An eCommerce Podcast Hosted by Brett Curry

Connor Young is a bit of a health nut – and an exercise enthusiast. He’s also an entrepreneur.

He’s combined his passions into a powerful and growing commerce business called Ample Foods. Connor and his team are doing a lot of things right with Ample. What potentially stands above the other wins is that they have achieved two very successful crowdfunding campaigns. The first was a traditional crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, which set the platform’s record for highest funded project in the food category. The second was an equity crowdfunding campaign that raised just under $800,000 on a $15 million valuation.

If you’re launching a new product or considering a crowdfunding project or equity funding project you need to check out this episode. Here’s a look at what we cover:

• 3 elements of any great crowdfunding pitch
• Why your crowdfunding pitch needs to go viral and how Connor did it for Ample Foods
• Use crowdfunding both to launch a company or a new product
• Why Connor would skip hiring a PR firm for his crowdfunding campaign if he had to do it all over again
• How to use Facebook Ads and Influencers for a successful campaign
• How “all the work” is in the pre-launch
• How to set your goal and why it’s important to be strategic about your goal
• Why momentum especially in the first 2 days is so important.
• When to consider your campaign a failure
• Plus more

Connect With Guest:
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Via Instagram

Mentioned in this episode:
Ample Foods
via Website
via LinkedIn
via Facebook
via Twitter
via Instagram
500 Startups
Indiegogo
Kickstarter
Sequoia Capital
Andreesen Horowitz
Y Combinator

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We’ve all had the following experience.  We’re on a quest for a specific product hoping if will fulfill a very specific need.  So we visit a product page on Amazon or another eCommerce site hoping that this might be the product we’ve been eagerly searching for….But, to our disappointment the product page doesn’t clearly tell us if the product will meet our need or not.  So we don’t buy.  Uh-oh.

Pop quiz.  What can increase customer engagement, improve conversion rates by 2-10x, and drive substantial organic traffic?  Easy - Q&A content.  My guest this week is James Arnold, the Co-Founder of Answer Base a SaaS platform that makes it easy to collect and leverage Q&A and FAQ content.  In this episode we dive into the following:

• Why Q&A content on product details pages is so powerful
• Taking a cue from Amazon where and how to use Q&A content on PDPs
• How to build a Knowledge Based that answers 80%+ of your shoppers questions
• How to structure your Q&A content to rank well on Google….HINT:  Google LOVES Q&A Content.  And so do shoppers.  
• How to leverage FAQ pages
• Plus more!

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Connect with James Arnold - Co-Founder at Answerbase.com

Via LinkedIn

Answerbase.com - Answerbase Q&A Software - Add Q&A to Your Website

Via LinkedIn

Via Facebook

Via Twitter

Via YouTube

Mentioned in this episode:

RVupgrades

“Why We Buy” Book by Paco Underhill - Amazon

eCommerce Evolution - Episode 107 - Anmol Oberoi

ePestSupply

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Episode Transcript

Brett:

Well hello and welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. Today we are talking about answering your shoppers questions through the use of Q & A content, FAQ pages. We're talking about how to use that specific content to increase conversions and even increase traffic. This is going to be extremely useful, practical information you can use to grow your store.

Brett:

Hey, Brett Curry here. Before we dive into today's topic, I want to talk quickly about YouTube ads.

Brett:

People ask me all the time, what makes for a great YouTube ad? And it's true, the ad is the hardest part for getting YouTube to work. Now, I love the campaign structure. I love audience targeting, and I love tinkering with bids and using the smart bid algorithm, and I even like budget management. I like all that behind the scenes stuff, but I've seen it time and time again where the exact same campaign structure just limps along with a mediocre video. But you get the right video with the right message that resonates with people, and that same campaign structure just takes off. It scales. And so over the last couple of years, my team and I, we've been collecting good YouTube ads. We've been watching, we've been paying attention and looking at our own clients, looking at the numbers, finding what are ads that resonate and work on YouTube. And so we started building this little guide, this little guide that we use internally.

Brett:

And we started categorizing ads and giving them fun names like The Manifesto and the UGC Mashup and the Have It All. And so we started kind of breaking down what elements in these videos make them work. And so I was speaking at a recent event, and I just happened to mention that this resource existed, and people sort of clamored for it. Like everyone's like, "Hey, I want to see the guide. I want to see that resource. I want to see all these successful ads." And so that's what we've done. We put together this resource, kind of first time ever, going to share it with a broader audience. It's free. So check it out and get our list of winning YouTube ad formulas with lots of examples. Let this be your inspiration for your next killer YouTube ad.

Brett:

So this is a free resource. We'll link to it in the show notes to this show, but you can also go to OMGcommerce.com, click on resources and then guides, and it's the YouTube Ad Templates and Guide. Check it out and I hope it inspires your next killer YouTube ad campaign. And now back to the show.

Brett:

I'm delighted to welcome to the show my guest today, he's the cofounder of Answerbase. Answerbase was started in 2007 and my guest Mr. James Arnold has been helping run the company since that time. He now works with all their enterprise clients and he is a wealth of knowledge on this topic. And so with that, James, welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time.

James:

Thanks for having me, Brett. Excited to talk about a Q & A and what it's doing for eCommerce stores.

Brett:

Yeah, absolutely. You guys have built a really phenomenal solution here, a great platform and tool. And we'll, we'll get into that later in the show. Want to talk about some of the hows and whys behind Q & A content and FAQ content because I think there's something here that likely a lot of the listeners are potentially either missing out on or not fully leveraging. And so we're going to go deep on a couple topics. We'll talk about some specific client case studies as well, but walk me through Q & A content. What is Q & A content and why is it so important to include on your website? And we'll talk about kind of the how and where and things like that in a minute. But first, what is it and why is it so important?

James:

So, question and answer content, when we refer to that, is about other questions being asked about products that eCommerce merchants are selling and the answers that best address those issues and problems. So I'm sure many people, or most people, have seen it on Amazon's product pages, how they have questions and answers around products. So yeah, but it's really important to provide that content, to provide that engagement, and really just solving the problems for potential customers that are leading up to a purchase, whether that be really high in the funnel or really low in the funnel towards the conversion.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really interesting because sometimes what's listed in the bullet points, what's listed in the product description, what's in the specs of a product, maybe that doesn't quite answer a question or maybe it leaves a little bit of ambiguity out there. But a lot of times if you look at, and Amazon's a perfect example of this, you look at that Q & A content, a lot of times the question that's right there at the top, or maybe it's second or third, is the question you're asking about that product. Right? Does it fit this application? Will this work on my skin type? Will this upset my stomach? Things like that, whatever. And that Q & A content sometimes gets right to the heart of the matter and answers the question that someone has when they're looking, and I know it makes a big, big difference.

Brett:

We're going to talk, go into a lot of details as we go here, but I think one of the things to always keep in mind as we're trying to create this great shopping experience for our customers is what would someone ask if they were about to buy this product in the store? What questions might they ask a sales assistant? What questions might they ask whoever's helping them before they buy. Sometimes that can be pretty, pretty useful. Why, other than what I just said, and then maybe I summed it up, but what are the whys behind why this content is so powerful, so useful?

James:

Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, obviously everybody knows that you need to have a really good product description, and that impacts your conversions. But you have different people who have different ways that they prefer to get information. I mean, not everybody wants to read through a few paragraphs of a product description in order to find the answer that they're looking for, which is really the roadblock to a sale. So you'll notice even on Amazon's landing pages, I mean they have, or product pages, they have the ability to ask your question even before you dig into the product specs because they want to make that as easy as possible to hit the nail on the head for that specific customer and what they're looking for. So the amazing thing about the engagement there is that you can actually use that engagement to then identify the most popular questions that are asked and then look to revise their product description from there.

James:

You know, it's funny. So retail stores, I mean they... I went in to buy some furniture the other day and I asked the retailer a question about the product, and you know, very nice a woman, but she didn't have the answer to the question that I wanted. And I had to kind of press a little bit to get a manager. So it took several minutes to get the answer to the question. Not minutes, I mean it was a bit of time.

James:

So there's online content, you have the ability to give the user a great experience all the time. You know what's being asked over and over again. You're going to refine that answer so that it's really serving every single customer well. And once you do it well once, that content is not subject to a bad day or a bad attitude one day, or even just needing to rush to lunch or these other things that sometimes you experience with the retail experience. You have a chance to have a great experience all the time for those customers.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so funny. And I love making the offline comparison just because it's a great visual. I went to Walmart a few weeks ago, needed to get an Apple TV, and we kind of wanted in a hurry, not that we really need it in a hurry, but wanted it. Anyway, so walk in, talk to a lady like, "Hey Apple TVs, where do you keep those?" She's like, "Oh yeah, we don't carry those." Like, "You do." And so we're talking like, "No. No. We don't carry them." So I said, "Okay, where are your Rokus?" Because I knew they would be close. And she's like, "Oh yeah, those are over here." Well, the Apple TVs were right next to it. Anyway, it's one of those things where that's not a helpful experience.

Brett:

I've also had some experiences where you're like, "Hey, how does this product work?" "I don't know how it works, but it's over here. Just go get it." But I think if you think about it, there's some online experiences that are that way too. Right? Or you wouldn't want to come to a clerk and say, "Hey, will this product work for this application?" "I don't know. Here's the manual. Just read it."

Brett:

But that's what we do with our product pages. Right? Someone goes to look at a product with a specific question, a specific need, and rather than getting that answer, we give them the product manual or obviously it's a little shorter, a little better hopefully. But our product descriptions can almost feel like that at times, where I compare it to... One of my best shopping experiences was with a local company that sells high end barbecue grills. And the guy that kind of runs a place, he's become my barbecue Yoda. I talk to him and he always gives me advice, but I can ask him any detail about how to cook something, or will this grill do this for that, and he knows the answer immediately. And he asks the right questions, just a beautiful experience. But-

James:

That's a great point. I mean my same retail experience, and there's been a few of these where you go and you ask a question about the product. Well, the person goes straight to their phone or computer screen and they actually look it up on their own website. So having that content available as self service content, and even can help service the other retail locations that you might be servicing as well. That's, yeah. I mean it's just, it's happening right now.

Brett:

Yeah. It's so valuable. And so you talked a little bit about Amazon, where now you can even ask some questions before you get to the product description. Is that where you're seeing it being effective, where you're posting this ability for someone to ask a question. Where are you often recommending that be placed on the page?

James:

I mean, certainly within the product pages, there's a couple points. So, you want to engage the user early on. So, typically under the product title, you'll see a couple calls to actions. First of all, the number of reviews, and the five star review that it has, or four star or whatever that is. And then typically right under that you want to show how many questions have been asked and then give an easy ability to go ahead and ask that question. So, a little bit further down on the page, you do list out the most popular questions and answer combinations for that product, and then obviously have a very easy way for them to post their new question on the page as well. So, there's a couple of things that can do for you from an SEO standpoint and a conversion optimization standpoint. And then also saving time, so your staff doesn't need to answer the same questions over and over again via email or a contact form or something like that.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. I love the idea of posting the most frequently asked questions, most popular questions and their corresponding answers, because I think if you look at the way people shop, and I would definitely fall into this category, I don't love asking the question. I don't love getting involved in a chat conversation with an online merchant. But I will definitely scan those questions and see if my question is being answered, and then I'm good to go. And that's the way a lot of people like to shop. Some people like to ask the questions. Some people like to be involved in that dialogue. Most people do not. And so if you have it there, that's great. And so I want to definitely talk about the traffic side of things because that's the G commerce know we're more of a traffic agency, so that side really excites me.

Brett:

But let's talk first about the conversion side. So, what are you often seeing? So now you've got the ability for someone to ask the question. You're also posting the most frequent questions and their corresponding answers. What are you seeing that do to conversion rates?

James:

Sure. So, there's a couple things that are going on there. So a customer's engaging, you don't necessarily need to post a new question to pose your question. So when they pose the questions, you can auto suggest results that are already available. So they don't need to wait for an answer, they can get the answer immediately. So we see about up to 80% of the questions that are posed through the ask question field are addressed automatically. So that's existing content that's addressing the answers immediately without any new engagements from the eCommerce merchants.

Brett:

Great. James, what percentage did you say? What percentage did you say were answering?

James:

80%, up to 80%.

Brett:

Great. Great. Awesome.

James:

So that's one touch point. For questions that are answered, we actually have another case study on our site where, RVupgrades.com, and they see 75% of the questions that are answered through Answerbase convert into a sale. So there's been studies in the past-

Brett:

Just to clarify real quickly. First of all, what was the merchant again?

James:

RV Upgrades.

Brett:

And what do they sell?

James:

RV accessories.

Brett:

RV.

James:

Anything you want for a recreational vehicle.

Brett:

I heard Harvey for some reason.

James:

Oh. Okay. No. RV-

Brett:

RV, got it, recreational vehicles. Fantastic. Totally makes sense.

James:

Yeah. Yeah. Think motor homes.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So someone actually poses the question and whether that's answered in the 80% that are answered through the auto suggest or whether someone actually has to answer it. What you're saying is 75% of the people that ask a question and get it answered, they convert. Is that what you're saying?

James:

Convert to a sale. Correct.

Brett:

Wow. So, I love the psychology behind why people buy and what leads to purchase and things like that. I'm sure there's several things going on here. One, just the value of getting a question answered is super important. But I know I've seen studies here, there's a great book that I've referenced before called Why We Buy by Paco Underhill and he talks about the physical store shopping experience. But there's something to be said about once you start engaging, if you engage with a salesperson, you're more likely to purchase, start engaging with the website, you're more likely to purchase.

Brett:

I even remember reading some material from people that were in the catalog business from back in the day where they said if you can just get someone to start even clicking, filling out a check box on the order form, if you just get them started, they'll start ordering. It's like just getting them to take an action. I think there's some psychology there as well, just getting them to take action. But are you seeing that fairly consistently where people that interact and ask a question, they're much more likely to convert?

James:

We're seeing a lot of conversions through the Q & A activity. We track who touches Q & A. We're tracking multiple things there as far as who's asking the questions, obviously, who's looking at the existing content, and it's just a significant amount of conversions coming through from that engagement. So yeah, depending on the size of the site and how many current page views they have, I mean that'll determine how many people are posing questions or asking questions, and then what that flow looks like. But yeah, we've seen a very healthy... Our customers, we look it to give them multiples on their investment that they invest into Answerbase, and we've seen that in spades.

Brett:

Great. Great. That's awesome. Let's talk a little bit, and again we'll get to the traffic side of the equation in a minute, but let's talk about FAQ pages. We're talking right now about putting FAQs and answers, question and answers, on a product detail page. What about FAQ pages? I know we got some considerations there from schema markup and a variety of other things, but talk to me about FAQ pages and how those work.

James:

Yeah, they're really powerful. You can dynamically build these pages, and like you said, I mean Google and other search engines recognize the schema markup for certain types of content. So you can break that down into the microdata to let them know what's a question, what's an answer, et cetera. And so we can manage this in a couple of different ways for our customers. So, if they have more short form answers, maybe less than 250 words for the answer, you can break that down into a really high quality, most popular frequently asked questions and have that serve you very well, and even getting traffic on its own and serving the customer well through that.

James:

And then for the longer form content, we actually turn those into landing pages of their own that are indexable, and their schema markup, if you have community features enabled for QA page, which is specific to that. So Google and other search engines recognize what's there too. So, if you have an approach where you know what you're going to be servicing on your product page, you know what makes sense for an FAQ page, you want to still engage the customer.

James:

I mean FAQs, nobody really wants to read through 30 questions to try to find their question. So to make that easily searchable, easily browsable, is very important. I mean they're important but it needs to be done well in order to really service the customer well.

Brett:

100% makes sense. And you know what's really interesting about... so we could maybe transition here to the traffic side a little bit, but as we look at how people are searching differently on search engines, there is an increase in voice search. And so quick, quick plug, episode 107 I interview Ann Moll from Emitter and we talk about voice commerce and what's going on there, and voice search and things like that. But as people interact with either a Google home device or even just their mobile phone, or Amazon Alexa or whatever, a lot of the searches being done there are posed more in the form of a question. And so Google especially loves returning that FAQ content if you pose your query like a question.

Brett:

So what are you guys seeing in terms of whether it's the Q & A content on a product detail page or whether it's FAQ page, what are you seeing in terms of traffic and ranking and things like that?

James:

For sure. I mean, we've been in business since 2007, so we have a large, a long amount of time that we've been able to see what Q & A content does and how that gets gobbled up into search and spit out and what the results are there. We have some case studies where we spawn a new landing page for the Q & A threads where it makes sense to and have those indexable. And as the content continues to grow, we've seen year, over year, over year organic traffic grows to those Q & A landing pages through Google. So similar with a markup, you can choose whether you want those to be featured snippets or not, have them be featured snippets. Different merchants have different preferences there with their SEO teams and agencies. But yeah, we have customers where when you search, they'll be in the featured snippets. We've quadrupled the organic traffic for one particular merchant, which we have a case study on, who's Epes Supply. On our site there, you can see that case study. So-

Brett:

What you mean by that is you've taken, prior to using Answerbase and really leveraging this Q & A content and FAQ content, since that time you've quadrupled their traffic that were getting traffic from search engines?

James:

Yeah. So we're responsible for over 75% of their organic traffic now and over 50% of their overall traffic. So that includes the directs and all the other acquisition sources and referrals. So the most interesting thing about that traffic, I mean traffic's great, but it needs to convert for you.

Brett:

Absolutely.

James:

We have seen Google Analytics under the users area, they have a average lifetime value, our customer lifetime value stat, and we're able to track that and have the Q & A content be recognized under its own line item there. So we've seen that the traffic going through the Q & A content, specifically, has an average lifetime value up to two times higher than the normal Google traffic that's been coming in. And what that really speaks to is where these people are who are asking questions, where they are in the customer journey.

James:

A lot of times if they're on the site, or if they're on another eCommerce site and that merchant has not addressed the product question on their site, the first thing they'll do is they'll go up in their Chrome bar, they'll ask the question right there, a Google result will pop up, and if you're in that spot and you can fill that need, you can build that trust because you have the expertise around the product and then a really quick call to action to go ahead and purchase from you to take advantage of that product. So it's a really powerful engine for drawing traffic and we've seen that with many of our customers. And again, since 2007 we've seen uphill's chart, up into the right as far as organic traffic and what Q & A's been able to do.

Brett:

Yeah. In my opinion it's kind of, you can almost look at it as an added bonus. It's a pretty large added bonus. It's really valuable and really enticing. But I think even if you just looked at this subject from purely a conversion optimization standpoint, it's totally worth it. You will see better conversions and then to add to that that hey, your organic traffic can increase and it's going to be really good quality organic traffic. Because what you said totally makes sense. If I type in just a really broad keyword, something like ceramic grill or something, that's one thing. But then if I type can I do this on a ceramic grill, or how hot can I grill, or can I grill and smoke and some of these other things, that really indicates how serious I am.

Brett:

And then like you said, it shows that, some questions show that you're really closer to making a decision. You're further along in your journey, than maybe just a really generic query. And I think the beauty of this is, and we'll talk in a minute about how your tool kind of brings us all together, but you're really trying to focus in on the questions that are most frequently asked. And a lot of times these are buyer questions. Right? These are the questions people are asking before they say yes. So then you can leverage those for people that are asking those questions to Google and they end up at your site. That's pretty awesome.

James:

For sure. Yeah, we look at it as you have the short term benefits of the conversion and the reduction in duplicate questions, so just being able to say cost there on your customer service policy as well as increasing conversions at the same time. And then you have the long term play, which is the building of that content and getting that organic traffic growing and being a new customer acquisition channel for you over time. And what's interesting about that, I mean, if you read many posts about content marketing, what should you be writing about? Many times, if not most times, they'll say, "See what your customers are asking about."

James:

And they tell you to go to your customer service people, go into your ticketing system, see what's the most commonly asked questions and use that as material to create value as far as content goes. So we see this as well. So it naturally happens for the Q & A engagement. But what you can do is you can track that engagement. You can see what is turning into traffic there. You can see what's turning into conversions and then you can use that to guide your content marketing, what has proven to already convert, what's proven to already build traffic at a nice growth trend, and then you can do a deep dive. You can do a deep dive in a video. You can do a deep dive in blog posts, and really you know it's worth your time and effort to dedicate resources towards that topic because it's serving your target audience.

Brett:

I love it. I love it. Well James, let's talk specifically then about Answerbase because I know you guys have built a phenomenal tool, a tool that's used by some really large brands, and challenging brands, and growing brands as well. How does Answerbase work and how do you guys help make this process easy?

James:

We have really easy integration in the product pages. That's where everything starts. We have both APIs and a widget that people can plug in. That will power the calls to actions on the product page as far as being able to ask a question and being able to see the most popular questions per product. Everything starts there because as soon as you, if you have an active store, you're going to see engagement almost immediately from your customers and you can just get that content train moving for you. And then we have a knowledge base and community features. If you want a community, we have it, so that can build alongside and build those landing pages out and get the engagement even from other customers who have purchased the same product, et cetera, in order to build that content out and be able to see that organic traffic growth that we've been discussing there.

James:

So those are really the two main pieces of Answerbase's integration. You have all of the administration tools and moderation tools that you need to manage the content and users, et cetera. But those are really the foundation of what we've built and what brings value to the merchants there.

Brett:

Very cool. And you guys integrate with essentially all the major shopping cart platforms, website platforms. I'm sure you're platform agnostic.

James:

Yeah, we're agnostic. We have, again, we have JavaScript snippets that you can plug in if you don't want to really dig into APIs. We have entire communities that are built off of our API as well for some of our enterprise customers. And all those are available on our business plan. The customers can choose how deep they want to dive in. But it could literally be a half hour install, if not less than that, for some of the platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify. We have one click install and then that gets the engagement going for you, and then you can do whatever you want from there.

Brett:

Awesome. What tips would you give someone on it, if they're just getting started? So if someone's listening to this and they say, "Hey, obviously Amazon's doing this and that makes a lot of sense." Because you guys are talking about these increased conversion rates and traffic and increase and stuff like that, and people really hopefully are getting excited. What are kind of the tips for where you start? What would you tell the merchant listing? What integrations, what features should they use first?

James:

Get the product page working for you. You'll see an immediate impact on conversions there. Again, that's a very quick thing to do, as far as the install, that can be under 10 minutes for some of the platforms that we have integrated into their app stores. So if you have traffic, existing traffic where your users can engage immediately, that's the first step. And then everything spawns from that because you're going to start answering questions. Those answers are going to start being answered automatically, and that's a great place to start.

James:

If you're even a small store, I mean, we've had some customers that have started with nothing and they just had a lot of knowledge about the products that they were going to sell. And so they can import and that's, depending on what they want to do there, but we had one particular customer import I think like a thousad Q & A combinations, really great content that they'd built out. They made that available. Once they imported, it automatically spawns those landing pages and they were seeing a few hundred thousand visitors after a year through that content, just using what's up here in their head in order to just communicate that in a clear way and communicate that in a way that Google really likes with original good content.

Brett:

It's awesome. I love it. I'm checking out the website right now, Answerbase.com. It looks like you have plans starting at $19 a month to get basic features in Answerbase, Q & A platform, and then goes up a little bit from there, but seems very affordable, very approachable, very usable both for small business on up to enterprise. Any comments or thoughts there?

James:

We set the plans up and the pricing in order to ensure that you're getting, our customers are getting a healthy return on their investment, and we can track that and report that to our customers as well. So it should be an easy decision, even within the 30 day trial period for active sites. I mean they should be able to see a return on investment through that. So yeah, I mean our goal is to provide value and build value, and obviously make it be a great decision for any commerce merchant to have on their side.

Brett:

Awesome. Check it out at answerbase.com. James Arnold, ladies and gentlemen. Any resources, tips? Where can people check out some of these case studies you were referring to, and then any closing thoughts, James?

James:

Yeah, just they can go to our site. They can look under customer success and see some of the case studies there. And certainly servicing customers has always been an essential part of converting sales. But customer support content hasn't really been utilized as it needs to be in order to become a customer acquisition source. So just understanding where those overlap and being able to effectively utilize that content can do great things for these merchants.

Brett:

Yeah, absolutely. Love it. Love this topic. Love the benefits here that people can can get under the customer success tab. I see the RV Upgrades case study and many others. So check that out as well. Good stuff. James, really appreciate the time and thanks for coming on and educating us about Q & A content, FAQ pages and all this good stuff.

James:

All right, appreciate it Brett.

Brett:

Yeah, absolutely. So that's a wrap for today. As always, we'd love to get your feedback, any other topic suggestions you have or feedback on the show. We'd love to get that review on iTunes if you feel so inclined. That helps other people discover the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

As some of you may know, my very first foray into online marketing was in the crazy world of SEO. That was circa 2004. After creating some wins for an online print shop I was hooked on SEO. In the early days of OMG Commerce, SEO was our bread and butter. Now it’s still an important channel, but as Google has become more of a pay-to-play environment, more companies come to us wanting help with ads. But…ignoring SEO is a mistake. The best, biggest and enduring eCommerce companies have an SEO strategy and they execute it. My guest on the podcast today is one of the very first OMG Commerce employees, Brandi Johnston. She runs our SEO department and works with Amazon organic optimization.

In this episode we cover a host of practical tips and insights related to SEO including:

• How SEO has changed since 2013 and what that means for us today.
• What are the easiest SEO wins merchants should focus on?
• What are some SEO wins that take a little more work but still pay off in the long run?
• What is a rel=canonical tag and a cross-domain rel=canonical tag and could we get any nerdier?
• What is a zombie page and how doe they impact SEO results?
• What are the top SEO tools, blogs and extensions to consider?
• Plus more!

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Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter

Mentioned in this episode:
Matt Cutts – Gadgets, Google, and SEO
Schema.org
Brian N Beane – Professional Coach, Trainer, and Speaker
SEO Tools
Moz – SEO Software, Tools, and Resources for Smarter Marketing
Moz – Whiteboard Friday
Search Engine Journal – SEO, Search Marketing News and Tutorials
Search Engine Land – News On Search Engines
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
Backlinko
Blumenthals’ Blog
Local U
Whitespark
BrightLocal
Schema App
Search Console in Google Analytics- Search Console Help
Think with Google – Discover Marketing Research and Digital Trends
SEMrush – Online Visibility Management Platform
Screaming Frog – SEO Spider Tool and Crawler Software
AnswerThePublic – That Free Visual Keyword Research and Content Ideas Tool

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My guest today is a man who needs no introduction. His podcast, Ecommerce Fuel, is one of the most downloaded Ecommerce podcasts on the planet. And Andrew runs one of the largest most successful private eCommerce forums – EcommerceFuel.com.

Each year Andrew sends out a poll to hundreds of successful merchants to get a pulse check on all things eCommerce. It covers an incredible number of details including growth rates, conversion rates, On-Amazon and Off-Amazon performance, ad performance, profitability trends and much, much more. I wanted to have Andrew on the podcast to dig into some of the most fascinating insights from the report and to share what we believe these insights mean to our community and to you as a merchant.

Here are a few things we cover:

• What is the future of drop-shipping as a business model?
• What surprises came from the on-Amazon growth stats that weren’t maybe as high as expected this year?
• The stark growth contrast between private label sellers vs. resellers
• The number #1 traffic source for successful eCommerce merchants
• The most popular vs. most effective ad channel…spoiler alert – they aren’t the same channel! The most popular channel according to the survey was nowhere near the most effective. Quite the contrary. We explore why.
• We explore Andrew’s spin on KPI – the Kardashian Performance Indicator…this is pretty funny
• Plus much more actionable data!

Connect With Guest:
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Via Instagram

Mentioned in this episode:
EcommerceFuel
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
EcommerceFuel Podcast
Ecommerce Fuel Podcast – 2019 State of the Merchant Report
EcommerceFuel Podcast – Making Sense of the Sales Tax Nightmare
Mike Jackness – President & CEO at Terran.com
Via LinkedIn
Via Twitter
ColorIt
Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition (IRCE)
Traffic & Conversion Summit

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Michael Jackness is the President & CEO of Terran.com – owner of multiple commerce brands including tactical.com, wildbaby.com, icewraps.com, color it and more. He’s also the host of the EcomCrew podcast and is a fantastic trainer and speaker. I got to hang out with Mike recently at an event and I was reminded of why so many people in the eComm space look up to him. He’s a brilliant marketer and eComm store owner. In this podcast, we dive into some of the most powerful growth levers available to commence merchants today and how to best use them.

Here are a few things we go over:

• What are Mike’s tips and advice on line extension? How important is it, and how and when should store owners consider it?
• Mike’s favorite tips for cross-selling & upselling because “you win or lose by what you do on the backend.”
• The most under-leveraged assets Mike sees in his students’ businesses?
• Favorite growth levers to pull when tasked with growing an eComm biz.
• Some of your favorite recent marketing wins from Mike’s many eCommerce companies
• Underutilized growth tips for Amazon.
• How important is User Generated Content (UGC) and how to get it.

Connect With Guest:
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Via Instagram

Mentioned in this episode:
Terran.com – Terran Interactive
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Via Instagram
EcomCrew
EcomCrew Podcast

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I’ve always loved the psychology behind why people buy. It’s what originally attracted me to sales and marketing when I was in college. I’ve always loved the study of persuasive headlines and compelling video ads. I’ll admit that I think less about shipping than I probably should. If we want to talk about pure conversion rates and growth, shipping is a huge deal.

That’s why I decided to invite Akhilesh Srivastava, CEO of Fenix Commerce, on to the show to talk about improving shipping, both pre and post-sale. Akhilesh knows a thing or two about this topic. He’s worked for big brands like Walmart, Nike, Petco, Staples, and Microsoft. Prior to starting Fenix Commerce, he was in charge of shipping and returns for eBay. He’s spent the last 10+ years living in the data behind shipping practices both on its impact on sales and the costs behind it for merchants.

Here’s a quick look at some of the fascinating points we dive into:

• How studies of eBay customers consistently revealed that 2 of the top 5 reasons people decide to buy or not buy are related both to shipping costs and shipping time.
• How the “get it by” feature can improve conversions and reduce abandoned carts by 20% or more.
• How Men’s Wearhouse is using the “get it by” feature and how it’s now been identified as their largest top-line growth opportunity for 2019….wow!
• Practical tips to lower shipping costs and improve your speed.
• How the USPS can “fill in some gaps” for you and help improve your speed of shopping

Connect With Guest:
Via LinkedIn
Via Twitter
Fenix Commerce Inc.
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Via Instagram

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In just a few short years Bill D transitioned from investment banker to single brand eCommerce store owner, to now owning and leading a portfolio of 10 eComm brands through his company, Elements Brands.

I wanted to pick Bill’s brain – one, because he’s just wicked smart, but, two, because I think all eCommerce store owners could benefit from his perspective. In this power-house episode we uncover:

• How Bill went from investment banker to owning a portfolio of growing eCommerce brands.
• What Bill looks for when he’s considering buying an eCommerce business (there are lessons here for you, whether you’re looking to sell right now or not).
• Why diversity of traffic is so important and what to consider here.
• What’s the metric to rule all metrics? No, it’s not conversion rate, or AOV, or Return on Ad Spend. (Hint: you’re probably ignoring it or not calculating it the way you should.)
• Why profits are sanity and revenue is vanity.
• How well document processes build value now and later.
• Plus much, much more!

Connect With Guest:
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Via Instagram
Elements Brands – Amplifying Awesome
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Via Instagram
Andrew Youderian
Sellers Summit
Tim Ferriss and The 4-Hour Workweek
Klavivo
Austin Brawner – Entrepreneur and Adventurer

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Casey Guass started Viral Launch as a broke 24-year-old college drop out.  The rest is history. It’s now one of the most beloved SaaS platforms for Amazon sellers.  Like most great companies it’s gone through some serious product evolutions. But, the core has remained the same – helping Amazon Sellers rank better on Amazon.  

In this podcast, we cover a lot…and get pretty nerdy with data.  Here’s a quick look at what we discuss.

• 3 Amazon ranking factors you might be overlooking including considering your canonical url for better ranking on Google (we explain what this means in the podcast).
• How conversion rate factors into organic rankings and what to do about it.
• Why you’re likely focusing on the wrong keywords and how to shift your approach.
• Casey’s 6-step road map for ranking a product on Amazon – this is pure gold.  
• Casey’s advice that he would NOT give to clients, but might try for selling his own products.
• Why you’re thinking about Amazon PPC is probably off a bit and how you should adjust.
• How to use brand analytics data for some “blow your mind” insights.  
• Plus more!

Connect With Guest:
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Via Instagram
Via Youtube
Viral Launch
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Via Instagram
Via Youtube
Follow the Data Podcast
2020 Sellers Summit
Steve Chou – MyWifeQuitHerJob
Brand Analytics – Amazon Seller Central
Kinetic PPC – Viral Launch

Christian Zeron started selling vintage watches online in college. What started mainly with some free time, a lot of creativity and a serious watch obsession (he’s a self-described watch geek). He’s since leveraged that into millions of YouTube views, millions in sales and over 1.8 Million monthly page views… without running ads.

I’m an ads guy so my experience with organic YouTube is minimal. I wanted to have Christian on the podcast to walk through his story and to give us practical tips on how to succeed on YouTube with organic content.

Here’s a look at what we cover:

• How Christian uses Gary V’s jab, jab, jab, right hook in his approach to YouTube content.
• How he’s learned from and grown from his YouTube failures
• How he grew from 0 to 68,000 YouTube Subscribers and millions of views
• How he comes up with ideas for 3 shows a week that generates raving fans.
• How his new pivot was an epic failure and how he’s retooled to make it a smashing success.
• What watches are his personal favorite
• Why selling a $10,000 watch is easier than selling a $300 watch

Connect With Guest:
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Instagram
Theo & Harris – Vintage Watch Shop
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Via Instagram
Via Youtube

Quick - what’s the best, most effective viral video ad you’ve seen?  Poo-Pourri? Purple Mattress? Maybe Squatty Potty? Chatbooks? Each of those videos (plus dozens more) were created by my guest today and his team at Harmon Brothers.  And not only where these videos viral hits…they SOLD stuff. Funny. Memorable. And persuasive to the tunes of hundreds of millions in sales. That's hard to accomplish.  

In this episode, we dig into some of the tips, tactics and secrets behind the Harmon Brother’s unrivaled success.  We dive into the following:

• 3 big mistakes most companies make when it comes to video ads
• Why humor is NOT a silver bullet 
• The inside scoop behind Poo-Pourri and haw it launched the Harmon Brothers to national prominence
• How do you land on the right “BIG idea”
• How and when to get feedback on your script and initial video edits
• How to think and create videos like the Harmon Brothers
• Plus more

Connect with Guest:

Daniel Harmon - Chief Creative Officer at Harmon Brothers

Via LinkedIn

Via Facebook

Via Instagram

Harmon Brothers - The Marketers Behind Squatty Potty, Poo~Pourri, FiberFix, Lume, and More

Via LinkedIn

Via Facebook

Via Twitter

Via Instagram

Via YouTube

Harmon Brothers University

From Poop to Gold Podcast with Harmon Brothers

“From Poop To Gold” Book by Chris Jones - Amazon

Mentioned in this episode:

Orabrush - Tongue Cleaner - Tongue Scraper - Cure Bad Breath

Poo~Pourri - Poo~Pourri, Before You go Toilet Spray

Squatty Potty - The #1 Way to #2

The Piano Guys™ Official Store - Shop Products, Music & More

YouTube Video - Creative Director: Daniel Harmon - “Over A Thousand People Came Together To Break a Record and Bring This Moving Christmas Hymn To Life”

Purple Mattress

FiberFix

Lume Deodorant - Natural Deodorants for Anywhere on Your Body

Chatbooks - High Quality Photo Books, Custom Prints & Cards

“Made to Stick” Book by Chip Heath & Dan Heath - Heath Brothers

“Building a StoryBrand” Book by Donald Miller - Amazon

A few months ago I delivered a talk at Social Media Marketing World 2019 on how to create a full funnel with YouTube ads. Feedback on the session was great so I wanted to share it here on the podcast.  

Why YouTube ads? Watch time for “which product to buy” videos on YouTube doubled this past year. Nearly 70% of shoppers say they are open to learning about products on YouTube directly from brands. In this talk, we’ll explore 3 ways to utilize YouTube ads for growth. We’ll uncover 3 proven YouTube ad formulas to put the right video in front of the right prospect at the right time. We’ll also examine the best bidding strategies and winning campaign structures to implement for success.

Mentioned in this episode:
Social Media Marketing World (SMMW) – Social Media’s Mega Conference!
Via Facebook
Via Twitter

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Is AI coming for all of our jobs?  As agencies and marketers, are we on the road to irrelevance?  Probably not fully, but our roles and our perspectives better shift and shift quickly.  Frederick Vallaeys is a brilliant marketer and programmer. He was one of Google’s first 500 employees and was on the original AdWords Quality Score team.  In this episode, we discuss how agencies and marketers of the near future should think more like pilots or doctors, or coaches (my metaphor). Pilots increasingly rely on instruments and AI to do their job.  So do doctors. But, deep expertise, strategy, and a human element are still really important. Here’s a hopeful but eyes-wide-open look at the future with Frederick Vallaeys.

• How Quality Score was yesterday’s black box and AI is today’s black box.
• Using Fred’s Two Levels of Automation – Leveraging things like AI and Machine Learning (ML) and then creating a layer of automation to keep the machines in check.  
• How is AI most impacting marketing now and how will it impact marketing in the next few years.
• What new changes to Google Ads is Fred most excited about.
• Some of Fred’s favorite Google Ad Scripts?
• Automation can be simple. AI and ML are cool but you can achieve a lot with the simple stuff

Connect With Guest:
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Optmyzr – Leading AdWords Optimization Solutions and Automated Tools
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter

Mentioned in this episode:
“Digital Marketing in an AI World: Futureproofing Your PPC Agency” Book by Frederick Vallaeys – Amazon
Search Engine Land – New on Search Engines

‍

Paulina Masson is the founder of Shopkeeper and a longtime Amazon seller.  She has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to pricing products. She understands the competitive forces behind pricing decisions as well as the psychological factors.  

Ultimately you want to price in such a way to maximize total profits.  While you should consider profit per transaction, that might not be the ultimate metric to try and maximize.  Here’s what we look at:

• How to run pricing split test and why it’s so complex.
• How to price your products at launch including a free margin calculator
• How to balance competitive price factors with consumer perception and psychology
• When to end your price in 99, or 97 rather than 00.  And how a premium product or your target market might influence this.
• 3 Types of Shoppers on Amazon and how to price for each
• When and how to use coupons – when to do a % off vs. a $ off
• How price impacts conversion rates
• Plus more!

Connect with Guest:
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Shopkeeper – Business Dashboard for Amazon Sellers
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via YouTube

Mentioned in this episode:
Amazon Business – Amazon.com

To date, this was one of my favorite episodes to record.  Partially because I love Amazon and love hearing behind the scenes stories from people who’ve worked there.  Brad does share a couple of great stories.

Mostly I love this interview because the advice shared is pure gold.  Brad Moss has a unique perspective on business and growth. At Amazon he served as the first business lead over all of Seller Central.  To say he’s had the inside scoop on seller central would be a gross understatement.  

I met Brad at an event in Miami.  When I found out he was a former Amazonian I was eager to find out a few things – 1. A good Jeff Bezos story.  2. What is was like to work there. The stories he told when we met and the stories told on this episode did not disappoint!  

In this episode we cover some pretty powerful lessons including:

• How Amazon thinks about and deals with areas of the business that stop growing.  As you might guess, they don’t have warm and fuzzy sentiments here.
• How Amazon looks at analytics…this is truly brilliant.  Understand how Amazon decides what data to measure, and what to change to get better results.  This is part of the key to Amazon’s speed and their ability to scale successfully.
• Two mindset shifts that Amazon looks for in their employees that will help instantly make you a better entrepreneur.
• A few funny (and potentially painful stories) about how little Amazon celebrates successes.  These stories underscore the Bezos mantra that “it’s always day one.”
• Top mistakes Brad sees Amazon sellers making and how to avoid them.
• Plus more!

Connect with Guest:
Via LinkedIn
‍
Product Labs – Best Way to Sell on Amazon
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook

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Arri is a whizkid of sorts when it comes to messenger marketing and SMS marketing.  At the ripe old age of 22 he’s leading his team at Conversmart and has worked with some pretty impressive brands including Tuft & Needle, Poo-Pourri and the Beard Club just to name a few.  

I know very little about SMS marketing for eCommerce so I was super excited to have Arri on the podcast to learn how he does it.  We both spoke at Ezra Firestone’s event in Seattle a few months ago. I was so impressed by his talk that we immediately scheduled a time to record the podcast.  

Here’s a quick look at what we cover in this episode:

• Some stats around mobile usage related to text messaging that are important to note?
• How does SMS marketing compare to email marketing
• What are some of the top ways eCommerce companies should consider using SMS marketing
• How to grow SMS subscribers
• Most common SMS campaigns and tactics with some real examples
• How to combine SMS + email + messenger for mind-boggling results

Connect with the guest:
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Via Instagram
Via YouTube
Conversmart – Performance SMS Marketing for DTC Brands
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter

Mentioned in this episode:
Blue Ribbon – Smart Marketer
Ezra Firestone – CEO at Smart Marketer – LinkedIn
Tuft & Needle – An Exceptional Mattress at a Fair Price
Beardbrand – Beard Care, Oil, Grooming, Trimming, and Styling Products
Safe Life Defense Body Armor

‍

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The thought of going International with your eComm business is both exciting and scary. It also seems like a HUGE undertaking. New tax codes, laws, and confusing acronyms to deal with like VAT and GST. Plus we still have the dated mindset that says we only expand internationally once we’ve maximized what we can get here in the good ole U S of A.  Kevin Sanderson will challenge your thinking and bust some myths to help you go international much sooner than you possibly thought…maybe right now. Here’s what we discuss

• What market your should target first when you go international
• What markets should you consider 2nd and 3rd when going International
• What are some non-obvious benefits to going international like lower ad costs and lower competition
• What about Australia?
• What steps to take and when to try your first international market
• Plus much more

‍

Connect with Guest:

Via Facebook

Via Instagram

Maximizing Ecommerce

Via Facebook

Via Twitter

Via Instagram

Via YouTube

The Maximizing Ecommerce Podcast

Mentioned in this episode:

The Amazing Seller Podcast by Scott Voelker

Jungle Scout - Amazon Product Finder & Research Tool

Helium 10 - Insanely Powerful Tools for Amazon Sellers

Unicorn Smasher - Google Chrome

VAT Registration - GOV.UK

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Episode 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 talking about going international, becoming an international company. Excited about this. We've not talked about this topic specifically on the podcast before, and so with me today is an expert on this subject.

Brett:

Hey, Brett Curry here. Before we dive into today's topic, I want to talk quickly about YouTube ads. People ask me all the time, "What makes for a great YouTube ad?" It's true, the ad is the hardest part for getting YouTube to work. Now, I love the campaign structure. I love audience targeting, and I love tinkering with bids and using the smart bid algorithm. I even like budget management. I like all that behind the scenes stuff, but I've seen it time and time again where the exact same campaign structure just limps along with a mediocre video, but you get the right video with the right message that resonates with people, and that same campaign structure just takes off at scales.

Brett:

Over the last couple of years, my team and I, we've been collecting good YouTube ads. We've been watching, we've been paying attention and looking at our own clients, looking at the numbers, finding what are ads that resonate and work on YouTube. We started building this little guide, this little guide that we use internally, and we started categorizing ads and giving them fun names like The Manifesto and the UGC Mash-Up, and the Have It All.

Brett:

Started breaking down what elements in these videos make them work. I was speaking at a recent event, and I just happened to mention that this resource existed, and people clamored for it. Everyone's like, "Hey, I want to see the guide, I want to see that resource, I want to see all these successful ads." That's what we've done. We put together this resource first time ever. Going to share it with a broader audience. It's free, so check it out and get our list of winning YouTube ad formulas with lots of examples. Let this be your inspiration for your next killer YouTube ad.

Brett:

This is a free resource. We'll link to it in the show notes to this show, but you can also go to omgcommerce.com, click on Resources and then Guides, and it's the YouTube Ad Templates and Guide. Check it out, and I hope it inspires your next killer YouTube ad campaign. And now back to the show.

Brett:

I have today Kevin Sanderson with Maximizing Ecommerce. He is the chief maximizer at Maximizing Ecommerce, and so I want you to hear a little bit of his story as well before we dive into this topic. With that, Kevin, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on, man.

Kevin:

Brett, I'm so excited to be here. This is going to be a lot of fun.

Brett:

Yep, and it's always good to connect with fellow podcasters. You run a podcast as well. You want to talk a little bit about that podcast, and then we'll get into your background and how you became a chief maximizer.

Kevin:

Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, I have a podcast called Maximizing Ecommerce. I bring on various subject matter experts. I look forward to... I've got a calendar appointment coming up here in the next couple of weeks with a big high profile guest that you may know, somebody from Springfield, Missouri. Very excited about that. We're going to be talking about some exciting things in the advertising world.

Brett:

Yeah, that'd be great. Looking forward to it. That guest is me just in case anybody doesn't know where I'm from.

Kevin:

Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Brett:

Springfield, MO. That is me. I think most people got that, but some are like Springfield, Missouri? What is that?

Kevin:

Where is that?

Brett:

Yeah, exactly.

Kevin:

Is that where the Simpsons are?

Brett:

Which I heard, I mean, I don't know if it's Springfield, Massachusetts I think is where the Simpsons hail from, but I don't think that's ever been confirmed.

Kevin:

Maybe one day-

Brett:

We'll claim them though.

Kevin:

... we'll know for sure.

Brett:

Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. Great. Kevin, give a little your background. What'd you do prior to e-commerce, and then why e-commerce, and why Maximizing Ecommerce, chief maximizer, all that stuff.

Kevin:

Sure. Sure. Basically, I was climbing the corporate ladder for a while, worked for a couple of different Fortune 500 companies. My position in one of them had been eliminated. It wasn't just my position. We got taken over by another company, and my level in the new organization didn't exist. I was basically asked to walk the plank. A good friend of mine in the insurance business hooked me up with the job at his insurance agency, and they're going through rapid growth. I was working really hard, and I was very happy for them and the things that they were doing. I was just like, "Wait, if I'm going to work this hard, I'm going to work hard for my own dreams."

Kevin:

I started thinking, "What would be the avenue to do that?" I'd always been kind of a wantrepreneur, and I had discovered actually the Amazing Seller Podcast from Scott Voelker, and he was walking through very systematically, step-by-step how to get started, so the short of it is I took basically a season's worth of earnings as a high school football official, invested that into my first product-

Brett:

Awesome.

Kevin:

... and then kept reinvesting, putting money in where I could. Then about three years later, which is a little over a year ago, left my job to do all this full time. The way I look at it is had a lot of great mentors. Scott is now a friend of mine, but sometime-

Kevin:

... when I started listening to him, I-

Brett:

... for sure.

Kevin:

Yeah, he's a great guy. I-

Brett:

I knew his business partner Matt. I don't know Scott as well, but he's super smart.

Kevin:

Yeah, Scott Voelker is an awesome guy. Scott Voelker's awesome guy. He and a lot of other people have been very giving with information, kind of like what you're doing here with this podcast. You're a virtual mentor to a lot of people, and I had a lot of virtual mentors as I was coming into the business, so the way I look at it is podcast is a way to give back. If we keep giving back to other folks, eventually it'll come back to us, but the goal is to, the way I look at it is give without an expectation of receiving.

Kevin:

I enjoy coming on podcasts like this and getting to chat more with you and sharing something that hopefully your audience can take away with that will help them, maybe just keep pushing that ball just a little bit farther down the field to use a football analogy.

Brett:

That's great. Actually, I'm glad you mentioned football. I want to divert just a little bit because I did not know you were a high school ref. I want to talk about this briefly. I mentioned on the podcast before, I think a lot of people know, I am currently coaching my son's varsity basketball team. We homeschool our kids. He's on a homeschool team. We play public schools and a lot of tournaments, and we're pretty good team, but being coach is super stressful. I do like it. I'm about to retire. This is my last year  so much time.

Brett:

I'd love to say that I've always gotten along with the refs that ref our basketball games. I've gotten into it with a couple, mostly professional and cordial, but I'm just curious, do you think reffing high school sports, because I've got a connection here, and I may be way off base, but-

Brett:

... do you think that helped prepare you at all for being an entrepreneur, or do you see any correlations there or handling the pressure and the emotion, all that of sports, any correlation to business at all?

Kevin:

Yeah, there's a lot of... so there's a lot of like... you're kind of on an island there by yourself. The funny thing is about being an official, anytime a coach at the beginning of the game says, "I'm easy to deal with, this is going to be a great game," I know-

Brett:

It's not.

Kevin:

I know pretty much this is going to be a train wreck because it never quite works that way because everyone's emotions get in the way.

Brett:

Really? Really?

Kevin:

Oh, we keep the side lane clear. We... Oh, then their side land would be a mass and... It was always a lot of fun. I did it for 10 seasons. I actually didn't do it this past fall, but it's definitely does prepare you because you're thinking on your feet. Everybody thinks it's really easy when they're watching Mike Pereira or whoever it was that's the former NFL head of officiating comes in and analyzes the play, and you see it in slow motion. When you're trying decide-

Brett:

From lots of different angles, and you got all kinds of time, and there's no pressure on you, you're.

Kevin:

Oh, yeah, it's like, they're like, "Oh, yeah. I agree with that," or, "I don't agree because my team, it would go against my team," so you're the impartial person who's trying to decide "is this past interference, is that holding?" The thing of it is... I'm not as familiar with basketball, but I know there's a lot of similarities, that there's the rule book and then there's a case book.

Brett:

Yes, yes.

Kevin:

The case book is more like how you apply, and it gives you situations similar to like how a certain rule is because they don't want you just calling everything-

Brett:

Exactly.

Kevin:

... verbatim the-

Brett:

Exactly.

Kevin:

... rule because real life is gray.

Brett:

It is. It is.

Kevin:

Brett:

There's so much gray, and I love that. A couple thoughts that I had, and I think there's some correlations with coaching as well. Coaches and refs can get into it, but there's some similarities there. You're on a bit of an island as a coach as well. Things go well as the players, things go poorly as the coach. There's so much emotion in that. I mean, which fine. That's the way it probably should be, but there's so much emotion wrapped up into it too, and parents get all upset and stuff like this.

Brett:

I think the tie in the business for me is if you can learn to silence or suppress some of the emotional response and just look at things objectively... You can never get 100%, but if you could just kind of objectively look at, "No, I think this was holding," or, "No, I think this is the way to take my business," lots of fears, lots of chatter, lots of whatever, but no, looking at this objectively, this was the way to take the business. Anyway, I think that's cool. I think we would have been buds if I was the coach and you were the ref. I think we would've gotten along.

Kevin:

Definitely.

Brett:

I mean, I may have told you a time or two when you sucked, but-

Kevin:

Like, "You missed the holding call," or, "Wait, why would you call-"

Brett:

Exactly.

Kevin:

"... that? You called more on our side than their side."

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I did-

Kevin:

it's like-

Brett:

I did have a situation recently where there was a foul call in one of my players, and the ref was like... I said, "You just got to explain this to me. How did he foul on this?" He's like, "Well, he had both hands on him." I said, "Well, he didn't actually have any hands on him. He had his hands out." Anyway, it was fun stuff like that. Anyway, that was a little bit of a sidetrack-

Kevin:

We could go down a whole-

Brett:

... on just-

Kevin:

... rabbit hole on that one.

Brett:

We totally could. Let's talk about going international. I want to look at a few areas, and we'll dive into some specific I know you're an expert in this arena, but I think looking at the when and why and where of going international. Maybe let's talk about those first two first, the why and the when. What advice would you give people, because this is the strategic part of it, and then we'll get into some more tactical stuff too, but why international... other than just make more money, but why international and when?

Kevin:

Yeah, great question. As far as the why, and if you think about it, you've got a business, and you're constantly trying to get eyeballs on your offers, whether it be you're using paid ads or if you're going on Amazon or off Amazon or a combination of both, whatever it is you're trying to do. The more people you can get to it, the better. The nice thing about selling internationally is now you've got new eyeballs that you wouldn't have gotten the chance to get otherwise.

Kevin:

Think of it this way. If you're in Canada, and you could buy something that's Prime is going to be delivered in a day or two to your house, maybe sometimes two or three days, because bigger country and not as many warehouses, but either way, if you can buy it competitively priced in your currency, and it gets there quickly, you're going to do it, and you've been trained to do that by going into amazon.ca. It's like you're going to start doing that.

Kevin:

Now, all of a sudden, just like we've trained our customers, or Amazon, I should say, has trained their customers to buy Prime stuff in the US, same thing in Canada, same thing in Europe, and the European marketplace is in pretty much all over the globe. It's like leaving money on the table if you're not going internationally because then that money you could make from selling your goods faster... so let's say you're ordering, let's say a thousand units at a time. Maybe if you're getting 10% of your sales in the US, in Canada, you're selling 10% faster essential, and so you can reinvest that money back into it. Maybe you were looking to hire somebody to run your paid ads or you wanted to launch a new product or hire a virtual assistant or whatever you wanted to do to invest back into your business-

Brett:

And more volume-

Kevin:

... you can do that.

Brett:

... to get better terms with your suppliers and things like that, maybe change the-

Kevin:

Absolutely.

Brett:

... cost economics of your business.

Kevin:

Yeah, I mean, there's so many things you could do with that money. It also adds a little bit of an insurance policy on your Amazon listing because a lot more competition comes in more quickly and to Amazon in the US than goes into Canada or UK. I mean, there's still competition, but you don't see the same players.

Brett:

Yep. Yep. We'll underscore this in a little bit because I know this was one of the things that intrigued me about the topic and why I wanted to have you speak on it is you mentioned leaving money on the table. A lot of people think there's a ton of work involved, but it's not as simple as copy and paste, but you already got your listings built. You can make them international, we'll talk about how to do that in a minute, and instantly start getting more sales. Let's talk about the ease and just a minute. What about the question of when. When should I do this? I'm just starting in the US or I'm at a million or two a year. Do you have any advice or any thoughts around when we look to go international?

Kevin:

Yes. I think oftentimes people push it out, I think, farther than they necessarily need to. I decided I was going to go fairly early on because I was testing a bunch of things because when I first started, I had like one product, and I was starting to add ons, more products. I was trying eBay. I was trying my own Shopify store. I was-

Brett:

When you say early, like first year, second year?

Kevin:

For me, it was my first year.

Brett:

Nice. Okay.

Kevin:

It was... I had... Let's see. I started in February of '16 was when I first start getting sales in my first product, and it was probably around September that I started getting sales in Canada. I was trying a bunch of different things at the same time because when I was still fairly new, I had time because I didn't have as many products and as much sales, so I had time to try different things. That's what I got the most traction on early on was going international, so then I took what I learned in Canada and then went into Europe. Europe's a little more complicated because that works differently than it does... Sales tax in Canada's pretty similar to the US except it's, really, for the most part, just the federal government you're dealing with there.

Brett:

Nice.

Kevin:

Yeah, which makes it much simpler. I basically had one product and three or four... I don't remember the exact number. I had a bunch I was working on putting in the pipeline at the time that I went into Canada. The nice thing was it really bumped up my holiday sales because, just like in the US, we're very consumer-driven, we're buying lots of stuff with the holidays. Same thing in Canada and, really, Europe too.

Brett:

When you first launched, it was in your first year, so total sales are still growing, you're still a new company at that point, but into that second year and beyond, what percentage of your sales became international?

Kevin:

Yeah, so between Canada and Europe, it's generally ranged in the 25 to 35% depending-

Brett:

Great.

Kevin:

... on the year.

Brett:

That's great.

Kevin:

Last year, it was over 30% of my sales-

Brett:

That's a huge bump. That's a massive bump just by taking the same products, same listings, making them available in other places. We'll talk about some specifics in a minute. Your advice is go early, and if you're already seeing success with products, now's the time probably.

Kevin:

Yeah. The nice thing is oftentimes people think like, "Oh, I need to get a whole new minimum order quantity," so what you could do just to take a step back is you can just go on amazon.ca or amazon.co., .uk. North America and Europe, this works. Pacific, like Japan, this doesn't work. But you could take Jungle Scout or whatever, Helium 10 or Unicorn Smasher, whatever you like to use and see, for the most part, those tools work, and you can see approximate demand. As long as there's some demand, it's worth trying. Sometimes people will look and say, "Oh, well, it's not the same sales as the US, so it's not worth a whole new order." Well don't order whole new stuff just for that. Take small portions of your existing order and test it out, and if you run out, oh, well. Restock the next time.

Brett:

Yep. Yep. Got it. That makes a ton of sense. You mentioned Canada and Europe. Are those the first two places to try and in that order for most people?

Kevin:

Yes. I would say Canada, then the UK, just to be more specific, although UK is now technically not part of the European Union, but as we're recording this, the plan seems to be that all the trade arrangements are going to stay for the most part, pretty much the same, at least through the end of 2020.

Kevin:

Now, that could change, so anything we say here, take with a little bit of grain of salt, but for the most part in Europe, what you can do to get started is to basically take your listings, put them in the UK, and then what you could do is then let's say you wanted to go to Germany, get your listings translated, go into Germany, and you can actually take your inventory from the UK, and they'll ship it to German customers, and you would just pay that-

Brett:

So then you're still just sending to the fulfillment centers in the UK, and that's-

Kevin:

Exactly.

Brett:

... supplying both UK and Germany.

Kevin:

Yes. Now, one of the things Amazon really wants sellers to do, and this is something I strongly suggest people think twice about, is to do what's called the Pan-European fulfillment program. What that means is... Think of it this way. If let's say you send inventory into Charlotte or California or wherever. Amazon's going to take your inventory, move it to wherever they feel like because they can get it closer to the customer. That's what they do in the US, and it makes really no difference. In Europe, it gets more complicated with now all of a sudden you're supposed to register for VAT in different countries. You have to register for VAT in like seven different countries if you do the Pan-European fulfillment program, so always start with just UK. Don't turn on Pan-EU-

Brett:

Yep. Yep. Yep. Makes sense.

Kevin:

... unless you want to pay like seven, eight grand for VAT compliance.

Brett:

Got it. Got it. Totally makes sense. Let's talk Canada first. Canada's a place, that's where, typically where we would go first. English speaking, very similar to the US in a lot of ways. Talk about what does that process like. You want to do a few of the details without going line by line on any documents obviously, but how do we get started selling in Canada, and why is that easier than we might think, or how-

Kevin:

One of the things... Yeah, great question. One of the things I like about Canada is this just north of the border, so longterm, you could theoretically, and people do this where maybe you tell your factory take a certain portion, send some of it into Canada, send some of it into the US once you have data of what you need, but you can take... as long as you have some inventory on hand that's not in Amazon's warehouse in the US, let's say, you can take some of your existing inventory, ship it into a Canadian fulfillment center, and turn on your listings in Canada. To do that, what you got to do first is register with Canadian government basically for their sales tax called GST/HST, as well as get what's called a nonresident importer status, so-

Brett:

Do you recommend getting help doing that? I mean, do you need an accountant, do you need an attorney? Is this something that people can just do on their own pretty easily?

Kevin:

You could theoretically do it on your own. I have a service where I just do everything for people-

Brett:

Awesome.

Kevin:

... but it's 100% something you could do on your own too.

Brett:

Cool. Cool. Okay. Great. Great. Let's keep walking through that a little bit.

Kevin:

All right, cool. You get registered. I think usually takes four to six weeks to get registered. UPS is probably one of the best ones to use to ship your goods. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't want to get involved in going across the border, so you're on your own. Now, one little tip I have for people, it could take [crosstalk 00:21:04]-

Brett:

Well, so what does that mean? That means you've got to do self-fulfilled Prime at that point or-

Kevin:

Let's say you're sending something into an Amazon Fulfillment Center. Let's say it's in.

Brett:

Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay. You're just getting stuff into the fulfillment centers in from-

Kevin:

Exactly.

Brett:

... from the US. Got it.

Kevin:

Exactly, because I think the best way to do it is to have inventory in the country because-

Brett:

Right. Totally make sense.

Kevin:

... you're going to have the best experience with a customer and get the most sales as a result. Basically, you have to create your own shipment into the country as opposed to in the US. Amazon gives you really good rates. If you're using UPS, you can use promo code EASY, E-A-S-Y, or promo code FAST, F-A-S-T. Both of them seem to work, and it's about 40% off.

Brett:

Cool.

Kevin:

You can reach out to UPS and also have them set up a brokerage account for you because you have to pay fees when you go across the border.

Brett:

Nice. Got it. Okay. You get the product there, and then... So really, any additional paperwork that's required, and then once we kind of have that wrapped up, let's talk about what we're doing with our list things to kind of make them friendly for the Canadian market.

Kevin:

Yeah. As far as the Canadian market from... Here's the thing I'll say. I can't find the exact number, but I've looked this up. It's anywhere, estimates are between 75 and 90% of Canadians live within a hundred miles of the US border, so the words they use are pretty much the same as the words we use. I mean, it's very, very similar. Europe, it starts getting a lot different, or sometimes even in the UK, it's almost like you're speaking a foreign language with some of the words in some ways.

Kevin:

But at least in Canada, it's pretty similar. You can pretty much rest assure that what you're selling, for the most part... you may have to make some slight tweaks. You can always look at your competitors and see what they're doing as far as are they converting things to milliliters or whatever the case is, so little things like that you could take a look at. But for the most part, it's pretty much what you have in the US, you could just... it's a dropdown, and people may not even realize that dropdown exists, but you'd probably see your store name and a little flag with like the US flag. You just switch that down to Canada, and then now you go to manage inventory, and you can add in your list options.

Brett:

Awesome. That's awesome.

Kevin:

Real simple.

Brett:

Yep. Cool. Very good. Canada first, then the UK, and then from the UK, you can target other European countries.

Kevin:

Yes.

Brett:

You mentioned Germany. Is Germany usually the second country after the UK that you target in Europe, or does it depend?

Kevin:

Yes. People, for the most part, have pretty consistent good results in Germany. Italy can be hit or miss. Spain and France, for most people, tend to be pretty slow. It's one of those things that... Germany is a pretty good one. For a lot of people, they actually do better in Germany than they do in the UK.

Brett:

Very interesting. Okay, cool. Then what about Australia, another English speaking country. Are you recommending people look at that, or where would that be on the roadmap typically?

Kevin:

Great question because you would think Australia, being a English speaking country, would be a really good one to go into. One of the things about Australia, it's one of the newest marketplaces, and so there was a statistic that between [crosstalk 00:24:30].

Brett:

It's one of Amazon's newest marketplaces?

Kevin:

Yes. One of Amazon's newest marketplaces. They were noticing that, like let's say in the UK and the US, they were getting something like $500 million a year in sales of Australians buying and having products shipped, so they said, "Oh, let's create a marketplace there. There's opportunity there." The challenge is the population's pretty small there. Right now, behaviorally, they're very used to buying on eBay. Last I looked, eBay sales were something like six times higher in Australia than they are Amazon sales in Australia so-

Brett:

Interesting.

Kevin:

Yeah. In fact, I remember it was right before the holidays, a friend of mine was saying, "Hey, should I go into Australia?" and I said, "Well, I'm warning you, it's pretty slow," and he said, "Well, how much have you done in sales the last week?" At the time it was like I made one sale in Australia previously. He said, "Okay, for comparison, how much have you done in Canada?" I had done, let's say it was like 129 sales during the same time period, so it's definitely much slower in Australia-

Brett:

Got it.

Kevin:

... but if you mature to that point, I wouldn't say that's a starter one, but at least it gets your foothold in there because down-

Brett:

Opening up-

Kevin:

... the road-

Brett:

... you'd think you would... Yeah. I mean, if Amazon is one-sixth the size of eBay sales and in Australia, Amazon's going to figure things out, and likely, that's going to get more to a point of parity, or eventually Amazon might win. That'd be my guess. But it makes total sense that's not your first play, but maybe third, fourth, fifth, something like that. You look at it down the road. Let's talk about some other benefits. I know something you mentioned offline, one benefit of looking at Canada is ads are typically cheaper, right? Do you find-

Kevin:

Oh, yeah.

Brett:

Do you find that consistent in some of these other markets, and then aside from ads being cheaper, any other of these benefits that people might not be thinking about immediately?

Kevin:

Yeah. One of the things I would say is another benefit is it's lower maintenance. Sometimes people think like, "Oh, I'm going to have to spend... if I'm spending, let's say, 10 hours a week in my Amazon US, I'm going to have to spend another 10 hours a week on Canada or UK or whatever." Well, I tend to find that that's not the case.

Brett:

Nice. Nice.

Kevin:

One, there's not as much competition, so there's not as much things changing ongoing. Then if you're getting, let's say, 10% of the sales, you probably also have 10% of the impressions, 10% of the clicks, and so you could probably get away with sometimes maybe only checking it once every couple of months or something like that once you get up and going, I mean, once you got it solidified.

Brett:

Less time, often cheaper, lots of economics. That makes sense. It's really..

Kevin:

Yeah. Another benefit that I would say is in Canada that's not in Europe is in Europe the selling price includes sales tax, their VAT, and that can be kind of a challenge of trying to manage your margins, whereas in Canada, it's added onto the selling price just like it is here. One of the other interesting things is with that is you also can get away typically with it adding a little extra to your price relative to the conversion rate because if you look at Canada, you got Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, all these big expensive cities that are basically the same as like here in the US, like the cost of living would be in like San Francisco or New York. Then if you don't live in those major cities, you might live in the boondocks, and maybe there's a general store an hour away from you that's like the size of the 7/11. This is what people have described to me. You're willing to pay just a little extra to have Amazon just bring stuff to your door. It's like a godsend-

Brett:

Totally makes sense.

Kevin:

... to those people.

Brett:

Totally makes sense. Yep. Awesome. This has been fantastic. I want to connect people to you and some more resources and some of the things as they want to dive deeper, but as we wrap up, what are some of the mistakes you see people make? Someone decides to go international, what are some of the mistakes, pitfalls, issues, things like that that people need to be aware of.

Kevin:

Yes. What I would say is check first to see if there's some sales for similar products to yours. Sometimes, people worry about hijackers. There's a problem oftentimes have what's called gray listings in other countries where people will take, like bots will take like a million listings in the US and add them to Canada. They're usually like two, three times with the price should be, and people worry like, "Oh, my gosh, I got to kick these hijackers off my listing." Don't even worry about them. They're not going to get the buy box. All they're going to do is, worst case scenario, if they do get the buy box and get a sale, they're just going to drop ship off of you, off of your US listing, so nothing to worry about there.

Kevin:

Then also too, just make sure you're doing at least your good, honest, try to be tax-compliant. Oftentimes freight forwarders will do a good job of getting people registered to at least be able to get their stuff across the border, but they oftentimes, they don't register people for the sales tax, and so you could end up having the Canadian government come to you and say, "You owe us money," and you didn't collect it, so now you don't have it for them.

Kevin:

At the flip side too, you're actually going to be paying on top of your fulfillment fees a sales tax as well as when you go across the border, on the declared value, you're going to pay their GST, their sales tax in Canada. Those two items would subtract from what you collected from customers, so in essence, your customers are paying that for you.

Brett:

Got it.

Kevin:

But only if you're registered for sales tax and Amazon's collecting it.

Brett:

Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. Okay. That makes sense. Fantastic. Couple of scenarios. One, somebody says, "Hey, I'd like to give this a go on my own, but I want more resources. Kevin hooked me up with some resources." Let's talk about that, and then talk about, for a lot of the people, and I would fall into this category where we say, "I would just rather have someone like Kevin do this for me," talk about that as well.

Kevin:

Sure, sure, sure. If you go to maximizingecommerce.com/brett, I do have a checklist that I put together. It walks you through step by step. I call it a checklist, but I don't know, it's like 14 pages long. It has resources and everything, sort of a mini guide.

Brett:

I'll link to it in the show notes as well, but it's maximizingecommerce.com/brett.

Kevin:

Yes. As far as if you're looking for someone to do this all for you, reach out to me if you wanted to kevin@maximizingecommerce.com and be more than happy to do a free 30-minute consultation to see if it makes sense for them; otherwise, you can use the checklist, and I'd love to hear about someone's success from using it so if anyone-

Brett:

Exactly.

Kevin:

... downloads it and starts getting good numbers, please let me know because I love adding success stories.

Brett:

Yep. That's awesome. Kevin Sanderson, ladies and gentlemen. Kevin, man, thanks for coming on. Thanks for educating us. Thanks for educating me because I didn't know much about this topic. Thanks for helping us go international. It's exciting.

Kevin:

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been a lot of fun.

Brett:

Absolutely. Check it out. Go to maximizingecommerce.com. I'll link to it all in the show notes. As always, we'd love to hear from you, what show ideas do you have, what topics should we cover, what'd you like to see more of or less of. We'd also love that review on iTunes if you feel so inclined. With that, until next time, thank you for listening.

Kiri Masters is the founder & CEO of Bobsled Marketing and marketplace institute and host of ECommerce BrainTrust. Author of Amazon Expansion Plan and new book Amazon for CMOs.  We talk Amazon a lot on this podcast.  I wanted to have Kiri on to discuss her philosophy both in how to expand and how to manage growth.  We discuss some really interesting topics including:

• What CMOs of big brands know about Amazon that we don’t
• Who you need on your Amazon team
• How to assemble your own all-star Amazon team?
• How to take advantage of the full Amazon stack rather than just focusing on one area.
• Plus more!

Connect with Guest:
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
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Bobsled Marketing
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
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Via YouTube
The Marketplace Institute – The First Holistic Amazon Capability Development Platform for Brands and Agencies
eCommerce BrainTrust
The Amazon Expansion Plan
Amazon For CMOs

Mentioned in this episode:
The Llama Commerce Show – Demystifying eCommerce Into Actionable, Digestible Bites

‍

Building an irresistible culture.  Creating raving fans. Treating your customers like friends of 10+ years.  These are some of the philosophies that’s taken Live Bearded from a single product lifestyle business to now a leader in the men’s personal care space.

The only thing more impressive than Anthony Mink’s beard is the culture of raving fans he and co-founder Spencer Bryce have built together.

Mink has gone from traveling to 30 countries in 7 years to now having a warehouse, office and an incredible team.  

This episode is critically important to any eCommerce company.  Especially as competition heats up and more and more products are becoming commoditized.  

Here’s a look at what we cover:

• Why culture is the most valuable asset you have.
• How adding value should be your objective …but this doesn’t always mean cash value.  
• Why every touch point matters and how to create memorable experiences.
• How Live Bearded has created its own mottos and lingo that fans have adopted.  
• Treat your customers the way you would a friend of 10 years
• Your main job is to build raving fans.
• Some crazy Live Bearded stories.
• Plus more!

Connect with Guest:
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
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Via YouTube
Live Bearded – Beard Grooming and Beard Care Products
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Via Instagram
Via YouTube

Mentioned in this episode:
Mastermind – Blue Ribbon – Smart Marketer
Mink In The Morning
Tony Hsieh – Wikipedia
Delivering Happiness (Book) by Tony Hsieh – Amazon
The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (Book) by Patrick Lencioni – Amazon

What’s the ultimate metric you should measure to grow your business?  Smart direct response marketers might say Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) or Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).  Advanced direct response marketers might say Lifetime Customer Value. But what does John Grimshaw say?  Well, you’ll have to tune in, but I’ll give you a hint? It’s CVV.

John Grimshaw is traffic Marketing Director at Smart Marketer.  He runs a consulting business called Data Centric Marketing. More importantly than any of that, he’s wicked smart.  

I LOVE this episode.  Here’s a quick look at what we cover:

• What is lifetime customer value (LCV)?  Why it’s important and why it’s so tough to calculate.
• How should you calculate LCV and why it’s such a head-scratcher for most entrepreneurs.  
• Why LCV is often a flawed or imperfect metric and why Customer Value Velocity (CVV)  is a better metric for scaling your business.  
• Real world example of how to use CVV to scale?
• Why you should ignore the canned Lifetime value metric in Google Analytics (but we got nothin’ but love for GA in general.  Just not this metric.).
• John’s favorite tools and resources for measuring CVV.
• Plus more!

Connect with guest:
Via LinkedIn
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Data Centric Marketing
Smart Marketer
Train My Traffic Person
Mentioned in this episode:
Mastermind – Blue Ribbon – Smart Marketer
Jay Abraham
Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik – Digital Marketing and Analytics Blog
Avinash Kaushik – Amazon
Timely – Fully Automatic Time Tracking

‍

Transparency.  Sustainability.  Social responsibility.  More than just buzz words these are now expectations that consumers have of the brands they buy from.  In this episode, we dive into what it means to be a mission-driven eCommerce brand.  We share lots of powerful examples like Everlane, All Birds and more.
My friend Ezra Firestone’s company Smart Marketer has the perfect slogan - Serve the World Unselfishly and Profit.  Now you can do the right thing by fighting hunger, helping orphans, cleaning up the environment or supporting mental health AND build a profitable brand in the process.
In this episode with Stephen we discuss the following:
- Who is the conscious consumer and how are they impacting eCommerce?
- Do companies have to go “all-in” on a mission or can this be a gradual process?
- What is “greenwashing” and why should you avoid it?
- Exploring the Mission Driven Marketing Playbook
- Plus more!

‍

Connect with Guest:
Via LinkedIn

Needle Movement - A Digital Strategy Company ‍

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The Needle Movement Podcast

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Mentioned in this episode:

E-Dreams (2001) Documentary - IMDb
Lafayette 148 New York
MeUndies - The World’s Most Comfortable Underwear for Men & Women

Episode 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 I'm really excited about today's topic. We're diving into how to create a mission driven eCommerce business, and what that means both for the impact of your company, but also your marketing and your messaging and your growth. And so, I have on the show today an expert in this topic. He's hailing from one of my favorite cities in the world, Brooklyn, New York. Awesome place.

Brett:

Hey eCommerce Evolution listeners, Brett Curry here. I have a really cool announcement, and an invite just for you. In February, OMG Commerce is hosting an exclusive invite only event at the Google and YouTube offices in Los Angeles. Now, if you've never experienced a Google office, they really do live up to the hype. And the Google offices in LA are some of the most unique around. More on the venue in a minute. First, let me give you the scoop on the event itself. It's called YouTube Ads for eCommerce, building full funnel growth with YouTube Ads. I'll be speaking at this event, sharing some of our best YouTube Ads strategies, some of our most successful YouTube Ad templates and more. And you'll get to hear directly from some amazing YouTube team members, including some incredible content from the unskippable labs team.

Brett:

I've seen this content before and it's amazing. I'm so excited about this event, but here's the best part, it's free, but it is invite only, and you do have to apply and be approved to attend because seating is limited. So sorry, no agencies, no service providers, this is just for eCommerce companies.

Brett:

Now, as promised, more about the venue. This will be held at the Spruce Goose Hangar. This hangar was initially built by the mogul Howard Hughes. And if you've ever seen the movie The Aviator with Leonardo DiCaprio, then you know all about Howard Hughes and his Spruce Goose. This hangar was recently renovated in true Google fashion. Now it's a cutting edge YouTube studio and Google offices and that's where we're holding this event. It's going to be amazing. So to find out more, to check out the application, go to omgommerce.com/youtube-event. Again, that's omgcommerce.com/youtube-event. I'll also link to the event page in the show notes of this show, and I hope to see you in LA.

Brett:

My guest is Stephen Carl. He's the founder of Needle Movement, a digital strategy company focused on conscious commerce. He got his start in the industry, which we'll hear about in a minute in 1998 working for an Amazon funded startup. I can't wait to hear that story. And now, he helps eCommerce companies and commerce companies grow and define their mission and be a conscious commerce company. Very, very bright. We'll dig into all kinds of strategy and helpful tips and ideas around this topic. And so with that, Stephen, welcome to the show, thank you for taking the time and really excited to dive into this topic.

Stephen:

Thanks so much for having me here, Brad. I'm really excited to talk about mission and to get more into it.

Brett:

Yeah, absolutely. So let's hear a little bit about your background. I know you're also running a podcast. It's always great to chat with other podcasters, which is fun. But yeah, what's your background? Tell us a little bit about that Amazon funded startup and how did you get to this place that you're at now?

Stephen:

I have to say just even for your podcast and your listeners, listening to your podcast, it's been an inspiration for me, and I love the community that we set up. So to get into I guess, so the background and how we are, we have to go back a ways because I've been doing this for about 21 years. For me, I've always, I was really lucky because in 1998, I got to start at a company, and I think just seeing these cycles over 20 years really informs my judgment and opinions. But let's just start at the beginning at the Amazon funded startup.

Stephen:

So the name of the company was cosmo.com. And cosmo.com specialized in one hour delivery of DVDs, food items, and drugstore products. I was a very early employee there. So I got to see-

Brett:

This was in 98?

Stephen:

Right. One hour delivery in 1998.

Brett:

Talk about being ahead of your time. That's great.

Stephen:

Yeah. And I think you learn also, I think it taught me a lesson about timing because you want to be, being 20 years ahead is not always the best thing.

Brett:

Right. So true, so true.

Stephen:

Being an early employee there, I think I was like employee number five, you do a little bit of everything, especially at that time. So I got to see instant gratification firsthand because I would see these orders come in for a DVD or Ben & Jerry's ice cream. And then, in certain situations when we were flooded with orders, I would be out there delivering it. Someone orders something and seven minutes later, I come with the bag. The expression on people's faces was [crosstalk 00:06:02], yeah.

Brett:

Yeah. You're like a genie. This was too good to be true. Yeah, that's fantastic. I mean, they were getting everybody out there delivering. That's crazy. What was the fate of this company?

Stephen:

First it was running in New York City. Then it expanded out to about 10 different cities, got a lot of venture funding, including Starbucks and Amazon. And I think Amazon is so interesting because Amazon Prime, Amazon Prime is, so this program in some ways was a granddaddy.

Brett:

precursor to that, yeah.

Stephen:

So the company grew and I think at the time, around 2000, from 96 to 2000, the stock market was really encouraging companies to grow their business and to expand. And then, in 2000, there was a big crash, and everything was profitability.

Brett:

The dotcom bubble.

Stephen:

The dotcom bubble. So, a lot of companies like Cosmo got caught in this, and actually Cosmo, was in the middle of an IPO filing in that. I guess the postmortem to it is, the company didn't last. It was actually bought a few years ago, I think at least the name by someone else. But I think the real message that I learned from it is how important company culture is as you grow because everything changes at every plateau of your growth, you're a different company when you make a million, you're a different company, at three million and so on.

Stephen:

But also the importance of profitability in a business and how you can't run out of cash. I think even when you get investors, there's something to answer to there. And also, there's not an infinite cash supply, that the best way to fund your company is to be making money and making profit. So maybe-

Brett:

your own profits, absolutely.

Stephen:

I would have loved to have cashed in on the IPO and made my millions, but I think I learned a really valuable lesson early in my career about the importance, and also even, let's look at Jeff Bezos, he invested $60 million in this company and he lost it. But we can argue that he actually made well on his investment because he convinced, this was an inspiration of how Amazon eventually differentiated themselves by offering, differentiating themselves through delivery.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, it's so interesting. I've never heard the story of this company, but yet you wonder, did that plant the initial seeds for the idea of Prime and One Hour Prime? Did it reinforce to Bezos the fact that the marketplace wants this kind of instant gratification? What did he learn there? And if you did learn some substantial things there that helped shape Prime, I would say that $60 million loss there was not so much of a loss.

Stephen:

Exactly. You learn from what works and you learn a lot from what doesn't work at the time. If you're really interested, there is a full feature documentary about the company called eDreams.

Brett:

eDreams, nice.

Stephen:

eDreams.

Brett:

Okay. That's cool, man. We'll link to that in the show notes for sure. I love the fact that you mentioned, this isn't really our topic today but I'll just highlight it really quickly, I love that you mentioned culture because that's something that at OMG we're big believers in, protecting culture, reinforcing culture, hiring for culture. But it does change. You hit that $5 million mark or you hit 40, 50 employees. And when you hit 100 employees, which we're not 100 employees yet, but you hit these different milestones and you're like, hey, things can shift and things can shift quickly. And if you don't protect that culture, you can lose what made you valuable and what made you tick and what made you successful. And so, really important reminders there for sure.

Stephen:

I can move on with, let's see, let me go through the rest of some of the history. After Cosmo, I worked for about, for over a dozen years and I would come in as the first eCommerce hire for digital marketing. Also to bring in the culture and just tell people what they should be doing. How to translate the web to some of these companies that really weren't well versed in it. Fortunately had a great, my first experience was awesome at a company called the 92nd Street Y, which is a not for profit. And some people might be familiar with them for the day after Cyber Monday, there is a holiday called Giving Tuesday, where companies give donations, or where people are encouraged to do that. And they were instrumental in launching that holiday.

Brett:

Interesting. And you said the 92nd Street Y, like YMCA?

Stephen:

Correct. It's really like a university. They have a wide breadth of programming but it is a not for profit at its core. And then, let's see, so to take that a further step, in, let's see, about 10 years ago, I got into women's fashion and worked with a company called Lafayette 148 New York, and they do luxury women's wear. So there we went from about $8 million a year in revenue online to 45 million now about four years later.

Brett:

Wow. Crazy.

Stephen:

That was just a good mixture of, they had a prosperous catalog business and we were just plugging in digital where we couldn't take advantage of the opportunities like setting up search, good retargeting programs, and even email, just starting that from scratch and leveraging it since it can be so profitable. So after that experience, I had a little courage of saying, hey, I've been doing this inside of a lot of companies. Why don't I work outside of companies and get back to that vision of doing a startup and having my own company. So that's what started Needle Movement.

Brett:

Got it, got it. And then what really drove this focus or this desire for mission-driven business or conscious eCommerce as you describe it? What was kind of the motivating factor or the driving force behind that?

Stephen:

Great question. I think there's a couple of things. For us, I really see mission-driven marketing as, I see it from a growth perspective because I'm seeing, I think we're in, as someone who's been in the field around the same time as you, we both follow these trends and it's been fascinating to watch over the past 10 years how much, starting with Toms Shoes, and even Everlane, which started about maybe eight or nine years ago. And seeing these companies grow, and just a different formation of this economy in a way where there is now this consumer that expects more from their companies. I think this is a byproduct of social media that social media humanized brands where brands can be humans, and heck, they have human names now. But with that expectation, I think now that we have this personal relationship, the consumer is now telling the company, okay, well, what sort of social responsibility do you have?

Stephen:

I think that's the professional angle. I see mission as a good extension of strategy. On the personal side, I'm a vegetarian. And I am more active on environmental sustainability issues. I see it from that lens as well.

Brett:

I love it. I think there's, obviously when you look at mission, we're going to dive into some good examples and talk about specifically how to use mission in your brand positioning and some really helpful practical things. I think what's great about this and how the marketplace is shifting is now companies can be rewarded for doing the right thing. So looking at, hey, what is a mission that's important to me? Is it focused on kids or fighting poverty or helping the environment or a number of things? How can I help support that and grow my business at the same time?

Brett:

One of my close friends and good, we partner on some projects and stuff, Ezra Firestone, with Smart Marketer, their motto is Serve the World Unselfishly and Profit. Those seem like shouldn't go together, but they can. Doing the right thing, helping people, being real, transparent, doing good can help fuel business growth. I think that it should. And so, let's kind of dig into this. What are some hangups, why don't you describe what mission is first, and then we'll talk about maybe what are some hangups or things keeping an eCommerce company from being a mission-driven eCommerce company?

Stephen:

Okay. I think mission is simply just tying, really differentiate your company by broadening the greater good that it can do beyond just the selling of a product. So it' how is it helping the community, how is it helping, whether it's the environment, the community, how is it getting involved in some, it's really I would say calibrating more because you were talking about Ezra Firestone. I know just from listening how generous he is and how much knowledge he shares. And we know in the eCommerce community, how much mentoring happens. That generosity is in people's DNA. I think it's sort of like our marketing channels, where we're all over the place doing a lot of different touch points and running around with our heads cut off sometimes.

Stephen:

A lot of times it's just calibrating and saying, okay, in a short way, what's that one cause that you really believe in that you want to focus your energies on. I guess to answer, you know, like you were talking about, it's so nice that there's this idea of a triple P company that it's people in profits and planet that, the consumer is changing and that they're rewarding this action. That's how it's much different than it was five years ago or 10 years ago because there wasn't as many people that were going to support these products. I think a lot of times the objections in people's heads that come in is people say, oh, it's not my customer. With millennials and gen Z, they are over two thirds of them, are very concerned about these issues. And they're basing their buying decisions on it.

Stephen:

But also the profitability that in many ways, you can see your mission as a marketing strategy in some instance because it's going to make your brand more persuasive. So those are the common objections that come in. We're definitely focused on making money, having profitable businesses. We know we have to make money, support our employees. It fits in nicely right now.

Brett:

Yeah, it does, it does. Things have converged to make this a good business strategy as well as the right thing to do. Talk a little bit about who is the conscious consumer and how is eCommerce kind of evolving as a result of that?

Stephen:

It tends to be a younger consumer that in the gen Z and millennial populations but even beyond that. It's just people that, they see their wallet as kind of a, as a way to project on the world that they want. When they put those hard earned dollars and they're going to buy a product, I think also because it's easier to make products these days and the consumer has more choices. So they don't have only five brands to choose from, they have 100. They can be picky, and with that conscious consumer, it's fascinating because commerce is tribal. I don't think when I'm talking about the conscious consumer, this is not everybody, but there is a customer out there where convenience is not the god. This is talking from someone who used to do one hour delivery, but it's not the end all be all for it.

Stephen:

So these are people that, even with Amazon or other companies, when they get a package in the mail, or let's just say they buy a small electronic chip and it comes in a giant package, big turnoff, or they see waste. But I think also, another way that explains it is secondhand retail is exploding right now. It is actually projected to rise higher than fast fashion, and that's because people see the utility of, I can buy something that's already been used. I can get it at a great price point, it's discounting 2.0. That's the framework that the conscious consumer sees things a little bit differently.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. It's quite a shift from, I'm a child of the 80s, born in the 80s, grew up. It's kind of a shift, like that was all just about consumption and enjoying things and really was not much thought given to waste or sustainability or efficiency or any of those things. I'm glad the narrative has shifted for sure.

Brett:

Let's talk a little bit about brand positioning. So an eCommerce company focused on all the things that an eCommerce company has to focus on, building a great product, responding to reviews and customer feedback, making that product better, working on marketing, trying to manage their P&L, all these difficult things that's sort of challenging to make a business work. How does someone make that transition from maybe, maybe they want to be mission-driven but they just weren't in the beginning. They just focused on their products in the beginning. How do they make that transition? Does it, can it be gradual? Does it have to go all in? Like what, what does that look like and how does that impact brand position?

Stephen:

Got it. So you don't have to go zero to 60 miles an hour. I think it's really having an authentic and transparent voice about what your company cares about. It can even involve serve, I think it does involve surveying the audience to see also what they care about. But let's take the example of Everlane. Everlane did not start really as an environmentally conscious brand. They started as a brand that was about transparency and saying, we're going to cut out the middle man but we're also going to tell you about the factory where it comes from.

Stephen:

So, I think that the progress can definitely be gradual. And I think even brands that are in this space, they're not going to create a clothing product that has zero impact. They're working with the materials they have, build it and looking at the options and picking gradually what is feasible. Like the brand Allbirds which is the New Zealand sneaker brand, I think one of the founders, I heard him talking about how they know of a material that could be much better, but financially, it's not viable right now. They would lose a ton of money by doing it that way. It can be a gradual transition. But really it's focusing on what are those one, what are those couple of things that you think makes sense and can be your stamp?

Brett:

Yup. Love it. So you talk about being authentic and people, especially millennial and gen Z, but I think all people to a certain degree have a good BS detector. What is greenwashing and why is that something that you should probably avoid?

Stephen:

Yeah, so greenwashing is when, let's see, I'll tell you a quick story for my, during the holidays, my partner, she's vegan and we went and, I told my mom, I'm like, can we get some vegan butter? And she was so nice and she went out to the store and she found a product that was vegan butter. And we knew it because it had this smiley face and it said, "It's vegan." But then I look at the ingredients and some of the ingredients were like, it had a couple of oils in it that really were not environmentally friendly. In that case, like with that company, they might not have intentionally have done that, but my response right now as a consumer was poor, was negative because I felt like they were promoting themselves one way and then they were doing something else.

Stephen:

But greenwashing also is, you got to be careful of how you name drop because when you're using terms like sustainable or ethical, there should be some thought behind it. It's not a copywriter shop, it's the leadership of the company. And finding verified products that, that's what a lot of companies do where they'll, instead of saying I'll do this, they will find a third party to verify the claim and then they'll use, they'll put that trust deal on the product page or something to reinforce it. But that's the thing about, it's just that, I think with greenwashing, it's just about being sincere about that approach, not using it for marketing because it's that bullshit detector, people are very wary of it.

Brett:

They are. It's interesting, we talked about how you can serve people and you can serve different communities and you can be mission-driven and that can lead to increased profits. But if you're only doing it for marketing reasons, if you're just saying, yeah, let's just stamp green on things or say it's sustainability, just for the marketing growth, people usually sniff that out, and that will typically have the opposite effect. If this is not something that's going to have some sincerity behind it and if you're not going to be transparent about some things, then you probably should just avoid it because being seen as insincere is potentially worse. Greenwashing probably not a good thing.

Brett:

Let's talk a little bit about the mission-driven marketing playbook. What does that look like and how does someone kind of use mission in their marketing?

Stephen:

Gotcha. I really think that mission is, it's just an extension of brand. It's just a way to talk, it's a way that, you take your core story and you determine what benefit you're providing to the world and you put, so it really starts with that I guess mission statement or however we want to say because that's a message that can go everywhere, your marketing, all your touch points. It's figuring out where it ties in and then, okay, so where this becomes the playbook is now we focus on all the marketing touch points where the mission can be communicated. So the website.

Stephen:

What I'm seeing now on the website is about us is becoming a larger section. People are not just saying, they're not just putting two paragraphs and a picture of a couple of employees. They're using cause to show stories. The home page, a lot of companies, if they're doing something mission-driven, they will mention it or mention just this is what we're about because you're buying our products, we want to tell you a story about us. And so, mission is used as a way to humanize the people behind the company because we're all told that, I think we've all heard a thousand times, especially our listeners, it's all about storytelling, you have to tell stories about the brand. And mission gives you the opportunity to say something without having to say buy this, buy now, hurry up because that's something that also people are getting a little cautious on.

Stephen:

But going back to that playbook, so the website, the areas to think about are your home page. I think product pages, there is potential where you can put trust badges below that buy button in some instances to say if there's something that differentiates your product, whether it's mission-driven or not, trust seals can really work well. But this gives you something else to talk about. Let's just say the product is cruelty-free if it's in beauty.

Brett:

You can talk about maybe even creating icons or badges that say things like cruelty-free or sustainable or something like that. So creating those-

Stephen:

Yeah, like Pura Vida bracelets is another example. They have something on their product page that says our cause. It's not the only thing but it's just, it's in your toolbox. Mission is just one of the things that's in your toolbox that you can talk about. So I guess for the website, that's one element. Then with email marketing and with email, people don't talk about mission all the time, but I noticed with brands like typically on maybe a monthly cadence, they will offer, they will have a more focused, non-promotional mission perspective. An example of Everlane is on Black Friday, that day, they were promoting one of their environmental initiatives and saying give to this fund instead of shopping with us on Black Friday. There were other days I'm sure that they were getting a lot of business so it's not like they said the whole holiday season is awash.

Brett:

Save your money this holiday season. Don't shop here. Yeah. They weren't doing that.

Stephen:

So for email, I think in your, you find a way with mission to, you add it to your lexicon where now Everlane, you'll see more on their products, they're mentioning the word sustainable or ethical. And that's what they regularly post. So they're not telling an entire story about mission but they're planting the seed by certain words that they're using consistently. And then you go into with PR, I think when the leaders of the company are talking, they're going to talk about the mission of the company as well and promote it whatever media they're using. And then I guess social media is also the content that you're using that's related to, it just gives you, it's just another story that you can tell besides something that's entirely product focused.

Brett:

Yeah. I love this and I think it's important to underscore, you still have to have a good value proposition. Why does this product exist? What problem is it solving? Why is it desirable? Why is it useful? In the case of Everlane, why would females in their demographic choose their leggings over other leggings and stuff like that. Their positioning is they're comfortable and they're amazing. They're really durable and whatnot. But they're also sustainable and they're ethically sourced and manufactured and things like that.

Brett:

And so, tying that all together I think is a really beautiful thing. And you're right, it does give you in social and email and other marketing channels the ability to communicate more than just a buy now message, which I'm a marketer, I don't mind buy now. But having something else to say there, like hey, we're about more than just making a dollar, we're trying to change your life with the product and then other's lives as well and create a legacy and things like that. So, really good.

Brett:

How else is this impacting the marketing playbook and storytelling and things like that? Any other thoughts there?

Stephen:

I think it's just, marketing is always about, marketing is mind warfare. It's so psychological. And with mission, what you're giving is you're giving people just an emotional reason to support you. I think with brand it's like, yeah, you have those five brand differentiators where it's like, it's price, then, you know, it could be price. The it product, it's the cool factor. Like you were saying, it solves a problem. And then we get into these other ones like planet or helps people. And those are tools that, this is slightly ahead of trend I think because not as many companies are using it. And when you say, hey, there's a whole other reason to buy our product besides just the great value of the product, it's that, because right now the modern marketing template that I'm seeing just from clients and elsewhere is it's strong product positioning, really getting into that product, and then mission-driven branding, giving extra values to it.

Stephen:

I think another thing that a lot of brands can utilize is where this product came from, where this product is made because it really ties into everything. People want to see that. It could tie into your cause, it doesn't even have to tie into your cause. But you're just showing, here's the factory where this is made. A series that Everlane did that was very, I'm not sure if they're still running it, but it was very popular, very effective, was called #TransparencyTuesdays, TransparencyTuesdays or Thursdays, I forgot which one. But they would have someone in the office walking around the different departments and people would send questions and they would answer them.

Stephen:

They were really bringing the face of the company out, and I think that's, mission is really just an extension of humanizing your brand and making these company, making these people from the company feel like they're in your living room and they're a part of you.

Brett:

Let's dive into some examples because I think that's the best way we learn, this kind of comes to life and triggers ideas as people are listening to this. So, lots of great examples from Everlane, I love that. What are some other companies, and certainly you can mention more about Everlane too, but what are some other companies that are getting this right, and what are they getting right? What are they doing that's really tying this all together, mission and branding and just bringing them all home?

Stephen:

I think Allbirds is getting it right. They are doing, because they're combining a few different messages. They're telling this romantic story of New Zealand well, which was something that was never used in sneakers before. Then they're going after comfort, where they're getting , this is the world's most comfortable shoe.

Brett:

Most comfortable shoes you ever worn, world's most comfortable shoes. I have several friends, I've never worn Allbirds, but several friends that just swear by it that they're amazing.

Stephen:

Then you have the sustainability angle where they're talking about the materials that they're using and how different they are. It's really strong product marketing there.

Stephen:

Another example that's more recent is an underwear company called yourparade.com. They are really using the mission-driven playbook because they are, they're offering underwear at a cheap price point. They are giving to, they're being size-inclusive. So they're talking about how many sizes they offer. They are donating to female-based charities and highlighting their founder is a woman. They're making from recycled materials. They've hit the flush on ... In addition to their branding is very bright and happy.

Stephen:

And that reminds me of another company called Madhappy, madhappy.com, they are basics clothing and their cause is mental health. And they're using mental health as just an overall marketing, branding, quirky topic. As we know, it's very top of mind, but they also do, they do popups and they sponsor meditations. So that's a way that they are, as well as making cool clothing that you can immediately recognize on the street. So they have this stitch that from a far, you could tell it's a Madhappy product. So that's a couple more of them.

Brett:

Really interesting. I want to maybe underscore something. And I'm seeing this more with brands, you mentioned Parade and inclusivity with their models and their marketing and even on their product detail pages. I'm seeing this with other brands as well. Everlane does this some. There's another underwear company that I think gets marketing right and a lot of details right and that's .. But they do a pretty good job of not every model is like this chiseled Greek god on the male side, or on the female side, it's not the typical supermodel that only half a percent of the population can identify with. It's real people. They're usually smiling and vibrant, and I don't know, I think that's a really good trend. Like to me, as I look at product, I'm like, okay, well that would probably look good on me. That's a normal looking dude rather than a bodybuilder or something.

Brett:

Do you see that as kind of an extension of mission or it all kind of ties together? Any thoughts on inclusivity with your marketing?

Stephen:

Yes, because it's a cause. I think inclusivity is, like I mean, we could say LGBT is a mission too. I think they all, there's a higher purpose to it. I think it's important to be, with these terms, and the reason why I'm pausing a little bit is, I think that's where the sincerity and authenticity goes in because it's not just about, these things can be used for good and bad. Like we were saying, in time, the customer can sniff it out. But I would say inclusivity is because is a mission of sorts in the sense that you're not giving to charity but you're highlighting the values that you want in a society at large. You're presenting your company as this is how I want the world to be. I don't want it to just be skinny stick figures, I want there to be people like me who are presented as beautiful.

Brett:

Yes. Very powerful. Very powerful for sure. As we kind of wrap up, I want to underscore something. I think it's, this was hopefully inspirational for people, saying, okay, there's a mission that I'm passionate about, that our company is passionate about, that we think our audience is passionate about and so we're going to advance that.

Brett:

I remember, one of my favorite business books and favorite books of all time is Good to Great by Jim Collins. It's one that's quoted all the time. One thing that was kind of interesting that they brought up was one of the values or one of the things that the great companies, the companies that made the transition from good to great, one of the things they had in common was that they were value-driven. But one thing that was not common was what those values were. They even talked about, and I almost hate to bring it up, but I think it underscores the idea of Phillip Morris, it's cigarettes and really unhealthy food. But their value was, we just want to enjoy taste, we just want to enjoy things. But the whole company rallied around that and that actually helped sustain some of their growth.

Brett:

I think it's important to underscore that as you identify something, this is meaningful to me and to our team, there's probably a market that's going to say, yeah, that's meaningful to me as well. It's an environmental issue or it's a kid poverty issue or it's fighting hunger or it's mental health. It doesn't matter specifically what you pick, just that you pick something that it is authentic, that you are transparent about it. And then it does tie in with your brand messaging. Would you agree with that, that it's not as important-

Stephen:

Yeah. As they say, the riches are in the niches. Society is very tribal. And people have, even with causes, people have things that they're, people aren't passionate about every cause, but they're passionate about certain ones. So, once you have something that ties in, you can definitely feed into the passion of that audience. And also, with brands, it's not just about getting buyers, but it's also about getting fans, getting community. That's how you build that social proof by having a large community that, and once they agree with you on that value, they're in. Even if they're not buying your product, they've already hit that first step.

Brett:

That's awesome. Yup, yup, really good. Well Steve, this has been great. Let's talk maybe just quickly about some resources, ways people can connect with you more and hear more about this topic and others that tie into eCommerce strategy. You've got a podcast, so why don't you talk about the podcast real quick and then let's talk about-

Stephen:

I appreciate that.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Stephen:

The Needle Movement Podcast is, for me, I have heard the term move the needle a million times. It's just about how businesses can, I work in digital strategy and it's how they can efficiently navigate this complicated world of digital marketing to move things forward. So we get into a lot of different topics. It's not entirely eCommerce. Like recently I did an episode on mental health. It's really just tying into the challenges that emerging business leaders have and how we can help support them and also have a little bit of fun at the same time. So that is the Needle Movement Podcast.

Stephen:

In terms of the resources, or I guess I should just mention, with Needle Movement, some people call it, I essentially call it a second brain to companies where companies are really overwhelmed, and they often don't have time to see what the most important emerging trends and the best way to make profit is. I love email marketing for example for that reason. But Needle Movement, whether you could call it a coach, a virtual CMO, a digital strategist, doesn't matter, but it;s to be that hotline, to be that second brain to businesses.

Stephen:

For the resources, in the show notes, we can go through a lot of examples, so that, I think the most powerful thing is to look at these websites and follow them and see what they're doing.

Brett:

Agreed. Get on their email list. Check out their site so that they'll remarket to you. Get on their email list, check out social media. Watch their marketing and their messaging.

Stephen:

We'll share a cool tip with the audience. There's a website called milled.com, and on that website, you can follow all of the brand's emails. So instead of, so you can subscribe as well and see how it looks in your inbox, but you could also quickly search and say, hey, what are all the emails that Everlane put out in the past?

Brett:

That's a great resource. Because I always find, I teach and encourage people, hey, go get on email list because you're going to learn a lot. And I do the same myself. And then I'm like, holy crap, I've got so many emails coming in, this is unbelievable. I'm on milled.com right now, look at this, you got Nasty Gal there, you got Rue La La, all kinds of stuff. And you look at their emails. That's a great resource, that's fantastic.

Stephen:

We'll also include the brands that were mentioned. If you look at five or six of them, it's going to be like that game, what is it called, Product Hunt, where you just spot where people are mentioning mission on the page or you spot what's different about the image and you can see it pretty quickly, and even going through, yeah, going through their touch points as well.

Brett:

And you've got a link to the email, or the Everlane email blast where they're talking about mission and supporting a cause rather than just shopping, and so we'll link to that as well. So it'll be great.

Stephen:

And to reach out to me directly, go to hello@needlemovement.com. And I look at all of those emails and answer them.

Brett:

Awesome. Fantastic. Stephen, thanks for taking the time, man. This was really fun. This was a really important topic. I think this is a topic that's going to be relevant for some time to come for the foreseeable future, and it's something that all eCommerce companies should be thinking about and strategizing about and watching and learning from. So, really appreciate you taking the time. And yeah, go check out needlemovement.com, go check out that podcast.

Stephen:

Thanks again for having me and for sharing this topic of mission right now.

Brett:

Absolutely. Glad to do it. And with that, we'd love to get that five star review from all of our listeners, if you feel so inclined, we'd also like your feedback, what would you like to hear more of? Give us topic suggestions, suggestions for guests. We're always open to that as well. And so, with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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There are over 150 million Alexa devices in use today.  Google has sold upwards of 50 million of its Google Home devices.  While most devices are used primarily to listen to music or play games or control appliances like lights and heat and air…voice commerce is on the rise too.

In this episode I interview Anmol Oberoi the Founder and CEO of Emitrr - a voice-first SaaS Platform.  We dive into voice commerce use-cases that are making an impact now.  We also talk about where voice commerce is likely heading in the near future.  Here’s a quick look at what we discuss:

• How games and quizzes through voice can benefit eCommerce companies
• What voice skills to develop and launch first and how to use customer feedback to make sure you’ll have high adoption rates
• What are the most popular voice skills that customers want right now 
• How voice can build loyalty and put a “fence” around your top customers keeping competitors away
• How smart devices with screens like the Echo Show and Google’ Nest Hub might make the biggest shopping impact right away

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Connect with Guest:

Anmol Oberoi - Founder and CEO at Emitrr

 Via LinkedIn

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 Via Instagram

Emitrr - Giving Voice to Businesses

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Mentioned in this episode:

Alexa Newsletter - Amazon Developer

Episode Transcript

Brett:

Well hello, and welcome to another edition of the e-commerce evolution podcast. I am your host Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. Today we're talking about a topic that is bright and shiny and up and coming. I think it's going to have a big impact on the future of commerce. It's having an impact now. So we're talking about voice commerce and voice first activities that lead to commerce. And if you're paying attention at all to the news, if you're reading trade publications, if you're following Gary V, you know that there's a lot of people that are very bullish on voice. I am one of those. We are an Alexa household. I believe at last count we have eight Alexa devices. We'll talk about that in a little bit, but I think this is a trend that will continue. And so we're going to be talking about today, what is here and now, what you can leverage now from a voice commerce perspective to grow your business. What is likely coming in the future and what do you need to be thinking about?

Brett:

Hey, e-commerce evolution listeners, Brett Curry here. I have a really cool announcement and an invite just for you. In February, OMG Commerce is hosting an exclusive invite only event at the Google and YouTube offices in Los Angeles. Now, if you've never experienced a Google office, they really do live up to the hype, and the Google offices in LA are some of the most unique around. More on the venue in a minute. First, let me give you the scoop on the event itself. It's called YouTube ads for e-commerce building full funnel growth with YouTube ads. I'll be speaking at this event, sharing some of our best YouTube ads strategies, some of our most successful YouTube ad templates and more. And you'll get to hear directly from some amazing YouTube team members, including some incredible content from the unskippable labs team. I've seen this content before, and it's amazing.

Brett:

I'm so excited about this event, but here's the best part. It's free, but it is invite only and you do have to apply and be approved to attend because seating is limited. So sorry, no agencies, no service providers, this is just for eCommerce companies. Now as promised more about the venue. This will be held at the Spruce Goose Hangar. This hangar was initially built by the mogul Howard Hughes. And if you've ever seen the movie, The Aviator with Leonardo DiCaprio, then you know all about Howard Hughes and his Spruce Goose. This hangar was recently renovated in true Google fashion. Now it's a cutting edge YouTube studio and Google offices, and that's where we're holding this event. It's going to be amazing. So to find out more, to check out the application, go to OMG commerce.com forward slash YouTube dash event. Again, that's OMG commerce.com forward slash YouTube dash event. I'll also link to the event page in the show notes of this show and I hope to see you in LA.

Brett:

My guest today is the founder and CEO of Emitrr, E-M-I-T, double R, Anmol Oberoi and they are a voice first SAS platform specializing in voice commerce, and so really excited to have Anmol on the show today and really thrilled to be diving into this topic. And so Anmol, how you doing? Welcome to the show and thanks for coming on.

Anmol:

Thanks a lot of Brett for having me. And thanks a lot for introducing Emitrre and our platform. I'm really excited to be here and share my learnings with the audience.

Brett:

Yeah, really exciting. And so let's paint the picture just a little bit for the audience. I mean obviously, we all know about Alexa devices and Google home devices and I think Apple has some devices. I don't know who's using those. I'm an Apple guy by the way, but I just, Google and Amazon have a huge lead over Apple in this space. But, talk to us, what are some stats? What are some things we need to be considering about the prevalence of voice first devices?

Anmol:

Absolutely. I think that's the really exciting part about voice and where the trend is moving from a web first to a mobile first and now to a voice first sort of approach. So just to give you some sense of how big things have already become from penetration perspective, I would say that if I have to just pick up an Alexa, they are close to 115 million devices just in the U S alone today. And every time I look up that stat to refresh my memory that what's the number that stat is continuously growing. And if you look at the population of US, which is 300 billion people, you have about 50% of the population. That means that almost, that essentially means that each home has at least one or more smart speakers. So if I had to think of it from a business perspective, then there is a huge, huge opportunity laying there for businesses, because Amazon's done a great job of creating a channel by placing a smart speaker in every home in the US.

Brett:

Yeah. And it's so interesting because one, I think, and then we're going to, we're going to dive into some really interesting stuff today on what are some use cases right now that you could be considering and using for your business. We'll speculate about where this is going. Ultimately, nobody knows fully, right? Nobody would have predicted just prior to the iPhone or just after the iPhone, what that would exactly do for mobile commerce. No one really knew, right? You got to see how it kind of plays out. But I think it's interesting, and I'll just, I'll share a couple of tidbits from our home. And so we have eight devices, so we're helping inflate those numbers. But we do have an echo show, which is the screen and it's bass speaker's amazing. And so we use that a lot.

Brett:

What I found, and so here's how we're using Alexa as it pertains to e-commerce. I am using it to reorder a lot, right? So I know we'll, we'll talk about that some, but you know, I'll be in the kitchen making breakfast and say, Alexa, reorder my protein powder and Alexa will say, "Hey, there are three things that fit your order history, which one is it?" And I'll say number one and then and then get my code and ordered. So I don't have to break stride at all in making my breakfast and protein powder is on the way. I've also used it, and I don't how common this is, I think it's less common, but I've also been in the kitchen and hanging out using the Alexa show or Echo show and I'll say, "Alexa, I want to buy a a pH water tester."

Brett:

We had to test our water recently, so literally it'll give several examples, and so then I can pick one and buy it. And really seamless and interesting, and I bought several things that way and when you get used to that, you think I can say something a lot faster than I can type it. I can hear and say yes, no, this option, that option a lot faster than, or I can multitask rather than sitting down and using my phone. And so lots of good use cases. I know we'll kind of dive into those. But do you have any stats or any insights? It seems like still most of the usage for these devices is, "Hey Alexa or okay Google, play the Rolling Stones or place a Beatles or play whatever." That's certainly how we use it more in our home. But yeah, what are some of the trends in how these devices are being used for commerce specifically?

Anmol:

Sure, absolutely. For me firstly, it's very surprising to see that you're already shopping on Alexa, I think your early mover. But as far as-

Brett:

I want to experiment and I'm nerdy and I don't mind if I buy the wrong thing on occasion. I just want to try it, you know?

Anmol:

Yeah, that's perfect. We need more of you. So to talk about stats a little bit about where things are as of today. I'll probably take a step back and let's say look at the web world and the mobile world in its early days. When the mobiles came out, everybody was really creating content, looking at games, looking at engagement. And that's what's also happening in Alexa. Mostly businesses are not present there. It's mostly content creators. It's mostly brands who, who lived it, who basically build their business on top of content. And it's essentially people who love games, right?

Anmol:

So people are buildings that's sort of use cases. And given that what's happening from a creator perspective, that's exactly what's happening from a usage perspective as well. So if look at usage, the highest possible use case that's being used today's asking a simple question. For example, asking Alexa, what's the weather today? Or simply, just the way you said playing music. So essentially it's just being used to do very simple search and rarely to consume content and you know, sort of use it for entertainment. But 64% of people in America said that they at least used it once to shop something or tried shopping something.

Anmol:

So essentially-

Brett:

One interesting side note here that I'll interject. The more we use the voice devices, the more we see, "Oh wow, it'll do that?" So just as an example, my 16 year old daughter has a boyfriend, boyfriend was going to be coming over this past weekend at the time of recording it. We're not too far past the pro bowl, which I don't understand why anyone wants to the pro bowl, but, but nevertheless. The boyfriend's watching the pro bowl, he was coming over after the pro bowl and so she asked, "Alexa, how much time was left in the pro bowl?" Alexis said, "There's four minutes and 39 seconds left in the fourth quarter." So it's stuff like that, as you start to see, "Okay, I can get all of these answers, real time things that are happening right now answers." The more you do that, then the more comfortable you become buying things.

Brett:

And I think what's really interesting and last thing I'll kind of say about, or maybe the last thing I'll say about kind of kids in the younger generation. You know we've got, we've got these kids that are growing into millennials and gen Z that have grown up with a mobile device and now voice devices are there as well and they're doing things intuitively and they're doing things that that older generations probably aren't even considering doing. And it's going to shape commerce for the years to come, which is exciting.

Anmol:

Absolutely spot on. Because I grew up in a mobile first world where I do everything on the mobile, because I grew up with the mobile. Unlike my parents or my great grandparents who probably did not have mobile access from the time they went to school or college because there was no mobile at that time. Like you look at millennials today, they are growing up in a voice world, because they have access to Alexa. That's the first thing they interact with at home. So essentially, that's the trend that's going to grow faster and faster and probably commerce will soon, not 100%, but we'll have a lot of business being done on voice.

Brett:

Yep. So you can figure it out now. You're really good at it now than in you know, five, 10 whatever the case may be, when voice commerce is really big, you'll be in great position to fully capitalize on that. There's plenty of opportunities now to succeed as well.

Anmol:

Absolutely.

Brett:

Fantastic. So, so what are some of the, what are some of the use cases you guys are seeing, specific to commerce where voice has having an impact now?

Anmol:

Sure. I think that's a great question, because one thing that I really share with everybody when I speak to customers prospects is that you need to think of it from a perspective that it's very different from web where you have a lot of real estate. In voice, you essentially don't have any real estate. So there are a lot of things that you need to take care of. For example, context. You said when you were in the kitchen and you want to order for protein, that's the scenario or that's the environment you are in that's making you buy that because you essentially don't have access to web or your laptop, and that's what we buy because that's when you're more comfortable with voice.

Anmol:

So understanding that behavior in building use cases is something that is doing very well right now. So just to give you some quick examples, one thing is if I had to talk only from an eCommerce perspective. Again, if you look at a customer journey on the web, people first interact with the brand through some sort of content or through ads, purchase something and then they want to track the order, what they've bought.

Anmol:

Similarly, the behavior to purchase is not there, but the behavior to sort of engage with brands is still there, and the behavior to track those things through voice system. So the two use cases that we've seen do the new vendors. If eCommerce businesses can sort of build games or quizzes on top of Alexa, because game is already approved in your voice. So if you've built that, you've built brand loyalty on voice for your customers.

Brett:

Can you give some examples that, the quiz thing makes sense. Well, I know you're talking about that. And then can you give examples of games that that commerce companies have built?

Anmol:

Absolutely. So I don't remember which commerce company built this, but there's a game called price it right. Essentially, what it does is, it lets people play a play game to identify the price of the product, and the person who closes to the price wins an award or wins that award. So it becomes a reward, or a loyalty angle in eCommerce, which is huge because they can then use that discount or that loyalty either to buy on voice again or to buy on web. So you're bringing back that customer by using voice as a channel. It's not always about direct transactions on voice, but it could simply be used to bring back customers. And that's, that's what's really important for businesses today because it's getting harder and harder to get new customers. So they use it for rewards.

Brett:

Yeah. And then, and then quizzes, how have you seen quizzes being used for commerce companies?

Anmol:

Based on a lot of this stuff. For example, people, I've not seen anyone but, but one of the companies that we work with, which is a pet store and they wanted to enable repeat orders in Alexa. They wanted a quiz to let people guess, they would give them clues about a product. So let's say it's a pet food, it's some dog food. So they would give them clues about the dog food and ask the people on Alexa to guess the name of the product by giving them clues. So that's, that's another interesting angle because that gives people glued to keep thinking that "Hey, what does this product?" Because they've used the product themselves and, and you're during the quiz, you're giving them clues.

Brett:

Interesting. Interesting. So those are definitely interesting use cases. They don't sound like they're currently mass appeal use cases. And I think one of the issues, we talked about younger people as they get used to using voice devices, they start just dreaming of ways to use it. But you know, if I'm shopping with, I do a decent amount of buying of things I see on Instagram or on YouTube. And so purchased this cereal that is kind of keto friendly and healthy. I love cereal, but I stopped eating it because it makes you fat, especially when you relate. And so, I like shopping for this, and I don't know the particular company that I buy this cereal from, I don't know if they have a skill for Alexa or a skill for Google Home or something like that. So I probably wouldn't even think about it. How do you promote your skill? How do you get people thinking about voice commerce for your specific brand?

Anmol:

Sure. So let's assume that you're able to get your skill out there in the market. You're able to have your voice presence. The customers that we work with have seen great success with Ebay specific things and things like for example, on the checkout page, if it's a repeat order, we know that the customer wants to repeat the same thing again. So one thing that we tried and it worked really well was that as soon as a customer checks out on your checkout page, after they've completed the transaction, you show them a call to action saying that repeat this order next time with Alexa or the Peters for the next time with voice. So that they know and that'll lead to people installing the skill and then using it. And then there are a lot of different other ways that you see people putting a push notification on their website saying shop with voice. Yeah, that's worked very well again.

Brett:

love it. Totally makes sense. So, so you talked about, you talked about games and quizzes. And like I said, I personally, I think that's a smaller use case. But you have several other examples that I think man, that's valuable right now and with a lot of people. And so can you talk about, I know you've got several examples, I think one from a pet food company and one from a men's clothing store and a few others. But what are some other really popular voice use cases right now?

Anmol:

Oh, from a shopping perspective?

Brett:

From a shopping perspective.

Anmol:

I think coffee is definitely a great use case, because if you look at coffee companies and if you look at flavors, people build a taste for things and people don't necessarily change that. And why I'm saying this is because one of our customers, which is a coffee store, ES Beverage based out of New York, and you know what's really funny, and I really want to talk about it because today there's marketing with Alexa skill on Times Square saying that we can say, 'Alexa, order coffee from ES Beverage." So coffee, anything that's grocery because.... Any consumables because you tend to repeat those things again and again. Medicines is something that we've seen people repeat on the spot. Although we don't have any customers who's in the medical space, but coffee, pet food, confectionery and groceries, something definitely that where we work with customers for repeat orders.

Brett:

So re repeat order, I think that to me is probably the clearest use case that is one very beneficial. It's easy to get the word out. You'll have a decent adoption from people that are used to using voice devices. It's a real benefit and it's going to impact the business, right? You're going to potentially increase your reorder rate because you've got that skill. What else? What else in the commerce space and and it can be before the sale, after the sale. What other use cases are you saying right now for voice?

Anmol:

So yeah, there are a lot of use cases before and after the sale. Before the sale. there's definitely deals, and that's the biggest use case for Amazon today. Everybody checks for deals before shopping. And Amazon is very aggressively promoting that use case but their own store. So every time you ordered something from Amazon and if you look at the packaging carefully, they have the packaging that says just ask Alexa for deals today.

Anmol:

So that's a use case that works again really, really well for-

Brett:

Alexa. Alexa, what are the deals on the day type of thing.

Anmol:

Absolutely. Absolutely. So if you say that, Amazon will, it'll by default active the Amazon skill and tell you the deals. But let's say for example it's a coffee company, then you just need to take the brand name and it'll tell you the deals from that store. Store locations, sometimes people want to know what are the closest store locations close to them. So that's another use case. Post purchase, what we've seen is order tracking is something that works really well, because people still want to track the orders. And to be perfectly honest, the use case for order tracking today, how it has done is actually broken, because you need to go back to the web. You need to enter your details and find that out.

Brett:

Yeah, you got to yo log in or you get to click the email and the email links to USPS or to UPS or something. It's a real pain. You got to have a reason for, I mean everybody's wondering when it's going to show up, but you got to have a reason for, this has to be here by this time or else I'm in trouble type of thing for me to go through the hassle of actually tracking that shipment because it's a pain in the butt.

Anmol:

Absolutely. And that's where voice is really making it easy, because just the way we've done it and we are vocal on test Shopify app for this is that we've integrated with everybody basically 800 plus delivery partners, and whenever somebody wants to track the status of their order, they just need to say what's the status of my last order. They don't really need to feed in any number or go back to the website and track that.

Brett:

Beautiful. I absolutely love that. Yeah, that's great because that solves a real problem, right? We all want to know what the status of our order is. You don't want to go through the hassle of checking emails, clicking on tracking numbers, getting to some delivery company's site and then trying to figure it out. So that, that's super interesting. One thought that I just kind of had that I want to bring up and get your input on. So whenever I'm shopping with voice, it's almost always in the kitchen and it's always with our Echo Show. So the echo show has the nice rich screen and it's got an amazing speaker. Part of the reason that I use that is because it's in the kitchen and that's what I'm thinking and doing and stuff and ordering. But also, it is nice having that combination of voice and screen. And so I don't know if you've got any insights there, if you've seen any data, if you just have any commentary or thoughts. Because what happens with that is I'll use the example of the water kit.

Brett:

So we had some insight that maybe our water was high pH and so you know I was hanging out in the kitchen and I said, "Hey Alexa, order a pH test kit." and it showed three examples. And the nice thing was I could see those examples, I could see the reviews under it and then I can just say, "Order number three." So it's still all done through voice, but I got some visuals there. To me, that seems like for shopping, especially if you're shopping for something new, that's going to be pretty powerful where you've got that voice skill that's working its magic and you're doing everything by voice, but you've got the visual to kind of help make sure, "Hey, this is what I want." Any insights or thoughts on that?

Anmol:

I completely agree with you, and what I would classify it into is that the screen is the conversion optimization tool there. You can look better because people get a sense of comfort and with time, when they become more and more confident with voice, then probably they will not be so worried about seeing it on the screen. But today, it's very much needed, and even when we talk to customers or even when we look at search in the market, people do want to build multimodal experiences, which is they don't just want to have it with the voice, they also want to have it on the Echo Show.

Brett:

Or the Google Home or whatever. And I think the key is, so as an example, go back to the water testing kit. I don't care what that thing looks like. So I guess that would be one of those things whereas I become more comfortable with voice, I could say, "Hey, order a pH kit." And Alexa or Google Home could say this was the number one rated product. It does this, this and this is that, is that what you want? Sire, get it. Whereas if I'm buying a new pair of sneakers or something or a shirt or something... And then that's probably, honestly apparel is probably something that's going to be adopted via voice later, I would think. Or if, it may not even be adopted at all, but something where I need to see what it looks like. But that's where the different modality and that conversion optimization with the screen is going to be, it's going to be important.

Anmol:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Completely agree with you.

Brett:

Yep. Yep. Fantastic. So what should e-commerce companies be thinking about? So, let's say I own a five to $10 million eCommerce store and we're selling skincare as an example. What should I be thinking about? What should I be considering now? What skills should I consider building out and using now? What should be on my radar for a few months down the road, a few years down the road? What advice would you give?

Anmol:

Sure. So the best segues that I would be able to give at this point is again, the one that I've got from my customers and, and for people who we've already built. The mistakes that we've made, the mistakes that they've made by being early. So I was trying to build everything with. What I would say is that even if you're at a five or a $10 million, you're pretty large already. And if I had to compare it to most Shopify stores, I don't think most of them do that.

Brett:

Absolutely. That's definitely above the norm.

Anmol:

Absolutely, so you already have a large audience. Start with very simple use cases where you start getting them on voice, just the way we spoke about games, quizzes, deals, rewards, you know, things like that. Or maybe auto tracking because, you have a large audience and you want to get them started with very easy use cases and see does it really work. And if they're happy and they're confident and you're just trying to build trust in the use case, then probably do a quick survey saying, how did you like our voice capabilities so far? We are thinking of launching the ordering capability or the shopping capability. Would you be interested? That's, that's exactly what we did with the pet store. And when we did the survey, more than 80% of people said that they would be okay. Although, I mean not everybody-

Brett:

The reorder, the reorder functionality?

Anmol:

Right, because we didn't give them the reorder functionality as the first step. We gave them the functionality to consume content or to just grab some information that they're looking for. And, and once they became comfortable with that and they were confident that yes, this works, that's when we told them that, "Hey, we're thinking of making shopping also easy, would you be interested?" So that's how I would plan it out. That look at it like a product roadmap just the way you do it on your eCommerce website. This is very, very similar to that. It's a journey, so start with very simple use cases, engage user risk, talk to customers, figure out what works and then we'll use cases like that.

Brett:

I love that. I love that. Start with something simple, something that works, something that's going to be either fun and enjoyable or useful. And then as you get some adoption there, ask your customers, right, ask them what they want, what would they use, what would be useful. I love that approach. Here's one of the reasons I'm excited about voice and why I think it's potentially very powerful for a merchant. I think this is part of the reason why Amazon is so excited about it, probably lots of reasons. It could be because they just want to listen in to all our homes. It is funny, my eight year old daughter, she is always unplugging the Alexa device. We use the Alexa as a Intercom system in our home. Our eight-year-old's always in plugging in because she's creeped out by Alexa listening and, and she's probably right, honestly.

Brett:

But aside from that, aside from Bezos wanting to listen into what we're doing in our homes. If I say, "Hey, reorder my protein powder, reorder my cereal." There's no option for a competitor to come in and swipe me away. So now, if I've bought this product from Alexa, or I'm sorry, if I bought this product from Amazon and I go search for it on Google, potentially serves another ad, something else, I will be served another ad. Something will pop up that may make me say, "Hmm, maybe I'll try that one instead. That looks kind of cool. Maybe I won't buy this one on Amazon. I'll buy it somewhere else."

Brett:

That's eliminated when you say reorder through your voice device. That's powerful for the independent merchant as well, if you can get someone just to reorder using your voice skill. Then us marketers, us diabolical marketers, we can't swipe away your customer because there's no opportunity there. lots of ways to, as you're building convenience, you're building loyalty, you're also building kind of a fence around your customer potentially too that can be, it can really work to your advantage. Other use cases that you're seeing for commerce companies right now? Other interesting things that you're seeing right now or or interesting things that are right on the horizon for eCommerce companies?

Anmol:

Right. It's a slightly funny use case but it's probably not every eCommerce company wants but returns is something that's really painful for customers because it's hard to figure out.

Brett:

But because it's painful, that limits purchases. There's that seed of doubt saying, "Hey there's a probability I'm going to have to return this. That's going to be painful. I just won't buy it."

Anmol:

Absolutely, completely agree with you there. we undertones is a very full use case on waste because if you wanted it on something you have to go back into the website or read the return policy and things like that. And it's hard by the nature of the use case itself. What if you could just initiate a return by telling Alexa? "Hey, initiate a return from store ABC." And we came across this use case in a really interesting scenario of a rental company that we were talking to. For them, returns-

Brett:

What kind of company?

Anmol:

It was a rental company. For them. Returns is about growth in business. Somebody returns something because they want to rent something else again. So it's return and rent, return and rent. And they said that returns is equivalent to growth in business for us, and that's when we started thinking that "Hey, probably returns is also a good use case for companies that really want to make their customer's life easy while returning, and what better than having it on voice?"

Brett:

Yep, totally makes sense. I like that a lot. Any anything you would predict is coming down the pike here soon or in the next months, years, whatever? How do you see voice evolving?

Anmol:

I think learning what's the biggest shift that's going to happen. Because we, I probably did not mention it, but we are also an Amazon partner. But working with them, what we've realized is that their goal is to make Alexa something very, very similar to a mobile. Everybody has a mobile, but they want everybody to have Alexa as well. The biggest shift that's going to happen is that if you look at the behavior today, people need to discover a used case or discover a skill on Alexa skill store.

Anmol:

And that experience today is not really well optimized, and that's what Amazon's working really hard on. You know, sort of make discoverability very, very easy and probably cut down the enablement of skills so that people can directly say, "Hey, I ordered pizza from Domino's." right after they bought an Alexa from a store. So they just want to make it that easy, that you don't have to worry about discovering skills or use cases. You can just say, I'm looking for pizza and it'll be able to tell you what all stores are available on Alexa to order pizza from, and that's how easy your life will become.

Brett:

Nice. That does make sense. Because now, and again to go back to the Echo Show, it's interesting if you just kind of watch the Echo Show, you're not doing anything, you're not giving it any commands, it'll scroll through stuff. So it learns the headlines you like, it'll show, "Hey, this is the what's going on here." and you want to know more, say "Alexa, tell me more about the wildfires in Australia." or whatever. So it's got news things up there that you can kind of dive into occasionally or recommend a skill, and it will say this skill is available. Say "Alexa, show me this skill."

Brett:

But I think that you're totally right. We don't think about, we don't know what we don't know. We don't think about the skills that we don't know exist. And so being able to just pose to Alexa, I need pizza, I need new sneaker, whatever. I need to reorder this car part. Then them being able to recommend a skill to help us, that really makes sense. I like that a lot. Well let's do this. This is, this has been fantastic Anmol. Let's talk a little bit about Emitrrer and what you guys do, how you make this easy, who you're most suited to help. So give us the scoop on Emitrrer.

Anmol:

Sure. Like I mentioned earlier are essentially a SAS platform and where our platform is really, really helpful is that building an Alexa skill is, it's not very easy and it is time consuming. So let's assume that you want to have a voice presence, you got to throw engineers solving that problem and you don't know if that'll work or not. So even if you spend six months learning the documentation of Alexa, understanding what to build, learning wastes UI and great waste design. And you build that and then you start marketing it and you'd realize that you've not really made a lot of sort of got a great from it. You essentially spent thousands and thousands of dollars and it's a lot of, it's a long effort in building that. What our platform does is that, you know, we've worked with Amazon to build use cases in such a way that we would allow customers in eCommerce to publish the Alexa skill within less than a week, less than a week's time.

Anmol:

And if you look at a , if you look at an eCommerce skills which, which we have a template for, or order tracking that would take anybody to build about six months from scratch. And, and we've got down absolutely we expensive because we know engineers are expensive, and then there's a huge learning curve. We've cut done that to do a week's effort. So that's, that's where we are really, really helpful. And since we work with Amazon directly, certification is extremely difficult in Amazon skill store. So getting a skill certified and published is very, very hard. Since we work with them, we have firsthand information about what sort of skills need to be built and how their voice design needs to be for it to get certified. So those are things which are really hard for engineers to, when there as a cost time developer of Alexa skills and you know, and that's where we've taken care of things and cut down the time to a week to quickly publish a commerce skill.

Brett:

Excellent, excellent. So if people want to find out more, they need to go to Emitrr.com E M I T R r.com. This is one of those things where if they want to develop a skill like reorder or something like that, they just set an appointment with you and or someone on your team and get kind of a walkthrough and a demo and a custom quote, I would assume.

Anmol:

Absolutely.

Brett:

Great. Any resources you would recommend in anything? If someone, if their interest is really peaked and they're thinking, "Hey, this could be something but I want to digest more, I want to listen to more, read more to kind of get the juices flowing and then, and then I'll talk to somebody." Any resources you would recommend?

Anmol:

I would recommend subscribing to the Amazon Alexa skin newsletter. I think that's the best because one you get insights-

Brett:

And is that your newsletter?

Anmol:

No, not our newsletter, but Amazon's the Alexa skill newsletter.

Brett:

I'll link to that in the show notes. Okay, great.

Anmol:

Yeah, because I think you get firsthand information about the people who are thinking about how voice as a new industry should move. And honestly, I learn every day from that newsletter and that's what gives us ideas about what capabilities and features we should plug into a product. It's helpful in general for anybody who's interested in the voice space.

Brett:

Great, great. Love it. And it looks like you guys have a free ebook as well on your site that people can check out. The ultimate guide for building, scaling and running a Shopify store using voice.

Anmol:

Right. It does include voice use cases, but the interesting use case here is we've collected information from about 60 Shopify experts and collected their answers in there.

Brett:

Great, great, fantastic. Anmol, any closing thoughts or any asks for our audience or anything else you'd like to mention?

Anmol:

I would say that if anybody's interested in voice, feel free to reach out and I'm happy to consult, think about how your voice journey should look, or is it even important at this stage to look at voice for your company or not? And always, when you're building a voice design, the rule number one to keep in mind is that write down what you write down. You know, remember that Alexa and machines speak much slower than human beings. So all that, that looks great on paper is probably not the best design on voice. So keep that in mind when you're building anything in voice.

Brett:

Totally makes sense. And, and I 100% agree that you need to look at is voice right for you now? And it might not be. And for smaller eCommerce companies, it's probably going to be more valuable right now for you to optimize your product detail pages or speed up your checkout or some of those other things, or refine some of your marketing. That's going to have maybe a higher return right now. But voice commerce is growing, it's going to continue to grow and you have to think about it. So that was the main reason I wanted to have this podcast now, as I think the quicker we can get our wheels turning and then be thinking about this and learning about it, the better equipped we'll be. I'd love all listers to the early adopters and, and new things like this that we can capitalize and get a competitive edge, but it might not be right for you now, but it will be at some point. And so we need to be thinking about it.

Anmol:

Completely agree with you there, yeah.

Brett:

Awesome. Anmol, thank you so much, this has been really insightful and interesting. I enjoyed our chat and really appreciate you coming on the show.

Anmol:

Same here, Brett. Thanks a lot for having me. I really loved our conversation.

Brett:

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, fantastic. As always, as you're tuning in, we would love to hear from you. Reach out to us on Facebook or through email. Let us know what you'd you like to hear more of. We'd love your topic idea for a show. Also, we'd love that review on iTunes, ideally a five star review if you feel so inclined. That does help other people discover the show and learn and grow as well. And so with that, until next time, thank you for listening. All right my man, that's a wrap.

‍

Shopify apps are great.  Someone else spends hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars, developing functionality that you can use for just $30 per month.   Apps on Shopify are so easy to install and so seemingly harmless that many store owners install dozens and dozens of apps - many of which they uninstall or never use.  This approach can have serious unintended consequences.

In this episode we dive into a smarter approach to apps that can help any Shopify store owner.  Here’s a look at what we cover:

• How to determine if it’s better to use an app or hire a developer to hard code a desired functionality. 
• What category of apps are best to consider now for Shopify
• What apps are almost always a bad idea
• How to tell if you have app conflict
• When should you consider apps vs. just switching to Shopify Plus
• Plus more!

‍

Connect with Guest:
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Electric Eye Agency - A Free Daily eMail from Your Friends in Digital Business
Via LinkedIn
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Honest eCommerce Podcast
‍
Mentioned in this Episode:
Klaviyo - Marketing Automation & eMail Platform for eCommerce
Aten Software
Gorgias - More Than Just a Gorgeous Helpdesk
Zendesk - Customer Support Ticket System and Sales CRM Software Company
Magento - Best eCommerce Software for Selling Online
BigCommerce - The Future of Commerce is Yours
Klarna US - Buy Now and Pay Later. No Interest. No Fees.
Afterpay - Shop Now. Enjoy Now. Pay Later.
4Pay ABM - A Cloud ABM Company
Shopify Plus
Shopify Pay - Shop Your Way, Pay Your Way
Shopify Flow - eCommerce Plugins for Online Stores
Zapier - The Easiest Way to Automate Your Work

‍

Episode 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 talking about a topic that we have never discussed at length on this show. We've certainly broached the subject, but we have not zeroed in on this. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. So we're talking about the app ecosystem for 2020, what do you need to know? What should you consider? Do you need an app? Do you not need an app?

Brett:

Hey eCommerce Evolution listeners, Brett Curry here. I have a really cool announcement and an invite just for you. In February, OMG Commerce is hosting an exclusive invite only event at the Google and YouTube offices in Los Angeles. Now, if you've never experienced the Google office, they really do live up to the hype, and the Google offices in LA are some of the most unique around. More on the venue in a minute but first, let me give you the scoop on the event itself. It's called YouTube Ads for eCommerce–Building Full Funnel Growth with YouTube Ads.

Brett:

I'll be speaking at this event, sharing some of our best YouTube ad strategies, some of our most successful YouTube ad templates and more, and you'll get to hear directly from some amazing YouTube team members, including some incredible content from the Unskippable Labs team. Now, I've seen this content before and it's amazing. I'm so excited about this event, but here's the best part, it's free, but it is invite only, and you do have to apply, and be approved to attend, because seating is limited, so sorry. No agencies, no service providers, this is just for eCommerce companies.

Brett:

Now, as promised, more about the venue. This will be held at the Spruce Goose Hangar. This Hangar was initially built by the mogul Howard Hughes, and if you ever seen the movie, The Aviator with Leonardo DiCaprio, then you know all about Howard Hughes, and his Spruce Goose. This Hangar was recently renovated in true Google fashion. Now, it's a cutting edge YouTube studio, and Google offices, and that's where we're holding this event. It's going to be amazing. So to find out more, then check out the application. Go to omgcommerce.com/youtube-event. Again, that's omgcommerce.com/youtube-event. I'll also link to the event page in the show notes of this show, and I hope to see you in LA.

Brett:

Really excited to welcome my guest onto the show today. My guest is Chase Clymer. He's the co-founder of Electric Eye, and he's also the host, he's a fellow podcast host. Love meeting other podcast hosts, but he hosts the Honest Ecommerce, hope I get that right, Podcast, and so with that Chase, welcome to the show man. How are you doing?

Chase:

I'm doing fantastic today. You made it through, you build me right. 10 out of 10 so far.

Brett:

Yes, fantastic. We're really excited. So excited to talk apps and look at the app ecosystem, I think it's going to be super informative and really help give people the info they need to walk in with confidence and navigate the app ecosystem. Before we do that though, how did you get to this place? So give us the 90 second background on how you founded Electric Eye, but how you got into eCommerce in the first place?

Chase:

Yeah. So way back when I was in a punk rock band and that didn't pay the bill at all.

Brett:

Yeah, you were. Awesome.

Chase:

So I learned web design, I started to learn advertising, I started to learn, get a little closer to the money as they stay. I started to kind of dive into eCommerce when my business partner left his company and we were teaming a bunch of projects together. We asked each other like, "Do you want to start something real here?" And like, "Oh, we're having fun freelancing."

Chase:

So obviously six months later we had an agency with a full thing of clients and we had no idea what we were doing. Luckily that was five years ago. Now, we do know what we're doing.

Brett:

And it's beautiful.

Chase:

It took awhile but we figured it out, so now we've got a fun solid team, a fully remote agency. We really like that lifestyle as well. But all we're doing out here is helping eCommerce brands grow with smart marketing and beautiful design and kind of through that, I started the podcast to talk to people like yourself and other agency and just be in this space and get to know stuff. It keeps me on my toes.

Brett:

Yep. I love it. I love doing podcasts for a lot of reasons. One of them is just connecting with great people. So you've been aggressive though. How long have you been doing the podcast and how many episodes do you have now?

Chase:

I've been doing the podcast for just over a year. I think we're at like episode 60 is coming out this week.

Brett:

Beautiful.

Chase:

So we do a podcast a week and it was a big undertaking, but I've got some people that helped me out on the inside. So all I have to do is find the cool people and hopefully have a okay conversation.

Brett:

Yeah, I'm the same way. There is quite a bit of work in launching a podcast. It really is better if you have a team. You don't have to, but I'm the same way. I just show up and hopefully conduct a good interview and I've got a team that runs the rest, which is beautiful. So hey, I got to know. What was the name of your punk rock band?

Chase:

Okay, so this was when I was younger, so I'll take it with a grain of salt. So me and a bunch of buddies were in a band called City Lights out of Columbus, Ohio, this pop punk.

Brett:

City Lights.

Chase:

We kind of hit glass ceiling. Everyone had better opportunities and funny enough, some of the people that were in that band are in other giant bands now and one of them is currently a client.

Brett:

That's awesome, that's awesome. I was just thinking, do you watch the show Parks and Rec?

Chase:

I do.

Brett:

I think it's the first season, Chris Pratt, his character is going through the evolution of all the names of... So anytime I talk to someone about the name of their band, I always go back to Chris Pratt rattling off the 15 names his band had. I was just trying to remember some of the names but I can't remember, but they were hilarious.

Chase:

Yeah, I think they settled on Mouse Rat was the name for the longest time.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They went back and forth on Mouse Rat and anyway, yeah. Good times I'm pretty sure that-

Chase:

I luckily had nothing to do with the name. I'm pretty sure it came from someone putting it into that hero game and it looked cool on the TV and they're like, yeah, that's a good band name. Yeah, let's do it.

Brett:

... Yeah, okay. Awesome. So let's dive in man. Let's talk about this topic, the app ecosystem right now. What should we be considering? What should we be thinking about? And so as we approach this subject, what are kind of, well do you want to frame the app ecosystem at all and then do that, but then let's talk about, hey, what are the first things you need to consider when you're looking at an app?

Chase:

Absolutely. Sure, so this came up, we had a pre-interview a few weeks ago and this was right after I had done a lot of kind of quick consulting gigs for a bunch of brands, and it was essentially, I'll just run into their website in and out, giving just my first thoughts and what I was noticing was repeating with all these accounts I was looking at is they had way too many apps installed, and that is a trend that I see across almost every store I look at, any client we're helping, it's usually they have way too many apps installed and people don't understand that that is actually a detriment to your store and it's probably affecting your conversion rate. You're probably paying for stuff you don't need to be paying for.

Chase:

So that's kind of where the idea for this podcast came from. Just to kind of set the tone. So yeah, we're talking kind of very specifically about the Shopify ecosystem here, but I'm sure that you can take some of this and apply it to-

Brett:

Absolutely.

Chase:

... Any of the platforms that are out there, and then-

Brett:

Yep, yep. So we focus on Shopify. But the same concept applies whether you're on Woo or you're looking at extensions from Magento or whatever the case may be. So a lot of these principles will hold true.

Chase:

... Absolutely.

Brett:

Yep. Yep. And so, I kind of had a flashback to the old Apple commercials, pushing the iPad and the iPhone and the, hey, there's an app for that, right? And that's the way it is in the Shopify ecosystem and so many benefits to apps. We'll talk about those. But I think we as store owners can get this mindset of, oh, I'll just add this app, I'll add that app, oh, man, I'll just go app crazy man because there's an app for everything. And why not try it?

Brett:

Well you talk about having too many apps will hurt your conversion rate and it could be impacting your site. Talk about some of the drawbacks to having too many apps.

Chase:

Absolutely. So the first and foremost, the biggest drawback, and this is one that people don't get until someone specifically tells them, is that when you install an app into your store, it's installing code into your theme, and I want to test this app out. I'm just going to install it and I'm going to get rid of it. And no one's the wiser, nothing bad has happened, right? Well, honestly, you're not thinking it all the way through. The second you click on install, that app no longer has access to your store and that code is still there. It's still in that theme file.

Chase:

So now if you just take this a step further and you're testing an app a week, you've got so much junk just in the file of your theme that's slowing it down and you're like, oh, it's just a few lines of code. Well, sometimes, but sometimes it's calling a JavaScript file from somewhere else. Oftentimes it's calling the same JavaScript file. A lot of these things are built on the same frameworks, but they'll be calling two or three of the same file because there's two, three apps doing almost the same thing.

Chase:

All of this is slowing down the performance of your store, and there's a lot of research done out there that the faster your store, the higher your conversion rate, and then the inverse is also true. So if you're just looking at it from a straight performance perspective, an extra line of code is a detriment to your store. So you want it to be zippy.

Brett:

Without a doubt. We see that all the time. We operate as an agency on the traffic side, driving Google search shopping, a lot of YouTube traffic and if a client's site slows down and we've seen this before, when it slows down, we'll feel the impact in all of our paid campaigns. So if you think about that and losing a second in speed and that's a decent amount, even losing milliseconds in speed can I have a pretty dramatic impact on your conversion rate. I've seen a second, can be 20, 30% drop in conversion rate. When you take that then we have clients that are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on various ad platforms and channels, that is extremely significant, right?

Brett:

So you may look at an app and say that's only 30 bucks a month, no big deal, and it's going to do all these things. Let me just try it, right? I'll just install the app, no harm. Yeah, but you get too many of those. You start installing an app a week as you mentioned, or even less, and if they're not really serving a purpose that you need, it's slowing the site down. What is that costing you? Both in terms of your paid traffic conversion rate decreasing, also organic traffic and everything else.

Brett:

So yes, so really valuable to think that through and think, okay, I'm adding this app, is it worth the potential loss of performance in terms of speed to add this functionality with the app? And so one thing that I think might be useful and then I want to dig into maybe some apps that people don't need, right? This may be useful just to say, hey, you probably don't need this app, so let's talk that through in just a second. But before we do, are there areas of the site that are more risky than others? And I think I know the answer to this, but are there types of apps that you should really consider? You're like, man, I don't know that I need this. My thought is any app related to the cart itself. Is that the riskiest place to place an app or any thoughts on that?

Chase:

I'm probably going to take the coward's way out on that question. It's like, I don't know test it because it really depends on the customer base, but I would say what people end up doing, and we just had this happen the other day with a client of ours, is they were looking for an upsell solution and they were a go getter and they were doing stuff on their own and I believe there was five or six that they tested in the week before they said they wanted to use one and there was lines of code in that upsell app leftover in there and then the one that they wanted to use, there was conflicts and then it cost us hours of time digging in there, cleaning it up, making it work. That's another byproduct of this.

Chase:

All that extra code is going to interfere with other apps as well. But going back to your direct question, where do you think that what's most detriment? I would say the further down the funnel you are, absolutely the more streamlined you want that experience and the less that you want to play around with stuff.

Brett:

And one thing I'll mention just really quickly, and again this is coming from our perspective because we drive lots and lots of traffic for eCommerce companies but you do something in the cart, where you do an upsell, a cross-sell, whatever type of app. And we know some of the developers of some of those apps and some of them are great but there are considerations you have to have. If you're not careful, it'll screw up your conversion tracking, right?

Brett:

So now I've got my Facebook pixel, I've got my Google pixel, I've got all these conversion codes firing. Now all of a sudden, and I'm using automated bidding, right? Which most people are now. So now I installed this new app, it changes my conversion tracking. Now my campaigns are screwed up. Now my campaigns don't have good data. I don't have good data now. Now things are getting messy. So yeah, just lots of considerations here.

Brett:

So anyway, let's though talk about and you mentioned to me, hey, the first question you have to ask is, do I need an app? Right? So I want this functionality but do I need an app or is there another way? So what are some apps you probably don't need? So if you're on Shopify, these are some apps you can probably get away with or get away without having.

Chase:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's probably the first thing. So anytime we bring on a new client or we're talking about maybe some CRO stuff or some performance stuff we're like, we're going to, let's take a look at the apps. That's the easiest win is to see what's going on in there, and we just run a basic audit, right? We copy and paste it into a Google spreadsheet and we go, what's this app do? Is it important? And we kind of just start from there.

Chase:

So the number one thing that we usually see, which is hilarious, is people have two apps that do the exact same thing. Even to the point where they have two upsell apps installed at the same time. Most of the time they don't have them both firing. They're not both live but they still have the demo app installed, they had the trial run there and then they just let it go and it's still installed in the store, that's still installed in your theme, that's still loading up when your website loads up. You know what I mean?

Chase:

So just leaving that stuff in there is a terrible idea. So the number one thing that I find funny is when you have two apps that do the same thing. Oftentimes there are some other ones that are doing the same thing. So people maybe they'll have a free shipping banner or a promotion bar at the top of the page and there's something built into their theme that already does that. You know what I mean?

Brett:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chase:

Why do you have two solutions that do the same thing? Another one that's kind of happens all the time is restock alerts. One of their marketing apps, which we'll talk about that later, but one of their marketing apps will have a restock alert, but they add just an app that does that specific one little thing. It's again, just going back to, don't have two apps doing the same thing. So really run through your stuff and audit it. The other two that I have written down here, that people usually have two of the same one is again, abandoned carts. Those notifications doing two of the same exact things.

Chase:

If one's doing SMS, one's doing email, that makes sense. But you've got two different apps both doing emails, why not just use one app to do it twice if that's how you want to run it.

Brett:

Yep. It makes sense. And then, I think you talked about things like form builders and other pop-ups and stuff like that. Yeah.

Chase:

Yeah, just beyond the, using two apps to do the same thing or just two functionalities. Just go and create a relationship with a good developer or a good agency or a consultant or a freelancer or what have you to help you just build in some of these simple code elements into your site. You don't need an app for a form builder. You can just hard-code a form and drop that into your site. That'll load lightning fast compared to an app that has to load JavaScript and then load the form, and that's a bad loop that you know it's a slower user experience as well.

Chase:

Other things that you can just have your developers build in, pop-ups. Heck, half the time your better marketing apps have build in pop-ups solutions that you can customize out the wazoo. You don't need a specific app for pop-ups, and then if you just start talking about conversion rates, that's a whole other conversation about pop-ups.

Brett:

Sure, sure.

Chase:

But often times on the product page is where I see people go out of control with things that you don't really need. So they'll have apps that are installing trust badges or installing tabs on the product page. Just hire a developer to code it out and you're going to be paying a couple a hundred bucks for a smaller task, give or take your market, but then you're not paying a monthly fee for it and it's going to look exactly how you want and it's going to be lightening fast and it's not going to be interfering with anything.

Brett:

Yep, yep. Yeah, I think sometimes we don't think about the overall costs that the total cost of ownership, if you will, and the cost of unintended consequences with apps. So yeah, it's 30 bucks a month, but you're paying that forever and if you can just hire a developer to build something to put it into the theme, what is that going to be benefiting you in terms of improved speed and performance and then yeah you only pay the fee once. So totally, totally makes sense.

Brett:

Cool, you talk about identifying apps that are fighting with each other, right? And this is something we used to do quite a bit of work in the Magento space. We were never developers always on the marketing side, but then a lot of Magento clients and this is something we'd see all the time. Like, hey, they installed, we called it extensions at the time in the Magento space, but hey, they installed these extensions, they break the site or they conflict with each other, everything blows up, right? How do you identify if apps are fighting with each other?

Chase:

Oh, I mean, that's a difficult one, and that is usually the result of people doing what we're saying here is just installing stuff willy-nilly and not really having a good track record of what's going on in there. So it usually ends up that we have to have a senior developer go in there, take some backups and just start doing operation, finding out which lines of codes are having errors with it, and then just reverse engineering what's supposed to be happening. And usually during the growth phase of these companies, these eCommerce brands, it's usually during the growth phase that they're switching on apps, they're getting more powerful solutions, there's a lot of stuff happening really quickly. So they're not really using the best practices.

Chase:

So you kind of end up with a theme when they're starting to hit their growth, they're passing a million dollars in sales. Their theme is usually terrible around that time in their life just because it wasn't something they were thinking about. So once they start thinking about performance and all this stuff, it's usually a good idea to refactor the theme is a nerdy way of saying like rebuild it from the ground up code wise to make it really fast and make it not have any of those errors and it's just something that's going to happen in the life cycle of your brand that if you want to keep the design same and you want to speed it up, you're probably going to have someone with a good architectural mindset about how these things are supposed to be built, retheme it to get rid of all that old code.

Brett:

Great. It makes sense. I think that's the advice of the day, right? If you had to zero in on this is the most important thing is, this is not one of those things where, hey I can just install it and then turn it off and it's all fine. I can just keep loading these up. No, the code stays and then there's some residual impacts there. Think before you install an app and dig in a little bit.

Brett:

So you mentioned getting a senior developer to get it back with the sign, kind of stress test a little bit to find if these apps are fighting with each other. Is there anything, any kind of symptoms that might be flaring up that a Shopify store owner could see that could possibly tip them off that, hey, I may have app conflict. I need to bring in a developer. Is it just site speed related? So now things are really slowing down, I need to, yeah.

Chase:

Well, I want to go back a little bit though. There's a way to avoid this completely.

Brett:

How's that?

Chase:

It's, from the start, just be knowledgeable, I'm not going to test these apps, I'm going to ask someone that knows what they're talking about, which app to use. So I don't have to buy twice to get to what I need. Just get the right one the first time. So that's talking to a consultant or a freelancer or someone in the ecosystem. I tweet stuff all the time. I'm like, "Hey, we're having problems. What's a good solution for this problem?" Just ask people smarter than you and they'll give you the answer.

Chase:

That's an easy way to do it, but if you do want to test something, just take a backup of your theme right then and there-

Brett:

Beautiful.

Chase:

... Don't install anything yet and then install it in the new theme and then you can revert it back to the previous version of it and it won't have any of that code in there. It's just a little bit extra legwork, but then you're saving yourself from having all of these lines of code added to your theme.

Brett:

Yeah, it's extra upfront legwork, right? And that feels painful, but it will save you so much time and headache, and heartache, but is totally worth it.

Chase:

Yeah, especially, like most the best thing about Shopify is it really allows entrepreneurs to just do it. Get out there, start selling stuff and having fun with it, which means that oftentimes the founding teams don't have a developer's mindset. I'm not a developer, but I know all of these issues because we run into them all the time now. There's usually not a developer on the team, there's probably nothing versioning the website, which means like taking backups and knowing where the new code's coming from and all the forks and all the fun stuff that you'll find on GitHub and similar solutions.

Chase:

There is no one doing that for these websites. So then you end up with something that's got all sorts of random lines of code in there. I guess that's something to think about with the ease of use of some of these sites. Then you ended up with these fun issues like that.

Brett:

Sure. It makes sense. So let's dive into when should you consider an app, right? So what types of functionality should you say? Okay, so these categories you're looking for this kind of functionality? Yeah, look at an app because it's going to be better for you then than hard-coding, or working with a developer.

Chase:

Yeah. So I think the first thing is kind of understanding the limitations of the platform you're on. Shopify is really, really, really good at their one competency, which is selling something to a customer online through their platform. That's it. That's the thing they're the best at. Everything that kind of gets a little bit further away from that, is a little outside of that sweet spot.

Chase:

So it usually comes in the form of kind of more robust systems that you want to add into your business. So, one right off the top of my head would be kind of want you to get past this sale, Shopify doesn't care anymore. So anything in the fulfillment development area. So you're talking about pick, pack, ship, getting the codes emailed to your customers about their tracking information, all that stuff, there are better solutions out there than what you're going to find natively on Shopify. So, that makes sense.

Chase:

I would probably say that's something you should probably have installed on your store. So a solution like a ShipStation or an OrderCup, there's a bunch of them in the fulfillment area. That makes sense because that kind of is outside of the core competency of the platform, and you're going to see kind of a theme here when I start talking about these other areas of a business that aren't the online store.

Chase:

So the next one would be like in marketing, there are a crap ton of reasons to use other platforms. Like your email marketing platforms, Shopify doesn't have that built-in and anyone that goes from Shopify's abandoned carts to a more robust abandoned cart solution will immediately be like, why didn't I do this on day one?

Brett:

Something like a Klaviyo as an example.

Chase:

Yeah, yeah, Klaviyo. There's a million of them out there, but I'm a big Klaviyo fan.

Brett:

Me too.

Chase:

If I'm going to tell you to pick right the first time, Klaviyo is the solution.

Brett:

Totally agree. Yeah, yeah. Followed Klaviyo from the very beginning. Primarily through of my buddies, Austin Brawner and Chad Vanags eCommerce influence. But yeah, they introduced me to Klaviyo years and years ago and it's just a great solution. And I want you to give more specifics here, but basically we're looking at is, if it's something that's outside the core competency of Shopify, that's when you look for an app.

Brett:

So what are some other areas? We've got fulfillment, things like ShipStation and whatnot, email answer, Klaviyo. What other areas, categories of things should you consider?

Chase:

This is something you're probably very familiar with is getting a data feed out of Shopify and into your marketing platform of choice.

Brett:

Yeah, sure.

Chase:

Your paid platform of choice really is what I'm talking about here. So you're getting a good clean feed out of Shopify to import into Google or Pinterest or Facebook, however you want to do that.

Brett:

Yeah, what's interesting, and then I'll just because this is one of our areas, just one of the quick things to consider there is you can directly connect Shopify to Google ads as an example for Google Shopping, but it creates some pretty serious limitations in my opinion. So this is where some of the apps you invest in for a good data feed. Yes, there's often some monthly fees associated there, but the level of customization you can create and the cleanliness of the feed and just the, because the feed becomes your ad and Google Shopping as an example.

Brett:

So getting the right app to get a good feed into Google ads or Facebook or wherever, totally worth it. It's going to have a dramatic impact on your marketing efforts there. Where you're looking to save a couple bucks by doing the direct integration. It's not as good, at least not right now. It's not as good. So, yeah, fully agree with that one.

Chase:

We do Facebook advertising for a lot of clients and the first thing we do is replace their feed. The native integration between Shopify and Facebook is hilarious at best. Getting-

Brett:

Same as the Google Side, yeah.

Chase:

... Yeah, yeah, yeah. We recommend the same solution for both of them and it's a software called Aten Software. I don't know what you use, but that's the one we recommend. It's a good deal for what it does. But that's the one we usually recommend.

Brett:

Yeah, I've not used that one. We use DataFeedWatch a decent amount, GoDataFeed. There's a couple of good ones. Those are services as well. But Aten, I'll have to check it out.

Chase:

Absolutely.

Brett:

Sure, cool.

Chase:

To run down the list here. Ones that are pretty useful to have installed after a while. Any help desk solution, any ticketing system, that's never going to be on Shopify's radar. So we're talking about Gorgias, the number one player in the field is probably Zendesk. Click solutions like that to help with keeping your customers happy, keeping track of their inquiries with your business. Those are going to be things that make sense to have installed in your store.

Chase:

Some other stuff is if you have a inventory on your website, that changes a lot, that's when I think it's useful to have a smart search solution that's powered by an app. You can hard-code it in. If your inventory is 12 items long, like 12 skews, you don't need an app, you can just hard-code it. But if you've got thousands of skews that are changing daily, weekly, you've got sizes that are always running out. You probably want a solution that can update in real time, your search results within the website. We're talking about your mobile search.

Chase:

People are lazy, they're not going to go through your filters. They're going to type in what they want there. Having a solution that can quickly update that and get them to the product they want. That's always a good investment.

Brett:

Yeah, and one of the great things about some of those smart search apps and services is they will apply some basic machine learning but then JAI but I think it's probably more machine learning of looking at, okay, when people type in type of search, these are the results I show them. But what's clicked on the most and what leads to a better outcome and then they will adjust the results accordingly. And so that's one of those things you're not going to custom code that necessarily or get a developer to build that with any kind of cost efficiency, but some of these smart search apps and services will do that for you. Apply some machine learning to improve the results over time as results are observed. So yeah, love that. Love that recommendation.

Chase:

And just on the topic of smart searches, that right there is an easy win for anyone that doesn't have one on their store-

Brett:

Sure.

Chase:

... Especially on mobile. People are lazy like I said earlier. They're going to type in something and spell it the wrong way, and if your website can't get them to the product they want, they're going to bounce. That's just an easy quick CRO when is having like an auto search and a good user experience on mobile that can get them to a product, so.

Brett:

I love it. Just kind of a quick funny aside and I'm sure others listening are the same way, but I find myself now and when I go to a physical store and I love to shop online. I don't like going to physical stores in most cases, sometimes I do. But I find myself, I'm like, I'm wandering the grocery store. I've been lost for 15 minutes, and I'm like, why can't I just search? I just want to type, I just want to say the thing that I want and I want it to appear and I want to buy it, right? But a site without good site search, smart search is kind of the same way, right?

Brett:

I just want to find what I want to find but you're making it really, really difficult for me. And so if I'm already in a store, I'm not going to walk out in frustration too quickly because that's a waste of time. But if I'm online and I'm on a site and it's not giving me what I want, I'm gone, you know?

Chase:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brett:

So smart search, it's so important.

Chase:

Absolutely. I've got three more that I have written down on this list here. So the next one would be product reviews. That the built-in one to Shopify is extremely lacking and there are some great solutions out there for product reviews. That is one, just having social proof on your website helps regardless. There are apps out there that do it very well and this is across the board. I know that there are solutions that are on Magento as well and also on BigCommerce, the same players are in that space as well. But yeah, having the social proof with those product review apps is definitely something to consider and I just want to have an aside here that like, don't fake your reviews, it's trashy because people are going to find out and Google is going to blacklist you.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah. Such a bad idea for sure. Good, what about something like product financing? This is something that we're seeing a little bit more of and I think especially for high-at-stake items, it can make a lot of sense. We've also seen, I've had a another guest on the show talking about those apps specifically, talking about how millennials and Gen Z often don't have credit cards, but they have debit cards and so they like having these payment plans and stuff. But any thoughts on product financing apps?

Chase:

Yeah, no, that's another quick one like the smart search solutions we were talking about, that's going to overnight change your conversion rate. Those are very helpful, and you should definitely consider having one. There's apps like Klarna, Afterpay, I think there's 4Pay is another one of them. There's many solutions out there. They all kind of do the same thing, but what they really all do is they do increase your conversion rate and that's something that Shopify is never going to offer.

Brett:

Yep, yep. It totally makes sense. Okay, awesome. So this has been super helpful and enlightening. Kind of as we wrap up here a little bit. What about when do I begin considering, okay, do I need another app or another handful of apps or do I just need to go to Shopify Plus? If I'm on Basic Shopify, do I need to pull together a bunch of apps and then I can win that way? When should I consider Shopify plus?

Chase:

I think from the financial perspective, if you're using Shopify Pay, there is a straight legit threshold that you're going to hit to where Shopify Pay and the discount that you're going to get from moving from Advanced to Pay on your payment processing fee. So I believe it goes from 2.7% down to 2.4%, I don't know what it is right now. I don't have it in front of me, but those are the numbers I have in my head. It's somewhere around the $2 million mark of annual sales through your website a year to where just moving to Plus will offset the cost of having Plus just from that discount.

Chase:

So that's a quick just litmus test to see what am I sales like yet? Anything below that you need to have a very specific reason of why you need the functionality of Plus. And so there are three that always come to mind for me, and the first one I just talked about is having that discount on your payment processing. That's a big thing. The next one is going to be access to Shopify Flow, which is essentially Shopify's built-in automation solution.

Chase:

It's kind of like a Zapier or an if this then that just lives inside your Shopify store. So it's really cool. Once you build a business that gets to the point where you start to realize you can start pushing data around and pushing processes around outside of the eCommerce store. So sending specific things to your fulfillment warehouse or splitting up inventory in your warehouse. There's a lot of, it's very specific use cases, so I'm probably not going to say one right now that matters to anyone else listening. But needing that level of automation and having Shopify Flow is really there is a reason to think about it. And then another one is if you have really specific kind of sales that you want to do and there are apps out there that do those sales, but you can get rid of them all if you can move to Plus and you can use the scripts that are built-in because then you can just code the exact sale and it will work right every time and then you won't have an issue with whatever solution you were using to make that sale happen, it'll just happen.

Chase:

And then another one out there that I've been actually using a lot more lately is, I think it's part of Flow or maybe, I'm drawing a blank on what it's called, but it's a solution to schedule things to happen on your store, which is really cool.

Brett:

Nice.

Chase:

So instead of having to stay up until midnight to launch that sale, you can just schedule it and it'll happen-

Brett:

That's beautiful.

Chase:

... And then it'll turn off. And then that just happens. So once you kind of start getting into building those systems within your business, some of those automations make sense that you kind of want to have access to them. And then the Holy grail that everybody wants when they move into Plus is having access to the cart, which I'd say having access to the cart is a good thing and a bad thing.

Brett:

Yeah, for sure, for sure.

Chase:

Make sure you always test it and make sure you-

Brett:

A lot of damage there if you don't know what you're doing or you do too much.

Chase:

... Shopify has got the number one most trusted default cart in the world because-

Brett:

For a reason.

Chase:

... because everybody is used to it. So anything you're doing there can be scary.

Brett:

Yep, yep. For sure. That's one of those things where don't want to reinvent the wheel. If you've got something you're going to test on the cart, have a good reason for it. You should likely have some other case studies and use cases from people you've talked to that have said, yes we made this shift and it worked and then you better be prepared to test it and see how it works for you, for sure, so.

Chase:

Absolutely test it. Don't just throw it in there because someone else did it and said it worked, I've tried-

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, yeah because-

Chase:

... There are very popular gurus out there that are like, these are the five tweaks that I did to my cart and this is what happened. Those are the five winning tweaks out of the 500 tweaks that they tried that year.

Brett:

... Yep.

Chase:

And they worked for his business because of their specific customer reacted to it the right way. They probably won't work for your business. You should be testing everything.

Brett:

Without a doubt, without a doubt. Awesome. Chase, this has been fantastic. I love getting some insight here on the app ecosystem. This is an area that people just have to proceed with caution. If you approach this with some wisdom and a strategy, it can be amazing. If you don't, if you're kind of willy-nilly to use your phrase, I think that actually fits in this case, bad things could be on the horizon for sure. So hey, let's talk about your podcast.

Chase:

Absolutely.

Brett:

You're now 60 episodes in, congrats on that. That's amazing. So you're being very consistent and just a little over a year in, that's awesome. Why should we listen? Why should we tune in other than you just being a really cool guy, why should we tune in?

Chase:

Absolutely, so I'm interviewing kind of a lot of people in this app ecosystem is one thing. If you're ever curious about a certain app I would say the ones that I use I have on podcast and I get some really good information out of them. None of the episodes are a sales pitch though. It's why do these apps exist? What's the use case for using apps like these? And then at the end, oh my gosh, sure. Give us five details about your app that people might like.

Chase:

I'm also interviewing other agency owners, other consultants out there in this space. At the end of the day I'm all about being honest. I don't want to, that's kind of where the name came from is like I, there's that shady get rich quick scheme element to eCommerce that I have a disdain for and I want to be a voice of truth and reason within this ecosystem. So that's kind of why I do the podcast, and then I've been getting into a lot more interviewing actual brand owners, some very notable brand owners or people in those departments, and just getting it from them, from the source of what they did and the mistakes they even made along the way to how they built that business.

Brett:

Yep. I love it, I love it. I'm excited to dig deeper and kind of binge listen to some of the episodes myself, so that's awesome. And then, yeah. What about your agency? Talk a little bit about what you guys do there at Electric Eye and how can people find out more about both about the agency and about the podcast?

Chase:

Absolutely. So I'm the co-founder of Electric Eye. If you have a website, you've got your product market fit figured out and you're kind of trying to figure out what more you can do, that's kind of the right fit for us. We like to help people with beautiful website designs and smart marketing. We have this app ecosystem nailed down. If you questions about that, you can reach out.

Chase:

If anyone listening to this podcast wants me to run through their site and give them an audit just say, I heard you on this podcast, I'll do that for free. That's not a problem at all.

Brett:

Awesome.

Chase:

If you want that, it's not a landing page or anything, just reach out the right way. The normal way through our website, it's electriceye.io/connect, and I'll do that for anybody listening and then if you like the sound of my voice, which I don't, but if you do, you can find more of the podcast at honesteCommerce.co, that's .C-O.

Brett:

How many people actually like the sound of their voice, right? It just doesn't happen very often. I will say that, I'm not sure if you're at this point, maybe you are, that's 60 episodes, but there was definitely a time in my life and I was like, oh man, I hate the sound of my voice. Do I really sound like that? That's so annoying.

Brett:

I ended up doing quite a bit of public speaking, first at church and then business events and stuff like that and then podcasting and so now there is this switch that that flips at some point where now, I sound the same in my head as I do when I hear my voice, so I don't know if you got to that point yet or not. It's all the same to me. It's just whatever. It not good or bad, it's just the same thing.

Chase:

Not quite yet, but sometimes I'll catch some of our podcasts and I'll be listening to it and I'll be like, wow, I don't sound like an idiot.

Brett:

Yeah. It's like eventually it just calibrates. You hear yourself recording and through a PA system enough, and then anyway, that's only relevant to some, but it is an interesting phenomenon for sure. So fantastic. And then Honest Ecommerce, wherever podcasts are downloaded or synced to that's where people can find you?

Chase:

Absolutely.

Brett:

Awesome. Chase Clymer ladies and gentlemen chase. Chase, thanks for coming on man. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks for helping us tackle a topic we have not explored in detail on this show and we will have to connect again, my friend.

Chase:

Sounds good. Thank you so much for having me.

Brett:

Awesome, thank you, and as always, we would love your feedback. Let us know different show ideas you'd like us to explore. We'd love your feedback. We would love your review on iTunes. So if you're enjoying what you're listening to, that five-star review does help other people discover the podcast so if you're so inclined, it'll help us a lot. Go ahead and do that, and with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

Brett:

All right that is a wrap.

Chase:

Yeah.

‍

It’s safe to say that your SEO approach is likely outdated.  If you’re looking for the latest hack, trick or SEO loophole  - you’re barking up the wrong tree.  If you’re obsessing over ranking and traditional keywords then you may be off target.

In this episode we talk about why “intent” is now the most important word in SEO and content marketing.  We look at how search behavior is changing.  We also consider how Google is indexing different forms of content like podcasts and video transcripts and what that means to us as marketers.  

In this episode we dive into: 

• The BERT Update.  What is is and how it’s the nail in the coffin for old-school SEO.  
• Why is intent the most important word for SEO?
• How REI tackles intent and what you should learn from their content strategies.
• Different content types - articles, podcasts, etc.
• How do you figure out what people are searching for and asking at different stages
• How to create content and rank that content for shoppers at different stages of the buying journey.
• Plus more!

Connect with Guest:
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Via Instagram
Via YouTube

theCLIKK.com - A Free Daily Email from Your Friends in Digital Business
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Via Instagram

Mentioned in this episode:
DigitalMarketer - Marketing Tools & Training
Traffic & Conversion Summit - March 31 - April 2, 2020 in San Diego, CA
Digital Marketing fo Dummies Book by Ryan Deiss & Russ Henneberry - Amazon
theSkimm
The Hustle
Morning Brew

Marketing Examples:
Nordstrom
The Home Depot
Lowe's
‍

Episode 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 my guest today is really a legend. He's a legend in this space. You know him, and I'm confident if you know him, love him.

Brett:

Hey E-Commerce Evolution listeners, Brett Curry here. I have a really cool announcement and an invite just for you. In February, OMG Commerce is hosting an exclusive, invite only event at the Google and YouTube offices in Los Angeles. Now, if you've never experienced a Google office, they really do live up to the hype, and the Google offices in L.A. are some of the most unique around.

Brett:

More on the venue in a minute. First, let me give you the scoop on the event itself. It's called YouTube Ads for E-Commerce: Building Full Follow Growth with YouTube Ads. I'll be speaking at this event, sharing some of our best YouTube ad strategies for our most successful YouTube ad templates, and more. And you'll get to hear directly from some amazing YouTube team members, including incredible content from the Unskippable Labs team.

Brett:

Now, I've seen this content before and it's amazing. I'm so excited about this event, but here's the best part: it's free. But it is invite only and you do have to apply and be approved to attend because seating is limited. So, sorry, no agencies, no service providers, this is just for eCommerce companies.

Brett:

Now, as promised more about the venue, this will be held at the Spruce Goose Hangar. This hangar was initially built by the mogul Howard Hughes, and if you've ever seen the movie The Aviator with Leonardo DiCaprio, then you know all about Howard Hughes and his Spruce Goose. This hangar was recently renovated and true Google fashion. Now it's a cutting edge YouTube studio and Google offices and that's where we're holding this event. It's going to be amazing.

Brett:

So, to find out more, to check out the application, go to OMGcommerce.com/YouTube-event. Again, that's OMGcommerce.com/YouTube-event. I'll also link to the event page in the show notes of this show and I hope to see you in L.A.

Brett:

I'm talking to Mr. Russ Henneberry, and he's the founder of TheClikk.com daily email newsletter about digital businesses, one of my favorite reads. It is one of those things that I subscribe to that I actually read. I subscribe to a lot of things, most of it gets cleaned out by my assistant. I actually do read The Clikk because it's very good. You also may know Russ, from his time at Digital Marker, he was the director of editorial there, on stage at TNC all the time. Also wrote Digital Marketing for Dummies. Dude is no dummy. He knows his stuff.

Brett:

And also we come from the same great state of Missouri.

Russ:

That's right.

Brett:

So, Russ, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for coming back on. If you count the 100th episode, this is your third time on the show, so congrats to you. That's rare air right there, my friend.

Russ:

I'm like Tom Hanks on Saturday Night Live. How many times did Tom Hanks do Saturday Night Live? No, I love doing this show and I love talking to you about this stuff. And I'm excited to be here, so thanks for having me.

Brett:

Yeah, absolutely. So, we talked a little while back, we did the 100th episode and you came on and talked for seven or eight minutes, and we talked a little bit about what's working right now for SEO. We're both SEO guys, at least that's how we got our start, right? That was like the first thing I ever did online was SEO. I don't really do much with SEO anymore, but I know you know the game very well. And so, we're going to dig into this. We're going to talk about this for an eCommerce business, help you lay out a strategy and identify what should you be thinking about as it pertains to SEO in 2020.

Brett:

And so, before we get into kind of the meat of the how-to and the specifics, and all that, I want to talk about what I think is the most recent big algorithm update. And that's the BERT update. Now, I guess, you and I were just talking about there was a core update that just happened a couple of days ago maybe, at the time of this recording, but there's not much information out about that yet. So, talk to the folks. What is the BERT update and what does it mean to us as marketers and merchants?

Russ:

Well, so, basically the BERT update the long story short on this thing is that Google has been improving its algorithm year after year, month after month, day after day in order to rank the best pages that have the most relevance for any keyword phrase. And this BERT update is just another step towards making the best content win, the most relevant page win, and not the spammer or the person that's manipulating the algorithm. So, there's not a whole heck of a lot you need to do if you're hearing about BERT, the BERT update and you're trying to figure out, "Oh, what am I supposed to do with this update?"

Brett:

What are the new tricks? What are the new tips.

Russ:

Right.

Brett:

What are the new hacks for SEO?

Russ:

There's no new tricks. It's just continuing to double down on understanding that really SEO is a subcategory of content marketing and understanding that you need be building just superior pages, and you're never going to probably have another update from Google where it's like, "Oh, there's these new loopholes and there's these new hacks and tricks." Right? All they're doing these days is just ratcheting down its ability to understand the nuances of language. For example, if I said to you Brett, as a human to human, if I said, "Do you want to go play some squash?" Who plays squash anymore?

Brett:

Yeah, I would like to watch someone play squash. I don't know how to play squash.

Russ:

Well you know what's hot? Is pickleball. Let's use pickleball.

Brett:

Pickleball is popular. I even know some that like pickleball. I've never played. It looks fun. I've got to play some time.

Russ:

But if I typed that in, how does a search engine or an algorithm understand the difference between pickle as something that is associated with the game versus the food group, right? Or being in a pickle, right? Which is a very nuanced way of using the word pickle. Same with the word squash, and you could play squash, you can squash a bug, you can eat a squash.

Brett:

You eat squash, you grow squash.

Russ:

And so, all this algorithm continues to do, and the BERT update's just another iteration upon, another layer on here where, where they're starting to understand the nuance of language. And so, I think we're going to get into some of this today, but understanding that long tail keywords are the game today, right? And the BERT update make long tail searches even more understandable by the, by that Google algorithm. They understand long tailed, very nuanced searches better after BERT than they ever have before.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. And as an SEO guy that lived through the Panda and Penguin updates, kind of the original spam updates, getting rid of spammy content, spammy backlinks and all those things. I personally love the way where Google is headed because, for the most part, the best content, those that have the most readable, useful, relevant content win. And I think that's why it should be that that's better for the ecosystem in the long run and ...

Russ:

Yeah. I mean it's, it's great, right? For those of us that want to build an actual business, we want to build a sustained business. We aren't looking at churn and burn, a bunch of affiliate sites or do a bunch of weird stuff like that. All they keep doing is just weeding out those business models and those types of models, so that you know what you're getting in the Google search results is going to be an actual business that's not here today and gone tomorrow, but actually has a product and is going to be there for their customer for the long term.

Brett:

Yep. Love it. Love it. You'd mentioned something when we recorded before that I thought it was great and I'd like to dive into it just a little bit. You said that intent is the most important word in SEO right now. What do you mean by that? And why is that?

Russ:

Well, a lot of it is because the intelligence of Google these days. But even beyond that, if you want your SEO to be anything more than just a parlor trick, right? Where it's like, "Hey look, I got this page to rank in the search engine." Right? You need to back up a step. Because you and I have known forever and I think you and I have even ranted about this before, where we've maybe had a client or you've been talking to a business person and what they're really focused in on is rankings, right? They're like, "Oh man, why is, why is this competitor ranking above me on this?" And then you get people that get a little bit deeper and they understand that, "Okay, so maybe it's not about rankings. Rankings I can't take to the bank. Rankings don't help me put my kids through college. Maybe it's traffic that I'm really after."

Russ:

But it's really the folks that understand that, at the end of the day, the business metrics that matter, typically for us, are lead generation and sales, right? And so, if you want to go beyond thinking about SEO as a way to get rankings, which if you are, that's fine, but you're not driving business metrics when you do that. And it's really not about traffic either. It's about whether or not you're able to move somebody along that buyer's journey. And to do that, you've got to back up a step from, "Okay, how does SEO work? And what are the different little tricks and different things like that?" And go back to the very foundation of SEO, which is the keyword that you're looking to go after in the first place. The type of resource that you're going to build to satisfy someone's problem, right?

Russ:

And to do that, we have to back up, we have to start thinking about this word intent. Like what are our potential customers and our existing customers, what is their intent online and can we anticipate that intent? And then, can we then build a resource and optimize that resource in a way that satisfies that intent? There's a mouthful there and I think as you go along here you put some flesh on those bones, but the concept here is: we need to step back, consider intent, consider what people are trying to accomplish when they go online and use that to inform the keywords that we target, and inform the resources we're building.

Russ:

What this does is it keeps you from creating a bunch of just stuff to go online, and instead starts to align what you're producing, the assets you're producing, by assets I mean things like podcasts, blog posts, videos, sales pages, comparison pages, demo pages, whatever, all these different pages are, they should be built to meet the intent of one of your potential buyers.

Brett:

Yep. Yep. And it's one of those, it's the process of understanding, "Okay, my ideal customer, what questions are they going to be asking? What are they looking for at the different stages as they go through this shopping journey as they hopefully land on and decide on buying my product? What are the questions to ask along the way? How can I answer those questions in a way that's authentic and true and that makes them say, "Hmm, I really like this product." And then eventually, you know, hopefully it leads them to buy."

Brett:

And I think a couple of things that go into this, we talked about this last time too, people are getting more and more comfortable with search engines, right? It's a natural part of what we do. We search on Google often dozens of times a day. We're now very used to, very confident making specific queries, very detailed and specific queries. And part of that is fueled by voice, right? We like voice searches, easy and accurate now. And so, I think all these things kind of play together, right? We're searching in a very detailed fashion, we've got lots of things that we want to buy. I talk a lot about ads now, but this stat I'm about to share really applies to ads or content or whatever. But the number of touch points now that someone interacts with prior to purchase has really gone up, and it's gone up because it's just so much easier, right?

Brett:

So there's a study done by Think, published by Think by Google talking about how looking at some real customer journeys where a guy's buying a pair of noise canceling headphones and he has 300 touch points, and that includes blogs and videos and searches and websites clicked on and stuff like that. Or there was a lady looking for hypoallergenic makeup and it was 120 touch points, or something like that. We're doing that because it's easy and we can bounce back and forth, and we're on our phone and then we're on our desktop and we're able to just do our research pretty quickly.

Brett:

So, what I think it'd be helpful, Russ, is let's look at the stages of the shopping journey and how to identify what people's intent is at those different stages and then how do we create content to satisfy that intent at those different stages?

Russ:

So, when we think about intent, the way I like to think about it is that there's four stages of intent, right? And certainly, depending on your business, you could go and carve this up in any way you want. But a great exercise to do with your marketing team is to sit down and draw four columns. And at the top of each column you're going to write, at the top of the first one you're going to write research intent. In the second column, you're going to write compare intent. And then you're going to write buy intent in the third call, and then a type of intent that I call succeed intent in that fourth column.

Russ:

And each one of those columns represents a different stage in the journey from, "I don't know who you are, bro." To, "Not only am I purchasing but I'm also referring, I'm buying other products you sell. I'm a repeat buyer." Which is sort of that holy grail where we all want to get, where we've acquired a valuable customer, the great lifetime value that's referring and promoting us.

Russ:

So, if you think about it each one of these stages is going to, your potential customer is going to go to the web, going to go to Google and ask it different questions, and query different things at each of these stages of intent. We were talking earlier about using the example of an espresso machine, right?

Russ:

Heck yeah. Nice high ticket item. And it's probably going to represent hundreds of touch points a lot of times before someone buys one. And so, they're going to spend time in that research intent stage. And when they do that, what kinds of things, and I sit down and make a list because in a lot of ways, a lot of times the best keyword research tool is your brain, right? Just sitting down and writing some things out. And then you go to the tools to verify some things, and maybe tighten some things up, maybe use a synonym here or there because you see it's a little bit less competitive. But, at the end of the day, this is about you sitting down and thinking through your potential buyer and thinking about what types of things is this person going to type in during that research stag?. And then making a list of the ones where it's like, "We need content that satisfies this intent." Right?

Russ:

So, for an espresso machine, you can play it out in your head because I actually was in the process of buying an espresso machine. You're going to be researching everything from features and prices. So, espresso machine features, best espresso machine, and adding modifiers, what we call modifiers to that seed keyword of espresso machine, which is what you want to buy, right? You want to buy an espresso machine. You're going to add little modifiers to your search that indicate that you're in that research stage, and that's where you need to have a resource built or not, right? You could choose like, "You know what? We're not going to target that. We're going to get deeper and we're going to go deeper in towards compare stage or buy stage."

Brett:

Maybe you're saying, "Hey, we're just going to create content for people that are a little bit closer to purchase, and so maybe that higher in the funnel we're going to wait on resources and content around that potentially."

Russ:

Yeah. So, if I'm in the compare stage, so I've moved past research, means I've probably put some things together and there's certainly gray area and bleeding across in these stages. But compare stage STO is really, really fantastic SEO for eCommerce because you could go out there, and let's say you sell espresso machines, you could create pages that compare the two different products, very specific branded keywords, and SEO for those brands, so it's Nespresso F51, I'm just making things up versus ...

Russ:

... Nespresso blah, versus another brand. Types of espresso machines that maybe be unbranded, you can write articles about that, and these things tend to be low competition, but think about how high the intent is there, right? It's super intent. And really from an eCommerce standpoint between the SEO of your product pages, and your category pages and stuff like that, this is a fabulous, fabulous place to spend some time, is what resources could we build that help people make better buying decisions when they're comparing the products we sell, or even comparing products we don't sell? So, it's something we sell versus something we don't sell, right?

Russ:

And being kind of honest about it, like, "Don't buy this machine if you don't want to keep buying the rechargeable pack, the little packet things. If you want a something that grinds your coffee, this is the right one." And help people make the right decisions. Now, the best way to do this and defining these kinds of keywords is to type the name of the brands in to Google and then type VS which is versus, and then watch what Google suggests after that.

Brett:

The Google suggest is such a powerful tool and one of those underutilized, I mean, it's based on popularity, right? And it really gives an idea, it gives you an idea of, "Okay, people that are typing in this way, this is what they're looking for, what they're asking." I love how you said one of the best, the best resource was your brain, so start just by thinking through the process. And I think another one of those underutilized tools is just Google Suggests very powerful.

Russ:

Yeah. So, we're live with no net here. I just typed in Nespresso versus, right? So, what did I find, Nespresso versus ... Google is going to suggest keywords that lots of people type in. So there's lots of volume here. You're in this compare intent, so you're past research intent, right? People aren't now researching like what is espresso, or what is an espresso machine, different things like that. You're now in this compare stage where somebody is deeper in the funnel, which is why I really love this stage for eCommerce.

Russ:

And what Google is suggesting that I'm trying to type in here is Nespresso versus Keurig, Nespresso versus espresso, and Nespresso versus a Breville, Nespresso versus DeLonghi, Nespresso versus coffee, Nespresso versus Starbucks. So, another tip here is, so I just typed in Nespresso versus, I can type in the Nespresso versus and then just type the letter A.

Russ:

Now when I typed that letter a, now I get Nespresso versus AeroPress, which I've actually had an AeroPress.

Brett:

AeroPress is fantastic. Really easy, very simple.

Russ:

I like the AeroPress. I take it when I travel.

Brett:

Yeah, it's a great cup of coffee.

Russ:

It's A-E-R, right? So, it's starting to recommend all of the things to recommend to create a versus piece of content about, that start with the letter A. And you can do this for B, C, D and if you really get nuts, you can go and do this for AA and AB, but that's probably a little over the top. But Nespresso versus AeroPress, Nespresso versus automatic espresso, Nespresso versus Aristo. And so, you almost run into this situation where you have an unlimited amount of compare intent resources that need to be built. And so, you make a list of these things and you start to prioritize, right? Like what should be built first? And create that content to satisfy that compare intent.

Brett:

And thinking about, "Okay, what do I have something to say about? So, now I know something about AeroPress and I can actually speak from experience there and this could be a valuable resource. I'll start there." Right? Or Nespresso versus Breville, I've used both, Breville. I personally talk espresso machines. I like to be able to tamp, right? I like ...

Russ:

What is your recommendation, then?

Brett:

So, we have the Breville One Touch, at the OMG offices. It's great. It's pretty automated. At my house, I have a Breville that's a little less automated, but I like it. And I don't remember what the one at home is. But both have got a built in grinder but you use the tamp. And then, the one touch that we have in the office, like you pick, you know, hey, this is a flat white or this is the cappuccino or it's a latte and it's going to do the foam and all that on its own. It's like all fully automated. The one I have at home, it's just you get the wand and you're looking, and you're creating your ratio of air and thickness of the milk. and all that fun stuff.

Russ:

Again, I'm getting stuff here, you know, Brevile One Touch versus X and Y and Z. There's going to be shortage. So, think about both branded, so what I'm doing here is branded, right? These are called branded keywords, so I have a branded product, it's a Breville One Touch, right? And then I say versus. But you can also go unbranded where you're your like, "Automatic espresso machine versus manual espresso machine." And do things. So, those are going to be unbranded searches. That'll bring people in before they're even starting to look at a brand. Now they're going to have a little less buyer intent, but it could still be a great keyword for you guys ...

Brett:

But still better than someone just typing in espresso machine, right? Because now they're at least thinking about, "Oh, I got different option. Do I want automated? Do I want a little bit of manual? What kind of espresso machine do I want?" And that means they're a little. At least a little further down in the buying process.

Russ:

Absolutely.

Brett:

Great. Do you have any suggestions for how do you decide what content to create? So, we could create video, we could create a podcast, we could write a blog post. And one interesting thing to talk about as we're looking at different formats, and you have, I'm sure, more details here than I do, but I know Google is working on where you ask a question and Google surfaces a YouTube video that answers that question. It will be queued up to where the answer is in the video. And I hear the same thing as coming with podcasts as well. I'm beginning to see podcasts show up more in the search, more in the search engine results page. And so, I love that, and I like creating content actually.

Brett:

But any suggestions on do we write a blog post? We do we create a video, do we create a podcast or do a little bit of everything? Any suggestions there?

Russ:

Right. So, you're right, I mean, I'm seeing the same thing. There was recent news coming out that that a smart ID to get your podcast into Google podcasts because they are starting to index podcasts. They are indexing, obviously, video and there's a lot that can be done there. I am still a text guy, still an HTML guy, but with with something like an espresso machine or really any physical product I like video as well to augment that page.

Russ:

And so, I wouldn't call these resources at the compare stage, especially, blog posts. I would build pages that, so I recommend that you build pages and you can see, if you go into Google, you're listening to this, I use it as an example a lot in the software space type in FreshBooks versus, and you'll see the whole bunch of lists of things that people try to compare FreshBooks again and click on FreshBooks versus QuickBooks, and you'll see that FreshBooks has really smart, they've built a compare stage intent page that compares FreshBooks to QuickBooks.

Russ:

And you go in there and you'll see this is not a blog post, it's a page that literally lays out the argument for FreshBooks against QuickBooks. And so, I wouldn't really consider it a blog post. Although it is meant to be informative, it's also quite salesy, right? It's like, "Look, this is how we stack up against QuickBooks and you should choose us." And of course the call to action inside that page, and this is why I really love these kinds of pages, a great place to start for software companies, but definitely for eComm companies is the call to action in there is, "Go buy the product."

Brett:

Yeah. Buy it or do a free trial.

Russ:

Take a free trial. So, REI in the physical product space, REI is really, really fantastic at creating content at the research stage. So, they'll create a piece like the ultimate mountain biking checklist. And it'll be a big blog post type thing, but it's just riddled. Home Depot, Lowe's, they do the same thing riddled with links to buy these things. So, it's like here's the helmet, here's the bike lock, here's the shoes, here's all the stuff you need to do this. So, while it's designed to be super informative and meet somebody at that research stage, the call to action is, "Go on over there and buy the shoes, buy the bike, buy everything you need to be a mountain biker."

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. And it's a different mindset than sitting down, "All right, I've got to create my intro paragraph and then my second paragraph." It begins to feel like an English term paper or something rather than this is a resource that has visuals that's got a side by side comparison. It's a bullet list and it's a little salesy at times. Those things can work very well for this kind of resource at these stages.

Brett:

Excellent. Let's talk about the buy stage and the succeed stage as well, but any other thoughts on deciding what medium to craft your resources in?

Russ:

Well, there's a couple of things there that we could talk about. One is medium, and if you want to call medium, is it an image? There's really only four different ways we create content online. It's either text, audio, image, video, right? So, again, I do like HTML text on a page, with all the on page SEO done and augmenting that with, if it makes sense, some kind of demo or something like that of the product on these compare pages. But the other thing to think about is the channel that we use, because today SEO is so much bigger than Google, right? And somebody said, "But Russ, between Google and YouTube, they own 90% of the market." And it's like, "Absolutely."

Russ:

But think about all the different apps that we use, the massive websites that we use every day. They're all search engines, right? In some capacity. They all have search functionality. And the cool thing is that most of them are light years behind Google, and are much easier to get ranked inside of, for example, Pinterest than it is to get ranked inside of Google for the same keyword phrases. Pinterest is still very reliant on weaker search engine technology that's just looking for exact match, where it's like ... You remember the old days when people are spitting out bestespressomachineintheworld.com? That kind of thing, where you're creating pins and boards and stuff like that have exact matches to the keywords you're looking to go after? That stuff still works over in these weaker search engines and you can drive traffic out of these channels much easier than you can get traffic, especially if you're just getting started through Google with a low authority site.

Russ:

So, what kind of content are we producing? Is it audio, is it video? I don't hate video either. For eComm, I really, really think video's strong but I'm still, if you were to tell me, |I'm looking to get my SEO started for eComm." It depends on what your business goal is where the opportunity is. I would either be telling you to spend time optimizing for compare stage intent, building pages with HTML text on them, augmenting the video if you can. If you don't have the bandwidth or resources, forget the video, but just create a page that compares this PA, this product to that product.

Russ:

Or I'd be telling you, if you're less interested in the front end where you're trying to acquire new customers and you're more interested in retention and loyalty, I'd be more interested in building content at the succeed stage, that last stage, which is very unsexy, much less actually then acquiring new customers is selling more to the ones you already have and getting them to promote and refer and and cross sell and other things. But you know, we've also learned ...

Brett:

It's extremely valuable, and a lot of people don't think about that from the content strategy of how do we influence that succeed stage of, one, making sure someone has a great experience with the products, so content to help them really enjoy and use the product well. And then content that's going to cause them to buy more, buy something else, refer ...

Russ:

Deflecting refunds and deflecting customer service issues, tickets and calls and stuff like that. If that's an issue, you're going to get that too. Take our espresso machine. So, if we skip past that bias stage, which is a little obvious, right? What are we looking to optimize for the bias stage? Well, we're looking to optimize probably a product or a category page. But when we think, it's a little bit different, is to think about SEO as it pertains to the person who already bought your product before.

Russ:

So, in the case of the espresso machine, Brett wants to create amazing espresso. He wants to dazzle his wife and his family with his amazing barista skills, and his friends, and all these things, and he wants to have great espresso. And so, how do we make him more successful with the product we've already sold him? That's one thing. But how do we avoid creating frustration?Because if you're like me, and I think most people are these days, we don't read the instruction manual. We take the thing out of the box, we start playing with it. And then, when I run into a problem, I'm like, "Oh, I really want to know how to make that cute little heart at the top of my ... "

Brett:

Which is really hard by the way, which I feel like I'm a pretty good barista. People want to come to my house and have my espresso. But the heart is difficult. When I'm creating latte art, I like to call it more like a Rorschach test. So, I'm going to make something, you're going to have to see what you see in that, and maybe we could psychoanalyze that, but it's more of a Rorschach thing, but it's going to taste amazing.

Russ:

Yeah, I mean, totally. And you think that's silly, but that's a great piece of content, especially for video, for an espresso maker and somebody selling espresso machines. But even before that, thinking about how do you reduce the frustration, the friction of getting your products set up, like you get a piece of technology, typically you're going to have that little quick start guide in there where they're just trying to get you onboarded as quickly as possible, and get you to have some level of delight with the product as quickly as possible.

Russ:

Well, nothing slows that down more than they don't know how to get it set up. They don't know how to install something properly. The most unsexy example in the world is that we bought a new dishwasher, ordered in online, I'm here in my office, I come home and it's installed right? And I'm like, "Dude, boom, there it is. Sweet." And I look at it and I'm like, "Look at all these buttons on here. Look, this is just a fancy dishwasher." Well, I went to the web, I went to Google to figure out what is this button, what does it do? And I'm a nerd, but I think I'm like most people where more and more we're turning to the web to succeed with the products that we buy.

Brett:

We know the manual is going to be written by some techy that doesn't speak our language. We'd rather go to Google, find something that's quick and easy or ask a specific question that's maybe buried in the middle of the manual or something. We'll just search for it, find it. Or maybe we'll watch a YouTube video. I actually watched several YouTube videos setting up the espresso machine because it was step-by-step and a little bit easier. But sometimes I prefer to read. So yeah, we'll go to Google to get to be successful. It makes sense.

Russ:

Yeah. I like to smoke a cigar once in a while. Like a good cigar, okay? Like really good cigars. So, I buy my cigars from JR Cigars online and they ship them to me. But content that they produce, a lot of times this kind of content can both attract new buyers and support the succeed. So, what they do is they create videos that help you to pair your cigar with the right whiskies, with the right after, is this an after dinner thing? Is this a ...

Russ:

And this is content marketing at its finest, and it's SEO at its finest. I'm searching for the right experience, and so I might be in that research compare stage out front, or I might already have the product in my hand and I want to have more fun with it, or I want to have a better experience, or I want to be able to use it better. And depending on where you want to attack, you could keep a content team busy on either one of these sides of the purchase, whether it's on the backend where you're looking to really grow a rabid, loyal group of people that want to buy more cigars, or espresso, or whatever from you. Or you could look to drive more demand on the frontend with a lot of compare intent type content. But either way, you could keep an SEO and a writer and a content producer very busy.

Russ:

And you know, then, if you're the one ... And really, I believe this, it takes a marketing mind, not a writer, writers are sometimes not the same as marketers, or a content producer's not always the same, it takes a marketer to set this strategy and look and say, "Okay, who's the customer? What will their intent be? And what resources need to be built? And then you can go set your content producer to go produce that stuff, write it, shoot it, record it, whatever. But you as the marketer should be the one setting that strategy and determining intent. If you can determine intent, then you go set your content producers off to do the work of producing that stuff.

Brett:

Yep. I love it. So, you mention REI before, and REI's a great company at creating content at these different stages, who else would you recommend people pay attention to? Because I think sometimes the best way to learn is get on some email lists, follow some sites, watch them re-market to you and what are they sending you? Check out someone's blog, things like that, who do you recommend?

Russ:

So, in the clothing space, I like Nordstrom actually. They create a lot of content that's right there up against the buy stage. Things that would cause you to have friction between the purchase, whether it's in-sore or online, I really like a piece of content like the suit sizing guide. It's on there, it's telling you ...

Brett:

Which is confusing for a lot of people. It's not easy to pick out a suit, not just an XL suit, there's all kinds of stuff you've got to think about.

Russ:

Absolutely. And if you're going to order something online, or if you're coming in-store and you're online, you're looking for a suit and maybe you're on Nordstrom's site, this creates friction between, and you might be embarrassed, like, "I don't know what the different cuts of the suit are." And this removes that friction. Give me another category.

Brett:

We've talked apparel, we've talked cigars.

Russ:

I mean, Home Depot and Lowes, and stuff like that, fantastic in their categories. But you could picture, like if you were selling fitness products, man, there's never-ending things to compare in that space, and a never-ending amount of intent at the succeed stage because these people want to get more fit, they want to lose weight, they want to do these things. This stuff is not super hard to figure out. Once you sit down and you say, "Well, dang, you're right. What would they be comparing? What's Google telling me they're comparing? Let's build resources that satisfy that intent and what kinds of things were they looking to do? What are their goals and how can we help them achieve them better? It satisfies an intent at that succeed stage as well.

Brett:

I love it. I love it. This was so good. This was the type of thing that everyone should go through, this exercise of thinking about how to influence at the different stages. And I really like the idea of the compare stage and the succeed stage, those may be the most immediately impactful stages. The compare side because that's when there's still lots of searches for some of those queries but someone's closer to purchase. The succeed stage really is about helping someone enjoy your product more and then refer more and buy more, and that can move the needle very quickly.

Brett:

The buy stage is relatively straightforward because it's really your product detail page and your.

Russ:

Yeah, it is. And it's hard to rank. You're going to have a hard time outranking Amazon for that page.

Brett:

You are.

Russ:

And so, if you want to take just a step outside of SEO for a second, because you and I are not necessarily in any one discipline of marketing, we know that this is a holistic approach, this type of resources you build, these compare stage and succeed stage resources, let's think about a page you've built that compares the Breville this to the One Touch that, right? That's a good piece of content to go out to a prospect email list, to go out to do paid ads, to drop out onto social media. It's not the sexiest thing in the world, but the clicks you're going to get are very high intent, that's why the word intent is so important.

Russ:

If I click on a comparison between this and that, man, you've got a potential buyer right there.

Brett:

For sure.

Russ:

And if you can find a way to either ascend them from that page with a call to action, or re-target them, or use all the different things we have at our disposal to bring that person back into the funnel, these are really powerful, I call them money pages, this is a money page that you're building, and that's what you want to be building is money pages.

Russ:

And then, on the backend with that succeed stuff, using your email list to drip out succeed stage content to people that bought your espresso machine, or whatever it is you sell. Would Brett a week after he bought, if there's a well-timed email that dropped into his inbox that said, "How to create the heart on the top of your espresso machine." He probably would watch that video.

Brett:

I'd be all over it, man. I'd be all over it.

Russ:

So, that's what I mean, is this isn't just about SEO, this is about anticipating intent and producing resources that satisfy that intent and using whatever traffic channels you have at your disposal. Don't limit this to search. But these are really great search strategies, really great. There's going to be some volume there, and it's super high intent.

Russ:

And then on the succeed stuff, we used to have a metric when I worked at SalesForce, every piece of content that we produced that was in that succeed stage, that would help people use SalesForce's software better, on the team that I was on every visit to that page represented a number, and that number was the amount of money it cost us to pay a customer service representative to walk somebody through that same process that was on that page, it's called call deflection or ticket deflection. It's actually represented in our team's metrics that visits to these pages represent customer satisfaction and loyalty, and call deflection, ticket deflection, right? Reducing the amount of customer service tickets that we were receiving and phone calls we're getting into call centers, using content ...

Brett:

Which is real economic value.

Russ:

Yeah. This is the kind of stuff where you go in, as a content marketer anyway, which none of you guys are necessarily, but this was my goal from the time I started becoming a content marketer all the way through to now is how does content marketing actually affect real business goals? And this is how you do it: you optimize for the comparison of two espresso machines and people start, you catch on to a good ranking there, you're going to make money off that page. You go run some traffic to it out of Facebook, or whatever, or buy that keyword at the top with AdWords, or whatever, and experiment with different traffic sources because this isn't just about search.

Brett:

Love it, man. This was super, super powerful stuff. Very, very valuable. Let's transition a little bit, let's talk about The Clikk. So, TheClick.com, your newsletter. So, why a daily newsletter? What inspired you to do this? Why you doing it? And tell us a little bit about it.

Russ:

So, The Clikk is an email first content marketing plan, on my part, and right now it's the only place you can get the content that I'm producing is by subscribing to this newsletter. The Clikk, it's spelled C-L-I-K-K, somebody said, "Why didn't you get C-L-I-C-K?" I said, "Because the domain was gone." So, it's C-L-I ...

Brett:

..a million dollars for it.

Russ:

C-L-I-K-K. They did, they wanted something ridiculous for it and I was like, "Ah, I kind of like this anyway." So, why email? A couple of reasons. I've been watching a couple of other businesses for a few years now, TheSkimm.com has become a legitimate publisher in this world, they're email first. TheSkimm.com has eight million subscribers, or something ridiculous.

Brett:

Wow.

Russ:

The Hustle, The Morning Brew, these are a couple that are in more of the Wall Street Journal type content space, and they're doing really well. And it's not hard to figure out why. Email is still the most powerful channel when it comes to actually getting pe- I talk to people all day long about business and all this stuff, and they'll talk to me about social media, and using Twitter, and using all these different things, and writing blog posts and doing all these things. At the end of the day, we need to own our media, right? You want to own that media and the best way to own your media still is email.

Brett:

It's still super powerful, yeah.

Russ:

So, creating this business has been about really focusing in on a few metrics, which is my conversion rate on the page, and then what are my open rates? And what are my click through rates in TheClikk.com? And creating the best product that I possibly can to keep those numbers as high as possible because it's a publishing play, right? So, it's going to sell ads eventually when it hits scale, and it's been a lot of fun to put together. I have a team of writers that I work with every day, I have a cartoonist, I have a graphic designer that makes cool stuff, and we are here for anybody that is into digital business, and we're creating what we think is the best resource about digital marketing and digital business news, and what's happening with Insta and Facebook and Google, all the big players, all that stuff. And we have a lot of fun in there. I have a little trivia question that I do in there every day, there's cartoons in there, like I said. So, it's fun, it's been a lot of fun to do.

Brett:

Yeah. It's very informative. As I mentioned, I read it every day, I enjoy it, it is fun, it's engaging. And if you listen to this podcast and you said, "Dude, I've got to have more Russ Henneberry in my life." You can have more Russ Henneberry in your inbox tomorrow. The Clikk.com.

Brett:

So Russ, this has been brilliant. Man, thank you so much for coming on. Had a blast, as always. And look forward to catching up at our next event, or whatever.

Russ:

Brett, it's been a pleasure and I will be down at your house in Missouri very shortly for an espresso.

Brett:

For an espresso. Come on, dude. Yeah, anybody's welcome. I'm happy to play barista for a little bit. So, with that I will link to The Clikk and the other resources we talked about, I will put those in the show notes as always. And with that, until next time, as always, thank you for tuning in.

Brett:

That's a wrap. Really good stuff. That was fun.

Russ:

That was fun.

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Mike Ugino is the CMO and co-founder of Sellbrite a SaaS platform for marketplace sellers.  Sellbrite was recently acquired by GoDaddy.  In this episode we breakdown how Mike and his business partner Brian approached building the company with selling it in mind.  We also talk about what the acquisition process was like including saying no to GoDaddy initially.  In this episode we uncover some golden ideas for scaling and exiting your business including:

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Sellbrite - #1 Multi-Channel Selling Software for eBay, Amazon, and More
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GoDaddy - Domain Names, Websites, Hosting, and Online Marketing Tools
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Mentioned in this episode:
The Llama Commerce Show - Demystifying eCommerce Into Actionable, Digestible Bites
The GoDaddy Blog - Online Marketing, Web Design, and Small Business
Influencer Marketing - The $68M Secret You Don’t Know - William Harris - The GoDaddy Blog
Brian Nolan - Co-Founder and CEO of Sellbrite (acquired by GoDaddy)
Idealab
The Carolina Bagel Company and Deli - New Bern, NC

‍

‍Episode 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 this is sort of like a throwback episode, but also with all kinds of stuff that's brand new and exciting and so this is a repeat guest and not only a repeat guest, but this guy was a guest on the very first podcast I did. Shout out to the Llama Commerce show. It's a whole 'nother story in and of itself. I had to go check that... Google that if you want some last and some good information too.

Brett:

This episode of the eCommerce Evolution podcast is brought to you by OMG Commerce and we're thrilled to underwrite this program and bring some amazing guests to you. I have a question for you. How is your YouTube gain? Are you using YouTube to help scale your e-commerce business? Hopefully you're using YouTube both as a remarketing vehicle and also for top of funnel growth. However, if you're like most e-commerce companies, then you're probably not fully leveraging YouTube. I have two free resources for you. The first is a two minute crash course on YouTube ads. I recorded this with the famous Ezra Firestone. You can check that out by looking at the links in the show notes to this show. You can also Google smart marketer and two minute crash course and you'll find the resource there.

Brett:

Also, we recorded a 90 minute webinar outlining exactly how we scale with YouTube. We talk about keys to a great YouTube ad. We talk about audience targeting, we talk about bidding, optimization and much, much more so I highly, highly recommend you check it out. You can also find that linked here in the show notes. It's also at the bottom of the two minute crash course page, so check them out and start scaling with YouTube and now back to the show.

Brett:

My guest is Mike Ugino. He's the co-founder and CMO of Sellbrite. I'll explain what Sellbrite is in a minute, but Sellbrite was just acquired in April. The deal was inked April of this year, bought up by GoDaddy. Now Sellbrite is a GoDaddy company. We're going to talk about what that process was like because I know a lot of our clients, a lot of people listen to this podcast. You're looking for an exit event, so I want to pick Mike's brain and hear a little bit of that story. We're also going to talk marketplaces because that's what Sellbrite does is helps e-commerce companies sell more, sell better on marketplaces. We're going to dive into that as well and have some fun along the way so Mike Ugino, what's up man? Thanks for coming on the show.

Mike:

Hey, hey, thanks for having me back again and then again.

Brett:

Yeah.

Mike:

It's nice to be on with you.

Brett:

Exactly. It's always fun. We were just reminiscing I think in that very first episode. This was pre eCommerce Evolution so this goes back to the Llama Commerce days. You were in your incubator, right? Sellbrite started in an incubator, which is a great story and we were using Google Hangouts at the time and you ended up writing backwards on a dry

erase marker board that was behind you I think, so they would show properly in the pictures, is that right?

Mike:

That's right. If you see behind me now, I have what in real life is properly written and it now looks reversed. At least I'm saying that, let's hope it actually plays out that way when we publish.

Brett:

It actually... Zoom fixes it so it looks correct.

Mike:

Oh well, okay. Well I thought that Google Hangouts did not fix it and it turns out that they did and my backwards writing was indeed backwards.

Brett:

Making people work hard on that but-

Mike:

Unfortunately we edited it out. Me trying to explain that so I looked less stupid than I already did.

Brett:

It's a good time man but yeah. Let's first explain what Sellbrite is and does and just a brief background and then let's get into this amazing growth and we're going to talk about the acquisition story with GoDaddy, because I know there's a lot of people out there listening that would love to be acquired by a company, the size and scope of GoDaddy. What is Sellbrite and what do you guys do?

Mike:

Sure. Sellbrite is a simple software tool and we describe it as the easiest way to sell everywhere that matters, so to list and sell your products on the world's largest marketplaces as well as your e-commerce store. Sellbrite helps brands and retailers to take the products that they sell, make them available for sale wherever they want to sell, manage all their product inventory, manage all their product content, fulfill any orders and do it all in a simple easy to use affordable tool.

Brett:

Yeah, and at first I think it was first introduced to you guys by my buddy William Harris. I think that's maybe how we made the first-

Mike:

Yeah, that's right.

Brett:

...connection and there are other tools that do similar things to what you guys do, but some of them are like crazy, crazy, crazy expensive. You guys are affordable. The tool works fantastically well. Connects inventory, creates this one unified view so you can kind of see everything and yeah, it's a great tool so just check it out for sure.

Mike:

And William by the way... William and I just published our first piece of content on GoDaddy's blog just to... because you brought William up.

Brett:

Nice. I think I may have seen that on Instagram or something.

Mike:

Okay. Good. Yeah, it's a fantastic post on influencer marketing.

Brett:

The influencer marketing.

Mike:

...to some of your listeners that run their own brands and a little bit, but it's an awesome resource that has tons of expert content that hopefully they can get value out of.

Brett:

Sweet so GoDaddy. I'm sure you just Google GoDaddy blog influencer marketing William Harris, Mike Ugino something like that. Also linked to in the show notes somebody would check it out there but yeah.

Mike:

Awesome.

Brett:

I'm eager to read that. That's fantastic. I remember when I first met you and Brian Nolan, who's the other co-founder, awesome guy. Met you guys, I think it's... well first time we met in person and he was at a Magento show or something like that but I know the plan from early on was to be acquired, right? Let's talk about this... I don't know if that was the plan in the very, very beginning, but it seems like it's been a while you've been thinking about it. Did that shape your thinking from the very beginning or was it not until you got into the business a little while before you decided, hey, we could potentially sell this one day?

Mike:

Yeah, I think there was always the thought early on that this business would be attractive to potentially a larger strategic acquirer. I don't think we had misgivings that we were going to build a Facebook level business because it's pretty niche. We target e-commerce businesses of which there are many and we knew we could build a wonderful business, but there was always another thought that there could be value there with the right partner but then also that we felt we could build a very large business and continue to run it on our own.

Mike:

I think we went into it thinking, let's consider both paths and it'll sort of work itself out as long as we focus on building a valuable company and then once we raised money focused on creating value for our shareholders.

Brett:

I think that's key. Build a valuable company first is what we're offering and what we're doing. Does it matter? Do people love our product? Are they passionate about our product? Are we making a difference? And then that's going to create options, right? It's always good to be in a position where you don't have to sell, where you could just keep tracking along and make great money because that usually leads to a better deal in the end for you.

Brett:

Let's talk about this process a little bit. What do you think you guys did right in the formative years as you were kind of building the company and then as you were getting closer to sell, things that you're looking back, you're like, hey, that was a pretty good... pretty decision. I'm glad we did those things or some of the-

Mike:

Sure.

Brett:

Some of your good decisions.

Mike:

That's a great question. From the very beginning, I think we were forced to be scrappy and frugal. We never had a whole lot. When we started the company we scraped together what little we had, actually pretty much cashed out my IRA to build our first product, which I don't recommend doing..

Brett:

Very risky.

Mike:

I apologize for little bit of background noise.

Brett:

No problem.

Mike:

We started with a little. We built a very small prototype and we operated it for a year trying to grow that tool and use it to prove that there's more that e-commerce businesses need. We immediately got feedback when we launched this product that it's great, but what if it could do this as well? And while we had ideas to build similar small products, quickly it became realization that ultimately this is a piece of what could be a bigger tool and that ultimately became Sellbrite.

Brett:

I love that and one thing I'll kind of add to that because I think this is really important. A lot of times as entrepreneurs we have the false notion that if we just had a ton more cash, that everything would get easier and there is some truth to that but I believe some constraints lead to creativity. Constraints can lead to making really good decisions and doing things that lead to future success. Big fan of Google and Google talks about some of the early leaders like Eric Schmidt for CEO and stuff that having constraints leads to creativity. When you feel like you've got all the money in the world, unlimited resources, a lot of times you don't come up with as good of a product. Like we as humans need those constraints a little bit so don't be afraid of that. Don't back away from that. Constraints can be your friend. I think.

Mike:

I totally agree. I think when your back's up against the wall, if you can thrive in that environment, you're going to do incredible things. I've always been someone who does the best work under pressure. I don't know why. I think maybe it's that if I have too much time I'll iterate and iterate and iterate myself to death..

Mike:

..as a perfectionist but I totally agree and it also forces you to be cautious. Sorry, funny side story on why.

Brett:

That sounds like growth. That sounds like they're expanding or building or something.

Mike:

Yeah, we're growing, yeah... rapidly growing right before my eyes. We are an Internet company and like most Internet companies have pretty terrible Internet in our office building.

Brett:

Prerequisite. If you're an online startup you have to deal with bad WiFi.

Mike:

Yeah, exactly. The whole WiFi drops a lot. Fortunately we've been able to withstand the calls so far, but finally after a few years and thanks to GoDaddy, we're upgrading our Internet infrastructure a little bit. Hopefully no more issues.

Brett:

Yep. Yep. I got us off on a... we went a little bit deeper-

Mike:

That's all right.

Brett:

...so you guys are scrappy in the beginning.

Mike:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, early on so we... It's interesting. We were fortunate to find Ideal app which is an incubator here in Pasadena testing in California where my partner and I met working for another online retailer. We were able to find them and they invested in the company early on and by early, I mean about a year... little over a year after we had launched that first product so it took a while. They have a lot of e-commerce experience, so they understood what we were trying to do even though I think at the time we were a little early in our market and a lot of the investors in LA didn't really understand the value or what it could become but what they asked us to do was kind of prove that there was staying power and that this could be a business.

Mike:

We launched a kind of like a dummy website of the full Sellbrite product and everything it could do with pricing plans and drove traffic to it to test out, could we acquire traffic profitably and could we prove a willingness to pay based on plans selected and then when they wanted to start a trial, we very kindly told them that unfortunately the product wasn't ready, but we'll let them know as soon as it is. That was a really cool exercise because it was very lean startup method and it forced us to start thinking like everything we do, we need to really test and they basically gave us a little bit of money to run that test and then invested more once we proved that.

Brett:

Nice.

Mike:

That was a great start. Ultimately I think what's made us successful is that we've been very focused on trying to build a great product and that's a very challenging thing to do in our particular industry because a multichannel tool means a lot of different things for pretty much everybody. I always cite a story of me growing up. My first job was in my uncle's bakery and my uncle moved from New York to South Carolina, rural South Carolina to open-

Brett:

Whoa, culture shock.

Mike:

Culture shock indeed, but to-

Brett:

To open what?

Mike:

Open a bagel shop in South Carolina, was kind of like a-

Brett:

In rural South Carolina, okay.

Mike:

A really kind of moment and to take it a step further, he decided to name it Carolina bagel, which is that... could be controversial. Pretty much the first bagel shop in the area, in the whole outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina but he made a fantastic product. Fantastic product, and people loved it and it caught on quickly and he was successful and then open a few more bakeries and I think early on that kind of always sank in like if we build a great product, everything else will work itself out. We've focused a lot on building an easy to use tool and making sure that we listen to customers, that we're monitoring to see what they're doing and where they're getting stuck and that we're constantly improving and we have iterated our product over and over and over again and done that at the expense of building more features.

Mike:

Sellbrite is less feature diverse than some of the other tools out there, but it's more consistent and effective at what we've kind of chosen to focus on as a result.

Brett:

Very, very good at what you do and it's simple. It's effective. It just works. Starting with that minimum viable product in the beginning, iterating, getting feedback, testing, improving, all of those things. That's awesome. I love that. Those are some of the things you did while you were scrappy, you tested, constantly improving, focusing on a good product and I think that applies everywhere. That applies to us as an agency. You as a SaaS business, e-commerce companies, if you can obsess about the product, good things are going to happen, right? If you continue to make it better and that happens at the expense of other things, right? Even you had said that like, well, you could build out all these other features or we could just focus on getting better and better and better at these core things.

Mike:

It's also key to know that you are not... in some cases this isn't true, but we were not the primary users of our own product. While we did create the product, because we felt that pain point as retailers ourselves, going forward it was no longer our full day. We didn't use Sellbrite professionally. Where I'm going with that is that you really need to listen to your users and you need to get their feedback and ask them what they want, what they need and sometimes that it all is reading between the lines a little bit because your customers are always going to ask for more than you really can deliver or more than you think is within your wheelhouse but making sure that you don't feel like the product needs to be performing for you I think is key and in particular for direct to consumer brand owners.

Mike:

We're SaaS, we're a software tool and it's a little bit different than if you make a physical product where you really need to have that feedback and you really need to constantly be soliciting the opinions of others because other people are going to also be using your product day in and day out and it's not a... it's much of a relationship thing as with SaaS, like software can stop working maybe for a couple of minutes at a time and then start working again and it's almost... kind of goes with the territory because there's a lot to it. Whereas if you build a physical product and it breaks once, you're going to lose that trust. You know what I mean?

Brett:

Yeah, absolutely and I think it's a really interesting point. I think this... well, let's talk about the agency world and the SaaS world first, because that's where you and I both live. We often start the company, I know this was the case with you guys. You built the

software to help with the need you had, so to help you guys manage better on marketplaces, right? But quickly as you evolve and grow, now you're building this company and it's growing and it's exploding and all these things you're no longer the primary customer. Right? It's easy and for me, when I was building the agency, I was very connected to all our clients. Now I'm still connected to some, it's pretty easy for you to kind of grow to a point where like, okay, I'm not necessarily either the prime customer or super connected to my customer naturally, so we need to have those feedback loops, right? We need to have those feedback loops from customers or else we're going to quickly become irrelevant and I think it is important.

Brett:

It is a little more binary I guess for physical products, right? Where it's either good or bad and you don't get a lot of whole lot of chances whereas with an agency or SaaS you maybe get a little bit of grace and there's some bumps along the road and you fix them and whatnot.

Mike:

Yeah, and there are things you can do to force yourself to be more aligned with your customers or your users. For example, early on, and I attribute a lot of our early success to this. We started a program, we just called it the Sellbrite store program where we actually purchased inventory from some of our customers, promised not to be price competitive with them and used our software to list products for sale and to operate a store and we rotated throughout the company. Everybody managed the store for a week, including all of our engineers, including everybody within the organization and you got unique insights from each.

Brett:

That's amazing.

Mike:

...team member that the team that they're part of, they would see different things and then have an idea on how to improve. It's the old drink your own champagne axiom.

Mike:

I recently heard drink your own champagne and I've upped to that one.

Brett:

Maybe a little more fun, a little more enjoyable.

Mike:

Yeah, we say eat your own dog food as well. It is important to certainly be using your products, but know that you're not the only user and not everybody sees things the way that you see them. Like you need that all feedback from customers who have other things going on in their life.

Brett:

And obsess over the customer, be willing to be wrong when something you think is important, you find out it's not important. Just obsessed over the customer, that's what you got to do. Okay. Next question. What are some things that either you wish you had done differently because they were either mistakes or just waste of time or something or some things that you thought would be important that were not important? Anything that would kind of fall in that list of, we either didn't do great here or we focused on this thing thinking it would be important once an acquisition came along, it wasn't important?

Mike:

It's a great question. I'm going to go more towards the things that I wished we had done earlier. Number one would have been try to fully instrument all of the analytics that you want to see as early on as you can, and I think this is one of those things that no matter how much you try to focus on an early, never gets quite the priority that it deserves but it's incredibly difficult to make strategic decisions in a business about what product to invest in, what feature to add next, which... in our case, which sales channel we want to prioritize or invest more in iterating upon and improving without truly understanding your customer base, how they're consuming your product, everything that goes with that and if yours make a handful of physical products, that'll be a little bit easier.

Mike:

Your instrumentation will be around, go to market strategy and much more kind of marketing focus and cost and fulfillment focused but from a SaaS perspective, understanding how your product is consumed by different types of users is incredibly important and it has taken us a lot of time and we've spent a lot of time that we didn't need to spend over the years just trying to mine insights out of data that's not very easily accessible. That would be one thing for sure.

Brett:

Getting your data clean, accessible in a dashboard type thing as early as possible.

Mike:

As early as possible.

Brett:

It helps you make better decisions anyways. Like even if you're not going to sell for a long, long time, it helps you make better decisions in the moment as well.

Mike:

Absolutely. Understanding who your customers are by vertical, the things that they're selling. You would think that a company like ours should be able to know that pretty quickly but it's actually, if you haven't planned for that and create a kind of a taxonomy for understanding the types of products or categories that your sellers sell within, it's very difficult. All the sales channels have different category structures. You can't just kind of do a quick query by keywords. It's a challenge and then not knowing that you don't necessarily know which verticals are hottest without more anecdotal type as evidence. Similar, and that's just understanding who your customer is and then there's how they use your product, making sure that all the key features and flows in your product are very well instrumented and that you're monitoring where those friction points are. It was later in our lifetime as a company where we really understood how performant our key features were, and so that's certainly something I would recommend to any software entrepreneurs out there is to make sure that you're thinking about that stuff as early on as possible.

Brett:

Yeah. Anything else they're getting... I love that. Getting the data as clean as possible and for an e-commerce store that's partially easy, right? You've got Shopify, you've got Google Analytics, but I think thinking about it at a deeper level, right? Understanding who our customer is, building segments, seeing how people behave and respond and just getting very, very clear with the data and do that as soon as possible. I love that advice. Anything else you wish you would've done sooner?

Mike:

We've always been somewhat restrained from a cash perspective, but I wish we would have hired the folks that are on our leadership team now. I wish we could have hired them earlier, because hiring great people that can execute a strategy and can help manage a growing team is invaluable. We're fortunate to have Angela and Keith on our team, who Angela runs our customer success team and Keith runs engineering who are terrific and I wish we had made the decision to prioritize those positions sooner.

Brett:

I would totally agree with that by the way. Like, there's some key hires we've made first which will be our COO, Sarah who really helped take away a lot of the management of our team away from me so that I can focus more on strategic growth and things. Several years ago was huge and then as we started implementing directors of departments, like our Google ads Director, Greg Maycock. Amazon Director, Chris Tyler, like that helped us grow tremendously and I don't know if we could have done it a whole lot sooner, but I would agree with you like that often will feel like an uncomfortable expense. Hey, I'm stretching a little bit to hire this person or to fill this position, but if you get... one, get the right person, which isn't always easy, but get the right person and two then have that job spelled out properly or give them the freedom to create and really make the job valuable, man, as soon as you can do that. Do that. Absolutely.

Mike:

Yeah, totally. We have changed our target customer as the company has gone on and we'll get into this a little bit as talking and talking about the GoDaddy story but I wouldn't say that we would have necessarily should've done that sooner. It was kind of more of reading the tea leaves and seeing what opportunities exist in the market and how we can truly widen the moat that we have with our product but I do think that the analytics has been something that could have served us so much better earlier on in our career with Sellbrite and then, yeah, like you said, having the right people to help you build an organization is absolutely critical.

Brett:

Any kind of a... similar question, any advice you wish you had gotten sooner? And maybe this is related to those two things, so if it is we can just skip it. No problem but any advice you wish you had gotten sooner or advice you would give to somebody who's looking to sell in the next year to five years?

Mike:

Looking to sell a company?

Brett:

Yeah.

Mike:

Yes. Let's talk a little bit about the story of kind of how we got to this point.

Brett:

Awesome. Will love that.

Mike:

I think that'll open up lots of lessons that I learned and little nuggets of wisdom. Let's see, the year was 2017 and we were approached by GoDaddy to partner with them and build marketplaces... basically an extension to the marketplaces for GoDaddy's online store product and it was super exciting. Ironically, at the time there were a couple of companies that were interested in that type of functionality and so we were having these discussions but we really liked the folks at GoDaddy and their product had a lot of

characteristics that we kind of identified with. It was simple, easy to use. There were clearly a lot of things about it that were well thought out and we decided to enter into a partnership to build them a white labeled version of our product, which we'd never done before.

Mike:

That was in the fall, I believe 2017, and then by the end of the year, right before we kicked off the official partnership, they reached back out with their corp dev team and offered and invited us to join the GoDaddy organization, which was awesome.

Brett:

Which means they wanted to buy you at that time.

Mike:

Right. They wanted to... made us an offer to acquire the company. We were on the verge at the time. We had just kicked off some smaller partnerships with other integration partners and we were really on an exciting trajectory and felt that it wasn't the right time for us to join forces with GoDaddy.

Brett:

Was that really tough to come in and say thanks guys-

Mike:

Sure. Absolutely.

Brett:

Did you feel like you might not ever get that deal again? I mean there's at least something in the back of your head saying if you say no now done, door's closed to GoDaddy forever.

Mike:

Absolutely. It is very hard to say no to something like that and trust that you can continue to pull off what has already been a statistical anomaly. I mean the fact of the matter is we raised very little money, so we're a largely bootstrapped and grew by... through our-

Brett:

Which is pretty rare for SaaS. I mean SaaS usually has to have some kind of-

Mike:

Totally. Very much so.

Brett:

...backing. They're expensive to start and operate in the beginning.

Mike:

We never had a large marketing budget, so we were not driving a lot of growth through rapid escalation about expend. A lot of it was organic. A lot of it was doing things but looking back I would say it was the right way. We were really focused on customer experience, driving great reviews, getting ourselves positioned with partners and app stores that we knew would provide a good return and that it would be fair with us and growing the business that way and so we decided to pass on the offer and instead pursue the partnership. Then in 2018 we started-

Brett:

Did that ruffle any feathers or was everybody kind of cool with that?

Mike:

I think it might have. I think whenever a corp dev team doesn't get a deal that they want it's obviously they were... that's what they wanted. Right? And so that's their job and so there was a little bit of not hostility, but... I think that's just kind of how that...

Brett:

That's the way it works. I mean, there's going to be some bruised egos. Some people are going to be disappointed like, hey, this was my goal, was to get this deal done. You're saying, no, now I look bad potentially, things like that.

Mike:

Yeah and that's okay because ultimately there was nothing that was in bad faith. I mean we had no ill will against GoDaddy. We were very excited about working together and what made it so hard is that we had not really officially been working in a development capacity with them yet, but we saw the opportunity, we felt like culturally we already fit well. It did made sense but it just wasn't the right time. In the next year we started building this integration and it was a monster of an integration to build. I mean we had never white labeled our software before and we were now having to rethink how it operates as an extension of another platform. Our product operates as its own source of truth and our customers use it and then connect to all their sales channels.

Mike:

In this world, we're building a solution that kind of fit on top of GoDaddy's online store and use that as its source of truth. It was a complex problem to solve but a cool problem and one that we really enjoyed working with them on but over the course of that year, the rest of the business suffered as we took our eye off of it and were focused so much on..

Brett:

It makes sense like what you focus on grows. What you don't focus on doesn't.

Mike:

Absolutely. That year, 2018 was a chaotic year for us and a scary year because we got to a point where we had hit... in SaaS we call it a growth plateau. A SaaS plateau where our new business coming in is kind of being evened out with our churn and so we needed to figure out how to continue to grow and reduce churn and we, in addition to building this white labeling solution for GoDaddy, invested a lot of our time and engineering resources into iterating on our core product features and flows, making the product a lot better, completely changing our business model. We changed our pricing plans and introduced a whole new like way that we bill. Previously it was based on things like your channel count and your skew count and now it was based on orders and for the most part we package our plans very differently and basically re-engineered the company from top to bottom.

Mike:

We also had to lay some people off, which was the hardest thing that I had ever done but our team was resilient and rallied around us. Fortunately because our team is so amazing after that and that was Q2 of 2018. Now we were about four or five months after having declined this offer thinking, oh crap like this never happened and we have an obligation to build this functionality and it could be that now the deal or it's not as attractive if we are kind of forced to sell the business but fortunately again, we made all of these changes and things started to pick up again and we were able to rapidly accelerate our lead growth. We were able to increase our conversion rates, we were able to reduce churn.

Brett:

Can you talk a little bit about that? Like what did you do to rapidly increase lead flow in any... I know that could be probably a podcast all by itself but any quick wins there you talked about.

Mike:

Sure. Well, I mean we invest a little bit more in marketing, but what we did was in conjunction with spending a little bit more in direct response, we implemented some better qualification tools to make sure that the right types of merchants were coming in to the platform so that our team that helps onboard and train and retain and support our customers was efficient with the time that they were spending and we were focused on good customers that were going to be a part of... that we could really help.

Brett:

Yeah. Part of fixing churn is just attracting more of the right people.

Mike:

Right, and also filtering out some of the wrong people and there are a whole variety of reasons why any commerce brand wouldn't be right for Sellbrite and Sellbrite wouldn't be right for them and that's totally okay and a lot of times they... fast forward a year and we're a better fit or they've outgrown the need for a solution like Sellbrite and it's just like kind of timing and a lot of times it is just their focus is on something that's a little bit outside of our focus but those things change as well. Making sure that we're as efficient as possible with the customers that we were working with and that wasn't a really a big part of it. Also like I said, we really improved our core product flows, so increased or decreased the time to value for using Sellbrite, made onboarding a lot easier.

Mike:

We invested a lot in content around training, how to use the solution and in conjunction with what was really a shift down market so the new pricing plans that we introduced were actually cheaper plans. We also built for what a future looks like at scale under that model by leveraging more one to many tools, more webinars, more kind of group training sessions, more content specifically devoted to your first few days with the solution and those things were hugely impactful because it allowed us to bring more customers in the door and onboarded on the platform. So-

Brett:

As you start growing against the vintage, did you guys initiate the conversations again with GoDaddy or did they approach you again or how did that all transpire?

Mike:

We kind of felt all along that there was a chance that things could come back around and we wanted to obviously make sure that we were continuing to deliver on our promise as a partner, but that the business was going in the right direction. Those couple of months leading up to having to lay folks off and in a couple of months thereafter, we had already started all of these improvements in advance of the layoffs because we knew that things needed to... we needed to make changes, but it took us a good six months for things to really take root and then come towards the end of the year and we were contacted again by GoDaddy. We may actually have reached out to them and said, "Hey, let's have a conversation." And we started up the talks again.

Mike:

By that point the business was stronger. We were more positioned to be a successful integration with GoDaddy's products because we were now more positioned on the long tail of e-commerce market. Very few providers of tools like Sellbrite even dare to

try, let alone want to try going downmarket to support smaller merchants but we knew that we had the easiest to use product and we knew that it's the fastest growing part of the market and it made a lot of sense for us to really focus there. It was a big risk for us but it was a calculated one. Really one that we felt like we could really pull off and it also aligned us very well with what GoDaddy was trying to do. On top of that, we were by that point also chatting with other potential acquirers and... that's a really important piece-

Brett:

Did you approach these other buyers? Did you work with a broker? How did these other potential suitors know that you were potentially for sale?

Mike:

Yeah. We did not work with a broker. We considered it but nobody really knows our business like we do and I don't think that there would have been any added value for us in hiring a broker. If you're doing absolutely huge deals, I can see it being more relevant, private equity type stuff but for us we really knew who the most logical potential acquirers would be and who would be interested and while there are always interested parties that are outside of your strategic world, rarely does that I think work as well in the long run post acquisition and team transition and things like that.

Brett:

You want to sell to a strategic partner, right? Because there's usually upside on the backend for you. Usually you're given, hey, stick around or if we hit these performance targets over the next couple of years, your earn-out is greater. Right? So it's thinking about the longterm success, always like good for your customers but better for you in the long run too.

Mike:

That's a big part of it, but also to the right strategic knows the value of what you do and what your team brings to the table. A value buyer or private equity is going to want to strip the company down to its parts and then sell them off or get rid of the ones that he doesn't want.

Brett:

Sure.

Mike:

They're not going to be as optimistic or as forward thinking in terms of what the future market could look like if you're a software integrated with their go to market operation and what we really focused on in talking with GoDaddy was that post-close, is where we really develop value together and what Sellbrite could do in the hands of GoDaddy's team and marketing organization and customer base, like what it could look like and those are really exciting conversations to have, and also there are a lot of skills and skillsets that I think we can bring to the organization that have... there's opportunity there to kind of supplement what already exists and GoDaddy's a fantastic organization. A very interesting and I think a lot of times misunderstood organization that's doing some super cool things and I'll talk about that... I want to talk about that in a minute because I think-

Brett:

Yeah, absolutely.

Mike:

...there's some valuable stuff there. Going back to being in this process, we had some partners that had interest for a while and that we'd always talked about joining forces who we're kind of saying, hey just to let what things are kind of heating up and then some others that reached out to us and some others that we reached out to because at that point now we had developed a white labeled capability to add our products functionality onto the stack of another large shopping cart or another large organization and enable their customers to seamlessly leverage the marketplaces and so we were excited about that and we developed a go to market rhythm around discussing that and talking with potential partners, so that then led to conversations. By the time we got back into this conversation with GoDaddy, there were some other interested suitors and I think that really changes the dynamic a little bit.

Brett:

It has to, right. I mean, if a potential suitor is bidding only against themselves, they're not very motivated to give you a great deal, right so-

Mike:

Yeah, I mean that-

Brett:

Sorry. Did you approach these other potential buyers or did they approach you?

Mike:

A combination.

Brett:

Great.

Mike:

Some had approached us and others we had reached out to, not specifically to talk about being acquired but to talk about partnering.

Brett:

Great.

Mike:

Yeah.

Brett:

Pretty cool. Kind of a-

Mike:

And I do recommend that. I do recommend if you're in this stage, think about what value you would bring to another organization. What is the draw and the what can you do post acquisition together and then think about how you could turn that value into something that helps your business even if you weren't acquired by that company. If there's a partnership that you can do where you can add value to them, but that would allow you to continue to operate independently, that's fantastic. Especially if that's your goal. If you want to remain independent, that's totally okay but those conversations have a way of then turning into corp dev, M&A type conversations.

Brett:

Very cool. Any lessons or takeaways from the negotiations themselves? I'm sure there's a lot you can't talk about, which is totally cool, but any lessons or takeaways, any advice you would give to someone during that negotiation stage? And then also would love to know why you ultimately chose GoDaddy versus some of the other potential buyers.

Mike:

Sure. Let's see. What can I say and what can't I say? It was a very above board process. It is a very emotional process.

Brett:

I think it's gotta go back to and sorry to interrupt you. Part of it probably goes back to, hey, we found some potential partners who were great, like the culture lined up. We could add value to them. There's already some experience there, so like once you do that then probably the negotiations are relatively smooth, right?

Mike:

Yeah. Well we had established great working chemistry together and so while you had these corp devs conversations going on on one hand you can kind of back channel if you will or talk with your sponsors and supporters within the organization about how things are going and it is a very emotional process when you are considering selling your company and then you're tasked with putting a value on the company or rather the value has been told to you and you either agree with it or disagree with it. It's an emotional process to wrestle with that. The second time around we came into it with more of a stronger position and we were able to use that to our advantage but I think no matter who you are and who you're selling to even if it is the perfect acquirer, there will be points where you ask yourself, why am I doing this, this is terrible, or how dare they say this to me or, like you feel dejected or like you're not very valuable or just a whole host of emotions.

Brett:

Sure.

Mike:

It is important to remember that... Oh actually, let me take that step further. It's easy to think that somebody is trying to play a game with you or that they're out to get you, right. Like, you potentially have everything that you've worked hard to build in then you feel like it might be robbed from you. Right. I think that's incredibly normal.

Brett:

Sometimes we don't realize how much emotion we have wrapped up into our company and I think that comes to light and I've actually heard about another entrepreneur friend of mine whose deal went south and I think a lot of this came into play. Like there was emotion and how dare you, and this is my baby. Not that you would say that necessarily, but yeah, I think sometimes we don't realize the emotion we have wrapped up in our business.

Mike:

Yeah. It's very hard to feel... or very easy to feel like things that are going to be taken from you or somebody is out to get you and to let emotions get the better of you but at the end of the day, I think most and I'm specifically going to talk about corp dev because that's who you engage with the most in an M&A process. That's generally the department within an organization that's liaising with you. Most corp dev folks are good people that have a lot of things going on, a lot of other deals that they're working on and aren't trying to be sinister. Right? You just have to take every conversation as a list of facts or expressions and then you reply to them and it's just kind of a slow, very slow dance and kind of negotiating and then you get through it. And fortunately, I mean my partner, Brian and I, we've gotten each other to talk things out.

Brett:

Helps. Yeah.

Mike:

Huge advantage. We also have a board. Some idea lab folks were on our board as well as some other advisors that have been through this and that's a huge advantage when you have somebody that you can talk to, and if anybody's going through this, I'm also happy to talk with anybody directly or personally-

Brett:

That's awesome, appreciate that.

Mike:

I think reaching out to someone that has some experience with this helps navigate some of those emotional minefields because it can be a very traumatic process letting go of something or feeling like you're going to let go of something and miss a fine print or something of that nature, but most of the time these things happen in good faith, especially when it's a strategic acquisition. It's a value buyer, private equity, you kind of know going in like, this is your only real option and that's what they do.

Brett:

Yeah. Really good insights. Really good insights. What about things you've learned from GoDaddy since the acquisition? Because I think, and I don't know how relevant this is, but it seems like people maybe when they think GoDaddy, they just think old Superbowl ads or something like that, maybe that's a little bit older, but like that's the perception, but GoDaddy's doing some amazing things and we're just talking about their offices in Carlsbad, California. They're two minute walk from the beach and employees go surf in the morning or lunch or whatever and they're doing a lot of really cool things. We'd love for you to talk about that, but what have you learned from GoDaddy and the people can apply to their own businesses?

Mike:

Yeah, well there's a lot that I've learned both just in terms of how big organizations work as well as really cool things that can add value no matter who you are or at what stage you're at. It's certainly been a bit of a transition for us going from a team of 20 to a team of 9,000 but GoDaddy for an organization that large operates surprisingly nimbly and operates very much in kind of like a startup like manner.

Brett:

Love it.

Mike:

They're also incredibly employee and team focused. A lot of people don't know this, but GoDaddy was just ranked in the top 50 by USA Today of companies for benefits and workplace satisfaction and they came in number 11 above Apple, above LinkedIn, above Comcast, like some big companies and it's not a surprise, it's a fantastic company to work for. They're very focused on training and in terms of just education and educational opportunities, they're focused on giving back. I'm actually wearing a GoDaddy for Good T-shirt, which is one of the charitable organizations within GoDaddy where we do more kind of traditional charity and volunteering work.

Mike:

I also was fortunate to participate in a program called Empowered by GoDaddy where GoDaddy has local market partners that serve... like underserved areas and basically recruit entrepreneurs or people looking to start businesses or around businesses seeking help and offers the whole breadth of GoDaddy's product. Whether that's domains, hosting, e-commerce solutions, marketing solutions for very little. In most cases they're free, as well as educational content, training. I participated in an hour long

training with several dozen entrepreneurs just talking about e-commerce and it was awesome because you get questions from the most basic of like, why should I start an e-commerce? Or why should I pursue e-commerce as part of this business to very granular strategies, so you have this whole range of folks that are just trying to figure things out and GoDaddy is so entrepreneur friendly. They encourage all their employees to have side hustles. They make all the tools available.

Brett:

Which is really smart because I think it makes for better employees, right? You have a side hustle. I know Shopify is on the same thing where hey, support people, we want you to own a Shopify store. You play around with this, have your own sandbox. Make this work. If you do that, you're going to be a much better employee and much better at support and things like that.

Mike:

Totally. They're incredibly customer focused. So GoDaddy's support is pretty famous. Nearly 7,000 of the people within the organization are part of the care organization and that models a lot of what we do, which is really focused on providing fantastic support and being there when our customers need us, but underneath it all, it's like you said it's... most people think of GoDaddy and they kind of hearken back to those old Superbowl commercials and it being a little bit kind of chauvinistic in its branding not necessarily as a reflection of the company's values as they are. A lot of those ads are 10 plus years old.

Brett:

Yeah.

Mike:

They spend a lot of effort to focus on changing the culture of the organization and the way that it goes to market for years now, but what a lot of people don't know is that in addition to being a highly charitable entrepreneur and kind of giving back focused company, it's also a very compelling tech company story. GoDaddy's not traditionally known as a tech company, but there's fantastic talent. They're developing really awesome software solutions. We're very fortunate to be now a part of that and I'm very bullish on the future of GoDaddy. I think that you're going to see them really not start knocking off some of their competitors and become more known as a forward thinking tech company over the course of the next several years, but-

Brett:

And I think it's hard to overstate, if you can create this environment where you're one of the best places to work, right? Where people want to work for you, they're passionate about working for you. A quick plug to OMG Commerce, we did make the 2019 best workplaces for Inc. magazine, which we're super-thrilled about.

Mike:

Awesome. So awesome.

Brett:

I think the most excited about, any award or accolade or anything and then we've kind... that's been my favorite, but if you can do that, if you can attract and keep good talent. We just talked about how important the right hires are, but a lot of that means you've got to build a company where people want to be there. If you could do that and then also obsess over customers, you're going to do well. You're going to figure things out. You're going to be able to make a go of it. So, yeah, really good. Other lessons, other the

takeaways from GoDaddy or the things you've observed that you've been impressed with?

Mike:

I have definitely observed a focus on continuing to improve coordination amongst teams. GoDaddy happens to be a company that is very inquisitive, so they bring in a lot of companies like Sellbrite.

Brett:

It can be tough to get this separate culture to get them acclimated and integrated with other teams. That's tough.

Mike:

Totally. We were fortunate to have a fantastic woman by the name of Judy who led basically our whole integration work stream that covered then every single part of the business and making sure that we were able to liaise with the right people within GoDaddy, worked through kind of a first 90 days checklist and made sure that our team felt welcomed. We had a party with them. The day that we announced the deal on April 10th we had everything ready to go from an HR perspective on day one so that there were no questions. Like it was just a fantastically organized rollout and integration and I can't imagine it going better, but when you bring in companies like that, it can create a lot of miscommunication or uncertainty and how the organization is structured and it's a very fluid, I think most big companies... you're like the reorg concept happening a lot, but GoDaddy seems a little bit more fluid to where the reorganizations kind of makes sense and there are like small iterations and improvements on things as we go along and so that's really impressive to see.

Mike:

Senior leadership is very hands on with their teams and their team's teams, which is fantastic. We've gotten to know really everybody within the organization, which has been awesome for a company that size already and we're six months in, but I think the continued focus on workplace satisfaction and career development is absolutely refreshing and so one of the reasons that we were so excited to join GoDaddy is that we knew our team, we're going to have opportunities. Our whole team followed us along, which is amazing, which is rare.

Brett:

Awesome.

Mike:

...and we're working with them to figure out what... not that they can't continue to do what they do, but like if there's anything else that they're looking to learn about, like there are paths. I'm discovering those and it's a pretty exciting conversation to have.

Brett:

I love it. Is there anything you're doing, and suddenly this is kind of happening naturally and this is maybe the way GoDaddy operates but start as a team of 20... not start as a team of 20 but you were a team of 20 right. How are you keeping the Sellbrite culture, the energy, the vibe you guys had now that you're part of a team of 9,000? Any insights there?

Mike:

Yeah, I mean it certainly is a challenge but a very welcome one. GoDaddy has been very good about wanting us to stay as a team and we were still in our office, we're incorporating more GoDaddy branding but we want that. We want our team to feel like

they're part of the organization and vice versa but at the same time we still operate our own product or standalone product. We are going to likely make that a GoDaddy branded product, but we're not forced to do it immediately and GoDaddy realizes the value in not rushing that out so we're able to still kind of maintain our brand presence and identity with the team, at least internally and then externally with customers for a period of time to make sure that it's a smooth transition and everybody is ready for it, and that includes all of our partners and anybody who depends on Sellbrite kind of being what it says it's going to be and not changing into something else. That's been huge.

Brett:

Yeah, love it.

Mike:

I think we still do the things that we do on our own. We still celebrate milestones. We have been fortunate to ... we can send folks to other offices to meet people if they want, which is a great way to kind of integrate them and get familiarity with your organization and then on the reciprocating end we have a lot of folks that come visit us, so we're able to kind of show off the culture and the team that we built that GoDaddy wanted. It's been a very good kind of two way process to bring us onboard but to ensure that the team feels like they're still... they're not losing anything.

Brett:

Very cool. Well, it's been fun for me and I've been watching very much from afar but, hearken back to our early conversations and to see the way you guys have grown and then I know the acquisition has been really ideal and really smooth. I'm sure there's always... as with anything there's price and bumps along the way, but very smooth and probably couldn't have gone any better, which is awesome and so I think hopefully this will give some encouragement to people that are looking to, either they're building their e-commerce brand or a software company building for that exit. Do it the right way.

Brett:

I love the advice of doing the negotiation... like just try to be objective. Know the emotions are going to creep in there, but try to be objective. Really good stuff, Mike. I think we've actually got a lot of time. I was going to talk marketplaces with you, but we're right up against about an hour so plenty to-

Mike:

That's all right.

Brett:

...but it's been super, super good. I love that offer. Like people can hit you up on social media, if they have questions or something.

Mike:

You're going to think all sorts of wild things that you might want to do or how could they, or, I can't ask for this or concerns that you may have or things that you haven't thought of that might get worked into a deal that you need to be looking out for. Having good advisors, having great attorneys that have been through this before..

Brett:

Absolutely.

Mike:

...had great attorneys. Don't be frugal about that. We had attorneys, they were expensive, but looking back on it now, I've never once thought about it as, wow, that was expensive. It's totally worth it.

Brett:

It's totally necessary. You're going to get... something's going to go bad if you don't have a good attorney. No doubt that. Awesome Mike. Much appreciated. We'll link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. We would check you out there, but it's Mike Ugino, U-G-I-N-O, so check him out on LinkedIn with that, buddy. Thank you so much. Excited to see what you and GoDaddy cook up here in the coming months and years is going to be fun.

Mike:

You're the man.

Brett:

All right.

Mike:

Looking forward to next time.

Brett:

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Mike, and as always, we appreciate you as well tuning in. We'd love to hear feedback. What are some burning topics? Some questions you have in the world of e-commerce or online marketing that you'd like answered? We would like to know, we would like to address those right here on the show, and so with that, until next time, thank you for listening.