In this milestone 300th episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, I've distilled the most impactful insights from recent top-performing episodes to help you prepare for eComm success in 2025. From AI marketing innovations to viral content secrets and customer psychology insights, these carefully selected takeaways represent the cutting edge of eCommerce strategy. This special edition delivers concentrated wisdom from industry leaders to help you stay ahead of the competition.
Key Highlights:
- Why "out-of-the-box" AI is dead and how to create custom AI marketing hubs that deliver real results for your business.
- The truth about UGC in 2025: It's not dead, but the bar has been raised - learn what actually works now.
- Surprising insights about customer purchase timing: Why 60% of buyers take longer than a week to make their first purchase, and what this means for your marketing strategy.
- How Simple Modern built a half-billion-dollar brand on Amazon, and their replicable formula for category dominance.
- The "infomercial math" principle that's changing how successful brands approach omnichannel measurement and attribution.
---
Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(04:00) Harnessing AI for Marketing Success
(08:45) Why UGC Isn’t Dead
(12:20) Leadership and the Power of Real-Time Feedback
(14:42) The Critical Role of Offer Systems
(16:25) Strategies for Winning on Amazon
(18:18) Mastering The Art of The Hook
(20:58) Insights From Post-Purchase Surveys
(25:04) Performance Max vs. Performance Meh
(26:17) Creative Thinking as Your Competitive Edge
(28:05) Lessons From Infomercials
(29:57) Conclusion
---
Show Notes:
- Miki Agrawal
- Ezra Firestone
- Roland Frasier
- Ryan Daniel Moran
- Rachel Tipograph
- Sean Frank
- Daniel Harmon
- Andrew Yuderian
- Steve Chou
- Michael Stelzner
- Russ Henneberry
- Dara Denney
- Ray Dalio
- Molly Pittman
- Bryan Porter
- Eugenia Chen
- Jermiah Prummer
- True Classic Tees
- Trevor Crump
- Savannah Knight
- Will Hughes
- Joran Pine
- RTIC Coolers
---
Connect With Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce
- Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/
---
Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.
---
Transcript:
Brett Curry:
Well, hello and welcome to another very special edition of the eCommerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I'm flying solo on this episode, but for good reason. This episode, this very episode that you're listening to right now is the 300th episode of the e-Commerce Evolution Podcast. Now, I'm a little bit blown away by that fact when I started this, had no idea that it would go this long. To put that into context, most podcasts, the average lifecycle lifespan of a podcast is seven episodes. It's called Pod Fade. Someone starts a podcast and they start to fade, lose a little bit of interest goes away. So podcasts that enter into the 300 plus episode category, that's less than 1% of all podcasts. So thank you to you for tuning in consistently and making this show a success, and also thank you to some amazing guests.
Before I get into highlights, really what I want to do today, so I'll preview this just a little bit, is I've selected 11 fairly recent episodes that just blew my mind, changed my perspective, changed the way I approach marketing, e-commerce business, and I want to share the big idea from those episodes with you and a couple of nuggets. It's going to be rapid fire, 11 quick episodes, 11 quick big ideas, plus some additional big ideas from the content. And I also selected these because not only are they just like highlights of the show, but I believe these get you ready for 2025. I believe the competition's going to be unique in 2025. Things are going to be maybe more difficult than ever in some regards, but also I believe it's going to be a great year of opportunity. I think the economic outlook is pretty bright.
So a lot of opportunities in the coming year, and I want you to take full advantage. So these 11 takeaways and 11 big ideas, we'll get you ready for the new year. Now, I just want to show my gratitude to some amazing guests over the years. This is not a complete list of guests, obviously 300 episodes, but a couple of noteworthy ones. One, Mickey Agarwal, founder of Tushy on this show, dropping truth bombs and wowing us with their creativity and just being in general, a very, very fun episode. My buddy, Ezra Firestone, the legend in the e-com space, blue Ribbon mastermind, smart marketer, boom, beauty and others. He was on the show. He's been a multi-time guest. Roland Frazier, host of the Business Lunch podcast, business investor, leader of the Epic Challenge, just an amazing business mind. Ryan Daniel Moran, author of 12 months to 1 million Great influencers, super sharp guy.
Who else have we had on the pod? Tons of other great guests. Rachel Topograph from Mack, Sean Frank from the Ridge Ridge Wallets, Daniel Harmon of the Harman Brothers, Andrew Derian, commerce Fuel, Steve Chu, my wife, quitter Job podcast. Michael Stelzner, social Media Marketing World. And list goes on and on. Amazing guests. So keep tuning in. Got an amazing docket or amazing lineup of guests coming up in 2025 as well. So let's dive in. Let's dive in and talk about, hey, what are the big takeaways? What are these 11 big ideas and some supporting ideas that we should talk about? First one comes from Russ Berry, pretty recent episode about ai. And his big idea is don't just use out of the box ai, but create AI marketing hubs. If you are in the camp of thinking, Hey, AI is really cool, it's really interesting, but it's not particularly useful.
I can't just use AI to create a meaningful project or save myself a lot of time. It's because you're getting what Russ calls boiled chicken results, and that's because you're not using finely tuned ai. So here's the big idea. AI has been trained on essentially the entire knowledge base of the internet, right? The whole internet basically has been ingested by ai, large language models, but you know what? The AI doesn't know your business or your project that you're working on. And so what we have to do is we have to feed the ai the proper information. One analogy that Russ gave in the episode is, Hey, imagine you hired a top notch business consultant, like one of the best business consultants on the planet. You brought them in, but then you proceeded to tell them nothing about your business, nothing about your industry, nothing about your customers, no data points, no specific knowledge about your business.
You just started asking that consultant questions. You would get very generic answers, maybe insightful, but not particularly insightful for you. So Russ talks about creating these AI marketing hubs. What does that look like? Well, in chat, GPT, that's a custom GPT in clawed AI by anthropic, it's creating a project. And this is where you're feeding the AI all the relevant data for your business. So documents, reports, rubrics, customer feedback, ratings and reviews, transcripts from videos or podcasts or whatever. You're feeding the AI as much relevant information as possible. And then you're asking specific questions. And what's so cool about this, and I've done this a number of times in my business, the more specific information you feed the ai, it just unlocks a level of brilliance. And Russ also laid out a couple of other tips I think are really good. He said three main roles that the AI is really good at.
One is the scribe. So just kind of creative content. I think Claude is exceptional at this exceptional at the written language. So come up with this email, come up with this copy for a landing page, that type of thing. Again, still feed it relevant information, the optimizer. So how do we evaluate and improve what we're doing right now? So here's this landing page copy. Here's this email sequence. Here's a video script that I've got. How do you make it better? So the optimizer and then the strategist. So, hey, given all these inputs, here's our sales data. Here's historical data over the last three years, here's what we're trying to accomplish for this season. What are some big ideas? What should we do this season? So those three roles, scribe optimizer, strategists, all very effective to use the AI for. And then last thing before I move on is he talks about the RTIF framework for better prompts.
So Russ's argument is the real missing piece with AI is you're not feeding in enough relevant data. You got to bring your data to the party, but also better prompts are going to create better results. And so what does RTIF stand for? Well, it's role, task, input and format. So basically you're saying, Hey, chat GT or Gemini or Claude, or whatever, you are a marketing assistant research assistant, or you are a copywriter for a D two C brand. I need you to give me 50 headlines for this product launch. Here are examples of winning headlines in the past. Here's some examples of competitors' headlines. Here's examples of other things. And this is the format that I need that put into. And so I believe that the future is going to be ruled by smart humans who know how to lean in and use ai. I don't believe that the machines are taken over anytime soon, but I do believe that you need to learn AI and leverage it because you very well could get beat out by another agency, by another brand, by another, fill in the blank that is leveraging ai.
So Russ Henneberry's episode on marketing, ai, custom marketing hubs. Check it out. If you have not listened, it is a banger. The next guest. The next episode is from Dara Denny number, episode number 2 87, content that converts. I believe Dara is one of the leading minds when it comes to better creative for ads and organic content. And one of the things we talked about, one of the big ideas is that UGC is not dead. Coffin is not sealed on UGC, but the bar has been raised. And so the key here is that it's not that UGC stopped working user generated content. It's not that testimonials no longer carry any weight. It's just that we've seen testimonials. We've seen UGCA lot now. So just having it isn't the strategic advantage. Just having it isn't going to unlock new results. You've got to have really, really good UGC, and that's the kicker.
The days are gone when you can have bland, boring, pedestrian, UGC and just expect it to work. So no longer are we moved by clips of real customers saying, yeah, this is a really good product. I like it. I like using this product, or this has been a game changer for me. Just really bland engineer stuff. However, if you can capture video of your actual customers or real influencers saying, I've tried dozens of products like this. Nothing has worked like this, or I've tried lots of protein powders, they all wreck my stomach, but not this one. I drink this one. I feel energized. I feel alive. No bloating, no upset stomach, nothing, right? We worked with a jewelry store for a long time and a lot of guys were intimidated to go to jewelry stores. And we captured a customer saying, I used to be really intimidated to walk in the jewelry store until I went here.
The minute I walked in, I felt comfortable. I connected with the salesperson, I talked to the owner, and they gave me ideas and solutions. I'll never go to another jewelry store. So you hear a testimony like that or UGC like that, and you're moved, you feel something and it overcomes objections and it solidifies the value proposition. It brings to life some of the benefits that you're talking about. But generic, UGC, bland, UGC, it is in fact dead. And I would argue that it's probably never worked anyway. It just certainly doesn't work now. So UGC is not dead. The other thing that I'll talk about from Dara Denny's podcast, from her episode, episode 2 87, is that you need to take bigger swings. You need to make bigger tests. It's not really effective to say, Hey, this was our winning ad before. What if we change the color of the headline instead of blue?
Let's go green. How would that do form a hypothesis? Why did this ad work? What is it tapping into? What emotions, what fears, what concerns? What desires? What about our product? Is it highlighting in a unique way? So let's form a hypothesis. How can we create something similar to that, but different but edgier, better but clearer, whatever? So form a hypothesis and take bigger swings, make bigger tests. Of course, lean into what's working, but take a small part of your budget, lean into bigger tests. That's where you're going to find breakthroughs. You're not going to find breakthroughs by making small little color tests and things like that. Next one, episode number 2 79, Dave Klein. We talked about leadership and management within a D two C brand. Now, Dave Klein, one of the best management thinkers of our time. He's one of the best trainers, one of the best coaches that I've ever been around in terms of developing your leadership and developing you as a manager, your managers, and their leadership style.
And so he talked about somebody, he was at Bridgewater Associates, so Ray Dalio's company, and he talked about they had this environment of constant real time feedback. So they would, even as someone is delivering a presentation, people are on iPads giving real-time feedback that didn't make sense, that wasn't believable, this could be improved, and they just gave raw, real-time feedback constantly. Now, not everybody could handle it. Not everyone could handle the pressure, the transparency, the feeling like you're maybe under a microscope all the time. Not everybody can handle it. But those that could grew and improved consistently, it unlocked new levels of growth. Now, you don't need to go to the extreme of Bridgewater, right? There are a few places that operate just like that, but I guarantee you, your team and you need better real time feedback. So one of the best ways to do this is to invite that feedback from your team.
Let your team know, Hey, I want real feedback from you. What can I do better? What can I improve? Was this meeting good? Was this idea clear? How can I make it better? And then especially if you get feedback that's not what you wanted to hear, meaning it's feedback that's, Hey, that idea wasn't very good, or that meaning wasn't a winner, or I don't think I am aligned with you in this. Celebrate that feedback. Thank someone genuinely thanks someone publicly for that feedback that's going to encourage more of it within your business. He also did a great job laying out understanding what are the bottlenecks within a company? What are the constraints for growth within your brand? And spoiler alert, if you're a small business, the constraint, the bottleneck could be you. So go back and listen to that. That's episode 2 79 with my friend Dave Klein.
Highly, highly recommend it. Next up, Molly Pittman. Dear dear friend, Molly Pittman, episode 2 94. I think this was the $600 million meta ad survey results, how to make Meta Ads better. And the big idea here is that you don't just need better ads. You need an offer system. You need better offers, and you need a greater diversity of offers. So Molly's point was, Hey, if you're spending like a thousand dollars a day on ads right now, you may get away with one offer. So one offer, sending people to your product detail page, here's my widget, here's an offer, take it. If that's all you want to do, just scale to say a thousand dollars a day in spend, that may be enough. But if you want to scale to a hundred thousand dollars a day in spend, that's profitable, you need an offer system. So of course, you still need Buy Now offers, but you need learn more offers.
You need sign up for this webinar, offers you need, join this class offer. You need download this guide offer. You need other free offers, experiential type offers that you test. And so this is something that as she, and as OMG, as we work with supplement brands, food and beverage brands, other brands where the price of the item is a little bit higher, how can we get someone into a funnel? How can we create offers that are more than just buy this product now? So you don't just need better ads. You need better offers. Check out the full episode. Molly Pittman, episode 2 94. Next up, Brian Porter from Simple Modern Drinkware Brand. The episode is 2 74, and so they talk about how simple Moderns has sold over half a billion in drinkware in just eight years. And really this is a unique brand because it was basically born and launched on Amazon.
And so this is not just a product being sold on Amazon. This is a real brand, a multi nine figure run rate brand, all born and launched on Amazon. And so they said, really, their formula for success on Amazon, and I think this is going to be the formula that will win for some time to come, is they win the search. So they win the click and the conversion from category level searches. So Tumblr, drinkware Coffee, Tumblr, 40 ounce, Tumblr in yellow, things like that. So they win that generic search and they win that search through a combination of SEO paid search and merchandising, how to get the product on the right shelf, how to get that product to jump off the shelf. That's how you win the click. Then how do you get them to buy? That's really the conversion rate optimization part of Amazon.
So we win that first purchase. Okay, then how do we delight them so that the next time they go to Amazon, they don't search for the category terms, they don't search for generic terms, they search for our brand. Now we've won them over. Now they go look for a Tumblr or other drinkware. They're just typing in our brand name. And so that's where you consider like, Hey, from unboxing to first use, ongoing use, what is that experience like? And am I winning someone over so that the next time they come to Amazon, they're only searching for me and not any of my competitors or the generic terms? So it's episode 2 74, Brian Porter from Simple Modern. Next up, Eugenia Chin. This is episode 2 88, viral Content. Love this episode. Eugenia started the company Panda Loon. She was on Shark Tank, and her big idea is that winning with Hooks, so getting the right hook or the right opening to a video is 50% of the game to making your content viral or creating an ad that has the potential to really scale with its spin.
And so she breaks down three components of hooks that go viral. The first one is a visual scroll stopper. So visually, am I arresting someone and getting them to pay attention to my content? For her? This was she sewed and put together this panda costume that she put on her dog. And so when the dog was walking, it looked like a panda with a dog face walking around. So immediate scroll stopper is there. Then some kind of audio grabber, some kind of audio sound that goes with it. This is especially important on TikTok, and she recommends build for TikTok first because then that translates into other channels, whereas building for Instagram or other channels first does not necessarily translate into TikTok and then use text reinforcement. So can I put some text on the piece of content that reinforces the visual and the audio hook and really, really brilliant.
Watch the full episode to get the full download there. But then she also talks about leading with emotion. Do we start with something emotional? So think about it from this way. As you watch your content, as you watch your ad, what are the parts where you lean in? What are the parts where you perk up? What are the parts of the video where you laugh or where you feel something, where you're moved a little bit, whatever that is likely, that's what you need to bring to the front. Back in the old days, and this is kind of gone in a post pandemic world and just a virtual world that we live in, I used to to play ads in front of a room of people and watch them. When do they lean in? When do they literally laugh out loud or conversely, when do they start looking at their phone?
When do they seem to be drifting and not paying attention? So the parts where they lean in, the parts where you can tell they're feeling something, maybe they get a little choked up, a little teary eyed or something. If it's kind of a moving piece, I want to bring that towards the front almost certainly. So lead with emotion, 50% of your results come from the hook. So Eugenia Chin, episode 2 88, viral Content. Next up, Jeremiah Brummer, our friend from No Commerce, episode 2 62. So no Commerce is a customer survey, a post-purchase survey platform. There are other things you can do with it as well, but the primary offering is post-purchase surveys. And the big idea, the big takeaway from Jeremiah's episode is that 60% of all your buyers take longer than one week after hearing from you before they make that first purchase. And you'd be surprised to learn.
And we unpacked a couple of studies. One was from True classic Teas actually wearing a true classic tea right now that I think it was 30% of their customers, they learned about true classics and didn't buy for up to a year after that. So whatever your platform is telling you, whatever you're seeing in Google Ads or Meta or whatever you're seeing in Google Analytics that hey, it's usually one day or two days after click someone purchases, okay, sure. But that's not from the first time they saw you. That's not from the first time they learned about you. There's this old marketing adage, this old marketing philosophy that I think still rings true where most people have to see or hear of a new brand seven times before they take action. And so this should shift your perspective a little bit on what's truly top of funnel and what we should expect our ad platforms to do.
I'm not advocating that we don't look at ROAS or MER or things like that. I am advocating that we understand that the length of time from someone being introduced to your brand and purchasing is probably quite a bit longer than you think. Okay? So go ahead and listen to that episode, episode 2 62 from Jeremiah Brummer. Now, closely related episode, and I want to give love to this one as well, is Trevor Crump from Bestie, also post-purchase survey platform. And the takeaway from both of these is you should do post-purchase surveys. But the biggest takeaway I got from Trevor's episode is, Hey, the reason you think people are buying from you, the reason someone chooses you over your competitors, or the main reason someone buys your product in the first place, probably isn't the reason you think it's, and so one of the things we can ask in our post-purchase surveys is, Hey, what's the main reason you bought this product?
So Trevor gave this awesome example of a client that he worked with, and they sold underwear for kids who wet the bed, right? So embarrassing issue, some kids struggle with it for years. They went to bed, they can't stop. And so they sold these underwear training pants, so it makes you feel bigger than if you're wearing a pull-up or something like that. But the owner of the brand was convinced there were two reasons that people bought one cost savings. You buy this, it's cheaper than buying pull-ups and two environmentally friendly, right? We're not filling landfills with pull-ups and diapers and things like that. Turns out those two were not even in the top five. That was not why people were buying. The number one reason that people were buying this product is it gave their kids confidence, right? There was a real emotional reason here.
Parents said, my kid, when they're struggling with wetting the bed, it wrecks their confidence. And I'm very, very motivated, very motivated to help them. I'll invest money, I'll spend money to fix that. Okay? The environment, that's a nice bonus and saving a little bit of money on not buying Pull-ups bonus. That's not why someone invested in this. It was to give their kid confidence. So understanding that, understanding why someone actually buys your product that can unlock a new approach to your advertising. Think about how that shifts the message of your video content or your image content or your ads in general, knowing the real reason somebody buys. So check out the full episode, episode two 50 with Trevor Crump. Next up, Savannah Knight, OMG Rockstar. We talked about Performance Max in this episode, and so I love this episode not because we talk about Performance Max, because if Google follows kind of the course of their history, max will be phased out at some point in the future.
There'll be other campaign types that replace it. But what I think is true about Max that will be true forever is that campaigns are always going to lean into AI and machine learning performance Max in kind of a special way. But the big takeaway here is that your campaigns are only as good as the data that you give them and the creatives that you give them. So the real unlock with Performance Max or whatever campaign is popular in the future is give the campaign good data, clear insights into this is my ideal customer, and then give the campaign really great creatives. I think we run a real risk of becoming AI dependent or smart bidder dependent, rather than bringing our best to these campaigns and then really allowing the AI to work some magic. So that's the takeaway from that episode. Next up, will Hughes, episode 2 31, the Million Dollar Mindset.
Will Hughes grew Organify to $100 million a year run rate, but he had to do so profitably, he could not acquire customers at a loss. So had to be first order break even, or first order profitable. One of the big ideas that he talked about in that podcast was creative thinking as a competitive advantage. So how can you unlock creative thinking, creative problem solving to give your business a competitive edge? And we talk about a concept in this podcast that I love called a reticular activator. So this is a part of your brain that's always looking for something familiar or something really out of place. And so you can kind of train your brain here as well. So one of the best examples of a reticular activator is your name. Think about it this way. You're walking through a crowded airport, all kinds of noise and chaos.
You can't make heads or tails of it, but you hear someone say your name out of the clutter, your name shines through. That's because your name is a reticular activator. Your brain, your subconscious is scanning the environment, looking for things that are familiar or things that are really out of place. Another example is if hey, you decide you want to buy a car, bought my wife a four runner. Once I started looking at four runners, everywhere I drove, I saw every forerunner on the road. It's not that suddenly there were more forerunners on the road, it's just that I was in tune with them and my reticular activating system was looking for them. You can train yourself to do the same thing. Look for patterns, look for things that are missing. Look for companies that are doing something really unique and really different. So train your brain to start looking for patterns and leverage creative thinking as a competitive advantage for your brand.
Last one, actually, as we wrap up here, my buddy Jordan Pine, episode two 30, lessons from DRT or Direct Response tv. We talked a lot about infomercials, and I love infomercials. Talk a lot about the Ginsu Knife commercial or other great infomercials that are on TV P 90 X. I bought the P 90 X program way back in the day because of their amazing infomercial. But what I loved about his podcast, a lot of things, but he talked about infomercial math. So what do they expect when they run an infomercial on tv? Where do they expect the sales to come from? Well, they expect 20% of sales to come from direct response, meaning someone picks up the phone or they email in directly, right? 30% they expect to happen on the website so that we go to beachbody.com or P 90 x.com, whatever, to buy the product.
And then a full half of all sales, they expect to happen on Amazon. So even if that infomercial does not mention Amazon, we expect a lot of those purchases to take place on Amazon. Now, those numbers shift a little bit if you get in store placement, if you're in brick and mortar stores as well. But just understand, this really underscores a really important point that when you're investing in things like tv, YouTube, meta, even the versions are going to happen someplace else. In a lot of cases, you may be sending someone to your website. The conversion may happen on Amazon, you may be running a YouTube ad, which did a big campaign for Arctic coolers, may running a campaign on YouTube, but the purchase is going to happen at Walmart, or the purchase is going to happen on Amazon. And so understanding where the purchases take place and where you expect them to take place is going to impact your measurement, how you determine if you were successful or not.
And it's going to dictate then what you do based on those results. So I'm so excited for you for 2025. I'm so excited for the podcast for 2025, and I can't wait to help you crush growth this year. D two C, omnichannel and the like. We would love to work with your brand, whether that's on the Amazon side, email side, YouTube side, Google side, meta side. If your brand feels stuck, you've been spinning your wheels with some important channels. Chat with us at OMG Commerce. We'd love to run a complimentary strategic review for you and see how our team can help you level up. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.
.png)
.png)
.png)
