the frustration I have. That's the frustration I have with Bard as well. If I ask it to write something, it's like, yeah, it's kind of correct, but it doesn't read nicely, so I have to teach it too much to take on a certain tone of voice. G P T four, I mean, what comes out of that is beautiful. I really love how G PT four writes sort of the inferences it makes.

Brett:

You can get it to write in any style. We were got to get the office who's always getting Chad G P T to write memos that he sends out. I want this to be like a snarky third grade English teacher's voice or whatever. And it is pretty good. It's pretty good at adopting that tone.

Fred:

Exactly. And so that's sort of the three models that I would look at, the three primary ones. But then even within the large language model, if you say that you go with open ai, you have to start thinking about costs, right? Because Chad, g P T, sure you pay $20 a month, but you're not going to scale your business. You're not going to scale an agency or a big in-house project with that. You're going to have to use the A P I in some capacity to do things for 10,000 products for 15 advertisers that you're working with. And so when it comes to the A P I, now you have choices. You can use model 3.5, you can use model three, model four. And sort of the trend is every model becomes three times as expensive as the previous one. And then if you get into the really old model, it's like a hundred times cheaper, a thousand times cheaper, but that cheapness comes at the cost of it's not as good, it's just not very good at writing headline.

So at the very minimum, you probably want to use model three. And then speed is the other consideration I love, you can go and talk to G P T four and you can sit there reading the response as it's generating. So by the time it's done generating, I've already processed it and I'm like, yeah, this is good, or No, this is bad. It needs a tweak, G P T 3.5. On the other hand, it's like, boom, here's the response. Here's two pages of answer about the thing you just asked, which is amazing. But if speed is of the essence, which it often isn't in business, then 3.5 may be a better model to stick to. And then you sort of ask what's up with these different large language models? And so training your own model, that's like question number one, should you be doing that? And then if you want, we can talk about fine tuning and embedding, which are sort of prompt engineering, which are those next two levels that are probably a bit more accessible to the average user.

Brett:

So we talked a little bit about embedding already, but how does that apply in this context and kind of the prompt engineering? What advice would you give there? Where do we maybe get it wrong naturally? What say you on that topic?

Fred:

Yeah, exactly. So the prompt engineering that oftentimes is about things like in context learning, and it's about providing that thing that you wanted to summarize or that you wanted to talk about or the source of truth for what it's going to verbalize. And so again, it's about function calling. It's about turning things into vectors and storing it into a vector database. But again, it can also be about simple prompt chaining. The other thing people often don't really understand about generative AI is that open AI's initial models, we're not chat-based. Now chat is nice because it becomes an interaction and that interaction has memory. So the thing you asked five questions ago, that's part of the memory of that large language model. And so it brings that back and it keeps grounding things in what you asked at that point. Whereas the original forms of generative AI were much more in completion mode.

So it was like, here's a list of five bullet point headlines, and then you would say, now complete this. And it'd be like, okay, here's 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 in that same style. So it would use your one prompt to come up with the next thing. But prompt chaining is probably one of the easiest ways to not go into embedding, but sort of prompt engineering, give it better or give better answers based on what you've built up to. And the other thing, like you said, this isn't like having an assistant, right? You can't come into the office and say, Hey, write me a blog post. I mean, sure, but what about how long? You have to give it very specific instructions, take a few minutes to come up with a really good instruction, and what would you have put in the email to your employee to help you with that? That's a good instruction probably for a large language model. So you still have to do that work. But what's cool too, that is you can actually use, so we use Mid Journey for image generation, and there's a very specific way of prompting Mid journey. So you can go to G P T and you can say, write me five prompts to get this sort of an output from Mid Journey. And now the one AI is telling the other AI what to do. And that works really well too

Brett:

If you want to get better at prompt engineering so that AI gives you better answers, use AI to help your prompt engineering. It totally makes it very meta.

Fred:

And then you know what, at the end of the day, Google's AI is reading the content that you've written to decide what's good enough to recommend to a user. And by the way, that's the other thing I was really, my mind was blown when Google and Microsoft, they started putting generative results. Because when I looked at chat G P T and people would ask the questions, I go, what's the highest tallest mountain in the world? Okay, it's Mount Everest. Maybe it's K two, I think. I'm not sure if that debate ever got resolved, but it's like, okay, well, so it seems to know things, but it's often also making things up. There's this great story I was talking to a friend who's a PM at Google, and he was in a meeting and they were debating what's the average conversion rate in B two B P P C?

And they were not agreeing with him that it was around 30%. So he goes back, G P T had just come out with chat G P T. So he goes, ask the question, and G P T comes back and he's like, yeah, it's about 30%. So he feels super validated, but he's like, well, can you give me some examples of reliable c r REM companies that talked about average conversion rate in the past year? It's like, okay, Salesforce, HubSpot, Oracle, and it's like these PDFs to these amazing sounding reports. So he clicks on the links and it's 4 0 4 error after 4 0 4 error. And what the large language model had done, it was like, well, you told me reliable C R M companies. So HubSpot, Salesforce, Oracle, it knows that it's like something that was written in the last year. Oh, let me put 2022 in the title of the link.

And by the way, G P T doesn't even look at links after 2021 or some of the models Don, right? So how does it even know that? So he was smart enough to click on it and not lose his job as a result of making stuff up. But then it was like, well, now all of a sudden Google and Microsoft, they're doing generative results. So how do they make sure that that is correct? That's exactly what they use as they use embedding. So it's not like they have a large language model and that thing magically knows the right answer to anything. No, they're still running it through Google's ranking algorithms and they're saying, well, look, here's 20 high ranking pages about whatever you asked. And they use vectors and they use semantic search to do that. And then it says, okay, now give these 20 results to a generative system and summarize it. And that's why the answer is usually fairly correct because it's not making stuff up and it's grounding by in context learning of saying, here's the 20 articles that I want you to take back and do something for the user with.

Brett:

It's amazing. It's amazing. So we're running out of time. I want to talk about just a couple things here as we wrap up just to see if you get a perspective. So how do you see chat-based AI changing Google's core, which is search, right? So there's, there's all kinds of debates and articles and stuff online talking about, Hey, chat, G P T is going to destroy Google search, and will Bard be enough? And Bard's going to upend Google's economic model and stuff. How do you see chat influencing search and search ads?

Fred:

Yeah, I mean, it's a big unknown. And the question is how do users interact with this chat? And I've been fascinated because I think Microsoft's approach to generative is much less aggressive, at least on the search results page than Google's. And you would think as the number two player, Microsoft would be incented to really change things up. But for them, it's a fairly small section that runs on the right side, and then you can expand it up in the edge browser to be full page. Whereas Google, it's like, I've turned that capability on, and half the time I don't see the organic search results anymore because they get pushed down by the generative answer. I think I've already seen improvements where Google is getting quite good at knowing what deserves a generative answer and opens that up by default. And something where it's more debatable, if that's helpful, it stays closed until I say, go and give me the generative answer.

But what you do have to realize, and you see this within Google, is that like I'm saying, what's in that generative answer is still what came out of the top ranked organic results, the top ranked shopping ads show up in there. It's just summarizing it. It's just providing a different interface to interact with them. But then the big question is, how does the user interact? Does this become a zero click search event where they got their answer? And if that's the case, then it probably wasn't commercial. It was probably not going to be leg gen anyway. So at some level, like who caress, right? But those things where the user does need to click through to buy something to get more information from your company, those links are appearing in generative. So I would say, I mean, keep doing the things you're doing, use generative AI to be more creative, to produce better content.

But if you're just turning it loose and saying, generate me 10,000 landing pages about different cities for my hotels, that's probably pretty risky. You need to ground it, you need to train it, you need to fine tune it so that it speaks your language, and then you still need to have human quality control on top of that, and that's going to produce good content. Google might appreciate that. That might become part of the rankings, but at the end of the day, this is Google's cash cow. So if the cash cow dies, then I think we're in a lot more trouble in general.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah. They're going to find a way. Google's always good at figuring out how do we still monetize this? How do we make sure there's plenty of ads to click? Because you got to keep the machine going and you got to keep advertisers happy. And let's face it, we all love Google search. If we're searching for something that has commercial intent, if I'm looking for a product of some type or a place to stay or a place to go, people click on ads. People click on ads even more oftentimes than they click on organic results. And I love what you said though, even the generative results that is pulled from, if it's something product related that's pulled from a shopping theater, it's pulled from a website. And so having the right structure, the right ss, e o, the right feed optimization, all of those details really, really important. And if you have that, then you're not going to get just left in the dust likely by the generative results.

Fred:

Exactly. And I think this whole track of having more authority, more influence, I think is really going to continue to matter a lot. So for what it's worth, I mean, something that I've written, because I've written a lot about it, it's been linked back to like Google's going to say, well, something that he produces probably is going to be better than something that's been no name author. That is probably just generative ai. So build your brands, build authority. It's same things we've been doing before. And then we also have to think about multimodality, right? We're seeing fewer and fewer clicks from text-based search results. We do more video. I mean, we're doing this podcast, right? It's because people like listening to people, they like seeing people. That's how people get a lot of content these days to do more of that.

Brett:

But it also does sort of just go back to Google's original. One of the original thesis was what if great ads are just answers to questions? And so then it's a matter of, okay, well, how do I answer the question in a really great way, whether that's through text or video or through my feed or through the page or whatever. And yeah, it comes down to just building a great brand and being great at merchandising and creating a great experience. And if you do that, yeah, the AI is going to help you, not hurt you in the long run. Fred, this has been amazing, and we could keep going and we just barely scratched the surface, and a lot of people's heads are spinning. Mine was spinning at several points in this conversation, but if you want to dig in, read your books, read your blog, check out optimizer, how can they best do that?

Fred:

Yeah, all of those ways. And then you can connect with me on LinkedIn. So frederick vales optimizer.com, go take a look at our blog. We produce A P P C town hall, which is every month we do a video episodes. So we talk to interesting people, and I think you've been on it, so have great conversations there. But yeah, thanks everyone for listening. And if I made head spin, I'm sorry. I hope I at least gave you some nuggets. I'm working to dig deeper

Brett:

In a good way, in a really good inspiring, yeah. Yeah, you're generating ideas, man. People are going to be able to listen to this and put this into, I also feel smarter just by listening to you, so that's always good. So awesome. Fred Valets, ladies and gentlemen, I'll link to the books. I'll link to everything in the show notes. So check that out. Check out optimizer. And also you spell optimizer too, Fred, because that's an area where people get tripped up sometimes.

Fred:

Yeah, O P T M Y Z R,

Brett:

Which just turned 10 years old, by the way. So congrats on that. Awesome piece of software top rated. Check it out if you need some help with your P P C optimization and with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Price. It’s an emotional topic for shoppers and for brands. 

As shoppers were more influenced by price than we care to admit.

As brands we’re often afraid to change our prices. And our current prices were probably created a long time ago. It’s almost a certainty that they price for at least some of your products is wrong right now.

Byron Myer’s is a super smart dude. He started Inogen, a med-tech business, while in college and took it public in 2014. Now he runs Glimmer Wish with his wife and daughters. He used price theory and price strategy to add tens of millions in sales at Inogen. He’s also used it to scale Glimmer Wish from 0 to over 7 figures in less than a year. 

And this isn’t a “let’s raise prices a bit and see what happens” approach. This is a scientific, mathematical way to find the optimal price to maximize profits.

Why Is your pricing wrong:

• It’s likely based on flawed strategies like competitor benchmarking or cost plus. Both strategies are ok to start with but do NOT produce your optimal price for total profits.
• You’re following old customer psychology that states you should always charge $19.99 instead of $19.97 instead of $20 or $22. Often this is incorrect.
• You haven’t changed the price in over a year.
• In the current environment if you’re not changing price or running tests quarterly, your pricing is probably off.

This topic will make you more Cold. Hard. Cash. Give it a listen!

Byron:

Everyone is so data-driven on ad performance, right? Or they're doing a CRO experiment and they're just diving into the data. But then again, they haven't looked at price in five years on their main selling product. So take that same mindset you use that you're so analytical with on your paid ads and apply it to pricing because there's just so much value. It's one of the easiest things you can do now that you know that there is a process to do it, to improve profit for your business, all of that profit's just going to flow straight to the bottom line. And it's best for almost every brand out there. I could almost guarantee you're at the wrong price point right now.

Brett:

Hey, it's time for the Spicy Curry segment. The point of the show when I get just a little bit spicy. And how is this for spice for you? Your prices are wrong. Almost undoubtedly what you're charging customers right now is not optimized. And I think the reason for this, and we talk about it in the show, is because we kind of are reactionary with our pricing strategy. We price based on co competitors competitor benchmarking or we use cost plus, but we never look at how does our price impact conversion rate and total volume and total profits. And here's the deal. Mathematically speaking, there's a way to find the right price for your business, the right price that will maximize total profits. The deal, we can't take percentages to the bank, we can't take competitor comparisons to the bank, but what we can take to the bank is cold hard cash. So in this episode, Byron Myers and I talk about pricing theory, pricing strategy, and pricing optimization, that you're going to love it. You got to check it out. So now back to the show. I'm here with Byron Myers and can't wait to dive into pricing and pricing strategy, but I want to hear a little more of your story, Byron. And so you're a longtime entrepreneur, very successful guy. You started a med tech business, then now you got a business with your wife and daughters. And so we're going to talk about both, but talk a little bit about your med tech business, why you started that and what the scoop was behind that.

Byron:

Happy to and just great to be here as well. Brett, this is, you're one of my top three podcasts of all time I listened to on the regular. So love that. It's an honor

Brett:

That warms, that warms my heart. That's better than a fivestar review any day, that verbal affirmation there. Love it. Thank you

Byron:

For sharing that. So yeah, my entrepreneurial journey started back in college, uc, Santa Barbara entered a business plan competition with a couple friends just for experience. Didn't want to start a company, but we stumbled onto a great idea, just completely driven from the market, just trying to solve a problem for a grandmother, and that was a portable oxygen concentrator. So basically made its own oxygen from room air and would replace all of the oxygen tanks that people had to drag around, which obviously have a limited capacity. And again, just all from the market. None of us were engineers. I was a math econ major and so it was another founder and the third was biology. And so we really developed the technology along the way after we had a full understanding of the market. But we launched that company still while in college. Ultimately took it public in 2014 at the peak, our market cap was over 6 billion. Definitely has stumbled since then. But I put in a good 20 years with the company and now actually I'm doing a new company Glimmer Wish that my daughter came up with haircare and skincare. And that has already been more fulfilling, has been more fun, more rewarding personally than taking a MedTech company public. It's just been great to do it with family

Brett:

And that's one of my dreams. I would love to start a business, start a brand, do something with family. We have a small real estate business that a few of my kids and my wife, my wife mostly runs it, so that's fun. But we'd love to do more. Building a business with family kind of fun. And it's great. Even if it doesn't make a lot of money, it's still enjoyable. And so I love the story though of Enogen where most people that start a school project, Byron, they just try to get a passing grade and hope the teacher doesn't call 'em out too much. They're just throwing stuff together. But you built an idea that eventually turned into a real business that eventually iPod. That's crazy. Not very often that that happens for sure. And I know maybe the recent history hasn't been as great for the company, but great while you were there, sounds like, and things do change for sure. I love this topic of pricing and price optimization, but when did you first become passionate about pricing? Was that something that just kind of evolved over time? Was there a eureka moment? Talk about why you became so focused on pricing.

Byron:

Yeah, yeah, great question. And this has really become my passion project now because brands I've just noticed don't pay attention to pricing, but how I stumbled across this at some point along the way in the Inogen journey, I wanted to put some more tools in my toolbox. And so I did the Rady M B A program, which is at uc, San Diego down the coast from where I was in Santa Barbara. And just in one economics class, the professor was talking about pricing just sort of on the side more on a theory basis. But I took the M B A program for my business. I want tools. How am I going to grow my business, make it as successful as possible? I didn't want just the M B A to further my career on my resume. So I saw there that economic theory allowed people to optimize prices by really solving for prices. But in the textbooks it's done with quantity and on a theory basis. So I adapted that to the modern e-commerce seller, which was all on conversion rate and made a bunch of changes and then used it in Inogen and used that process repeatedly year after year to optimize prices. And we improved profit by millions by doing this. And so now I'm doing it in my new businesses and it's working well and I just want to share it with others.

Brett:

Yeah, this is so interesting because I think most people when it comes to price, they're more reactionary. They're looking at what competitors are charging, they just arbitrarily pull something that's kind of what do I think I can get away with? What do I think I can charge here? Rather than being strategic and mathematical and applying pricing theory. And to your point with your previous brand, this was responsible for millions and millions of dollars in profits by improving your pricing model. And little changes in price can have a dramatic impact on profits, but little changes in price can also have a dramatic improvement or change in conversion rate. And so really excited to dive into this topic a little bit, but where do you think most brands get priced wrong?

Byron:

Yeah, I think that probably the most common error is that they just set it and forget it, right? They think about price once and then never look at it again. But the second most common problem is that they're setting prices incorrectly. And I think largely using the methods that you mentioned, they're looking at co competitors. That's competitor benchmarking. They're doing cost plus trying to get their margins to a certain place. But all of those methods, I mean they're great when you don't have any data and you need to launch with something, but once you have data, you need to use a mathematical tool. And to be fair, I just don't think brands are aware that you can mathematically optimize price to maximize margin. I mean, it's not a just arbitrary point. You test and test a few prices one way to do it, but you're not going as far as you can. There's an actual method you can use to get to the right price point. There is a correct price which you can solve for.

Brett:

And it's really great that you said some of those tools, competitor benchmarking or cost plus. It's okay if you don't have data or you got to start somewhere, so you got to start somewhere. But yeah, ultimately is your goal to compete with your competitors or is your goal to maximize profit? Is your goal to get a certain margin on each item? Or is the goal to maximize total profits? Right? We don't live on percentages. We can't take percentages to the bank, but you can take cold hard cash to the bank. And so yeah, you can find mathematically what the right price is. So can you walk us through what does your model entail? How are you weaving theory with practical tools and stuff? So walk us through that a little bit.

Byron:

Yeah, you can really set up a few simple tests, which you need to gather the data, which you would then do calculations with. And you hear a lot of people say sometimes, especially now, just raise your price, see what happens, see if you're better off, which again is better than not doing anything. But I found that many times brands are better off lowering price because you get such an improvement in the conversion factor. And so as you said, it's not about maximizing the margin on a per sale basis, it's the total margin in the business. So what you need to do is run several price tests and pick higher prices, pick lower prices really as far away as you can, 10 20% or more. It kind of depends where your price point is and capture the conversion rate data at each one of those price points.

And there's tools out there to easily do this. Like the simple shop is one where you could see conversion data on a per product basis. You can get it in ga. Shopify doesn't show conversion rate by each product for some reason, but I'm hoping they're going to improve that. But then you're essentially drawing this relationship, which is actually the demand curve. Every business has its unique demand curve, which is also price elasticity. So that's how demand is changing. So in other words, how the conversion rate for your product is changing as the price changes. And so each one will have a different slope, a different shape of that demand curve. And once you have that data, then you can do some real math. And from there it's just an equation. You need some other points of data, but you're just doing calculations to find the right price and not between those test points that you did, but any price along the whole demand curve which will maximize profit.

Brett:

Yeah, it's super interesting. So not just what the prices you tested, but look at that demand curve and the concept of price elasticity. It's brilliant and it does unlock new thought processes and a new level of profitability for you. I remember actually this is one of the areas in college really sticks out in my mind. The price elasticity of demand and understanding that for some things are very elastic. Heart surgery as an example, you need heart surgery. Does it really matter what it cost? You're going to figure out a way. It could be 10,000, be a hundred thousand, be 200,000, you're going to figure it out if you need it to save your life versus gasoline. I don't know, the two gas stations next to each other, one's 10 cents a gallon cheaper. You're probably going to do that. Why wouldn't you 5 cents, even 1 cent a gallon cheaper? If you notice, maybe you would take that into account and that's inelastic, right? And so what you've got to do though is you've got to price, you've got to have enough tests of price to build that demand curve for your business and then you find the sweet spot along that curve. Am I understanding that correctly?

Byron:

Yeah, pretty much. And almost every brand in e-commerce is pretty elastic, which means it will vary. The conversion rate will be sensitive to price changes. And so almost every brand can benefit from doing this exercise. And you need to understand what that price elasticity value is for your business. And then you can find out what the optimal price point is doing a bunch of math.

Brett:

And now that I just said that, did I inverse those? I know what I described was good, but I think I described one as elastic when it was not elastic, and so I didn't want to spell you out. Econ class concept is the same. I swapped the words, whatever. So yeah, demand is inelastic for heart surgery, demand's going to be what it is,

Byron:

Elastic

Brett:

For gas, so

Byron:

Correct.

Brett:

Thanks for not calling me out, but there was something in there that you said, I was like, oh, wait a minute. Yeah, I said that backwards. How many tests are we maybe going to need to run and for how long can help map that out?

Byron:

So at a minimum, you want a higher price point than your control and a lower price point than your control. So you have three distinct points where you're using your control price as well. Ideally I like to do more, but it kind of comes down to the brand's ability to track data, to simultaneously run tests. So you're doing these simultaneously. Ideally, if you're not set up to do that, you can do them sequentially, then you have to take into account seasonality. You have to have some normalization factors that put the data back so you can compare it with the prior data, but that's all doable. This is all better than not looking at price at all. So we're better off no matter what. And a lot of people get all concerned about is the data statistically significant and all that. Of course you can use calculators online to find out if it is and the amount of data you need to run for it to be stat sig and all that. I try not to get too hung up about that because again, you're all better off no matter what, but I tend to run a test for at least one month regardless of the volume that a brand's doing. So ideally you're simultaneously running three different price points for at least a month

Brett:

Would be control, higher price, lower price, run those all three simultaneously, ideally for a month.

Byron:

Correct. Then you'll have plenty of data to do the calculations.

Brett:

And when you're running these price tests, are you mainly suggesting someone does this on their Shopify store or on Amazon or both or does it depend on where they get the most volume in any insights there or does it matter?

Byron:

You can do it anywhere for a glimmer wish. Amazon's doing great for us right now. That is our best channel. And so we're leaning into Amazon. I've done all of the data using Amazon data. You can get to conversion rate data in Amazon, you can change prices, you can do some price AB testing, but you don't need to wherever your most volume, the volume is for your business. I recommend doing the process, but you can do it everywhere.

Brett:

Yeah, super interesting. Cool. And so anything specifically for a Shopify store owner? I know you mentioned can see conversion rate by product. So if we are running a Shopify store, that's where we need to lean into GA or some other tool

Byron:

You can use ga. I use, I think it's $5 a month and no relation on my part, but it's called the simple shop.com and it's just an overlay and it will show you everything you need to know, conversion rate data by product and a bunch of other helpful info. So it's a pretty inexpensive solution.

Brett:

And then you're getting the data, you're running the calculations, and that's going to basically the calculations you run, is that going to give you one price? Is it going to give you a price range? What is that going to spit out for you?

Byron:

It will give you the exact price to maximize total profit. Now, there's two separate processes actually. You can maximize total revenue or you can maximize total profit. And those are two distinct price points. That's not the same price to accomplish both. And so if for some reason you want to maximize revenue, you're valued on revenue, not on profit, it could be

Brett:

An exit and you want to show that top line growth and there's some real business reasons to do that

Byron:

Potentially,

Brett:

But you're going to maximize profits.

Byron:

So you could do that. And I like to do that anyway just to see where that point is. But most brands are going to want to maximize profit, so it will give you the exact to the cent price. Now from there, I recommend doing some fine tuning just math, and then I talk about in a course I have where you can bring in consumer psychology and some other factors where you do want to finesse that mathematical price point a little bit sometimes to just fine tune it,

Brett:

Yeah, get it to maybe end in an interesting number. You do the dot nine 9.99 or 0.97 or 0.67, whatever, what you do in there to optimize. And then you're also taking into account other things like how's this going to impact my sales velocity on Amazon, which could impact rankings, which has a bit of a virtuous circle I guess because it's looking at conversion rates, it is taking that into account.

Byron:

It is, and it's also taking into account in the equations you need your marginal cost, so that's the cost for one additional unit. And so you're not including fixed costs in there like rent and overhead and actually not even including advertising costs, which a lot of people would include, but just that cost really of your product, any processing costs, fulfillment costs. So some of those Amazon fees are going to go into that as well. But you need your marginal cost and eventually you get your marginal revenue from your demand curve. And so to get marginal revenue, you have to do some derivatives. So I don't want to scare people, but there is some math involved, but I have a calculator to make it easy. So you don't have to do all that hard work, but you're setting marginal costs equal to marginal revenue. And that is what is from the textbook that when you do that, profit is maximized at that point. And so it's just how you manipulate the data to get it into the economic theory to maximize profit.

Brett:

Nice. So you need to understand it for the most part, but yet you don't have to run all the calculations yourself, just get the inputs, use your tool, and then it will spit out the answer. Now, once you get that optimized price and it's to the penny, and then you maybe tweak it a little bit to use consumer psychology and things like that and to make it look right after you do that, now how often are we going back and looking to run a test again and maybe change our price or reoptimize,

Byron:

Right? I'd say at least twice a year. And this will depend on a lot of factors, how much volume the brand is doing, if there are changes, competitors coming out, other products launched right now, just the economic environment, so uncertain, I would probably be doing things every quarter because everything, what this process is using is real buying decision. That's why it's so much better than any other method. It's how people are spending money from their own wallet. That's the data you're using. So everything's included, the economic factors going on, large macro factors where your competitors are priced, even using the cost of your product, your cogs, because that is changing as well. So all that data is factored in to these decisions.

Brett:

And man, with things changing rapidly right now and inflation still happening in uncertainty, this process is coming up with your demand curve and it's very possible. In fact, it's almost a certainty that demand curve is shifting a little bit right now because of outside factors, because of competitive factors, because of economic factors. And so running these calculations on a quarterly basis makes a ton of sense. Any other, I know we could get into more of the nitty gritty or break down the formula, but that would be difficult to talk about in a podcast. And so we're going to plug the course. I know you've got a special discount for the listeners. We'll talk about that in a minute. But any other insights on how we should be thinking about price or any mistakes that we left out? Any other general thoughts there?

Byron:

The biggest thing was that I would just encourage brands to look at price mean. Everyone is so data-driven on ad performance or they're doing a C R O experiment and they're just diving into the data, but then again, they haven't looked at price in five years on their main selling product. So take that same mindset you use that you're so analytical with on your paid ads and apply it to pricing. Just so much value. It's one of the easiest things you can do now that you know that there is a process to do it, to improve profit for your business, all of that profit's just going to flow straight to the bottom line. And it's best for almost every brand out there. I could almost guarantee you're at the wrong price point right now.

Brett:

And man, how much easier is it to go out and adjust your price than it is to AB test landing pages or split test your bullet points on Amazon or hire a C R O firm and go through that process? All those I would recommend, I've had recent podcasts, guests and episodes dedicated to C R O and how to improve ux, and that's all valuable, but it's a lot easier to adjust price. And I think we forget how much price impacts conversion rate and then again, how much little price changes can impact profit one way or the other. And one other thing that's interesting about price is it can impact your ad performance, right? I'm a Google shopping guy from the very beginning of Google Shopping, and we see it all the time. Back when we used to do SKU level bid adjustments and pulling data at the individual product level, you could see it, you drop price and Clickthrough goes up and you drop price and more people see the product, you drop price.

And even before any of that happens, Google starts showing the ad more because they know that if the price is lower, more people are going to click and more people click, that makes more money for Google. And so yeah, there are things that shift here, and so it makes all the sense in the world to look at this the right way and also to know that you're probably at the wrong price point. Honestly, this is interesting. This has me thinking about pricing from a service standpoint. So a service model, and actually just to click on that, just this is mostly for my benefit, but I know we have other service providers, other industry people that are involved that are more service-based. How do you apply pricing in a similar pricing model to a service?

Byron:

And you can also apply it in a B two B scenario as well. For an actual product, it gets a little tricky because then you tend to go into quantity rather than conversion rate. But if you a service where you are displaying prices, you are measuring that in a conversion rate scenario where you're probably capturing a lead and then converting that lead. It doesn't matter if there's a Zoom process in the middle of that or a phone call, you're still having the conversion data. I did all this at Enogen using phone sales. It was before e-commerce. So you can apply the process to pretty much any selling environment you may have to make some tweaks. I'm happy to talk to brands if they have unique situation of how they could apply this to their own store SaaS or B two B, whatever it may be. It can definitely work.

Brett:

Yeah, really cool. Let's talk a little bit about Glimmer Wish. So you mentioned it, I know you're running with your wife and your daughters. You have more fun with that than you did your previous business even though the previous business went public. But where did the idea for Glimmer Wish come from and what do you guys sell?

Byron:

So my daughter came up with the idea, she was 10 at the time, and she always wanted these just fun looking haircare skincare products in the store. And then my wife would look at the label and see, oh, this just has all these terrible chemicals in this product. You're not getting this. And so it was my daughter's idea, well, let's make fun products. Kids want these ones that she saw with clean ingredients that moms will approve of, right? Because the clean products were boring. Nobody wants something in cardboard and it smells like lavender or something,

Brett:

Or patchouli or something.

Byron:

Yeah, exactly. So we custom mold, mermaids, unicorns in these fun shapes, these fun bottles, all with clean ingredients. We do haircare products and skincare, and we launched to the market about a year ago, and it's going great, and we're just having a ton of fun.

Brett:

What a cool concept. And I love that your daughter's the one that came up with the idea because yeah, most shampoo bottles, conditioner bottles, haircare product, it's just a tube or it's, it's a cardboard sleeve or something, which by the way, there is a market for that. We have several brands that create clean products and someone who's really interested in avoiding plastics or whatever, they're going to gravitate towards that. But what about kids, man? They want cool products. And it is actually easier as a parent to get your kid to brush their teeth or put conditioner in their hair, take care of self-care if it's fun, if the packaging is fun. But most of that stuff, for whatever reason, I'm sure it's cost related and probably a few other factors, but most of that stuff is garbage, right? It's garbage that you don't want to put on your body or in your body. And so yeah, it's a really cool brand. And I'm looking at one of the unicorn, the unicorn conditioner right now, which is super fun. And I'm also, now I'm looking at your pricing, got me thinking how long did it take you to come up with your specific pricing? And so actually, do you mind if we talk about the pricing?

Byron:

Sure.

Brett:

Cool. So I see some of these, the unicorn shampoos, $22 unicorn conditioner, 22 body wash is 18, mermaid haircare, duos 44. So those are ending in a low number. And I know psychology or some of the teachings in the past were like, Hey, end in seven or higher or whatever. So talk about these prices and how they compare to maybe where you started.

Byron:

Yeah, well, I'm definitely using what we talked about for my own business as well. And like we said, Amazon's working really well. So that's where most of our data is. We're on Shopify too, and trying to grow that channel, of course, but Amazon's about 60% of our revenue, and so most of our data's there. It's easy to test things on Amazon. And so we launched at around $17, $18 and use the traditional processes. You don't have data. So yeah, we did competitor benchmarking, we did cost plus, and our cogs were high when we came out of the gate, so we kind of had to price it up there a little bit. But once we had data, ran the process and found out our optimal price point to maximize total business for the company was around $22. So we went with that. And then once you run that, you implement those prices, then you verify, okay, am I getting the right conversion rate, which the process predicted I would get? And that's the,

Brett:

So you got to go back and check it, right? Process said this price point, this conversion rate, but does that actually happen? So you got to run it and then verify the data.

Byron:

And so we did. And then the fine tuning, that's an interesting point because I think here the consumer psychology has shifted a little bit and it's what happens. Everyone used to price at 1999 would be kind of the price point. And you're seeing a ton of brands now, especially in the beauty space. So I think kind of geared at this audience, which we're in our customer are moms buying the product, moms are buying the product, and they're buying all these other products and related industries. Everyone is moving towards just rounded off, just give me a price, $20, don't say 1999. I think other industries that still works, but the latest trend is to just give me a flat price, even one number that I can take to the bank.

Brett:

A lot of people are saying, yeah, I get what you're trying to do. I know this is a pricing tactic. And so yeah, now people are just like, give me, I want clean ingredients. I want clean pricing. Exactly.

Byron:

Yeah,

Brett:

No

Byron:

Gimmicks.

Brett:

Yeah, really good, really good. Byron, this has been fantastic. You got me motivated to talk price more frequently with customers and take a closer look at that because one of the things we talk about a lot back to the C R O discussion is we run a lot of top of funnel traffic as an agency, a lot of YouTube, a lot of Google shopping, a lot of search and more. And so we love conversion rate optimization companies and specialists because if you can improve your conversion rate a little bit, now that changes the economics of your top of funnel campaigns. Now we can go harder on YouTube and we can push performance max more and we can grow the business. Same is true though with price, we start to get more profitability or we optimize price for conversion rate, which leads to profitability. Same thing. That has an impact on top of funnel lines. I know I mentioned Google shopping a little bit ago, but it has an impact on all your ads. So big fan of this. So for those that want to check out the course, how can they find it? We'll link to it in the show notes of course, too, but how can they find it? And then I think you got a special deal for everybody as well.

Byron:

Absolutely. So the course is profit professor.io, go check it out. It's just my passion project, just trying to help people and definitely want to do a discount for your listeners, 50% off what we can do. Just use code O m G

Brett:

Code O M G, and that's at Profit professor because he's taking you back to school. But he doesn't in a polite way, even when he is a guest on your podcast, if you make an error in describing something, he'll kind of let it slide and be gentle about it. But a profit professor, really, really good stuff. So use that code, omg, get 50% off, I think impossible for this not to pay for itself and not to help you tremendously so likely. This is a lever you are not pulling either not pulling frequently enough or not pulling in the right way. And it's another way to optimize your business. Byron, so glad I had you on. This is really, really good. Can't wait to share this with the e-comm world. And any parting thoughts, anything you want to share? I'll also shout out to girl dads out there like myself, I got six daughters. I got to go buy some unicorn shampoo now. I think that's going to make some people very, very happy. But any other asks, tips or anything to close on?

Byron:

Well, as you're looking at the course, just know I'm available. I want to help people. And I love just connecting with brands too. If you want to reach out, hello, at profit professor.io is the email address. Happy to help you through the course or just talk, see how we can help each other. We're all in this together. So I want to thank you too, Brett, it's been an honor. I love the pod. I listened to every episode and it's just been great to be here

Brett:

Now. It's going to be both super exciting and potentially a little bit weird to hear yourself on the podcast.

Byron:

Absolutely.

Brett:

But you did a great job, really informative. Love this. Can't wait to share clips and share the whole episode. So Byron Myers, ladies and gentlemen, Byron, thanks for taking the time and we'll have to do this again sometime.

Byron:

Sounds good. Thanks a lot.

Brett:

Awesome. And thank you for tuning in as always. We'd love to hear feedback from you. What would you like to hear of on the podcast? And if you haven't done it so far, we would love that five star review on iTunes. It helps other people discover the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Why does one hook work and another flops?

Why does one offer get customers clicking and buying and another offer get’s only a shrug?

How can you know BEFORE you spend money on an ad if it’s likely to convert?

Today’s episode is a recording from a recent talk I gave at Ezra Firestone’s Blue Ribbon Mastermind.

I break down 7 ad tests guaranteed to make ANY ad better.

Follow these tests and your ads will have more stopping power, more engagement, and drive more ACTION.

The visuals do help with this one, so watching on YouTube might be a good idea, but the audio sill captures most of the value.

Here’s a breakdown of what you’ll learn:

• How to tell if your ads differentiate your product ENOUGH from the competition
• A test that great standup comedians use that applies to your ads as well
• A test that’s best illustrated using a cat, and one that’s best identified using a donkey. Any guesses what these tests might be about?
• How to handle lingering objections
• How to tell if your ad has the power to motivate your prospects to take action
• Plus more!

This presentation was super fun for me. Hopefully you’ll find it entertaining and helpful!

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And if you've been in this industry for any time at all, you've wrestled with questions like, why did this hook crush it and this hook completely flop? Or why did this ad scale to the moon and this other ad that seemingly was similar, completely fizzled out? And what if you could know ahead of time if an ad was likely to work or not? And so this episode is a recording from a recent talk I gave at Ezra Firestone's Blue Ribbon Mastermind where I talk about seven ad tests to run before you spend money on your ads. Another way to look at this is seven ways to supercharge any ad. It's a ton of fun. Hopefully it'll be entertaining and engaging as well. And I think whether you're running display ads, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, TikTok ads, this will apply and help make all of those better. So please enjoy my presentation on Seven Ways to Supercharge Any Ad

Brett:

Thanks to Jeremiah and thanks to Chat GPT as well. That was interesting. So fully embrace that, whether it's scaling a business or scaling a family, I'm comfortable with both. So you got questions about either I'm your guy, we can dive right in. So really excited about this presentation and I'm excited about it because we're going to be talking about the part of marketing that I love the most and really the reason why I got into marketing. Now for most of my career, I've done really nerdy stuff. SEO, PPC, feed optimization stuff that will literally put you to sleep. But we're going to talk about today, the fun stuff. So we're going to get into the psychology behind marketing, and I think these seven, Molly Pitman's excited who here likes, who legitimately likes the psychology of marketing. White people buy white people click on one ad and not another ad.

Why do people laugh at one joke and they don't laugh at another joke? And so we're going to dive into that, and I think this is super important for a couple of reasons. But first, how many of you guys are writing your own copy? I bet it's actually not very many, but curious. Okay, that's a decent amount. That's actually surprisingly more than I thought. So I do think over time you guys will probably, as you scale, you'll write less of your own copy, right? You'll hire a team, you'll utilize chat, G p t some. How many of you think though the chat G p t could write like a killer video script right now? Yeah. Okay, that's so few of you. I think it could be like okay-ish, right? And it's probably going to get there. But whether you lean on ai, lean on your own team, lean on freelancers, whatever the case may be, I think these seven tests will help.

Does this ad have the power to stop someone in their tracks to get them interested, to get them to say maybe to get them to click? I also think some of these tips apply beyond marketing, even to presentations and speaking in front of groups. And so hopefully we'll have some fun and we'll dive in. We'll maybe do some q and a at the end as well. And then this will be slightly nerdy, but I'll go pretty quick. So if you'd want to skip the nerdy stuff, it'll be over before you know it. But five growth tips you're likely missing from Google Ads. So we'll dive into this. And also this will be a great teaser because on May 22nd, I believe May 22nd is the big day smart Google Ads is going to be released. I know Victor's excited, Molly's excited. So my team and I, two members of my team and myself, we crafted really a full Google Ads course, search Performance Max, YouTube, we lay it all out, it's available to you as a Blue Ribbon member.

So that launches on the 22nd, and this will be kind of a good precursor, warm you up, gets you excited about that course. Now I have had the privilege of working with some pretty awesome brands like Native and Boom and Overtone. And so we run all the Google, YouTube, Amazon for boom and Overtone. We spend about a hundred million dollars a year on ads across platforms. And so I've got this unique perspective where I'm not writing a lot of copy either. I'm still working on strategy a little bit for some of our bigger clients, but I can see lots and lots of data. What video ads have the best view rates, what ads have the best conversion rates, what landing pages work? And I think these tests will work on landing pages as well. We do have a team of 73. We're in the top couple percent of Google ad agencies and same on Amazon.

So let's get started. Test number one, I think this is one of the most important, and this applies to videos, emails, landing pages, I think presentations, you name it. So this is the Scratch Out write in test. So this is how you know your ad fails this test. If you can take your ad as it is, remove your name and your branding, add in a competitor's name or branding. If the ad still works, it's not a good ad. If you can take the ad just like it is, remove your name, add a competitor name. If the ad still works, it's not a good ad. So the ad really needs to work for you and only you. So this is not like every individual element of the ad, but this is the ad in its entirety. So this ad should really communicate why you are unique.

So a couple of good examples. So this is native, native deodorant. This is an ad that's a couple years old now, but 50,005 star reviews. So lots of other natural deodorant companies, especially at this time, but very few could make that claim. 50,005 star reviews and growing. So they had a lot of the same benefits, a lot of the same features, a lot of the same things going on, but this social proof element was really unique to them. Nobody else could claim that amount of social proof. We all know Purple Mattress. What are just the most iconic video ads made by the Harmon brothers? So this whole ad, how many of you guys have seen the raw egg test ad, the purple raw egg test ad? That's actually fewer than I thought. Okay, so five seconds. Basically they're proving the comfort of the mattress that it will cradle your pressure points.

And the way they prove that is this 300 pound sheet of glass drops onto the mattress, raw eggs are underneath it, and the mattress cradles the eggs. The eggs do not break, proves the mattresses next level. So the whole ad is built around. This is a mattress unlike any other. Every other mattress fails this test. So this definitely passes the scratch out, right in test. Really no other mattress company, at least we're led to believe no other mattress company could pass this test. Now here's another example and I already have a thumbs down on it, but how do you feel about this ad? Our science, your comfort? Does that ad pass the scratch out right in test? Could another mattress company run that same ad? Could another brand like a chair company or almost any other brand related to or product company that you sit in or feels comfortable, maybe even apparel could run this right now.

I will say if that ad is used for remarketing, if it's used to remind if it's used, it's targeting someone that we know has seen the raw egg ad and now we're just reminding them and getting them back in, then maybe it's okay. So another principle that's really important is as we look at these seven tests, we either want our ad to pass the test or there needs to be a strategic reason why it's okay that it doesn't, why? And so we need to be thoughtful about why the ad doesn't pass the test. So this ad doesn't pass the test, but like I said, for remarketing, or in some situations it may be okay, alright, we're not going to watch the video. This is boom. So three sticks is all you need. So this is the boom stick trio, and essentially this will replace your whole makeup bag.

So does that pass the scratch out, right end test or does that fail the test? How many think it passes? Hands up for passes? How many of you think it fails? Yeah, so it passes, right? Because I don't know any other brand that I've never seen this before. Three sticks to replace your whole makeup bag, three sticks of this unique product. And if you have those, that's all you need. So passes the scratch out, right in test. Let's talk about this one. This is the align. This is a probiotic gut health probiotic. So welcome to an Align gut. You got a lady relaxing in a pool, she's living in bliss here. Number one, doctor recommended probiotic brand. So first of all, how many of you, if you saw that ad, how many think you would click that ad? Yeah, nobody. Anybody here an avid probiotic user?

How many of you guys are using Rocking the Probiotics? Okay, that's a pretty fair number. Do you think this ad passes the test? Does this ad pass the scratch out right in test? How do you think it passes? Monica's like, I'm going to scratch the back of my head. I don't know, maybe I'll be ready. So nope, nobody's feeling good about this ad. I think this ad is maybe close, right? The headline, anybody could say that, right? You drop the line, you throw in any other probiotic brand and you can say welcome to the whatever gut. Now the number one recommended probiotic brand by doctors, that is potentially unique. I don't know how much we believe it, but it's potentially unique. So what would be better is maybe to key in on that, right? That headline is sort of a throwaway headline. The graphic is sort of a throwaway graphic in my opinion.

How could you bring number one recommended to life? And how could you uncover why? Why is it the number one recommended brand? Is it gentler on the stomach? Is it easy? Does it work? Is it more efficient? Why is it more doctor recommended? But I would lead with that as opposed to picture. And welcome to the Align gut. So scratch out right in test test number two, the shrug test. We've all heard it said that the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference. And the worst ads are not the ads we hate. The worst ads are the ads that we never see, the ads that we never pay attention to that never make us give it a second look or a second thought or anything. So looking at your headline subject line, the top of your product detail page, does it pass the eh, I don't know.

It's the shrug test, right? It's the meh test. So we'll look at a couple of these. I was served this ad recently, mother's Day, which is cool. Anybody here need the reminder that Sunday is Mother's Day? Because yeah, me too, Matt. I was really glad this was a terrible ad, but it did serve as a good reminder that, oh crap, I need to buy a Mother's Day gift in Pronto. So I don't even know what this ad means, but the gift, it's her. Okay, I'm going to tell that to my wife. I'm like, Hey, you are the gift, babe. So seriously, I didn't buy one. You are one. And so the gift, it's her. And to the almost perfect moms, I don't know what this is. I don't know if we're buying the necklace that's on a cake. Is that an earring? Is that a cake decoration?

I don't know. And I only looked at this ad longer because of this talk. If it hadn't been for this talk, I would've just blown by this ad and kept on going. So this is kind of like a, I'm shrugging because I'm confused, right? Sometimes you shrug because you don't care and then sometimes you shrug because you're like, I don't want to work to figure out what you're trying to tell me. So the shrug test, this is also a kind of related piece, is the, well, I would hope so, right? You make a claim, you say something. This would be like a restaurant saying, Hey, we're not going to serve you cold food when the food shows up on the table, it will not be cold mean's the least you could do. That's what I expect. Well, I would hope so. Or kind related as things like fair, honest, reliable, some of those things that we're probably not going to give any credence to initially until we know you.

And so better just not to say it. So the shrug test, does this make someone shrug or just they miss it all together or does it make them say, well, I would hope so. Next test. Love this one. The authenticity test. And this is really important and this is one where you probably need to get opinions from a few different people if you're running a big campaign or something. I do think, and a quick side note, sometimes it's good just to test ads. You need to, speed is important. So we're testing headlines, we're testing copy, we're testing subject lines, we're testing display ads. But for bigger campaigns, you're making a big investment, you're making a big push. You need to really think about this stuff. Or at least as you're analyzing later, look at maybe why something did or did not work. But the authenticity test.

So this is where we're asking do I really believe that? So you said that I'm seeing this in the ad, I'm watching the video, but do I believe it? Do you seem and feel authentic? How many of you guys feel like you got a really good BSS meter? Your gut on someone else is really quick. So how many you guys are involved in hiring for your company? How many of you know in the first two minutes I don't trust this person? And they haven't even said, yeah, it happens. And we even had this recently in our company, we're like, oh no about this one. But we kind of played it out and it turns out the gut was right, right? We are usually pretty good. Our BSS meter, our trust meter, our authenticity meter is pretty highly tuned and we need the trust of more.

And so just know your prospects. Your customers probably aren't thinking about it, they're not thinking about you anyway. They never were, right? They're not thinking about your ads, they don't care about your company. So they're not thinking about believing your claim unless you really do some of the things we're going to talk about here. So do I believe it? I want to throw some props to ridge wallets. You're going to get to hear from Sean Frank in just a little bit. But as we look at this, especially now, it's really hard in my opinion, to create a good display ad, right? A display ad that actually gets someone to stop and pay attention and stirs up some emotion and convince us and stuff like that. It's pretty difficult to do. But this ad, the wallet redefined and you guys were the first in this category, or at least the leader titanium wallets, R F I D, blocking indestructible lifetime warranty.

So the wallet redefined, we see this wallet. This is the opposite of the, do you guys remember the George Costanza wallet? How many Seinfeld fans do we have in the crowd still? Like the best show ever? Yeah, Jacque's with me on that. So this is the opposite of the George Costanza wallet, right? The big fat thing throws your hips and your back out when you use it. And so the wallet redefined three colors or three materials, 10 plus colors, lifetime guarantee. I think that feels authentic, especially if you are in the market wanting to take a look at it. I believe that at least enough to look a little further, I believe in enough to say, okay, I'll take a closer look. Simply safe. I loved when these guys first launched. Anybody here listening to Sports talk? How many sports talk radio fans do I have?

Wow, me and Craig Hilly. Okay, a couple guys. All right, good, good, good. I remember for a while they were like Dan Patrick, a lot of the other sports talk hosts and they were saying things like, Hey, you set this up yourself so you get the shipment, you set up the system yourself. No long-term contracts, easy security. And that was the real pitch. And in my opinion, I actually did some work in the security business a long time ago. That was the differentiator, right? You choose a d t or somebody else, they come in and they install stuff, it's expensive. You sign like a two year contract. It so simply say, well hey, you set it up in 15 minutes and no long-term contracts. Now as you look at this, what are your thoughts? Do you believe these claims faster? Emergency response. Do you believe that?

Not believe that or not care? How many of you say you believe that A little too good to be true? Yeah. And also how many, and let's talk about this. What do you think are the reasons someone buys a security system? Why is somebody buying a system to put in their home? Yeah, maybe something just happened, neighbor had a break in, they had a break in peace of mind. I want the security. We're traveling, kids are home. We want to make sure that they're safe. Maybe, but is that the security system? Is that why you're buying the security system, right? I want to choose the system that gets the cops to show up quick. I don't know. I would argue that's not why people buy a security system. People buy a security system because they want to feel peace of mind. And something just happened recently.

And so you're almost creating doubt with this headline. You're almost like raising some other objections that maybe aren't even there that where I'm pitching that the cops or the fire department will show up quicker when I was like, oh yeah, maybe they won't show up. Maybe that is a problem. I should have thought of that, right? Where really the pitch of this thing is you install it yourself. No long-term contracts, easy protection done. You don't have some slick salesperson coming out and people drilling holes in the wall to put up the touch pad. It's easy, but that's not what this says. And really under a dollar a day isn't very impressive either because most security companies are 30 bucks a month or thereabouts. So I think this ad misses the mark. I don't know that I really believe it and actually it kind of creates a little bit of doubt in my mind.

Test number four, the curiosity test or the tell me more test. Now the reason I like this, so two ways to think about this. You can run an ad that's strictly a curiosity play where you're telling very few details. You're really just trying to stir something up and get them to click to find out what's up. But there's another point too, where you're kind of just leaving the prospect wanting more. And that's a good bit of advice if you're performing or singing or whatever. You want to leave the audience wanting more so they come back for more. Because really the goal of an ad is to get someone to say maybe to get them to look at your ad, to consume it and to say, maybe this is worth my time. Maybe I should click it. Maybe I should check out, maybe I should sign up for the email funnel.

Maybe this is what I need that will solve my problem. So the tell me more or the curiosity test. Couple of good examples. I'm always blown away by native ads. We're actually doing, we're running native ads as kind of an alpha test right now. We'll see how it goes. I was blown away by the randomness of the picture. Anybody ever scroll to the bottom of a Yahoo article and you're like, what? Are these pictures related to these headlines? I don't get it, but this one I've seen a lot. So that's kind of a sign that it must be working, but don't borrow money if you own a home, do this instead. In parentheses, it's genius. And that little parenthetical phrase, it's genius. You're like, well, if it's genius, I want to know. And I do buy and I do own a home and maybe I do want to borrow some money.

So now I'm going to click. I don't understand this picture. That dude looks angry and she looks like she's not concerned about financing. She's interested in something else. If I was to make an assessment, but this is purely a curiosity play, right? You see this and you're like, okay, I just got to know. I know what your little genius trick is here, so show me. And so this will likely get clicks. I love this ad Zipify pages. Shout out to Lauren, represent Kevin. Yes, sir. So eight easy fixes to improve your Shopify product pages. How many of you would look at that? I'd be like, okay, I kind of want to know how many of you want to know what the eight tips are? You see that and you want to know what the eight tips are. Anybody here? I don't care about these. A lot of you don't want to raise your, so you look at that and you're like, yeah, I would like to know.

I would like to know what these eight tips are so that I can apply them to my business. Has this ad been pretty successful, Lauren, or do you know? Yes, I've seen it quite a bit. And Jeff just, he's got a funny look on his face and it's all pointing to the headline. It just works. I like that ad a lot. I see these guys a decent amount of Fisher Investments. Blunder number 10, mismanaging retirement withdrawals. And so this was looking at, hey, if you've got over $500,000 to invest, we are your group, we're the solution for you. And so has anybody ever seen these ads before anybody been served? Fisher Investments? Yeah, I see 'em a decent amount as well. And so if you click and I always click on good ads just to kind of see where I go from there. Their landing pages are great.

You're basically just getting some free reports and basically like this is blunder number 10. What are the other blunders? What are blunders one through nine? What are blunders 10 through 20? If there are those blunders? So you're left with some curiosity and you want to click and you want to find out more. So passes the curiosity test. So next one, this is really important. So this is where you got to think about, hey, what are all the reasons someone says no to my product? Why do people not buy what I'm looking for? And actually I heard a great way to discover this. Who's using post-purchase, post checkout surveys or post-purchase surveys? Jeremiah has got a few people here. You can find some amazing information there. One of my favorite questions that I can't remember who told me about this, but the question is why did you almost not buy today?

So someone purchases and you ask them, Hey, why you weren't going to buy? What would've kept you from buying? And you'll likely get some key objections there that you can then better overcome in your ad copy and your videos, things like that on your landing pages. So lingering objections, if there are still objections that are hanging out, people will not fully take action. So let's look at some examples. So look at all the reasons why someone would say no to buying our product. And then let's address each one and overcome those. This ad does have a lot going on, but there's some really positive elements. This is Huel pasta versus instant noodles. This is targeting health conscious, busy people, likely busy professionals. So both of these are same prep time. How many of you guys grew up on ramen? Either ramen in college or ramen as a kid?

Dude, I used to love that stuff. Drop an egg in that and it's pretty fantastic. I do want to live past my sixties, so I don't consume it anymore, but it's pretty good. But this fuel pasta, it takes the same five minutes, but it's got 25 grams of protein, vitamins a lot. I kind of like that sometimes. One of the ways to make you feel more authentic rather than trying to prove things more. So there's a couple Legos you can take. You want to be authentic and you want to prove something. You can either go deep on the science or you can actually just kind of crack a joke about it and you can kind of be funny. You need to still back it up with something. But I actually like this vitamins rather than listing it all out. They just are like, it's a lot of vitamins, too many to talk about in this ad.

And then it also talks about, hey, 21 meals for only $3 and 76 cents per meal. So it's not the 10 cents that ramen noodles provides you, but you're getting actual nutrition. It's a good meal, you're going to feel better, your body's going to thank you and that type of thing. So it's got the ideal amount of protein, fats, carbs, fiber in all 27 episode. So this ad is really aimed at let's overcome objections. What are the reasons someone would not buy this? And let's overcome those and get the click. Also like this weighted blankets. Who here likes weighted blankets? Who here hates weighted blankets? I am with you. I don't understand. I got to kick the sheets at a hotel Untucking stuff. I want light pressure on my body. I like one leg out. Sometimes weighted blankets. Sounds awful, sounds horrible, but it's a trend. It's the thing.

I know a lot of people that love weighted blanket, but I have heard they are hot. I will never know because I will never try. But this says, Hey, are you a hot sleeper? Try our cool max weighted blanket, right? So is, I don't really know what cool max means, but it's trademarked, it's got a special name. It talks about me being a hot sleeper. I would like to find out more and you overcome maybe my number one objection to buying a weighted blanket, the fact that they are hot, okay, the physical reaction test. I love this one. I think this is one that you need to think about in all aspects of communication. This will make you better. So how many fans of the office do we have? So BJ Novak, what was his character? I just totally lost it. Yeah, Ryan, of course.

So he was one of the primary writers of the show. I dunno if you guys know that, but I heard him on a podcast and he said, and he did a lot of standup and stuff. He said, good standup causes a physical reaction. And this is something that comedians are watching all the time. I know the guys at Raindrop work with comedians a lot comedians are watching the room and they're watching, Hey, when I say this, when I deliver this joke in this way or at this time, do people move? They have a little lean in or some kind of physical reaction. If not, we got to work on it. So one of my favorite jokes, I actually use this on my kids, they didn't like it. So I have eight kids. So anybody here like Jim Gaffigan, the comedian, love that guy. So he's got five kids and he said when they knew they were going to have their fifth, he sat his other four down and he said, listen, we're going to have another baby.

And I just want you to know, this does not mean that I will love any of you any less, but I'm going to have to let one of you go. It's just one of those. I remember hearing it and I totally had the same reaction, totally leaned in and lost it. My kids did not think that was funny, but I keep telling it, I like it, but it needs to have a physical reaction. So I remember I had this friend once and you would say something and he would look at you with a deadpan and be like, oh, that's funny. Like I don't think you think it's funny because I'm looking at you right now and you're not reacting. You are not showing me any signs that you think this is funny. So a physical reaction. A couple of examples actually, I knew the Raindrop guys were going to be talking a little bit.

This is a Dr. Squat commercial. Anybody seen this one? This is for the Dr Squat cologne ad. And so they're saying Cologne ads are, I'm using an example here from Raindrop. So I had a physical reaction when I saw this part of the ad, so we can play it later, but this is an ad for Dr. Squash and they're talking about how aren't cologne ads weird? And it's showing this man doing all this great and then he just eats raw mayonnaise, just plain mayonnaise. And you have a reaction to that visual, right? You kind of wince or you lean in, you're like, ah, what's going? And then you can't stop watching after that point, after you have the physical reaction, you can't stop watching the ad. And so one thing that we like to do, this isn't always easier, always possible, but I like to show ads and then watch people's reactions.

And so we've done this before where have people in a conference room just play the ad, don't say anything and just watch people. When do they lean in? When if it's a joke, do they actually make some kind of movement? Do they wince? Do they move? When are they reaching for their phone? You can kind do this yourself too. I like to just try to be aware of where I am as I'm watching a video. When do I start thinking about something else? At what point in the video do I start daydreaming or think about, oh, I got to actually check this email, I got to do this thing. Like, oh, okay, that we got to fix that part of the ad, it lost me and this is my ad, right? This is for our company or whatever. And I started to drift in this part.

So your ads should cause a physical reaction because without emotion we don't take action. Without emotion, you really can't get someone's attention and then they for sure won't take action. So you've got to stir up some emotion. And the physical reaction test is a good one. Alright, number seven, the Missouri test. What's actually crazy? So the longest time Brewer and I at Chris Brewer, my business partner, co-founder of O M G, we were the only Missouri peeps in blue ribbon. And then I'm hanging out with the folks at this table, Amber and Ben and Emma, and they like, where are you guys from? They said Branson, Missouri. That's like 45 minutes from where we live. Crazy small world. We know a lot of the same people, it's wild. But Missouri is a unique place. We are the show me state and also our state animal is the mule, which is super, super charming and something we're all very, very proud of.

The jackass is the state animal of Missouri. So the show me test though is this is where any kind of claim you're making, anything you're saying you really want to show it rather than just tell it. So if you don't show me, I probably won't believe you. That's the idea behind this test. So when it comes to claims, you got to show us. So great ads show rather than tell before and afters are great. So this is one from a lawn care company. This is actually Sunday I think. And this actually is a display ad, but it's a video ad and you've got this guy who looks kind of like the sham wow infomercial pitchman up in the upper left corner. It's got the before and after, it's showing old Batman words like bang, pow or popping up as it's showing the before and after.

But it's really showing the results, right? Showing the before and after, which is super powerful. I think you can also, and I wanted to use display examples. One because they're easier to show and they're faster to show, but also I think it's harder to show something in action in an image ad than it is in video. But these are some really great examples. So here's awesome shoe company, but what better way to show this is waterproof, wear it anywhere and then just show it actually in water. And maybe I've even seen some of their ads where part of the shoe is fully submerged, the water goes up to half of the shoe. And so you're saying, Hey, I see that this is a waterproof shoe, I like this one too. So stuff like socks, how do you show socks in motion or how do you show that you got a wide variety of socks or how they fit or how they look or the fact that they're stylish.

I really like this. It's laying out various colors, but you also got to do a foot model as it were here showing off the socks. So this was pretty great. There was this one company we did some ads for and they were actually a lawn care company as well. And so with this company, I was convinced that before and afters would be the winner. So this was another lawn care company showed the lawn before the product showed the lawn after the product. But actually that is not the image that won almost ever. And we did this test and the ad that won was an ad of a dude's hand with the product attached to the end of a hose and he was spraying. So that image worked better than before and after images almost every time. Now I just said that before and afters are great, and I just said that showing is important.

Does anybody have any theories? We've got a theory, and I think this was proved out as we ran some tests, but any thoughts as to what that image was showing that maybe the other one wasn't? Why would an image of just a dude holding a bottle in a garden hose, why would that work versus before and after? So there likely was some confusion, and we actually heard this from a few people. If you show before and after, it could be a service like, oh, I need to hire a lawn guy, right? Yeah, Jacques, it looks like guns are cool. Guns always make, yeah. So I agree with, I never thought the gun thing, but I like that it does look like a gun. But that's what we're convinced of as we started looking at other ad copy and combination things that were working, is it communicated that it was easy?

Like, oh, I can stick something on the end of the hose and go stand out in the yard. I can do that. I don't know what they had to do to get that before and after. Or was that like you hire a gardener, you spread seed, you do all these things, what kind of work did that take? But the image of just the dude holding the spray bottle, it worked. And so you do have to show, and that goes back to the objections. What are those hidden objections? They're going to keep someone from clicking. Are they confused? Are they shrugging? Are they not caring? And then how do we show the real benefit and how do we show someone why they should take action? And so we really do like this too. We like testing, and I showed this at the last blue ribbon, a mix of unpolished U G C cut for length, like cut.

So it's real punchy and just shows the benefit, but they'll also showing that with polished photography and videography, that works really well. So let's dive in really quickly. So we got about 10 minutes. I'm going to go rapid fire through five growth opportunities that I bet you're missing on Google and YouTube. So maybe you're doing some of these, but I bet you there's at least one that you could be using that you're not. So let's dive in right now. Number one, Google ads to Amazon. How many you guys are selling on Amazon right now? Amazon Business. How many of you? Amazon is more than 30% of your total sales? More than 50? It's a few. Okay, cool. So here's crazy, and this did not make sense to me when I first heard it. When I first saw it, I had to look at the data to believe it, but there are a ton of people who want to buy on Amazon.

Their plan is to buy on Amazon, but they still begin their journey on Google. And so for some people, maybe your parents, the internet starts with Google. That's where everybody starts their search. So we've looked at this now several categories, millions of searches a month of people on Google typing keyword on Amazon. So bedsheets on Amazon comforters, Amazon water filter, Amazon, but they're starting on Google, which is crazy. And so the interesting thing about running Google ads to Amazon, and it's also one of the sneaky things that Amazon does. Amazon runs ads too, right? And Amazon's number one source of traffic is Google, right? Amazon gets more traffic from Google than anywhere else, and Amazon is the number one advertiser on Google. So no one spends more money on Google p p C than Amazon. But here's what happens. So if Amazon is running an ad for let's say water filters, someone's searching on Google for water filters, Amazon, you click on Amazon's ad, it leads you to a category page that is full of Amazon's ads, right?

Ads that Amazon is charging other sellers. So Amazon is really playing some arbitrage here where you click on an ad on a Google ad that Amazon posted, they're paying Google for that, but then when you land on a page, you're almost certain to click on one of Amazon's ads and now they're making that money back. And so what we found is we've got some advertisers that are spending a thousand, $2,000 a month driving traffic from Google but bypassing all their competitors and going straight to their product detail page or their storefront. But we've seen companies spending a couple hundred thousand a month on Google ads to Amazon. And so this isn't the key to growth on Amazon, but this is something that likely your competitors are not doing and it's something that can add a little boost to your Amazon business, but it's a way to leverage Google.

So Google to Amazon ads, I really like that strategy. It's something we can talk more about if you are interested in knowing more. Also love this. So we work with bigger brands and I really think the trend right now is going omnichannel. And that seems weird to say because omnichannel was a phrase thrown out in the early two thousands I feel like. But most of the bigger brands we work with are D two C, Amazon and other marketplaces, and now trying to go retail. So trying to get into retail stores. So YouTube actually has some pretty unique opportunities for you trying to drive sales to retail stores. We did this with Native first when they were rolling out into Target and then into C V s where we picked some key markets, do some geographically focused YouTube campaigns, and you can run those to display on mobile and on desktop and also on TVs.

And then they've even got a few tools, they're not necessarily great, but a few tools to show how many people actually show up in a store after seeing an ad. But you can also just measure things like store sell through, but using YouTube to drive in-store purchases likely something you're missing. And if you're selling in physical stores, could be valuable Shorts for remarketing. Okay, I'm very bullish on YouTube shorts. How many YouTube shorts fans do I have just as a viewer? Are you watching YouTube shorts? They're pretty great. And so we've been wondering what kind of ads are going to work on YouTube shorts? Is it the traditional longer form video ads we see typically working on YouTube or is it something different? YouTube shorts have to be a minute or less. What we're finding is that ads on YouTube shorts are fantastic for remarketing and the style of ads that are working are more like TikTok style, Instagram reel style, a lot of influencer content still want to cut it up so that it's really hitting on all the high points, all the top points.

But we've seen this now for a couple of bigger brands where we are, you can't exactly target shorts, but you can kind of funnel the traffic there and then you can see if the traffic is truly YouTube shorts. But some of the lowest C P A campaigns we're running for bigger brands are remarketing campaigns using YouTube shorts, mostly beating traditional YouTube when it comes to remarketing. So shorts for remarketing, that is a winner. Discovery ads for reorder. This is something that we audit hundreds of accounts a year and everybody's running remarketing, but almost nobody's doing really well and almost nobody's running good loyalty campaigns. So thinking about when does someone win? Should someone reorder my product and let's run a discovery ad to get them to do that. So discovery, their display ads that show up on YouTube Gmail, mostly just on Google properties. So really great ad inventory and usually very, very effective.

So discovery ads for reorder. Let's talk about, I'm going to throw out a controversial topic and it's okay if we have massive disagreements in this room. We can carry on a debate later. How many of you hate running branded ads? How many of you think bidding for your own and this I promise is not a trick. How many of you think bidding on your own product name is almost criminal and you sort of hate Google for it? Anybody you hate paying for your own branded name? What's that? Oh, you can ask Ryan what he just said a little bit later. So yeah, this was like your brand, right? So why am I paying Google? How many of you view it as like, no, it's a necessary evil, it's good, I'm willing to invest in my own own brand. That's several of you and some of you're like, no, I still think, I think this is a trick, so I'm going to hang out.

So I actually think that both of those are true At the same time, I think that paying for everybody who searches for your brand name and clicks on an ad is nuts, right? If you have to pay for every single click and try to maximize your visibility there for every single person, I think it's kind of crazy because you likely would've gotten some of those clicks organically. But you do need to look at your product detail page or you do need to look at the search results page rather. You may be having lots of competitors creeping on you, and if so, then you have to be a little more aggressive than others. Talked to Peter Goodwin, groove Life. We were looking at a SERP for his brand and he just dominates every conceivable area. He's got videos, he's got five pages, five different listings in the organic.

He's got the knowledge graph, all the Google shopping everywhere, everywhere. There's no other competitor there. He could probably back off a little bit on branded search and be ao, okay, for other brands, I've seen this with some apparel brands where you type in this name and there are competitors everywhere, and I promise you there are some people that see your ad on Facebook or see your ad on YouTube and they're just sort of interested. And if they go to that serp, because that's usually what people do, they see an ad, they go to Google search next. If they see another more attractive competitor, lower price, better offer, better reviews, they are likely to do that. So here's what we like to do. This is where we separate brand campaigns into two main categories, what we call brand N C A or brand new customer acquisition and brand loyalty.

So you can look at anybody that's bought from you before, sign up to your email list, even visited your site before if you want to be that detailed and you can put them into a separate campaign bucket and you can say, Hey, I want to bid for efficiency, or maybe I don't want to bid at all. If somebody has done any of those things before purchased from me in the past, maybe I don't want to bid at all, but if someone has never purchased from me before or if they've never really interacted with my brand, I do want to bid on that shopper because there's no guarantee that they're fully sold on my brand yet. So that's one pretty easy, simple way. Does say a little work to set up, but separating out brand loyalty, repeat customers from new customers who have not purchased yet. So I think that that is a place you can find some efficiency and get better performance from your account if you treat brand a little bit differently. Friendly.

I was going to do q and a and we do not have time for q and a. Do have a couple of free resources though. If you scan that QR code, we got our top YouTube ad examples and guide, got some Amazon guide, some other free resources that will help you grow through Google and YouTube and Amazon and all of that. Also, happy to chat. You want a second look at your account. Want to talk about struggles you're having either on Google, YouTube or Amazon? I'm here. My business partner, Chris Brewer, Flamingo Shirt, can't miss him right here. He is. Happy to chat as well. Couple podcasts, spicy Curry and E-Commerce Evolution. Been doing E-commerce evolution since 2017. I feel like that's a little bit like OG status for as far as podcasts go. So two podcasts, check those out. I'm always looking for really good interviews as well. So if you like the idea of showing up on a podcast, telling your story, I would love to interview you and so we can chat about that. So with that, I'm finished. Thank you so much.

‍

Liz Saunders knows the Amazon game well. She was the Chief of Staff for Jungle Scout as it grew from under 40 employees to a few hundred. And the founder of Fluencer Fruit. Through software, coaching, and services, she helps brands and influencers maximize their results with Amazon’s Influencer program.

The Influencer game is still early at Amazon, but right now, it’s free for brands to participate in and driving some compelling results.

Take This Case Study:

An Amazon product with no change in ads, no improvement in organic rankings, and no change in ratings saw a 45% MoM increase and a 3x YoY increase in sales - ALL From Influencer content.

Do I have your attention now?

Check out what Liz and I discuss in this interview:

• How you as a brand can qualify for the Influencer Program (good news - it’s pretty simple).
• How to attract and recruit the right influencers for your brand.
• Where does influencer content show up, and how do you influence the best placements?
• The difference between the Inspire and Discover Feed on Amazon.
• How to use Influencer and Amazon Lives.
• Plus more!

Transcript

Liz :

To make your listing organically interesting to influencers. It's that upper carousel, make sure you have traffic. All the things that as sellers we know, like that listing quality score, going back to making sure you're listing is optimized. That's what you want in place for influencers to just basically find you, so to speak, right? But then there is the other direction of, well first, a lot of sellers that I work with, they'll go to their listings and be like, oh my gosh, I have influencers on my listing. I wondered how those people got there. It says, earns commission next morning,

Brett:

Amazon Influencer program. Why should you consider it? What are the benefits? What's in it for you? Well, the Amazon Influencer program is relatively new and it is making an impact for sellers. I just completed an interview with Liz Saunders of Flu Fruit. She's an early pioneer in the space. Also spent six years at Jungle Scout. She's a legend. And so we talk about what's going on with influencers on Amazon. And I think the reason why Amazon has this program is they're trying to solve the problem of discoverability. Still, the vast majority of the products that are discovered and sold on Amazon are done through search, but Amazon wants you to engage in social shopping, and Amazon wants you to find products in a variety of ways. And so they've got a few tools to do that, right? They've got Amazon posts, they've got what's called the Inspire feed, and they've got what's called the Discover Feed, but then they've also got Amazon influencers.

And so in this episode, Liz talks about one particular client of hers where they optimize a listing for Amazon Influencer. They got six influencers to create videos for one of the products. Amazon rather put those six videos on a product detail page. And over the course of about 30 days, they grew sales on that product, 45% month over month. So 45% increase over the previous month, and that translated to a three x increase year over year. The only thing they did different was these influencer videos. No change in ads, no change in ranking, no real change in reviews. It was driven by influencer. So if you want the full scoop, check out the full interview with Liz Saunders on how to leverage Amazon Influencers.

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, c e o of o m G Commerce. And today we're talking about Amazon influencers. How do you work with them? How do you leverage them? What does it all mean? How do you grow your business with influencers? And my guest is Liz Saunders, and in case you don't know who she is, you should know and you're about to know, but she was with Jungle Scout for six years as the chief of staff helped see the growth there from 38 employees to a couple hundred employees. We met at Seller Summit in Miami, Steve Chu and Tony Beck. Shout out to the gang there. And as Liz and I were chatting, we chatted over dinner. There's a group of us, and Liz somehow left my phone behind. Liz started taking pictures of herself with my phone, which is great. And so then we started chatting. We're like, Hey, we should do a podcast. And so Amazon influencers, here we go. But with that, Liz, welcome to the show and how's it going?

Liz :

Hey Brett, I'm doing good. I think that the fact that you invited me after I took a selfie on your phone when you left it unattended is a true testament to your love, our shared love for sophomore humor because I literally sometimes have the sense of humor of a 12 year old. So I appreciate that. You

Brett:

Appreciate that. Me too. My inner junior high student comes out a lot. My wife likes to call that out, and I'm like, I don't think I want that to die yet. I want that to keep going. And so no, when I saw the selfie, I was like, this is gold. Thanks, Liz. Made my day for sure.

Liz :

I think the best part is too, it's not like we like our besties going into that version of our relationship, I just was like, here's your phone use. You get help going for it,

Brett:

Going for it. So got to be bold. That's a good lesson, good takeaway there. And so that is awesome. Well, let's dive into this topic and if you would talk a little bit about flu fruit. So your company is flu fruit launched this year, and you tools, software coaching to help brands and influencers really maximize this game of Amazon influencers. And so kind of why did you start this and give us the quick rundown on what you do and then we'll get into some tips and how toss.

Liz :

Yeah. So I started as an Amazon seller in 2016, move to Jungle Scout, have done K D P and merch and retail arbitrage and was a F B A, all the things. So I am deeply invested in all the ways that you can make money on Amazon. And a friend of mine a year and a half ago was like, you should really look at this influencer program on Amazon. It's really fascinating because you can make commission off of traffic that's already on Amazon. And I was like, well, that's wild. So I got approved in December of 21 and coming from the Amazon world anyways, and of course my background being yours at Jungle Scout, it was immediately obvious that there was a tool that needed to be built for this world. There are things that we know on the product listing page that you can pretty quickly prove impact how well an influencer's videos do. So create a score, weight it based on how those factors help your videos be seen. And it was easy to automate. So after a year in the program, I was like, we need to make this tool. And I initially thought, oh, this is going to be a side hustle thing. Really cool. And it very quickly became obvious when I was onboarding people at seven o'clock in the morning and 10 30 at night around my full-time job that it was probably time to go invest more time into this.

Brett:

You're onto something when you start to see that demand. And I'm sure that was rewarding and exciting and scary and all of those things rolled into, but yeah, you realize, hey, I've got something here. I got to give this a go.

Liz :

Yeah, exactly. I love Jungle Scout and I'll always be grateful for my time there, but truly one of the hardest conversations I've ever had in my life was going to sit down with Greg Mercer and tell him that shout

Brett:

Out to Greg Mercer. What a great dude, what an awesome tool shape the industry. Just, yeah, awesome guy

Liz :

Having to sit down with him and be like, I think I need to go do this other thing. And it's not because I don't love being here, but so yeah, it just all happened really quickly. Launched in May and here we are in August, but to your earlier question, it is a software tool. So that part and then coaching, we've got a class now for people who have an audience to get up and running with influencer and making money and then also having so many relationships in the world of sellers, it was like, oh, I need to go help sellers understand the world of influencers as well. And so that kind of spawned this other portion of the business.

Brett:

That's awesome. I will make one comment. I know Greg's a good dude and so I'm sure that conversation went well. I've been on the other end of that conversation a number of times. So we've got an agency of 70 some employees and we've had a few instances where someone who's trusted team member, core team member, they approach me and say, man, I've got this itch to do my own thing. And we had that happen with our very first Amazon director, so the dude that started the Amazon portion of our business and ran it and he's a brilliant guy and his name's Chris, and he came to me and he is like, I got to do something and I've got this idea and I want to pursue it. And so I was both bummed but also really excited. The entrepreneur in me is like, of course if you've got that burning inside, you got to do it. You'll always regret it if you don't give it a try. And so kudos to you for making the leap and really, really exciting. So let's dive into this. So let's speak to brand owners first. So I'm a brand owner. I sell on Amazon. Why should I consider the influencer program? Is it worth it? And what are the benefits? Get us excited about the opportunity a little bit.

Liz :

So the opportunity for brands to work directly with Amazon influencers is pretty wide open right now, and there's a couple things that are really compelling for me when I look at the data now, I will go ahead and call out that we are very siloed. So the data for sellers that's available is not the data that's available for influencers. So one of the things I'm trying to do is put some of that together so that we can have data backed conversations around

Brett:

Stitch that together between the two sides with influencer

Liz :

Fruit because it's a win-win, right? And win. We'll add Amazon into that. When influencers make commission, it's because sellers are making sales and then Amazon makes their piece too. So it's like a win across the ecosystem. But the things that we're seeing, and this is early data, so I'll call that out, is when we drop influencer content onto a product listing that has some page views or traffic on it already, that it moves that conversion rate up, which if you think about makes a lot of sense. We know that video converts better than text. We know that U G C video, which is what Amazon influencers are, we're basically incentivized U G C sitting at the top of your product listing. So U G C converts better than brand. And then we also know that Amazon continuously places influencer content at the top of your page and they are not stupid.

They're not going to do that if it's not doing positive things for sales. So one of the brands that we've been working with, they had a product compared to the others, it had a lot of traffic on it, but the conversion rate wasn't amazing. We dropped six influencers worth of content on it in a week, and they did 45% month over month and they did three x year over year with no other changes to the listing, no changes in P P C and acknowledging that Amazon ecosystem, it's really hard to eliminate all external factors totally. But as close as we could control that, that's what we came back with.

Brett:

So six influencers in a week for a particular brand, it was 45% month over month growth and you said six x year over

Liz :

Year three x? Yes,

Brett:

Three x. Okay, okay. Still, I mean three X is still insane when that's the only thing you did differently. So you get six influencers all to put content in a week. Then where all does that content show up? So you mentioned that it's on the P D P and you're 100% right? Amazon, if they test something, if it doesn't work, they're getting rid of it. But if that content's showing up at the top of a P D P, rest assured Amazon's doing that because it is making them more money and it'll make you more money as well. So where do those six influencers, where do their content show up?

Liz :

So actually there's two steps. You can be in the influencer program, but then that next step is getting approved for what's called additional onsite placement. And as an influencer, that's where my money is, right, is because I'm showing up at the top of your listing. So one of the places is if you are brand registered, you have a product video uploaded that creates that pop-up video carousel at the top of the page. There are six spaces there available only to the seller and to the influencer. So it shows up there. The other places below the fold, there's that middle or lower carousel influencers show up there. Those are the two places specifically on product listings if you get into fashion and some of that, there are a couple other places that they can show up. But generally speaking, the other places that we're seeing Amazon test, and this is kind of like a day by day, but is search results pages. You'll see influencer stuff pop up there.

Brett:

It's almost like sponsor brand video or what used to be called video and search where those video ads appear in the search results.

Liz :

But the wild thing is if I create a video for one of your products and Amazon puts me in one of these places, it's not something you're paying for. I probably convert better than you do. And it has this kind of infinite number of testing places that Amazon plays with from time to time

Brett:

Super interesting and especially this is early Amazon's just testing it and trying all types of things. Probably eventually they're going to monetize it more from the brands. I would assume, and we may get into this in just a second, but so the influencer makes a commission on this. The brand is paying that commission or Amazon's paying that commission or how does that work?

Liz :

So kind of both. It comes out of that referral fee that you pay to Amazon regardless.

Brett:

Okay, so Amazon's not tacking on an additional influencer fee, they're just charging you the 10, 15%, whatever. It's for your category 8%. And so they're paying the influencer out of that.

Liz :

There's no additional cost if you have a listing that's attracting influencers, it doesn't cost you anything.

Brett:

That's wild. I wonder if that is ever going to change. That's super interesting. I mean I'm always watching how Amazon is monetizing things and I kind of nerd out a little bit and looking at the Q two earnings report this year for Amazon, it's becoming pretty clear that everybody has always said that a w s was the cash cow for Amazon, that that's where most of the profits came from. With Amazon, they're generating plenty of free cash flow and profit from the retail business, but now it looks pretty clear that the most profitable part of their business is ads. So ads is like a 40 billion a year part of their business and 75% margins or something wild like that. And so you got to think maybe, so right now they're eating this cost, but eventually they're probably going to monetize it and charge brands. We'll see, I mean if they do that, I'm sure it'll probably pencil out for the brand owner either way, but right now it's free. So do it. What's the risk? You got to try it. I

Liz :

Think of it as the way they're monetizing right now is because it's only available to brand registered brands. So well, the upper carousel, you can have influencers on your listing regardless, but that upper carousel, which my videos and upper carousels do eight times better. So I know that the listings are

Brett:

Doing better eight times better in terms of

Liz :

What in my commissions.

Brett:

Oh, got it. Okay. So you're speaking now as an influencer. This what's cool. So you're on both sides. You work with brands, but you're also an influencer, which kudos to you on that. So when you're creating an influencer piece of content for luggage or something, when your video shows in that upper carousel, you're doing eight x the commission, if it was showing it somewhere else. Interesting. Which

Liz :

For the seller translates the same way because their sales are reflected in my commission, kind of one-to-one almost there. So if you have brand registry and you're, if you haven't uploaded a product video to unlock that carousel, if I can ask you to do anything today, please go find a video that you can utilize in that placement. It is a real opportunity for you

Brett:

Unlock that video carousel. That's one clear action item and takeaway you got to do that unlocks influencer content at the top of the p d p. So cool. So then if I'm a brand, so you kind of convinced me there's opportunity here. There's really no risk here either. So why not get in early and start testing this as a brand? So then how as a brand, do I find the right influencer or is that not really the game? Here is the game really just make myself available and then influencers will find me. What does that look like?

Liz :

So there's kind of two sides of that coin. So to make your listing organically interesting to influencers, it's that upper carousel, make sure you have traffic. All the things that as sellers, we know that listing quality score, going back to making sure your listing is optimized, that's what you want in place for influencers to just basically find you so to speak. But then there is the other direction of like, well first a lot of sellers that I work with, they'll go to their listings and be like, oh my gosh, I have influencers on my listing. I wondered how those people got there. It says earns commission next time.

Brett:

So to participate in that, that could just happen automatically if your brand registered. You don't have to as a seller go in and click a button or sign something saying I'm willing to do the influencer program.

Liz :

Amazon controls placement for influencer content. So that is a really important point to bring up. If I create content for your listing, usually the way it goes is 24 hours and my video is published and another 24 hours and I get placement. I can tell you that as a rule or as a usually I guess not a rule, I show up if there's an empty spot on that carousel, I'll show up there, but at the end of the day, Amazon controls that placement. And so if they decide not to put me there, it's outside of my direct control. But you also then on the seller side, don't have control as to whether or not influencers show up on your listing.

Brett:

So one, there has to be influencers that create content and then Amazon's, you have to have the video carousel unlocked, which means you have to upload a product video and then I'm sure Amazon's just got to decide is it worth it to put this here and is this going to help conversions? That's one thing, and this is a little bit of a parallel, but on the Google side, and I spent a lot of time on the Google side, people always want their product ratings to show up in the sponsored, almost said sponsored products, that's Amazon. But Google shopping ads, and that's something that Google just decides. They decide when to show it, when not to show it. If they think it's a little bit different than Amazon, but they decide, Hey, I'm going to show the product listing here. I'm not on this one. Do I think it's going to increase the click or the conversion? If I do, then I'm going to put it there. And I know Amazon works in a similar way. They're testing everything. And so if I believe this video is going to help, I'll put it there. But that's up to Amazon. Totally makes sense.

Liz :

And we think they do it based on conversion rate. We think it's last touch attribution, we think it's conversion rate. So one of my videos has been in an upper carousel for the better part of 18 months now they test me off and then they rotate me back on usually. But I've been there for a long time and I think that they do a test to see if other people convert better than I do. And so far I've been put back on basically every time. Well, basically I've been put back on every time, but I believe it's because I convert better than the ones they're testing against me. They don't tell me that, but just empirically I believe

Brett:

It to me makes sense. You're observing it, you drop off for a little while, it means they're price split, testing it, you get put back on means you're the control or the winner. So go Liz.

Liz :

Exactly.

Brett:

Teaching those other people how to do it. I love it. That's very cool. So what are some other tips here? So as a seller, I want to get my listing optimized. I want to have the video there to unlock that upper carousel. What else am I doing as a brand to try to make influencer, to maximize influencer for me?

Liz :

So there are ways you can actually reach out to us. So if you find somebody that you're like, oh, I like this person's content, you see them either on your page or on a competitor's page, an unrelated page doesn't matter, right? Because influencers are not necessarily driving traffic that's affiliate stuff. So it's a totally other ballgame. But if you find somebody that you think does a quality job of talking about a product type or whatever, you can actually click on their profile and it will take you to what's called their storefront. And then it is the one place that Amazon lets us direct people offsite because just like sellers, Amazon does not want you to send them anywhere other than Amazon. They don't want us to do that either, but they gave us an ability to link to our other socials. So if you go to my storefront, you'll find my Instagram, you can message me on my Instagram account even though you can't message me directly on Amazon. So if you find somebody, go to their storefront, go to their other socials and message them there if you want to work with them. The thing I'll call out for you is as influencers, we get a lot of outreach from agents who are repping lots and lots of ACEs. So if you can find a way to distinguish yourself as I own the brand, please do that because it helps immediately the influencer know what kind of conversation they're having.

Brett:

Influencers would much rather talk to brands, right, than agents for the most part.

Liz :

Absolutely.

Brett:

So identify that you're a brand, preferably a brand that's already got some traction conversions, good things are happening and you're reaching out to someone that you believe has an affinity towards your category or your type of product. They've done it before, which means it'd be pretty likely to review you. Now one thing that's interesting here, and I've not consumed a lot of the Amazon influencer content, so just put that caveat out there, but I mean sometimes our influencers like, man, I tried this product. Okay, one of my favorite. I mean obviously they're not really incentivized to do that, then they won't earn a commission. Amazon probably doesn't want that there because then it's not going to increase sales. But what does that look like?

Liz :

Most influencers that I work with don't leave bad shoppable video reviews.

Brett:

Yeah, okay.

Liz :

You do get a one click reach for related product. So hypothetically, if I was like, I don't like this product, I would definitely pick a different one and somebody clicked on a different one and bought it, I do then make a percentage off of that one click distance basically.

Brett:

Interesting. So as an influencer, I've got a video for one product, but someone clicks on that and buys another product. You still get a commission on that.

Liz :

So my Shade Tent, which is the one that I've been in the upper carousel for the better part of 18 months, I've made over $5,000 on that one video. Wow. Yeah, it's wild. But not all of that money is from that Shade tent specifically. And I only had one shade tent video for over a year. So I can tell if it's related to the Shade Tent video, if they click through and buy weights for the Shade tent, I make that if it's a related product, it's one click. But as opposed to affiliates who get the 24 hour cookie of your entire cart, it's just a one click related product.

Brett:

Very interesting on the, that's just got me thinking and maybe there's, I think this podcast mostly appeals to brand owners and on the seller side, but just in case someone's out there and I want to be an affiliate or an influencer, that sounds fun. Do you offer training and stuff for how to be more influential as an influencer? Or how do I create content?

Liz :

Yeah, so I actually, the wildest thing for me, and I think that we know this living in this world is the number of sellers who actually also have like, oh, I have this Instagram account that I'm side hustling, right? It's like everybody in this world is some sort of side hustler. And so what I do is help you if you have an audience, because to get into the Amazon influencer program, you have to have an audience on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube. So that has to exist to get approved for the program. I take people who have even a medium size but highly engaged audience from that point to monetizing as an Amazon influencer. And I have a course for that. It's a low cost course, but it just basically walks you through so you're not having to Google and join every Facebook group and ask questions and all of that. It just walks you straight through.

Brett:

Awesome. What kind of following does somebody need? So how big does their Instagram or YouTube or TikTok following you to be?

Liz :

So I'm going to wait for your shocked face, but Amazon doesn't actually give us a number. Oh, got it. But what they tell us is that you need to have an engaged audience that they're looking at your follower account and the engagement numbers. So just anecdotally, I got in with an Instagram account of 2,700 followers. It's basically my food journal. So people are like, do you have to show your face? The answer is no. I did whole 30 a couple years ago and just messed around with this account for a while, had 2,700 people on it, and when I applied, I got in right away. So TikTok is the easiest platform at the moment to get approved with, but really wherever you have an audience on those four platforms, it's worth applying because you can apply to the program an unlimited number of times, and then once you're in that onsite placement, you only have three chances for, so there's kind of like two steps, but if you can

Brett:

Wait, explain that. So I can apply as many times as I want to, so I can just keep building my TikTok following and then apply and eventually I'll be approved, hopefully. But then once you get the onsite placement, there's only three tries. Explain what that means.

Liz :

So you can be in the program and not approved for additional onsite placement. So not approved to show up on product listings, not approved to show up in search results, which is where the money is for influencer. But once you're in, then you have to submit three shoppable videos that puts you into that application process or that approval process for the onsite. And that is the time when Amazon is going to be fine tooth comb looking at your video content, but you only have to upload three. And right now at the time of this recording, it takes between three and five days to hear back on that piece of the process.

Brett:

Super, super interesting. So we talked about it. I'm just again trying to visualize, so as a brand owner, the influencer content can show up on that top carousel. I've got at least one video there can be show up in the middle of the page sometimes in the search results page. Where else are people finding and consuming influencer content?

Liz :

Absolutely. So the Inspire Feed and the Discover feed. So if you haven't seen those yet, Amazon has started rolling out basically social shopping. It's their way to compete with TikTok and Instagram. So Inspire should be on at this point, everybody's shopping app. It was the little light bulb down at the bottom menu, but now it reminds me of a YouTube icon at the moment. But it's like you can scroll through and they'll see influencer content, brand content, and also customer review videos. But basically you can scroll it, influencers can tag a bunch of products in it, including yours, and that shows up there. The Discover Feed is specifically for fashion and beauty, and it's a little bit more of a mystery in my mind, but I have found, I have pictures, they're called Shoppable photos of me in an outfit that I tagged. I bought the clothes on Amazon and I have found myself on the listing in that photo or in the feed for Discover in that photo.

So Amazon has all these different placements that they're testing and starting to get up and populate, but that's actually something as a brand, if you're not doing posts, that's an opportunity for you as a brand to show up in those feeds. So my Inspire Feed, for example, is approximately 40% brands, 40% influencers, and about 20% customers. Just anecdotally scrolling. So if you're a brand, now I'm with you at some point, I think Amazon is going to monetize and make brands pay to show up there. But at the moment, if you're doing posts Amazon, there's a chance they'll put you in that Inspire Feed.

Brett:

Very, very interesting. Now, it is very clear, Amazon still is larger driven by search. That's how people find products on Amazon. But they are trying very hard and being very creative and doing all these things to try to improve product discovery. What are other ways that users and shoppers can find new products? And so the Inspire feed, the Discovery feed, love it. Do those appear to be growing? And I know you've got insights on both sides, sellers and as an influencer, are you getting more commissions? Can you tell if it's coming from an Inspire Feed versus Discover versus on the page?

Liz :

Yeah, so there is one report that you can run that you can see if it came through Inspire. I would say Amazon is putting a lot of money into it. So they're asking basically every time you turn around, Hey, we really want vertical shorts for, they're not saying for the Inspire feed, but that's what it's for. So my guess looking at it is that the amount of content that they're putting in there is getting more and more. It's hard to tell at the moment who's having success on the Inspire feed.

Brett:

And it's just interesting because you talk about how you're making most of your money as an influencer with that carousel at the top of the page. Well, and you already talked about it, but that that's a conversion rate play, right? That's not getting more traffic to a listing, even more internal traffic that's already on Amazon. It's just closing more of the traffic that you've already got. And so that's still a search play. You're still leaning into Amazon ads or whatever to get someone there and then the influencer helping close deals, which is still great. But yeah, I'm just curious. I would love to see the Discover Feed and the Inspire feed really take off, but as an Amazon shopper and the Target demo for the Discover Inspire Feed necessarily, but I'm always just searching for stuff.

Liz :

I do think that the discoverability problem is part of what they're trying to solve for here, and they're going up against TikTok as an example because they want it to be quick and shoppable and trendy, but they also have a lot more rules around what you can do in the videos. So when you think about TikTok, part of the reason you buy half that stuff is because the influencer made you laugh or connected with you or where is this stuff on Amazon? And I still love it. I think it's going to do good things, but it's like 10 things that you must have from Amazon for your car or for my baby or for my dog or so it is, I see it being more home shopping network than TikTok eventually,

Brett:

Which is just interesting to me because that's not the mode most people go to Amazon for. I go to Amazon for something specific, researching a couple products, just going to buy, I'm going to buy stuff, not necessarily consume content. Whereas if I was a TikTok user, which I'm really not, but TikTok or Instagram or Facebook or whatever, I'm going there to just consume content, hang out, and then I'm open to discovering something new. So yeah, it'd be really interesting to see how Amazon continues to iterate and improve that experience and hopefully they'll get traction because that's an issue for a lot of brands. I know an issue for Amazon is that discoverability of new products. And so I hope they keep improving. I hope that they crack that code.

Liz :

It would be really cool if it would help when you first launch your product on Amazon and you're like, if you build it, it turns out they are not coming, right? You're like, wait, I did all this work and it's great, but I can't even find myself when I type in my brand name and product name. So if they can help people clear that gap, I feel like that would be an amazing use of it. We'll see.

Brett:

Yeah, and I think there's also something to be said about if you sell a premium product and you're not really well known on Amazon or even that well-known off Amazon, selling a premium is a okay. And I think that's actually a great strategy in a lot of cases, but you got to tell the story and you got to show someone why are you more expensive? Otherwise we default the price without clear understanding as to why you should pay more. And maybe some of these influencer videos and some of the content in the Discover in Inspire Feed could show someone why you're worth a premium price. So I think there's got to be some branding elements there as well. I want to go back to something you mentioned a minute ago, which is important and we help a lot of companies with their posts. How do I create posts as a brand? But talk about why that's important. And you mentioned that that shows up also in the Inspire feed. Is that right?

Liz :

Yeah. So my best example of this is somebody that we both know from Seller Summit actually, Amanda Creations. And when Inspire launched, I happened to be in one of the first rollouts. So it was like when there was not a lot of content at all in there, and I would be scrolling. I was like, Amanda, I didn't know that you were doing this. And she's like, what are you talking about? And I was like, you're in the Inspire feed. And so then this is at the beginning, we're starting to put it all together and her words to me were basically, I didn't know what Amazon was going to do with it or why it was important, but I just knew that we should do it. Yeah,

Brett:

Test it.

Liz :

And it's like, yes. So when I scroll now I follow her also. So I know it's an algorithm, so it's not random totally that I find her. But you can see when you're scrolling, Amazon is still surfacing brand content in Inspire and discover for free. The brands don't even know it's happening half the time. They don't send you a report that says, we showed 15 people this post that you did today. You just know like, oh, I had a bump in this product. I wonder why. So if you are a brand and you aren't doing posts, it is kind of like a wild play to be like, I'm creating content that Amazon is placing for me that I'm not paying for. It's a pretty good, I don't want to say risk, but gamble to take because posts are pretty easy to put

Brett:

Together. Posts are easy to put together. And yeah, I talk about this a lot on the pod, but the companies that are going to do the best long-term on Amazon and those that are going to be sellable, if your goal is to exit your brand one day is to actually build a brand, not just playing. So we talked about how Amazon is mostly search and it is, but if that's all you're doing is just playing the search game and trying to manipulate price or get a few more reviews here and there and things like that, that's okay, but you really need to build a brand and get repeat purchases if your product is conducive to that. And so some of these additional things are what's going to help you build a brand and protect margins and scale and then eventually sell. So really cool. Any kind of final tips or suggestions? What should I be thinking about as a brand if I want to make influencer work? Anything we left out?

Liz :

Absolutely. So there's one tip that I'll give you. The other thing that you can be doing as a brand that is available to influencers is lives. So if you want to, you have multiple skews, you have one skew, whatever you feel like you can add, go ahead and do a couple lives, you can repurpose that. We never know where Amazon might test that content. And that is available to brands as well.

Brett:

You can repurpose it. So you do a live, you can now take clips of that and share in other places, is that right?

Liz :

Yeah, so any content that you upload to Amazon you own fully and they allow you to post in other places. So if you're doing a live on Amazon, then you could also clip it and utilize, repurpose the content.

Brett:

I think that makes sense. Then that kind of, again, just you're able to leverage a little bit more, right? You took the time to do a live, maybe it did something for you on Amazon, maybe it didn't, but now you can repurpose that content, chop it up, put it on TikTok and ads or Instagram or Facebook or something like that.

Liz :

Yeah, I mean, LifePro is one of the brands that I've worked with through Creator Connections, which is an invite only for brands and influencers. So if you have that in your backend, but they do lives all the time and they're like a fitness thing. So they're like, we have these products and then they do q and a with trainers. There's a lot that you can do and build that audience. And of course, like Amazon, it lets you repurpose it because hoping that you'll repurpose it and drive traffic back to Amazon. So it's a good little flywheel there. But to your question about working with influencers and kind of final tips, I do offer a white glove service. So if you're like, Liz, I have more money than time right now in way of, I don't have the time to go find these people, find them for me, I will find them for you. And I have over a hundred influencers that are using the tool that are available for working with, and they cover everything from dogs and pets and kids and any outdoors, anything that you could possibly need for your brand. So that is also available.

Brett:

Love it. So flu, it's like influencer without the N, whether the i influencer fruit.com. And so yeah, talk about that. So you've got the white glove service, so you can help brands find influencers, but then you also got some training and some software, some tools. So yeah, give us the rundown.

Liz :

Yeah, so I will also put together influencer fruit.com/omg so that everybody can find all of this in one place. But yep, starts with the tool for influencers to help them find your product listings that are optimized for them. So it tells them from the search results page, if you have that upper carousel and how many other influencers are on there, and then goes through the course. So if somebody has that audience is looking to monetize with that. And then on the brand side, if you're just looking for, listen, I need six influencers to fill out that upper carousel for me, can you help me? The answer is yes. So there's a link on there that goes to book a call. Happy to hop on and chat with you about where your brand is at and how we can help.

Brett:

Awesome. So flu fruit.com/omg. Check it out. Liz Saunders, ladies and gentlemen, Liz, this was very fun, very enlightening. I'm so glad we did this. And yeah, we'll have to do it again sometime. That

Liz :

Sounds great. Thanks Brett.

Brett:

Awesome. Thanks Liz. And as always, thank you. Could would not do the show without you, and so would love your feedback. Love that review on iTunes if you've not done. And hey, hit us up on the socials. I'm actually very active right now on LinkedIn, so hit me up. Let me know what you'd like to hear more of on the show or let's continue the conversation on LinkedIn. I'm also on a few other places, YouTube shorts and stuff, so check me out there. But with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Amazon DSP is a misunderstood platform. Heck, even the name is confusing!

The Amazon DSP we’re referring to in this episode is the Demand Side Platform. Not to be confused with Amazon’s other DSP - Delivery Service Provider (the independent contractors who deliver your Amazon packages).

Amazon DSP Ads are a way to target shoppers on and off Amazon with highly relevant image and video ads based on Amazon’s behavioral shopping data.

No one has more shopper data than Amazon. But Amazon doesn’t publish that data or allow anyone to use it unless…you advertise using Amazon DSP.

DSP is one of the most powerful advertising platforms I’ve ever encountered. But it’s also commonly misunderstood, and it is advanced. This is not for beginners.

There are a lot of ways to waste money with it. But there are a few ways to accelerate growth.

Here’s a look at what we discuss:

• The top mistakes advertisers make when running DSP ads.
• The top 3 strategies for accelerating growth with Amazon DSP.
• Why running DSP remarketing only and testing too small will likely fail.
• What it means to have a DSP “seat” and why they are so rare.
• How one seller tripled their DSP spend and accelerated growth by 35%, all while lowering their TACoS.
• Understanding DSP attribution and why it’s a hotly debated topic.

‍

Transcript

Chris:

Anytime you have uncertainty in an economic environment, we see people pull back on certain areas. I have seen, I don't know if I've seen as low of an inbound interest in DSP since we've been doing this for six years. To me, it lines up exactly with the economic conditions that are out there. And yet OMG has consistent advertisers that are still running DSP and I would just highly recommend that's got to go into your thought process. When people pull back, it's a great opportunity to put yourself right back in.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today is a very special episode. We have not one but two guests and not just two, any old guests. These are OMG experts. One guest you undoubtedly know, he's been on the show many, many times. My business partner and the co-founder of OMG Commerce, Mr. Chris Brewer. Chris, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Chris:

Good to be back. It's going well. A little warm down here in the heat box, but other than that, it's all good.

Brett:

Yeah, so OMG HQ is in beautiful Springfield, Missouri. We're experiencing some unseasonably mild temperatures. It's still summertime, but it's feeling pretty good. But Chris is down in Florida and is hot. It's always hot and so you kind of know that, you know that moving in. So just the way it goes. But Chris is not the only guest. As I mentioned, there are two guests and the other guests on the show. This is not just his first time on this show, this is his first time on any podcast. But this guy is an Amazon DSP legend. And that is our topic today. We're talking about Amazon DSP, what that means, what you should know about it, how you can utilize it, and all sorts of good stuff around Amazon DSP. And so Austin Chambers, DSP specialist for OMG Commerce is our other guests. Austin, what's up man? How's it going? And thanks for joining the show. Yeah,

Austin:

Good to be here. It's going pretty good. It's definitely a little change of pace for me from being behind the scenes usually. So we'll see.

Brett:

Yeah, you're behind the scenes. You know how to work a spreadsheet. This guy understands line items and orders and all kinds of stuff related to DSP. He can nerd out with the best of them, but understands the tactical side, the strategic side. But yeah, podcasting, this is new for you and it's going to be a lot of fun. So we're going to dive right in. For those that do not know, what is Amazon DSP? So Mr. Expert, why don't you start

Austin:

For a newbie? A DSP is a demand side platform. So it's a platform to do display advertising. Amazon DSP is obviously Amazon's demand side platform. Their DSPs all over the place. Google Ads is a version of something like that, but Amazon's is exclusive to Amazon. Only accessible through Amazon.

Brett:

Yeah, it's kind of interesting. So one, there's a little bit of confusion as to what DSP is because there's another Amazon DSP. So we're talking demand side platform. We're all about advertising and accelerating growth and getting new customers, making sales on Amazon. But do you know what the other DSP stands for? Chris? This may be the DSP. Some people have in mind.

Chris:

Well there is one with Amazon. When you Google it, it's their delivery, which is brilliant naming convention when they started this.

Brett:

I think this does sort of underscore the fact that Amazon kind of operates in these small autonomous teams and sometimes these teams do not talk to each other at all. Right? So yeah, the other DSP is delivery service provider. And actually there was a point in time where I was like, I want to start A DSP, that kind of DSP. If I find I knew this guy that was into logistics, I'm like, Hey, what if we partnered together, we start this business? And he's like, dude, that'd be a terrible business. And then after I looked at the numbers, I'm like, you're correct. So I'm not talking about the delivery service provider, but demand side platform and to people that don't know. And I am glad you laid it out that way. Austin, people may think that DSP is unique to Amazon if that's their only exposure, but it's actually a generic advertising term demand side platform just means it's a platform that advertisers can access and utilize and run ads on. However, the name's a little bit misleading because getting access to Amazon DSP either requires a special seat or massive amounts of ad spend or a connection with an agency like ours. But simply put Amazon DSP as a way to run display ads, video ads on and off Amazon, but utilizing Amazon's shopper data. Now, Austin, from your perspective, why is that a big deal that we can use Amazon's shopper data to build our ad targeting?

Austin:

Well, the main thing is Amazon has hundreds of millions of shoppers, even just in the us and they don't share that first party data with anyone. It's all housed internally. So using Amazon's DSP as a way for us to build custom audiences or Amazon builds audiences to target shoppers based on data signals straight from Amazon, we're not relying on a third party doing market research. We're getting the metrics straight from Amazon.

Brett:

Yeah, love it. And Chris, from your perspective, why is that? Why is that such a big deal to harness Amazon's shopper behavioral data?

Chris:

Well, I mean, for one, if you're a seller, if somebody visits your page and decides to keep shopping, looking at other comparisons, seeing who's got a promo or a deal, having access to that data is huge because you can quickly within milliseconds, I think Austin retarget those people and we can talk about it too. But you also, you don't necessarily have to be an Amazon seller to harness the power of that data. Brett, you can also run ads off platform to that audience, which can also be valuable depending on your brand and what you're looking from a return perspective.

Brett:

And no one has more shopper data than Amazon. Nobody has more shoppers in the US and nobody has that data like Amazon and you are not getting that data any other way other than utilizing it through the Amazon DSP platform and it just works. And so when you take that data from Amazon and then combine that with the ad networks that you have access to through DSP, now you can reach any Amazon shopper at any time and it can be extremely effective. So talk about that just a little bit, Austin, where might our ads show up? So I'm running DSP, I can target people based on what they're in the market for, what they're shopping for, what they viewed on Amazon, I can target them based on that. Where might my ads show up

Austin:

Really all over the place? I'd say typically 80% plus of spend is on site ads. So whether that's product detail pages on Amazon, so whether that's product detail pages on the sidebar and search results, stuff like that. But also Amazon has partnerships with a few dozen different third party, what they're called open exchanges where whether it's the Google or I mean you can show on weather channel Yahoo. So you have access to endless inventory virtually. Yeah,

Brett:

It's almost the entire internet or it is like the whole internet that you would want to be associated with. You can access through Amazon DSP. And yeah, there's actually a backdoor into the Google display network. And we're a big Google agency as well. Chris and I have been doing Google ads since forever. And so what's cool is now you can run ads on the Google Display network through Amazon DSP based on what people are shopping for on Amazon. But to your point, Austin, 80% of the time your ads are showing up on amazon.com search results page. There are some areas on the side and at the bottom where display ads show up even on product detail pages, even on your competitor's product detail pages, you can run Amazon DSP ads, which is brilliant on Amazon's part. They don't care. They don't care if someone buys from you or from your competitor, they just want someone to buy. But it's also pretty awesome from your perspective too. If you can show up on a competitor's page and steal that shopper, why not do it? Which is pretty great. Alright, Austin, so let's get everybody excited about Amazon DSP. Let's talk about a case study. What is one of your favorite Amazon DSP case studies and what's possible with DSP?

Austin:

So my favorite case is an example. It's a client that came to me about two years ago. They were doing good on P P C, doing good on the seller side of things. We've been pretty consistent on DSP averaging 12, 13,000 in ad spend over the course of the 2021 year. But came to me, said, Hey, I want to lead into DSP more. Here are the keys to the house. So I love hearing that,

Brett:

By the way. Yes, we will always, if it's a brand we know and trust, we'll always accept the keys to the house. We'll take very good care of your house. But yes, we very much love to hear that phrase.

Austin:

Yeah, exactly. So I took that and kind of ran with it. We like to ease in. We don't want to blow up the boat overnight. So we will increase 13,000 to 17 to 20 to 25 throughout the course of the 2022 year. I think we averaged right around 30, 35,000 in ad spend per month. So up for 13,000 P P C ad spend remained flat year over year. So it was a difference of less than 1% difference in P P C ad spend. So

Brett:

Basically tripling DSP spend, sponsored spend, so Amazon P P C basically stayed the same,

Austin:

Yeah, basically flat on the P P C side. Take that into 2023. We've increased to about 50,000 a month in DSP ad spend. We've actually seen a decrease on the P P C side by 10% or so. Sales are up 35% versus 2021 when looking at it on a monthly average. So tacos and we use DSP ad spend when figuring that tacos is down from 35 to 40 down to under 30 some months. So we've increased DSP ad spend by three x plus, but also decreased tacos at the same time and increase P P C efficiency.

Brett:

Beautiful, love this so much. So we've gone accelerated to the floor, but in a very controlled, methodical, measured approach, but triple DSP ad spend, but we've been able to reduce sponsored ad spend and now total efficiency, total tacos is better than it's ever been. Go ahead Chris.

Chris:

Yeah, a couple of key learnings here. I get the fortunate place to be able to talk to a lot of potential DSP advertisers and now this case study is a little different because they kind of passed the trust threshold with OMG. They were currently advertising and obviously knew what we could do. But the key factor here with this particular client, and I can't emphasize this anymore to brands, is they gave us the leeway to be able to grow and not just like, Hey, let's test this for two or three months and see how it goes. Because typically when I've seen new brands come in and we used to all actually allow a three month DSP test, and that's usually what it ended up. People limped along spent the bare minimum and then couldn't really tell actually how it was impacting because you looked at this DSP spend relative to their P P C spend, and it was one percentage, two percentage, 3%, you're not going to be able to tell any sales differences from those kinds of numbers. So they stuck with it and they had a team that could focus strategically. And this is a key difference because when we get DSP advertisers coming from other places, I'm not going to name names, but a lot of times it's places that are using somebody else's seat or it's software driven and they don't have people that really understand how to effectively use the audiences and scale. So that's something just to keep in mind.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really interesting. We do talk to people and DSP is a bit of a controversial channel and we'll get into this more later, but there's been a couple of Twitter storms or X storms I guess you should say now, where people are like dog and DSP. And we have talked to a number of brands that have not had a great experience with DSP, but we found exactly what you said, Chris, we're like, okay, well how much did you test? How did you test? What did you do? And they're like, well, we spent 3000 a month. And when we do the math and look at the traffic that generated, we can say that increased the number of shoppers to your page is by two or 3%. It makes sense then that you wouldn't feel that or wouldn't notice that, right? If you're already growing a little two or 3% bump, maybe you see it, maybe you don't.

And so yeah, this is unique where this client trusted us and we'd earn that trust. We've proven it and we're able to scale. I do think, and this is just a quick side note because I know we have agencies listening, amen. This, we have a lot of clients listening to this. You're working with an agency, obviously don't trust someone until they've earned it, but when you want someone to steer the strategy or steer campaigns, don't also keep your hand on the wheel. If you're steering and you've got someone over on the passenger seat trying to jerk the wheel, bad things happen. And so yeah, this is one where we were given a little bit of free rein and we took advantage of it and proved it out. And so what's also interesting about this is I think a lot of brands hit a bit of a ceiling with sponsored ads. I love sponsored product ads, sponsored brand sponsored brand video. I think they're foundational. I think you got to start there and really get those working well first. But sometimes you get a ceiling where you can't really scale more than you are now efficiently. And that's where DSP can come in. So it can create great top of funnel growth, great remarketing growth, great repurchase growth, and help you even improve your tacos, which is amazing.

Austin:

And I'll provide a little bit of context of what Chris said about people coming in, spending two 3% of their ad dollars on DSP. This client was spending in the single digits, five, six, 7%. Their monthly sales can fluctuate that much each month anyways. So cutting out that much spend or adding that much spend, it's hard to see the difference. It's going

Brett:

To look normal. The patterns are going to look the same,

Austin:

The patterns are going to look the same. So we took that from 7% to, I mean a quarter of their ad spend almost plus. So whenever you add that much, when it's that substantial of a percentage of the overall piece, you can tell when it makes a difference.

Brett:

What are some of the top mistakes you see Amazon, DSP advertisers, sellers making with Amazon DSP? We talked about one where you're testing at such a small level, you'll never be able to feel the difference. Now I will say I think you should test in a way that's reasonable, right? Don't just start spending 50 grand a month unless that's an in significant amount to you, which I know some sellers it is. So you want to test smartly, but test in a way that we see the difference. So that's a mistake. What are some other mistakes you see people

Austin:

Make? You already said it. Testing small, testing only. Bottom of funnel is one of the biggest things. People want to come in. They want to spend minimum budgets on only retargeting or only repurchasing, which is a piece of the puzzle, but it's only one piece of the puzzle. It's not where DSP really shines. I like to spend roughly a third on bottom of the funnel tactics. When you're only spending a small percentage of overall ad spend on bottom the funnel, you're not going to see a big difference. The other thing which Chris alluded to is people only wanted to test for a short period of time. And this case study, it was six plus months of scaling before we actually started to see a difference in the monthly averages. So can't speak to exactly why that's the case, but that's what we've seen time and again, so giving it 6, 7, 8 months of scaling and being a significant piece of the pie for it to actually prove itself out.

And then one of the other things, and one of the biggest things for me is judging it strictly off roas DSP. When you're talking mid and upper funnel DSP with awareness campaigns, if you judge them by roas, it's going to be a fail 99% of the time, especially when you consider Amazon's attribution model is last touch or last click. Whenever you're running awareness campaigns, that's going to be their first touch. They might have three or four other ad types they come on contract with along the way. So of course that in market campaign is not going to have a good roas. So typically if you're just judging all of the campaigns based on ROAS or ACOs, you're going to be disappointed.

Brett:

Yeah, I love this so much. And I think the way you should look at this is more the way you might look at YouTube or Facebook where part of this is generating awareness and building a brand and getting people to convert later. Anything that's not bottom of funnel, part of the impact or benefit is the lift you generate or the halo effect generated. One reason why people love sponsored products and they get addicted to it, and actually they get a little bit spoiled with sponsored product ads, is it's immediate gratification. If someone clicks on a sponsored product ad, they're likely very close to making a purchase. They're interested, their comparison shopping, they're ready to pull the trigger. And so that's where you get 10, 15, 20% conversion rates, something like that on some product detail pages. So DSP is not the same if you're running remarketing or retargeting, that can be similar.

But the real beauty, the real magic of DSP is when you can layer on some of the other targeting and over time you're building that top of funnel interest and it is going to create a lift. And this is one of those things where you have to have a little bit of faith, right? We're still measuring. We can still see are we on the right track even in the early days. But the real benefit comes six, seven months later, like you talked about Austin, where, hey, you know what? We're spending more on DSP, but our tacos, our total advertising cost of sales, the total percentage we're spending on ads has gone down because of DSP, which is awesome. So let's talk about some of, what are some of the strategies you recommend? How are we utilizing DSP? You said about a third for bottom of funnels, like third remarketing, repurchase. Where do the other two thirds

Austin:

Go? Yeah, so I like to do thirds for bottom, mid and upper funnel. Typically, that's not a one size fits all, but that's usually pretty close. So when we're talking mid funnel, it's going after people that are already familiar with your competitors. They're in the market for, you're selling product A, your competitor selling product A, so they're looking at your competitors. So we're targeting people that have viewed those competitor products or we're targeting the product pages themselves. So this is combination of contextual targeting and competitive remarketing is what a lot of people call it.

Chris:

Well, maybe too Austin, and forgive me Brett, if this is on your roster of questions later, but I think it may be a good time because, and I'm just remembering things when I talk to people on calls and things come up around the same timeframes we were talking about audiences is how is what OMG can do with our own DSP C different from sponsor brand display, some of the display options that you already have within sponsored? Where is it good? Where is it limited? People often want to understand the difference there,

Austin:

Which I know that one of the later questions is when to consider DSP versus just sponsored display. Brett, do you want to wait to compare the difference?

Brett:

Go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, Chris has totally hijacked the show. He's totally just, he decided I'm no longer a guest, I'm a host. I'm just going to fire away questions like I own the place. No, actually that was fun. And so no, yeah, answer the question. I love that question.

Austin:

Yeah, so one of the main differences between DSP and sponsor display is the way you can customize your targeting. So sponsor display is really good at some things. One of the things I love about it the most, which is not available through DSP is bidding on a C P C basis. So DSP is strictly ccpm, so we're paying for impressions, not strictly for clicks, but with sponsored display, you're a little bit more limited with the type of targeting as far as overlapping and excluding certain audiences. With DSP, we can target a viewer of a specific product. We can exclude people that have already purchased that product or a competitor product or people that have viewed 30 days ago, but not within the past 15 days. With sponsor display, you're kind of at the mercy of what they offer. So last 90 day viewers kind of open-ended, last 265 day purchasers. I can target people that have purchased in the last 30 days if I wanted to. So the customizability with DSP is far and way better with sponsor display. And from what we've seen, the scalability is as well with sponsor display on both our clients and other clients or other brands that I've talked to. Sometimes they hit a pretty low cap on sponsor display spend, which is something that we rarely struggle with on DSP. Yeah, D

Brett:

S P way more customizable, targetable, and you can really scale it, which is amazing. Now Chris, you've mentioned a couple things. You mentioned something a few times that I bet people have heard and they're like, wait, whatcha talking about a seat? We're talking about a chair. What is the seat? So can you explain that? What does it mean to have a DSP seat and why is that a little bit unique right now?

Chris:

Yeah, so I don't remember. It's been I think over five years, Brett. Yeah,

Brett:

Yeah, for sure. It was like 2017.

Chris:

Yeah, we had heard about DSP A guy that actually used to work with us, heard about it, and we started to ask questions of our Amazon team about it. And back then, I don't know what is now, but back then it was like you had to have $30,000 as a brand individually to advertise on DSP. I think it

Brett:

Was like 30 to 50 a month that you had to commit to get a seat for DSP.

Chris:

Yeah. And so back then we didn't have that because we didn't have any advertisers at that point for DSP, but we started to get some in and I don't know, we got our own platform. And so here's the key things that you need to ask for, especially if you're out looking for a Amazon DSP provider is one, find out how experienced the team that's going to be actually overseeing the campaigns and the ads is ask them how much time they kind of spend in the account. Do I get a strategic discussion? Because what you'll fare it out there sometimes is if they are outsourcing that, because some places say, oh, sure, we have our own seat. But what they mean is their seat is their advertising software provider and they're running it through that. And again, all I can tell you is the feedback I've had from some of those, we get a decent amount of leads from those kinds of relationships. We've also ourselves provided seats to software companies, but we do it a little differently to kind of give them that strategy. And so that's basically it. We've even helped agencies kind have a seat through us so that they can get enough to kind of get their own. So we try to be a good industry partner there as well, try to

Brett:

Help the ecosystem where we're friendly to other agencies. We don't keep all of our toys just to ourself. But yeah, I think it's a great question to ask. Do you have your own seat? And then what kind of experience do you have with DSP? Yeah, we've been doing this for five plus years. I think it was 2018 ish. We were one of the fastest growing Amazon D SS P agencies. So myself, our Amazon director, we had to fly out to Amazon to the hq. We had dinner with Jeff Bezos. So all of that was true, except the Jeff Bezos part did not see him, did not meet him. But we did get to go to Amazon hq, which is cool. And so yeah, ask those questions. And so Amazon has kept the barrier pretty high to get an Amazon DSP seat for a while. They were not making it available to anybody. I think that's opened up a little bit. But anyway, so OMG is a little bit unique in that sense. We've had a seat for a long time, very seasoned, very experienced. We had a direct line to the Amazon DSP team, so that's pretty

Chris:

Special. And usually a good question to ask is, well, if we run DSP with you, can we get access to the platform so we can kind of get in there and see what you're doing? And if they say, oh, sure, we'll give you a dashboard access, usually that means they've got some kind of software overlaid because with OMG commerce, all of our accounts are within the same essentially DSP seat. So if we were to give a client access, they would be able to see all the information from all of our clients. So it's just a little bit of extra little tip there to find out, hey, is this really their own seat or are they outsourcing this somewhere

Brett:

Else? So let's go back to strategy Austin. So you were kind of beginning to lay that out. So third remarketing and repurchase, third kind of mid funnel. And you were talking about being able to target people that are shopping for competitive products. You talked about being able to put an ad on a competitor's product detail page. So continue the thought there. Why is that? I think that should be obvious why that's so cool, but why is that special?

Austin:

Yeah, well one is you're hopefully drawing sales away from competitors, which if competitors are selling more or less and you're selling more, it's going to help your organic ranking. You're going to show up for sponsored ads more. So that's kind of the main thing. Whenever we go after anything that's not bottom of funnel, it's stealing a sell away from someone else.

Brett:

And how often would that be if someone gave you this scenario, call it five, 10 years ago where they said, Hey, what if shopper's about to buy your competitor's product and at the last minute you show up and show them your product and show them the price and the reviews and maybe a little message about why it's so awesome, would you want to do that? I would be like, yeah, I want to do that. I'd do that all day long. And I remember back in the early days, and I've been doing this a long time, in the early days of remarketing back when that was kind of a novel idea, people would ask, Hey, can we remarket to our competitors shoppers? So remarketing on Google or Facebook or whatever, you're remarketing your own shoppers or your own site visitors. But people have always wondered, can I remarket to my competitors shoppers?

And the answer pre DSP is, well no, unless your competitor lets you pixel their site. Other than that you can't. But with Amazon DSP, Amazon's like, I don't care. So yeah, sure. Use target shoppers of your competitor, put the ad on the competitor's page. We just want people to purchase. And so if you leverage that and do that, right, it's such a powerful way to grow. And the thing you got to keep in mind is I think there are some cases where if I'm looking at Nike shoes on Amazon and a pair of Adidas sneaks in there, probably still going to buy the Nike. But for a lot of product categories, we're not super brand loyal. So I'm looking at one product, but I see another brand that's maybe comparable and has better reviews, and I like the look of it better. It's possible that I'll buy that instead. Yeah. Okay. So that's competitor targeting A do you have another thought there?

Austin:

Yeah, something I was going to add is with those audiences, if you have one or two top competitors that seem to be performing well, we can make an audience of just those competitive viewers or target just those product pages. If you don't care, we can make an audience of 150 different ACEs in your category and exclude ones that have a price point that's too high or too low. So the way that we can customize those audiences to target exactly who we want to target is pretty endless.

Brett:

And one of the things I like to think about with Amazon, and I think this applies to Google shopping and some of the other marketplaces and stuff, is part of the success here is part advertising, part merchandising, showing up on the digital shelf, and whether that's organic, and that's Amazon brand management and s e O type of stuff, or it's sponsored ads, that's the P P C magic that we like to run. But with Amazon DSP, there's a little bit of merchandising too because it's like we're able to follow someone as they slide down that aisle, right? They're on the aisle looking at toothpaste or they're looking at fitness equipment, and as they slide down the aisle away from our products, looking at a competitor's products, we can pop up and say, Hey, hey, what about me? Did you think about this? And just pretty powerful. And so lots of opportunities there. So I would say that's kind of mid funnel. Maybe it's inching in the top of funnel depending on how you define it. But then what would be kind of some top of funnel strategies?

Austin:

So top of funnel is typically going to be in market audiences, which is people in the market for x, y, Z category. So let's say you'd sell toothpaste and someone might be in the market for oral care products. So maybe they were on Amazon and they went to a product that was in the oral code subcategory. So those are typically the largest audiences, super broad. They do have some more specific ones here and there, but usually you're going to get several million people in an audience like that, sometimes 50 million. So super broad audiences, both in terms of size and in terms of how broad the category can be. They're also lifestyle and demographic audiences that can be layered in. So based on people's purchase habits and shopping habits over their lifetime of being an Amazon shopper, they're obviously really into fitness. They buy a lot of supplements and workout equipment and athletic apparel, and then another, not necessarily past top of funnel, but the very top of the funnel is typically where we use video ads, S t V. So streaming TV is kind of the new big thing. It's one of those things, it's like running TV commercials, it takes a pretty big investment, but this is about as far up the funnel as you can go. It'd be comparable to YouTube top of funnel advertising,

Brett:

And we love what's possible there. With streaming tv, you can show up on Amazon fire TV sticks and Amazon devices and things like that, which there are millions and millions of. Let's talk about those in-market audiences really quickly. So give me a category, Austin, make up a category, not toothpaste. I think that's a little too broad, but something else. Dog food. Dog food. Okay, so let's look at dog food. So basically if we're looking at an in-market audience, let's go a little more specific. Let's go organic dog food, okay, so organic dog food, what does that in-market audience look and how does someone get in that audience and how does someone get kicked out or leave that audience? Just so people can kind of understand who are we targeting if we say, I want an InMarket audience for organic dog food?

Austin:

Yeah. So InMarket for organic pug food virtually means that within, and it's either 28 or 30 days, I believe it's past 28 days of shopping on Amazon's side that within the past 28 days, that person has searched viewed bit in the subcategory for organic dog food. So whether they clicked on a couple products and search results that were or labeled organic dog food, maybe that was part the title of the product, something along their shopping journey within the last 28 days indicates that they are about to purchase or wanting to purchase organic dog

Brett:

Food. So we know they've been on the aisle, right? To think about this like a physical store, someone's been on the organic, someone's been on the dog food aisle, but then they've been down where the organic dog food is, right? They've been living for it, they've been shopping, and maybe they add it to their cart and they put it back on the shelf. We know there's interest there, and so now we can target them. So what are some of the creative ways that sellers and that we are using in market audiences?

Austin:

So typically what I like to do, Amazon has some pretty good overlap reports that show us how certain in-market audiences overlap with our custom audiences. So let's say we sell organic dog food and I have an audience that's made up of people that have viewed our product. Amazon is going to show us the in market and lifestyle audiences that overlap. So we can pick and choose which audiences make the most sense based on how our audience actually fits into those other categories. Once we let something run for a while, we like to pull some audience insights reports that show us what other audiences that we're not targeting interact well with these ads. So maybe people are in the market for organic dog food, but it's also people that live in high-end gun zip codes or people that are over 55 and maybe it's primarily women that click and not men. Over time, we can layer in those audiences to get as specific as possible to get the best possible results.

Brett:

What's really cool here, Austin, is actually you can utilize DSP to get more insights into your shoppers, to get more insights into your buyers and those people that are looking at your product by saying, Hey, what are the related audiences? What's overlapping with my buyer? And yeah, you get to learn some pretty cool things and then that can adjust your targeting. Anything. And Chris, want to get you involved in this as well. Do you hear any misconceptions when you're talking to potential DSP advertisers or are there areas where they're just blown away when they hear what's possible on DSP? What's kind of the perspective from an audience standpoint of the people you talk to?

Chris:

Well, first I must say that I've got an audience of organic dog food lovers behind me that may potentially chime in because there's someone in the house they don't recognize right now.

Brett:

You mean the furry, the furry lovers of organic dog food or maybe lovers of any dog food in general? There

Chris:

You go. Actually, I think he got so excited about Austin's organic dog food example that it just could not contain himself.

Austin:

Makes sense.

Chris:

At any rate, your question was around what was that? Because now I'm often dog

Brett:

Food. Yeah, and it's totally okay that the dogs are, which by the way, I'm going to say something kind of controversial, not super related, but just curious to me, curious what kind of dog food you feed your dogs, Chris. Because I've started to see this trend of vegan dog food, and that's always surprised because I've always thought dogs were meat eaters. Are your dogs meat eaters, Chris? Are you feeding them veggies and stuff?

Chris:

Actually they are loving this week because I cooked some fantastic ribeyes out on the grill the other night. And did you Giving your

Brett:

Dogs ribeyes,

Chris:

Man, given dogs ribeyes. We are also, I'm going to tell you what kind of a couple Jenny and I are. We offered to babysit my daughter's boyfriend's poodle while they are in Central America for two months. And anyway, it's one thing walking a dog like our poo who's about this big, and it's another walking a dog of that size. And let's just say that the plastic bag has to be larger. That's all I'm going to say. And I think this relates to your question, it's because we feed them, we lift those ribeyes had to put 'em up way up on the refrigerator so the dog wouldn't get them. And then we woke up the next morning, realized we never put them in the refrigerator. So they've been getting cut ribeye chunks for the last several days and they're loving it. But we actually do buy the fresh food in the refrigerated section at Walmart, which is the organic stuff that doesn't have all the fillers, and we mix that in with some really high quality food. But you asked, there's the answer.

Brett:

Fascinating. Totally a side note, but super interesting. Hey, I believe there's a market for anything. So sell vegan dog

Chris:

Food increases engagement in your podcast. People love dog stories for sure. This is going to be the only part people maybe I love that podcast, especially the dog food segment. I like the

Brett:

Dog part. And why does Chris give his dogs ribeyes? It's crazy when you leave it out and don't refrigerator. It makes sense. So Chris, what I was talking about though was audiences. So you talk to people when they first reach out to O mg and they're like, Hey, what's possible with DSP? What are either the misconceptions about audience targeting or the things people get really excited about related to audience

Chris:

Targeting? Oh gosh, they just don't know. They don't know. They've heard D SS P, they've heard it can be great. They don't know. They aren't familiar with the different audience types. Again, that's a good vetting out for your agency is how well does your agency understand all the audience types, all the various targeting and where you should actually start. We don't do this with everyone, and I think we also are sensitive to people's interest in getting a good return. Sometimes people just want to see, Hey, what is my return actually going to be? And in those cases, we'll actually recommend, Hey, let's start more bottom of funnel. Let's get you those retargeting audiences and most people that they get that audience right away. Retargeting, there is some confusion sometimes about where their ads are actually going to appear to these audiences on platform, off platform. But we've got a great resource in our strategy document that we can share with folks, and I'd be happy, anybody wants to contact the podcast to send this over to 'em that kind of lists those different audiences out. I think we still have a resource on our website, the DSP roadmap that goes through some of those audiences. I would highly recommend if you are a newbie to DSP and you want to know more, that's a great resource to grab and it's a very easy

Brett:

Read. Yep, got to get that for short. So a couple things to talk about. We talked about some of the traditional things to do like, hey, if you're selling organic dog food, let's target that. If you're selling tooth whitening toothpaste for sensitive teeth, even though I said don't talk about toothpaste, that you target people that are in the market for that, but you can also get creative in addition to that. So use this as an example. Silicone wedding rings. I've seen ads for silicone wedding rings, looking at treadmills or looking at other exercise and fitness equipment. So ways to look at, hey, what else might someone be shopping for that's very related or complimentary to my product? Or they would indicate, Hey, someone's looking for that. They would benefit from having my product as well.

Chris:

Are you doubling up there too? What's that? Oh, that's your, okay. I was looking at that. This is

Brett:

A health. So yeah, talk about this is like a sleep tracker health tracker. It's an aura ring, but same thing if you start to see, hey, this looks like this is a biohacker, this is someone who's buying all kinds of fitness stuff and supplements and crazy things like that. Let's show them an ad for an aura ring. And so you can begin to do things like that too, to find someone who's likely to be a customer of yours.

Austin:

And that's one of the other things about the audience overlap report that we can pull sometimes audiences show up there, show up in that report that it's like, why is someone that's in the market for this clicking on my product at a high rate? It shows you things that you wouldn't have ever thought of,

Brett:

Just shows you, hey, other ways to merchandise and sell this product,

Chris:

And this is a perfect opportunity to do. What I've been able to do on every podcast I've ever been on with you is that I actually was in the market for one of those aura rings, one of those little biohacking devices, but I got it down to two, but I just could not make a decision. I was just frozen because it was just an either aura decision.

Brett:

So I knew it was coming. Listeners, I should have stepped in, I should have spared you. I should have put the kibosh on it. When Chris warms up like that, I'm like, okay, there's a pun, there's a pun. There's a pun impending here. But no, that's actually pretty good either Aura, I get it. W okay, so let's do this. Let's talk about measuring DSP because this is one of the more interesting parts about DSP. I mentioned that sometimes there are people on platforms that talk ill towards D SS P I saw a Twitter storm, a good buddy of mine who's in the space texted me late one night. I was like, dude, do you see what's happening on Twitter right now about Amazon DSP? So I looked and I chimed in and I talked to my buddy and stuff, but a lot of misconceptions about how DSP is measured. So what do we need to know about DSP measurement? Austin,

Austin:

Which one thing that I tell every client that we bring on is I take especially OZ numbers. I take those attribution numbers with a grain of salt because it is view based attribution. One question that we get asked a lot is, okay, I'm selling this product. Someone looked at this product and then we showed a DSP ad and then they purchased or are they going to come back and buy anyways? There's no way to quantify that. I guarantee that some of the people would've come back and bought anyways, which is why we take the numbers with a grain of salt. There's no exact formula for accounting for that, but we do know that there has to be some over attribution just because all the numbers point that there is. So we expect ROAS numbers that are above realistic. If they're lower than what we expect, then something's probably not going quite right.

Chris:

But I think that's to be, there's some amount of that with anything you do. Facebook is going to attribute more, they're going to lean more into Facebook attribute the things that led to conversions there. It's going to lean heavier there. And so I think that's common. I do think that Amazon, because of the nature of what it is, I think you have to go into it with again, that longer view because if you fall in love with your early returns of what you see in the reporting just from a retargeting basis, those are going to change as you move more up funnel. And you've got to see over time how it impacts the bigger picture.

Brett:

And I kind of nerd out about attribution. I like it. So I'm going to give my point of view on this and try not to get too nerdy. I hear people say things like Amazon attribution is wrong, and my take on any attribution is it's only wrong if it's broken, if it's not working the way it was intended to work, that's when it's truly wrong. Otherwise wrong is probably not the right word to use. You just need to understand what is this measuring? Because when you look at Facebook attribution, it's measuring what it's says it's going to measure. If you look at Google Analytics, it's measuring according to a set of standards. One example here, and this may not be a great example for everybody, I'm not an accountant. I've never aspired to be an accountant, but you got cash accounting, you got accrual accounting.

You would never say that cash accounting is wrong and accrual accounting is right. Maybe accrual accounting is preferred for your business model. It's just two different ways of measuring. And so what you got to look at with Amazon DSP is that it's not a click-based conversion only. It's also impression based. And that actually makes sense. Now, you may be like, oh, well I can't handle impression based conversions well, but you're also buying it based on impressions. So that's why Amazon is doing it. So that's not right. That's not good, bad, right, wrong. It just is what it is. So if you know that conversions are coming in view based or click-based, that's going to help shed light on what you were looking at. And that kind of plays into what you said Austin, where yeah, we probably want to overshoot a little bit on ROAS because there may be some view based conversions that are attributed that maybe those people are going to buy anyway if they didn't see the ad. So maybe we need to be a little more conservative in our look at things. Were we going to add something to that, Austin? Yeah,

Austin:

You were talking about attribution models is you have to understand that Amazon uses last touch with an emphasis on clicks,

Brett:

Right? That's another great point.

Austin:

And I think it's across all ad types. Now. I know at one point, I think sponsored brand used a different look back, but I believe across all ad types, it's a 14 day attribution window. So if someone clicks any type of sponsored ad sponsored product brand display and then views a DSP ad, as long as they don't click that DSP ad and they still purchase within the 14 days of the original click, the click gets the attribution. So DSP is not going to get a sale attributed when A P P C click took place within the same attribution window.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. And again, not to get too technical, that can just be too much for a podcast, but there is a little bit of setup. There's a token you have to place to get everything communicated to get DSP communicated with your sponsored product ads and stuff and sponsor display and sponsor brand. But yeah, once everything is communicating, then only one ad is going to get the credit. And so that's a really good call out. If I click on an ad and then I see a D Ss P ad, DS P is not going to get credit and I convert, or if I click on a DSP ad or just view a DSP ad first and that's what gets me interested. And then I search for you and click on a sponsored product ad. That sponsored product ad is going to get the credit for the conversion. So you got to understand what it's measuring to know how it's working.

Austin:

One thing that we haven't talked about yet, which as an agency, we're just getting our feet wet in is A M C, which one of the nice things about A M C, which is Amazon Marketing Cloud, is they have queries that give us different attribution models. So if we want to see based on first touch or last touch or multi-touch, we can see the path to conversion and maybe eight times out of 10 that in-market audience was the first touch attribution, but it's getting almost no credit because they're converting through A DSP retargeting or a sponsored brand.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, it's so good. And there's some areas where Amazon is way ahead of Google as an example, competitor targeting and stuff like that. Can't do that on Google for obvious reasons. But then there are other areas where this comparing attribution models, like that's kind of table stakes in Google, but it's not available everywhere in Amazon, but it is inside of the Amazon marketing cloud. And that's so interesting to use a football analogy, what if someone didn't really understand the game of football and we're all chiefs fans Go, chiefs go Mahomes. What if someone didn't understand football? But they did understand that the person in the end zone with the ball, they're the one that scores, they're the one that gets points. Someone could look at Mahomes and look at the chiefs and say it's the receivers, it's the wide receivers and the running back.

They're the ones that have, they have the ball in the end zone, not that dude with kind of the crazy voice or whatever. Number 15, it's not him, it's that's the guy in the end zone. But we all know it's the quarterback that sets it up. And in some ways that's what DSP does. It's the setup. It's the setup for the actual conversion. But you can only see that if you run DSP long enough and you're measuring lift and you're measuring total sales and you're looking at your tacos, or if you're looking at an A M C report and seeing, hey, you know what D SS P was the first click or the first impression on 20% of my conversions or 30% of my conversions or whatever. So yeah, understanding the role that DSP plays, understanding how Amazon measures it all, that's really important to crafting the right strategy and knowing when to press the gas pedal and when to hit the great brake pedal as you're building your business.

Chris:

So what you're saying, Brett, is this is a great podcast or post is this is how you don't fumble in the attribution game.

Brett:

Yeah, you do not want to fumble. You don't want to get right. That

Chris:

Was a great example. I do think you got to go with that somewhere. Yeah.

Brett:

Sweet. I like it, man.

Austin:

I will say that's one reason why I like the N F L more than Amazon because N F L uses multi-touch attribution. Quarterback gets credit lineman get credit receiver gets credit. Amazon's all last touch.

Brett:

So true. Yeah. Yeah. Guys, even the N F L gets multi-touch attribution basketball, multi-touch attribution. You got assist, you got rebounds, you got points, all that. Anyway, so get with the program. No, just last click. Awesome. So let's talk about what are some other considerations here? I'm just getting, if I'm listening to this and I'm like, okay, I'm a successful Amazon seller, when do I know the time is right for me to start on DSP? And then what should I start with other than reaching out to Austin and talking to Austin? That's a given, but what should I start with and when am I ready?

Austin:

And you kind of alluded to this before, there's a point when you are running P P C ads that you're spending about as much as the platform will lets you, you're efficient, you're making money, but you've plateaued. You can't really push any further. And what I've seen is that is

Brett:

Any incremental dollar you spend is just like, it's just going to Amazon. You're not getting much out of that.

Austin:

And that's the point where DSP comes into play. If your P P C is, you're holding it back because performance is not that good, DSP is not going to come in and magically make everything more efficient. DSP is there whenever you've plateaued and you're ready to grow. I would never recommend it for a brand who is not in a great spot on the P P C side of things. Or if they're in a super big growth stage and we don't know where P P C is going to go, then we don't really know where to start with DSP whenever P P C has so much fluctuation. So I like to look at D SS P as a percentage of overall ad spend. Let's say you're spending $200,000 a month on P P C at the right spot. I'd like to be spending roughly 50,000, 75,000 on the DSP side.

Keep a one to three, one to four ratio. So if you've hit that point and you don't have to be spending 200,000, that's just an example. But if you hit that point where your P P C ads are going, well, they're efficient, but you've plateaued and you want to continue growing, that's where DSP comes into play. We like to start small with bottom of the funnel campaigns just to make sure return is going to be what we hope and expect it to be. But we also come in with a playbook that has a built-in ramp up period. So month one, we might only run minimal spend on retargeting repurchasing, but there's already a plan in place for month two and month three to add mid and upper funnel and to scale budgets. So there's no guesswork whenever month three hits. Like, oh, what campaigns do we want to start? Now we already know what campaigns we're going with, assuming everything to that point is performing, we think it should.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. Really this DSP is a way to accelerate growth. It's not the way to fix fundamental business problems. It's not the way to grow your business when there are other more pressing issues. It's what works when you've got a stable foundation, good product, good reviews, good sponsored product, sponsored display, sponsored brand video, things like that are not sponsored display. Sponsored brand. Sponsored brand video. Then you go hard on DSP. Chris, how do you advise people? People come to you, you're the first one that people talk to, typically, what are you advising people on when they know they're ready for D S

Chris:

P? Yeah, and I would just say these are not hard and fast rules or anything. This is just strictly me having a lot of discussions with Austin and the team and evaluating brands because I could say easily, oh, you need to have at least a $25,000 a month P P C budget so that we could at least have an incremental spend to start with on DSP. This is if you're not coming in and saying, Hey, we want to run top of funnel and we've got this budget set aside and we're good for that. But I think to do having a healthy P P C spend is a good indicator that you could be successful on DSP. I'll let Austin speak to more about that. And we're also going to be ones that are going to say, Hey, we don't think we're going to analyze that because you've got to have enough sessions and visits to your product page. That's a key thing that we can't, even if you wanted to, we couldn't even get advertising. There's certain products, Amazon won't let us advertise on DSP for certain categories, but also if your sessions are running, let's just say roughly below 7,500 a month in a 30 day lookback window, it's probably not going to go anywhere, but I'd want to lean on Austin for any additional things you might say on that topic.

Austin:

Yeah, and I'd say even 7,500 at this point is pretty conservative. Even if that audience does go through, spend is going to be next. 7,500.

Brett:

What? Austin, could you clarify that? 75 or

Austin:

What sessions or with vendor accounts? It's called a glance view. So that's basically how many individual sessions of people visiting the page have occurred over whatever look back window. We do 30 day audiences, so we always look at a 30 day look back window.

Brett:

Awesome. Well guys, we have even exceeded the allotted time that I thought we would spend, but it's been so good. I still love DSP as a marketing junkie as a long time advertising marketing guy. DSP just fires me up, man. It's just unique. It's got unique targeting capabilities, it's got all kinds of data at your disposal. Some really, really cool stuff you can use with DSP. It is advanced. It's not the first thing you should do, but it is something that should be part of your growth strategy if you're a serious Amazon seller serious about growing a brand on Amazon. And so, hey, if you're interested, omg commerce.com, click on the Let's talk button and let's talk about DSP. You'll almost certainly be talking to Chris at some point. And then if everything looks good, you'll probably talk to Austin as well. But gentlemen, any closing thoughts on Amazon DSP or anything marketing related or hey, chiefs related?

Chris:

My closing thoughts would be anytime you have uncertainty in an economic environment, we see people pull back on certain areas. I don't know if I've seen as low of an inbound interest in DSP since we've been doing this for six years. To me, it lines up exactly with the economic conditions that are out there. And yet OMG has consistent advertisers that are still running DSP and I would just highly recommend that's got to go into your thought process. When people pull back. It's a great opportunity to put yourself right back in and

Austin:

A little bit more to add in. Closing thoughts on when to consider DSP. If you think of it like account health seller, account health as personal health, if you go talk to a personal trainer and your diet is trash, they're going to tell you to get your diet right before you start working out. And I like to see you P P C and DSP as diet versus exercise. We could work out all day long on DSP, but if you're not eating right, then it's pointless. Whereas if you get your diet right, you start eating well, get healthy, then you can work out and actually see gains.

Brett:

And even to go next level and to talk about my ring for just a minute, if your diet and exercise are right, but your sleep is garbage, you're going to be sunk too. So you got good sponsored products, you got good DSP, but there's fundamental business issues. We can't fix those either, but love that analogy. Love Amazon, DSP. So check it out omg commerce.com with that. Gentlemen, thank you. This was entertaining. This was fun. We covered a lot of subjects, chiefs, dogs, organic versus vegan versus meat for dogs, plus a lot of marketing. Goodness. So thanks fellas. Awesome. Thank

Chris:

You.

Brett:

Thanks Brett. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. Connects with us on the socials. I'm actually pretty active on LinkedIn right now, so hit me up. Or check us out on Instagram and YouTube. The YouTube channel is growing, so check that out as well. And with that, until next time, thank you.

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Your Amazon listings are probably NOT as optimized as you think. Your products likely aren’t merchandised as well as they could be either. In this episode, Brandon shows you how to find obscure keywords to dramatically grow your sales and rankings. He also shows you how to merchandise your product to fly off the shelf. 

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We also talk about AI, competitor research, new product development, and what it will take to get ahead and stay ahead on Amazon. 

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Brandon is in an elite club of 8 figure sellers on Amazon. His brands will sell over $30 million this year on Amazon, and he’s targeting over $50 million in sales next year. 

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Here’s a look at what we discuss:

• The two main factors that impact ranking on Amazon: 1. Performance and 2. Relevance and how to improve BOTH.
• How to find obscure keywords that you can rank for quickly to boost sales.
• The 2 biggest mistakes sellers make when it comes to merchandising and how to fix them easily.
• How to get feedback faster and easier on product designs so that you don’t waste time or money on products or merchandising that’s likely to fail.
• How to use AI to quickly synthesize what your competitors are doing well, what they’re doing poorly, and what you should do about it.
• Using AI to get a clear picture of your ideal buyer.
• How stacking small changes can allow you to double or triple sales year over year.

Transcript:

Brandon:

I got off the stage. I walk into the hallway, a guy chases me into the hallway from the audience and says, that's my listing. I said, do me a favor and please change your title tonight. Like literally, here's the suggested title that I gave in the talk. He comes back to me the next night, we're out of social after a whole day of audience, he had his team change it. He comes back to me and he shows me a screenshot of 20 different keywords that have gone from either not indexed to top 10 immediately and says, credit

Brett:

In the bank, let's utilize that.

Brandon:

Yeah, he said, we did the math on this. We're going to make over a hundred thousand dollars more profit this year just from that one change.

Brett:

It's time for another spicy curry hot. Take the part of the show when I get just a little bit spicy. So here's the hot take for this show. You're likely focusing on the wrong keywords. Either you're shooting too big or you're not shooting for what's relevant or you're not looking at what are the untapped opportunities. Example, let's say you sell toiletries bags. Should you just go after the keyword, toiletries bags, or should you think about something more specific? Maybe you sell toiletry bags for men. Maybe they're leather. Maybe there's a waterproof component on the inside. So I think you want to look at what problem does your product solve? What are the opportunity keywords out there? What could you be relevant for and what's going to move the needle? And then are you thinking about untapped things like, I didn't even know this, but DOP kit is another word for a toiletries bag.

So focus on the right keywords and look for untapped opportunities. That's where you're going to create a compounding effect. Little wins with little untapped keywords will snowball, and then you go after the big stuff after that. So focus on the right keywords. Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today my guest is Brandon Young from DataDive and Seller Systems. This cat is an eight figure seller on Amazon, and so we're going to talk about how can you double your traffic and conversions on Amazon by digging into the data and understanding things that most people don't understand and finding obscure keywords and obscure opportunities and leveraging AI and understanding the algorithm and all kinds of fun stuff. I first met Brandon in Fort Lauderdale. We were both speaking at Seller Summit.

Shout out to Steve and Tony. Awesome event. You saw on Amazon, you got a 10 seller summit in the future. We both spoke there. I heard his presentation and I was blown away, and so I had to get him on the podcast. And then I also found out my team loves the tool that he designed. So data dive. It's an amazing keyword research tool. My team uses it on the Daily, and so I was just thrilled to meet Brandon and now pumped to have 'em on the show. So with that, Brandon, how you doing, man? Thanks for coming on and welcome to the show,

Brandon:

Brett. I really appreciate you having me on. It was really great to meet you at Steve's event. Can't say enough about how awesome Steve is, and it's such a little known secret, his event because he caps it on only a couple hundred sellers. He wants it to be intimate, and I tell him he could have 2000 people on an event with his following and with the following he has, but he doesn't like it. He wants it to just be one-on-one.

Brett:

Yeah, which I love that about scb and Tony as well. They've designed the event to be what they want and like an event that they enjoy attending. So a couple hundred people, those are my favorite events too. I like the big ones as well. I like speaking on big stages. That's fun. But connections community that you make in a smaller event is super cool. Really good stuff. So I'm going to send Steve and Tony an invoice for our promoting of the Seller Summit here. So you're welcome guys. But man, really excited to dive into this topic. We're going to talk ai, we're going to talk algorithm. We're going to talk.

Brandon:

Sorry to interrupt you, Brad. This is really important. We did not address Steve properly. He is now a bestselling author,

Brett:

Bestselling author, Steve Chu, which I know want him amazing props with his mom, who all of us in the e-commerce space, and I get this all the time as an agency owner, our parents, our aunts and uncles grandparents, they have no idea what we do. And Steve always makes jokes about that. His parents are like, why don't you get a job, Steve? Why don't you just get a job? I don't know what you're doing, but he got the bestseller with Family First Entrepreneur and now his mom thinks he's cool. So that's definitely a win. So y man, I'm super excited about this. So let's talk about the fact that you are an eight figure seller. That is pretty elite status. So talk about that. How'd you get started and how did you go from where most people play to the eight figure

Brandon:

Mark? Yeah, I appreciate that. We started, it was my wife and I when we were dating, we decided to start a business and we figured out what F B A was from a buddy. To me, it just clicked that that was such a scalable business model because we could leverage the billions of dollars in infrastructure that Amazon has. I don't need my own warehouse, my own employees, my own packing materials, and I don't need to ship anything myself. So I could focus on some levers that really drive growth, like product development and getting the inventory in. So we started with wholesale and liquidation, and then in 2016 we went to Canton because my wife now my wife, we got married in 2017. She is originally from China, and I looked at her and we looked at each other. I'm like, why are we not doing private label? We have a huge advantage here. So from 2017 on, we just kept scaling, doubling and tripling almost year over year. Last year we did 22 million, and this year we should do about 32 million.

Brett:

It's insane, man. So cool. Kudos to you guys. I love the way you frame that. We're leveraging the billions of dollars and infrastructure and ads and everything that Amazon's doing, and you're focusing on a few key levers, growth levers that you can pull to create really outsized returns. And so love this. Several things we're going to dig in there. We're going to talk about the algorithm. We're going to talk about under leveraged and underoptimized listings. We're going to talk about AI and some other cool tools you guys have developed, but let's talk about the algorithm first. So maybe give us an overview, your overview of the Amazon algorithm, and then let's maybe dig into some things that people are not aware

Brandon:

Of. Well, this part usually puts people to sleep, so we got to warn, pause, get some coffee, do some dumping jacks,

Brett:

Slap yourself. This will make you a lot of money. This may not be exciting, but it'll make you lots of cash. And cash is exciting.

Brandon:

Okay, good. I'm a data guy, so this stuff really, I get geeked out by it and I get excited by it, but a lot of people are just glosses over them. So data

Brett:

Tells a story though, and I know that's part of what data uncovers what's happening and what you need to do. So there's a story there. You just got to figure out what that story

Brandon:

Is. Yeah, exactly. And so Amazon needs to figure out the order that products show up on different search terms. And so a lot of people, the first, the primary is that Amazon is a search engine. It's not just a marketplace. So you really have to understand how that works. Then you have to understand that they're going to

Brett:

Reward. It's still product discovery, and sorry to interrupt you, but I think this will just be a good setup is still the vast majority of product discovery on Amazon. It's still done through search. There's the also bot, there's other places you can discover products, but it's still largely driven by

Brandon:

Search. Yeah, a hundred percent. What I'd say is there's two elements to the way that Amazon's going to decide where to rank you on which keywords you should show up. And the first part is a bucket we'll call performance. And then the other bucket we're going to call relevancy. And so the relevancy piece is really just a multiplier. So if you think about it this way, your bucket of performance is going to be your click-through rate. So how many times does your listing show up on a search result and how often do people search it? And then it's going to be your conversion rate. So once someone clicks on it, how often are they purchasing it? And then it's going to be your overall revenue that you're driving, which is a big part of it because Amazon wants to get that sweet commission from you. Amazon

Brett:

Takes a cut of that, so they want to maximize it. Yeah.

Brandon:

The other part of it is going to be that multiplier of relevancy. And the way that that works is that if you are selling a dog bowl and someone searches for dog food, they don't want your dog ball to show up, what they'll do is on the relevancy piece, they're going to make that number less than one. It might be 0.4 or 0.2 basically meaning that it's going to reduce that overall rank number that you have. If you consider it, I just got a quantifiable number of what my product score is from ranking potential and I multiply it by a number that's less than one, then that number goes down. So for every single keyword, every single keyword on Amazon, you're going to have a rank score, and then that rank score is made up of those two things. It's going to be that performance times that relevancy.

And so once we started to figure out how that works, then we realized that it can't be calculated daily. It has to be calculated over time. So then what happens is Amazon's going to run that calculation and then it's going to run it again for a three day average and then like a seven day average, a 15 day average, a 30 day average, a six month average, and so on. But they can't value all those things the same because they want products to be able a trend in the right direction to improve and things like that. So what they do is they value the newer data more. So your one day average, your three day average, your seven day average is going to be weighted more than your six month average for example. And so it started to really make sense that when you're sitting there with a product that runs out of stock for 30 days, it's really tough sometimes to recover because what happens is now you've got a bunch of zeros averaged into your performance, and so you've got your 1, 3, 7, 15, 30 day average all zeros, and all you've got is those longer term averages that are weighted less.

And so now you need to start accumulating positive history again, and it could take you another 30 days or more to really start to recover, which is expensive. You've got to spend money on marketing. You're not showing up organically. Most of your sales are P P C, and then that could be a vicious cycle because P P C converts less than organic usually, so your overall average is worse than it was before, and it becomes almost impossible sometimes with that spiral to recover. So we understand how the algorithm works, but more importantly we also understand how relevancy works. And so relevancy to make that number one, two things have to happen. You're going to get two different ways that relevancy is calculated. The first is that where the keyword is in your listing matters. So title is worth more than your bullets. So if you're in the title, you might get a multiplier of one, and if you're in the bullets, you might get a multiplier of 0.8 or 0.9.

It's going to be less. So someone that really wants to rank for a product, you'll notice. And then where it is in the title matters too, the beginning of the title is worth more than the middle of the title. So you'll notice that sometimes people will just write a title with a long tail keyword in the beginning and they're ranking in the top three for that keyword, but the really popular, also relevant high search volume keyword, they're number 20, right? And it's like why are they winning this long tail keyword when the better listings that outperform them, they sell more units are winning the other keywords, the higher search volume keywords, and the reality is it's because of the way they wrote the listing. They're getting more value there and more rank potential is what we call it. The last part of that is going to be the match type.

So if you write your keyword that someone searches in exact form, meaning that if I want to sell a diaper bag and I say, okay, I want a diaper bag backpack. If I write diaper bag backpack at the beginning of my title and someone searches for diaper bag backpack, now I'm going to get what we call ranking credit. So this ranking credit is going to be a hundred percent of the credit toward into the bank of that keyword, but if I write backpack diaper bag, I'm not going to get a hundred percent of the credit. What I'm going to get is maybe 30% of the credit because that's what we call a broad match. It's the same keywords but out of order. So understanding that the order you write the words in the match type and where you write it matters, and then understanding how the algorithm works, we've been able to basically build a listing writer that will help you maximize the rank of your product to maximize the rank potential of your product. Whether you perform or not is going to be based on how you design the product and the competition.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that so much. So thinking about both performance and relevancy, and there's some similarities. I've been in the Amazon game for a long time since 2016, but go way back on the Google side, and there are some similarities here. Both Google and Amazon wanted delight users. They want to give people exactly what they're looking for. Where it varies a little though is Amazon's primary goal is to sell customers stuff. They want people to buy stuff. So that's where you as a seller and Amazon are totally aligned. However, Amazon doesn't care if it's your product or somebody else's product. They doesn't want customers to be happy. And so I think understanding it in those two veins is super, super important. Where do reviews, where do they play into that scenario? Where would you put those and how would you weight number and quality of reviews?

Brandon:

So to me, reviews are weighted a little bit in the algorithm, but not a lot. But what they matter is going to be on the performance. So if your reviews are worse than your competition, you're naturally just going to get less clicks. So your click-through rate's going to be lower and you're going to get less conversions. Your conversion rate's going to be lower, so it's going to impact you on that performance side more than it's going to impact you directly on where you rank.

Brett:

Totally makes sense, and this is one of those virtuous cycles. You get more clicks and you get more conversions, then Amazon's happy, they're going to show it more and the higher you rank and usually the higher your click-through rate is and things like that. So really, really cool. What are some of the things that you think people miss in relationship to the algorithm? Any kind of non-obvious things that are hidden in there that most sellers overlook or most sellers don't pay attention to?

Brandon:

So I think overall people try to write their listing and design their listing to maximize rank, right? This is the goal, but the two mistakes I see people make are going to be that they don't do enough product design and testing of content at all. Even if they think they do a lot, they might make one or two main images, maybe three main images that they test, but they don't spend enough time and effort on the content side. The other side is going to be on the product design altogether. What type of testing did you do with audiences to determine that you have the right to rank higher than the current incumbents, the best sellers that are already out there? Do you know for a fact or do you have a high level of confidence that you're going to outperform the best sellers? Once you come in, now you are competing against someone with lots of reviews, usually a good rating.

You're coming in and you're trying to be the new guy on the block. If you only have a similar performance when you test, let's say you pull a hundred people and it's like 50 50, when they see what the other one has done and the history they have, it's going to be very difficult to beat them if not impossible. So you've got to have a significantly better offer. You've got to have a significantly better design to be able to come into a market and beat them if it's just head-to-head. So the last piece that I think people don't spend enough time on is the keyword research. It's really understanding how many hundreds of keywords there are that drive sales for that product, not just the top five keywords. And so most people don't realize that there are many different ways people will search for a product because we are just a product of our upbringing and what we call something based on our local vernacular. So I'll give you an example, a toiletry bag for example. What do you call a toiletry bag? Do you have any other words or ways that you call it?

Brett:

It's not something I talk about a whole lot, but would a toiletries bag also be like a makeup bag?

Brandon:

So a makeup bag could be, but that would be more geared towards women. So have you ever heard the term DOP kit? No,

Brett:

Never heard of that. There

Brandon:

You go. That's the second or third most popular way to search for a toiletry bag.

Brett:

Wait, spell that for me.

Brandon:

D O P P kit.

Brett:

What parts of the country or world is do

Brandon:

Kit? Midwest, I guess

Brett:

Midwest. Interesting. I'm a Midwest guy. We call it toiletries. We must be like upper crust Midwest or something because I've never heard,

Brandon:

But I'm telling you, tens of thousands of searches a month for DOPP kit. And then you've also got bathroom bag, you've got travel bag, you've got men's travel bag, you've got men's bathroom bag, you've got all these different keywords that, and then you've got all the different material types. You've got leather, you've got any type of bag you've got there, canvas. So this is just an example for toiletry bag alone, you might have a hundred relevant keywords with a significant search volume, and you're really only when you write your listing based on what the research you've done and what you think, you're only going to hit 50, 60% of those keywords, 50 to 60% of that potential search volume is a better way to look at it. So what we've gotten really good at is saying, okay, how do we reverse engineer and find all those different ways people are searching?

How do we find all those keywords? And so there's a tool like Helium 10 that allows you to maybe do a reverse asin. So you can put a product in there and then it'll tell you all the keywords it's ranked for or indexed for and where they're ranked. Now that's helpful, but a product might be indexed for thousands of keywords, but index doesn't mean it's relevant. It just means that you could be on page 15 and doesn't matter. So how do you really start to take that data and make it useful? What we've done is we've started to look at the top 20 or 30 sellers, and then once you combine all of the keywords that all of them are ranked well for, and you eliminate the noise and you add a relevancy formula that helps sort all that out, now you've got just the keywords that drive sales for that product and a score on 'em like is it a loosely relevant or is it highly relevant and is it something I should be building into my title or is it something I should be targeting in the backend?

And so we really start to understand the whole picture, and it all stemmed from a mistake we made. We had a product that we launched and it was a toy that lights up, it's like a Lego type toy with lights inside of it, and it was really cool. I looked at it and it was a plane, it was a train. You could make it into any five or 10 or 15 shapes, and there was a competitor on the market. So I said, okay, well, they're doing well and they're in stores and we could sell that. It's cool. Every kid would want to have this. And we didn't sell more than five units. The problem was that we could not find keywords to rank it for because no one is going to search for Lego and then buy my random step. It's going to be almost impossible to maintain a rank on any Lego keyword because all the Legos are going to

Brett:

Be, you can't mention Lego. Lego is a brand term, so you can't really mention that in your listing.

Brandon:

Yeah, it's very difficult to maintain rank or get ranked or even on P P C. No one's going to click on it because if they search for Lego, they want Lego. So that's the question that I had to start answering, which was before I developed and launched and did anything with a product or even researched or validated or whatever, I had to answer the question, how are the current sellers getting their sales? What are the keywords driving sales? And can I duplicate or beat them? And if I answer those questions, then I'm going to have a very high batting average when it comes to finding, launching and developing products.

Brett:

I really like this and I like the way we're framing it here. I like the way you're framing it. It is kind of two parts. It's one part merchandising. How do you make your product jump off the shelf, so to speak, and make people want it, make sure that it looks unique and it answers that question of, okay, this is the product, this is what I'm hoping for and what I'm wanting, it's that zero moment of truth or first moment of truth that they used to be used on physical retail shelves and how do you make that thing jump off? And a lot of that's going to come back to user testing. So we're going to get into that in a minute. The other part is really SS e o, and that's actually the very first thing I did online was ss e os started doing s e O for Google back in 2004. A lot of similarities between SS e o on Google and on Amazon with a few key differences, but a lot of times we're like, Hey, I just want to rank for toiletries bag. Well, okay, good luck if you're just starting, that's going to take a little bit of time. But there's a lot of money in the long tail and the really long, more random, more specific keywords, there's a lot of money to be made there and things

Brandon:

That, well, not only that, right? I think that a lot of people underestimate those long tail keywords for helping to pad your metrics. We had talked about performance being a major part of your ranking, those long tail keywords that if they're super specific and relevant, you're going to convert much higher on those. So those being blended in, even if it is only a sale a day or a sale every other day, but you've got 50 of those keywords, that extra high conversion rate being averaged in is going to help you rank for those bigger

Brett:

Keywords, those click-through rates and conversion. It's a really high on long tail, which has a compounding effect as well. So that's great. Awesome. So let's talk more about that. So the keyword side of things, the relevancy side of things. So how are you uncovering that? So you're taking top sellers of a given product, cross-referencing what they're ranking for, applying a score, determining what of those keywords is actually moving the needle versus what's not, and then anything else you'd want to add to that, and then where do we go from

Brandon:

There? So the whole thing is once we understand how are they getting their sales and what can we duplicate? And what you'll find is a lot of the best sellers have what we call outlier keywords. These are going to be those generic keywords that you realistically can't duplicate. If you launch a brand new toy, you're not going to come in and rank for toys for three-year-old girls, right? It's just not going to happen. You can try, but you'll just fail miserably. You don't have that foundation of all those other relevant keywords. So what we're finding is that once we see and we can paint the accurate picture of the market and we can understand, okay, these best sellers are selling 6,000 units a month. The next guy's selling 4,000, the next guy's selling 2000, and then all these other guys in the middle are selling 1500 units and they're ranked for 60 to 70% of the search volume relevant search volume.

We see that that's kind of more in line of what we can expect to sell because we're not going to duplicate the success of these best sellers necessarily because they're ranked for almost all of the relevant search volume and they're ranked in the top of those search terms versus being in the 10 to 15 range, which is where you'll be in the first week to two weeks. So we really start to understand what can we realistically expect to sell? How many should we order? What are the keywords that these better sellers are ranked for that we can't duplicate and what can we duplicate? And so it's about painting the picture to make sure it makes sense and understanding if the market's too competitive or saturated or if there's not enough keywords. So really we get to answer all of those questions from good keyword research,

Brett:

Any anecdotes, any stories of, Hey, we uncovered these keywords for this product or for this category, we put them in the listing, we start focusing on it, and this is the impact that made.

Brandon:

Oh, hundreds and hundreds of those. So not just from me but from students or from users. I get sent screenshots on a regular basis where once you lay this out, for example in DataDive, you get what's called the master keyword list. And so it's what it sounds like. You got all the competitors laid across the top, you got all the keywords on the side, and then you got all the ranks. And so if you put your product on there and you're like, oh, wow, I just have this giant hole where I'm just ranked 35 or 55 for these keywords that all share the same root word, the same exact word in them, and you're like, well, what am I doing wrong? And then you go look at your listing, you realize you didn't write it in there, you don't have it in your listing. Amazon's not sure it's relevant.

So all you have to do is unlock that relevancy piece by writing it into your listing. So you might have multiple holes. What we recommend with a revamp is to go in and say, okay, pick one root word that you realize you have a weakness on. Put it in your title. Put the best keyword with that root word in your title and see what happens Within 6, 8, 10 hours, you're going to see a movement in your ranks. You're going to see a movement going up because you've established relevancy and now all of a sudden you had credit in the bank and now you unlocked it. That's the way it works now. Or what you took out of the title was more important, and now you see a downside on some, so you have to change the listing back right away, the title back right away. So we never recommend changing the whole title right away.

If you've got an existing listing, just maybe one keyword at a time, one root word at a time. But I'll give you an example. I was speaking at an event at Kevin King's billion dollar seller summit in Austin, and I was using a case study. I was randomly looking at card shuffler one time, and the bestselling card Shuffler was selling a lot more card than everybody else, but there were a few keywords that he was ranked maybe 35, 55, just not ranked well at all. And he was top three for every other keyword. And I was like, okay, well that's a clear sign to me that he's got credit in the bank for those keywords, but Amazon thinks it's not relevant. All of those keywords, the route that they shared was two deck, two deck shuffler, right? Or one was two to four deck. So the thing is he was selling a six deck shuffler that could also shuffle two decks.

I gave the example. I said, look, without a doubt, if this guy goes in, he's got credit in the bank, if he changes and just adds two deck into his title, he's immediately going to rank better for those keywords. And I got off the stage, I walk into the hallway, a guy chases me into the hallway from the audience and says, that's my listing. I said, do me a favor and please change your title tonight. Literally, here's the suggested title that I gave in the talk. He comes back to me the next night, we're out of social after a whole day of audience, he had his team change it. He comes back to me and he shows me a screenshot of 20 different keywords that have gone from either not indexed to top 10 immediately and says, credit

Brett:

In the bank, let's utilize that. Yeah,

Brandon:

He said, we did the math on this. We're going to make over a hundred thousand dollars more profit this year just from that one change.

Brett:

But that's something you wouldn't have thought of because it's a six deck. It's not a two shuffler, but when you understand that, yes, but it'll also shuffle just two decks if you want to do that. And that's what people are looking for and that's how you become relevant and that's how you sell more units. And so that is awesome. So that's the SS e o side. I know we could talk all day about that. There's more resources on your site and your podcast where people can dig into that. So we'll talk about that later. But let's talk about the merchandising piece. And I know this is something you're very passionate about, that a lot of sellers are just trying to sell something without clear differentiation or without understanding what does the marketplace actually want. So what do you recommend when it comes to testing your product and testing some of your merchandising elements like pictures and design features and things like

Brandon:

That? So one of the, after I validate a product that I want to do it, I have to figure out how I'm going to win. So one of my favorite things to do is to work on the design side. And for the last eight months or so, since the beginning of the year, I've been playing with Mid Journey. So Mid Journey as an AI text, two image generator. And so you type what you want it to generate an image of and it pops it out. And so I've realized that the skill that you're going to need moving forward is going to be what they call prompt engineering. It's going to be how do you talk to this AI to have it give you back what you want? And so I've taken two trips to China this year because I've spent so much time doing custom products, and we have a travel brand, we have a toy brand, and so we are just designing a ton of characters and the usual unicorns and princesses and mermaids and dinosaurs and stuff.

So just spending a ton of time developing new characters. And so once I look at the incumbents or the best sellers, I take their product. Now, if I just need to design the character, I design the character, my team puts it on the product, but sometimes I can get the AI to give me the full product already done with the image I want. And so straight out of communicating with this ai with Mid Journey, I can take that image and I can take the main image of the top three sellers and I can go into a product like a software like pfu, and we can ask 50 people, which one would you want to buy? And if I'm getting more than 50% of the votes against the top three bestsellers that are already on the market, I know I've got a slam dunk. And then so

Brett:

I love that tool, by the way. It's an underrated tool. And I know we're talking ai, we're talking a lot about a lot of things, but pick Fu John and Pick, I think hes one of the founders or whatever, but such a simple affordable tool, but yeah, allows you to get feedback from real people on which image do you prefer, which product would you buy? Things like that, that really can save you so much time, so much money, and really just set you up

Brandon:

For success. And just on LinkedIn, I posted a slushy cup. I was in a talk showing my inner circle. I've kept my AI product development stuff kind of more tight because I think it's really going to disrupt the market. If you're not using AI for product development, you're in a bad spot in six months, 12 months, you might not have a business. This is truly how fast I think product development will go moving forward. You can develop products a hundred times faster, a hundred times cheaper, and they will be better. You're going to convert, you're going to have better designs. And so the old style of waiting for a designer to give you back five concepts and then choosing the best one that wasn't really that great anyway is over. And so straight out of mid journey, you're about 90% of the way there. You have your designer clean it up and then make a decent main image out of it, and then you compare it.

And so just in the class where I was showing the strategies around how to prompt the prompt engineering class, I asked for a suggestive product and someone said a slushy cup. And now I made a Spider-Man slushy cup because first of all, I'm not going to get the licensing to make a Spider-Man slushie cup from Disney. Maybe with this cup I could if I send it to them, to the right IP legal team or whoever's in charge of it over there. But it was just as an example, this cup is 10 times better than anything currently being sold on the market, any of the current bestsellers that are crushing. And what I can do,

Brett:

We can show up for those that are watching the video, and then we'll post a link and actually, hey, if you only listen to the show, which is totally fine, by the way, check out the YouTube video, check out the YouTube channel or check out. That's a really good point. The podcast site@omgcommerce.com on your podcast. See, I excited to see this slushy cup. Now I will confess I'm not 100% certain. I know what you mean by slushy cup.

Brandon:

So this is a new product that you free some stuff, then you add some juice and you squish it together. It's like silicone. You squish it together, and what ends up happening is you make it into a little slushy at home. It's like an at-home slushy type thing, but the designs are so generic, just absolutely a generic. So

Brett:

Now as a preview, what we're about to see, this was just AI generated. So you worked with AI through prompts and Mid Journey and that's how you designed this?

Brandon:

Yeah, all I did was say make me a Spider-Man slushie cup. But I did it in a certain way with certain features and prompted it in the right way, but it wasn't that difficult to get to this product.

Brett:

Dude, that's pretty sick. So we got it. For those that are just watching, it's like a closeup of the Spider-Man face mask or the mask. So the eyes are real big. It's got a pretty cool, I can't tell what's going on with the lid actually from my vantage point. But yeah,

Brandon:

There's no lid currently on this. The lid is going to be separate to put on to drink out of, but it shows the slushie spilling over the top.

Brett:

Dude, that's pretty sweet, man. If I was like a eight year old boy, I would totally rock that slushy cup. You're going

Brandon:

To buy that or your parents are going to buy it instead of a generic one. I could charge twice as much as the current bestsellers and they're going to be like, man, I got to get my kid the Spider-Man one. I got to do it. But I'm doing so many products, I've got hundreds of products right now. I'm going back through my catalog. And one of the things that you need to understand also is that I need to go disrupt myself. I'm going back to my current bestsellers and I'm saying that's not going to be good enough six months from now and I'm making 60, 80, a hundred sales a day better

Brett:

You disrupt yourself than somebody else. So you've got to be preemptively thinking this top seller won't be the top seller forever. So what's next?

Brandon:

What is next? And how do I beat myself? And so I have a list of new products we're developing. I have a list of existing products I need to add variations or new heroes and really just update designs on and just keep outwork the competition so that we can scale to that 50 million mark next year.

Brett:

Love it. That's awesome, man. Any other tips or insights or resources on how do we make sure we're really leveraging the design? I think you've mentioned to me something about you've got a new tool that mines reviews from competitors' products and gives you a summary of what's there.

Brandon:

So it's a product brief tool that this is all the work that we would do with developing a product anyway. We need to go in and see what are the features that we need to add into the product. So if I'm handing a product brief to a factory and I say, okay, needs to have these types of zippers, this many pockets, it needs to have this functionality. Let's say a diaper bag for example. It needs to have a cooler pocket in the front. It needs to come with a changing pad, it needs to have stroller straps, it needs to have a security pocket in the back. But the way that I would come to that conclusion is that I would have to spend dozens of hours going through the top 2030 sellers looking at all their reviews, looking at the features that they all have, finding out what people want, what they don't want, reading the questions and the answers.

Every single product you develop, you need to be doing that. But now AI can do that in a matter of minutes for you instead of dozens and dozens of insane hours. So the tool we just released in the DataDive is the AI product brief tool. You select the competitors, you hit a button and it comes back and it spits out all this information. It tells you these are all the features they all claim to have. You can check 'em off and say, okay, I want that one, I want that one, I want that one. These are all the things people say they don't like about it. These are all the things people say they like about it. Here's some suggested improvements that the AI thinks you should make into the product. And the AI gets involved in helping you develop the product

Brett:

Better. It's reading all the negatives in all the positives, and it's making inferences there and it's saying, okay, this is what we would do.

Brandon:

And then even based on what they figured out the product is, they come back and tell you the top eight avatars, the top eight buyer personas that would buy this product and why they buy it, which to me is magical because you're a marketer as well. So you know that you need to trigger someone's buying a part of their brain. Why are they buying this? What is the value to them? What is that trigger to get them to pull the

Brett:

Trigger? And it's one of those things where the more you understand about your customer, the more directly you can speak to them, the more directly you can design for them, the better you'll be able to zero in on the right keywords when you understand that avatar. And that's something that I think a lot of business owners, and I would say Amazon sellers are definitely in this category. You don't really know who your buyer is. You don't really understand them at a deep level. Now I'm curious, how is the AI by looking at that? How are they understanding who the avatars

Brandon:

Are? Look, I don't know how they do it, but it's pretty magical. So it's just inferring based on the product type and then it's knowledge based pulling from its G PTT category,

Brett:

Product type keywords. Look at all that.

Brandon:

Yeah, so it's inferring based on the questions, the answers, the reviews, the type of product, and it just kind of digs through the whole world wide web and says, okay, these are the top eight people that would buy this product pretty insane. And then after you've selected everything you want, you got those suggestions, you hit a button and it generates the brief that you can now hand to your factory and say, this is how you make a much better product than what's on the market.

Brett:

Dang. So going from idea to really doing all the research that you want to do, putting that together really. Now, and you mentioned this with Mid Journey as well, where you're getting a starting point now with AI and then you're refining it, you're getting a starting point here with AI and you're letting it do all the legwork, then you're refining it. We're not just letting AI do all the work, right? It's not ready for that yet. It may never be, but it is very much ready to do the initial grunt work. And then you're refining and polishing and getting ready and then taking action from

Brandon:

There. And all of that is after you've already validated the product from a keyword perspective. So you look at the competition, you understand that you can beat them from a S E O perspective. Now it's just a matter of making a better design.

Brett:

Brandon, this has been awesome. We could dig into each of these topics at link, but we are up against time. So let's do a couple of things. Let's talk about data Dive specifically. And as I mentioned Team O M G, we love DataDive. We use it on the daily in our agency, but how can someone learn more about DataDive and who did you design DataDive for?

Brandon:

I appreciate that. We designed it for ourselves really. So the reality is we were developing these same exact processes to validate products and choose products back in 2016. This is maybe even back as far as 20 16, 20 17 before Helium 10 even was out. We were piecing together keyword data from seller labs and from viral launch. And so we were having to do VLOOKUPs and try to match keyword search volumes, try to understand who was ranked for what and what keywords were driving sales. And this is all after we made those mistakes. And really I was like, before I pull the trigger on another product, I want to know how I'm going to sell it. That's it. That was like, and I need to know that. And that's where we started. So then once Helium 10 came out and Cerebro came out, we started pulling. They allowed you to start pulling 10 competitors at once.

We would pull that raw data and start manipulating the data. We did that for every single product that we've developed. And then I started teaching in 2018 with seller systems and we started teaching how to manipulate the data and how to create this master keyword list manually where this changes is. A few years ago, two and a half years ago now, my now C T O joins, he was formerly the c e O of the largest development firm out of Romania. And he's semi-retirement, starting a business in retirement and stumbles across me and says, I'll learn how to sell on Amazon. Now I can do it from anywhere and I don't want to work 90 hours a week anymore. But the first thing he says to me when he watches the first class, he dms me. He's like, why is this not a software? This needs to be a software. There's a lot of work that could just be automated. He's like, with your permission, I want to hack together like a Google sheet that has macros that can just do this automatically. And I am not looking to make money on it all. Let the community use it as well. I said, yeah, for sure. We have an abundance mentality. We're all about it for sure. It leaks out of my inner circle. Within two weeks we had 2000 people using it.

Brett:

We might be onto something. I

Brandon:

Said, okay, well we've got product market fit. I said, maybe we should put some money behind this. And so here I am. I'm nearly $3 million invested into this software now, and it does

Brett:

So many people, I don't think people fully understand because we tried to build just a small tool for our agency. Dude, it's so expensive. So yes, software and SaaS maybe may feel expensive to some people, but dude, it takes immense amount of capital to build it and then to maintain it. And yeah, so hats off to you guys for doing that.

Brandon:

No, I appreciate it. Yeah, luckily we're blessed. We do well with our brands. We do well with the coaching, and so we've just been pouring our extra money into the software to keep building it, bootstrapping it, but I'm also impatient, and so I don't do anything unless I'm going to do it big. So I said, I'm not going to have five programmers and take three years to do this. We ramped up to over 20 programmers and really have just been hammering out tools and staying on top of it. And so the fundamentals are, it gives you that master keyword list. It has a product scorecard to give you a quantifiable number as to what the potential risk of doing a product is. So it helps you look at things like R O I, how good the images are for the competitors, the SS e o of the competitors, just all the different elements you'd want to answer before you pull the trigger on a product.

And it gives you a quantifiable score whether you should move forward with that product. We have a listing writer that takes into account the algorithm and gives you a quantifiable score of your rank potential. So we think it's the best in the market. The new AI tool we just launched there yesterday as well is we tap the AI to write your bullets, but we do it in a way where we're telling the AI and we're telling you which keywords to make sure you still include. So anyone can just throw a listing or ask chat G B T to write their listing. But that's not going to rank for all the reasons we talked about earlier in the show, which is you need to know what keywords to put where and in what order. And so you need to know the data first, and then you need to have the AI write it in a way that also incorporates those keywords.

So we did it in that order. The AI tool now writes your bullets and does it to maximize rank. We also have some P P C tools. We have a really unique way of doing P P C as well. We group our P P C keywords based on root word. So we want to make sure that they share a common word or phrase because what we found is that keywords that share a common word or phrase will perform similarly. So if I'm talking about all the keywords that have gray diaper bag and there's a lot of long tail keywords that have gray diaper bag, I'll put five of those together, those all should still perform pretty similarly. So I'm not getting something performing good and something performing bad in the same ad group. And what that does is it helps boost the quality score of that campaign. It lowers your cost per click faster. It's just a much better way to optimize as well. So the software helps you do that. Then we've got a dashboard. We've got a keyword tracker that's in beta. We've got a dashboard and some P P C tools coming out as well. So a lot of development, a lot of things we're doing

Brett:

Totally worth checking out. So DataDive tools, get it, data dive tools, check that out. Also seller systems.com. If you're interested in coaching or learning, I would

Brandon:

Love to have your audience get a discount code with your code.

Brett:

Let's do it, man. Let's do a discount code. Why not?

Brandon:

So for anyone listening, if you use the code O M G, you will get $50 off per month on DataDive Sweet, and you will get a thousand dollars off if you join my mastermind. The inner circle, we've got over a thousand members in there, over 407 and eight figure sellers all helping each other. Weekly calls, five to 10 live classes a month, lots of live events in person. So

Brett:

That is a deal. $50 off a month for DataDive and then a thousand dollars off seller systems code O M G, write that down, utilize that.

Brandon, been a ton of fun, man, super informative. I'm all jazzed up as a result of this conversation. Thanks Brandon, and thank you for tuning in. And as always, we'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on this show? If you haven't done it already, leave us that review on iTunes. Also connect with me on the socials. I'm getting pretty active on LinkedIn, almost daily posting on LinkedIn. Brandon's a good fall on LinkedIn too, so check out Brandon there as well. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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Post-purchase surveys can teach you a lot about your customers, and no one knows that better than my most recent guest, Trevor Crump. 

Trevors is the co-founder of Bestie, which is one of the fastest-growing post-purchase apps on Shopify. 

We talked about the key questions you should ask your customers and how you can turn their answers into extra cash! 

Make sure you give this episode a listen to learn key things like...

• The 3 questions that need to be on your post-purchase survey. 
• Where your customers are coming from (because we all know how hard attribution can be). 
• What Trevor has learned from running one of the most popular post-purchase survey apps on Shopify. 
• Plus, some of the most surprising things surveys can reveal. 

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Transcript:

Trevor:

So one of the things we talk a lot about is you've got this, there's a lot of trends out there that merchants follow. Oh, I'm seeing a lot of people do use U G C right now, so I'm going to create U G C. I see a lot of people creating listicle ads such as for the five reasons why I bought Tushy or whatever. And so I think that there's this two-tone approach that you need to go about. The brand should go about things. One is I think that following trends can be great. Try to be early in some of those trends because you'll see that U G C is still super important, but it is not doing what it used to do and people are starting to see through a lot of it. So you got to go a little bit deeper.

Brett:

It's time for this spicy curry hot. Take the segment of the show when I get just a little bit spicy. Let me quote Mark Twain for you. He said, it's not what we don't know that gets us into trouble. It's the things we know for certain that just ain't. So. Now I believe what we don't know about our customers is hurting us, but I also believe there's some deeply held beliefs, myths we have about our customers that just aren't true. As an example, I think a lot of people believe they know the reason their customers buy from them, but often they're off base. So one of the things we talk about in this show is a brand who believed the two main reasons people bought from them were one, cost savings, and two, the fact that their product was environmentally friendly. It turned out as they asked their customers, less than 10% of people believe those two reasons were important in purchasing.

And so can you imagine what if you were crafting all of your sales pitches in a way that only landed with one out of 10 in your audience, or you could shift it? And when you really know why people buy now, you can craft your message so that it strikes a chord with nine out of 10 of your ideal prospects. So what myths do you have that need to be busted? Hopefully we'll answer that on this show. Hot Take over. Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, c e o of o m g Commerce. And today we're talking about do you really know your customer? Do you know them as well as you think? Do you, I mean, do you really, really know them? Because if you knew your customers better, I bet you do at least a few things differently. And so today my guest is Trevor Crump. He is one of the co-founders of Bestie Bestie app, and so excited about this topic. I'm very passionate about it. I love the tool that Trevor and team have designed. Trevor is a fellow podcast host, so when you get two podcast guys together, it's going to be a little bit nutty. It's going to probably go off the rails, it's going to be valuable, but it may go off the rails. So with that, Trevor, how's it going, man? Welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time.

Trevor:

Yeah, man, I'm super excited to be here. Really, really appreciate it. Yeah, I actually love interviewing other podcast hosts because dude, so

Brett:

Fun.

Trevor:

It's a blast sometimes when you're interviewing somebody you never know, are they going to be short-winded? Are they going to be long-winded? Am I going to have to be cutting this person off? Am I going to have to be stretching for questions? And so sometimes the episode doesn't go where you think it should go, but it always turns out super entertaining and super valuable. And so I am a big fan of it, man.

Brett:

Yeah, me too. Because yeah, and really, I don't know which is worse, you have a guest who really doesn't say much. That's difficult, but you can also have someone that just doesn't know when to stop, and then you've got to interrupt because it needs to be a dialogue. If it's not a dialogue, it's not an interesting radio. And so yeah, I like interviewing podcast hosts as well, because what I'm always trying to do just for fun, when someone asks me a question, I'm a guest on another podcast, I'm trying to think how do I package this answer in a way that's authentic, meaningful, fun, but also where I don't talk for seven straight minutes because the host wants to talk to right? And the listener needs that. So that's awesome, man. So first of all, what is your pod and why did you start down the path of podcasting and yeah, tell us a little bit about that. Yeah,

Trevor:

So our podcast is called the Unstoppable Marketer. It's specifically meant to interview marketers and entrepreneurs in the D two C space. So we interview founders, we interview VPs of marketing, CMOs, et cetera. And it's just really to figure out where were you before, where are you now, where are you going and what are you doing to get there and what are some of those big mistakes? And so yeah, I've got a following on social media on Instagram and TikTok that's a decent size, and so was doing a really good job at the short form content side of things. At the time, our main business was actually a marketing agency. So rather than you're very specific on the YouTube side of things, Google side of things, we were very specific in TikTok and Meta. That was our big time breaded butter, little Google too as well, just as ancillary. But TikTok and Meta was where

Brett:

Supports it well, provides a good underpinning for TikTok and other socials. Google kind of closes the deal.

Trevor:

Yeah, absolutely. And so I was getting so much traction, so much interaction on my short form content that I needed to complete. We wanted to complete that funnel. And so we said, let's create a podcast for the people who I've just learned that anybody can be a short form content. It's pretty easy, especially with AI nowadays, if you're good at speaking, you can literally have AI write everything out for you. And as long as you can present it, you can look like you're super knowledgeable when you may not be. And so we said, let's create a podcast, and me and my business partner, we love to just talk and we love to meet other people. And so we created the podcast and it's been awesome ever since. Man, it's been really successful. It's got us a lot of good contacts and also a lot of business.

Brett:

That's one of my favorite parts about the podcast is just the people you meet. You get to hang out for an hour with smart people like you, grilling you with questions and learning, and you get to share that with people. And you're right, you can fake a two minute, one minute TikTok video. It's pretty hard to fake a 45 minute interview. And so the truth comes out when you go long form, which is super fun. So let's dive into a few things. First of all. So to kind of have a preview for the audience, we're going to talk about how do we get to know our customers better? How do we craft surveys, what do we ask? When do we ask it? How do we then use that to improve all the metrics we love like lowering CAC and raising L T V and all kinds of good stuff. So I can't wait to get into that. Also, going to talk about some surprising lessons like, hey, you thought this about your customer, but then actually the opposite was true. So we're going to get into that in a minute. But you ran an agency and then you pivoted to bestie app. Talk to us about that. Why'd you make the pivot? When did that happen? Why did that happen?

Trevor:

Yeah, super good question, man. Actually, before I started the agency, I was formerly A C M O for a big eight figure brand out here in Salt Lake City called Fond Design, which is a women's diaper bag and accessory company. And at the time, this was back in 2018, attribution tools were really, really expensive. I mean, they still are, right? But they were really expensive back then, and I could not convince my C M O or not my cmo, my C F O to get us, give me the budget for an attribution tool. And so we just were doing a little research, we were trying to figure some things out at the time, back in 2018, it was over attributing everything to us. So now it's under attributing. Back then it was over attributing meaning like Klaviyo, if my Shopify said I made a million bucks that month, Klaviyo's telling me that I made 500,000. Facebook's telling me I made 700,000. Google's telling me I made 300,000, but I'm only making a million, right? Yeah.

Brett:

So according to all the tools, the aggregate of 2 million, but you only made a million. And so yeah, exactly one over index thing over attributing. Now post I was 14 really under attributing,

Trevor:

Right? A hundred percent. So it's like, Hey, we got to figure this out. So we were just doing, me and my e-comm director, we were doing some just brainstorming and we saw that our email open rate for our thank you email was like 80% right? And normally our open rates back then were like 20, 30%. And I'm like, holy cow, 80% open rate, 50% click-through rate. This is massively valuable real estate. It's that confirmation, Hey, your order was placed. Here's your shipping information. So we just got a freemium account on SurveyMonkey and we asked three questions. We said, Hey, how did you hear about us? What brought you to the website today? And how long have you known about us? And let's see if that just information gives us some solid information. And we started learning things about our customer that we had no idea, and it became the most pivotal piece of the puzzle when it came to us understanding how our customers heard about us.

And so we started running surveys like crazy through that. So the moment we got enough attribution surveys, then we started asking questions about why they were buying the product. Then we started asking questions about who they were, what podcasts they listened to, what influencers they followed. And it just became the catalyst to so much that we did. And so fast forward, it helped us scale from this seven figures to an eight figure business. Fast forward back to this agency and we just kept finding that a lot of D two C brands, all these companies that we're working with these merchants, none of 'em were talking to their customers. The way they were talking to their customer was usually through dms or an Instagram poll. That was the majority of their conversations. And so we thought, Hey, listen, remember we did this back then let's find a way to automate this and build this process out and really help brands get a better qualitative understanding of who their customer is and what makes them tick. And so we started to develop bestie in 2022, just going through developers overseas and contractors and Fiverr and going down all these routes. And eventually we came with product market fit in first of this year, got approved on the Shopify app store and really just started grinding and getting more and more customers and the rest has been history.

Brett:

Love it, man. And I know you guys are really growing rapidly and I love this process. So let's talk about those three questions for just a minute. And you guys went low tech, right? Or lower tech, right? You used that thank you email. You used SurveyMonkey, right? We got inexpensive tools available if you need 'em. And I know Bessie is inexpensive as well, but yeah, you hear about us, what brought you here today and how long have you known about us? And I think once you get these answers, then it just blows your mind. You're like, wait a minute, I didn't know that. And now that I know that, now I want to know more. And once I know more, then we can start changing things. And so what were some of the surprising things you guys learned? And you said that was called Fawn Design was the name of the brand. What were some of the surprising things you learned in that first round of questions?

Trevor:

Two really big things that we learned. One thing that we learned was that 40% of our audience, the first time they heard about us was through word of mouth. So that was the biggest channel. And as you know, there's no attribution tool that can account for word of mouth. There will be. And so we always had this fear of, okay, hey, we're at our highest CAC possible right now, so any more money we spend, we start to go over that CAC and things become inefficient. And so that was a huge learning is we were stuck in this spend of 50,000, $60,000 a month. And when we saw that, it's like, okay, hey, 40% of our customers first heard about us through other people buying the bags and then walking around with them. So essentially the way we sell more bags is by selling more bags. Exactly. Does that make sense?

Brett:

Each bag you sell is now a

Trevor:

Walking advertisement

Brett:

Billboard. And now that new customer is not just the value of the new customer, but now they're going to be attracting other customers.

Trevor:

Well, not only that, but moms, if anything about the mom world, anything that helps moms be better moms or look like better moms from a style aesthetic perspective, they are going to shout it from the rooftops all. Absolutely. So not only did we say let's try doubling spend and just see what happens. Can I get approval from our C ffo and can we go from 50 grand a month to a hundred thousand dollars a month and just see what happens

Brett:

There? The CFO didn't sleep good that night. Trevor, the CFO was like, man, I don't want to release this money. But

Trevor:

After 40 days, all of a sudden, like CAC went up a little bit, but it was like, Hey, just keep with it, keep with it, keep with it. The other thing that we learned was that our buying cycle was under 30 days. So that was the other thing for us. So it was like, okay, cool. We theoretically should see the fruits of the labors of the word of mouth by doubling our spend within a month here. So it's not like we're going to have to go six months and hope this is going to work and have a really, really bad CAC for six months, but then it's going to start to get better. So that was huge for us.

Brett:

Love that. So you found this key insight word of mouth is driving 40% of business, so let's just sell more bags to sell even more bags, but then knowing 30 day selling cycle, we don't have to commit to a test for that long, so let's commit to a test for 30, 40 days now we should be able to get some really meaningful data and see if our theory was correct.

Trevor:

Totally. And then the other thing that we did is we built, I know there's a lot of arguments and debates around loyalty programs if they work or not. And we took our stab at building a loyalty program because we thought that was a no brainer. If people are organically sharing about us, 40% of people are organically sharing about us. Let's build a loyalty program. And the original loyalty program we built didn't work very well for us. We did just your standard loyalty program that you're going to find on any other website, and it just ended up being more work to the customer to go through those hoops and they were going to share about it anyway. But what we actually ended up doing that started moving the needle big time is we created incentives to say, Hey, not only if you shout to us, shout out to us on social media, we are going to refund five orders a week and we're going to give anybody who shouts to us, they're going to enter in a giveaway and get a hundred dollars off their next order. And so we just started doing a bunch of things like that that started getting us more content and more opportunities to work with new influencers. And yeah, it was awesome, dude. So that was one massive learning. I can go into a ton that we learned there, but yeah, it was really cool.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. And I think that's something to keep in mind is with loyalty programs, especially if you've got a product like this where tight community, it's beneficial to the shopper to share your product, makes them feel good, look good, all those things people are going to share anyway. So if you create a loyalty program, it's overly complex, overly hard to understand and feels like a lot of work, you're not gaining any ground. So people are going to share anyway. But I love this where just make it fun, make it random, make it like, Hey, you're going to share anyway. We will do these little fun things and celebrate it. So shout at us on social media and we'll make it worth your while. Super, super smart. Let's dive in then, and we'll probably drill into some other lessons there from Fawn because I am interested in that, but I want to shift fast forward a little bit. So now with Bestie, I know you're working with lots of different brands. What are some of the scenarios where brand thought one thing was true about their customer? Did a survey found actually that the opposite or something totally different was true? Let's talk about some examples.

Trevor:

Maybe the first one that comes to my mind and I say these people, they've given us permission to talk about this story. So there's a brand out there called pajamas. And Pajamas is like a built-in potty training aid for parents who are trying to teach their kids how to not wet the bed at night. So essentially it's like reusable diapers that you can rewash, kids can pee in it and it doesn't soak their bed. And when they originally came to their agency, they said, Hey, people buy us for two reasons. They buy us because it saves them money and diapers cost a lot of money, number one, so it's going to save you money. And number two reason is it's going to save the environment because I think every pull-up takes 15 years to decompose. And so there was this big eco push that they were trying to go.

So sure enough, the agency that they're working with creates all the content around those two solutions. And because this is such a problem solution product, people see it and problem solution products tend to sell themselves usually. Now when you really hit on the actual reason somebody buys it, they sell 10 x more. So they were running those ads for quite some time. And then we got bestie set up and we said, Hey, I know that these are the two reasons why you say people are buying from you, but what if we just created a survey and we asked one question and the question just said, what motivated you to buy pajamas today? And we listed those two right cost savings, and then we added three or four more responses with one open-ended response, like an other open-ended response. And after a week or so, we got enough statistical significance data that said, okay, let's see if eco-friendly and diaper savings costs are the number one and number two drivers and eco-friendly accounted for about 7% of the reason why people purchased and cost savings accounted for about 9%. Wow.

Brett:

So two of the lower priority reasons that people are purchasing that. Really interesting. So what were the winners?

Trevor:

The number one, which was 53% over half the time somebody's buying was they wanted to shorten the window it took for them to potty train their child. So they didn't want to have a six, eight-year-old wedding, the bed they wanted to get them in, they wanted to fix that, nip that in the bud quicker. So that was the number one reason by 53% shortening up that window. And then the second reason, the second reason, which was like 24%, was to improve child's confidence. No five-year-old feels confident going to bed with a pull-up on, but if they're wearing pajamas, they don't feel like they're a little baby anymore.

Brett:

I love that so much. And as a parent, and I don't know if you know this, Trevor, a lot of the listeners do. My wife and I have eight kids, count 'em, eight

Trevor:

Kids. Oh my gosh,

Brett:

Dude, oldest is out of the house, second oldest is in college. Yeah, lots of kids. So dude, the number of, we calculated one time the number of pul numbers, number of diapers, and now I've forgotten, but I think it's like four to 8,000 to 6,000 per kid or something like that is the average. So you do the math there, it's an insane amount of pull-ups and diapers. They are expensive. What's really interesting, I think this is a difference between this is the business owner mindset. This is what we think is most important from a business standpoint. But then when you put your parent hat on and your parent lens on your parent glasses so to speak, this is what's important. But when you look at that, yes, we want to save money and yes, we want to save the environment, but what's interesting about the environmental issue is in surveys, we see that all the time show up way lower than the business owner thinks.

And that's not to say that you shouldn't be environmentally friendly, people do care about that, but it's just not at the top of the list when it comes to where am I going to spend my money? We think that it's, but in this case, yeah, it's my kid's confidence and my kid's psychology. I'm motivated for that. I'm motivated to spend money for that. And let's face it, man, I don't want to change wet sheets for the next five months next year. No way. If we can get this trained faster, let's do it right now. So love that. Kudos to you guys for asking the questions and really kudos to the business owner for being open to it because I think some business owners approach it, they're like, no, no, no, no, I know my customer. I know this is the reason. These are the reasons. But that ain't necessarily true. So love that. Any other kind of aha moments surprising? I thought this thing, it was actually the opposite.

Trevor:

Yeah, I think maybe another, okay, yeah, another one was there was a women's clothing boutique, and this one's a little bit more on the attribution side, on the women's clothing boutique. They're a big massive clothing boutique here in the Salt Lake area, and they kind of felt like they were hitting a wall when it came to their ad spend, right? Hey, nobody can really help us here. We just need to find either a good in-house marketer, a good agency who we can just trust that are going to spend our money effectively. This is what our CAC is, this is what our L T V is and this is what it's going to be. We're going to be an x million dollar a month business and that's it. And they kind of felt like that was their fate for a little bit. And so we started to run attribution surveys and just back to those same three questions, how did you hear about us?

Where did you come from and how long have you known about us? And this founder, the way they sell a lot of their clothing is she is wildly, wildly interactive in her stories. So she'll jump in her stories and she will try clothes on and she'll say, Hey, I am this tall. I weigh this much, this is how my body fits in it. And people just love it because they're like, oh, cool, I can see that. I can visualize it. I'm the same size, or I'm a little bit bigger, I'm a little bit smaller, so I'm going to need a small versus a medium or what have you. And so she just tries on every new piece of clothing that comes in. So if you go look at their stories, they've got a hundred stories, not a hundred stories, 25 stories a day, and they were convinced like, Hey, we're the ones who are selling Google Analytics attribution.

It's all telling us people are coming from our Instagram referrals. That's where everything's coming from. And so we said, let's just run an attribution test. Let's see what's going on here. Come to find out that 75% of the people who said they first heard that brand, that women's clothing boutique was through Facebook ads, Facebook and Instagram ads. So it had nothing to do with her stories, nothing, right? It was the ad first and then how they got to the website today. The top two reasons was from her stories or they just remembered her. They had remembered it. So we came back and said, Hey, the insights here, the actionable insights here for you are, I know once again, this goes back to what was happening over at font design, this word of mouth thing. It's like, Hey, I know that it looks like the people who are buying are people who are coming just from you guys organically, but they first started following you and heard about you through your ads.

Why don't you try to double your ad spend and see what happens? They doubled their ad spend for three months and their business has five XD since then, and they're scaling and growing and opening up new locations all because it was just like, oh my goodness, we've got the right L t V for this and let's just test it out and see what happens. And sure enough, they're absolutely crushing it, their m e r, so their marketing efficient rate, efficiency rate didn't increase, didn't decrease. It stayed the same, but they five x their monthly revenue because of just putting the money where they need to

Brett:

Put it. It's amazing. It's amazing. And it kind of goes back to that first touch, last touch type of argument. And yes, we've got tools that can calculate that, and I like attribution tools. There's several. I like triple oil, north Beam, there's several that are good, but they're not perfect. And so getting these questions answered is huge where we thought that it was all our stories and organic, but really it was ads. We had something kind of similar with one of our brands or jewelry brand, and we were doing just a small YouTube test. Of course we were running all their Google and that was going very, very well. But we wanted to test YouTube. They wanted to test YouTube, ran it for a little while, and they were like, I don't know. I mean the numbers and the different platforms, they look okay and this's one thing we've seen with YouTube a lot under attributed in platform almost always, it's like, well, we're going to ask.

We're going to ask. Actually, they didn't even think about this. They were just like, well, we don't know if we're going to keep going. And then they came back to us the next week and they said, Hey, wait a minute. We started doing post-purchase surveys and we started looking one out of five people this last week mentioned YouTube, and they're like, oh, let's jack up the spend here. So it's one of those things where maybe it doesn't show up in the attribution modeling, but you ask people and then you see it. And I'm curious too, I got asked this question, remember I bought some apparel online. It was a brand that I really like, and I saw this question of how long have you known about us? And I stopped to think about it. I was like, you know what? I think I first heard about this brand seven, eight months ago, and I just hadn't done anything. I saw it, thought it was cool, didn't need it, kind of moved on whatever. But the ads, I kind of saw the ads for a little while. They went away and then they came back. Any surprise learnings you're seeing there? I know with Fawn, you found the buying cycle was short 30 days, but any examples where you've learned the opposite, where there's a significant number of people that heard about our brand months ago and they're just now purchasing?

Trevor:

Yeah, yeah. There was a golf bag brand that we worked with or that uses bestie, and they were really, really shocked by their results. They found that 60% of their audience didn't hear about or didn't purchase until after a year. So they were in this buyer's journey for a year. And so one of the things for them, if you're a golfer, golfing is a seasonal sport. In some states it's not. Obviously in the Californias and the Arizonas and states like Florida, you can golf year round and plenty of other states, but buying season, there's a difference between golfing season and buying season. And so what a lot of these golf brands will do is they'll shut their ads down or they'll turn spend down dramatically in the off months. And that's what this brand would do is they would turn their spend down dramatically, but it come to find out they need to be advertising in October so that they are going to have a really good February, march, april, may when people really, really start to buy.

And so that was really shocking for them. You tend to see that a little bit more though anytime I've recognized anytime something's above $200, you do tend to see the buyer's journey extended a little bit more. That becomes less of an impulse buy. And so you start to get more responses like oh three to six to 12 months before I heard about you before I actually purchase. So yeah, we see it all the time. We see it short and long. I mean, the Fawn Design one was interesting because that was a $200 diaper bag too, but it was under 30 days. But I also think a diaper bag can be very problem solution. So people definitely can buy those

Brett:

Problem solution. There's an easy justification for the diaper bag. I'm going to look like a good mom, I'm going to feel like a good mom. I'm going to be able to execute a good mom with golf equipment. And some of those other things like maybe I got to justify this with my spouse, or maybe I got to sneak in the purchase or do I really need it? So maybe I'll ask for it for Christmas. All kinds of things like that can kind of come into play so good. And I think this just underscores the more we know about our customers, the more we're going to shift. I would argue for the golf client, if I knew that my 60% of people were waiting more than a year, I may look at, okay, I don't have enough urgency. Maybe that's unnaturally long. Maybe I need to up my urgency or how can I get someone on the list?

How can I get them to purchase a little bit quicker? But I think part of that is it's just going to be a longer sales cycle. It's going to be longer than diaper bags or something else. And so then I need to work within that. And yes, I need to maybe now advertise more in October and do some of the off months, but if I know that I'm going to shift my behavior. Let's talk about, and I love the questions you mentioned so far, what else would you say are kind of top questions to ask? And are those the three you start with and then you go somewhere else? And then when and where should you be asking these? Yeah,

Trevor:

Super good question. So a couple different answers to those, right? So it's like attribution stuff is always great to just be getting a better handle on things. I think a lot of people rag on attribution with post-purchase surveys because they say, oh, how does a customer remember? But at the end of the day, sometimes it doesn't matter if the customer's wrong about what they remember because at the end of the day, it's what they remember what, so they

Brett:

Remember that you're going to see patterns as well. If it's true, if you start seeing patterns emerge with a lot of customers, you can bank on it being true or true enough to take action

Trevor:

A hundred percent. Eventually things start to you get enough data and you're like, okay, hey, are all these people wrong? So attribution is always a really good one. Those are the three questions I love the most. I don't think that those three questions are good questions to ask alone. So if you're just asking, how did you hear about us? That's tough because it doesn't tell the full story. If you're just asking what brought you to the website today? If you're just asking how long have you known? It just doesn't tell the full story. So I like those three questions in that story. Those

Brett:

Three pair well together like fine wine and cheese, you got to have 'em together.

Trevor:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Some other really good questions, I talked about motivation. Motivation question is by far one of my favorites because that gives you your value props. You think that your value props, your unique selling propositions are X, y, Z, but your customers are telling you exactly why I thought that somebody was buying because, but they're actually buying because they want to help their kids' confidence. I never thought about that, so let me change. And that nowadays, you probably know this, especially on the YouTube side of things, we know this from meta and TikTok, audience segmentation, that kind of stuff, placements that stuff. No more silver bullets when it comes to media buying like that anymore. The silver bullets are how you create your content and how you message it. And so the motivation question is so pivotal because then you bring that to your creative team or to your social media team or to your media buyers or whatever, and you're now telling 'em, this is why people buy.

Brett:

And you can potentially maybe shift the audience you're building just a little bit on Google. You've got the ability to shift based on keywords and things like that. But yeah, ultimately you're shifting the angle in the story and think about how big of a difference this is. What if my ad was 30 seconds and 20 of it was about saving the environment? And then I just mentioned something about my kids' confidence. That's very different than saying, Hey, kids struggle when they wet the bed and when we've seen these studies that do this, but man, if you can increase that, I'm just totally making this up as I go, but you lean into confidence and then you say, and what if you could cut the time training from an average of three months to just two weeks? And you know what? This is also, you're saving the environment. You're going to save money. Those become cherries on top or the additional benefits. Everybody wants that. Nobody wants to destroy the environment, nobody wants to spend more, but those just weren't the primary drivers. So focus on what's primary and then mention those other things that really kind of push someone over the edge. And that is a big, big difference That can be a total game changer for your ad campaign. So absolutely love that.

Trevor:

Some other questions that kind of tie into motivation is like how do you plan to use the product? So whatcha are going to use this product for what problems are you trying to solve? Why did you pick us over a competitor? What almost stopped you from purchasing today? That's a really, really good one, dude.

Brett:

I love that one. Any insights on that? Any insights that have come from that question? What almost prevented you from buying?

Trevor:

Yeah, absolutely. You get a lot of people who taught price compared to lack of review. So I've recognized that the people who, because you can do, at least with bestie, you can do follow-up questions. So if somebody says, Hey, it was a price thing, you can ask about the reviews or the testimonials that they saw. Did you see any reviews, testimonials or do you have any social proof? And so I think that ties a lot into it. You get some people who say your website was just really, it was really challenging to get through to get to the product page. That was really challenging. You get some people who just will flat out say, we've seen responses such as the competitor I was looking at was out of stock. And so I came to you. I mean, you get all sorts of stuff. You get all sorts stuff.

Brett:

You're my second choice.

Trevor:

You're our second choice. But here I am,

Brett:

You lucked out. But man, talk about valuable insights. So it shows how you stack up and man, what insight would that be where you're like, yeah, you know what? I almost didn't buy because your website's so stinging hard to navigate. But I was really desperate, so I bought it, right? So that's like, oh no, my website's great. It's converting. No, you're actually, they won it so bad. They're fighting through your website. So yeah, love that question. By the way, before I forget, and this just a quick side note, we'll get back to this topic. You mentioned Utah a minute ago. I'm in Missouri. We're Midwest guys. Our golfing season is not the same as our friends in California and Florida and Arizona. Why is Utah such like this D two C hotbed? I remember several years ago we had a client in Ogden, Utah, so flew into Salt Lake, went just, I think, is it north? Is it north of Salt Lake? Yep.

Trevor:

Ogden's North.

Brett:

Yeah. And maybe it was Logan, actually Logan. Anyway, but this guy was like, dude, you got to move out here. I'm like, well, I'm pretty plugged in Missouri. I'm not moving. But he's like, no, no, no, no. The scene here is amazing, like tech D two C, it's happening. So what are some of you posted on LinkedIn recently? Some of the brands, the amazing brands that are in Utah. Can you run through some of those by memory and what's with Utah? Why is it such a hotbed of D two C and tech growth?

Trevor:

There's so many responses that I've heard from this down to, from religion to all sorts of things. But yeah, I mean there's a lot of really cool D two C back to businesses from the Tech D two C side of things, or also the merchant side of things. So you've got Ekk who's here, that's one of the fastest growing footwear brands in the world right now. D two C footwear brands. You've got brands like Kodiak Cakes that started here. You've got brands like Clean, simple Eats, just ingredients. Those are in the C P G space. You've got Mixers, which is a big female founded brand that's absolutely crushing it right now here in Utah. You've got Gab Wireless. I'm not sure if you've heard of Gab Wireless, but that's this massive brand right now where it's phones for kids. So it's giving them the smartphone experience without the dangers of smartphones. Dude,

Brett:

Love that.

Trevor:

Which you'll have to look it up. They're one of the most fantastic brands right now as somebody with kids. I love it. Traeger, you've heard of Traeger. Traeger started out

Brett:

Here. I totally heard of Traeger. Yeah. Got lots of friends

Trevor:

That Traeger. Yep. My lifetime value at Traeger is stupid, so that's great for me.

Brett:

V i p at Trager.

Trevor:

Yeah, that's right. Also

Brett:

Shout out, I saw on your list thread wallets. Yep, threads. Shout out to Colby Bauer. He was on the podcast. Oh,

Trevor:

Amazing.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dude's awesome. It's been a hot minute. It's may have been like three years ago. May have been pre,

Trevor:

Yeah, Kolby and Mackenzie are great. You were about to say Skull Candy, that's another brand that came out of Utah that's still here in Utah. Kick in Alive and well, I mean list goes on and on some e-commerce brands, you've got pattern pattern's absolutely massive. You've got

Brett:

Pillow Cube.

Trevor:

Oh yeah, pillow Cube's a big one. You've got creatively, you've got the Harmons Brothers came out of here. I think you've got the list is Big Corso, which is route shipping insurance. Those guys came out of Utah. So it's massive. So reasoning why, I don't know. You do have, Utah is just in general a very entrepreneurial minded place.

Brett:

That's what I've noticed.

Trevor:

Yeah. I have some theories I have behind it is you get a lot of young men who go on what's called moron missions. So like L D SS missions two

Brett:

Year Mission, man, it's like primetime preparation for being an entrepreneur.

Trevor:

Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest, I am one of those people who did that, who did a two year mission. And one of the biggest things you learn as a missionary is number one, hard work. You are working your butt off. It's nonstop. You're up at 6:00 AM you're in bed by 10 30 and you're on a very rigid schedule. And it's during these years of your life that are really impressionable, right? 19 to 21 years old. And then not only that, but you are getting rejected literally 24 7. And if you're an entrepreneur, like rejection is, you just got to be used to rejection. You got people who are telling you left and that this is not going to work. You got your parents, especially if you got older school parents who are maybe more in the baby boomer side who don't understand entrepreneurship, who are just go get the nine to five. So you get a lot of rejection and so you're not afraid. You're not afraid of failure. And so I think personally that that's a huge, huge reason is I

Brett:

Think it is too. I think it's huge because that learning to deal with rejection, and I got my start in college was selling radio, trying to put myself through college. I got married young and I dealt with a lot of rejection and I realized this isn't that bad. I didn't die. I got told no, but I didn't die. This is no big deal. I'm just going to keep cranking. And what's interesting, and we're people of faith, I've got lots of friends who are Mormons, but not Mormon myself, but my son is selling solar systems door to door. And it's another, all the great companies are based out of Utah and it makes sense. And so he's leading a team. He's in Connecticut right now leading a team, but most of his buddies there are went on warm a missions and stuff. And I would agree, man, one of the best ways to train as an entrepreneur or salesperson is going through that experience. So

Trevor:

There's also a couple colleges here as well that really pride themselves in entrepreneurship as well. So it's not just the religion side of things, but there are some colleges that are very, very into it. You also get on the other side of things this kind of times, Utah is a very family friendly culture. And so traditional motherhood, fatherhood roles are very big. And you also get a lot of big female founders here have been moms who are thinking about other things that they can do. So you get a lot of moms out here who've started businesses that have blown up and just succeeded just out of solving a problem for other moms.

Brett:

Don't Sleep on Utah, man, Utah, it's a rising star in the D two C place. Keep your eye on it, think about how you can partner there. And so really, really good stuff. Love this topic so much. And my head is spinning and now I'm thinking of questions and advice. I got to give you clients so we can really maximize what we're doing here. But love that you talked about, what problem are you solving? Why'd you choose us over competitors? You, and I know I'm putting you on the spot here, but can you think of any insights or aha moments from those questions?

Trevor:

Yeah, I can think of one. So there was a men's bag company who did you choose us over? Your competitors? And a massive, massive response that we got. So one of this brand that was using bestie, they started to just go really, really deep into the entertainment or the, there's a name. It's combining entertainment and education at the same time. Yeah,

Brett:

Edutainment.

Trevor:

Edutainment, right Space. It's something that was just kind of like bags kind of lame ish. And they went really, really hard on TikTok and started to get a big TikTok following from an organic perspective. And so these people found that, hey, one of the number one reasons people are picking us over competitors, bigger competitors that have a big name in the space is because they're following us on TikTok and they love what we're doing and the questions we're answering and how they, we've turned such a mundane thing into something a lot more fun and turn something mundane to fun and interesting. And so that was a huge reason why they're picking them over a competitor.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so great. And it's just a reminder that yes, we do want good features and we want to save money or pay a fair price or whatever, but we also want to be delighted and we want something to kind of make our day better. And so sometimes just the content you create, the message you present is enough for someone to say, Hey, all things being equal here as far as features and stuff, I like your personality better. I get more enjoyment from working with your brand than with another. And I'm going to go with you one of my favorite stories, tushy, the Bidet attachment company. So I had Mickey Agrawal on the podcast a couple of years ago, and so she talked about, Hey, we want to communicate just like we're friends with people and we want the whole journey to be fun and entertaining and we want people to talk about it.

And so we saved this. We bought one for the office because people requested it, but there's this little guide that's this number two shall pass, and it's just like a series of puns, like bathroom puns. So it's like part guide, but then part just humor. And that thing has been passed around, hopefully didn't make trips to the bathroom and then get passed around. I think it's all been contained in the office, but people talk about it, it's hilarious. It's so much better than just a user manual. And so adding personality in what you're doing, it can allow you to charge a premium and really endear customers to you. So really good stuff. Really good stuff. Awesome, man. Well, hey, any recent episodes of the pod that you want to highlight that people should go back and listen to? I mean, I know we should just binge listen to all of it, but can you think of

Trevor:

Any? Yeah, should we just have an episode where we just Yeah, I'm trying to think of maybe some of my favorite episodes. Kik, we had the VP of marketing over at Kik on, he was awesome to listen to. Really, really cool to see what's going on with that. Because what happened is the story of Kik is such, they kind of switched their entire persona buyer of who was originally buying the shoe to who's now buying it now and how they've scaled to a nine figure business. That's a really, really cool episode. I think we just did an episode where just my co-host and I, we just did it. We didn't have a guest on, it was our actually most recent one. And it was actually one of my favorites where we just talked about what content is converting right now, what content is working to drive sales, why is it working? Why is certain content not working anymore? What are some inspirational brands who are doing it cool, who are some inspirational, we dove into directors and tied certain directors and how they create movies and why they're so good and some of those attributes and how you can pull that from your business. So that was a great episode.

Brett:

Yeah, that's fantastic. So just as a teaser for that episode, what is some content that is converting now versus that isnt? So

Trevor:

One of the things we talk a lot about is you've got this, there's a lot of trends out there that merchants follow. Oh, I'm seeing a lot of people do use U G C right now, so I'm going to create U G C. I see a lot of people creating listicle ads such as for the five reasons why I bought Tushy or whatever. And so I think that there is, there's kind of this two-tone approach that you need to go about. The brands should go about things. One is I think that following trends can be great. Try to be early in some of those trends because you'll see that U G C is still super important, but it is not doing what it used to do and people are starting to see through a lot of it. So you got to go a little bit deeper,

Brett:

Has to be good. U G C, it used to be just run U G C, you win. Now it's got to be this U G C has to serve a purpose. It's got to be authentic, it's got to be compelling, it's got to be good.

Trevor:

Yeah, exactly right, exactly. So how do you get to trends as quick as possible? So totally good with doing that kind of stuff. I don't think U G C ever goes anywhere. What's now happening a little bit more. What we're seeing with U G C is U G C tends to do a lot better towards the bottom of the funnel. So it's like, hey, I don't really care what somebody thinks about a product that I don't know about yet. So tell me about the product first. Then I want to see a few people who look like they really love the product, work with it. But the other thing that's working really good is just storytelling ads. It kind of goes against the grain where nowadays it's like, Hey, that first five seconds is so important. So first five seconds is so important, which is totally true, but most people are thinking those first five seconds is five reasons why you should, or this is why you shouldn't do X, or this is how I made more money here, or this is why my butt is getting cleaner, or you're getting these really impactful hooks.

But I even think that with how saturated TikTok is and what's happening with Instagram right now, you're getting so many people who are, that's becoming noise. Those hooks are becoming noise. I'm not saying that they don't work still and they can't, but when you just jump into the narrative of a problem, oh, the other day I was doing X, Y, z. That goes against the hook, like your general hook standards. But people are starting to key in on storytelling a lot more. And then if you can get to the problem really, really quickly and you really follow a good storytelling framework, which is just jumping right into it, what is the problem, what is the solution? And you're kind of following it, that content's working really, really

Brett:

Good. Yeah, I love this. And really I think this comes down to understanding why is something working. So if U G C is working or if listicles are working, why it's not, just because there's something magic in that it's not just totally formulaic, there's something behind it. So understanding the psychology and the persuasion behind it and the attention grabbing factors, you got to understand that. And then I think you can kind of riff on things. And I agree with you, I think U G C will never die, but you can't just wing it. You got to be good at U G C. And I think that's really key. So dude, this has been fantastic. Thoroughly enjoyed this episode. And so you got to go check out the podcast and it is the Unstoppable Marketer. Did I get that right? Yep. Nailed it. Unstoppable Marketer and then bestie app. So how can people check out bestie? Give us the quick pitch. I think people are now sold on your approach to asking questions, but why should I choose bestie and how can I learn more? Yeah,

Trevor:

Yeah. So bestie app.co is where you can go. We offer free trial right now, so go check it out. We're more than happy to jump on a call with anybody and help you set some stuff up. We're kind of approaching things a little bit different right now. There's plenty of post-purchase survey tools that you can look at, but one of the things that we're most interested in is how can we deliver actionable insights that the user doesn't have to really do anything to figure out marketers nowadays we have, each one of us has a thousand tools. We're looking at every single day. We're being pulled in a hundred different directions. And so the question is, how can we deliver those insights to you? So you have actionable ways to just get up, you see what's going on with your surveys, what's happening with your customers, and you got the actual tips to go and check it out. And so go check it out. We've got some really cool things happening right now, some cool partnerships and some cool feature drops that are going to happen in the next couple of weeks. So go there, or if you want to just follow me on social media, all my handles are at the Trevor Crump and I talk about bestie all the time as well. So that

Brett:

Is awesome. So check it out, bestie app.co. You just got to do it. Get started. Do the free trial because when you know more about your customers, you know what to do differently and you know how to maximize things. Trevor Crump, ladies and gentlemen, Trevor, that was a ton of fun, man. You crushed it. We'll have to do this again sometime.

Trevor:

Absolutely. Now I got to have you on online, so we will swap it. Yeah,

Brett:

Absolutely. Man. I thought you'd never ask. I was just sitting over here like Unstoppable marketer, all these cool guests. I'm like, I've never been a guest.

Trevor:

We'll get You seem unstoppable. You seem unstoppable. So we'll get you

Brett:

There. Awesome. Thanks dude. Tons of fun and I look forward to it.

Trevor:

I appreciate you having me on.

Brett:

Awesome. And thank you for tuning in. We could not do this show without you, and hey, we'd love your feedback. What would you like to hear more of? What other topics should we dive into on this podcast? Also, connect with me on the socials, getting pretty active on LinkedIn, posting almost daily with some good stuff, good clips, good insights. So reach out to me there. Love to keep the conversation going there. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Gracey Ryback, an A-List Amazon Influencer, began her journey on TikTok by talking about products she loved. Soon after, she started hosting Amazon Lives. To date, she has driven seven figures in new sales for various products on Amazon. 

I first met Gracey when we both spoke at SellerCon in Austin earlier this summer. Her presentation was amazing, and I immediately knew I had to get her on the show.

If you’re like most of the brands I know, then you’ve likely never tried Amazon Lives, or if you did, you did it as a brand and got little to no traction. 

The good news is that your competition likely isn’t using Amazon Lives or Amazon Influencers either... so you have a potential edge.

Here’s what Gracey and I discuss:

• Advantages of Amazon Live with an A-List Influencer vs. Live as a brand.
• How to show up on the Amazon home page with your Amazon Live.
• How to find Amazon Influencers to work with that fit your brand.
• TikTok Shop - how it works, how to leverage for growth on and off Amazon.
• How to fully leverage influencer content.
• What is the influencer marketing mindset, and why is it critical for success in influencer marketing?
• How creative control may be killing your results with influencer marketing.

Transcript

Gracey:

The more times you show up on an Amazon Live over time, the better results you're going to get. It's consistent and slow and just show up more often because every single time you go live, you're reaching more people. So don't expect a one-off huge spike success. That's not really how the platform works for Amazon Live more like small and steady and long-term.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're talking about a topic we've never dove into on this podcast before. We're talking about Amazon influencers, Amazon Live, Amazon affiliate TikTok shop, and it's going to be amazing and inspiring, and you'll for sure get your money's worth from this podcast. Now I met today's guest when we were both speaking at Seller Con in Austin, Texas packed room, Amazon Sellers on the edge of their seat, ready to learn some tips and strategies for growing their business. And there was one speaker, one speaker when she wrapped up, people were chanting her name. They were like Gracey Gray c chanting for Encore. They were so excited about this content. I may be embellishing a little bit, but a lot of that is true. And so we connected in the green room. I spoke two, no one was chanting my name, but that's okay. We both met in the green room and decided, hey, we got to do a podcast together. So with that, Gracey Ryback is my guest. Gracey, what's up? How's it going? And welcome to the show. Hi

Gracey:

Brett. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here and get into a topic that you've never talked about before. I

Brett:

Know it's a brand new topic, which we talk about Amazon all the time. And for listeners that listen frequently, which I hope is all of you, you know that I'm passionate about building a brand on Amazon, not just selling stuff, not just being a good seller. That's fine if that's where you are, but when you can build a brand on Amazon, that's when the real power's there. That's when you got something you can sell later, something that's maximized in value, something you can start launching new products and benefit there too. And so I think what you do, Gracey, is perfect for those that are ready to build a brand on Amazon. And so as a quick backstory, just 60, 90 seconds, how did you become an Amazon influencer and how did you become an expert in this space?

Gracey:

Yeah, so let's flash back to 2020 when the world was going through what the world was going through. And I was actually just trying to create content on TikTok just as a passion project. It was just for fun. And at the time my mindset was like, I'll never make a penny from social media. I'm not that kind of person. I'm no influencer. I just want to help people save money on Amazon. And that was my intention behind my content. So I just started creating TikTok videos without expectation and not knowing what would happen. My contents started creating traction and I started growing in followers. Throughout that process, I started realizing that there was something happening on the other side, the A K V Amazon brand side for sellers that I didn't know about stuff was selling. So in the process, I met some Amazon sellers who introduced me into this world of what it's like selling on Amazon, what they're looking for to make a successful brand. And in turn, I realized what I do is very highly connected to them. So it only made sense that I started learning more about both sides of the industry. So that's kind of how we got into it. And throughout the past three years that I've been doing this, I've also expanded to seven different platforms. I do Amazon Live as well, and I live and breathe this. So,

Brett:

And driving multiple seven figures in sales as a power influencer, I would call you. And what's so cool, and the way you described that, it made me think of something that's I think a really important business principle. So you started not with the goal to make money, although that's great, that's where all entrepreneurs, but you started with the goal to how can I be helpful? How can I help people save money on Amazon? Lemme just create content with that as the goal. And then it took off. And one of my favorite stories comes from Jim Collins. I'm a huge Jim Collins fan, so good to great, great by choice must reads for anybody in business. But he's a big Peter Drucker fan, as am I one of the greatest management thinkers of all time. And Jim Collins tells a story about when he was a younger teacher at Stanford, he met Peter Drucker and Jim was like, how can I assure that I'm going to be successful?

And Peter Drucker said, you're asking the wrong question you shouldn't desire. You shouldn't try to be successful, try to be useful. If you're useful, you'll be successful. I just love that. I think that's so good. That's what we should do as brands, as managers, as leaders, as influencers, whatever. How can I be useful if I'm useful to other people that I'm going to be successful? And that's what you have done. So talk to us a little bit about Amazon lives, and I know we've all seen it. You log into Amazon on the homepage, you see it and it's on mobile and stuff like that. But what's the power there? What are some of the results you've seen just set the stage for somebody who maybe doesn't know much about Amazon Lives?

Gracey:

Sure. So Amazon lives started, I want to say right before 2020. And it was their take on trying to bring more personality to the products and trying to do more product demos, but on Amazon's platform. And so they have a bunch of creators and there's different tiers of creators that we can talk about, but basically you can talk about up to 40 products per stream. You can talk about anything that sells on Amazon. There's two types of streams, there's a regular stream and then there's a deal stream. And the viewership between these two streams can differ a lot. But the main point of it is basically to highlight products that shoppers may or may not be looking for on Amazon, and then bring somebody who is a creator, an influencer, potentially an expert on that product or a loving user of that product and just have somebody able to talk about it, show it, demo it, and be able to answer questions if buyers and customers have them.

So it's a really fun platform. I do streams about three times a week and I've highlighted countless products in all different niches and areas. And I think the real value from them is getting those traffic clicks to your product and of course the sales that come along with it, but also having somebody put personality behind your product and be like, this is how I use it, this is what I use it for, this is what I like about it. Here's all the questions I can answer about it, and here's my personal experience. And you don't get that from a product page or a listing.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. I mean, it's really all about product discovery, isn't it? Because one shortcoming of Amazon, and I love Amazon, it's the largest retailer online by far. But still the vast majority of products that are discovered on Amazon are discovered through search, meaning someone has to be actively shopping for your product or your category anyway. And I really think that's one of the big reasons why Amazon created Amazon Live. They want it to be the Q vvc or little infomercials where, hey, maybe I'm bored and maybe I just want to look at stuff and see what's available. And now I'm going to be introduced to a product that I didn't even know I needed, but now I can't live without it and we all love to buy stuff. And that became very true, even more true during the pandemic. Retail therapy is a real thing. It's a real thing every day, but especially then where we're like, man, I got nothing else to do. I'm going to buy something that feels good. I get some endorphins or some dopamine release if I buy something. Yeah,

Gracey:

I do that too. Sometimes I'm on board. I'm like, well, lemme browse Amazon as my social media and try to find something I maybe need or probably don't

Brett:

At all. So let's do something really quickly, Gracey, this will be kind of fun. Let's do confession time. I'll confess something as well. When you're bored, what is a category? What is a shopping category you go to frequently where you're like, maybe I'll just kind of look at this category and see what I can find?

Gracey:

Not to be stereotypical, but it's always fashion and beauty for me. I always find some really cool beauty product that I maybe want to review or just want to try. And then fashion is also fun because there's a world of Amazon fashion that is kind of underbelly and there's a lot of good stuff there. And a lot of times people are like, where'd you get that? Where'd you wear that from? And I'm like, Amazon. And they're always shaken by that. They're always,

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, really Amazon, Amazon's like a boys for cheap stuff or whatever, which wasn't true, but that's a perception. So my confession, and I don't know how masculine this sounds, but I'm just going to say it anyway, it's not beauty. It's not beauty, but I like shopping for shoes, man. I just got some new Adidas. If I was a little more flexible, I could kick 'em up here and you can see. But it also also shirts. This is a relatively new shirt, so on occasion if I'm bored, I will buy a new shirt or I'll buy a new pair of shoes and I don't feel overly guilty about that. So

Gracey:

I love it. My last thing has been watches. I've been really into watches recently, so maybe you can

Brett:

Relate. So I like watches, but I love my Apple watch, so I'm like, I don't know that I would ever do anything different. So I watches are more of a fashion accessory I know for a lot of people. For me it's kind of functional, but I get that. I can see my dad was a huge watch guy, so he was always shopping for watches. But yeah, that's good. I like that. I like that. So yeah, so this is a way for people to discover our product. So what are you seeing most successful as Amazon lives? Are they most successful when it's someone like you hosting them where the platform inside and out, you're natural, you're like TV host or Q VVC host or whatever, or should a brand host a live themself or is that even possible? What do you recommend there?

Gracey:

So can stream themselves as long as they're brand registered on Amazon, they have the ability to go live and they would show up on their own brand storefront and they basically can either drive their own traffic if they have that external traffic or basically the only people that would see their streams are the people that are already shopping on their page listing storefront. There is pros and cons to this brands. It really depends on how much your brand has created a presence on Amazon already on your storefront, how many followers your storefront has, and basically that's going to be the audience that you're going to watch if you are streaming as a brand. The good thing is that the audience that you have is probably much more targeted and much more vertical than an influencer doing an Amazon live stream, which could be anybody and everybody watching their own audience or even Amazon's onsite audience. So the viewership numbers may be fully different, but you might get higher revenue if you are reaching a very vertical audience.

Brett:

And just to clarify Grace, just to make sure, this is new to me too, so I just want to make sure I'm following. So if I'm going live on Amazon as a brand, then that live is only visible if someone is on my storefront or on one of my product detail pages. Is that correct? And it's only visible while I'm live, or can you replay it later or how does that

Gracey:

Work? No, I'm less familiar with the brand side of things than I am with the creator side of things. I want to say that live streams do archive after a certain amount of time, and I do believe that they're only really highlighted while they're actually live similar to influencer streams. And the lifespan I would say is like 24 hours, 48 hours after I stream, and then it kind of goes away and makes room for the new live stuff. But influencer live streams are a bit different because in that sense, and I also want to mention time commitment as a brand, unless you want to hire a creator to do the livestream on your behalf for your brand, it may or may not be worth investing all that time into As a brand owner, if it's like you and a small team and you have much better things to do, that is very, very important to note.

But if you are working with a creator or an Amazon Live influencer, then obviously you have two A-list placements and a-list is the top tier of Amazon Live creator. And those streams have potential placement on either the Amazon deal page, daily deals page, which is a great placement, or the amazon.com homepage. If you kind of scroll to the middle of the amazon.com homepage, you can usually see a little live stream with the carousel of products in the middle. And so these streams are going to get a lot more viewership than a brand stream would just because of the placement. But the caveat here is that anybody and everybody can see this stream, so it may not be somebody interested in the products. So that is the difference,

Brett:

But it really makes sense. You made a great point. So if my brand isn't huge on Amazon and myself and my team, we've got to decide where do we invest our efforts? And so do I invest a little more time in running Facebook ads or Google ads or Amazon ads, or do I go live and if I don't have a huge following, then hardly anybody's going to see my live. And so it makes a lot of sense, I think in most cases for someone to partner with an influencer like yourself or somebody else and just say like, Hey, I want you to run this. It's going to have a much broader reach, and you'll probably find quality in the quantity, the larger the audience, the more likely you're going to find some people that are likely to buy. And so that makes a lot of sense. How is that structured? If I'm a brand and I'm selling, give me a product that

Gracey:

You like a mirror,

Brett:

A mirror, I'm selling mirrors and I am looking for an influencer. How am I doing that? Is there an influencer marketplace? Am I going to be paying an influencer like a commission of every deal that's closed? Is that trackable? Am I just paying a flat fee? What does that look like typically?

Gracey:

That is great question. So there are a couple ways to find Amazon influencers, and the way that I suggest is if you're going to invest in Amazon Live, the thing that's going to get you the most R O I possible is to work with an A-list Amazon influencer that frequently shows up on the Amazon deal page or the Amazon homepage. If you're doing a deal stream on the deals page, every product in the carousel has to fall under three types of deals, three and a half types of deals, a lightning deal, a deal of the day, a seven day deal, or a red limited time bar deal. So those four types of deals are eligible for a deal stream.

Brett:

So one more time, that was lightning deal deal today, the red bar, what was the other one? Seven

Gracey:

Day deal.

Brett:

Seven day deal.

Gracey:

Got it. And then homepage placement. It can be anything and everything doesn't necessarily have to be on deal.

Brett:

So how did somebody become an Alister? So I know you're an Alister, but how do you become an A-list influencer?

Gracey:

So everyone, part of the Amazon influencer program is eligible to start live streaming. You have to download a little app and then once everybody starts out as a rising star. So once you stream a certain amount of minutes and drive a certain amount of revenue, you can apply for insider level, which is mid-tier level, insider level. Once you get I think 2000 followers on your storefront, on your Amazon storefront and drive a certain amount of revenue, then you can apply for a-list. Now a-list is a bit more challenging because Amazon has to manually hand vet every A-list or they approve because obviously they want good quality on those highly viewed placements. And that's basically how you do it. You just stream a certain amount, drive a certain amount of revenue, and then you can apply and just make sure you have a good quality live stream where you're entertaining and you know what you're talking about. And another thing that's really important to Amazon is that us creators, we have the product in hand or at least experience with the products that we talk about so that we're not just reading off a page or talking willy-nilly about something we don't know about.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. I've looked at just a couple of Amazon lives, not very many, and the few I looked at were kind of painfully boring. This was like the bad Q V C host or someone who's not really comfortable on camera. And so you got to get good. I am curious though, now I slip into podcast voice when I'm on the podcast. There's been a few times when I've gone back downstairs to the office and I'm talking to my assistant or something and you're like, who are you? Hey, you are still in podcast mode. I'm like, oh, sorry. Yeah. So do you get into Amazon live mode? And maybe you're there now because we're recording, but if you're not, can you give us a flavor of Gracey pitching a mirror on Amazon Live? What would that look like?

Gracey:

That is so funny you say that because whenever I'm on Amazon Live, it's just me. I don't have a co-host. It's me for at least one and a half to three hours at once.

Brett:

Dang, that's a long

Gracey:

Time. And I'm talking about 20 to 25 products normally, and I am just nonstop for two hours at a time. And when I'm with my Amazon friends in person, they're like, dang, Gracey, I watched your stream and you talk a lot, but in person you don't talk that much. I'm like

Brett:

Part of the game. That's how it's successful. Now I'm curious, are you, after a live, are you wiped? Are you energized? I

Gracey:

Am hyped up on energy. I usually stream very late at night because that just fits better with my schedule. I have just my schedule, my regulars, they come in late at night, and so I try to sleep at night, but it's normally like two or 3:00 AM

Brett:

I recommend it. Yeah,

Gracey:

Wired up and I can't fall asleep well after a stream.

Brett:

So funny. Yeah, I'm the same. Don't, we're not recording at night. I don't podcast at night, but I'm totally fired up after a day of podcast recording. I'm tired too sometimes if it's like three or four, but for the most part I'm like, yeah, a little bit, but I'm like, I'm feeling good, man. I'm like, this was a good day. This is what I love to do, so that's awesome. Okay, so talk about Amazon affiliate. So Amazon affiliate, how is that related to Amazon Live? I'm assuming the best influencers are also part of the Amazon affiliate program, but walk us through that.

Gracey:

So think of Amazon affiliate as the upper umbrella and think of Amazon Influencer as the STEM of the umbrella. So I guess you can technically apply for the influencer program by itself, but Amazon affiliate has been around since I believe the nineties, and that was Amazon's affiliate link program before social media became what it is today. It was more so websites and articles and blogs across the internet where people could share products and affiliate links. And then once social media became what it is, I think probably closer to 20 20, 20 19, Amazon started gearing the influencer program towards social media. So more of graphics, more of giving influencers Amazon storefronts so they can drive their traffic to Amazon storefronts, which they would get commissioned for any sales they drive off the storefront. And also the opportunity to live stream and also the opportunity to create little shoppable review videos, which we can talk about too. I think that's a really great topic to talk about. But yeah, this whole influencer program is like a STEM off the affiliate program that's more social media focused and gives influencers more opportunities of ways to earn while sharing their products.

Brett:

Nice. So most of the A-list influencers, they've got their own storefront. You've got your own storefront where you can list product. Got it. Okay. Everybody does. Makes sense. Yeah. So what is a shoppable review video? I'm assuming that's a video that has a longer shelf life. Maybe someone puts it on, you put it on your storefront, I assume. Could a brand put that on their storefront as well or on their P D P or something like that? So

Gracey:

This is a topic that I've been talking about for a bit, but I think it's a really crucial one for your topic of brand building and just making sure that your brand has people behind it and personalities behind it. And it's not just a random product. So little review videos, any influencer with a storefront. So any member of the influencer program can upload a little shoppable video, which could be a product review, it could be an unboxing, it could be a testimonial, it could be just like, here's how I use it on a normal day and upload it to their door front. They could tag a specific ASIN on the backend, put a little title on it, put a little thumbnail ally on it, and then that would then be potentially placed on the brand's product listing and it would show up right before the reviews and under the description in the middle section, sometimes it's at the bottom, sometimes it's in the middle, and it just helps shoppers just learn more about the product.

Maybe they want to see it being used, they want to see it in real life, they want to figure out how to assemble it or see how people use it, whatever. And whenever a buyer watches this video, then the creator or influencer, then we get commission for it, kind of like an affiliate link. So it pays off for the creator, it pays off for the brand, and Amazon controls the placement. So not every video places, not every places forever. Sometimes they rotate out, but it's important as a brand to have enough videos in this little line so that it's not empty because if it is empty and you don't have enough videos, they will place your competitors related product videos on your listing.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, not good for sure. Okay, awesome. So then as you're creating these, so the way most influencers work out, are you just kind of deciding what products you want to talk about and you just do it because an influencer, or do you have to reach out to that brand and talk about the way your deal works or you, and then you don't have to answer necessarily just for you, you can answer for influencers in general, or are people just getting the commission through the affiliate program, or what does that typically look like?

Gracey:

So I mean, a lot of people when they're starting out are just recommended to talk about products they already have around the house, stuff that they use, stuff they have stuff they like, stuff they don't. And then once they kind of exhaust that, then they can reach out to brands, they can basically create those partnerships. And a lot of times because the creators are getting paid by viewership and by any buyers that click on the page, I do know a lot of creators that if it's a high value product, they want the product anyway. They'll do this review video for free. And of course if they want to do a small flat fee payment, they can do that too. But usually it's not because you never really know when it's going to place, when it's not going to place, how long it's going to place for. So if it's a flat fee, it's usually small.

Brett:

Makes sense. So as a brand, and I know you maybe kind of mentioned a few things around this, but I just want to get clarity. If I'm a brand that I want to work with an influencer, how do I find those influencers? I know it's possible that influencers are just going to reach out to me as a brand, but how can I go out and be proactive and find somebody? So

Gracey:

If you are leaning towards Amazon Live influencers, I always say just keep an eye on the homepage placement and the deal page placement throughout the day. You're going to find after a couple of days of looking at it, there's going to be the same people showing up all the time. These are the people that are going to frequent the deal page and the best people to work with to get that placement when you do work with them. There's not tons of people who do this. So that's one way to find Amazon Live influencers. And then there's two ways you can find influencer for other things. You can obviously look at your competitor products, related products to your brand and see what videos are showing up on their little shoppable video section. And then you can reach out to those, find their storefront and have them do a video for you, something like that. Or you can go on social media and there are different keywords and hashtags you can search up on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, whatever platform you're looking at. It could be Amazon finds, Amazon favorites, Amazon Hall, Amazon pet, Amazon home, whatever. And you'll find thousands of creators that are creating Amazon content if they're creating Amazon content safe to assume they have an Amazon storefront safe to assume they're in this Amazon world that you can work with them.

Brett:

Nice. Very, very cool. And so any case studies that you can mention, you don't have to mention specific brands or whatnot, but what kind of impact can this have, because I know I've heard people that get on Q V C and it sells a bazillion products or thousands of products. I know some people that have tried Amazon Live, again, not really anything out of it. So what does it typically look like or what are some examples you could share?

Gracey:

So based on the results that I have heard of, I would say that Amazon Live is not the kind of platform that's going to sell you out. For example, it's going to get you some clicks onto your listing. It's going to get you some sales as well. And the best strategy for Amazon Live,

Brett:

New reach, right? New discovery with new prospects that aren't actively searching for you. So there's some real benefit there too.

Gracey:

Yes. Yes. And it's more, I guess the more times you show up on an Amazon live over time, the better results you're going to get. It's consistent and slow and just show up more often because every single time you go live, you're reaching more people. So don't expect a one-off huge spike success. That's not really how the platform works for Amazon. Live more small and steady and long-term. If we're talking about TikTok and social media, then results can vary from nothing to everything. You can sell out, go viral, your brand will never be the same overnight, or you could get a couple thousand sales, you get a couple hundred sales, or you could get a small little bit of sales. It really so highly depends on who you work with, how well the video does, so many factors,

Brett:

So many factors, but I think that's a really good way to frame it. You're going to go live on Amazon, you're not going to sell through your whole inventory, but you're going to make some incremental lift in sales. You're going to reach new people. If you can do this consistently, it's going to build more exposure for your brand. And so it's worth doing for sure. You mentioned TikTok. Let's go there for a little bit. I know you do a lot on TikTok. I have a big following there. Talk a little bit about how you utilize TikTok for promotions and then I would love to get into TikTok shop as

Gracey:

Well. So I started out on TikTok. TikTok is still my favorite platform to this day, and my favorite part about it is that every single video that you make, every product that you talk about, it's a new chance to be reaching a new audience and millions of people. And my favorite thing is that you're not held back by your following. So TikTok has two feeds, the for you page feed and then the following feed, and I don't know anybody who stays on their following feed. So all the time people are just finding new creators, new products, discovering new things. It's like an app for discovery. So that's why you could work with a creator with 5,000 followers and go viral with 5 million views. You can also work with a creator with a million followers and get 5,000 views. So the possibilities and the potential is not determined by your following. It is on every other platform.

Brett:

It's really based on the quality of the content. And I don't mean just production quality, but how interesting is this, how much does it catch fire? Which is so cool because then that means I don't have to work with the biggest influencer, I just got to work with the right influencer. Exactly. And then the cool

Gracey:

Stuff could happen. Exactly.

Brett:

Yeah. So how do you use TikTok as an influencer and how does that tie into Amazon Live and Amazon affiliate?

Gracey:

So when I first started on TikTok, I was just linking Amazon products, no affiliate program knowledge at all. Then after that, after I learned more about it and I was like, wait a second, I didn't know that you could monetize this, then I started monetizing it through the Amazon affiliate program. And that actually led into my transition to Amazon Live, which I was invited to join, I believe early 2021. And that is how I got there, start on TikTok, got invited to Amazon Live. But with TikTok, it's really, really cool because TikTok actually wants to get into e-commerce themselves because they saw what a huge success was happening with users driving TikTok traffic to it. Totally. When I first started with Amazon's influencer program, they did not like TikTok traffic. They thought it was the wild, wild west. They did not support it. It was not a platform they talked of.

And to see how widely that's changed and how focused they are on TikTok now, it's just funny. I mean obviously because it worked and it did so much success, but you would think that they would be friends and partner up, but no, so TikTok actually wanted to create their own shopping platform called TikTok Shop, and basically there is a marketplace of products that sellers and brands can join. And then as creators, they're giving us all these incentives. They're giving us a really good commission cut or they're giving us coupons to buy product samples with, or they're giving free samples out to creators who are participating in TikTok shop a lot. Whenever I create a video, I can tag a product. It has a disclosure that says eligible for commission. That's how it's a TikTok shop video. And TikTok is actually boosting those videos right now and giving them more traffic so that it can run this program and get more traffic to it. And in turn, all these brands are doing so well, maybe not all of them, but a lot of brands are doing so well. New customers selling out, just getting their name out there, the brand awareness of it all. It's been a huge success so far.

Brett:

Interesting. So how does TikTok shop work? So again, if I'm a brand, what should I be thinking about? Am I going to have to find an influencer to help me with TikTok shop? Am I just going to get listed? Then influencers can run wild with it. What does that look like?

Gracey:

I would say if you are on Amazon and you have the ability to put your products on a Shopify site, do that and then join TikTok shop because this may not drive back to Amazon and really help your Amazon business, but it is going to create the brand awareness for your brand that they can then find on Amazon and they can also just create new customers. You can get amazing U G C videos that you can then reach out to the content creator and maybe buy the rights to or whitelist from their page. There's so much you could do from this that can also benefit Amazon, but you can find new creators that will just organically find your product in the marketplace, or you can kind of jumpstart it. You could work with a couple creators at first, get the product name out there and then other creators will follow suit. So there's so much to do with it, but there's just a way to join the TikTok shop marketplace. And I don't believe the requirements are too much because they're really looking for new brands and sellers to join.

Brett:

I was just trying to get it going, trying to hit critical mass, and they're very motivated there. Everybody, all the social platforms want to be shoppable and want to get into the e-commerce game to a certain degree. Same with Facebook and Instagram as well. And so to work with TikTok shop, you've got to be connected through Shopify probably primarily, which by the way, you should be doing that anyway. And I think the vast majority listeners already have their own.com, but if you don't exclusively Amazon, this is a great way to launch on Shopify and this is a great way to start getting traffic and just start building that brand off as Amazon start getting some traffic there, some traction. And so makes a ton of sense. But also to your point, often brands that are Amazon first brands, someone may see the live or the TikTok video or whatever, then they view your website and then they go buy on Amazon. Right,

Gracey:

Exactly. And that happens more often than you would think. I mean, people just love buying on Amazon. It's so seamless. So

Brett:

All my stuff is saved. I get fast shipping, I know it's guaranteed. There's just no friction there. So that's why a lot of people like it. Yeah, love it. So what have you seen brag a little bit, what are some of your success stories on TikTok? Are you getting, what's been some of your most successful promotions on TikTok?

Gracey:

So I find that whenever I create content about products that are trending or products that are being talked about a lot throughout the app, because TikTok is a very trend-based app. If one person's talking about something, your entire feed will be this one thing that everyone's jumping in on and everyone's talking about. So I personally just am a huge user of TikTok. I'm on the app hours every day, I'm working, but also scrolling. And I want to say it's for research purposes,

Brett:

Just entertainment, which is at least partially true and probably mostly true.

Gracey:

It's unhealthy. But in that way, I can see what people are talking about, what people are wanting, what the current trends are. And then what I do is, and this is something I do myself, so I literally just share what I do myself. I want the product, but I don't necessarily want to pay a huge price tag for the product. So I will go and find a cheaper alternative on Amazon. I'll find a deal, a promo code, a coupon, a way to find the same product but not break the bank to get it. And I post about the trendy products, and those are the ones that everyone's like, oh, I've been wanting this, but I didn't want to pay $300 for it. Thanks for finding a deal that's like half off now I'm going to get it. So there is a difference between doing deals and just doing fines and reviews because people can discover the product for the fines and review videos, but the price tag might be too much to pull the trigger on that product right away. But when there's a deal attached to it, they're like, okay, great, it's not going to break the bank. But also this is time sensitive. I know that the deal is not going to be forever. It might miss the opportunity. I've been wanting it, it's been my wishlist, now I'm going to get it. And that is what I love doing.

Brett:

That's awesome. So deal cheats, I know that's your Twitter slash x handle, the same handle. What is with that Elon Musk? So much admire there, brilliant guy, changing lots of industries. I don't get it, man. I don't get the X. Twitter got a lot of value in that name Twitter, and we're still tweeting and it's still called Twitter. But anyway,

Gracey:

I was talking to my friend about it and he's like a huge Twitter user. He gets all his social media and news from Twitter, and I was like, whatcha going to say now I'm going to go X about it. Let

Brett:

Me X you. What does that mean

Gracey:

We did on X Anyway,

Brett:

Yeah, I don't think anybody's going to start calling it X, but we will see. Time will tell. That'll be interesting to fall along for sure. So deal cheats, you're focused on deals. So when you're going live on Amazon or you're going live on TikTok, you are talking about deals. So here's a trending product, a trending category, but here's where you can find it for less

Gracey:

Type thing. Exactly, exactly.

Brett:

Cool, cool. Makes a lot of sense actually what you described, what you described. So interesting. There may be some brands out there selling a premium and they're like, I hate that. I want people to come buy my product for a premium. But here's the thing, I think there are people that are willing to pay a premium. There are people that are just willing, just want to do deals. And then I think there are people that they will pay a premium or they'll get a deal if they don't know there's a strong enough reason to pay a premium. And so I think what you're describing is what happens a lot on Amazon, someone who's wanting to sell out a premium, they run Facebook ads or on YouTube ads and they position their practice premium, but they don't do quite enough to make someone say, I want that product, that exact product.

All they do is they do enough to make someone say, I want a product like that, and then they'll go find something else. And so hey, deals are always going to exist. There's a part of the marketplace that wants that exclusively. But I think it's just a reminder, if you don't want to be a discount brand, you got to work extra hard to not be one. So really, really interesting. Okay, awesome. So any mistakes you see people make as they're getting into Facebook lives or mistakes you see people make when they're trying to get something to go viral on TikTok? What mistakes should we avoid in this process?

Gracey:

So there's two things I want to mention, and I think the first one is that sometimes when brands work with a new creator, they want to have a lot of creative control over how the video goes or what people say. Or a lot of times brands will say, oh, mention that it's vegan and that it's on all these buzzword terms that they may believe is important. They worked really hard to create an amazing product That is all these things, yes, but I as a creator know that that's not going to sell the product necessarily. Cool. I love that it's vegan and gluten-free, but these buzzwords aren't going to sell. And so giving the creator the creative control to say what they know works well and talk to their audience and in the way that they know is what they're looking for and what resonates. That's really important. And so that kind of goes back to just making sure that you look at the creator's other content, see how it performs, see how they come across on camera and make sure you like that and put that trust into them that they know what they're doing. That is one.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. And just a quick thought on that and then keep going on mistakes is you want the influencer to sound authentic. You want their passion to come through. I want excited Gracey talking about my product. I don't want someone to be like, I'm just going to say what you told me to say. I want to get paid as a viewer, as a shopper. I can feel the difference. I can see the difference, I can feel it. I want passion to come through. And so yes, maybe there's some things you're restricted from saying than mention that, but otherwise let the creator create the results are going to be way

Gracey:

Better. Exactly. And then the second one would be their mindset around influencer marketing as well. So something that I've come across is that a lot of brands will compare influencer marketing to the mindset around paid ads. So when they do paid ads, wherever that may be, they put a certain amount of money behind it and they expect a certain r o i to come back to them. And that is not always the case with influencer marketing. There is a lot that you can't really determine or predict with influencer marketing. But also even if you don't get the sales that you're expecting, that doesn't mean that the campaign was a flop, that it was a failure, that it didn't get anything because maybe you got a bunch of external clicks, maybe you got higher ranking, maybe your product got a lot of external traffic. There's so many other things that happen with influencer marketing that is so much more than paid ads and so much more than just sheer sales. So I want the mindset to hopefully understand that not everything is about sales, and I'm getting so many other benefits from working with a creator than just r o i in sales. I

Brett:

Love that understanding. What's the nature of influencer marketing? How does it work? It's not the same as paid ads. And so if you want to be successful, you got to approach it with a creator, with an influencer mindset. And you mentioned this, you said this really well earlier, that when you go live on Amazon as an example, it gets better over time. The more people see your product, the more Amazon sees success, the more they're going to favor you and show you. I'm not a social media influencer, but I know the same is true on social media that the more we post consistently, the more we do things on social media, the better it's going to go. And sometimes things are going to really hit and take off, sometimes they won't. But yeah, you can't just have it, Hey, I did this, it should have this return. It's not as clear cut, but the benefits often do compound and you got to be patient and wait for those benefits. Love that, love that. Any other tips, ideas, strategies? What should Amazon sellers, and if someone's really, really interested in this, what should they do next? Where should they learn? Where should they go?

Gracey:

Yeah, so I mean there is thankfully so much more information and just education coming around this topic, which I love to see so much of what I love to do is just bridging the gap between creator and brand because I do know that there's a communication gap between both sides. So

Brett:

Influencers speak, influencer brands speak brand. Exactly. And they don't often connect with each other

Gracey:

And it should be mutually beneficial. Totally. That's the nature of it. And so I think if people want to get more involved with this or just start out and try and you don't have to put a huge budget behind it, that's always what I say. You don't have to throw thousands of dollars. You can start out with gifted campaigns, commission-based campaigns, start developing these relationships with influencers and then find people who it works with and then double down and then increase your budget over time. And I believe it should always be a slice of what you're doing with your brand's marketing. I don't think it's smart to fully depend on P P C fully depend on ads because I think there's an area of influence marketing that both of these things can't give. So I think everybody should start out, try, start small, learn as they go, and then increase once they start getting more experience with it and they will see all the benefits.

Brett:

I love it. And I really think this is for some brands, is going to be more of like an accelerant for other brands. This is core of what they do. But I totally agree with you. You can't be all P P C, right? And I'm a Google fan. I've been doing Google ads since the early two thousands, so love Google. But I would never recommend a brand only run paid search or Google Shopping or even Performance Max. I love YouTube, but I would never suggest you just do YouTube. All of these things work together. And so if I've got my strategies dialed in all the right places and then I've got influencer marketing cooking and I'm going on Amazon live, it can really help accelerate and spin that flywheel faster and get you where you want to go a little bit quicker. And so love that though. Start small, do commission based deals, do gift based deals, no reason to spend a fortune right out the gate. And so awesome, awesome stuff, Gracey right back, ladies and gentlemen. So Gracey, people should follow you online. They should pay attention to what you're doing because they can learn from it. So where can they find you? So at deal cheats on the Twitters and where else can they find you?

Gracey:

On X?

Brett:

On X? Yeah, exactly.

Gracey:

X on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Amazon, live everywhere. It is the same deal sheets. It's

Brett:

All deal sheets.

Gracey:

Okay. Yes, yes. Got it. And my email is contact@dealsheets.com,

Brett:

Contact@dealsheets.com. Don't abuse that. Ladies and gentlemen, Gracey is a very busy person, but if you got, so basically people have questions or whatever, they can reach out to you there.

Gracey:

Yes, yes. I'm open to questions and happy to help.

Brett:

Very gracious of you, Gracey. So with that, anything else you want to mention? Any fun fact, anything you are totally excited about right now could be related to this topic or not related to this topic?

Gracey:

Gosh, I don't know. I'm excited for the future of this industry. I'm excited to see more brands get involved with influencer marketing and that is what I'm excited about.

Brett:

Yeah, I am too. I think this is here to stay. It is not going anywhere. This is just fundamental, the way humans behave and shop and one kind of thing. One final thing, one final thought I'll put on here is, the other thing I love about this is I mentioned YouTube, big YouTube guy, we do a lot of scaling on YouTube for larger brands. What's really powerful is if you've got a collection of influencer videos that really are passionate and that resonate and that overcome objections and nail some sales points, if you get approval from the influencer, we can do a mashup. One of my favorite types of videos on YouTube is an influencer mashup or like a mashup for the beginning of a YouTube video and then kind of go into a product demo. But that's another way to leverage this. So use influencer marketing, it's going to pay dividends directly, but then if you get access to the footage, now teams like O M G or other agencies can help scale that on Facebook and on YouTube and on the places. And so lots of ways to leverage this content and to leverage this approach

Gracey:

That remind me of one last point I have. Yeah,

Brett:

Awesome. Please, if

Gracey:

You are a brand registered, obviously you have access to the brand referral bonus program as a seller. So you should definitely take advantage of that when working with creators because you can get so much more detailed tracking. And the way that you can have the creator use your attribution link is for the referral kickback that you get from Amazon, whatever that is, 10% depending on category. But you can then offer them that increased commission for whatever sales that they create from the attribution it. And then you benefit, they benefit, take

Brett:

Advantage, easier tracking. Yeah, you can use that to help fund or help pay for the influencer. So glad we stuck around for that tip, Gracey. That was a good one. So again, Gracey, thank you so much. Thanks for bringing the energy, super fun, super entertaining and really appreciate it.

Gracey:

Thank you Brett.

Brett:

And as always, thank you for tuning in and hey, we want to hear from you. I mentioned I'm on the socials, I'm not an influencer, but I am there. So check me out on LinkedIn. Lemme know what you'd like to see more of on the show. Let's connect outside of the podcast. Also leave us that review on iTunes. If you haven't done that, leave us. That five star review helps other people find the show. Makes my day. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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FREE RESOURCE: OMG's Ultimate Email Marketing Testing Checklist

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How can you triple your results from Email & SMS? Is crafting a single captivating subject line the key? Does discovering the ultimate promotion hold the answer? Likely not.

Making huge improvements is all about finding dozens of small wins, stacking them on top of each other, and letting the improvements compound.

In this episode, Nick Flint, our Email Strategist at OMG, breaks down 8 Email & SMS tests you need to run right now! We talk about how Email & SMS can improve EVERY other channel. We’re talking Google Ads, YouTube ads, Facebook, Amazon - ALL made better by leveraging Email & SMS.

Here’s a peek at what we cover.

• Why opt-in rate is NOT the key metric, you need to measure for your opt-in pop-up. (And why that spinning wheel might be doing more harm than good.)
• How making some prospects “work for it” can increase purchases and email engagement.
• Should you show your price in emails or make people click to see the price?
• How Everyday Cali used a creative “break our site” offer to drive engagement and get solid customer feedback.
• Plus, much, much more…

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Transcript

Nick:

One thing I want to emphasize here is don't just look at the number of signups that you get. A lot of people, they'll turn on that spin to win popup and they'll say, Hey, look, I'm converting 15% of site traffic to actually spin this wheel and give me their email. But a lot of those end up just being junk emails. Who thought they were going to get that a hundred percent off? That never actually hits.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today have we got a show for you. We're talking about email and SMS, both top tests you should be running. So some things we've learned recently, some of our top tests that we think you need to test as well. Plus, and I love this topic, how email can make every other channel better. So you're running YouTube ads, you're running Facebook ads, you're testing landing pages, you're doing stuff on Kickstarter, you're doing all kinds of other stuff. How can email and SS m s make all of that better? We're going to dive into it. And my guest today is the man, the myth, the legend, our resident email and s m s expert, but he's not just an email. And SMS expert, he's an e-commerce expert. My guest is Nick Flint from OMG So we get to hang out frequently, at least virtually we're in different cities, but Nick Flint, what's up man? How you doing? And welcome to the show.

Nick:

I'm doing good. How about

Brett:

You? Good, man. Yeah, I said we hang out, we live down the street from each other or something. You're all the way in Florida. I'm in Missouri. But I think you helped facilitate some of the virtual ways that OMG Commerce team members can hang out. And I think I could be wrong, we have a Slack channel for cat lovers. We have a slack channel for dog lovers. And did you create those or did somebody else create those?

Nick:

Someone else created them, but I am an active and avid member, and that came up because first my dog started barking when we were about to hit record. And then two, Brett is actually a kitten guy now. He got himself a cat. So I told him he has to hop in the OMG Cat Channel.

Brett:

I got to hop in that cat. Now what's the name of the cat channel? I think people will be entertained by this.

Nick:

We have cats are the best. And then for the dogs, it's dogs and their dogs. So the WG dogs and then the OG dog.

Brett:

Oh man, dogs and their dogs. What is up? So yeah, I would love to hear from listeners and you may be like, Hey, this topic is boring, don't worry, we're moving on. Although I think most people get into this topic, are you a cat person? Are you a dog person? Which is better. So what's interesting is that I like both, but I actually prefer other people own them and not me. However, I married an animal lover. I have eight kids, most of them love animals. So it's like a zoo around my house, not just because of the number of kids, but also animals. We just got a kitten, a kid's name is Lottie. I can't remember now why my daughter chose to name Lottie that way, but she's like at the cute stage where she's attacking everything and super small. And anyway, it's cute, but the cuteness only lasts so long. So which side of the fence do you land on, Nick? Are you cats are better? Are you more of a dog person? Are you equal opportunity? Well,

Nick:

It's hard to run with a cat. So I'm going dog side.

Brett:

Let's put a collar and leash on that cat and go for a jog. Does not work. Yeah, yeah, does not work. Awesome, man. So let's dive in. Let's talk emails. So I know you're always testing, you're a brilliant marketer. And actually just for those that haven't listened to the previous podcasts, give us your 62nd background. How'd you become an email marketing expert?

Nick:

So it kind of started off in the beginning of college, me and a couple of buddies we were into working out into supplements. So we thought there's this genius idea, we'll let people try supplements before they actually buy them. We were the kind of pioneers of the subscription box, but a few of the big ones beat us to it, like Ipsy and the other random subscription box company. So after a couple of years of doing that, we sold that off and I really just started doubling and tripling down on email and S M Ss marketing. I realized owning that company, doing all those different things, running the socials, product development, talking to suppliers, dealing with finances, that was the worst. And then email, s m s, I really just gravitated towards that. It fit my natural personality and my natural skills. So I just doubled, tripled down on that six years ago and been running ever since.

Brett:

Love it. And what's cool about you, Nick, is you know what it's like to build a brand. You know what it's like to run a brand, done it and you did it successfully, but yeah, your passion is email and s m s. And so I remember when Chris Brewer, business partner first said, you got to meet Nick Flint. This guy's awesome, we got to do whatever we can do to get him to join team O M G. Glad he identified you, glad you joined the team and love having you around. So let's talk about recent tests. I know you're always tinkering, always testing, always looking at results. You both have that creative side. You can write awesome subject lines and headlines and stuff like that, great copy, but you're also really obsess about the data. And so what are some of the most recent tests we've run and what have we learned?

Nick:

So when we're working on the different client accounts, there's a ton of tests that we're running on a regular basis. We're actually condensing some of our top tests into a guide slash checklist that the listeners here can download. There'll be 50 different tests that we run for our clients and today we're going to hop into some of my favorite ones and some of the most impactful ones.

Brett:

Yeah, so top 50 tests that'll be available on the website. We'll link to it in the show notes, go get that guide, give it to your email person. You review it, there's going to be some gold there, but let's highlight some of those right now. Alright,

Nick:

We'll kick it off with the initial popup on the site. So whenever someone comes through it, you can always put 10% off, offer a fixed dollar amount, or you have the spin to win. And one thing I want to emphasize here is don't just look at the number of signups that you get. A lot of people, they'll turn on that spin to win popup and they'll say, Hey look, I'm converting 15% of site traffic to actually spin this wheel and give me their email. But a lot of those end up just being junk emails. Who thought they were going to get that a hundred percent off? That never actually hits. So don't just have the test set up where you're saying, Hey look, here's the wheel and here is the 10% off offer. And then looking at how many people sign up for each one actually look at the flow and see how does the revenue look for each subscriber after they sign up?

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good looking at the metrics that matter, right? It's the same when you're looking at a video campaign, Facebook or YouTube or whatever. Views are cool. We want to look at views, but what we really care about is clicks and signups or conversions or how that impacts brand lift or one of those metrics. So looking at the right metrics. And one of the things that I love, one of my favorite marketing quotes is how you bring them in is how they behave. And sometimes I think a 10% off offer or small dollar amount offer, that's a good trade probably, right? They're giving you their email address, you got to give 'em something in return. So that seems like a fair trade, but you may just have people wanting that a hundred percent off offer. They would never be a good customer anyway. And so if you're just purely looking at the wrong numbers, you're being led as straight potentially. So love that. Also, by the way, what do you recommend? So what if someone's not into discounts? What do you recommend for that initial pop-up offer?

Nick:

I like going with a guide. Just kind of figure out if your people are on your site looking for something specific, what kind of guide can you tie in there as well? We've also done this with a couple of landing pages where if they're coming from Google or Facebook and there's already an offer on that ad that they clicked on, we don't want to hit them with a different offer when they get to the landing page. So we have a complimentary guide like, Hey, you came here for 10% off supplements because you saw it on Facebook and we're going to give you the top five workout plans to follow while you're here versus saying, Hey look, here's another 10% off pop-up.

Brett:

Perfect. So testing the initial pop-up offer, but not just for signups, but actually for how that flow generates revenue. Love that. What's our next test?

Nick:

Next up we got email versus email and phone number. This is kind of one of the things where you see that superficial value of your number of signups, but when we're looking in the account and we're saying, Hey, for our customers who give us their email and their phone number, they end up being a lot more active, they're placing a ton more orders. We can hit them on both those channels later on. So yes, you might have a lower signup percentage when you're asking for both their email and their phone number, but like you said, you're attracting the people that you want to attract when you ask for that. If they like your brand enough to give you both, they're going to be better long-term customers. So try asking for both and see what the initial percentage signup looks like, but then also long-term set a reminder to go back in through those flows or even go look at that cohort in Klaviyo and see what kind of value do they bring.

Brett:

Yeah, and I know there are different ways to look at L T V because that does depend on the amount of time you're looking at True lifetime or whether you're looking at 10 years, five years, 30 days, 60 days, whatever, 30 days would be too short. But I'm confident, and I'm curious if you had any numbers to support this or anecdotes to support this when someone gives you email and phone number. So email and ss m s, LTVs got to go up for that person. I mean in general, any thoughts, stats or anecdotes there?

Nick:

So you have a couple of things you can look at one in the Shopify dashboard, they'll have different cohorts where you can see, alright, if people ordered in October, how many of them came back in November, December, January? And the darker the color, the more frequently they come back. And when we've turned on the two step popup where we ask for both, we'll see those colors start to get a little bit darker in Shopify so people are coming back quicker and we'll just have the different groups laid out within Klaviyo. You can go to your metrics, look at that, and it'll tell you by customer segment what the average order value looks like and how often they're coming back. So you can look at those too.

Brett:

Nice, love it. So two step, does this work for most? Are we seeing most brands do email and s m s or does it vary depending on the brand?

Nick:

Kind of depends on the brand and who they're after. We have some more B2B focused brands that we work with and they're like, Hey, this guy's buying equipment for his office. He doesn't necessarily need to sign up for s m s because he's on his laptop all day anyway.

Brett:

Yep, makes sense. Alright, so we got initial popup, we got asking for email and phone number, what's our next test?

Nick:

Alright, we're going to make them work for it this time. You're going to try two different things here. You got your discount code displayed directly in the popup. So hey, give us your information and the success screen, you have two options. Either say, good job, you unlocked your code, here it is, go use it. Or make them actually go to their inbox and open up that first email. You have two trains of thought here. One, they're on the site. We want to just get their buying journey as fast as possible. Give 'em the code, get them to check out, and that works well for the impulse buys. But if you're a little more of a premium brand and people really want you, they're after you, you've set that reputation as being like, Hey look, we're the best. Come and get it. Then you can make them go to their inbox, go ahead and click on that first email, get their discount code in their inbox, and then they'll go back to the site and that'll help out with deliverability for that profile in the future because they actually took action on the first thing you sent them.

Brett:

Nice. So you're using that one. I think that kind of the more someone engages with your brand, I think the more likely they are to continue taking action. It's kind of one of those things that I remember hearing back in the catalog days of marketing pre-internet, when people would send out catalogs, they wanted to get you to interact with the catalog because once you started marketing in it, or if you added one item to your order form, you just start adding more, right? So there's this idea of once I get you to take action, you'll keep going down that path consistency. And so I like that engage with the email because now you're kind of clicking and working a little bit. You're probably going to continue down that path, but you bring up a really good point. That also means you're much more likely for that email to be delivered to that user later, right? Because they've clicked on it, they've opened it, they're indicating to their email service provider that, Hey, this is an email, this is a company who I want to get emails from.

Nick:

And you can get a little more granular with it too and use that initial email to your advantage. So if you're a clothing brand, you sell men's to women's clothing, they sign up the popup, you say, perfect, go to your inbox to get your discount. Now you can actually see which button they click on shop men's or Shop women's. You can go ahead and tag them in Klaviyo at that point saying, Hey look, they signed up, they got their discount and then right off the bat they clicked on the go shop. So we're going to mark them as interested in men's clothing. Nice. You can talk to them differently,

Brett:

Gets you a little more data about that person right away. But again, you got to kind of weigh it, right? Is this more of an impulse purchase and you may have too much drop off if you have them take extra steps or is it more of a premium and you want them to take extra steps? That actually increases the likelihood of conversion. So you got to measure it, you got to test it, which that's why we're saying it's one of the top tests. So alright, what do you got next?

Nick:

Showing prices on your campaigns versus making them go to the site and see them. I've seen this go both ways for different brands. Sometimes if we show the price and it's higher than they're expecting, they don't even click on the campaign at all. Sometimes if they don't know what the price is, we make 'em go to the site. Once they're there, they're like, all right, now I really want this. Now that I've read the description, I've seen the images on the site, I read some of the reviews. So practice hiding those prices versus actually showing them and see what the different clicks look like there.

Brett:

Yeah, I love this principle so much that we think about this a lot in terms of YouTube. So as an example, there's a certain type of YouTube ad where you can run product listing ads or shopping ads right by that YouTube video. And the thing about Google shopping ads or product listing ads is they show the price Now, same thing we've found to be true there. If the price is less than what people expected, where it's like, whoa, that's a really good value. Then showing the product, listing ads to a brand new customer maybe before they've watched very much of the video can really work. Right now they're watching the video and they're saying, oh, these prices are cheap. I want to learn more about it. Versus if it's a little more than what they anticipate, I like keeping that price for when they land on the site, let them watch all of the video and be sold by the video, then let them land on the site and be further sold and convinced and excited about the brand.

And so they overcome that price objection. And same principle here. If I look at the email, I just see a picture of the item, the shirt or whatever, and I don't get a lot of details about it, I may never click, but if you leave that out, I may click and then once I interact, I got to have it. So love that. Totally worth testing. And it's probably also worth testing maybe if someone's never purchased so they just opted into your new customer flow or something versus they've already bought for me a few times. In that case, maybe it's better to put the price in it. Right? Just got to test it. Sweet. What is our next test?

Nick:

Next up we got short versus long flows. And another one I've seen go different ways for different brands. So if we send out something like a welcome flow, whenever we hop into the account and we're testing out some new popups for them, we're just going to go ahead and ab split that into random segments. On the left side, we'll have a shorter flow, here's your discount, a reminder about your discount, get it last chance. It's going to expire in 24 hours. So something like a little three-step flow. And on the right we'll see that longer path. So a little bit more education here. So we're going to give 'em the discount, we're going to pull in some customer reviews, we're going to tell the brand story, we're going to highlight different features about the product. Hey, last call for your discount code. There's five different emails in there, so what ends up converting better? Just having that little short and sweet on the left side or on the right, if we talk about it more, do they need more handholding to get them to convert?

Brett:

Yeah. And are you finding something similar there where we talked about before impulse purchase versus long consideration cycle? If it's a higher price point, I'm really deliberating on it a little bit versus something that's just easy to purchase. Does that usually help dictate or inform long flow versus short flow or what have you seen there?

Nick:

It kind of depends on the product. Not as much on the price point. A lot of times they're kind of tied into each other. So if it's a higher price point product, there is more kind of back and forth comparison shopping, different brands around. But sometimes it's education based. So if it's something new and novel and people need to kind of understand what it is, you might want to have the longer flow in place to educate them on. One thing that kind of pops to mind that I've seen recently on TikTok a lot is the pop darts game. It's like a little darts and they're sticky and they land on the table, but it's not like a brand new invention, but it's a new thing that people kind of need to know and learn about versus something like a water bottle, what a water bottle is already, you don't need to be educated on it.

Brett:

Yeah, don't need a five-step sequence of education on what this water bottle will do for me. Yeah, totally makes sense. All right. How many tests do we have left here for the pod?

Nick:

We'll do two more on the pod and then they can hop in and see all 50 on the sheet. Next. What's next up can be your tiered discounts. So whenever you have some kind of promo or sale running, go ahead and same thing, split this off in two different groups and try it out for each side. We're going to have half of them that get look 20% off site-wide, come and get it while you can offer ends to the end of the weekend, whatever the specific sale or offer you have at the moment. And the other half, the AB test, we're going to have a tiered discount. So 10% off of a hundred, 20% off of 200, 30% off 300 and C. Does that actually end up having a higher average order value if you put the tier a little bit higher so they add a couple more things to their cart, was that worth it or should you stick to the fixed price from then on?

Brett:

Yeah, I really like it. I mean, I've been shopping, getting new polos and new tees lately. I like true classic. I built a few others that I like as well, but I've noticed where I add a couple shirts to the cart and then they're like, Hey, here's some boxers for this price. And then by the way, you get to 200 and then you get a mystery gift or a discount or whatever, and it's pretty enticing, right? I'm almost there. I'm getting there. I may as well add one or two more things to the cart and get that discount. So yeah. Any other specifics? Anything? Is there any reason not to just test both? I bet sometimes these tests surprise you as to which one wins.

Nick:

So I mean really I consider your own margins at that point. I use the numbers 10, 20 and 30 there just because they're kind of nice round numbers, but it could even be the same with 15% off 20 and then 25, you don't have to give away 30%, but just factor your own margins in and say, Hey look, if everyone bought 300 bucks at 30% off, would I still be making money there? Make sure you are and then you can test it.

Brett:

Yeah, man. And that's been one of the trends that I love seeing in e-commerce. And we faced some headwinds as an industry, increase cost of goods sold, increased cost of ads, economic just wildness, ups and downs, and some economic uncertainty for customers, consumer confidence kind of going up and down. And so you got to be profitable and I love that. That's the trend. E-commerce brands are seeking to be profitable now. It's not kind of the days of just grow at all costs and top line. We'll figure out the bottom line later. That's not a recipe for success. And so yeah, consider your margins, give some discounts, give some incentives, but consider your margins. Don't give away the farm. It's not worth it. So I love that. So tiered discounts versus standard discounts. What's our final test that we'll talk about here on the pod?

Nick:

Last one we'll go with is content versus product push. So if you have a product you want to sell, try out some different emails here, try out just talking about the product versus some content behind it and then tying that into the product.

Brett:

Nice. Yeah. And what have we seen here? Any examples or details here? So

Nick:

Fitness brands is always an easy one to talk about. So hey look, here's this pre-workout, it's got these six ingredients in it, it'll boost your workouts and these specific ways, come and get it now. Versus hey, here's this new workout we developed for chest day. It's going to give you a huge chest, it's going to increase your bench. And by the way, take this pre-workout before you go hit the gym because it'll help out with this workout we just gave you.

Brett:

Love it. Yeah, fitness brands are really a natural fit for this. I think supplement brands are too. I've been taking beef organs supplements recently, had a couple of buddies recommend it, started reading about it. And this particular brand that I started ordering from their emails are awesome. They're really engaging. They talk about some stuff you didn't know about. Meat-based products actually are very, very nutrient dense. So yeah, it's just been, I find myself reading every email they send and then there's always content talks about the product too, but there's always content. Again, I think this probably depends a little bit on what you're selling, but I think this works also for apparel, right? Sometimes apparel, it's like, hey, this is the summertime shirt and here's why it's great. It's four-way stretch and it's breathable and it's likable and all these things. So got to test it.

Alright, awesome. So that was just a taste and Nick Flint, that was just a handful. That was just a few people got their money's worth for the podcast just by hearing those. But we got 50, I say you wrote them, not me, but 50 email and SMS tests, go to MG commerce.com, grab that, we'll link to it in the show notes as well. But also, I'll just plug this right here, Nick. If someone's listening and they're like, man, I would benefit from someone like Nick Flint running my email and SS m s or helping out with it. You do audit accounts, right? You are willing to get in and give some feedback on someone's email and SS M SS campaigns, we do that for our clients and we could do that for others as well. And so anything you want to say about that?

Nick:

Yeah, so a lot of times when I'm hopping into an account and looking at your current setup, how many campaigns are going out, what do your flows look like, where are your popups being run? I'll be able to give you 3, 4, 5 quick bullet points that are kind of the heavy lift. So I'm not saying, Hey, here's a 20 page P D F of what I found. Read through this, give me a synapsis and then I'll give you some advice from there. Hey look, these are five things that we would do if we hopped into your account. You can also implement them if you'd like. So whenever we do those audits, they come away with some actionable items, not just some random metrics. We pull out

Brett:

Actionable, not just audits to make your current person look bad or to make you feel guilty or inadequate, which that's where a lot of audits go, whether it's an audit on your Facebook account, Google account, email accounts, most agencies play the game of let's make you feel bad, let's make the current person doing this look bad and let's give you some anxiety. If you don't go with us, sometimes you got to just say it like it is and sometimes it's a mess. But yeah, we'll give you the 80 20 of what it's going to take to be successful with email or go to the next level with email for your brand. So hit us up, omg commerce.com. Would love to chat. Let's talk about other channels. So we got some things to test to improve email and sms, but one of the things I love about email and S M Ss is it makes everything else better. Facebook, YouTube, landing pages, stuff you're doing on a Kickstarter or whatever makes it all better if you're strategic with it. So what are your thoughts on what are ways we can leverage or improve or enhance other efforts through email and SS m Ss?

Nick:

So a lot of times when people think about email, they think about how can I get sales on my site directly from email? I want to set up some flows, I want to set up some campaigns. I want people to go from there to my product page to check out and then they're done. But I think you can build up this engage list, this audience that likes hearing from you and leverage them on other channels as well, like Google or Facebook or Amazon.

Brett:

So what does that look like? Give us some specific ideas. How can we pair email with some of these other channels?

Nick:

So you start off with your engaged audience and you say, all right, what could I do with them to help boost my other channel? Since marketing's not just these individual silos, they should be working together in sync. So one big thing is pretty easy to get up and running would be asking for product ideas and feedback from the customers themselves. So hey, we're launching a new pre-workout. Should we do cherry or raspberry? And just ask 'em to either respond directly in that email, then you're getting the deliverability boost from people responding to you, or you can go ahead and have two buttons, click on, click here for cherry, click here for raspberry. And then you can see, alright, who voted for cherry? So when that product drops later on, you can go send an email to those 500,000 people who all said they wanted cherry. Say, Hey Nick, thanks for picking Cherry. We went ahead and took your advice and we just launched that. Here you

Brett:

Go. Or you can send it to everybody else that voted for the other flavor and be like, Hey, sorry it didn't win, but here's $5 off. We think you'll love Cherry too, or something like that. You could have fun with it even on the people that didn't vote for it. But I do love that email is not just for one way communication and getting people to buy stuff. And it's not just for educating people, it's for educating you. It's for using that as a feedback loop, as a feedback mechanism to know what product to launch. What do you not like about the brand and love that. Very smart. I think there's not enough people using email that way. Give us another idea.

Nick:

So if you have an reviews integration set up that links in with Klaviyo, something like Shopify reviews or stamped, you can see who has left you a four or five star review and who was happy with you. And this is kind of top of mind for me because we had a brand that didn't have great reviews on, it was like three, four years ago during Covid or something, shipments were delayed and their Trustpilot score was like two stars but only had 15 reviews. And on their site they had hundreds of four and five star reviews. So what we did is we took that audience saying, Hey look, these people, they like us. They told us they like us. So we've sent an email saying, Hey, if you love our products qa, leave us review on Trustpilot as well. We made sure we didn't violate any of Trustpilot little random rules like incentivizing. There was no incentives there. This is all organic. And people who liked our product, they also went over to Trustpilot to talk about it. And now when people search for that brand on Google, they'll see a good score there. So that could be helping out with other sales channels too.

Brett:

Yeah, love that. Asking for reviews. What about some ideas for Amazon? So we've got a thriving Amazon department at O M G. We help sellers and brands grow on Amazon, but how can we leverage email? We're trying to launch on Amazon or if we're just trying to improve on Amazon, what are your tips there?

Nick:

So this is kind of a full company strategy. If you want to have both an Amazon channel that's thriving and your own D two C site, you have to have balance between the two of them. I know a lot of people, they prefer people shopping on their regular site, they could see their information, they can go ahead and retarget them later. They really own that customer versus saying 'em to Amazon. But Amazon's a huge powerful channel too. So if you're company that has both channels up and running and you launch something new on Amazon, go ahead and use your existing list to send people there to really make that launch successful and help it skyrocket in Amazon rankings for your categories.

Brett:

And that's a little bit risky. You may want people to purchase from your store better margins there potentially. So sending customers to Amazon can feel a little bit risky, but most shoppers are considering Amazon anyway and there's a lot of benefits to getting that initial acceleration of sales on Amazon. It's going to help your ranking, going to help your momentum, just like Nick said. So I think it makes sense. I think for most brands, if they're established and they've got a thriving D two C business and they've got a good email list and then they launch on Amazon, we usually want to hit that list at least part of that list. Hey, consider purchasing on Amazon, consider reviewing on Amazon. And that can help you get launched much faster on Amazon. What about something, what about something like Kickstarter, Nick? How have we seen clients use email and Kickstarter together?

Nick:

Exact same setup there. Just like you would have a product launch on Amazon. So you have a Kickstarter campaign getting ready, you're doing all the work for it, you have your goal set that's probably undershot, so you make sure you hit your goal whenever that actually goes live. I know Kickstarter, I forgot it's 24 or 48 hours. They want you to hit your funding goal in that amount of time and then you make it on their main page. So if you grow that email list and you have a new product launching on Kickstarter, you send all your email subscribers there, go buy it, you hit that target goal of your revenue for that Kickstarter campaign, boom, you're on the front page of Kickstarter and it'll help accelerate the sales there.

Brett:

Awesome. Love it. What are some other little tips? I want to get into Google and Facebook and some other things, but what are just some other tips? How can we utilize email to get marketing assets or to get other things we need to make our marketing better?

Nick:

I mean, U G C seems to be a pretty big hot topic these days. You want people with your product gc

Brett:

Love it.

Nick:

I've seen full agencies pop up of just getting people U G C from people wrapping their products, just

Brett:

U G C agencies. Yeah, and I mean it works, right? U G C works for YouTube, works for Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and really anywhere you have online video, U G C, real U G C, good U G C compelling and authentic U G C. Very powerful and I think that's going to be true forever. So what are we doing then with email to help us get U G C

Nick:

So we can have a post-purchase flow whenever that product comes in. There's some apps like wonderment that can actually track product delivered and follow up with like, Hey, hey, if you want to shoot us a picture of you in your new shirt, you out there skateboarding with a new skateboard, you ride in your new e-bike, then send it on over to here. Some people set up a specific section of their site to push them to, and you can actually have that call to action to, Hey, send us a picture of you rocking your new thing and we'll shout you out on Instagram or whatever that reward may be. Love

Brett:

It. Awesome. What are a couple other ideas to use email and then we'll get into some specific other channels.

Nick:

So one thing about me that my wife doesn't love is I like to do things the cheap way. At least at first. If I can find a cheap fix for something, I'll try that out before paying the professional to do it. All right,

Brett:

So is your wife like let's just pay for it, let's get it done right the first time. Is that kind of her mo?

Nick:

Yep. And I'm more the, I'll think about it for a week, I'll YouTube it, I'll try the cheap fix and that's probably why my fans still clicks and why I have it off right now.

Brett:

Yeah, so I get that. I can see from both angles. I don't really fix things. I'm not like a fixer of stuff breaks around the house, I got to call somebody, but I get that. I like the frugal aspect, but I bet your wife just gets stuff done faster in terms of it's fixed and it's working.

Nick:

Yeah, she does. But if you're frugal minded like me and you're concerned about the bottom dollar for your company, how you were saying earlier, brands are more focused on profits now, not just revenue should be. Yeah, I love using email as that cheap touch point, that cheap little point of contact with your customers. And then let's say you have a product launch coming out, shoot out a couple of emails talking about it, people who didn't convert, alright, try out the SMSs. They're a little bit more expensive to send, but that's the next touch point. Try out a couple SMSs, a couple more emails, and then you can resort to something like postcards, which are more expensive to send, but it's that higher touch point because it's showing up in their inbox. So email can be the cheap option before you hop over to SMSs and then you can go to postcards from there.

Brett:

Love it. And we've seen a lot of good success obviously from S M S, but also postcards as well. Shout out to post pilots and the crew over there. Full disclosure, I'm an investor in post pilot, but that doesn't mean that my belief in it is not. I think that just underscores my belief in it. But postcards can work great as well. Make that part of your flows. So let's talk about Google ads for a little bit. I'm a Google guy, love Google Ads, been running Google ads since early two thousands. How can we use email to make Google ads better? Yeah, how can we do that?

Nick:

So the first you can do is set up a good back and forth structure and open conversation between whoever's running your email and whoever's running your Google account. Luckily at OMG Commerce, we do both of those for a lot of our clients. So we have that internal communication like, Hey, what's working on your side? Here's what I'm seeing over there. But if you don't have that going back and forth, maybe you have two freelancers doing it, maybe one employee is doing it over here and one's doing it at home, make sure you have that back and forth communication. And once that's set up, you can kind of help each other learn from what each person is doing. If I'm noticing that a specific landing page is working really well for emails, so the brand gave me four landing pages to send people to, I noticed that one's really taking off. I'm going to go let our Google accounts know that, hey, look, try this landing page out over here. I've seen a lot of success with it through email.

Brett:

Love that. And you know what you may find is, okay, this landing page is converting well from email. That might not be the best landing page for top of funnel YouTube, but it may be the best for remarketing display campaigns or remarketing discovery campaigns on Google. And so I love that getting that dialogue going of here's what we're seeing with these landing pages, these are the audiences or the flows where it's converting. How can you use that to make your campaigns better for these channels? Because yeah, what's converting well on email, it's probably going to convert well with Facebook retargeting as well and with Google and Google Display network and discovery remarketing. And so yeah, get that dialogue going between those channels. What about on Facebook? So how can we leverage email and Facebook together?

Nick:

So you kind of have a similar setup, but now it's with ads or specific videos that they're running on Facebook so we can kind of notice things super fast on Facebook. So one of the accounts we work on, they have a different agency doing their Facebook account and we have that same back and forth communication where we're sharing insights, Hey, it's what we're learning over here. And they do the exact same thing over there. And they noticed that this one ad was just taken off way more than the other ones they were testing. So they passed along those assets and said, Hey, definitely try these out because people who are seeing this ad, they're seeing this ad on Facebook, they're seeing what we initially showed them, we also want to make sure they're seeing them within email.

Brett:

Nice. And was that the partnership with Smart Marketer and l I think the nail polish brand or was the Skittle?

Nick:

That's the one, yep. So basically the manicure that had five different colors on the nail polish was performing well. So we're trying that in emails now too, saying, hey, if people would, they rather see five different colors on the nails or just a full green set. And they notice that on Facebook it's converting really well. So now we're testing that out on emails too.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that so much. And that's one of those where man, just good images or good videos, if they convert on one channel, they'll probably convert on another. They at least need to be tested. And so yeah, that's a really cool and compelling image, like five different colors of nail polish on someone's hand. If that's working well on Facebook, let's try it on Google Display network, let's try it inside an email. It's likely to boost conversions there as well. And what's so cool about this, Nick, is as we start stacking all these little improvements, you start testing all those 50 things we talk about in the guide to improve performance, improve opt-ins and all that, you start making these little improvements in 50 different areas that compounds and that makes a big overall difference. Then you start looking at, hey, well what learnings can we take from these other channels and apply to email and what learnings can take from email and apply to these other channels? Now you're talking about another set of compounding and acceleration and after the course of a few months or several months, you could be talking about some real material improvements in performance. So love that. What about landing pages? What do you thought? You already talked about landing pages a little bit, but maybe is there another point you had on landing pages?

Nick:

And like you said, Hal, it's not just the top of funnel versus bottom funnel here. What always works on one channel is not necessarily going to work on the other, but you should be definitely looking at which landing pages you're using, you're setting traffic to, and at what point in the funnel should they be connecting with those pages.

Brett:

Nice. Cool. What about, see a note here for product leads or for mystery products? Talk about that. What's that idea?

Nick:

So one of the hardest things for a brand to do is to get people to make their first purchase on the site. They've seen some reviews, they might follow you on social. There's been brands that I've been following for probably years I haven't bought anything from. I just haven't seen that thing to spark my interest to actually make me go ahead and place an order on the site. So we'll test out a bunch of different small lead gen type offers through email. It might be something like free shoelaces with shoes. It might be buy one water bottle, get one free. It might be an exclusive flavor drop that's coming up. And we'll see the different lists. We'll have it split off between people who have never purchased from us before and people who have purchased from us before. So that same offer of free shoe laces for if you order a pair of shoes, which I mean hopefully they come with laces already, but this is a bonus pair.

We'll call it a bonus pair. And hey look, when we send it to non purchases, they didn't really get excited about that, they didn't really take us up on that offer. But if it was a new flavor drop and we had that campaign split off between purchasers and non purchasers, all the people who have been holding out for this long, they all hopped on that and actually placed their first order. We're going to share that with the brand saying, Hey, look, when we talked about your new flavor, that was a great lead magnet. So start using that for some of your lead magnets on other platforms too. Yeah,

Brett:

I love it. And you'd mentioned one of our clients that does mystery gifts, which I love the idea of mystery gifts and one of our longtime friends Groove Life silicone wedding rings, I bought several over the years, they're friends of mine and I remember one time I went to purchase and they're like, Hey, buy this and you get a free mystery gift. Now I'm a pretty smart marketer, I know what's going on. My guest was okay, this is probably unsold inventory that they're wanting to get rid of. But I was like, I trust these guys, I like this product. So I clicked, I bought it, my mystery gift was like a thin bezel, pink ring silicone ring. So it's like, dude, I got something for breast cancer awareness month. I got something if I'm rocking like a Hawaiian shirt or Miami style shirt, it's a pretty cool ring, but it got me. And I do wonder something like a mystery gift that may work better for your existing customers, getting them to buy again rather than a brand new customer who doesn't maybe have the trust in the relationship yet. But test things like that and see what the impact is. Love it. Awesome. So I think you had one more idea or maybe multiple if I skip something, but talk about other ways we can kind of tie in email and our Amazon business.

Nick:

So one of our brands actually got really creative. I've given all the credit to them for this one. It was a California, they have some really cool California gear and merch. Cali,

Brett:

Shout out to Chris Lynch and the gang, one of the coolest brands. If you're ever in La Jolla, California, just north of San Diego, do a kayak tour in La Jolla shores, then buy some of their rad gear, which is, I know what we're helping with on the email side. So yeah,

Nick:

Go ahead. And their campaign idea was they had a developer build a new site. They've been working on it for months. They did their own QA testing and they got it live and they sent an email out their list saying, Hey, if you can go break our site, then we'll give you a 50% discount code. So they saw a ton of people going over, they're all clicking the links, try and get some 4 0 4 error where they're try and get some product page to display weird. So they could have spent a couple more months testing every little thing on the site, or they could have had something broken that they didn't know about that should have been addressed sooner. And they had their email list go ahead and tackle the site and click through everything. And they use that for their new website launch to see if they could break anything on there.

Brett:

I love it. And what's so cool, and you may or may not know this, but did that lead to sales from those that were on the site trying to break it? Did some of those people purchase? I'm sure they did.

Nick:

So they gave them a 20% off discount. Like, Hey, if you try to break it, you can't let us know. We'll give you 20% off. The good and bad thing here was the developer did a pretty good job on their new site if there wasn't too many broken things. So they got some sales from the people reaching out saying, Hey, I'd spent 30 minutes, I couldn't find anything. And then in that case they would give 'em like, all right, thanks for trying, here's a little bit higher of a discount. But they did get some sales, but there wasn't that many broken things on the site.

Brett:

I love that so much. Yeah, just a creative way to get interaction. And then once you've, now I'm motivated, now I want to click around on the site for maybe 10, 15 minutes and try to find something where it's broken. Even if I don't, I probably found something that caught my eye and I like the 20% discount, one of the 50, but I may go with the 20. It's really interesting. That reminds me of this ad, this campaign that Joseph Sugarman wrote a book called Triggers. If you've never read the book triggers, it's awesome. Joseph Sugarman was the guy behind the blue blockers sunglasses, but also a lot of other products that if you were alive in the eighties and nineties, like you would've noticed. But he ran this ad for something like a thermostat, I don't know, it was a more expensive product, a couple hundred bucks and basically said, this ad has seven typos in it for everyone you find take $10 off the price and this is when you mailed stuff in. But anyway, he heard from people saying, I spent two hours staring at this ad trying to find all the spelling errors. And so it's like these creative ways to get people to engage with your site or your marketing or your ads, it can make a difference because once you get someone's attention, they're really spending time with you, their likelihood of purchasing goes way, way up. Really good stuff. Nick Flint, did I miss anything or did we miss anything on the leveraging email for other channels?

Nick:

Yeah, I can pull one more out for you. So a lot of times customers like hearing from other customers, not just the brand. People are going to say how great their product is all day long, but they want to hear from people like them. It's a lot of times email marketers, they'll hop on your Shopify store, they'll scroll down the product page and see how many reviews are there, make sure you're also checking your Amazon listing for reviews. We've seen brands that have ton of reviews on Amazon, not as many on the Shopify stores. So go ahead and hop on over to Amazon, check out those reviews too and see if there's anything good you can pull out for the email campaigns. Same thing with Facebook or even maybe Google reviews. So make sure you're not just looking at one spot for reviews. Look at the whole ecosystem where people can find you and then you're probably going to cherry pick the best ones from there.

Brett:

Nick Flint, ladies and gentlemen, Nick, you crushed it. As always, love those tests. Love the ways to make email and all our other channels better. So much appreciated. Hopefully we'll get lots of people downloading that guide and also a lot of people reaching out wanting that email audit.

Nick:

And if you find a typo in the guide, we'll give you a free email audit.

Brett:

I love that. Yeah, look for a typo in the guide. We'll give you a free audit. Plus maybe something else for free. So look for those typos. Well played. Nicklin well played. Awesome. Well as always, thank you for tuning in. We would love to hear from you. Hey, connect with me on the socials. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn these days, so hit me up there. Or the other social platforms, I'm kind of hit or miss, but I am there some YouTube shorts, I'm pretty active there. And on YouTube got clips from the pod on YouTube, so go check that out as well. And so with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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Tomer is a speaker, an Amazon Seller, the host of the Top Dog community, and the author of "Ride the Amazon Wave." We recently met when we both spoke at SellerCon in Austin.

Tomer has a unique approach to getting 5-star reviews and scaling sales on Amazon. No, this does not include buying reviews, begging for reviews, or doing anything that toes the line of Amazon's TOS. 

He is all about surprise and delight. And I couldn't agree more! I learned things from Tomer about reviews that I haven't heard ANYWHERE else…and I've been doing this for a while. 

Here's a look at what we cover:

• Why the raw number of 5-star reviews for you or your competitors isn't what matters most, and how to shift your focus to the 5-star review RATE instead.
• Why 4-star reviews hurt your listings.
• 5 keys to a 6-star experience on Amazon that you probably have yet to think of.
• Creative ways to delight customers without spending more. 
• Why offending some customers can be a good thing.
• Thinking about every element of your product as an "experience."

‍

‍

Transcript:

Brett:

Well hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMGCommerce, and today we're talking about building a six star experience on Amazon and we're getting into why reviews matter, but we're going to look at this from an angle that I bet you have not looked at before because it's not just about five star reviews. We've got to do more than that. There's more to it than that. And so we're going to dive in here. My guest today is Tomer Rabinovich. We've met each other at Seller Con this year in Austin, Texas. We were both speaking, I was blown away by his presentation. I said, Tomer, you got to get on the podcast. And he said Yes. And so Tomer, how you doing man? Welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time.

Tomer:

I'm good, Brett. Thank you for me.

Brett:

And I do want to just point out just to underscore what a cool guy you are for me here in the States, but it's pretty late for you. So what time are you recording right now?

Tomer:

I'm in Israel and it's 10:15 PM here, but usually I have more calls after this, so I'm good to go.

Brett:

You're good. So you're ready to rock and roll. I feel the energy, I feel the excitement. So we're at a rock and roll. So Tomer is the founder of Top Dog and he offers consulting. He's got an e-commerce group community, which we'll get into a little bit. And then also a product that's about to launch, which I think everybody will want to learn about as well. And so Tor, if you would kind of give us your background, how did you become a top dog? How did you get into this space? And then we're going to get into our review topic.

Tomer:

Yeah, so you mentioned seller con. So I actually started with those guys back in 2014. I did of course, started selling in 2015 on Amazon. Been doing that for eight years now and been consulting mainly bigger sellers, 70 figure sellers, aggregators, different companies for the past five years probably. I've been speaking at pretty much every major event in the industry, so staying busy. And I also have my own event called TopDog Summit, which is also a big event for a small event for bigger sellers. And also wrote a book called Ride the Amazon Wave, which is right here. So

Brett:

There it is, ride the Amazon Wave. Love the cover design by the way. Love the book and kudos to you, man. That's a huge accomplishment. I know writing a book is building a business all on its own. It's a massive,

Tomer:

Most challenging product I launched so far.

Brett:

So no, it's out and we'll probably direct you, make you the least amount of money indirectly. Very, very powerful. But directly, yeah, we'll not compare to some of your other Amazon products I'm sure, but awesome book, awesome accomplishment. I know everybody knows you. You're speaking at all the Amazon events and so yeah man, really excited to dive into this topic. So talk about five star reviews and how they lead to rankings and why it's not just about the total number of five star reviews you have. Enlighten us please.

Tomer:

Yeah, so if you think about Amazon, Amazon wants to show the products on top that's rewarding on top that are actually selling the most, but that are also doing serving their customers. So that means the customers are actually leaving five star reviews for those products. So it only makes sense that if I'm selling a water bottle and you're selling a water bottle and I get more reviews than you based on every a hundred sales that each of us is making, I will rank higher than you long-term. If you start at the same time, I'll rank higher than you. Now if you already have a thousand new reviews and I have zero, it might be a bit more difficult. But what Amazon is doing is they're rewarding sellers by getting more five star reviews on an ongoing basis. And we've seen this time and time again what we help a seller customize or let's say adjust their customer experience for their product and they just skyrocket in terms of ranking almost overnight when they start accumulating the reviews or if you see that S P V button on Amazon that you can just start using. When we see sales that don't use that and then they start using it, they just take off in terms of ranking as well. They just fail a lot more reviews.

So one of the reasons to keep getting five star reviews is for ranking. And it doesn't matter if you have, maybe you think, oh, I got to a thousand reviews or 10,000 reviews or whatever and I can stop getting reviews, but that's not the case because your ranking will drop. We had a seller that had this gray hat strategy you can call it, where she was sending postcards to her customers from Amazon to get five star reviews from them asking nicely, not incentivizing them in any way, but that's obviously against Amazon terms of service. She got two thousands of reviews decided to stop and her ranking tanked as a result. So I mean

Brett:

Because she was getting a really high percentage of five star reviews by sending in that postcard, once she stopped that maybe the experience just wasn't good enough on its own. So she started getting a lower percentage of people leaving a five star review and that the rankings, so

Tomer:

What everyone can do right now in their niche is they can just go into Amazon and just look at all their competitors on page one, see how many reviews they got in the past 30 days, how many sales they got in the past 30 days, divide one by the other and we call that review percentage. And then you want to see where you stand compared to them. And if you see someone, let's say you're at 4%, they're at 8% and it changes between each product because some products are more, they get just more reviews by nature. Let's say you sell disposable cups, that's not going to get a lot of reviews probably, but if you sell a diaper bag, which is a very personal product, that might get a lot more expensive product to get more, just depends on the product. So if you see that a seller has a very high review rate, you can look at their reviews and see what people are mentioning, obviously buy their product, kind of reverse engineer what they're doing and so on.

Brett:

Yeah, that's so good. And so then what tools are you recommending to see how many sales reviews have come in in the last 30 days?

Tomer:

The easiest tool to use is Helium 10. If you use Helium 10 x-ray, that will just show you the snapshot of the last 30 day sales and then you'll see how many reviews they actually got in the last 30 days. You can just double that to a CSV file, add one more column with a very basic formula to divide one by the other. And that's it.

Brett:

Super simple. And so it's not so much that there's this certain magic percentage of five star reviews to sales, but it's more of a relative scale. So are you getting more five star reviews for every 100 sales as compared to your competitors?

Tomer:

Exactly. And he'll intend, the problem is you only see how many reviews they got. You just see a number. So if they got a hundred reviews in past three days, that doesn't mean much to me because maybe they sold a hundred thousand units. So it just depends.

Brett:

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, very, very cool. And so this is something, let's say that we're new with a product and we're going up against a product that's got a thousand reviews already. If our review rate is way higher than theirs, are you saying we could challenge them rank equal to them in a relatively short period of time? You're talking a few months I guess, and I know everything is different, but

Tomer:

It depends on different factories as well, but definitely you can, if you think about it long term, you can win. You can win over in terms of reviews over them as well, not necessarily if you even sell more units than them for a long period of time. So that's another reason you want to look into this, but sellers tend to think, I just launched my product, how do I get reviews? That's how they think. But to get reviews actually happens long before they launch their products. They need to plan ahead. How am I going to get reviews when they do their power development process and not after the fact that they launched because you can kind of fake reviews or whatever. There are different ways to do that with shady services, black tactics, whatever. But those can only get used so far these days to get a bunch of reviews. But that's not a long-term strategy. So you need to get five star reviews from real customers buying your product of an Amazon.

Brett:

Yeah, it's the only way to make that work because even if you go gray hat, just like you talked about, and even if you don't get caught and Amazon never finds out, once you stop that and your review rate drops, you're in trouble and your rankings will suffer. Let's talk about, and that was a perfect segue by the way that hey, getting reviews starts way before you start trying to get reviews actively. So I know that begins with that experience and you talk about this like a six or you call it a six star experience. What is that and why should we shoot for that?

Tomer:

Yeah, so if you think about reviews for a second, you can only get 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 stars and anything that is not a five star review hurts you. Even a four star review brings you closer to four than 4.5 or five. So we only accept as sellers, we only accept five star reviews for our products. So because of that, if we aim for a five star product, we might land at four or three or two stars, but if I aim for six, I landed at five. So it's kind of aiming for the moon and landing amongst stars. That's kind of what we are trying to do with this six star experience strategy you can call it. But it's really, we call it over deliver and surprise the customers as much more than they expect. And usually when you buy a product, it doesn't matter what it is. If you look at the McDonald's commercial, the burger can look really good when you get it, it's not that good. So advertising usually falls the other way around. But when you think about selling a product and you want to get a five star view for it, you want it to be in a way where you advertise in a way, but when they get the product, they actually get more than they thought they will and that's

Brett:

What we need. Got it. Yeah, I love that. So when they get it, there's some element of surprise of the light, some element of, wow, this is better than I thought. Yeah, because the flip side of that is a big deal. I know we've got a client, and I won't mention the product, but it's a very effective product, but for whatever reason, when you look at the pictures, you think this is kind of a large product, but when you get it, it's kind of small or it's smaller than you would expect. And so people look at that and they got complaints like, Hey, this isn't the size of product that I thought it was. It still works. And so they had to start shifting the photography where they would show the product in someone's hand. So surprises, you know what you're buying right then. And so yeah, totally makes sense. You want to,

Tomer:

Yeah, and because we're doing e-commerce, you don't really know what to expect. You can read reviews, you can kind of see what's going on in my talk. So I kind of mentioned a roller coaster. When you look at a roller coaster, you don't know what they're feeling, right? You can see them screaming, you can see whatever. You can see them coming down the line when you go up, they're roller across the street. You can see them coming down asking them questions, how was it? Whatever people throw up, people enjoy. You don't know what's going to happen when you go up. You don't know what to expect. It's kind of the same way when you buy a product online, you don't know what's going to happen when you actually get it and use it, but if it's more than you thought, that gives you an edge as a seller by that type of experience. And I think we are in 2023 right now. This is the time to really do that. And the bar to entry in customer experience is so low right now because people don't expect it to be better than they thought. They only expect it's going to be worse than they thought. So there is so much opportunity.

Brett:

Yeah, love it. Yeah, it is wide open for someone to do just a good job and then if you do better than that, it's all the better. And I love this approach of aiming for six stars to try to hit five and for the moon. Then among the stars type of thing, have you ever heard Brian Chesky from Airbnb, have you heard him talk about how Airbnb hosts should kind of craft their experiences to wow guests? It's a very similar concept. He uses a different scale. He's like, Hey, what would a 10 star experience be like? And he is like, well, if you knew the person's favorite band and that band was at the house when they showed up and all these outlandish things, and obviously you can't do that, but you start there with your thought process and then back down to, well, what could we do? How could we

Tomer:

Personalize

Brett:

Do that

Tomer:

For 1% of your customers? So one thing with your experience is you don't, not everyone need to have an equal experience. I'm like, let's say we have a crazy idea for an insert. There are insert cards now with videos in them and a whole bunch of stuff. Let's say you do that for 5% of your insert cards, invest two, 3000, really good insert, but only for 5%. If that doesn't work, you need to change strategies completely. If that does work, then you can start dialing it down for cheaper things. But I'm like, let's start with the most expensive thing we can do. Let's go nuts with this. If this doesn't work, we need to change strategies. But if you start small, if you, let's say put an insert that says get 20% off on our store, that's not going to do anything, right? 20% off is a gift. It's a gift to you, not to the customer. So that will probably not work. That is just to have a check mark that you have an insert card and whatever, but that doesn't really do much. And if that doesn't work, it's going to take you a long time to figure that out that you need to change strategies and find something more appealing to the customer.

Brett:

Interesting. So I want to kind of break down the six store experience in just a minute, but now you mentioned in search and you've got my curiosity peaked. So what might you do there? If you do a high cost insert, test it on 5% of orders, what's something wild or crazy you would potentially do there?

Tomer:

So it can be even an instructional video inside of that video. So instead of sending to a lake or a QR code to scan, and you can test that in a different insert and just different things and see what people do they watch more, what do they click on more, what actually works better? And then at the end of the video you can have a magnet to something else to kind of go fill out the form or something like that. So you see how many people actually fill out the form as a result of that compared to sending them directly to the video on your website and see how many people fill the form there and then you can kind of see which works better. Any considerations there to avoid T O ts violations? Yeah, definitely.

We don't want to valids in any way, and the way we do it is do it. We always do a very soft thing and we always think about the customer first. What I mean by that is let's say I want to send it to watch an instructional video. I'm not going to send you to put in your email name an email to watch a video because I can just send you to the video. But if it's a warranty for example, then I can ask for the name an email because I have a justification for that. So it just depends on what it is that I can offer. We don't offer eBooks, we don't offer discounts, we never ask for reviews in our inserts either. You can, by the way, you are allowed to ask for reviews as long as it's unbiased and whatever. But I just think that asking for reviewing your insert is kind of like the waitress coming up to you and saying, how's the foot before you had your first bite?

Right? It's kind of like that. Yeah, so we never do that on what, what a good analogy. Once you have their email, you can always follow up asking for a review, but in our case, that's not even the main way we get reviews. So maybe I'll give you an example of a product and that give you something you can think about. So we were wanted to sell the slack picking set. Basically I said, it teaches you how to lock, how to break into houses. And that set while we were producing it, it became a prohibited product to be sold in Amazon us. Imagine that. So I ended up showing exactly what we wanted to do and the idea was this, everyone was selling these kits. It comes in a small case with all the tools inside and instructions and stuff, and it comes in either a regular brown box or just even a color box of the case.

And what we came up with the idea of making the box black all around and it has a small lock in the front and when you open up, so with black hole around it looks like a deposit box, we made it look like a deposit box and then on the bottom we had made in China and all of the stuff that we need to have on our packaging, but because of the e-commerce, we could do whatever. We can make a very cool looking packaging. So it was black all around small lock in the front. When you open up it from the lock side, you have a small note inside it says congrats, you've just picked your first lock. And that's person they see that puts a smile on their face and a smile goes a long way. Doesn't need to costume more necessarily. We had some funny mentions inside of the flap when they open up the packaging, we had some more stuff offered to remove the object from inside.

So on the bottom of the packaging and we made it very playful and fun and very giftable as well. Not just a product you would necessarily buy for yourself and it's not really a giftable product as a product in its own, but we made it giftable and it has a lot of small surprises throughout the process and imagine one of the pieces is missing when they get the product right, but they see so much different things that add to the experience, so they feel more obligated to reach out to us, say, Hey, this business is missing before leaving a one-star review because they got more value when they got this product.

Brett:

Really, really good example. So I know that was probably touched on a few of these pieces maybe, but how do you create a six star experience? What does this look like? What's the process you go through to say, is this enough to delight customers?

Tomer:

So I am not the most creative person probably I'm very analytic and systemized. So to me, I just think of a product as an experience. So every single touch point they have with the customer is an experience that means when they first look at the packaging, open the packaging, get a product out, learn how to use it, learn where do they store it, what did they do with it, when did they throw it out, if they get a replacement after all of that chain of processes and what I can do in every single touch point and help them out. So it's packaging, it's insert cards, it's instructions, it's even post-purchase things that we do after they purchase, watch a video or sending them email as a result. So we do a lot of different things and as we talk, I know we are talking maybe a few weeks before our Kickstarter launch, but we can talk more about it later maybe, but we're doing very unique things there to get that Kickstarter experience and to get a lot of opt-ins and do also good in the world and not just benefit ourselves with more money and whatever.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. In fact, you mentioned, let's dive into that just really quickly. So talk about the product that you're launching the Kickstarter for and then how are you tying that into Amazon sales and a six star experience? Walk us through that.

Tomer:

So it starts with a product. So the six star experience methodology, the first five stars are all about have a good solid product that is better than everything else on the market. Now with the six stars, the over deliver and surprise and that is when you become, you do something different, hopefully something no one else did before you something out there. The example with the lock picking set because, so the first stars is you need a product that actually works, right? That's the first thing. If the LOF picking set doesn't work, nothing is going to help me out, doesn't have

Brett:

Me on that

Tomer:

First five stars that we need to hit, which are pretty basic. So the product is laptops sleeve, it flips like a regular laptop sleeve, but it's actually also a power bank, a docking station and a laptop mat all in one. So the problem we're trying to solve is I'm as in, you can call it a digital entrepreneur. I have three kids, but I have my own home office where I'm right now and I have coffee shops I go to and I have conferences I travel to and I don't want to take the bag with me or even the charger with me. So we thought what if we develop something that is an all in one thing that solves this problem. So you just take this with you, you have a built-in charger, you have everything built in, you just take the laptop in the sleeve and just work right for the entire day and the battery is strong enough to charge two and a half times.

So we are at the final stages of the PO development. It's been about eight, nine months I think something like that in process. But we documented the entire process of that is probably by the time people watch it, they can find that project shared as well from different steps that we took to develop the entire thing. But at this point, everything I told you is just a product. This is not customer experience, it doesn't really, so then we again think about every single touchpoint. So the packaging that we are doing is very unique. It's an old idea for a book packaging. We are on video as well, so I can explain to you what it looks like, but it looks like this. If you look like this is the packaging, they open it up like this and the book will come out and the sleeve will come out that it's like an old packaging idea for books.

If you let them on the video, it's going to be a bit unclear of what I just said, but it's a really cool and unique packaging. So as soon as they open it, the sleeve pops out of the packaging. So that's the first experience that they have. We're going to have some messages on both sides of the packaging so they can see that as well. And then inside the sleeve we're giving them a key chain and that key chain is a dog key chain. We are called Top Dog my company. So we are giving a dog and we're working with a charity organization in the US so when you buy our product, you actually help save a dog at the same time. And the dog itself has an N F C chip inside. So when you put your phone against it, you're going to see an update on your dog and what's going on with dog, did you get adopted or not and what? What's going on? And later that dog is going to be the one that is posting on social media on our behalf is going to ask you for reviews, it's going to offer you new products we're launching and so on and so on. So we are creating an entire experience

Brett:

From, and now that dog is going to be the liaison between top dog and the customer.

Tomer:

Exactly.

Brett:

Yeah. So fun. So fun. Yeah. I want to talk about product packaging just really quickly because this is such an important topic and this is one of the things that can really change the game in terms of surprising delight. I just remembered the old days when all product packaging sucked and opening a product was a pain and it was not fun. I think Apple was one of the first ones that really focused on man, we want the box and the unboxing experience to be great, to be powerful. One of my best experiences recently, and I posted about this on LinkedIn, so if anybody wants to see a video or kind of see it, go check it out there. But I bought a new coffee maker by cafe. It's a GE company, but it's kind of a high-end coffee maker and the box, instead of opening the top and trying to yank the thing out, one, I had a rope attached to it so you could pull it out of the box that it shipped in.

Then the product packaging itself, the top just opened up almost like what you were talking about where the base is secure, but the top two pieces open up and you just pull the coffee maker right out. I mean it's so great. Usually you open an appliance and you're fighting to get stuff out of the box. This was so easy and it set the stage wonderfully. It was so fun. And now I've told a ton of people about it, it's just, I'm sure it costs more for the box, but what does that gain the company in terms of reviews, recommendations, virality, all that? I've got to think that it's worth it.

Tomer:

So I will say a few things to that. One thing I will say is that Jeff Bezos mentioned that if a customer has a bad experience, they won't tell With social media, they won't tell five people, they'll tell 5,000 people. I believe the same thing happens when you have a good experience, but it just doesn't happen very often that we have a very unique experience. We want to talk and share because how many products did you buy in the past few years and how many products did you talk about on LinkedIn?

Brett:

We have Amazon shipments every day,

Tomer:

Right? So that's my point. To get that five star review from a normal customer on Amazon is difficult to do, right? You need something that will stand out from everything else. So that's why I'm saying it needs to be a different experience. The product has to be better, but you need a different experience when they get it. When it comes to the price, that's a critical factor, but the packaging is pretty much the only thing. We also have a surprise gifting inside that we do sometimes on some products, but customer experience as a whole doesn't need to cost you more money. The example with the lock picking set is just being a bit clever and playful in how we do things, but it doesn't mean hard cost you more. So we use different services for this. You can also use a lot of AI stuff for this right now, but this is I think a bit premature for that, for this level of creative. But what we do is we use NA designs for a lot of different packaging just to see a lot of different ideas from a lot of different designers. And we use a website called Squad Help that helps us to get taglines and slogans and very funny sayings around our brand. So this is a crowdfund kind of like 99 designs, but to get a lot of people suggesting you slogans and tag lines and stuff and then you just pick the winner and then you get paid and then they can trademark whatever they sent you.

Brett:

Yeah, I mean it's so great. So being a play on words or whatever, I remember I interviewed Mickey Agar, she's the founder of Tushy, which is the bidet company. You put it on your toilet or whatever. And then she started a few other companies too, but with the packaging is full of puns, but it came with this little booklet that said this number two shall pass. It was just hilarious. It didn't need to be there, but it was just so funny and ended up at our office and people pass. And so just little funny things.

Tomer:

You don't need to tell jokes, you don't need to be funny, you don't need to be a comedian, you just want to be a bit witty and playful. Put a smile on your face and that adds value. Value is what creates a six experience. And then they will be eager to leave you five star reviews or reach out to you if there's a problem. A lot more than if you don't have something like that.

Brett:

Yes, when you're human and you put a smile on their face, they're more understanding and more likely to go to you instead of going to Amazon to ask for you to fix a problem.

Tomer:

And when we think about the packaging, you mentioned it might cost more, so not necessarily. So we've seen a lot, we helped a lot of cells that have poly bags, but just being a bit more creative and playful with those we have. It just depends on the nature of the product and what it is. The more commoditized your product, the better you want to, the more you want to push towards this. I had during Covid, I wanted to launch a new brand, like a medical brand that is playful and humorous and selling omes and a bunch of other stuff, but we ended up not doing it. It was too saturated obviously during Covid, but for sure

Brett:

Good

Tomer:

News that's really missing in that space. In medical you don't have any of that and I think why not? You can make anything playful and fun and

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. So you mentioned the idea of a free gift and for Top dog for the laptop sleeve slash dog slash charger, you mentioned the dog. It was the dog key chain you said, or dog. So give us some ideas. How should we think about that gift? How much is that often going to cost us? What are you advising people to do in relationship to the free gift?

Tomer:

I will say generally speaking, customer experience. I believe it's something to dedicates 5% of your profit towards this is just take whatever your profit is, I don't care what it is, 5% of it every year say this goes just to improve the customer experience of our customers. And it can be packaging it be a gift inside, it can be letters you send 'em physically, it can be sending them the band that they love studying a few thousand bucks on that. It can be whatever you want it to be, but also understand, again, you don't need to make every customer have the same experience. I have this seller I help to sell off on Shopify as well, and I told them, give me the list of your top 20 sellers, top 20 customers right now that bought multiple times from me to sell this big products for 250 bucks.

And they had these customers buying 10, 20 times from them. And I told 'em, look, call them up. Just hold them up. Just call them up as the owner and just see what they say. And they were just blown away. And then I convinced 'em to send 'em some gifts and some other things because I mean this is something again, no one is doing right, no one is treating their customers more than the customers expect. So it's just something that adds so much. And those people, what do you think happened? It went viral, right? They

Brett:

Buy more, they tell all their friends. Yeah, I mean there's a few brands that I've discovered on Amazon that we buy a lot of those products and I would be pretty blown away if the owner of one of those companies called me to thank me. That's something I would remember. It's something I would share with other people even as a fellow business owner would still be cool. So pick up the phone and we put that aside. We don't think about it because we're like, well that won't scale, but that's the point. It doesn't need to scale. You're doing this for the biggest customers.

Tomer:

One of the person you can watch is Taylor Swift. Taylor is actually doing a lot of things like going to her fans' weddings to sing there all of a sudden out of blue. She does crazy stuff like that because she knows this will go viral. This is what people will talk about. And also even if it's not, let's say you do it and nothing happens, it's still the right thing to do. It's still doing good to your customers. So when I do this stuff, I have zero expectations of them working

Brett:

Nice,

Tomer:

But if it does, that's great, but if I do it a hundred times at some point it's probably going to work. But if I did it a hundred times, I at least gave a lot more value to a hundred customers. So that's kind the effort. Yeah.

Brett:

Yeah. So good. So good. Awesome. Other things we're considering with the customer experience portion. So the product's got to be good. It's got to be at least five star worthy. It works. It is as advertised. The product is good. But anything else you want to talk about on the customer experience part, which is what pushes us to that six star level?

Tomer:

You want to talk

Brett:

A little more about the post-purchase effort too? Just curious what else we're considering there. I think there may be something there

Tomer:

With the dog, it's fairly straightforward on what to do with the dog example, the dog emailing you and messaging you and stuff like that. So that's what we do there. But we have different brands where we do different things. We have a baby brand for example. What we do there is the insert card is written in a kid's font and that's the baby thanking their parents, thank you for buying this product for me. And it's very playful, very cute, and it's like you could buy anything for yourself, but he decided to buy this to me instead. I'll give you one example. When you do these type of things, you might piss some people off. For some reason this starts with dear mom and dad, we had lesbians messages, gay people message us saying this is not right. I'm a single parent, whatever. You might step on some people's toes when you do that type of stuff.

But I think you have to take a risk. You have to choose, this is my target or this is what I want to do, this is what I enjoy, this is what I want my brand to be about with Top Dog. Maybe some people don't like dogs and they get this product and they don't want this key chain, they don't want anything to do with it. They might be pissed and that's okay, I don't really care because this is what we decide. We're going to stand fully behind and this is the brand, these are the values, this is the mission. And I think whatever you decide the brand is going to be about. And with the baby brand, it's more about paying attention to your kids being like a parent without screens and all of that stuff. This is what we decide. And I think you have to connect the mission of the brand, whatever it may be, to an emotion of the customer.

And I think when we in Tab what we tell Tab is going to be about digital entrepreneurship as a e-commerce brand and digital entrepreneurs for them to own a dog is a struggle because they keep moving around, but now they can help save one instead. So that the emotional hook of the brand and that we found this is the integration between dogs and a electronic brand. And you can think there is no connection between the two dogs and that doesn't have any connection. But if you think about Amazon is a company, Amazon, if you go to a page not found on Amazon, you see a dog, right?

Brett:

And those are actual

Tomer:

Dogs of Amazon's employees that they are allowed to bring to their offices and they have over 10,000 dogs. If you go to mid of Amazon page,

Brett:

I've been there, it is crazy. In 2018, we were one of the fastest growing Amazon D S P agencies. So we got invited to the hq, myself and our Amazon director just got to hang out at two different campuses there in Seattle, awesome place. But dude, there are dogs everywhere. I mean the dog park between buildings full of dogs in the build and never seen more dogs. And they were all clean and groomed and it was the wildest thing. It was like I was at a dog show, but cool. But when you think about people love

Tomer:

Dogs, dogs just have an emotional hook to them. They do. Why Amazon is doing this, it's also the right thing to their employees, but that's why Amazon is doing this Now, saying that that might not be for everyone. Maybe you cannot work in Amazon because you don't like dogs and that's fine. But I think as brands, we try to play it safe all the time. We want to have the right packaging, the right thing to say, the right insert. But if you do it, I mentioned in my talk that safe actually equals death if you ask me when it comes to it totally

Brett:

Does. Yeah. Because if we try to not offend anyone, and obviously don't necessarily go out and try to be offensive, that's not the goal either. But think about it. I'm not a dog person, but if I got that packaging and I knew it was saving a dog and you had the dog tag, at a minimum I'd be like, oh, that's cool. And then I'd move on, right? Very small percentage of people that are going to be upset because you do something fun or slightly amusing or you do the right thing and we've just got to put that out of our mind and do what resonates to most of your customers. Do what works for your brand, have fun with it. Do the right and

Tomer:

Don't. And even fault with dear mom and dad, we thought we can change this to dear parent, but it's not the same thing when the kid is writing.

Brett:

Think even in that case, two moms, two dads, most people get that postcard. They're like, oh, this is really cute. It's going to be a very small percentage of people that are like, I'm offended because of the way you structured this postcard. Most people are going to just love it. And so that's what you got to go with.

Tomer:

And brands, midwives are just amazing in how they approach their audiences and how they talk to their audiences and the videos they have and all of that. Just you see a company about something and I just love companies that are playful. But again, emotion can be any emotion. Emotion can be anger, it can be fear, it can be whatever you want it to be. It doesn't have to be funny in top that we're going to have a mix of funny, but it's also very emotional dogs that you help save, right? So it's like a mix of a few things. And I think the more emotions it can create in your customers, the better.

Brett:

Absolutely. And we talk about this a lot. Without emotion, people don't take action unless you're stirring up desire. Either I want to get out of some kind of pain or I want to go towards some kind of pleasure or enjoyment. If you're not stirring up emotion, people won't take action. So the worst thing is not to make people angry with your advertising, but the worst thing is to be ignored or to be just so uninteresting that nobody notices. And so love that approach. Love what you're talking about here, Tomer. And so we will link to the Kickstarter in the show notes and get that out to everybody. So check out the top Dog, laptop sleeve, power Bank, docking station. And I think other things were included with that too, which is pretty awesome.

Tomer:

Hold on.

Brett:

Exactly. But tell us about what else Top Dog does because there's probably some Amazon sellers listening that are like, Hey, I'd like to hang with Tomer and the Gang. So what does that look like?

Tomer:

So we have a few things. One, obviously you can also buy the book available on Amazon, audible, anywhere you buy books from. And the book is the first book as far as I know, that is not about how to sell on Amazon, it's for active e-commerce sellers. So it teaches you how to do product research when you already have some products live, right? And how to build a real company, how to hire people, how to exit if that's what you plan to do. So that's the book. Then we have Top Duck community. So the community is welcoming everyone who is active in this industry. So we have sellers, we have aggregators, we have services, we have agencies, we allow everyone in. It's a paid community, it's own dedicated to app. When you do this video, it's probably doors are open, I assume, but you can check it out if you go to joint top dog.com and check out the community. Then I also work, I have some one-on-one relationship with bigger sellers where I help them grow towards an exit. So that's the only way I do if I help them scale to an exit.

Brett:

And we have our summit as well. But that's pretty much it. It's awesome. We'll link to everything in the show notes. So it's join topdog.com, also tomer rabinovich.com. You find out all the details. We'll link to it in the show notes. Tomer, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much. I had a blast and we'll have to do it again. Thank you so much, Brett. Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? And hey, if we're not connected on the socials, let's fix that problem. LinkedIn is probably the best place to follow me, but I'm also on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter occasionally. And so hit me up. I'm sharing stuff in between episodes and would love to connect with you. And so with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

What if you could find one strategy that, if properly executed, could:

• Triple your revenue
• Build a hyper-engaged community around your brand
• Get feedback on exactly what products to launch next (and create anticipation around the launch of new products)
• Create an ongoing, repeatable marketing vehicle that improves CAC and LTV
• Establish a content machine

Sounds too good to be true? That's exactly what creating "Challenges" did for Alicia Reynoso and her fiancé. They went on to build a "60-Day Hydration Challenge" around their brand: Live Infinitely.

They leverage their challenge to grow from a mostly Amazon brand, to 50/50 Amazon and Shopify, to having a successful exit.

In this episode, Alicia and I dive into the why behind "Challenges" and what it takes to make them successful.

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're diving into a topic we have never covered on this podcast before. We're talking about challenge-based marketing, but more than that, we're talking about how to build a community, how to build a loyal following, because I'm convinced if you're going to build a valuable brand that's in it for the long haul or that you can exit from a really nice sale, you need community, you need engagement, you need loyal followers. And so my guest today is Alicia Reynoso, and we met two different times recently. We spoke at Seller Summit in Florida. Shout out to Steve Chu and Toni. And then we also met at Blue Ribbon Puerto Rico. So we're speakers at both those events and no, was it Puerto Rico or was it another event? Alicia at Denver.

Alicia:

Denver.

Brett:

Denver, yeah. Yeah, blue Ribbon Denver. But so many people were like, man, you got to listen to Alicia's presentation. And so we connected. I'm so glad we did. And for those that don't know, Alicia is the founder of Challenge Makers, so she helps people with challenge-based marketing and then through the former co-founder of Live Infinitely. So we're going to talk about that. So Alicia, thanks for taking the time. Welcome to the show. And how's it going?

Alicia:

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I've been super excited in all of our Blue Ribbon events. I've heard so much Curry, so I've always wanted to actually connect, so I'm glad we actually got the opportunity.

Brett:

That's awesome. And so I think we got to talk about this for those that are watching, and look at the video one, you started a health-based brand that you guys sold, which we'll talk about as we go, but you're not in a normal studio, not in an office. You're also not in a typical bedroom, which has become kind of the norm in a post covid world. But looks like you're in an RV. Alicia, can you let the folks know? Where are you right now? My

Alicia:

RV. Yep. So my fiance and I, we actually live on the road now after selling our business. So we live six months on the road and we're just started our next six months for our second year. This year we're traveling the East coast, so right now we're in North Carolina and it's

Brett:

Been a blast. That's awesome. And so this is your second year to spend half the year on the road?

Alicia:

Yep, yep. Last year was all West Coast. Oh yeah, love it. This has been the dream for sure, starting the business, selling the business, and then travel. So last year we did all West Coast. This year we're doing the East coast.

Brett:

That's awesome. I even have, part of me is like, man, the van life or the RV life would be really cool. Now I've got eight kids, so that is not my immediate future by any means, but I also know it's a lot of work. I had a guy that worked for me for a long time named Brandon, and he and his wife and two kids had an rv and he said had some really bad experiences, some comical experiences, but he told me, he said we had a travel itch and we scratched that thing until it bled. I get that too. I get that there could be some challenges too, but it looks super fun. So I'll live vicariously through you guys for now. Awesome.

Alicia:

Yeah, maybe when your kids are grown, you can hit the road, try it out.

Brett:

Very possible. Very possible. I may be more of a flying and Airbnb type of guy, but I like the idea of RVs too. So let's talk about this. So we're talking about building a hyper-engaged following community around your brand. First of all, how did you start your brands? So let's get a little bit of your background and then we'll get into the why behind challenges.

Alicia:

Yeah, for sure. So I was on 1920 looking, I thought the internet was the coolest thing. How can I make money? How can I start a business? I learned about Amazon F B A through amazing, the amazing course. I bought that course. Yeah,

Brett:

I just spoke at Amazing Seller a couple months ago. Oh, you did?

Alicia:

Yep. Oh, nice. Yeah, I've been wanting to reach out to them. That was really what kicked it off for me back then with the amazing course.

Brett:

I'll make an intro to the gang. They'll love to hear from you.

Alicia:

Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, for sure. So I took that, got it started. We launched Live infinitely in 2014, more so 2015, 2014, we launched a dead product. So official launch 2015. And every year it was just super easy to scale. It was like the Wild Wild West back there, or you could just launch products and scale. So we were very successful the very first few years, but then things started getting more competitive. You had to get a little bit more creative. And so that's when we're like, okay, let's get on Shopify and try to build our brand Amazon and Shopify. And that's where really the struggle came in. That's when we joined Blue Ribbon and we're like, okay, how do we learn Facebook? How do we do all the things, email marketing, learn all of that. And we were slowly making progress until 2019, 2020, we learned Facebook ads in 2020 is when we launched our challenge. And that's just when it changed our entire direct to consumer website that just blew up from our Facebook ads and our community. And we went from 99% Amazon to 50 50, 50% on Shopify, 50% on Amazon.

Brett:

Beautiful. I think that's where healthy brands usually want to go or aspire to go that 50 50 split between Amazon and true D two C or with Shopify or BigCommerce or whatever. I think buyers are more interested in that, that feels like, and it is a more stable business. So kudos to you for getting there. And we already dropped the spoiler alert earlier, but you sold and you had a successful exit, and I think that was in large part to the fact that you had a diversified business, which I know helped a lot. So give us kind of the overview. We will dive into all the details. So this is more like a, here's what the challenge was, here's what it did, and then we're going to get into the ins and outs and the why's and hows and things like that. But I want to tease this for people because I don't know, we got a lot on our plate. We got a lot of marketing opportunities. We could go Facebook, YouTube, things on Amazon, bottom of funnel, mid funnel, whatever, but I think a lot of people are missing this concept of challenges. So what was the high level stuff and then how'd it work?

Alicia:

So it was a 60 day hydration challenge. Water bottles was our hero product. That's what we sold and most of. So we created a 60 day hydration challenge initially to nurture our existing community and just try to increase our lifetime value and get people to know us and understand the brand more. But then it ended up being something that we used for everything top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. It was like all of it. It was this really unique way that we could go out into the world and attract people with something that was purely value-based, like, this is for you. It's free to join, come into our world and let us help you. And then when people bought our products or were in our world, then it was something that they got to actually know our brand more and fall in love with us.

And everyone in our community would market all of our other products, so then they'd buy more. And so it just became this big thing that completely changed our brand. Before, when we were just on Amazon, we were trying to convey our message of living infinitely, meaning live your life with infinite possibilities. Chase after your dreams, live bigger, live bolder. That was all of our messaging. But when you're on Amazon, it's a little bit trickier to share that. And so when we had the community, we were able to share that message of going after your dreams and being healthy and really create that connection with our customers that we never had before, which helped in all of our marketing because we actually knew our customers then. So it was high level this thing that came in, meaning our intention was to have it at the bottom of the funnel to nurture our customers, but it just changed everything, which is really

Brett:

Cool. And just to tease the results, I heard something like, was it double, triple the business or something over time? What was that

Alicia:

Little nugget? Yeah, triple revenue. And the biggest thing was our lifetime value increased by 47%, which was huge for us because we sold a 14 game changer, $15 water bottle. And so especially on Facebook, how do you go out and acquire customers on a 14, $15 water bottle? We had to get super creative with our bun ring and everything, but then we'd get people in and they would fall in love with the brand because we helped them in ways that other brands weren't, that the lifetime value just skyrocketed.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that so much. And so, I mean really the game with D two C is how do we get that appropriate CAC or customer acquisition cost compared to L T V? And so there's really only so much you can do to lower your customer acquisition costs. You've got to increase L T V to be able to really accelerate and press the gas pedal down. And one thing that I like to talk, one thing that I've been talking about a lot to brands is there's a difference between being a purveyor of goods online or selling stuff online and having a brand and a community. And when you have a brand and a community, then it becomes so much easier to sell the next product that you launch or to upsell or to bundle or to increase that L T V. If you are kind of a nameless, faceless community list product on Amazon or wherever, you can have success, you can make money. But really the next level of success is when you build a brand and you've got a brand when people are searching for you by name and when you've got a community and a following around that brand. And so challenges, that was the vehicle you used to really launch that. So walk us through, how did you get to this point where you're like, Hey, we should do a challenge?

Alicia:

Yeah, for sure. So finally just we were at that 200 19 or 20 where we're like, alright, we're kind of stalling. We're not really growing. We need to change something in order to continue to grow off Amazon. And so we sat down, we're like, okay, who is our customer? Who are we marketing to? At that point, we were selling Hamot backpacks, bug nets, we were kind of all over the place. It was Amazon, we looked for bestseller rankings we can be, and we were like, let's launch that and that works. But then we're like, okay, who is actually our customer? And we sat down and took the time and realized who they were, and then we're like, okay, how can we provide value to this customer even if they never paid us, how can we bring somebody into our world provide so much value to them even if they don't buy our product? And so I was super excited. I kind of was our customer. I love being healthy, I love sending goals. So I was like, I can create journals, I can create eBooks and guides and videos and workouts. I was going to do all these things. And then I realized that's just not realistic. We were a small team of three. So much, so much. Yeah, that's so much content

Brett:

Make, there's a lot of people that are doing that, right? There are content creators that have YouTube channels and that have guides and have personal communities and coaching and all that exists too, to a certain degree.

Alicia:

And it's great. And if you have the resources then you can do all of that. But I just didn't, we just didn't have a team. And so then I came up with the idea of a 60 day hydration challenge, and that just allowed me to take all of that value that I wanted to create and bundle it into this challenge, this community because they would join the 60 day Hydration challenge and pledge to drink water. But then every single week we have many weekly challenges where we'd work on our nutrition and goal setting and self love and all of those other things that were super important to our customer and our customer's journey to being successful. We could provide them all of that value in just a weekly live call, I'd jump on and be like, alright, this week we're going to focus on nutrition and I mean, I'm not a dietician or nutritionist or anything, but I just talk about my experience and this is my recommendation. Eat some whole foods and here's a little checklist to see that you ate some Whole Foods this week and introduce people to new concepts of the things they needed to learn on their customer journey to be more successful. And so that's kind of how we came up with that idea because it gave us the ability to dramatically overdeliver without having to go and create all this

Brett:

You could overdeliver and really the customers are creating the content and it's even probably more effective and more motivating and more engaging and more fun than even if you guys had just broken your back trying to create content. And so I really love this and I love what you said a minute ago, this idea of truly understanding your customer. And that's another part of the pivot from just selling stuff to being a brand is understanding let's not just be a product-focused brand. Let's be a customer-focused brand. Who are we serving? Who do we want to serve? Who can we connect with? And then let's provide value to them. And I love what you said, let's provide value even if they don't buy a single product because they will. People love to buy products and if they're connected with you and you offer good products and you offer community, people are going to buy stuff, right? We are addicted to buying stuff, but rather than just selling a random products, how do we curate products, build products, launch products that are for this set of customers? So

Alicia:

Love

Brett:

That shift, love that shift.

Alicia:

It just is way more fulfilling going from selling on Amazon to and Sword Live infinitely the name. I had a mission from day one but couldn't connect with our customers. And so it was finally, that was such a fulfilling time in our business with actually serving them and actually connecting. So it just provides a lot of fulfillment that way.

Brett:

Love it, love it. So I know you said that challenges are the most effective way to build community. Why do you say that?

Alicia:

I say that because it's really identifying the customer journey. And if you can in any of your marketing, know your customers and the journey that they are on and help take them from point A to point B, like I said, without them paying, you're going to have a lifelong loyal customer for life. Because if somebody comes in and you help change their life, whether or not they pay you, they're going to look at you as the source of truths, who they trust, who they would come back to. And so it's a challenge is the vehicle that can help take them from point A to point B because you're like, here is what you need all the resources to be. Our customer wanted to be healthy, hydrated, loved, motivated, all these things. And so with our weekly challenges and the 60 day overall, it was so much more than hydration.

It was like they come in for hydration, but then they leave a different person. They set goals, they felt like they loved themselves, they stepped outside of their comfort zone, and so they go through this transformation that they didn't even expect. And so that's why it's an even deeper transformation. And when you put them in a challenge community, they're going through this, they're going through this experience with people, and that's what really changes the game because when you go through this journey alone, it's like if we sent them some guides or like, Hey, knock yourself out. Here's some tools and resources and they just try to do it, they're not going to be as successful likely. Or if you can put them in a community where they can go on a shared experience and the challenge of the vehicle that is that experience, then it creates this hyper-engaged community because they start sharing their tips, their tricks, their failures, their successes. This is my favorite healthy meal, this is how I set my goals. And then people start commenting like, oh, I love that milk. Can you send me some more information? And it creates this community around that sharing experience that your customers are on. And so that's why I think it's the best vehicle for sure because it's systemized. It's super easy as a brand owner to deliver and just give your customers the ability to connect in ways that they wouldn't normally be able to.

Brett:

It's so good. It's so good. I love Donald Miller's building a story brand. And one thing he talks about in the book is that the hero in the story is not your product. It's not you as the business owner of the brand. The hero is the customer. And so our job is we're a guide along that journey. We're like a Sherpa helping our customer to the peak of the mountain that they're trying to climb. And so the more we can show that with our product, here's how our product can help you get what you want in your life. But then I think the challenge, the community really helps accelerate that where otherwise it might just be a water bottle and then the water bottle is just sitting at home. But with the challenge, it's like, no, no, no. I'm part of a community now where I can share my story, I can hear other people's stories, I can get motivation, I can get questions answered, I can celebrate, and I got people who will cheer me on and clap.

For me. It's a real experience in a community. Kind of an interesting story, I just got into running again. I went for several years without running, and I just run by my house. So there's big hills and stuff, but the other day I was running and running up this big hill and I saw two guys running down the hill, and then at the bottom of the hill there was, I think it was one of their wives in a Tacoma pickup. And so she picked them up and brought 'em up the hill and they just kept running up and down the hill. And every time I pass, they'd be like, you can do this, man, you got this. And as the lady drove by the Tacoma, she's like, you keep going. You just keep grinding. And I didn't know who they were, but I was like, Hey, this run feels pretty good. This is a better run than normal. It's just the spontaneous

Alicia:

Community.

Brett:

That's awesome, but we all want that. And so that's when you create these challenges, you can create the environment for that for your customers. And I think you nailed it where you said it's actually pretty easy if you structure this the right way.

Alicia:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's a great example where it's like you feel like the sense of motivation when you have people in your corner, it's just a whole different thing. And humans, we're designed to be with people, and so we all crave that connection. And whatever experience you're going on, sometimes you don't have people in your life going through that experience. You don't have people that are into running or that want to get hydrated or get in shape or, so if you can find a community through a brand that provides those people that are on that shared experience, you're going to lock into that brand and stay loyal to them.

Brett:

Totally. I think that's the real magic behind some of these communities that you and I are part of Blue Ribbon. I mean, okay, so part of the Magic Blue Ribbon is Ezra Fire Zone. He's a genius and he is an awesome, good actor, but the reason someone will stick around in that since the beginning, my business partner and I have been in that group since the beginning. It is because of Ezra, but it's also the connections. These are people and we are going through the same stuff all the time. I can't talk to some of my local friends or my family necessarily about what we struggle with as entrepreneurs, but I can in that group. And so you're creating that for your customers through these challenges, which is really cool. So let's talk about this. So I am sure there's some people listening that are like, okay, but you sold water bottles before you sold the company. That's easy to do a hydration challenge. So how could this work for another brand? And then how do you figure out where do you insert this or where does this fit in the customer journey?

Alicia:

Yeah, for sure. So there's two steps to that. And the first is the, I didn't come up with this, but it totally makes sense. There's three core markets that every product serves. When somebody is going to buy your product, they're either trying to serve something to do with their health, wealth or relationships. Those are the three core markets and needs that people are trying to fulfill. So that's the first step is identifying where your brand falls in that. Do you serve them in their health, wealth or relationships? And sometimes it's not so obvious. Maybe it's the relationship with themselves, maybe it's the relationship with their pets, maybe it's their health with mental health or emotional health or physical health. Kind of just have to dig deep in what of those three core markets do you help serve. And then the next step is really taking the time and mapping out your customer's journey because sometimes it's not so obvious. Even water bottles seem so obvious to me now, but it's like I was struggling. It probably wasn't

Brett:

The beginning though, was it?

Alicia:

No, I like spend a whole week, you could sell a water bottle to anybody. I could have sold it to 40 year old men. And that's a whole different customer journey than the middle-aged women that our community was made up of. And so really figuring out who your customer is and their customer journey in relation to your product. And that has to do a lot with your brand mission. So you have to understand one of your three core markets, but then next step is your brand mission. My brand mission was helping empower people to live their life with infinite possibilities and believe in them themselves that they could do things, they could do big things. So that's what I wanted to empower people to do. And so I found my six day hydration challenge and my group of people in the customer journey and designed that to fit my brand mission.

And that's just going to be you, your brand, your brand mission. And then just taking the time, I have built out this avatar worksheet essentially where it's the before state, the after state where your customer is, where they're trying to go, and what are all the objections that are stopping them from achieving that. And so I know one example, skincare, we had a client that was massively successful was their challenge. They created a confident in your skin challenge. They realized that the ultimate desire of their customers were to feel confident, to feel beautiful. They were like women 30 plus that are just hitting that age where like, oh my gosh, and they want to still feel youthful and pretty. And so they've made their challenge around feeling confident as you're aging and their challenge just knocked out of the park. And it's just really a matter of, it's not so much the product as it is your brand mission and what your mission is to what you are trying to do in the world. And so I think it can be harder for faceless brands or drop shipping brands. You need to have a mission. You need to know what you're trying to do with your products, and that's going to be the ultimate driver of how you can create your challenge,

Brett:

This element of authenticity where customers can sniff out if you don't really mean this or if you don't really care. Absolutely. And so this has to connect with your mission, with your brand mission, or else customers are going to be like, why would I do that? You don't believe in this. People just get that. Maybe they wouldn't verbalize it that way, but they get that sense. And so it does have to align with your mission for sure. Absolutely. As I was looking at some of your ads, some of the things that you ran to launch your challenge, you were in those ads, I think it was you and a family member or something maybe, and just was authentic man. You could see your passion. People connected with that. They commented on the fact that, Alicia, you're living this, you're doing this. We want to be like you, type of thing. So I think that's important to note too. The challenge has to line up with your mission,

Alicia:

And you're absolutely right, customers can sniff it out. I've seen a few communities or challenges be launched where unfortunately the brand owners weren't bought into their own mission or didn't really have a strong one, and they're successful enough, but the ones that just kill it are the brand owners that are truly passionate about the mission of their brand. So that really matters.

Brett:

Cool. So what would you do then if you sold auto parts or auto accessories or if you sold home goods or something like that? And I know I'm throwing some big categories at you, but thoughts there, and I know you've got to go through the process. I know this isn't just like a, oh, snap your finger and you come up with a challenge. But any thoughts there to help someone apply this by looking at the health, wealth and relationships and the journey?

Alicia:

I mean, yeah, so auto parts, it's likely to men, that's likely your customer and you'd identify health, wealth or relationships. It's likely relationships, or it could even be wealth could

Brett:

Depending on Yep. Because wealthy our Jeep or our truck or whatever is a status symbol to us. Yes.

Alicia:

Status. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Or it could be the relationship with themselves and their family. So really identifying which part of that you're in and then understanding that man's customers journey. And you'd be surprised these communities, I wasn't sure if it would work very well with men, but they do because even men are looking for community. We need

Brett:

Connection too, man. Yeah,

Alicia:

Yeah. They're looking for connection too, where you could join a community and talk about, I mean, my fiance brilliant with cars and can tear 'em apart and put 'em back together, and he geeks out when he can, finds somebody else that is as knowledgeable and can build these things with him. And so understanding, I mean, I wouldn't know exactly the exact challenge I would do, but understanding him, somebody like him that loves cars and that's why he used to do build 'em. And then providing him the community to meet other men that are knowledgeable or want to learn about auto parts and building cars and what's that for? Is it for racing? Is it for just buying and selling cars? What is your brand? What's the point of your brand? And really building that community because somebody that builds them to race is much different than the person that's building them and selling them. And so it's taking all those pieces and coming together for that person and best serving them.

Brett:

Totally makes sense. Yeah. Is it an off-roading community? Is it a racing community? Is it like a classic car restorations? We're building these and taking 'em to car shows. What is that community building? And building it around that I think makes a ton

Alicia:

Of sense. Yeah. Then they'd be so excited, I just entered this car show, check it out. And they'd show pictures of the subs that they put in the car. I don't know, whatever that they put in. So there's definitely people that would love to share that experience. And so it's really on the brand, obviously. And then how you can build that out

Brett:

Totally makes sense. And I can see this apply on the food side of things. If you're selling healthy prepackaged breakfast bars or something or packaged oatmeal or whatever, that would be a health play. If you're selling barbecue supplies and barbecue tools and utensils, that's a relationship play, right? Barbecue is about even the memory and gatherings and prints and memories. And so yeah, I like that thinking about what does this tie into and then building your challenge around that. Super, super smart. Cool. And I know you mentioned this in the beginning, but the challenge really accelerated every other aspect of your business. It was a three x multiplier of revenue, which is impressive considering how well you guys were doing on Amazon at the time, but how does a challenge help scale the rest of your brand?

Alicia:

Yeah, great question. So this is the part that was totally unexpected and totally welcomed. I did all of our marketing, ran our ads, emails, wrote our content, everything like that. And so when we had our community, all of a sudden these incredible stories with pictures of our water bottles and stuff were just flooding this Facebook group. And I'm like, man, these are way cooler stories than I could have came up with. They're they're real, they're authentic. And so I would scrape that content and turn 'em into blog posts, which then I would use that blog post to send as an email, which would drive revenue. And then if that email performed very well, I'd turn that content into a Facebook ad and then that Facebook ad would drive revenue. And so I was like this free content that was just flooded,

Brett:

Free content machine man.

Alicia:

And I mean by the time we sold, we didn't even tap into a fifth of that. I feel like it was just so much and we could just keep going through different stories that would relate to different people, different segments of our community, and we just run them as ads. So that was the biggest thing that helped us scale was just before I would beg people, can you please take a picture was our water bottle. Can you send us something? And we had no idea how to do influencer marketing or brand ambassadors. We didn't have any of that. And so to get that kind of content was really hard for us. And so I was the face of our ads for a long time, but then as soon as we had this community, they became everything. And so I didn't have to come up with all this content anymore in my life, just got so much easier and I could create my monthly plan. I'm like, here's a cool story, here's a great story, and just throw it all in there in these emails and blog posts and ads performed so much better than even the stuff I could come up with because it was so authentic. And so people would share their stories of how their lives were changed by coming into and being a customer of ours. And you can't make it up. And it wasn't forced, it wasn't paid for. It was real.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so great. And I think it makes a lot of sense in the beginning, especially to kind be the face of your brand if you're so inclined and you've got the personality and the ability to do that, but that's also hard and it's exhausting. And then if you ever want to sell your business, that becomes tricky too. So you kind of leveraged this challenge to allow the customers to be the face of the brand and to really have this content machine that you leveraged for scale. And so kudos to you for that. Let's talk a little bit about some of the mechanics here. So how did this work? So you got this 60 day hydration challenge, you got these mini challenges along the way. How did you promote it? How'd you facilitate it? And I know that that could be a podcast in and of itself, but kind of high level, how did you promote it? How did you structure it? How'd you facilitate it?

Alicia:

For sure. So the structure essentially is 60 day hydration challenge or six day quarter objective. The thing that you have your customer pledge to do for that time period, however long that might be, 30, 60 days. And then every single week I would break it up into mini weekly challenges. And there were so many reasons for this one, because six stay is a long time and people lose interest. So they were like, oh, I don't know. But then if you're changing up the conversation every single week, that's what caused the hyper-engaged ness of our community was like, it's nutrition week, it's self-love week, it's setting goals. And so the conversations were always changing and people were always interested in what's going on, so they would stay around and engage longer. And then the other part of that is that it helps them with all those other things that we talked about to be successful along the customer journey. And then my first challenge

Brett:

Too, because if all you had to talk about was water, maybe you kind run out of things to say like, I'm still hydrated. I feel great. There'd be more to it than that. But the idea that you have then specific mini challenges each week, change the conversation lot. Maybe the same person to comment every week and to share something new and fresh every week. There's going to be some people along that journey. The water's cool, and so the hydration is a nice benefit, but it was really one of those mini challenges that

Alicia:

Lit

Brett:

A fire under them and cause them to really make big personal gains in their life. And so love the idea of the weekly mini challenge.

Alicia:

Exactly, exactly. What happened. Some people were like, I'm working on my water, but I'm really doing my self love. They're doing that. And then the other really big pro to that is that people from our first round, they still do it like 16 challenges later. They're still in it because every single round is different because you change the mini weekly challenges. And so it's a senate and forget it kind of machine. Once you build it, you just keep it running and all you do is change out the mini weekly challenges and it's a whole new every single time without having to reinvent the wheel, which is really, really good because then people stay around and when they stay around, they start promoting you to the new customers and they're like, do you have the purple bottle? Do you have the grit green one? And they start selling your products, and that's better than anything you could say.

Brett:

That's awesome. And so are you mostly then facilitating this through Facebook and through community there, or are you doing something through Discord or Slack or email or kind of how are you facilitating it?

Alicia:

Yeah, it was all through Facebook. So we had a Facebook group mainly for a few reasons. Facebook groups are just like, I feel like the best community place right now has all the tools you need, being able to go live and set events and see who's engaging. And then also just because that was the majority of our ad spend, we were all on Facebook. And so it was easy. That was our customers, they were there. So that's what I always recommend. And all the communities I've helped, they're on Facebook as well. And it gives you all the tools that you need to run the communities, which is great.

Brett:

Very cool. So how much you and your fiance exited the business? Congratulations to you guys. I know that Thank you. For most brand owners, either that's the goal or they want to merge with somebody else, but usually some m and a is part of the goal for e-comm brands. So talk about that just a little bit. How do you think this success with challenges allowed you to have that exit that you had hoped for?

Alicia:

Yeah, I mean, it gave us so many pieces of the puzzle that when we were talking to our broker for years, they're like, you need this thing, this thing. I'm like, and then when we had this community, we're like, we have those things, now we got it. Here's a roadmap. Here's a five to 10 year roadmap of what the customers want. Because now we actually know them. We talk to them, they say, we run surveys and they want these products. Here's a game plan. We could give them that as well as it definitely provides a level of defense when you have an audience that is so valuable in so many ways. And that's why Facebook so such a big company, they've got a huge audience. And if you can have an audience of your own net rallies behind you, that's your biggest fan and grow your email list and stuff, it's very attractive to a potential buyer of like, Hey, look, here is some defense because you got this hyper-engaged community and a big email list and it's continuing to grow and here's a vehicle to attract new customers. But definitely most of all, just that roadmap because Shannon and I, we launched products back in the day that completely flopped because we didn't know our customers. And that's very expensive. That's so hard, so

Brett:

Much time, so much money in your first run and working with manufacturers and prototypes and all that just to then w w have it fail. Yeah, it's painful.

Alicia:

It's very painful. And every product that we launched after our community was a success because it was based off of what they wanted and we were able to be show them, us building it and it out to launch and they were ready, goodbye. And so that it really helps that roadmap. We didn't have one before. If somebody said, where do you take this brand? Before it was like, keep growing. It's wherever

Brett:

You want to. Whatever sounds good to,

Alicia:

Exactly, exactly. But

Brett:

Now when you know your customer and you have this community, you know what products to offer next because they will tell you, and what does a buyer of your brand want? What does a potential investor, whether it's a strategic or PE or whoever's going to come in and buy the brand, they want to know, how can I grow this brand more, right? I'm buying it at this value, but I want to grow it to 2, 3, 4, 5 x what you're currently doing. So what's my product roadmap? How defensible is this, right? How likely am I to be able to ward off competitors and then grow as competition increases? And having a community is about the best protection, the best moat that you can have around your brand. Certainly intellectual property, IP and pads and stuff, that's cool, but that's kind of hard to get in a lot of cases.

And so having this community around your brand really provides that, and then it increases L T V, it can help either lower CAC or just keep CAC at a healthy level. And so I love it. I think this is likely one missing piece that people need in their marketing and in their approach to building new customers or attracting new customers and keeping existing ones is launching challenges. And so I know you are not part of the brand anymore. You guys sold it and stuff. Are they still doing these challenges? Is it still running or do you know?

Alicia:

Yeah, yeah. I believe they still are. I think they're on the 16th round now.

Brett:

That's so cool.

Alicia:

Of the 60 day irrigation challenge. And we exited at the 10th, so I did 10 of them before leaving.

Brett:

That's awesome. But really the ideal thing here is you find a challenge that works, that gets people interested, and then you keep doing it, you keep running it and it becomes evergreen and you change out the mini challenges. But then the overarching challenge still works.

Alicia:

And the biggest thing is you can't mess up, to be honest. If you start a challenge and it doesn't hit the target, if you're showing up authentically and you're showing up like this is our brand, this is our mission, this is what we're trying to do, that shines through beyond anything else. And then you can make adjustments your customer's like, man, you're so cool. I really enjoyed this, but how about we try a step challenge now that would make more sense. So it's like it's going out there. And I mean, my first challenge, I just was winging. I had no idea. I didn't even know I was doing weekly challenges. I was just like, Hey guys, let's drink water. And it just evolved into something and people helped me build it because they could see the authenticity and they bought into the brand mission. So that's why I emphasize brand mission more than anything because you just really can't mess it up, like are genuine and you have a strong mission, and that's really what you're trying to do is help transform people's lives.

Brett:

Well said. I love that. That's going to be a good place to kind of wrap up this discussion. I do want you to share, though, people are listening. They're like, okay, this sounds awesome, but you know what? I don't want to do this by myself. So Alicia, what is the name of your company? I think it's Challenge Makers, correct. So tell us a little bit about that and how do you guys operate?

Alicia:

Yeah, for sure. So challenge makers.com is where I have a little course now where you can go through in the exact process of my templates, the M avatar worksheet, identifying your own customer journey, and then all my emails and all the templates into building a challenge. I have that available as well as the option to work one-on-one with me where my team comes in and we strategize it for you and actually build it for you. So we have both options available on challenge

Brett:

Challenge makers.com. Alicia Reynoso, ladies and gentlemen, Alicia, that was so good. So fun. Thank you for the time. Really, really enjoyed it.

Alicia:

Thank you so much for having me. That was a blast.

Brett:

Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We would love to hear from you. Hey, connect with me on the socials. If we're not friends on LinkedIn, what's going on? If we're not connected on Facebook or on Twitter, let's do that. I am beginning to post more regularly and check out the YouTube channel, O M G Commerce, YouTube channel, posting new content there, new shorts, new stuff. Maybe you missed a previous episode. We got highlights for you on YouTube. So check that out. And as always, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Drew Sanocki has successfully turned around 8 and 9-figure eCommerce brands not once, not twice, but 5 times. Among his successes are AutoAnything and Karmaloop. 

Drew is also the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Post Pilot (direct mail made for DTC and eCommerce). 

He knows the strategies behind what it takes to succeed in DTC better than almost anyone I know. 

Here’s a look at what we cover:

• Jay Abraham’s 3 ways to grow any business. 
• New Customer Acquisition (NCA) is only ONE way to grow your business and is almost certainly the most expensive way.
• Why Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) can be misleading and why focusing on Customer Value Optimization (CVO) matters more.
• What all failing eCommerce brands have in common and how to avoid the death spiral. 
• The principle of optimizing before you multiply. 
• Using direct mail for retention, remarketing, AND new customer acquisition.

Whatever you do, don't mention "Growth Hacking" to Nirav Sheth. Trust me, he's got something even better!

Nirav is the CRO mastermind driving success for some of the fastest-growing and most loved DTC brands like Molekule, Mack Weldon, Athletic Greens, Four Sigmatic, and more.

He has a truly unique and effective way of approaching optimization that defies all traditional CRO norms. It all begins with understanding what we should test and what we shouldn't based on the dollars behind it.

What we cover:

• How an eBike company turned the tables on their "add to cart" rate, resulting in a jaw-dropping $12 million impact.
• How a shoe company reworked its mobile experience to simplify and improve conversions.
• When to run quizzes, when to not, and when to ask more questions instead of less (this will likely surprise you).
• How to think about CRO from the customer's perspective in terms of "micro journeys."
• Should you go headless? Why Nirav thinks it's usually a bad idea, and when to consider it.

‍

Transcript

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're going to be looking at what it takes to be one of the elite D2C brands that's growing at a fast pace and delighting customers at the same time. So we're going to be diving into optimization and my guest today, the gentleman on the show today, no one better in the business, no one knows more about this topic. And let me just read for you the list of some of the companies this guy's worked for. So he's currently working with Athletic Greens, dollar Shave Club four Sigmatic, Mac Weldon. He was the CTO at WeWork. He was also the CTO at Athletic Greens. This guy knows his stuff. He's going to blow your mind. It's going to be a super fun discussion. So I'm delighted to welcome to the show ov she. So ov, welcome to the show, man. How you doing? And thanks for taking the time.

Nirav:

Thank you so much for having me, Brett. Super excited to be here with you.

Brett:

Yeah, I'm pumped about this. So obviously I've been in the D2C business for a long time, had the agency OMG Commerce since 2010. I'm an avid online shopper, and both from the service provider standpoint and the customer standpoint, I love good ux. I love a good user experience. I love a website that's easy and intuitive and fun to shop and I know that you do that so well. But I do want to hear kind of quickly before we dive into this topic, and we got lots of tips and insights and pet peeves that we'll talk about and some other fun stuff. But how did you get into this? How does somebody go from wherever you began to now working with some of the most loved and fastest growing D2C brands?

Nirav:

Yeah, well, great question Brett. Well, I actually started the whole business and my consulting agency Anata out of my childhood bedroom. So out of my parents' house, 1100 square foot home.

Brett:

That's awesome.

Nirav:

Green tile walls, the most ugly looking walls you'll ever see. Love it. Blue carpet, it

Brett:

Was. Do you have pictures of these green tile walls and

Nirav:

Blue carpets? I do, I do. It's still there. Yeah, you got to share those and then it's like a 60 square foot bedroom. And that's really where I started my company from. And it was a place where I had to grow up with immigrant parents coming from an immigrant family and first generation came out of college and I was three classes short of graduating and I had a decision maker. I was either run and create my company or go get a job and I had no other decisions. My parents made it very clear, you don't make enough money to make this work, you're going to have to find a job. We didn't spend $45,000 a month on it year at George Washington University education for nothing. And we didn't work our butts off for that. So I had six months to do it in while going back and forth from dc taking the mark train back and forth from Delaware to go get my classes done. And at the same time we're growing the company and luckily still to not a flourished, but I was able to make the $50,000 in six months that I needed to make. And that's what really started in nada. And from there, dude, that's pretty

Brett:

Good. 50,000 bucks in six months for a guy finishing up school. That's awesome. And if anybody's wanting know how to spell that or trying to type it in while you're on the go, it's a N A T T A, correct?

Nirav:

Yes, absolutely correct. Okay, awesome.

Brett:

And so then were you getting a degree in design in UX or how did the work relate to the degree

Nirav:

That and barely It went from, I had an electrical engineering degree, which helped me understand programming and knowing programming, but really it was really teaching me be how to be a really amazing project manager. I could be able to take any project from start to finish. And I think that's a true skillset that I got in knowing how to manage budgets, how to work with timelines and be able to complete something. And so that's really what it taught me from a business angle and how anada as I was starting to create it, that's where I fit in. I became that project manager and then I just staffing and going to hustle to find the next client.

Brett:

Love it. And really that engineering mindset is super valuable for optimization and testing too, isn't it like that? Did that training help you with the optimization process as well?

Nirav:

Absolutely. I mean the mathematics and the statistics side really helped out and to truly understand what is going to move the needle and what's not, especially on optimization front, if you don't understand both qualitative and quantitative metrics, you really lose.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, so good. Yeah, so good. Well let's dive in then. So what are some of the most common mistakes you see D two C brands making when it comes to UX and ui?

Nirav:

So the biggest mistakes that I see in the UX side as well as UI is really trying to hack at solutions and think that by changing the color of a button or by making a small little change that is somehow going to move the needle in a massive way, especially with convert like C R O programs out today. You're really just trying to throw darts on a board and see which one sticks. And nowadays it's really, really difficult to be able to run the number of tests that it really takes in order to create a successful C R O program. When you're doing UI and ux, you're trying to figure out what's going to move the needle with conversion rates, what's going to move the needle with average order value? What's going to move the value the needle with lifetime value or churn? And when you're looking at these metrics, you're specifically having to figure out what benchmarks can you work with, what are you going to be able to move the needle on and how are you going to be able to do that?

And when you don't know why your customers are not completing their purchase or why they're not buying from you, but you're just throwing darts on the board to figure out, well maybe this will work or maybe this will work. You have to have such a large volume of tests in order to conduct that level of work. And when you do, are you really measuring how much it costs you to run that large volume of tests? So Brett, to give you an example, well when we think about running, let's say 50 tests and you get one winner, maybe you get two winners out of it. Okay, so then two out 50 you got correct. Well what about the 48 out of the 50 that you got losses in? Did you ever put that into your equation about the investment that it took to not only launch those 48 other tests but that the losses that you incurred while running those 48 other tests?

And so I think a lot of this common mistakes that we're seeing across a lot of the merchants that are how launching C r O programs that are doing UX UI work is that they're not paying attention to number one academic research that's already been done and used nowadays. So there's two companies that we really heavily rely on. One is Nielsen Norman Group and the second is Bay Mart out of Copenhagen. And we love these institutions because they use hundreds of thousands of hours of usability research so that we don't actually have to AB test every single thing. We know what are the common issues that people face from a navigation copy user journey flow perspective for, and especially with Bay Mart, it's all around the e-commerce funnel, P L P P D P cart checkout, these are all common terms in the e-commerce space and they have massive reports telling you the 300 things not to do on your product page.

And so leveraging that and having that say, I don't need to test that, I'm just going to make sure I don't do this and I follow these heuristics, is the best starting point for a lot of brands that just need quick wins. So if you're going to do quick wins, don't do quick wins based on, hey, I just want to test this, do quick wins based on academic research. That's actually been done because e-commerce has actually been around, it's funny to think about it, it's been around for more than 20 years. It's wild. And I wouldn't even think of that as 2020 long years. But we have that long period of time that people have been purchasing and buying online and there's a lot of research to start with. So I would say number one, starting with research is really important, but two, when you start doing a C R O program, pay attention to what are the tests instead of trying to do such a large volume of tests, what about trying to find one to five tests that you could be able to do that are much more insightful, that are bigger swings?

And I think that's the big difference, what we're focused on here in anta, but what we've done across with athletic grains, what we've done at Dollar Shade Club is that we actually said we don't want to launch 200 tests this month. We want to launch 20 tests this month. And out of the 20 tests we have such a higher win ratio because we've done so much research to back what the hypothesis was in the first place and why we believe that was causing an issue. So we're using qualitative data to figure out the why. And that's like going to, maybe, it might be going too detailed into this, but when you figure out what is an opportunity, you have to discover why that is a problem and discover before you start creating a bunch of solutions and trying to have an A B C D E F test, which will take probably 60 days to run in a very large volume site, why not just find one or two solutions because you actually did the work to figure out what the problem was in the first place. And I think that that's a common issue that people have.

Brett:

I love this so much. And then I've talked about this topic with a few other people and there's this kind of general consensus or a lot of people talk about it where you say, Hey, if you want to make a test, you got to isolate each little variable, otherwise you run a test and you won't know was it this button or this headline or whatever. But thing about that is if you make a small headline tweak or you make a button color change, most likely you're not going to see any difference, right? It's a small change. You probably won't see any measurable difference. If you do, it probably won't move the needle at all. And then how long is it going to take for you to get to something meaningful? So do you really want to know exactly what change it was that made the difference, whether it with the button color headline or a number of things, or do you just want to get the good results? You just want to get, do you just want to improve those problems? And I love how you outline that. How can we increase average order value? How do we increase lifetime value or reduce churn? And so looking at where are we off, where do we need to see improvements, what are our hypotheses behind why we need to see improvements? And then let's make some tests that are likely to move the needle and such a smart approach there. Any examples or any specific wins you can map out there following your approach?

Nirav:

Yeah. Well let me go a little bit deeper into the approach, Brett, and I'll give you an example please. While working through that. So one of our clients being a large e-bike company, they, what we wanted to look at is where does the opportunity exist? And a lot of times it's really hard to quantify where the opportunity exists, but if you have benchmark information specifically, to give you an example, let's take add to cart rates. And when we look at add to cart rates, specifically in the leisure space or in the activities and hobby space, we can be able to get a large benchmark of saying, okay, based on this size of product average, like average order value is above $500 in this specific vertical, we're expecting add to cart rates to be at roughly 15%. And that's what the industry benchmark is. So that provides us a lot of useful

Brett:

Information. And you mean 15%, 15% of people with an add to cart go ahead and complete checkout? Is that what you mean? Or 15% of business add to cart?

Nirav:

Yeah, 15% of you visitors add to cart. Got it. So in that industry it was a little bit lower just simply because the average order value is so much higher. You're selling products that are 2000, $2,500 a year. A, your add to cart brains are as high as you would get from a, let's say a $10 product or a $20 product. And so once we know that that's 15%, then what we can do is say, okay, where are you performing as a merchant? And so when we looked at the merchant, they were performing at close to around 10%. So now we have a 5% differential. And we can quantify that by taking their visitors and taking their average value and saying, look, this 5% differential, if we are able to get you from 10% to what the industry benchmark is at 15%, this one test alone or this one area that we're going to focus on is going to bring you 12 million in additional revenue. So yeah, because

Brett:

A 50% increase going from 10% to exactly 15%, 50% increase in add to carts. And ideally you would think that it'd be the same percentage of add to carts end up closing, and so could be a 50% lift. Right?

Nirav:

Exactly. But that's where Brett people don't actually take the time to quantify the actual money value behind it. What you traditionally see in the Optimizely based approach was this democratization around testing programs that says, Hey, everybody pitch your hypothesis everybody, and let's vote on which one we want to launch. And that whole approach misses one big factor is how much money is this worth? Because if I have a 20 million opportunity on one hand and a $10 opportunity, on another hand, I don't care if I got 99 votes on this $10 opportunity I'm using, I'm going after the 20 million opportunity.

Brett:

Absolutely. Absolutely. It's so interesting and I think that first of all, that's so brilliant. What are we going to test and why? And then if we do test it, let's just say we find a winner. Let's say our mind is blown, we have an answer, we go in a different direction. What could that do for us in terms of sales? It's kind of just a shift in mindset. I remember meeting a guy who was early on a team on Amazon, and then he was there for quite a while and he said towards the end of his stay there, as they would pitch new ideas to management for a new business use case or whatever, it had to be worth a billion dollars to even be considered. How would this idea generate a billion dollars in new revenue or otherwise? Why are we doing it? Because that's not going to move the deal enough. Now that's thinking huge Amazon scale, this was probably a decade ago too, but we still need to have a similar mindset with our business. Okay, got finite resources and finite time. So which tests am I going to run? And let's think about not only am I likely to win here, what problem am I trying to solve, but how much money could this make me? And if you know those things, then you're off to the right start.

Nirav:

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And if we're talking about the mid-market brands that you and I both speak to, brands that are doing 25 million all the way up to $200 million, you're looking for opportunities that are going to move the needle for you in millions of dollars of range, not in thousands of dollars of range. And if you're spending thousands of dollars, but your actual program to run UX and UI and C R O costs you $20,000, $30,000, it's not going to pay for itself and you're just wasting time and money to while doing it. So definitely have to find your r o. I

Brett:

Love it, man. That's so good. Awesome. So case studies examples, what are some of the tests you have run? And walk us through the process of how you got to that test and then what that did.

Nirav:

Totally, totally. So in the case with the E-bikes, one of the things that we really found from a lot of our deep research was that the more people that use search, the higher intent those people were, and that if we drove more people to search, the more people we could have to purchase. And this was claiming from both quantitative research that we could see those numbers, but also qualitative wise, when we spoke with the user studies to figure out, hey, what is it that you're, where are you getting stuck? What are you not being able to find? And they said the search was the part that was a missing component. And so finding that we actually did things to elevate the search results to make it not only more prominent, but also bring more focus specifically to that area, improve the search results, improve the empty search results, et cetera.

And by doing that, we saw a nice lift in not only the add to cart rates, but also the conversion rates. So the process that we used was very similar to what I was mentioning, which is one, let's focus on best practices and let's just eliminate all the common leaky funnels that could approach. Number two, look for benchmarking opportunities. Where are we seeing some lower rates compared to industry benchmarks? So we're seeing low add to cards. And then as we dug back to go deep into figure out why was the add to cart lower, we're seeing that people were not able to find the search leverage search and use search results as a result of that. So then we solution specifically around search versus solutioning around everything. When you think about add to cart, it could be a myriad of different issues, content can be a problem, PLPs could be an issue.

The way that you're showing imagery could be a problem. Instead of trying to solve every one of those, we needed to run some usability studies to actually figure out where are customers getting stuck. Both polls and surveys are really good, but also interviewing cus customers and some unique things we've learned about when one of our clients, another case study example is with M GM E, which is a footwear premium, luxury footwear brand for per women and men. And they make shoes out of Italy. Great, great client, great product. And one of the things we did was we did a usability study with them on their phones and on their desktop. And the craziest things we've observed Brett, but on your phone, when people are shopping and going through the user journey, they're being impacted by 40 different things when they're on their phone, their kids shouting from the side, totally husband's asking them a question, their TV's going on there may be

Brett:

Driving, I probably shouldn't infest it, but sometimes I'm look at stuff like at a red light or whatever, and that's probably not safe, but it happens. Yeah,

Nirav:

It happens. And on a phone that, and we saw the eyes going everywhere. We saw their focus going everywhere. And then on a desktop they were like eyes were concentrated, they were reading the full pages and you barely saw any movement. And just by doing that form of user study specifically with M G E, we were able to start ascertaining When we were looking at specific rates that we wanted to improve, we had to say, okay, this is what we're dealing with on mobile, so let's do things that really concentrate, focus on mobile and not put too much content in front of them because we just know we have such limited attention. So speed is of course important, but two, what are we trying to showcase to them? How are we trying to merchandise in front of them? Because if we only have such limited attention, maybe one or two product offerings is much better than the entire catalog where on desktop we could show a lot more, we have much more focus from them.

So doing use user studies helps us really understand that specific market. And while that mobile to desktop example can be probably true for many other brands, this is where brands like Athletic Greens have done really well. And another brand that we work with called Cloudera Lab, which is a men's skincare line, has done really well with one product called their serum, is that they keep such a centralized focus on just one thing. And the reason why I love that is because if you have such limited attention and they already have so much cognitive load on them because they're being distracted by 50 different things, what can you show them as just the one thing with one message that makes it easy for them to buy? And that's what I've always loved about athletic grains from their product line is that they made it so simple.

Now, not every merchant can only sell one product. I'm not advocating now destroy your entire cashflow. I can only sell one product. But at the same time, if you're on a mobile journey and you're trying to bring somebody who's brand new to you, can you maybe showcase and kind of merchandise one or a few products at minimum and then keep it so narrow because you already know that the cognitive load is so high and that they have no attention span. So what can you do to drive them in versus trying to serve them everything? One of my friends, Antonio would always say, don't tell the whole story. Tell a story. Yeah,

Brett:

I love that. Don't tell the whole story. Tell a story. And yeah, if you think about that, someone may be really interested in a product, they see a YouTube video, they see a Facebook ad, they get a referral from somebody, they're interested in one product, but then we get to your landing page or category page, they see all these other options and they think, well, maybe I should consider this, maybe I should consider that. And any confusion, any slowdown in the process, you just increase the odds That person's going to bail, they get distracted, they got to put their phone down. Exactly. They got to the light changes or whatever, a kid needs them and then they never come back. And so that's really, really smart. So don't just tell the whole story, tell a story. Yeah. So how do you help someone think about that then if it's, maybe I've got a large product line, but I know these are my two or three core products. So how do you help someone narrow that down to decide what are we going to showcase on mobile? What are we going to showcase on desktop? What is that experience going to be like?

Nirav:

I think you have to treat things Brett as micro journeys from how you segment your channel. So looking at various channels of where you're getting your incoming traffic from, whether it's paid search, organic, et cetera. And once you understood where that journey is going, then you can be able to ascertain which set of products can be merchandised specifically for that journey. And so when you're defining your initial landing page to your product detail page to where you're showing the catalog and the cart checkout experience, you have to then go through that experience and say, what was the ad that we served for them? What is the emotion that we're trying to elicit from that? And then where are we serving in terms of trust factors, testimonials, product information, et cetera, to really gear them into that one core product or two core product offering and move it forward from there.

But specifically to answer your question, finding not only, you have to know where your segment's coming in from that way you know what best to serve them because it's not always just going to be the two most popular product. It's going to be based on the copy and the messaging that you're saying all the way starting from the ad. And I think that's another problem where a lot of agencies who are doing traditional C R O fail and we failed at it. I I'll say very clearly that for so many years at my agency, we failed at this, was we were looking so myopically at just the website perspective and say, well, I don't pay attention to what comes before it. That's a black box. What I pay attention to is once you land on my site, what do I do with that? And it's like, but if you don't pay attention to what came beforehand, how do you know what messaging was being served? How do you know what emotions were being elicited? How do you know what was there? And so if you only pay attention to one area, you're missing out on the reason why that person clicked over in the first place and what were they being promised?

Brett:

Yeah. And that's thinking about just looking at the website as a silo, that's looking at it from your perspective. Yes. Not the shopper's perspective. The shopper's coming in with this context, these expectations, these hopes, these dreams, promises made in an ad, and they want consistency. They want to see what they see in the ad or wherever they saw you, and then they want to know immediately that they're in the right place when they land on your site and that you're going to deliver on those promises. So really, really smart. Other case studies you would reference, but both of those were brilliant. Any other case studies you would reference?

Nirav:

Yeah, I mean, another reference that I would have was say there's a really great company that we've been working with for the last couple years is a company called Thesis and they sell nootropics and their product really works well. And one of the things that we've really learned and identified, and this came before we even started, was that their quiz experience was their main kind of core acquisition funnel. And a lot of brands are starting to go this quiz approach and they take say, Hey, don't have a starting point, take the quiz and learn about the products. But especially when you have a product that requires more education and people don't really know what to start from, quizzes can be a really, really great place to work with. But one of the things we learned in the quiz experience that a lot of people don't understand and see is that they launch these quizzes without understanding what are we trying to do in terms of delivering value.

So when you have a quiz that's too short, meaning you're not asking enough questions to ascertain what it is about that person, the psychological behavior of that person is like, Hey, you didn't ask me enough, so before you deliver me, Hey, these are your results. You are, you're making the consumer feel I answered a few questions and now you're delivering a result, how is that result even possible? And so you're losing them in that track. So just by making this fundamental change, by understanding that user behavior and watching them go through the quiz process and seeing how they processed it, we learned that by asking a lot more questions and making the quiz even lengthier, which is normally the opposite, you would see from most people say, Hey, make your quiz shorter. That's the reason people are abandoning because this quiz is too long. It's like, no, no, no, people are actually not purchasing because the quiz isn't long enough. And so interesting, the more we actually got into it till a length process, the higher the conversion rates got, the higher the overall clickthrough were. And people who completed the quiz were at such a higher rate of conversion and people were willing to go through it because the questions, as long as they're relevant, we'll stick through the process. And it's not about how many questions you answer purely, it's about making sure that those questions were valuable, that it felt like it was dictating towards what the result was going to be.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. I think some people's advice, whether you're talking about ad creative videos and stuff, is make it shorter. People don't have good attention spans, but that's not really the point. It's make it better, make it relevant, make it speak to the person. And the same could be said with quizzes. People know people have a sense of what does this question have to do with anything that I'm shopping for? Or you ask a really good question, I think this person's smart. This person asks good questions. And we've seen this work a lot. We've done a lot in the beauty space and personal care and hair coloring space worked with a number of clients and help them scale. And we found the same thing that a slightly longer quiz is better because people want to get this right. The target market was women. A lot of people, a lot of ladies try to cover the gray in their hair with color.

They want to get it right. They're not messing around, they don't want to use your product and then live with a mistake for a long time. And so they would rather you ask them questions. And I love that perspective that if you don't ask enough, they're like, wait a minute, this is not a, isn't a recommendation. This is just some canned thing. This whole quiz is a hoax. But I also wonder, because we see it's on the video side too longer, YouTube videos, two minutes, three minutes, someone engages that long, they're much more predisposed to sell. I also kind of wonder if someone engages more with a quiz and they spend more time with you, likely more, more inclined to convert, I would think at that point.

Nirav:

And that's exactly what we learned, was that they were much higher to convert once they actually spent that much time with you because they realized that you're spending the time to ask them all these right questions. And again, I go back to was that question relevant? So don't ask questions simply to ask another question, make sure it's relevant. And one of the things you said early on is what's one of my pet peeves when it comes to UX and ui? And one of my pet peeves is just asking something up there simply because it's satisfying the requirement of, Hey, I put a quiz up there or I made this hack in the conversion funnel. It's like, I hate that if it's not relevant. That's my biggest pet peeve is that you're doing a quiz just because everybody else is doing a quiz. So if you're selling pistachio milk, for example, and you put a quiz up there, what is the quiz about at the end product you're selling is just going to be a pistachio milk and there's no other versions of it. What am I doing it for? Flavor That doesn't make any sense. So don't use a quiz that's irrelevant. Help me find the right

Brett:

Flavor of pistachio milk.

Nirav:

Yes. Which

Brett:

By the way, I like pistachios. I like pistachios a lot, but is pistachio milk good? That sounds disgusting.

Nirav:

I have no idea. I haven't tried one yet, but I know it exists. Yeah,

Brett:

That's hilarious. So yeah, why are you asking me a quiz? I don't need aqui. You sell two colors of t-shirts. I don't need a quiz for t-shirts. But yes, if it's something like nootropics where I've heard about it on podcasts and I know people are talking about it, but it almost sounds like I'm trying an experimental drug, and so I want to make sure I get it right or hair color, I do not want to screw this up. Quiz makes a ton of sense. So yeah, exactly. Not blindly following the trends that are out there, but how is this relevant to my shopper's journey? What am I making easier? What am I making better? What am I making clearer or am I just checking box? Yeah, totally makes sense.

Nirav:

And wherever you can deliver value. Yeah,

Brett:

Yeah, for sure. Deliver value. Any other pet peeves is just always fascinating to me. People that have a keen eye and are really good at what they do, I love to know what are their pet peeves. It's fascinating to me. I

Nirav:

Would say so many of my pet peeves are around growth hacking. I've been around growth hacking for a long time that some of the tactics that people use. So to give you an example, we worked with a very popular bone broth company and they were growth hacking. And they were looking at, okay, how do I get a O V to or my CAC to go up against my L T V and say, Hey, if my CAC is $90, I have to sell at least $99 worth of bone broth and be able to make a profit off the first purchase. I get that. But then they get them into a subscription program. So to buy $90 worth of bone broth meant that you're buying close

Brett:

To it would be a lot of broth, man.

Nirav:

It's a lot of broth. You're selling 1516 bone broths and then you're getting them on a 14 day subscription and then you're seeing a churn happen, a churn rate of close to 80%. And they were questioning, they were boggled. Why are people churning? And it's like you just sold 'em 15 boxes of both broth and then you got another one shipped 15 days later. And you're asking the question, why isn't this working? And it's purely because they're playing the

Brett:

Numbers game only. They gave up water and all other beverages and just drank bone broth. That would be the only way they're going to consume that much

Nirav:

All the way. Yes. If they drank it like coffee at some point. Yeah. Yeah.

Brett:

But

Nirav:

This is what bothers me on that growth hacking side is that you're, you stop paying attention to the qualitative or what the consumer experiences and you're just hacking away at the numbers and you're forgetting that brands are not built from just purely hacking away at these numbers. They can help elevate you, but if you create a brand experience that really sucks because of this, you're, you're not finding that right middle ground between brand and growth. You're too on the growth side. And the other one is still, I see a lot of these spinning wheels on our websites, the wheel of fortunes. And I cannot understand why certain companies need a wheel of fortune. I understand that if you're a gaming company or you're selling toys, by all means use a wheel of fortune, but you're selling makeup or underwear. I don't know why a wheel should ever be used when it's next to a piece of underwear

Brett:

And I guess you got to can test it or whatever. I've never once in my life, and I'm an avid shopper, I shop from tons of Shopify stores, never once put my email address in there. And obviously I know how they work. I'm a marketing guy and we run email as a service. But I have put my name into a lot of popups because I'm like, well, I'm about to buy this. I do want to get the 10% off, but the wheel never done the wheel. Even one ton.

Nirav:

Yeah. So I'll say with you, yeah,

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So what's interesting to me, and as we talk about the bone broth company, that's sort of like your KPIs are driving your strategy rather than here's strategy and delighting customers and making good business decisions. That's our strategy. We got to have KPIs, we got to measure stuff and see how we're doing, but the numbers aren't in charge of everything. We're trying to give customers a wow experience and get them to buy from us forever. We're not just trying to optimize a K P I. We're not trying to hack away at a K P I.

Nirav:

Yeah. So I can't agree with you more, Brett.

Brett:

Love it. Love it. So you said something to me before we hit record that may be a little bit controversial actually. I think what we just talked about could be a little controversial, but I think people are going to agree for the most part. But you talked about, you gave me a perspective on headless, which headless design may maybe describe what that is really quickly for those that don't know, but you've got a unique take on headless, so explain what it is and what's your take on it.

Nirav:

So a headless environment is taking the front end layer off your, let's say your Shopify store, your Magento store, whichever platform you're on and saying, Hey, I don't want it to live in that platform anymore. I want it to own my entire front end. And so you're lifting your liquid theme or whatever the kind of setup you have and saying, I'm going to host the webpages now I'm going to make sure that I can control the full gamut of it. And now because of that, I will technically load faster as a site because I'm now not having, being so dependent on the monolithic platform on the backend side of it. And that's what traditional headless e-commerce is.

Brett:

And what's usually driving that decision is part of it just because it's like cool and it's a buzzword buzzword. People are like, well, we're headless now. Yeah. Or what, what's like, what's driving that decision to be headless?

Nirav:

I would say there's a couple factors, Brett. Number one, speed is the most enticing place because so many e-commerce stores are slow and they think that that's the quick and fast solution. They say, Hey, and this is coming from developers, this is coming from agencies that can make a lot more money from being doing a headless build because they're close to 150 to $200,000 build. And so that's where a lot of agencies and a lot of people want to play, and it's fun new software. And so they'll say, Hey, let's go headless because it's going to make your speed a lot faster and it's just not true. Can you build a fast headless site? Yeah. But can you build a really fast loading Shopify site? Hell yeah. You, it all depends on the architecture that you use, whichever one you want to use you can use and you can still bake both fast. But I would say earlier the answer to that was no. And the reason I can say that is been 2019 and 2018, I launched Roth's headless in 2018 being their C T O and then worked with being working with Athletic Greens. And we launched Athletic Greens headless in 2019 along with molecule with air filter company as well. Asmatic,

Brett:

Beautiful, beautiful product molecule.

Nirav:

And we've launched some headless because their platforms at that time in 2018 and 2019, their platforms were inherently slow. And we tested that because their T T L, which is their time to first bite, and to be able to get that kind of first load coming in from 'em was extremely long. It was like 0.8 seconds. So if you were saying, Hey, I want my site to load in one second, and your system takes 0.8 seconds to get there, you only have 0.2 seconds of a gap to say your site's going to get to one second load time. And so we had to make a decision at that point during those times to go headless because the technology was not moving up and performing at this space at war. And nowadays all of that has flipped entirely. Shopify has rebuilt their entire architecture in such a great way that their TTLs are close to 0.2 seconds, which is a massive 400% decline in T T L, which is great.

But also just their infrastructure and their setup allow you to build a really, really fast loading site on them. So you would say, but why is my Shopify site slow? 99% your site is slow, is because it has bad architecture and bad theme code on it. You're using a theme that has way too much crap in it. Or two, you have your Google tag manager or your segment set up whatever's loading your pixels. It's not optimized. And so that's taking things off. So if I just unload your G T M and say, Hey, turn it off, I guarantee I can make your site load a hell of a lot faster. And so there's a lot of these different solutions out there to make your site faster. And headless is not the only way to make it faster. I can make a really slow loading site and headless too if I just architect it really badly. So got it. The same case.

Brett:

So if your Shopify store is running slowly, it might not be Shopify's fault, probably your fault or your, the designers, developers, whatever. So you got to fix that. So then when are the use cases when you might consider now, because the speed is probably not the deciding factor, when should you go headless or when should you consider headless?

Nirav:

Yeah, so I'm going to answer that in one second, Brett. The only one other factor I wanted to make sure I brought up was that people say I don't launch as many features and functionalities in Shopify. Shopify just doesn't have enough. So I want to go headless because of that. And again, that's a fallacy that there's enough app integrations and systems out there, but you can also use React and View jss as JavaScript platforms to add the additional layers of functionality that you previously wouldn't have been able to. So that goes to kind of going towards your answer, the earlier question that you just posed, which is, when is the right time to go headless? Well, I think that headless when, and you have a set of engineers like a 10 to 20% engineering team, and you want to be able to feel like you have more control of everything because you're willing to pay for that control.

That's might be a good time because at that point you can say, Hey, I'm willing to take the risk. I want to take the risk so I can control every little facet of my site experience, so exactly the way I want it to, and I can be able to use so many different third party systems to make that happen and unwilling to spend the engineering costs that requires. And that answer to it is there's a few companies out there who have 30, 40, 50 person engineering teams, but even those including brands like Dollar Shape Club who've had large engineering teams have gone back to times where they're not headless and they're not kind of using this kind of customer architecture. They don't want to waste engineering power on that. And so even that, I bring that point up, there is a strong contention that unless you really can afford that, normally most of these brands, whether they're Unilever owned or not, they're cutting back their engineering power. Why do we need to keep paying for this when I don't need it anymore, right? Yeah.

Brett:

Don't need it. Or are we really getting wins? Are we getting enough wins with having control of every little aspect of the website to make sense to have this extra cost of going headless? Or is it more of a lateral move? So yeah, yeah, continue.

Nirav:

Yeah. And the big risk with going headless is you're owning hosting again. And remember the day is when you had to worry, is my psych going to go down? Is my checkout going to go down? You? That worry is back on your plate now because if it does go down, it's your fault. It's not Shopify's fault anymore. And that was the reason why we moved to platforms like cloud hosted platforms. We saw that whoever's been around since the Magento days, I have, that's, that shit went down all the time. Me too. Why police workers

Brett:

When it went down all time, it goes down at the worst possible times, right before a Mother's Day sale, or God forbid, yes, right before Black Friday. And then what are you going to do? Right? And that's where, yes, yeah, there's a reason we all kind of went to the cloud and it rather than self-hosted for the most part. So yeah, totally makes sense. Yes, totally makes sense. The

Nirav:

Cases where I do see headless being still dominant and being really good is that there's two different places when you're launch, when you're having a brand that is multinational, that you have multiple different storefronts. Shopify has now kind of done a pretty good job of growing global. And I love the international plays that they've made now because it's actually enterprise ready. And so being able to have one single store that you can be able to take internationally can be really helpful. But there was time period where you had to have multiple individual storefronts, but that meant that you had to have multiple individual front ends. So every single, let's say you existed in the uk, you existed in Germany, you existed in China, you existed in Australia. You actually needed to maintain 10 different code bases or 10 different front ends. And that's a part where with athletic greens, still today, it's a headless site experience.

And the reason we built it as a headless site experience is what we wanted one unified experience across the board. Didn't matter which country you were buying from, that the front end was one combined experience and then we could push it to separate checkouts. So that way if you needed to transact in the uk, you needed to transact in Germany, you could do so, and the purchasing and the seller record could be in that country, but that you could still maintain one common front end. And that solves so many, so much engineering problems and it solves so many experience problems and actually elevated the ss e o of the core parent domain because the parent domain owned all that ranking versus it being out to individual sub-domains, whether it be athletic greens, UK athletic greens, Italy, et cetera. You didn't have to own separate, separate domains. It could all just be part of one core parent domain.

Brett:

Totally makes sense. Love it. Love it. Nav, this has been fantastic. Our time has flown by. I could keep talking about this stuff with you. Love your passion, love your skill, love the insights and what you guys are doing. Talk to us a little bit about ADA design. So obviously we got a really good flavor, really good, really good feel for what you do. But tell us a little bit about the agency. Are you accepting clients? Are you all booked up? What is it? What that like?

Nirav:

We are accepting clients. Thank you so much, Brett. And NADA is really an inter-agency. What I mean by that is that we're taking a sli taking a different approach to the agency model. Typical agencies work on an hourly business model. So they're trying to rack up hours for the most part. They work in silos so that you don't really know what's happening behind it and that they're working with fractionated resources because that's a typical agency model, especially when we're fractionating resources. One person is put on 5, 10, 15 accounts. And so for us, we said we want to be able to create a better experience for the merchants in places that we work with. So we're not doing billable hours where we're working purely on a retainer and we're saying you getting dedicated team members for that. So when I say dedicated, it means only working for you.

Dedicated, yeah. Point to sleep, waking up to you only. And we're fully transparent. So that's a digital product team that's fully formed, ready to go to work with the brands that are there in a transparent way. So every desire developer, project manager, QA is on all of your calls and all of your messages and being very clear. And that has allowed us to really be able to work in the same KPIs that they're going after is our mission. So we're no longer trying to rack up hours because that's somehow going to make us more money. We're saying if your conversion rates go up by 50% and that's what you want to go after, let's all go after it. Because the more you are successful, the more we can be successful as a result. And so that's what Anata is. As an agency, we kind of work with brands in that capacity, and we work with mainly brands that are in the mid-market to side. So any brands that are doing at least 25 million online and upwards, we're working with traditionally D two C brands and digitally native brands as well.

Brett:

Love it, man. Love it so much. What about those that are listening and they're just like, dude, I got to learn more from neuro. How can they do you have free resources, you have other podcasts you're on, and I can link to all this in the show notes if you do.

Nirav:

Primarily I'm linking through everything through my LinkedIn profile, so I'm posting a lot of content there both through my personal profile as well as the company's profile. And I will be on tour speaking as well.

Brett:

That's right, man, we were just talking about that before we record. Yes. I'm going to try to get you on some stages, dude, because you're really, really good and more people need to hear from you. So I'll link to your LinkedIn profile as well, but it's ni of N I R A V, chef, s h e t h. So look him up on LinkedIn. Ni of You crushed it, man. This was super fun. Thank you so much.

Nirav:

Thank you so much, Brett, for having me. This was such a great conversation.

Brett:

So good. So good. As always, we would love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? What'd you think about this episode? If you listen to this and you thought, oh man, this person I know has got to hear this episode, share with them and leave us that review. If you've not done that already helps other people find the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

YouTube is a different beast. It has arguably greater reach than Facebook, with more ad inventory available. 

But it’s not easier to scale on. And it’s not easier to measure. 

For brands that get it right, YouTube can accelerate growth like no other.

Take Dr. Squatch as an example. They scaled from $3 million per year to over $150 million per year, in large part due to the success of their YouTube ads. The same goes for Manscapped, William Painter, Organifi, and DOZENS more.

This episode is unique because Jacques Spitzer and I interview each other! Jacques is the CEO of Raindrop (the creative agency behind Squatch, Manscapped, Shady Rays, and more) and the podcast host of Marketing People Love. 

OMG and Raindrop have collaborated on several campaigns (including NATIVE), with Raindrop handling the creative side and OMG handling the media and strategy. 

In this show, we discuss:

• Why most brands get YouTube creatives wrong and how to fix it.
• Why measuring YouTube performance is harder than most and why you’re probably not measuring YouTube properly.
• How to truly achieve “exit velocity” with YouTube.
• Getting the proper view of brand lift, search lift, and halo effect from YouTube ads.
• Creative breakthroughs and much, much more.

‍

Transcript

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO, OMG Commerce. And today is a really unique, really fun, really high energy, blow your mind, awesome type of episode. This is a joint episode. This episode is going to be published on E-Commerce Evolution, but also on the Marketing People Love podcast because me and Jacques Spitzer, our joining forces and we're interviewing each other and it's like I'm asking questions, he's asking questions, but it just comes together in a pretty beautiful, organic way. And so we're talking about how to scale on YouTube, why most people misunderstand YouTube and how to make it work. I think you're going to love it. So here we go. Let's dive in and let's talk YouTube ads with Jacques Spitzer.

Jacques:

Brett, we are going to be, I know diving into topics that you and I we text about late at night after

Brett:

Yours. Your

Jacques:

15 kids are down for bed. I just add one every time I talk to you. Yeah, it's

Brett:

Only a eight, but it's

Jacques:

Only eight.

Brett:

It feels like 15 at night, so I think

Jacques:

You're like something. Yeah. But we talk about, and I'm so excited to surface some of the things that we talk about, what's working, what is really, really working is just what we get excited about. And so let's dive into some topics around the all impressive YouTube platform that so few people understand how to leverage

Brett:

True man and you know, speak at a lot of events. I speak at a lot of events every time I do almost. I ask people, Hey, who hears by show of hands running ads on YouTube? And it's always less than 20%. Sometimes it's 10%, and then people that have run it are often frustrated by it and they don't know why it's not working. And so I think we've got these two really unique perspectives. You've seen a lot of the campaign side. You're a creative guy, creative agency, the ins and outs of making killer YouTube content. I'm more on the campaign and strategy side, although I understand creative pretty well too. So I think this combo of ideas is going to be pretty powerful. So look out after you listen to this, plus, after we tell you about a little special opportunity that won't be right for everybody, but for some people when you can come hang out with me and Jock, I think people will be ready for YouTube. I think they'll be excited, motivated, inspired for YouTube.

Jacques:

Yeah. Can't wait to talk about that event later in the podcast.

Brett:

Exactly. Exactly. So I think we kind of, cool, let's talk about YouTube in general. And I think part of the reason people don't have success with YouTube is because they don't really understand it. They don't understand how people engage with it, what creatives should be like, how people are consuming it. And so I think it'd be kind of cool just to share our perspectives on what is YouTube and how do people interact with it. And so a couple things, and since I talk about YouTube a lot, I've got a few stats that are kind of memorized, but

Jacques:

Give us those juicy stats, Greg, the juicy

Brett:

Stats. So it's over 2 billion active users, which that's kind of a meaningless number anytime you get in the billions our minds just kind of break a little bit. But one set that I love is that in the primetime hours, which we're both longtime ad guys, I still like TV ads. I still enjoy watching how do people advertise on tv? But during those prime time hours, so seven P to 11 p or whatever, more adults engage with YouTube than any cable network. So more people are watching YouTube than any cable network. Also, what's interesting, I'm curious if your son does this. My kids, especially my 12 year old, through my 15 year olds in the evening, if they're watching TV on their own, more often than not they're watching a YouTube creator. They're watching YouTube on their the tv, right?

Jacques:

Absolutely. Yeah. My sons just about turned eight and that that's why I wasn't shocked. I heard the stat that something between 45 to 47% of people consume YouTube on their television. That blew my mind, but it kind of started making sense when I started thinking about with smart TVs, the way that they've just proliferated, it's just a button away and it just changed everything.

Brett:

Yeah, and I think we could even get into some kind of cool ideas on how that shifts creatives just a little bit if you're showing it on the TV versus computer mobile. But what's interesting about that is that I think the key is prime time has become very personalized. Just like everything else. We don't want to just watch a sitcom. We want to watch what we want to watch. And so YouTube is massive. I think it reaches like 97% of all adults. Actually, I may be fibbing on that. It's around 90. Let's go with 90. I think that's right. Of all adults in the US consume YouTube average session durations like 42 minutes. So it's a really lengthy amount of time spent on YouTube. And the way I like to talk about is my dad's 73, he's on YouTube all the time. My six year old son, Benjamin, he's on YouTube all the time. It reaches everybody. And so it, it's a powerhouse and their shopping experiences taking place on YouTube. So people look for unboxing videos and product review videos, and what is the best travel pillow or best noise canceling headphones or best waterproof shoes or whatever. People are searching for products on YouTube as well. So

Jacques:

Pretty cool. And I know this, of course, Google has all their search history. And so it's also for other personalizing whatever content that they're getting served, especially on the ad side, based on what they're interested in their life phase, if they have kids, if they have a dog, all the things that they have searched on Google or on YouTube that would make them the audience for anything that they watch.

Brett:

Exactly. And what's cool about that, what the search behavior is, people searching for stuff on Google or on YouTube, first party data. So you are, you're willingly giving that data to Google. And so Google can then target people based on that. So I know privacy changes are going to shift and who knows what the future's going to look like Exactly. But I think Google's going to be able to target people based on their search behavior for the foreseeable future because not third party data, it's first party data. And so very powerful though for Google to know, Google knows what you're shopping for, Jacque, Google knows when you're looking for the new sports code or the new shoes, they know when you're shopping for stuff. And so they can deliver those relevant ads. So I did see recently a billion shopping experiences happen every day across Google. So that's Google, search, shopping, YouTube, Gmail, like a billion search opportunities a day. So just a massive opportunity. And I've also seen almost half of people bounce between YouTube and search. So I see something on YouTube, I'm just going to search for it. So this combination of Google and YouTube is very powerful.

Jacques:

So Brett, I, I'd love to ask you about this. Recently, on my last two podcasts, I had two people who really, they have brands that have really been able to harness YouTube as a platform and to really grow their top of funnel ad spend to grow their ads, to grow their awareness and actually convert. We're well known as an agency for the work that we did with Dr. Squatch to take them from 3 million to hundreds of millions in sales. And U2 was a huge driver for them in that

Brett:

It was the, and just to brag on you a little bit, jock and on the Dr. Squatch team, you guys won YouTube out of the year, right? Yes. That was

Jacques:

In 2019 or something? No, 2020. So it was during 2020. The height of the pandemic, the height of e-commerce and spending. So it might be the highest converting ad in human history, which is kind of crazy to say. It's kind of crazy to say it's crazy

Brett:

Because it's soap and it's not like, yeah, it's not cheap soap either. I've got some at the house. It's fantastic. So worth it. Yeah. But it's not necessarily, how easy is it to differentiate soap and then get you to buy a premium soap? That's not easy to do.

Jacques:

Yeah, if you go to YouTube, you type in Dr. Squatch, save Your Skin, watch the ad. It's me mesmerizing. But we've since had so many other success stories. I think we probably have five or six of the top performing ads of the last five years, four brands on YouTube scalably. And when I think about that though, I always ask these brands, well, how were you finally able to, and I'm going to think about it in terms of exit velocity or escape velocity, almost like the gravitational pool. How are you able to overcome the uncertainty that is involved with triangulating all these numbers and all this information? Because it doesn't act the same way as a bond of funnel YouTube search, like a pay-per-click ad. And it doesn't act like a meta ad. And no one in the world may know more about this than you, Brett. So I'd love to understand how are you all, I think my question to you is how do you educate your partners to be prepared to understand what is and isn't working for their brand when it comes to YouTube? Because that is, I think, the mystery that's keeping so many brands from unlocking the potential that is YouTube.

Brett:

And it's so glad you brought that up. And this is obviously a topic that I'm very passionate about and you're passionate about too because you, you've seen these brands,

Jacques:

Seen it firsthand.

Brett:

Yeah. You've seen them explode and then you've seen the brands that don't touch YouTube. And of course they can still be successful, but sure it's not the same and they don't become doctors. Dr. Squatch doesn't become Dr. Squatch without YouTube, so Absolutely. So it is possible. I think one thing to keep in mind is that this problem of not understanding what ad is working or what channel or platform is working is the advertising problem. We've always faced it. It is the original advertising problem. I love the PT Barnum quote and the movie The Greatest Showman was kind of loosely based on PT Barnum. Brilliant

Jacques:

Movie is fantastic. I love the sound, I love the soundtrack.

Brett:

We listen to my kids, we like to listen to that in the kitchen while we're making meals. I don't know, it just fits kitchen. I listen

Jacques:

Kids myself just to get myself amped up. So we're on the same page. Brett,

Brett:

Yeah, I like it. But he said that I know that half of my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half. So that, that's always been the problem. But you got to keep advertising. Now, I'm not suggesting that you just be like, well, it's okay. I'll never know. And so we'll keep going. But I do think you'll never know perfectly, and that's a big deal you'll never be able to fully pinpoint. But thankfully we can get way closer than PT Barnum did back in the day. And so there's a few things to keep in mind. One, I think that the YouTube is often the very top of the funnel. It's often the very first touch point, the very first introduction that someone has with your brand. I think it's a little bit different too in terms of meta for a few reasons. And I'm so glad you brought up, it's different than search, it's different than shopping, it's different than Meta.

It's certainly everyth than the Amazon ads. And so I think with Meta though, one meta is pretty good job of tracking and you often only have one meta login, right? You got one Facebook account, that's it. And all of that tracking was designed a little bit more recently than Google's, even though Google's improved and they got enhanced conversions and things like that. I think Facebook often has a better picture a little bit. But even more than that, YouTube is top of funnel. And usually someone is on YouTube for a purpose. I'm there researching a topic, I'm there watching a specific creator that I like. I'm there looking to research something I'm going to buy. So you are interrupting them. And they were not there to view your ad. So getting them to click and purchase right away is not very common. Not very likely. I think it's a little bit different on Facebook because you don't usually go to Facebook with a specific purpose. You're not going there to, maybe you're going there, totalk a particular person, but usually it's just kind of, oh my

Jacques:

Gosh,

Brett:

I'm just there. I'm just hanging out, right? And so easier to bail and go do something off of Facebook. So I think both of those are important. And then one thing that we, we've got to look at, I want to dig into a couple different metrics because we always want to look at like is this truly creating a lift for our business or is it just a waste? It's just a loss lost opportunity. So some metrics to look at, but one of them is view through conversions. People that see the ad, they don't click because that's not why they were on YouTube. But they do purchase within a given window and usually we like to a one to one to three day window. So there's a few other things I want to dive into there. But I'm curious, Chuck, from your perspective, and so glad you had those interviews with those two awesome brands, what did they say? What were some of the things they said? Yeah, that gave them confidence.

Jacques:

Totally. And as someone who uses YouTube myself and has bought things that I saw on YouTube, yeah, yeah. I recognize that when am on Meta, I click on the ad, it's a direct click. When I'm on YouTube, I usually go to my Safari ad tab and I open up and I'll type in the URL or I will Google search it. And so we see, just because of that behavior, a lot of people there, you

Brett:

Just clarification there, Jacque. So you're watching YouTube, you're watching

Jacques:

On YouTube, on your phone, Google. Yeah,

Brett:

On my phone or your desktop or something that's happen. Or

Jacques:

If it were on my tv, either way I wouldn't click on the link. And I think that immediately changes the way that you can truly track the behavior because the behaviors going to look different. People are going to come, we see they're not sure You do too, that we see a huge lift in branded search. We see a huge lift in Amazon search for the brand. We see all this behavior that's influenced by seeing the ad. It's just the route they take to buy or purchase is indirect. And of course you're going to have people that find out about it, go to the website maybe they don't necessarily buy, they get remarketed on meta. Now it looks like a meta conversion. So it is messy. It is messy, but so it's such a bigger ocean. It's a huge ocean of opportunity. And I want you to react to that before I tell you what our clients have explained. Does that all add up?

Brett:

Oh, it 100% adds up. And so I want add a couple of things to it, but before I forget, I remember my buddy Will Hughes, shout out to Will Hughes who was on the podcast a couple months ago. But he used to run, he was the head of growth at Organifi. We worked together for a while. We were helping with YouTube there. And he always talked about how there's so much more scale on YouTube than on meta. Meta I think is easier. And for some brands, Meta's always going to be your number one source of new customers. But YouTube has more scale, it's a bigger ocean, there's more ad inventory there, more opportunities to sell. It is bigger anyway, so that that's something to keep in mind. But I love this concept of branded search and I'm maybe just completely making up this name, but I'm just going to go for it cause it's fun.

I think the dude name is Mark Pritchard, but he's with a p and g. And if it's not Mark Pritchard, then that's a cool sounding name and sounds smart. I would trust a guy named Mark Pritchard. So we feel good about that. But he said one of the best metrics they track for their brands to see if they're succeeding is how branded searches are growing. Because they know that if, and they know tv that they know tv, they know radio, they know online, but they know if people are searching for you by name, that's when you've got something going. That's when you're no longer just someone who sells stuff online. You are a real brand that people want and that people search out. So that's a big deal. We also look at with this big haircare brand, then we ran YouTube. They were spending three to 600,000 a month, something like that on YouTube.

They had to pause when I was 14.5 first hit because tracking was broken. They just didn't want to keep running. So they paused. We also ran their Amazon ads and their Amazon business, their Amazon branded search cut in half when we paused, paused YouTube. Now we got it all back. Everything was fine. We got it all going again. But just a real clear picture, that branded search comes from somewhere. You don't just wake up with an epiphany of a brand in your head. You saw something that made you want to do that. So that's really important. We also noticed live bearded client, longtime client, if you've got a beard, you got to try live bearded, you'll smell better, your beard will look better. All that. Oh my gosh, you just turned this into a podcast ad. I did me. That was free. That was natural product.

I got to send voice. Oh my gosh. So anyway, we running ads for sample kits and stuff. And so for a while YouTube was clearly the top performer. Then we brought in a third party attribution tool, which I do recommend. I like third party attribution tools. And then there was like, well, I don't know that YouTube's actually working. Look what it says on the third party attribution tool. So we started digging deeper and then we looked at, every time we scaled up on YouTube, every other channel got better and there was a lift in unattributed conversions. Okay? Every time we pulled back on YouTube, the performance of meta got worse. The performance of every other channel got worse. And so it was really clear, actually, we kind of came to the point where I think YouTube's the best driver of new customers right here for this.

Yeah. So anyway, I think there's several things you, you've got to be really smart about what you're measuring and looking at, but the results are there if you have the right creative, we're going to get into that in a minute. And nobody knows that better than you. But then you got to have the right campaign structure, but then you got to measure it. You got to know what are you measuring, how are you measuring it, and are you looking at overall lift and are you looking at it in an intelligent way? So yeah, we'd love to hear what your clients were saying.

Jacques:

Every client that we have has truly broken through it that I keep calling it that escape velocity, but it's so true. True. Oh, that's cool. It's like this because you could just feel these, we work with brands that are doing a hundred million, 200 million, 300 million in online sales, and I can feel the fear from them and not understanding the picture. And the irony a lot of times is that they're getting a monthly budget to YouTube that's the same as one day on Meta. And they're expecting to be able to experience this amazing life-changing result. And I'm like, no, you're spitting into the ocean and expecting to, yeah, no. And so all three of them almost matting, matting, mattingly, Mattingly, I don't even know if that's a

Brett:

Wordly you got to say.

Jacques:

Yeah, I'm sorry. Sometimes it feels like, I remember asking someone when you were in love and every time someone tries to explain it, it's like it. No, I don't know. Somehow we just had the confidence that finally we were in love and YouTube. That confidence works very similarly. It's like all the triangulation of information. They're using post-purchase survey attribution tools. They are using viewed through conversions. They are using lifts on Amazon and Meta. They are using lifts in branded search, trying to see how much of it's lift lifts in direct traffic, all of these pieces to paint the picture. And at some point they go, what if we took that budget from $3,000 a day to $10,000 a day? What if we took it from 10,000 to 20 from 20 to 50, right? And they hit this exit velocity where they're like, oh my gosh, it's all working and we can continue to invest in this way and skill in this way.

Another thing that I think they've shared with me is that they use for their own like CPA targets and everything else, that they typically come up with some sort of CPA target that they're comfortable with. That's not the same necessarily as their true target. They're usually adding somewhere between 40 to 60% to their true CPA target to give themselves that sort of wiggle room of the unknown without feeling like, I know I'm not wasting money. It's just it. It's not as obviously efficient as maybe with some of my other channels. But that gives 'em the confidence to say, okay, as long as we're within this range, I can spend more and more and more. And then they do the reconnaissance on, okay, is this even if half of these V2 conversions are attributed? Or even if a third are, this is really working for us. And it seems to me that it is the ability to gain confidence and honestly just having the chutzpah to do it, there's some point where exactly how do you it? You just put yourself out, you go, but you have, there's a point up until the point that you're trying to get as much information as you can. So that's how they described the process to me. And it's pretty much never strayed from that.

Brett:

I love that. And here's why I believe if you've got the right creative, if you got creative that really hooks the right audience and overcomes objections and makes them really want, you're probably creates desire stirs people to say like, dang, I really want that. If you've got that creative and then you've got the right campaign structure, the right audience structure, you're reaching the right person at the right time in the right way, and then you've got the right bidding and all that, and then you're tracking it as best as you can. And if you've got a landing page that converts and follow up system and all those things, you get that in place going to work. And one of the things that I think is really interesting, and you brought this up earlier, but I couldn't agree more. I've seen this too, a lot of times the companies that get it and spend more on YouTube faster are those that have done stuff on TV before.

Because I think YouTube actually functions quite a bit like tv. We watch it on tv, a lot of us do. But it functions more like that where you're right, a lot of people do just what you do. They watch the YouTube ad, they don't click it, but they go search or they go check it out in some other way. It's the way TV has always worked. You don't click on the TV ad, it just leads to results later. And so often, and actually we just start consulting with without even invested on a brand that's doing well north of 50 million and all they've done is TV and radio and they're growing online and on Amazon. So we're like, wow, I think we could do some stuff with YouTube here for this one. But a lot of people just don't have that confidence. And they grew up kind of in a Facebook world and where they could track everything pretty well. And so YouTube is a little bit scarier. So yeah. Let's do this. Chuck, I want to think about and talk about creative, and this is your wheelhouse. I'm passionate about this too. I just talking about it and I geeking out about ads. But what do you do when you are talking to a client and they want to do YouTube or they're open to doing YouTube? How do you talk about creative in a little different way there than say if they were just doing social?

Jacques:

Totally. So there's a couple things to be keep in mind. One is, you know are right that I very much view it just, I do television, I view as an online version of television, which really isn't true anymore since 45% of it's being watched on television anyway. So you know what I mean does I think even if you think about it that way, it's a television commercial. It is. If 45% of it's being watched on tv, you might as well just call a television commercial. And so it acts the same way. People react to it the same way. And so that's how I think about it. One is ultimately we'll work with a brand. What is your goal? For instance, we collaborate together on native, for example. Native is highly at retail. I can walk into my ride in and grab some, I can ride, walk into cvs,

Brett:

Walmart, Walmart, wherever you want to go,

Jacques:

Right? Yeah. And so the, that's going to be a big opportunity for them to get as much velocity in front of people, get as many eyeballs on their brand because when they go to do their typical shopping experiences, they're there next to a lot of other potential options. Now, if we want to drive people to action right then and there, a lot of times we do more what's called longer form advertising. We try to make an ad that's over a minute and a half long, two minutes, three minutes. And that's something that we've like we do both become known for both. The longer form is definitely harder. And my dad asked me one time when we first launched the original Dr. Squatch video. I'll never forget, I had my wife, my dad, my best friend, everyone I shared it with, they're like, that's just a really long ad. Three minutes is really long. And I said, I

Brett:

See. So you make ads, you just make 'em longer. Good job. Yeah,

Jacques:

Yeah, exactly. They're like, man, that's a really long ad. I mean, it's funny and it's good. I was really long and my reaction to my dad was like, I understand that you feel like it's long, but you to this day still watch a 30 minute infomercial as you flip through your channels on tv.

Brett:

Yep,

Jacques:

Yep. This is just the new generation of the infomercial. Yes, yes. This is just the new generation of an ad that grabs your attention, holds your attention, educates you, helps you understand why you might want the product, and then asks you multiple times to take action. And in fact, it's easier than ever to finally take action. You don't have to call anybody, you can just go to the website. And once I started realizing that we'd done a lot of work with works power tools and some other brands that have actually transitioned a lot of their spend from longer form TV commercials into the internet, ad spend variety. That's how I think about it. The humans have not changed. We have not changed. I totally disagree. When people say humans have short attention spans, we have short consideration spans. And it's something that I've been preaching because I'm like, people

Brett:

Out are really good. That's a really good way to So explain what you mean by that. I think I know where you're going with that. Yeah. And I think I 100% agree, but what does that mean?

Jacques:

So when we launched some of our ad campaigns, let's say it's a three minute spot and it's, it's educational, it's entertaining, it just keeps hitting you with so that you just like, oh man, I just want to keep watching. Even though it's here to watch something else. This is actually more entertaining than what I just clicked on. Our average, average watch times for spots will be anywhere between 28 to 40 seconds. People that could skip after five

Brett:

Seconds. It's insane, by the way. That's insane. Yeah, I look at a lot of ad campaigns, that's a crazy high number for a two and a half or three minute video or even a minute, a and a half, it could awesome, right?

Jacques:

And then the people that complete it will range anywhere from 8% to, it depends on how you're targeting, but up to 20%. So that means one in 10 to one in five, somewhere in that range of people will watch the entirety of the ad. And so there's two reasons why that matters. One is I believe that humans have a sunken cost fallacy on their time. So if they watch the ad, if they're one of those one in five people are watching the ad that long and you're like, you're still watching this ad, you're interested, go ahead and take action, you won't regret it. And we have a money back guarantee, I

Brett:

Already just go find it, go buy it. It

Jacques:

Literally works like that. It's like if you can and in YouTube you have that opportunity to tell that story, maintain the connection, and then have that remind people, you're still watching this. You clearly have interest. Go check it out. You have nothing to lose. So that's why the long form I think does work well because you can close more people that see it for the first time to try it, rather than if they get just pieces of information, a 15 second ad, a 32nd ad, they never really get enough to stop and get their attention and then feel like they have to take action, then they're great as reminders or they're great. If you're truly an omnichannel brand and you're going to do a ton of damage at retail, a ton of damage, damage on Amazon, then I'm like, great. Run a bunch. I mean, I would run a bunch of fifteens and thirties or even bumper ads. We make a ton of bumper ads too. Little six second reminders. So creatively, that's how we think about it. It's just like how do you get someone to care about your brand and then actually listen and then actually take action? And you would think all advertising is that, but I think a lot of times it's just not, unfortunately.

Brett:

Yeah, I love the comparison that this really is a short form infomercial. If you're trying to drive direct conversions or as direct as is possible with YouTube, and there's still going to be a much higher percentage that search for later, go to a later see it on meta click, things like that. But if you want to drive conversions, you do need that longer form video because the more time someone spends with your brand, that the more likely they are to purchase. And one of the things, and I don't 100% love this advice, but I think it's illustrative and it's kind of good. I remember hearing Dan Kennedy, are you Dan Kennedy fan? Are you familiar with him at all? Maybe conference and yeah, she's with Russell Brunson now, but okay, he used to have the biggest marketing conference and then this was kind of pre trafficking conversion summit.

Anyway, Dan Kennedy, brilliant guy, but he used to speak at all the Zig Ziglar conferences and stuff like that. And he would say would always sell from Sage. So he sold this thing called Magnetic. It was a training course on how to market the way he does. And so he said, I never look at feedback forms. I don't care. I don't care what the feedback form says. I don't care if they like my hair or my suit. All I look at is the receipts who purchased, who bought from my talk. And I actually looking at feedback forms, I think there's some things you can learn there, but all he cared about was the results. What leads to sales? And when we look at that and we, we've looked at clients who run same version of an ad. One that's 30 seconds, one that's a minute 15, the minute 15 often has 5, 10, 10 x more conversions than the shorter version. But to your point, short versions can be great for reminders, for remarketing, for getting you to purchase in stores. It all works together. But that's where the creative strategy comes into play.

Jacques:

And I never want to set someone up for the wrong expectations. No one's ever scaled a brand off of 15 second YouTube ads.

Brett:

Correct? Doesn't happen. Doesn't

Jacques:

Happen. It just doesn't exist. So it's like, yeah, I'm not going to tell someone what it does. And it makes sense. It's just math. It's just math. It's like if you're going to reach people and they're willing to give you, I mean, because that's an average, right? So let's say 25% of people one in four is willing to watch 75% of your ad, they're willing to watch two minutes of your ad. Well, now they know your value propositions. They know why you exist. They know a lot about your brand. And what's crazy is that even if they don't buy, you've taught them enough in two minutes that they can explain to a friend so they can end up being referral source.

Brett:

They've become a referral source. It's so

Jacques:

True. A referral source it, it's pretty wild. Imagine you watch an ad about a backup generator for your home or something and you're like, I don't really need one. But then your buddy's out in Colorado and he is like, oh yeah, winter's coming last year we lost power. And you're like, oh yeah, I just saw this ad for this thing. Or maybe it's a pool fence or something. And you're like, I don't have a pool, but your kid, your friend just had a kid and they have a pool and they're like, oh, we need a pool fence. You're like, oh, you should check out this company. I heard about it literally works that way, but not if you only advertise for 15 or 30 seconds, you have to create the imprint in people's minds.

Brett:

Yeah. Love it. What are some of the, and I know people that listen to your podcast know all this already, but people that listen to mine might not. What are some of the campaigns that you're most proud of? So as you look back at the work, the Raindrop and a quick shout out team OMG is working with, so we partner together on clients a lot, but we just hired you guys to create some ads for omg, which I'm super, super excited about. But what are some of your campaigns you're most proud of?

Jacques:

Yeah, I mean, we've been spending a lot of time talking on YouTube. So most of our campaigns are omni-channel and they have a YouTube as they

Brett:

Should be component.

Jacques:

And so I mean, got to start with the doctor  Squatchwork because it was so transformative. Yeah, it's so good. And people loved it so much that the performance of that out on YouTube in 2020 allowed us to help with them grow the company to a point where they were able to afford a Super Bowl ad. So we did a superb bowl ad together and that was just an incredible experience. It's also been transformative for brands like Dossier, and it's been amazing to be working with

Brett:

Nas is affordable,

Jacques:

Affordable luxury fragrance fragrances. Correct. And Bones Coffee was another one where anytime we can watch brands grow by tens of millions quickly behind William Painter was a classic one too. That was way back when. That was fine.

Brett:

Yeah. That's one that I always think of with you guys is the William Painter.

Jacques:

Totally. Totally. Your

Brett:

Space is your money maker. I love that. Yeah, love that opening. And we had the chance,

Jacques:

Chance to work with Shady Rays too on multiple campaigns. So I mean, they've grown from 20 to, I don't know the exact number now, but it's closing in on nine figures and they are opening their own retail stores. They have three or four retail stores now. They're doing national television commercials. And it's just cool. I think I enjoy watching us take brands to that next level or just having the opportunity. We did this incredible campaign with Manscaped, just won a gold telly award and it's one of my favorite campaigns ever. That's one open

Brett:

With the torture scene or there's a torture

Jacques:

Scene. Yes. Torture scene of his, potentially of his crown jewels, if you will. I, it's like I could keep going, but there, there's in general, we love the work we get to do. A lot of it does involve comedy. I don't think it has to involve comedy. Right? We are getting into some other forms of work that don't necessarily involve comedy that are longer format, but you said it earlier, it's like people are only on YouTube for a couple reasons and usually it's to be entertained or to learn something. Yeah. So your ad has to do that. It has to entertain them and it has to allow them to learn something. And you don't have to enter if you're a traditional ad, ah, you're not watching it. You're just going to be like Skip.

Brett:

Exactly. So much, so much good stuff there. We both had the privilege of speaking at an event in Puerto Rico recently. Yes, as on Blue Ribbon Ribbon Masterminds. Super fun. And even though I'm not the creative guy, my talk was on seven ad tests or things to think about before you run. One of my favorites, and you guys always nail this one test is what I call the physical reaction test. Does the ad cause a physical reaction? And all of those you just mentioned, cause a physical reaction, you lean in, you laugh without being able to literally laugh out loud. You want to do something, you're motivated to pick something up and search for it or do it creates a physical reaction. And so you guys are so good at that striking the emotional chord. Put some humor in there to keep people watching, and then it just works. And I love the William Painter example, and then Shady Ray is super cool too. I've got to check that out in more detail. But I get to watch the William Painter one a little bit closer because I actually taught those guys YouTube, so they took my YouTube course and then Oh,

Jacques:

That's right, that's right. Yeah.

Brett:

That was actually our first intro. I think you guys saw the YouTube course as well. Something it's

Jacques:

Easy. So we, we watched the YouTube course and when painters was watching YouTube two, the YouTube course, and then because of that, the Dr. Squatchatch team was watching the YouTube course. So we were all on watching your courses. That was like five years

Brett:

Ago. You were great. And so I got to keep in touch with the William Painter guys, and so I won't give away any numbers that they don't want to be given away, but they were scaling so fast and they were spending a lot of money on YouTube, but they said, they were like, Hey, we figured it out. This was driving sales. So we're not even tracking YouTube direct performance. We're looking at all of it together. We're just mashing it all up and looking at it, they were more sophisticated than, I'm oversimplifying a little bit, but back to our original point, they had the faith and they were like, no, no, no, no. Look at total sales. They're growing whenever we scale this. And so they were looking at more merr, total media efficiency ratio, which is pretty cool. So Awesome. Well, so we just kind of teased a few things inadvertently. Dr. Squatch, we talked about us speaking at events. Yes, we talked about YouTube courses, but Jacque, we got something coming up, man, we got something coming up that's not for everybody. And by that, that means that we can't let everybody come because we're going to have limited space. But do you want to talk about the event we're doing together here in a pretty short period of time?

Jacques:

Yes. So Google, la, you and myself, maybe another person. We'll see.

Brett:

I think someone from YouTube is planning on speaking as well.

Jacques:

Someone from YouTube. Little

Brett:

Bonus.

Jacques:

Yeah, three people. I don't call myself expert in many things, but I am an expert in this. You are an expert in this. Can't wait for that event in September. I believe it's only going to be open to brands themselves. Google. Yeah, that's what Google Will is asking us to do. That's what

Brett:

Google's requesting. Yeah. Brands only appreciate, we're both agency owners, so nothing but love for our agency friends, but this event is just for brands.

Jacques:

And more than anything, I'm looking forward to the energy that I know you'll bring. In fact, I asked after the Puerto Rico event, if you could give me your presentation, I could steal half of it since it was so creative heavy.

Brett:

I will, I'll do that. I never did that want it? Still want it still. I'll do that. I'll do it as soon as we start hang up here. So let's do that. Yeah. And what's cool is I, I've been waiting a long time to do this event again. So it's the YouTube slash la offices and Ply Vista. It's the Spruce Goose Hangers, which phenomenal facility. If you watched the movie

Jacques:

Can be Spruce Goose. Like what's Spruce Goose? That just sounds

Brett:

Amazing. Oh, so amazing. Here's the story. Have you heard of the movie The Aviator with Leonardo DiCaprio? Yes. So he plays this eccentric billionaire, Howard Hughes. Howard Hughes lived in la. He was actually rich because his father was rich. That's another story. He built what was going to be like the biggest airplane, most ambitious, called the Spruce Goose. He built these two gigantic hangers in Los Angeles. The whole thing was a flop. It was a bust. But also Howard Hughes tried to make movies and stuff. Anyway, Google bought those two hangers and converted them into half as YouTube Studio, half as Google, Audi, Google offices. And so it's a phenomenal space, dude, it's, it's really cool. So in 2020 February, I got invited to do a similar event at those offices Packed house. It went so good that the people at YouTube or the people at Google were like, Hey, let, let's do something like this in Chicago, then we can do L New York or whatever.

But then guess what happened? A few weeks later, COVID hit, and so then we had not been able to do an event like this. So it is free. Some meals are included. You get to tour the facility, all that, get to hang out with me and Jacques, but it is limited. So we'll tell you how to go and register here momentarily, but coming up in September, and dude, I'm stoked. It's going to be a lot of fun. Now we're going to talk about YouTube and creative, but also Performance Max. I think there's this window, and this podcast is not about Performance Max. I don't want to get into it, but there's a window of opportunity because YouTube is kind of difficult. We have found some brands that have been able to scale YouTube placements through Performance Max. I think it's a little easier to get there, maybe is from a budgetary standpoint. So I'll uncover that at the event. Here's how, here's

Jacques:

Be P maxing

Brett:

Max, P maxing, P

Jacques:

Maxing. I don't know who's calling it, performance Max p Maxing baby.

Brett:

Pax Baby. Yep. Yep, yep, yep. So, hey, any jock for the listeners of either podcast? And this has been, so this has actually gone remarkably smooth, but it's also weird. Am I asking you the question? Are you asking me the question or we are just, we're

Jacques:

Asking other questions. It's a first podcast in history.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. That's so funny. Any free resources, anything you want people to check out, anything you want people to do other than go check out. Yeah,

Jacques:

I would say the biggest thing that we spend time putting out in a thoughtful way is every quarter we send out something called the Founders Report. So if you go to Raindrop Agency and you go to our little menu and you find Founder's Report, it's absolutely free. And it literally has the exact same type of content we talked about today and actual examples of the best performing creative at any given moment in time. And so we do that for free. It's fun. We now have over 6,000 people part of that community. And that's also how you would find out about events like the one coming up in September.

Brett:

Awesome. And I, I've seen that. I get that newsletter. It's fantastic. Quick resource on our end@omgcommerce.com. Under resources, we got the top YouTube ad examples, and so the Raindrop team made the list multiple times, but basically these are a collection of our favorite YouTube ads that we, we've either seen scale firsthand or we've managed them, or we just know they're really, really good. And so we got links to them. Some of my thoughts on why I think they're good, but I think that's another great way just to learn YouTube ads is by watching great YouTube ads. And so check that out as well. If you'd like to attend the How to Scale your brand on pmax and YouTube event, live at the YouTube LA offices this September 14th, then go to omg commerce.com/youtube event. Again, that's omg commerce.com/youtube event, and you can apply to attend for free. There. Space is extremely limited. This is only for brands. Sorry, no agencies. We love you agency friends, but this is for brands only at YouTube's request. Learn from me, Brett Curry, learn from Jacques Spitzer from Raindrop. Learn from YouTube and some Google execs while you're there. Get a tour. Breakfast is included, lunch is included. Happy hours included if you can stay, but space is extremely limited. So head over to omg commerce.com/youtube event and apply today and I hope to see you in LA and talk YouTube in pmax in September. See you then.

Did you know that over 1 billion shopping experiences take place on Google alone each day? And that's not all – millions more transactions occur across platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon.

Now, let me ask you a crucial question: Are your products making showing up on the ever-expanding "digital shelf," where eager shoppers are searching for their next purchase?

Enter feed marketing, the perfect blend of art and science, advertising and merchandising.

Feeds serve as the lifeblood for Google Shopping Ads (PMAX) and Facebook ads, a foundational framework for eCommerce brands. By leveraging feeds, you can amplify all other marketing efforts and drive better results.

Jacques van der Wilt is a renowned leader in shopping feeds, a mentor to startups, and an accomplished entrepreneur. As the CEO of DataFeedWatch, he spearheads a global feed management company, optimizing product listings across 2000+ shopping channels in 60+ countries. With a wealth of leadership experience in the US and Europe, Jacques is a sought-after speaker at industry events and a respected mentor at Startup Bootcamp. His expertise and dedication continue to shape and inspire the online merchant community.

In this interview, we discuss:

• Common feed mistakes that keep your products off the digital shelf and unavailable to eager shoppers.
• How a sporting apparel company increased clicks by over 200% with better product titles.
• Optimizing your efforts as you go (based on results).
• Giving shoppers AND platforms (Google, Facebook, etc.) what they want so that you attract more new customers.
• What Dynamic Prospecting is, and how optimized feeds can fuel new customer acquisition.

‍

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we are talking about optimizing the digital shelf being wherever your customers are during the millions of shopping experiences that happen every day online of this is part merchandising, part marketing, and all cash producing, business building info that should be extremely helpful and fun. And so my guest today is an expert on this topic of feed-based marketing and optimizing for the digital shelf. I've got Jacques van der Wilt on the show today. He's the c e o and founder of Data Feed Watch. And he was just telling me before we record that he and I go back to 2016. So that's when OMG first became a client of Data Feed Watch. So it's a tool we've used for a long time with a lot of different clients and it's been a wild ride and hard to believe that's been over seven years ago. And so with that, Jacques, welcome to the show and how you doing man?

Jacques:

Great, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. I am, I'm doing very well. How are you?

Brett:

I'm doing great. Doing great. Excited to be here. Love this topic. And I think this topic, it can be a little boring if you're not careful, but it can be extremely exciting and extremely beneficial if we approach it the right way, which is what we're going to do today. So now you, first of all, thank you for being flexible. We're in very different time zones right now. I'm in the Midwest in Missouri and you are in Amsterdam. And so it is evening your time right now? No,

Jacques:

It's 5:00 PM Indeed.

Brett:

Oh, okay. Okay. So not crazy morning time for me. 5:00 PM for you Exactly. But yeah, excited to be chatting. So I want to kind of frame the topic this way. If we think about merchandising, let's think about a physical store. So if I own a shop, I'm thinking about where do I put my products, what products do I select in the first place? So what products am I showcasing on the shelf? How am I positioning these products? I think about product packaging and lighting and placement and again, where traffic is and things like that. And then I want to think about optimizing. I'm going to be measuring for sales and sell through and optimizing that as we go. And that that's a real science. And that's why if you go to Walmart or Lowe's or whatever stores you're, you go into changing stuff all the time, moving products around, changing end caps, moving stuff from one shelf to another because they're trying to optimize for shopping experiences.

And if we look at the online shelf, let's just take Google as an example cause I'm a Google guy, we're a Google agency. Over a billion shopping experiences daily happen across Google Properties. That's across search shopping, YouTube, the display network all over Google, a billion shopping opportunities per day. That's a lot of eyeballs, that's a lot of opportunities to get your product in front of people that are either actively shopping or at least looking in your category or fit the criteria that make them a decent customer. And so lots of opportunities and obviously there's millions of shopping opportunities on Amazon daily and on Facebook daily. And so we're going to dive in and talk about how do we think about this in a digital space. And a lot of that goes back to your feed, the product feed and how you structure it, optimize it and again, try to get your price in front the right people. So with that Jacque, first of all, do you want to give just your background really quickly, just kind of 30 seconds or so, how did you start Data Feed Watch and what did you do right before that?

Jacques:

Well, that's a good question, Brad. About 15, no, 12, 15 years ago I started a company called Word Watch and it did automated bit management for Google text ads. Nice. And you are going to be fil rich and everyone would want it and it would work like crazy. And actually did in a way she said, we found out that small customers didn't have enough statistically relevant data in an age that algorithms weren't even around. And very large customers were like, I want bells, whistles, levers, stuff to decide instead of, so how much would you like your CPA to be? So while we were focusing on the mid-market and growing our business, Google came up with something they called product listing ads. It was a funny new thing. Instead of the text says they would show an image of product and below it would say what the product was and would even show the price and you could click it, it would take you straight to a page where you could buy the product. And we were like, okay, great, you we'll do that. We start optimizing the drill, us being Google Cowboys and yeah, so we told customers, so Google shopping or product listing ads are included and will manage your campaigns as well. Of course we did it manually. We then, yeah, we had automated anything yet

Brett:

Everything was manual man. Those were the good old days of bidding up, bidding down. We used to have spreadsheets and we'd run calculations and we'd bid up a penny down a penny on a couple products. And those were fun times.

Jacques:

Exactly. So while we were figuring out how to do that, it wasn't that hard. We could possibly automate it. We got totally nuts of the that for every customer we would have problems getting us product data into something called the Google Merchant Center. And with that conversation on the phone saying, sure, you know, really need to have your price in that file you going to send to Google because otherwise you get nothing to sell. And you know, would've to go back to his web developer, how do we get the price into that feed? And it would take a month and the developer would charge him like 500 bucks. It would go nowhere.

So we figured, okay, this is not going to work. Maybe since we're already a tech company, we hack something together to solve some of the problems. So it took three months and we basically created a very rudimentary version of Data Fit watch with a rename and a combine and an anesthetic value. And we ran it for a while. And guess what? It solves like 90% of our problems. Like whoa, whoa, this is cool. We had looked before, is there a tool out there that can do this? First, there were several tools already and we didn't get it. There were complicated and we couldn't afford it either it was thousands of bucks a month where we are, we know we're talking to American retailers with a GMV of like $5,000 a month. So that was the pivotal moment. We are like, okay, maybe we should make this our core business, this little rudimentary tool and forget about the automated billing on Texas. Which in retrospect, Brett next week was

Brett:

A very good choice.

Jacques:

Rev, our 10 year end anniversary party

Brett:

In retrospect chose

Jacques:

You chose price you chose.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah. Well also if you think about anything that's like bid management has struggled because Google created their own systems based on data that we can't see and complex algorithms and machine learning and AI and nobody's pouring more money into those tools than Google. And so yeah, bid management now it's just better to give that to Google and to their smart bid algorithm. So I love this and a couple things again, and I think the way we got to frame this when you're looking at feeds is this is the digital shelf. This is being available for all those millions and millions of shopping opportunities that happen every day. And so first off, you got to have, are your products available to be on the shelf? It's not a limited shelf, it's an infinite shelf. But the first thing is if I want my products available, are they available? Will Google even show them? So are my products approved inside a merchant center? Are they meeting guidelines for Facebook and for all the other shopping channels that I can be on? And so let's dive in here. I want, I want to talk about what are some of the top mistakes you see? Cause I know over the last 10 years, and I'm sure hundreds of millions of products later, what are some of the common mistakes you see with data feeds that limit sales opportunities?

Jacques:

Well the most common mistakes are stuff forgetting to fill out the shipping data, which we do either in the data feed or in the gmt, Google Conversion Center. Lots of errors are incomplete data basically. So incomplete. I do not have a GTIN or I forgot to put in my image or I have a gtin, but it's the wrong format. So it's actually not a gtin. The incompleteness and the incorrectness incorrectness is the biggest failure. Yeah. However,

Brett:

Yeah. And it's so important to bring that up because that's not fun stuff like filling out the G 10 and global trade identification number or shipping information, that's just little paperwork stuff. And I'm air quote, so that's obvious. Obviously digital. But that's the kind of stuff that keeps your products in the stock room in the back. They're not on the shelf because they're just sitting there waiting. They're waiting for these details because Google will not show them without those details. Neither will other shopping platforms. And so you got to fix the little stuff to even have the shopping opportunity.

Jacques:

So are many, I dunno, there's an error for every field right there. The shipping and the images, those are very, very common ones. Also, the number of errors differs per shopping cart. So if from agen you're likely to have more errors than if you're on Shopify. I hope nobody kills me for that, but that's what the data shows.

Brett:

Yeah, no I think it's totally fine. And we, interestingly enough, in the early days of OMG commerce, as we were getting into e-comm a lot, we partnered with a Magento agency. So I, I've been around Magento, even met the two founders of Magento. A lot has changed since the early days. They were the leader like open source leader. And now I hardly hear anybody that's on Magento. Obviously it's Adobe commerce now, but more complex, more complex, more robust. So yeah, I don't think coming after you for making those comments, but it is more complex and so more room for errors typically

Jacques:

What I liked about your intro is said, well data feed optimization is young, potentially a boring topic. And I couldn't agree more. So maybe the biggest mistake that I've seen for 10 years in a row across the board is that a retailer understands he needs to send his data to Google, Facebook, Amazon, we 2000 channels in more than 60 countries. But he needs to send the data and he sees this as a burden. I have to do it, I have to do it every day and there's errors and need to fix those and don't how it's still going to take me. So it's a negative thing. But in fact defeat is a foundation of every single advertising campaign on any channel. Whether that campaign is successful or not depends. First of all, if there's a smart guy running your campaign

Brett:

Or gal Yep, exactly.

Jacques:

Somebody at owned commerce or whether data that goes into these campaigns is actually good. So it's an opportunity to make more money, to sell more products, to get a higher row as and a higher ROI for every retailer to tweak his data. And then fixing errors is certainly the first thing you going to do. Let's clean out the house, garbage in, garbage out. If you have a crap title, you will show an ad with a very crappy title. You don't want to do that if you do not get your availability. So you advertising products that are out of stock, but you got to tailor your feet to show that. It means that Google is going to show your ad, the customer is going to click it, we've all done it, clicking it to find out that the product is no longer available. And what does the consumer say? Oh these guys are stupid. They dunno what they're doing. So you just lost 75 cents on a click. Not the problem. The problem is that you lost a customer if not for life then if you remembers your name you will not come back because you guys are stupid, right?

Brett:

Yeah, yeah. You advertise a product that got the shopper all excited and now it's not available on your store. And it's so important to think about feed-based marketing. So Google shopping and on the Google side these feed-based ads can appear across the display network and inside of YouTube and the Google Discover app and even inside of Gmail and they can appear across Facebook and Amazon and all over. But these are the foundation of marketing. This is definitely wallet out traffic. This is when people are wanting to buy something and they're actively shopping. I love looking at top of funnel ads like top of funnel, YouTube and Facebook and even native ads and other things where we're trying to interrupt people that we think fit our ideal customer profile and draw them into our brand. But all of that is made better. If your feed marketing is on point, if feed marketing is working, then everything else gets better.

Remarketing is better dynamic, remarketing is better, shopping is better. But there's even in the old days, in the glory days of Google shopping, which we're just talking about back when you could get a 10 or 12 x return on ad spend or something like without trying, it was mostly just shopping traffic and that was it. Like search query based traffic. Now Google takes your products and they put them all over and there there's a thing called dynamic prospecting that Google offers, which a lot of people don't know about. And we all know about dynamic remarketing. That's where we shop for a product on a website. We don't buy it now we browse the web and we see that product everywhere. Well yeah, exactly. Dynamic prospecting. Those when Google says, I know that you Jacque are shopping for non-stick cookware and you haven't bought anything yet. And so I'm just going to start showing you feed-based ads across the display network and inside of Gmail and inside on of YouTube. But it's not for products you've seen before. It's for products that I think you'll be interested in. Dynamic prospecting. Well all of that is made possible by having a really good feed and for that feed telling Google and other platforms what your product is, who it's for, when they should show it care. And then it's positioning it in a way that the customer says, ah, I want that

Jacques:

Exactly. You you're spot on telling Google what it is that you sell. Yeah,

And be specific. Yeah, a big fan of less is more with one exception. When Google says, so what are you selling? More is more you tell them everything that you have. If you can do all optional fields and even more, that's great Cause the more data Google has to match your product data with the actual search query, the higher the quality of the clicks will be, right? It will drive down your conversion rate, it will drive, sorry, it'll drive up your conversion rate, it'll drive down your CPA just because you have great data. You didn't have great data in your shop. No, it was okay data but you optimized it and now it's great data that went to Google, they went to Facebook, they went to criteria, they went to Amazon advertising anywhere where you will find your customers.

Brett:

So good. Let's talk about what are the top opportunities. So if we're looking at feed based marketing and all the potential, all the opportunities that it has, what are the biggest levers we can pull? What are the greatest areas of opportunity?

Jacques:

We created something called a feed marketing report, Brett, we did it last year. We're going to have a new version in the full, we basically analyzed what are 20,000 online stores doing with the data feed. So the good news is they were doing the things that we said that would work, but now we have the data to show that it's not just, we're saying that optimizing title is good idea, but it's like the most popular optimization type across 20,000 stores in dozens and dozens of countries. And then why is the title the number one? So I mentioned earlier Google looks at the search query and they look at the data in the feed and then if someone is interested in buying a pair of jeans, then many of them will know I want to Levi's five one because it looks good to me, I want a blue one.

No like everyone and I'm a size C two and that's it. So he's not going to look for all other brands. He may enter a pair of jeans you and they will work, but often they'll just say, I want Levi's five one mens blue jeans size three, two, your title in your shop is probably 5 0 1, which is fine cause you are, you're on the Levi's section and the image is there. So it's a good title. But for Google you want to combine the brand, the product type, the gender, the color, the size into Levi's five one men's blue jeans size 32. And then Google says Hey, I got 50 ads for the search query but there's only three that have exactly the same makeup of the title as a search query. So this must be a good match for the consumer. So despite the fact that this guy is bidding not top dollar, I still show his ads cause I want to make the consumer happy. So by enriching the title you get more impressions. However, with that great match between the search query and the title, the consumer is more likely to click your ad cause it's exactly what you just entered. How you get a higher ctr, well guess what happens if he makes it to your product page, he's more likely to buy because you already went down the chain. It's what it came for. You already knew the price from the ad. So more impressions, high CT R and high conversion rate, that's a triple whamy by enriching your title. And

Brett:

When you get that higher clickthrough rate, the other advantage there. So you're getting really relevant traffic, you're showing up to the right people searching for products just like yours. When you get that higher clickthrough rate, Google actually rewards that. Google says Aha, people love this listing. And so they want to show it more. So if you can optimize for click through rate, that is another way to expand your reach. Google's going to show that ad more if they think that people like it. And I think there's this approach, and this is just what I've gathered from now talking to thousands of merchants and auditing hundreds of Google ads accounts, is that a lot of people look at merchant center or look at their feed and they're just like, man, I don't want to think about this, I don't want to stress over it. Just make this as easy as possible.

Just get the feed up there. Which understand you got to run a business but the return on optimizing your titles is massive and it multiplies and compounds your other marketing. So take your time on a title One example I'll give, and this totally ties into what you were talking about, a buddy of mine runs everyday California longtime client adventure business just north of San Diego, California. So it's like kayak tours but also apparel. They've got awesome apparel and so they've got a shirt, which is one of my favorites. It's a long time, it's a classic. It's actually called L classico and it's like California flag and it's got the California bear named Brutus. He is holding the surfboard. And so that's the name of the product L classico. Well, without any customization, without any feed rules, without a tool, you send that information directly from Shopify to Google and you're telling Google, here's my product, it's L Classico, that's it, that's not enough.

That's Google. And Google's good at reading images and Google can figure stuff out. They're smart. But I would agree with you, the more you give Google the better. Because Google doesn't get tired of data. They feed off that data, they make good use of it. And so it's better to say L classico, black men's Excel, t-shirt made in the usa. Some of these other things add to that because then you're going to show up in more searches. Google really knows what it is, they know when to show it. And so yeah, I totally agree. Optimizing the title, it's something you need to think about early, but it's also something you need to think about as you go optimize the title as you go. You were telling me about a sports apparel, I believe a sports apparel, a retailer who did some title work and got some pretty phenomenal results. Can you talk about that case study just a little bit?

Jacques:

No, absolutely. So the title optimization is crucial in the way that you said, and it actually is very simple because with a tool like the Fit Watch, you can simply combine seven fields in the right order and you're done. So if you understand it's important and you understand how to structure your titles, it's a one minute job. But how would you structure your titles? Well, so you can use common sense and for every industry there's like a standard to put the prototype first and then the size and it whatever. If you Levi's, you want to put the brand first. If you're a no name brand, you got to put the brand last. It won't even show in the ad, but it'll still be in the title. But the smartest way, yeah, we got an instinct use case there is to check out what your customers, the ones that are buying on your site, are actually searching for, right?

So one example was these guys were selling baseball gloves and they had, they're making good money, they had good titles, everything. But then one guy figured out, let me check out what these guys are actually looking for. It turns out that they're looking for, they were entering in search query where they were left hand or right hand throw. If it was for themselves, if for the kids it was supposed to be leather or some other kind of material, none of that ever made it to the title. Maybe leather in a material field, but that's it. So they start experimenting by putting those very terms into the titles of their baseball gloves and I think they like 250% up on clicks. It was mind boggling usually. Yeah, I'm not big fan of like oh 250% more clicks. But in this case, yeah, it made total sense.

And when I explain this to people, many will say, well I got 25,000 products. I'm not going to figure out what the series queries are for 25,000 products. Life's too short. I say you're right if you definitely not do that. But do you know what your 10 best selling products are? Well, yeah I do. So what percentage of your total sales debt? Well, it's actually 22%. Well how much time are you going to spend on finding out and optimizing the search queries ar and titles of 10 products? Well actually I can do that in an hour. Exactly. So it's not important to finish it for 25,000 products. It's important to get started with your 10 best selling and then your best selling category and then your second best selling category. Take a year, I don't care, but get started at the top and you'll see instant results.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. Optimize the title. It makes all the sense in the world. And you know what a lot of people don't know too. And then again, I know I'm speaking about Google, but this totally applies whether it's Facebook shop or Instagram shop or other channels. But a lot of people will look at their Google shopping results are now performance max. Performance Max is kind of the king of Google shopping traffic now. But a lot of people will look at that and say, oh my return announcement's fine. I'm at a 200%, 300%, 400%, whatever fits for your business. But they're not looking deeper and they're not seeing that, oh you know what? Almost all the sales are coming from just a couple of products. Most of my other products are not visible. Most of the other products people are not seeing and it's because my feed is not optimized. The titles are not optimized where there's a lot of people that would want what you sell, but you are not giving it to them and so they're missing out. So title, totally agree, got to optimize it. What are some of the other biggest opportunities for growth?

Jacques:

Well, I told you before, right? I could talk for two hours, but we don't have two hours. So lemme just zoom in just one, two more. The other question I ask a lot of customers, would you like to advertise all your products? And they go, yeah, of course. And I say, well really. And then they start thinking, well actually 15% of my products is below 10 bucks at the gross margin on that, on average it's like two 50. The CPA is somewhere between two and three bucks. So actually I am losing money every time I sell something. So maybe I should stop selling products with a price less than 10. Or maybe I'm smart and I've already enriched my product feed with gross margin data. So now I know for every product, but the gross margin is either the amount or the percentage. So now I can start excluding based on gross margin just to make sure that the advertising money I'm spending will go to the products with a very decent margin. So excluding products is crucial. Exclude on based on title price availability, but look for the unprofitable or less profitable products and make sure that the money that you will no longer spend on the low margin product will go to another product. Now it'll automatically go to the products, whatever I margin simple math, just increase your ros. And why would you even care to sell all of your products? You want to make money. That's the business that we're using. And

Brett:

It makes sense. You have some products we carry because customers ask for it and we need to carry it. And they're great add-on products, but they don't make sense to advertise. There's not enough margin there or the price is too low to advertise. And so we can exclude that through custom labels, exclude that from our ads. We can also, but we can make them available to free list things across Google, which is not massive opportunity, but it is growing. There is a way to send a feed that to show up in free shopping areas across Google, which is nothing to sneeze at. And so that's an option too. So right, love this. We got titles, we got custom labels, understanding what products should we not sell, what price should we optimize? Let's, let's talk one more tip here cause I know we're running out of time. So

Jacques:

One more tip is a mind boggling statistics that I got from Google years ago. And the statistic is if you have a Google shopping ad on the serp, the search engine result page and a Google text ad, the customer is 90, that's 90 zero, 90% more likely to visit your site. That's their sta it's not mine. I didn't make it up. So what we've seen in the last years, in the last many years, everyone used to have tech sets and we've all moved to Google shopping makes total sense. Google shopping is the king of the hill, but we shouldn't have abandoned the tech sets, but we did because it's a lot of work, you know, need to set up this campaign. You can only partially automate it, it requires maintenance. So you're going for usage, do Google shopping, feed driven automation feed and done. However, we for example, offer a feed based text add server.

So that means that again, you know, create a data feed for Google text ads or for Bing text ads. And then four times a day we recreate a Google search campaign of that by automating it. You can create a unique single ad group for every individual product. Usually you'll stick this yellow all colors and sizes or even a single product type into an ad group. And you have a bunch of keywords and text sets for the entire group. Now you have one ad group with unique keywords and unique text ads created automatically. So obviously now that gives you from the long tail, from short tail to the longest possible till it enables you to create a campaign with not too much trouble. The maintenance with products are in stock, out of stock, new products, new product types is done automatically because it's feed driven. And if you can go so granular as to have unique text sets and keywords for every individual product, that is certainly going to drive up your r oi.

We see it a lot with booksellers, yeah, because they're selling boatloads of books. But I really like the customer. We once was selling second cars and he didn't even have a big budget, but he wanted to advertise anyway. But your cars is a disaster, right? Because you got dozens of brands and each brand has a dozen mix and then they have colors and different tires, different engine sizes. D So before you know it, you got a million variations. You don't want to create a taxed campaign for that manually, but automatically it works. So you're basically advertising your secondhand cars with the longest possible tail. Cause again, just like with the Levi's example, people know that they want a c F E from this year and that car. So they'll find it. And since it's so long deal, the cost per click is very low. So this guy became very successful in selling secondhand cars through Google Tech sets at a very small budget. And that's what automation can do for you as well.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. And we all get excited about the new traffic channels. We get excited about TikTok and Instagram reels and then other things that are new and shiny and we should, as marketers, we should try those things. But sometimes we sleep on what's still really effective. And one of those is Google search. Google Search is one of the OGs, but it's so effective. And I love that you brought up that point. We see that over and over again. If you're just running Google Shopping or now if you're just running Performance Max, that's not bad. But if you have search ads, and those can be part of Performance Max, but we actually recommend separate search campaigns too. It will increase your click through rate, right? People, when people see the product listing ads of the shopping ads in a search results page, and then they see your text ad, it just adds confirmation.

It's more selling, it's more convincing that hey, you're trustworthy and you've got what people are looking for and you're worth a click. And so having it show up in both places makes both campaigns better. So I love that focus on search and consider feed-based search. If you got a large SKU count or complex catalog, it can make life easier. So Jacques, this has been tremendously fun, super helpful. I've enjoyed it immensely. If people are listening and saying, Hey, I'd like to check out data feed watch either for more information, cause I know you guys have reports that you published, we can link to those in the show notes. But either for information or to check out the tool, how can they find you?

Jacques:

Data feed watch.com. And indeed we have a super big block where you find ticks and tips and tricks on anything about data feed optimization. You'll find the feed marketing with super interesting stats that enables you to compare yourself against your competitors in a certain vertical or in a certain country or whatever. All the data's there. Or you can just simply get a demo or sign up for a free trial so you can try it out and see for yourself.

Brett:

Love it. I highly recommend it. Check it out. If you're looking for a solution, get your feed marketing right. And when you do that opens up all opportunities that makes every other marketing activity you do better. If you need a second set of eyes on your shopping or Pmax account, reach out to OMG Commerce. We're happy to chat, happy to help. And so with that Jacques, man, thank you so much for the time and we'll have to do it again sometime.

Jacques:

All righty. Well thanks for having me, Brett. It was a lot of fun. And to your audience, you guys have

Brett:

A great day. Awesome. Thank you. And as always, I appreciate you tuning in. We'd love your feedback on this episode or any episode you found valuable. And hey, if you're listening and you're like, this is such great information, share it with your community, share it with people you think might be interested or in forums or wherever you think people might like it, that makes my day, of course, but also helps other people out as well. And so with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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Community and great brands go hand-in-hand. If you want to maximize LTV, build raving fans, stimulate referrals, and create a stable base of customers - COMMUNITY is at the center.

Carlos Alvarez is a legend in the eComm and Amazon seller space. He's been a full-time seller on Amazon for 15 years. He's also in the super-elite club of 9 figure sellers.

He's built the world's largest Amazon seller meetup group. It used to be fully in-person before the pandemic, but is now hybrid, allowing for greater accessibility and participation. And that's not all! He's created a community exclusively for physical product brands as well.

Here's a look at what we cover:

• Why focusing on size alone isn't the way to build a large and thriving community.
• The secret sauce principle of "if everyone is invited, no one is invited."
• The mechanics of building an email list and how to build an engaged community from that list.
• How to structure an offer ladder.
• Tools for building community.
• Plus more!

Mentioned In This Episode:

• Wizards of Ecom

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and I am delighted about today's guest. We go way back. We've been friends a long time in the industry. Mad respect for this guy, Mr. Carlos Alvarez as my guest. He's the host of the Wizards of Ecom, which is, if you did not know, the largest Amazon seller meetup group on the planet. And it's one that you should check out if you're an Amazon seller. He's also been a full-time seller on Amazon for 15 years and nine Figure Seller, which that is a pretty elite club. So this guy knows what he is talking about. And we're going to dive into some fun stuff Today. We're going to talk about community building. We're going to talk a little bit about building audiences on YouTube. This is stuff that's going to be applicable to you and it's going to be a lot of fun. And being on the air with a fellow podcaster is always fun too. So we may just go off the rails and riff a little bit. Who knows? You'll just have to wait and find out. So with that, Carlos, how you doing buddy? And thanks for taking the time,

Carlos:

Brett. Amazing. Thank you so much for that intro. And I've, I've been a fan of yours even longer than as long as we've known each other. So from afar, I think I've even referred to you in some of my events as like, that's my coach. Well, not officially, he doesn't know it. I've just been following his stuff.

Brett:

Dude, I'm thrilled to be your unofficial coach. This is amazing. But yeah, we were trying to remember where do we meet first? I think it was either T N C or Social Media Marketing World or one of those events, one of them, but cross paths and we're like, Hey, this is a pretty cool guy. We got to stay connected. So yeah man. So talk to me about wizards of e-com. Was that built out of just your desire to connect with other sellers or how did that come to be?

Carlos:

Absolutely. I being an e-com seller and me was elementary school dropout, g e d, just by myself and discover eBay, then discover Amazon. It was very solo, it was very working all night, slamming energy drinks, making, I get making sure I get those eBay orders out back in the day. And

Brett:

What was your energy drink of choice? I'm just purely curious here.

Carlos:

It got really bad, man. It used to be like two days, no sleep, had no concept of virtual assistances or processes back then. I wish I did. But it got to the point where it was a cold, I dunno if you know what a ola that is because you come down to Miami, it's this,

Brett:

I haven't seen it.

Carlos:

Short. Styrofoam cup full of Cuban coffee, which is like by itself.

Brett:

Yes. Okay. I had not heard that name. Dude. Cuban coffee is insane, so I don't know how much sugar is in that. So it's like straight espresso basically with lots and lots of sugar. I like the espresso part, not so much the sugar, but yeah, that will keep you up for a couple days probably.

Carlos:

I would get one of those, drop a five hour energy in there and then whatever energy drink I had, I would blend it and I would slam it. It was bad. No, no. But I just, just doing this nonstop by myself and I started getting into building my own brands and building communities in real life has always been a thing. I like meeting even been like that with Amazon wholesale accounts. It was like, if I can get face-to-face with this vendor, I will close. But if you're forcing me into email, I'm just, it's done. So meeting other sellers, I, in building community, I'm very, I don't need to be the guru of the community liable to go out there. I'm fine with being the guide, guide, not guru. And I want to find other people that are doing what I do and hopefully learn from them.

So I didn't know where I fell with my experience level in this and I was like, let's find other sellers if they exist and let's create a meetup, which I had used meetup.com to build other brands for a scuba brand in the past and other things. So I was like, let's just put this thing on meetup.com and maybe somebody will show up. I had four people, I picked a coffee house close to my house and three other people showed up for the next four events. Nobody showed up. And I used to take pictures, I would strategically pose for the picture so I'd catch like a table or two behind me. So it looked like they were part of the group

Brett:

Beat ups going great. Lot of people in the coffee shop today. Yeah,

Carlos:

Can't wait to see everybody again next week. That's all I would say. Right, right, right. Yeah. And it builded, that's

Brett:

Not lying. That's just creative

Carlos:

Ally technically, right?

Brett:

Yeah, yeah. That's so good. That's so good. So glad you kept it up. And one thing I just want to mention about in person events, something, it is kind of lonely to be an entrepreneur. That's true regardless of the industry, but especially a virtual entrepreneur, everything we do is online. Everything we do is digital. And so we don't have the human interaction as much. And I will say even though we, we've been a digital agency since 2010, the best, the longest lasting connections and partnerships and JV opportunities and friendships have all started in person. Either started in person or through a referral from somebody that I met in person or those relationships were just made better in person. And so yeah, you just got to get out there, you got to go to events, you got to do stuff like meetups. It's worth the time. So then when did that really start to gain traction? Because you went from you being the only one in the meetup to now largest meetup in the world of Amazon sellers. When did it really take off?

Carlos:

I think with everything, not just one thing, but one of 'em is consistency

Brett:

For

Carlos:

Sure. I was consistent with it. The other one was feedback. So those first events was whoever was the biggest extrovert, I dunno if that's a good example, whoever was the biggest extrovert that showed up, that was the topic because that person was willing to just interrupt and I mean just completely bully the conversation. And I was just happy people were talking and showing up. So I didn't identify that as an issue. And this has been something that I've, I, I've since learned and it's helped me in all my communities. And that is ask people for feedback on the group, which sounds obvious, but the thing is when you ask 'em or you buy SurveyMonkey, I don't even know if that's still around, but buy some survey tools, you send it out and nobody responds. But I learned that if you tell them what you think is a good idea to do, they all are more than willing to tell you why that's a bad idea.

And I'd say, look, I think it's a great idea if we start meeting at 7:00 AM on Saturdays, everyone would jump in on why that's a bad idea and they'd suggest a time we should meet. So getting feedback from the group here, and this really changed stuff was what are you getting out of the group? And people would say, I'm a beginner, and all we're talking about is these digital marketing tools for the last few weeks that could help Amazon sellers. And sure enough, the last few weeks, the extrovert of those weeks was a digital marketer. So I was like, wait a minute, maybe we need a beginner hour. So we carved out a spot, first hours for beginners, all your beginner questions and then we have a topic. So we started being able to cater for different people. We get feedback and we adjust what time really works.

We tried all those times during the week, which meant a lot of times changing something that worked to test to see if it was better and it wasn't. And then pulling back to what you knew. So I would say a year in, we had a structure that people were like, wow, I wish this existed where I lived. I happened to be in Miami at that point. We started hearing that and then we got reached out to a local newspaper who featured myself and the guys over at Gja and they referred to me as the Pied Piper of Amazon. They published it and it just blew up.

Brett:

That is awesome. That is awesome, man. And that's one of those things where consistency, showing up, putting in the hard work, not quitting when no one shows or not quitting, when things don't go great, eventually you reach a breakthrough or things really accelerate. It's kind of one of those things where the overnight successes that are talked about and celebrated, they're usually years, multiple years in the making and sounds like that was true for wizards of e-comm as well. So I love this aspect of community building and I think this is important, whether you're selling a physical product, whether you're selling accessories or beauty or supplements or whatever, having a community around your product is so powerful because we buy for emotional reasons and we're all craving connection. We want to buy stuff for sure. We also want community and connection. We want the brands and the things we buy to resonate with us and they speak about who we are and how we want to show up in the world. And so lots of valuable things around community. I think it's important for service providers as well like myself. But let's dive into what do you consider some of the fundamentals or the key ingredients to building a community?

Carlos:

I think one of the ingredients, and I might even just be totally plagiarizing this from authors, I've read so much about community that if I say something that sounds super knowledgeable, there's a chance that I read it from someone and anyone listening to this, I am not stealing it. Just you tweak it and you make it to your own. And at the end, you don't know where this thing came from, but there's an author named Priya Parker who wrote a book called The Art of Gathering. It's been very impactful even prior to that book on how I approach community or I was doing something and then reading that book really validated a lot that I was doing. But a really important thing that I took from there is for a long time when I was building community pre wizards of e-comm, I gauged, if you asked me how did the event go, I would tell you it was good if a lot of people showed up and it was bad if not too many people showed up.

And later on I wind up becoming the city organizer for meetup.com and helping other community builders start their communities and making them grow. And something I learned is that meetup is your meetup community or however you're meeting, it's a gathering and a gathering is any time there is three or more people and you need to treat it as such, you need to treat it the same way as if it's 50 people. But if you have three or more people, you have a gathering, you have a community and you should treat it as the valuable thing that it is. So when you change that approach, all of a sudden you're not so discouraged because you only got five and you have to start somewhere. There's so many amazing people in communities I know that just died. They just abandoned them because of that, because that didn't just rapidly grow within the first few months. So that would be a big one. The other one for me is having a secret sauce here is if you have a community and you're waiting for people to join and they're not, the problem is you.

When you just have that community sitting there, it's sort of like everyone is invited and when everyone is invited, nobody's invited. Yeah. So you have to know so true who you want in your community and you need to actively reach out to those people, be where they're at. I'm talking a little digital marketing now. Hang out where your community hangs out. And if you don't know what that is, look for it. More than likely, if you started the community, you are your community. So where are you hanging out? And invite those people to the community. Don't just like, we'll take anyone, anyone that's willing to register and update their profile picture, you're in our community, that doesn't work. That's actually hurting you.

Brett:

That's not a community. Yeah. Is it, was it Groucho Marx maybe that said he didn't want to be a part of any club that would have him as a member, right? It's like one of those and just kind of tug and cheek, but it's like, yeah, if this is available to anybody, then I don't want to be there. I want to be there with people that are like me or with people that I aspire to be like, so this is how I want to show up. This is who I want to be in the world. This is who I want to rub shoulders with. If the community is for that type of person, then I'm in. If it's for everybody, anybody and everybody, then I'm nervous that it's going to be a bunch of time wasters or it's not going to be valuable. And to your initial point, I think this is so important.

If it's the right five people that can be transformational. If it's the right three people that can totally transform your business. We did a thing locally, but when OMG was starting, and then I had two other friends in Springfield, Missouri where I lived, one was starting a business one and had a business a little while. So we did this thing, I can't remember if we call it the think tank. I know we had some stupid name for it, but we just got together regularly and asked each other hard questions and gave each other candid feedback on our business. And it was so transformational and so valuable to the start of the business and it was just like three or four guys. And so if it's the right people that that's all that matters. Are there elements? So I like the way you talk about it's a gathering. If it's three or more, it's a gathering. How do you make it feel, and hopefully this will apply to in-person and virtual a little bit. How do you make it feel like a gathering versus Hey, this is awkward, this is uncomfortable. What are we

Carlos:

Doing here? No, that's a phenomenal question. Yeah, that's a phenomenal question. So I, I'll give you the quick answer, but it's going to sound like a cop out. And then I'm going to explain a little bit. So it's rules. All communities need rules. Your group has to have rules. And a lot of people think when you say that, it means you can't say your political affiliation, don't talk about religion, avoid. That's what they think rules mean. And yeah, there should be something there that says that if that applies in your group. But when I'm talking about rules, I'm talking about how to make it closer. Again, I'm going to take something from an author I read about rules can be something like this and this can make you feel part of something. Like there was this community, I don't remember the name, and I think it had to do with tech.

And there was a rule that said, here's the free food, here's the drink that we have for this event. You cannot pour own drink. You can have somebody else pour your drink, but you can't pour your own drink. So you can create rules like that force this community building and that are fun. And you wind up saying, you're not going to believe this. I'd be like, Brad, I was at this crazy event yesterday in Miami, they had the best beers. We couldn't open our own beers. We had to ask somebody in the community to do this. So you create these rules like this, that's so fun

Brett:

And

Carlos:

It's so fun and endless.

Brett:

It's just rip really quickly. I don't want to derail you too much because this is so good. But I think that in some way that's just a brilliant thing. It's so simple, but it's like it teaches you to say, Hey, it's okay to ask for help and everybody has to do it. So it's acceptable now, but it's okay to ask for help. And actually not only is it okay to ask for help, but when you ask for help, a lot of people are delighted to help. A lot of people are like, oh yeah, love, love, love to crack, open your beer for you. Absolutely. But it also gets the conversation going and it's so many brilliant things there. Okay, that's great example. Keep going with rules.

Carlos:

No so rule. There's all kind of rules that you can create in your community if you try to apply this one, it's probably, maybe it'll work. I think this one's a good one. Maybe this is the Yeah, yeah, right. But this is the equivalent of would you rather do this? What are they going to be talking about afterwards and what are they going to want to come back and experience that? Or everybody look to your left and say hi to so-and-so that's sitting next to you, which happens a lot. Nothing against them, but this is your community. You chose the people that are here. You invited the people that you wanted to this, it's your gathering, it's your rules. Something else Priya Parker said was that a gathering is the temporary suspension of the constitution and you and rules and you replace it with a different one.

So it's like your rules, for example, outside of us getting together for this meetup, let's say you can pour your own drink. Obviously we all can, but we're temporarily suspending that rule. If you want to be part of this community and you need to ask somebody else if that makes sense. When she first said it, I was like, man, this sounds illegal. You can't suspend the constitution. But when you start peeling it back, it makes a ton of sense. So create your rules and that whether it's virtual or in person, is going to go really give you that impact that you're part of something that everybody knows their name, what show is that from? Cheers. Yeah, cheers. Everybody knows your name. So that's what does it now in person for me is my strong suit. I can do this really good in person. My next would be email. So the email community and being able to achieve that on email. Now you have to do different things, but you can do it in whatever channel is the most comfortable for you. Again, I just keep giving you examples that are in person because that's my thing. That's my jam. Yeah,

Brett:

I love this so much. And what's interesting about the rules piece, we all want to know how we can and should behave. We want some guidelines, we want some direction. I remember reading years ago, I thought it was so interesting that kids who play in a fenced in backyard often are in end up being more creative than those who grew up with no fences, no boundaries. And the idea behind that is if there's no boundaries, I maybe am timid or concerned or I'm afraid I don't know what to do. But if they're clear boundaries, I can just go wild in that space. I can create and I can play and I can make believe and I can do all these things and that that's related to kids. But I think for adults it's similar. We want some structure. How do I show up in this group? What's okay, what's not okay, who is this group about? And then when you know those things, you know how you have the freedom now to create within those guidelines. So I think that's super helpful.

Carlos:

Another one, another one is a name you. Yeah, you got to give your event, your group and the people in it, a name meet meetup.com has always done this. And I thought it was it. I thought it made no sense in the world until I started really building out communities. And it has a block. You can't even proceed unless you give someone a name in the group. So if you created a, I'm going to u, I keep using Meetup too, but you don't have to be on Meetup. But if you create a community that's about blogging and maybe you call blogger, everybody in there is a blogger or a creator. So when you write an email or you communicate in person, create, let's get together and let's take a photo that naming matters. The name of your event matters. The name of your group as a whole matters. When you combine all these ingredients, you come out with a really amazing community recipe. So I'm hoping, I love that. I'm hoping somebody listening to this realizes that you just have to do more than just create the event, sit back totally. And wait for people to see the title somehow and join

Brett:

H. How do you think that, let's translate this for a minute to an e-commerce brand. So I'm selling sporting goods, let's just say on online H, how do I do this? So how do I think about that initial thought of, hey, if everybody's invited, then no one's invited, right? And doesn't necessarily matter how many people but the right people and what are the rules I would set up and names and things like that. It how would you translate this for an e-com brand?

Carlos:

Me personally, I would do something that most people won't do, and that is my mind just would immediately go to say I'm into sports, and let's say it's, I don't know, let's say it's, I don't know, cleats or something, right? Yeah. I would immediately say, okay, I'm going to go out there and start either all guys or co-ed, weekend, kickball league. And I'm going to say, where are my weekend warriors at? If it's like, maybe weekend warriors is wrong, but where am I? We were super athletic as kids and we enjoyed this, but never thought of going pro. We had other stuff, but it doesn't mean we don't like sports and we want to get together on the weekend and play some cool sports and build a team so we can join all these different leagues together and scratch that itch that we have and we thought we couldn't do anymore.

So I would think to that. And then I'm like, okay, I'm that person. I sell the gear that goes along with this. And it doesn't mean that everyone that joins I'm going to sell to, I'd be more than happy for them to take a picture of it. I'll probably give them the gear for free and they're probably going to want to pay for it. But s I might be able to sponsor that group and other people ask about it. I'll build an email list on it. I'll sponsor different games and I'll start building the email list and building the community. I mean, I wasn't even ready for the question, but that's how I would do it without even thinking of it. I'd immediately jump to that. Now if that was totally off the table for me, I, I'm not going to go give my weekends up to do it.

I actually think it would be harder, totally doable, but harder. Ryan Die said something years back four, I think it was like four God Covid warps time, no pre covid. So the year or two before Covid 18, 19, he said something about doing things that are not track, that don't really have a trackable ROI or an as easy of a trackable ROI is going to be better. And I think he hit it on the head. And when it comes to building an in-person community and going out there and doing kickball to grow your brand, something as crazy as that, it has a very difficult to track ROI to it versus I'm going to set up an email and I very clearly see open rates, conversions. It's much more trackable, so it becomes much more difficult as well.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. Yeah. You think about physical store, what's the ROI of having a greeter who really smiles at you? I don't know mean you could probably track it somehow, but it's pretty hard to track and you just know it works. So just do it. Get someone who's cheerful and happy and those sort of things. So let's talk about email groups. You said that that's kind of one of your go-tos, and I think that that seems pretty approachable for price service providers who are maybe like us at OMG Commerce where our clients are all over the country and even international or e-com brand where customers are spread out all over the globe. So how are you building an email community? What are some of the components there and how does that actually work?

Carlos:

Email, you have a lot of options. So you have the actual email itself, which is extremely important, but I feel you need in conjunction with the email, a way for people to interact in a controlled way. Now, I don't want to sound like a dictator here, but in a controlled environment between emails. So for the longest time, for me and almost everyone, it was Facebook. And I love Facebook. I'm not anti-Facebook at all. However, Facebook groups for me, while there's a lot of powerful use cases for them, is not the best place for me anymore to have real time back and forth communication where notifications are not throttled and everyone's seeing your message if they really want to without having to know we're a three step process to make this happen. So the WhatsApp is phenomenal though for it. The problem is WhatsApp caps on the amount of people that can be there becomes very challenging. You'll get somebody that'll post some, get ahold of the link publicly and just post some really inappropriate stuff that you don't see until the morning. I don't want to deal with that. So Telegram is my go-to

Brett:

Telegram. Nice. Yeah, I used it.

Carlos:

Discord even more powerful. But the learning curve for most people on Discord is unfriendly. So Telegram is basically a rebranded. WhatsApp is my best description with a lot more privacy features and a lot more control from the community manager, creator, owner side that you can put in place to make it a pleasant experience all the time. It allows for bots. So once you have the email and you have a place for everyone to communicate between the emails, it now is where some of this flexibility comes in. It depends what your email is about. A lot of people don't do an email list because they're like, I'm not a writer. Some of the best email communities I've seen were just curated content. And the cool thing about curated content is say you have this one Telegram community that where people go that are part of this newsletter to engage with each other, but the curated content might be different areas of it.

I just saw you gave a killer webinar with as a Asez, a Firestone on Google. So say there was a curated AR article from Google in there, but there was another article had nothing to do with Google. You can have these breakout rooms where people can discuss the topic for the next three days. Is this, our suspending of the constitution is we can't post anything in these subgroups unless it's about four or against or whatever about this particular article that came out on X newsletter. So that would be an equivalent that you can put together that I think would be super impactful. And a lot more people I notice engage that way because they're like, yeah, I love this. I just want to tear this up. This Google webinar that Brett and NRA did terrible want to tear this up. It was all

Brett:

Wrong. He doesn't know what he's talking about.

Carlos:

No, nobody's

Brett:

Ever said that. But your breakout rooms within Telegram, is that what you're saying? So these breakout rooms. Yeah, totally could. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what's interesting, so I've used Telegram a couple times for a couple of different groups that I've spoken at or been a part of. You don't need a tutorial, it just works intuitive. You open it up. Yep, you get going. So totally makes sense. And the privacy piece makes a lot of sense too. So how then are you building this email group? So email group is kind of the consistent content telegram that is the vehicle for connection and commenting and real community building between emails. How are you building this? How are you growing this? I'm assuming a name is really important here too. I'm assuming setting the parameters for who this is for is also important. How are you building that email? Community

Carlos:

Building the actual email list?

Brett:

Yeah.

Carlos:

Yeah. So again, this is one of those ones that's like pick your poison, do what's good for you, don't repeat for me what mine is long form free, long form, high value content. So I'll give you an example. There's a YouTube creator who's probably the name in efficiency nowadays called Ali Abdal, right? So amazing channel by the way, if you haven't checked it out, Brett, it's absolutely amazing. I learned something, I'm some of those channels. You learn bite-sized, digestible things every episode. So Ali Abdal doctor who becomes full-time YouTuber. So he creates these high form, high value, long form, valuable content, it's free. And in there he gives a free resource where it's applicable. Here's my checklist on that I go through before going to bed to make sure I get optimal sleep. He is never, and he's pushing 5 million subscribers ever sold something on his YouTube channel.

Wow. Now what happens is it doesn't mean this guy doesn't know how to sell or it's just like some pro bono thing. When you download that free resource, he sells to you via the email based on what you've sort of self segmented yourself. Hey, I'm into this, I'm into efficiency, but don't blast me on everything efficiency. I'm into this one particular area of efficiency like sleep, which just makes your job easier. I mean you could have community and also community and profits are not you mutually exclusive. They can be in the same sentence. So they self segment and then you start selling to them. So my way of getting people into my community or into my email list is long form high value content. If it was the scuba community, it was scuba lessons and the long form content was going out there for hours out into the water with scuba, with wizards of e-com. It's an divorce worthy quantity of free long form meetup events where I'm getting up there and teaching 12 to 20 times per month. And for somebody's YouTube channel, that could be you. It like everything that goes into building a YouTube channel at scale, you're putting in all that. So for me, that's the easiest way. Nowadays though, there's another way that I don't have a ton of experience on. I've begun experimenting with it. Have you ever heard of a tool called Spark Loop?

Brett:

Spark Loop? I have not.

Carlos:

They just got acquired by ConvertKit and prior to that what they do is they plug into every email service provider out there, if you've heard of it. They're connected with it. And what'll happen is when you someone up for, I want to set up sign up for Brett Curry's email list. When I go sign up, there's an immediate popup, like a modular popup that pops up and it says, if you're into Brett's email, check out these three and maybe it's Ali Abdal and two other people that are on there. So they're helping you feed your email list. I know some people that put email lists out in specific niches and they'll grow that thing to a few thousand emails just through Spark Loop and it's like $67 a month.

Brett:

That's amazing. That's phenomenal. Okay, cool. And lean into whatever works for you. But I think that that's kind of tried and true. It just works. You're giving long form valuable content. Content that people are hungry for. And we've done this too where we talk a lot about YouTube ads and how to grow with YouTube ads and it's kind of complex and especially the creative aspect. And so we've got a guy that's top YouTube ads and examples and templates and here's 16 winning ads. And I break them down and show you why they work and show you how you can duplicate it and things like that. People want that content and they're willing to exchange their email address for it. And then if you can build the community on top of that, now you're delivering even more value.

Carlos:

A side note, if you had a paid email newsletter on YouTube ads, I'd be your first subscriber. So I'm saying that

Brett:

Thing would be massive. I guess I should should consider that. There's one more

Carlos:

Thing. Maybe a discount since it was my idea.

Brett:

Yeah, totally. Founding member, we'll get to get you the founding member discount. Yeah, for sure. So that's awesome. So then you think about, so you're building community, how do you think about strategically monetizing that community? And you want to protect the community and you want it to be valuable and it's a gathering and it's people that you want to hang out with and they want to hang out with you. And so if you don't monetize it, then now you just got a club or that's just a friendly gathering, which is okay, but you need to pride monetize it. But if you try too hard to monetize, you maybe kill the spirit of it. So how do you strategically monetize a group?

Carlos:

Like you said, you have to be very careful. Well, you're gaining trust in your gathering and they trusted you operating under your suspended constitution for different periods of time. So it rapidly builds trust. And if you just say, Hey, everybody say you just discovered this very generous affiliate deal and you just start slamming them with all these deals that they should get and you become salesy, you'll burn the community rapidly by doing that. So there's so many ways to make money with the community. And I would start with some affiliate stuff. It just, because I have no idea, are we talking about a specific community? Are we talking about the sports one? But assuming people here listening to this are in want to do all different kinds of communities, what are some things that everyone can benefit from? I would start with a plugin that a friend of mine shared recently.

It's a plugin for chat gpt four for Instacart who does not want to save time shopping. Maybe you don't like whatever the case may be. Right? Totally. And I would show this prompt that says, create a grocery list with meals, this many meals for a family of excise under X dollars. And then show everybody this. So you see, you let people know, Hey, who's interested in this loom video I put together on how to save a bunch of money and time with your Instacart? Pat Flynn, another one. Pat Flynn did a great example with when he first started, but I think he did one that was like, here's a script that you can use to save a hundred dollars on your cable bill. But had nothing. His list had nothing to do with that, but everyone on his list wanted to save money and he knew they all had cable. So come up with some easy stuff like that and start seeing who buys. Start getting the feedback from that. The next easy spot to move into with communities is digital products. But you can get into physical products with a digital community for sure.

Getting people's feedback on a product before you bring it to market is priceless.

Brett:

And people want do that. People want to give that feedback because they feel like they're helping you and and likely in the process as they're giving feedback, they may consider, Hey, I want to buy that product too. So let's talk about feedback for just a minute. Cause I think this is huge. I love post-purchase surveys. I know people that use no commerce or triple whales got this now where you're asking people, did you find what you were looking for and why did you buy this? And why did you almost not buy? There's a ton of questions you can ask and getting that feedback is incredibly valuable. How do you get feedback from your groups? What's the mechanism there? And then what kind of feedback are you soliciting?

Carlos:

So when you build a community there, I found that there's no way around building it to a point that when you walk into the room, there isn't at least a small reaction of, oh, the principles here maybe sit up a little straighter. Or remember he's the one that painted these walls and everyone acts slightly different. I don't know a way around that. And for everyone it's going to be different, but I don't want my feedback colored even that much. So what I do is, like you said, there's a door greeter, someone that smiles. We have people that are just dedicated to identifying the new members and approaching them so they don't just walk out these same people, they're sit, they're not sitting next to me at the table. They're sitting amongst the group and they're asking, and they get uncolored unfiltered answers. That's so good, so good. So the equivalent in person is that,

Brett:

Yeah. And man, what a valuable thing because everybody, I think whether they're joining a virtual group or in-person group, they're fighting with, am I in the right place? Should I get out of here? Do I need to duck out if there's a break, if there's a quick break, do I just need to hit the exits and get so people have that anxiety or at least that and that concern. And so having people dedicated to making those people feel welcome, love that so much. But also people who are not you and who don't appear to be super associated with you asking for feedback because you're always, even people that are super direct and that want to help and that maybe don't have as much of a filter, they're still going to filter stuff for you because it's, that's just human nature. But they'll give more candid feedback to somebody appear to be the leader. So really great. Really, really great. Any insights, I know we're kind of coming up against time has been super fun, super valuable. You're also doing a lot of stuff on YouTube and we love YouTube ads. We we're actually working on building our YouTube channel only have some strategies now just for fun. But how are you building community? How are you building content on YouTube? Any tips or insights you can share there?

Carlos:

Yeah, I'm going to approach, I'm approaching it the same way in a lot of the same ways I do with the meetup, the in-person communities or the meetup communities in the sense of I'm going, I'm beginning with long form, high value free, long form, high value content. I'm not going to be selling not even a, remember Black Friday or Cyber Monday, nothing. There's nothing going to happen. And the path to that though, because this is a business is going to be free resource. There might also be that I have an annual event online seller crew, so I'll probably drop that in the beginning. So it's like some people are just going to see it, but it'll be free resource, free valuable resource, and then an email sequence that leads to an offer. Or maybe Brendan Burchard, I do his high performance planner, love the guy, but he, hes, he's fixated on this free offer, $7 offer, 49, $50 monthly continuity, 200 to 1000, offer to 10,000, right? So I like the path sometimes for me, the hardest one is that $7? Yeah,

Brett:

What is that going to be? Yeah,

Carlos:

Right. But that's the path I plan on taking with YouTube. The thing that I feel like is going to help me a lot with YouTube is I already have a pretty massive community. And one of the ways I've already monetized, say the wizards of eComm community is we have an optional monthly membership that people get access to all the classes that we've done. Nice. The recordings of all the classes. But one of the perks that comes with it is they get to have unlimited email access to myself and my team, which sounds a lot scarier than what it is. It's actually very scalable. And if you're into content creation and you're saying, okay, instead of just giving you this three line answer, I'm going to build out this amazing thing and I know other people are going to ask this, so I'll already have that piece of content for them.

So it, it's like a flywheel. So I already have, I know what people are asking and I'm going to create content on that. And you know what, maybe it says on YouTube that my chances of ranking to the top of page one on that particular content is not so good, but it is according to my group. And being able to not just create the content but promote the content to my group at the in-person events and via email will give me the jumpstart to that engine on YouTube. So that, that's my YouTube playbook right now. And I'm excited. Hardest part so far has been a teleprompter. You're not using a teleprompter use wonder.

Brett:

Yeah. Because it's one of those things where if you're listening to someone speak in person, you, you're engaged and there's a lot more room for someone to slow down or chase rabbits or gather their thoughts or whatever. People are pretty ruthless when they're watching content online. And if your YouTube video has too long pauses or there, there's too much, it feels too slow, people will bail. And so getting that focused scripted while still not sounding stiff it, it's pretty difficult. But it is necessary I think, in that format for sure.

Carlos:

So is everything else we've done and we've managed to do that. So I don't think the teleprompter kills

Brett:

Us. Yeah, yeah man, this is so good. I'm pretty pumped to build a community here. This is awesome. So then if someone is listening in or watching and they're like, okay, I got to check out wizards of in-person groups, how could they do that? And then what are the virtual group options as well?

Carlos:

Sure. They're their in-person groups. And the in-person groups are also live streams. So you could watch the in persons virtually as well or attend. The easiest way to get all the information on everything that we're doing as far as classes is we have an app in wherever you download apps called wizards of e-com. And you could just, it'll have it broken down by city when you get in there. And then one of the other cities will just be called virtual. So say you don't live near any of the cities that are currently visible, you can just pop into virtual and you'll see all the events. Our podcast wizards of e-comm podcast is on there. I don't do enough talking about the community on the podcast. So the app would probably be better. And wizards of e-comm dot com.

Brett:

That's awesome. That's awesome. And so I'm assuming, do you have more virtual attendees and group members now than in person? Or is in person still the majority? Or do you know off the top of your head?

Carlos:

No, I, I'm going to say there's more virtual just because of what it is. Well, COVID really blew that up. Prior to Covid, we were just in person, but then our community got so close with so many people virtually when we were forced to go virtual that afterwards it was kind of abandoning your brother. So it was like, how do we make this work? And that's why it's a very hybrid effect in an in-person event. Only the speakers on camera up and people online can ask questions. It, it's a work in progress still. And we get feedback and we try to make those improvements with the feedback. Sometimes the feedback is not as fast when it's audiovisual things that need to be changed, but that's what we do. So yeah, the app would be the best place for people to find out everything. The website wizard a e-com.

Brett:

Cool. And then the, I'll plug the YouTube channel as well. It looks like it's just wizards. Ofcom, yeah, wizards of e-com with one M. Obviously if you search for it and misspell it, you're, you're going to find it anyway. But Carlos, man, this was super fun. Love this insight. I knew you were doing amazing things. I did not have all the inside scoop. Now I do. And I'm even more impressed. And so, dude, I got to check out next time I'm in Miami, I got to check out one of the in-person meetups. I want to come hang out, want to come see, want to come see the Gathering and how you do it. So it'd be amazing. A hundred percent. Cool. Alright. Right. Any other asks? Any anything? Any other resources, anything else you want people to check out? Obviously check out the podcast as well. But any other cool stuff you want to point listeners to?

Carlos:

Man, coolest content I consume on the web is your stuff

Brett:

Not already.

Carlos:

If you're not already consuming Brett stuff consume it pays me really good

Brett:

To say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got to send a payroll memo right now. I got to get Carlos paid for those comments. So that's awesome, man. Really appreciate it. Tons of fun. Looking forward to round two in the not too distant future.

Carlos:

Thanks. Thank you, man.

Brett:

And as always, thank you for tuning in. Hey, if you listen to this and you're like, man, this would be valuable. I know this person who needs community, who needs this insight, share with him and pass the word along. Would love to be introduced to your friends and I know Carlos would as well. And also, if you've not done it, leave that review on iTunes. Makes my day and helps other people find the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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Josh Hadley is a podcast host and a successful brand builder. His business Hadley Designs, just crossed 8 figures in annual sales.

One key to his success is hiring manager-level talent overseas. His approach to hiring is fantastic. It's definitely one of the better ones I've seen.

But that's not all! Before we dive into our discussion on hiring, we do a rapid-fire exchange of our top 6 takeaways from recent podcast episodes. Super fun and hopefully inspiring. 

Here's what we cover: 

Bonus Content: 

• Creative problem-solving as a competitive advantage. 
• The numbers behind successful infomercials. 
• The metric YouTube cares about to boost your brand's YouTube channel? 

Hiring Content: 

• How to get clear on WHO you should be hiring. 
• How to measure the success or failure of a new hire before you hire them. 
• How to create a compelling job description. 
• How to find, attract, and retain top-level talent overseas - get Josh's full formula. 

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Mentioned In This Episode:

Josh Hadley

• LinkedIn
• eComm Breakthrough
• Hadley Design

Brett Curry

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Other Individuals / Resources

• Destaney Wishon
• Jordan Pine
• Mina Elias
• Liz Germain 
• Will Hughes
• Alex Hormozi 
• Michael E Gerber
• Criteria Corp
• Measure What Matters

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Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of, OMG Commerce, and today we have a return guest and I am thrilled to have him and stoked about this topic. And so Mr. Josh Hadley is coming back for round two on the show. Josh is the CEO of Hadley Designs and he's the host of the e-Comm Breakthrough Podcast. Check that out wherever you like to consume your podcasts. And so today it's going to be kind of fun. Since we're both podcast hosts, we thought it'd be really interesting to kick off the show sharing a few takeaways that we've gathered from our brilliant guests in recent weeks and recent months. And then we're going to dive into the topic of hiring management level talent from overseas, which I think is something we all need to consider and all need to look at. So with that, Josh, welcome to the show, man. And how you doing,

Josh:

Brett? It's good to be back here. I saw you just last week too, and so this is great. We went a few months without talking to each other and now it's back to back, so this is

Brett:

Fun. Yeah, I think it was like maybe a couple years we didn't go without talking. And then yeah, we ran into each other at Seller in Austin. I had a chance to speak there. Got to chat with you a couple times. Awesome to see ya. And yeah, man, it sounds like you and your wife, your business is exploding in all the best ways. And so I'm going to mention people need to go back and listen to the episode where I had you and Becca both on the show. That was episode 151. That was over a hundred episodes ago. Holy cow. That was in February of 2021. But you guys tell the story, you guys are just the cutest, this awesome husband and wife team, but do you want to talk a little bit about what you guys sell and the growth you guys have had? And then we're going to get into the content for today.

Josh:

Yeah. Yeah, it, it's amazing. As we were just kind of reminiscing of the last time we talked, that was over two years ago now. And man, our business has completely changed and in a good way. And we've continued to double down on what's working, and we've seen great results because of that. But ultimately, our business started as a custom wedding invitation business and has since pivoted to a stationary empire. We have over 1200 different SKUs that we sell primarily on Amazon, and we crossed the eight figure mark at the end of last year, which was congrats, which is fantastic. And so yes, and we still have a lot more room to grow as well. We see a bright future ahead of us, and we're very optimistic.

Brett:

Love it, man. And your designs are awesome. Becca, your wife is extremely talented. You're a brilliant entrepreneur, strategist, business mind, and so you guys just work great together. So excited to see where you go and where you grow from here and happy to have insight and to watch you guys do that. So let's do this. So e-comm Breakthrough podcast. First of all, how do you hosting a podcast? Is it as fun as you thought it would be? Had it been harder than you thought it would be? Give folks at home the scoop who are maybe thinking I'd like to host a podcast.

Josh:

Yeah. Well, for myself, to me in my zone when I'm talking to people and interviewing people, that's my favorite thing. What I love about having a podcast, if we're just at dinner, right, Brett, and I'm talking to you about your business and I just continue to ask you 21 questions, you're like, bro, this is getting weird. Why do you want to keep diving down so deep? But in a podcast, it's almost like it's

Brett:

What you're supposed to do.

Josh:

Yeah. Like dude, just keep going deeper and deeper. There was one podcast guest that I had on Howard Tai and the strategies that he ended up sharing all the podcasts. He's like, dude, you made me spill the beans. This is the stuff I share in my mastermind group, but you just kept probing further and further. So anyways, I love that the podcast just gives you an excuse to really get the juiciness and real actionable tips and strategies from the guests. So for me, selfishly, I'm the one jotting down. I think most of the notes even more than the listeners, but

Brett:

Yeah, I totally agree. It's one of those phenomenal vehicles to connect with the really smart people and spend time with them and learn from them, and then pass that on, share that with others. So yeah, this is, just look back. So you got 200 and we're 250 plus episodes and been doing this since 2017, so I'm kind of addicted to it. I like it. Yeah, glad to have you joining the fold of podcast hosts. It's a

Josh:

Fun. Well, Brett, if you recall, you were the one I asked about what it would take to get a podcast started backup when we were in war room. Remember that? That was

Brett:

Right back in the war

Josh:

Room days four years ago. Yeah, I want to say. And I was like, dang, do you like it? Is it worth it? And you're like, yeah, dude, you should just start one and see what happens. And here we are.

Brett:

And here you are. Okay, awesome. So excited about that. Let's dive in though. Let's, we're going to each share three big takeaways from recent episodes that we've gotten, just little nuggets of inspiration, truth, e-commerce, goodness, that sort of thing. So what is your first takeaway?

Josh:

Yeah, so I had Destiny Wish on from Better ams on the podcast.

Brett:

I got to hang out. She was in Austin at Silicon. She was, well hang out with her. Yeah.

Josh:

Yep. She was one of the biggest mindset shifts that I got from recording that episode with her, which our team has really adopted at this point is doubling down on the keywords where our conversion rate on our products is better than the market average. And so what she shared was a new Amazon brand metrics. Amazon's coming out with so much data, it's hard to keep up. You've got search query performance, you got brand analytics. Well now this is brand metrics and this is located in the advertising console, not in Seller Central on the ad console. You need to go down to ad metrics and then you can get pretty far down in your product categories and you can see what the market average is for your conversion rate. And so take your PPC conversion rate for whatever particular keywords you're advertising for and see which keywords you're winning and where you have a higher conversion rate, then the market average, and then all, it's just a matter of pay to play at that point. Just keep doubling down on those and you'll watch your organic rankings increase. We have seen that work since we've been making those adjustments in our business. So that has been

Brett:

Super interesting and it totally makes sense because Amazon is motivated to sell more stuff. And that's like the key metric that Amazon looks at to determine ranking is you're obviously looking for relevance, the keyword match, but the greatest signal of that is someone buying after they type in that keyword. And so looking at what's converting above average through your ads, doubling down on the organic side, love that idea and shout out to Destiny. Good You in Austin. Awesome. So the one I'm going to share is this from episode two 30 of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast, Jordan Pine, he is a direct response TV veteran, so he's been working in the direct response TV world. He knows all the big names there. And so we were talking about how do you take lessons from direct response TV infomercials and translate that into success on YouTube or Facebook or any online advertising.

And so we talked a little about Ginsu knives and that famous ad where it cuts through the Pepsi can and then through the tomato and all these wild things. And he shared the numbers, the metrics behind infomercials. And this was fascinating to me. And I bet there's a lot of people out there that are like, how do they make money? 19 bucks for this product? How does that work? Well, the breakdown is this. They always push the phone number at the end of those commercials, but only about 20% of the audience or 20% of sales come from the phone. Not surprising for young people, but that's kind of the way that works. 30% comes from the website. So 30% of people visiting fancy whizzbang, peeler.com, whatever the product is. And then 50% comes on Amazon comes from Amazon. So people watching the infomercial getting excited about it and then just go into Amazon to find it.

And that's why, and I've seen this now, I was kind of alerted to this after the interview, I've seen a few infomercials where at the end they say, not available on Amazon, so don't go. Interesting. Don't go because you'll go and buy something else. And not, our product is not available on Amazon. So this is just a reminder to me of anything we are doing top of funnel, YouTube, Facebook, whatever, not infomercials per se, but just anything we're doing, we're going to drive traffic to Amazon. And so you got to have your Amazon game dialed in as well. And it's also a reminder that top of funnel efforts drive action at the bottom of the funnel. So shout out to Jordan Pine. Awesome, love that. What is your takeaway number two?

Josh:

Yeah, so I think coinciding with that takeaway there from Jordan is I learned this from Mina Elias from the Trivium Trivium group. I think you had Mina on your podcast as well.

Brett:

I know him, I don't think, no, he's been on the podcast, but I do know him. Yeah.

Josh:

Okay. So Mina, what he shared, he has a lot of experience in selling supplements on Amazon and also advertising as his own agency as well. So one thing that he shared, which I thought was fascinating, is as he was working on his supplement brand, one of the things he did is he reached out to somebody that created sales funnels, your one click add to cart type stuff, your Russell Brunson, ClickFunnels type of stuff. And what he did is he reached out to this guy and had him set up a bunch of different funnels. And long story short, the funnels didn't end up working out, but here's what he learned from the process. The person that was managing the funnels was just constantly making one tweak at a time. It was changing up the images, changing up the copy, and just testing, test, test, test, test, test.

And long story short, what he ended up doing is how that has impacted the clients that he works with as well as his own brand. And he said time and time again, the one test that continues to work the best for us is switching out your main image. And you need to just keep testing and testing and testing that main image because that is the biggest indicator or the biggest conversion rate lift mover out of all the tactics that you could do on Amazon. And it's so simple, but most people just set it and forget it. I mean, it's only a white background image, but if you really look at it, there's a lot of different creative ways that you could implement that. And so since then we have doubled down on our testing efforts. We've been using product pinyon as well as pfu to just, yeah, I love Pfu. Understand what incremental like change can we make to the way that these cards are showing up or the way that it's angled, and we're seeing some good performance of that as well. So it's a good mindset shift. Just simple tweaks can make a huge difference.

Brett:

Sometimes we make it too complex and sometimes we want to look for the hidden secret or the hidden tactic or strategy that nobody's talking about. So we want to do it when sometimes it's just as simple as just keep testing that image, because that is what drives decisions more than anything else on Amazon from a shopping point of view is does the image clearly communicate what this is, the quality? Is it what I want? Does it going to fit my needs? And so yeah, tweaking that testing. That makes a ton of sense. That's really, really good. Cool. All right. So next one for me. This is from Liz Jermaine, episode 2 34, talking about YouTube organic growth. Now I'm a YouTube ads guy. Always love YouTube ads. I like the YouTube organic side too, which is not my wheelhouse per se, but she came on and talked about the four stages of organic growth on YouTube.

And what's so cool is she and her sister started this fitness channel years ago. They haven't posted any new content like three or four years. She still makes a really nice income from that channel because some of the content ranks and it still gets views and it still gets engagement. So when you do YouTube organic, it will get better over time. It's in some ways the opposite of TikTok or Instagram reels where they can really skyrocket and go viral quickly, but then they die a very speedy death. YouTube can go viral too, but it often just ages and gets better over time. And so she talked about the metrics that YouTube loves the most. And I don't remember if this was the metric to rule all metrics, but I think it was go back and listen to the episode, just make sure, but it was time viewed.

So YouTube is obsessed with how long are people consuming your content? And if they watch it halfway through all the way through, they're really engaging with the content, that's what YouTube cares about. And they'll start feeding that content to more people if they find that the engagement or the view rate is really high. So check that one out. And then I'm going to go ahead and share two in a row, cause I want to end with your third one, and then we will roll right into the rest of the content. But episode 2 31, this was my buddy Will Hughes. We met each other when he was the head of growth at Organifi. And then we did an episode recently talking about Liquid Mind, and it's his process for creative problem solving. And it was one of the most fun episodes. I've had a lot of people talking about this sharing across the e-commerce forums and whatnot that everybody liked listening to Will. But one of the things he shared is that as business owners, we need to look at and just as problem solvers look for things that are undervalued and things that are overvalued, and then focus in on that and look for outsized opportunities. And so one of the examples he gave was the Oakland A's back in the days when they set the streak and when in the early days of Bill Billy Bean and the movie Moneyball, the era that was based on, have you seen the movie Moneyball, Josh? I

Josh:

Have, yeah. You're talking about the old days when people actually cared to show up at Oakland A games, because right now it's the opposite problem

Brett:

Is that I don't follow baseball too closely. It's a great sport. I don't follow closely. So yeah, this is back, I guess in more of the glory days of the A, but prior to Billy Bean kind of turning things around and go watch the movie Moneyball, it really showcases that they were dumpster fire material. So what Billy Bean and this B baseball analyst played by Jonah Hill uncovered was that a metric that really matters in baseball that's undervalued is just on base percentage. And it doesn't matter if you walk or whatever, if you get on bait, if you get on base, that's what counts. Because really as a manager, as someone building a baseball team, you're trying to manufacture runs, you're trying to buy runs. And so they had one of the lowest salary caps in baseball. The Yankees were like 10 x, their salary caps, something crazy like that, or salary, payroll.

And they were able to create the longest winning streak in baseball season history. And they had tremendous success because they found what was undervalued and they found pitchers who had great numbers but looked goofy, throwing the ball guys that walked a whole lot and got on base that nobody wanted. And then they built this team of misfits, so to speak, and that's probably a little bit of an exaggeration, but they looked at what was undervalued, what was overvalued, and they looked for outsized opportunities, which there's so many opportunities in our business like that if we train ourselves to look at it that way.

Josh:

So I love that. I think that is such an important mindset shift as I follow Alex Hor as well, one of the things he's been doubling down on what of

Brett:

My days

Josh:

Love that guy. In a lot of his conversations, he talks a lot about, it's not how hard you work, how many motivational speeches do we hear that's like, you got to burn the midnight oil, you need to sleep for four hours. And it's like it all comes down to leverage. Yes. And understanding where's your time best spent? There's way too many things that you could do in your business, so focus on the ones that when you pull the lever actually provide an outsized return. So it kind of correlates with that same principle, but

Brett:

Totally love it. Super awesome. So your takeaway number three, what do you got?

Josh:

All right. Takeaway number three, I had the chance to interview Michael e Gerber. He was the amazing author of the E-Myth it, and I think most entrepreneurs have read that book and it's

Brett:

Transformational. I read it three or four times back before we, the beginning of OMG 2010, I read that book, consumed it over and over again and really shaped a lot of my early strategy in omg.

Josh:

Yeah, I mean, it truly is transfo