An eCommerce Podcast Hosted by Brett Curry

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
Via Facebook
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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

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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!

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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

‍

Connect with Guest:

Anmol Oberoi - Founder and CEO at Emitrr

 Via LinkedIn

 Via Facebook

 Via Twitter

 Via Instagram

Emitrr - Giving Voice to Businesses

Via LinkedIn

Via Facebook

Via Twitter

Via YouTube

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:
Via LinkedIn
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Via Instagram

Electric Eye Agency - A Free Daily eMail from Your Friends in Digital Business
Via LinkedIn
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Via Instagram

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.

‍

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:

See Transcript Below...

‍

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

Sellbrite - #1 Multi-Channel Selling Software for eBay, Amazon, and More
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Via Instagram
Via YouTube

GoDaddy - Domain Names, Websites, Hosting, and Online Marketing Tools
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Via Instagram
Via YouTube

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.

Who doesn’t love a good story? As humans, we’ve relied on storytelling for entertainment, education, and preservation of culture since the beginning of time. Storytelling is also for marketers.

During my first sales job at a local radio station my boss sagely advised me that “facts tell, but stories sell.” I’ve never forgotten that lesson. In this episode, I chat with the charming Jaime Cross the founder of MIG Soap. From her kitchen table to now a multi-million dollar eCommerce business Jaime has grown largely based on great products and solid storytelling.  Here’s a taste of what we cover:

• What’s the psychology behind storytelling?
• How good storytelling can increase the perceived value of a product by 2x or more.  
• Common storytelling mistakes to avoid. 
• The process MIG uses to get their overall story right…and then to get the story right for each product.  
• How to turn customer testimonials into stories
• How do you deliver your story across email, product detail pages, and more.  
• Storytelling resources

‍

Connect with Guest:

Via LinkedIn

Via Facebook

Via Twitter

Via Instagram

‍

MIG Soap & Body Co - Organic Skin Care and Body Products

Via LinkedIn

Via Facebook

Via Twitter

Via Instagram

‍

The HER Effect

Via LinkedIn

Via Facebook

Via Instagram

‍

The HER Effect Podcast on iTunes

‍

Mentioned in this Episode

Blue Ribbon - Smart Marketer

Russel Brunson

Ultimate Marketer's Blueprint to Funnel Hacking - ClickFunnels

Funnel Hacking Live 2020

Ezra Firestone - CEO at Smart Marketing Inc.

"Building a Story Brand" book by Donald Millers

‍

Episode Transcript

Brett Curry:

Well hello and welcome to another edition of the E-commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and man, I love digging into stories of real entrepreneurs, real e-commerce store owners that are out there making it happen and you're going to love the story we're going to share it today and the guest that I have on the podcast today. I was at Blue Ribbon a few months ago as her Firestone's mastermind, heard Jaime Cross tell her story, and I was blown away and grabbed her right after and said, "Hey, you got to come on the podcast," and thankfully she agreed. This episode of the E-commerce Evolution Podcast is brought to you by OMG Commerce and we are thrilled to underwrite this program and bring some amazing guests to you. I have a question for you. How is your YouTube game? Are you using YouTube to help scale your e-commerce business?

Brett :

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. So, 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, so 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. 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 :

Well I'm delighted to welcome Jaime Cross. She's the CEO of MIG Soap and has been tremendously successful and has massive, massive plans and this huge vision for the future, which I'm really excited about. And so we're going to get into a topic that I love and we're going to talk about story selling. And so we'll uncover what that means here in just a moment. But with that, Jaime, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Jaime Cross:

Thank you, Brett. So great to be here.

Brett :

Yeah, yeah, and love your story. Love the topic that you shared in Seattle at Ezra's event. And so we're going to dive in. We're going to uncover this subject called story selling. And you guys have done a beautiful job of this. And so we're going to be going deep on what you guys are doing and how you're doing it and how that's works for your business and things like that. But first, I think it'd be fun for people to hear the story of, one, what does MIG stand for? Right? So what is MIG Soap? And then let's do the three to five minute origin story because you've got an amazing story. We're both people of faith and I love the story of how you started your company. And I think this could be inspirational to some people as well. But first, what does MIG stand for?

Jaime:

Yeah, MIG stands for Mighty In Good.

Brett :

Mighty In Good. And why did you land on that name?

Jaime:

Yeah, well MIG was one of the... It's part of the dream that I had. I saw it in my dream coming up out of these oils and that was one of the things that I was really like, "What is this MIG?" And we went through phases of, maybe it's this, what really speaks to who we are? And as we began to really build depth in our brand, Mighty In Good, just something that we landed on, because it's not just our products, it's our culture, it's our sourcing. Everything that we do is literally Mighty In Good, so.

Brett :

Yep. I absolutely love that. We talk a lot at OMG Commerce about culture and how we help our team grow, and develop, and... We talk about always being... We're all about accelerating growth, individual team growth and our clients growth. But I think when you begin to look at your business as, we're more than just great products, right? We're more than just great marketing. We're more than just a good story. We are impacting the people that are on our team, we're impacting our customers, impacting our suppliers. That, to me, that's when business becomes fun. When you're doing more than just your products, which you guys are absolutely doing. So walk us through... How did MIG come to be and what's your story that kicked this thing off?

Jaime:

Yeah, so I found myself... I was in corporate banking years ago, finance, wealth management, all kinds of... Just all the finance world, and came home to be home with our newborn and two years into full-time motherhood, I found myself in the position where I think a lot of mothers find themselves. Is there more to life than changing diapers? I feel like there's more.

Brett :

Yes.

Jaime:

There's something stirring in me. Big purpose. I wanted to change the world and I grew up a dreamer and I always wanted to do big things. And so I was in this stage two years into full-time motherhood where I felt like, man, I'm supposed to build something, I'm supposed to do something. And having given up a huge salary, my husband was a full time teacher and wrestling coach and I think we were living on $1,800 a month after taxes. And we couldn't... We weren't paying our bills, and so there's this sort of perfect storm of, there's got to be more and we need a radical shift in our financial future. I looked at my future and it totally haunted me.

Jaime:

So in one desperate night, I just lie in bed, bricks in my chest bawling my eyes out, crying out to God. And I asked him to show me a billion dollar idea so that I could change the world and leave a legacy for my family, and went to church that Sunday and, in a raw state, just was kind of staring off and not really paying attention to the sermon. And in the middle of nowhere-

Brett :

I've had Sundays like that, yeah.

Jaime:

Yeah, I'm nursing my newborn, struggling through postpartum depression.

Brett :

I haven't had Sundays like that, but I...

Jaime:

And my pastor, he stops the sermon, comes to the edge of the stage and gets everyone's attention and puts his hands on his heart and says, "This has never happened to me before, but the Lord just spoke to my heart and said that there's a stay-at-home mom here who he wants to give a billion." I still cry when I tell this story because it's-

Brett :

It's crazy. It's so cool. Yeah, it's just amazing.

Jaime:

Yes, so he's just said who he... "The Lord spoke to my heart and said that there's a stay-at-home mom here who he wants to give a billion dollar idea to."

Brett :

How crazy specific is that? And first of all, like how crazy is it for the pastor even to say that, right? That's putting himself out there quite a bit. I can look really dumb if I say this and this doesn't happen, or if everyone's just like crickets. But that was directly for you which is amazing.

Jaime:

It totally was, and I was ready to jump out of my chair, but in my heart I was just screaming, "Lord, whatever you give me, I will be faithful with it. Just show me." Because I didn't want to throw my life against the wall like spaghetti and hope it stuck. I wanted the... I think as visionaries too, and entrepreneurs now especially, it's easy for us to look at our future and say, "Man, I don't want to be 80 years old and look back on my life and think I didn't build the life that God put in me to build."

Brett :

Yeah, yeah.

Jaime:

So-

Brett :

Yeah, and I think that, to me, and I know to a lot of other people, and this was kind of an important shift that I think entrepreneurs need to make, it's that understanding that if I try something big and it fails, that would be tough. But if I never try, and if I have this haunting feeling that I could have done more, I had something inside of me that the world needed, that other people needed, and I never let that out? That would haunt you way more than a failure. Right? We all have failures and we grow from failures. That's part of it.

Jaime:

Absolutely.

Brett :

So yeah. Yeah. Really powerful. So you heard the pastor almost his prophetic word, right?

Jaime:

Right.

Brett :

Where do you go from there? Soap doesn't... By the way, just like little commentary, soap doesn't sound like the most logical billion dollar idea. Just throwing that out there.

Jaime:

Exactly.

Brett :

But so where did you go from here?

Jaime:

Yeah. To capitalize on what you're saying, starting something big, every vision starts with being faithful with the little things. And for me it was, I woke up told my husband, "I'm going to start a skincare company." And I had to learn chemistry and Ayurvedic medicine. I went out that day and found books and I was pulling chemistry books off the shelf at the library and Ayurvedic medicine and naturopathic healing. And I did my own research for a year and then formulated our first bar of soap after that first year.

Jaime:

But people think that the destination is the journey. Or no, that the destination is... That's what it's all about, but ultimately we've all heard it. The journey is the destination. Who we're becoming in that process. That's what it's all about. So, started, launched our product after a year of research, and I mean 2:00 AM like nursing babies studying chemistry, a subject I had failed in high school.

Brett :

That's awesome.

Jaime:

Launched the product.

Brett :

Well now you have a reason to study, right? Sometimes in high school you're like, "I don't need this, I'll never use this."

Jaime:

I'm never going to use this, right.

Brett :

Periodic table, I don't need this stuff. Yeah.

Jaime:

Yes, so, took my product... Here's another thing. It's like, okay, now I have a product. I have people coming to me, they're like, "How do I make money?"

Jaime:

I'm like, "Well what do you have in your hands?"

Jaime:

"Well I have an insurance company."

Jaime:

"Okay, go sell insurance." I'm like, "Okay, I have this soap, I need to go sell it." So I'm just walking up and down the streets of Denver, calling my mom saying, "Hey, can you load the babies up? Because I need to work." So she would drive eight hours a day, slowly, while I would walk into these stores asking for owners, and buyers, and showing up in my stilettos ready to do business with these people.

Brett :

You were hustling.

Jaime:

Yeah, and so I did that for wholesale retail for a year. Then I jumped into farmer's markets because I wanted to go deep with our audience and understand what people really wanted. And it was four years of R&D. Proved our product, came to the point where like 95% of people are coming back to my table. After going back to the drawing board, thousands of hours, and reformulating, and reworking my offer, basically. And came to the point where 95% of people are saying my acne is gone, my eczema is gone, my psoriasis is gone. Olympic athletes are saying-

Brett :

Which was that? Was that the intent? I mean, I know you... So you studied chemistry, studied Ayurvedic medicine, if I said that correctly, was the intent to have this healing property or were you just trying to create soap that was clean and that was healthy?

Jaime:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm a farm girl and I'm just super... I understand a lot about the Bible even... Or, not the Bible, the body at that point. That your body's designed to heal itself and so I didn't want to just create a product, I wanted to create something that was naturopathic medicine in skincare. And of course, going to farmer's markets where there's three other companies selling... They would send their people to my table and listen to my pitch and listened to my thing and try to hack my products. Then they'd be launching and saying my... They'd be stealing all my stuff. So I had to get really aggressive about who am I and what do we stand for and what this brand that I'm building and how are we going to separate ourselves in a saturated market where everybody wants to do what I'm doing. So I got really good at that because I'm like, "I will dominate and you cannot touch me," in a sense.

Brett :

Yeah, there's so many things we can dive into right here. One, just your obsession as you dug into the science and the chemistry and you obsessed about building a great product. That's actually a theme that's come across multiple interviews I've done recently, several have not been released yet but with some pretty big names, just talking about, "Hey, really the quality of the product is almost more important now than any marketing strategy or anything like that." So I love that you did that. I also love that as you got into the marketplace... Competition is fierce, right? And there's some unscrupulous players out there, or even just good people, they're trying to make a living too, and they're trying to take from what you're doing. And so you got to be dogging and you got to say, "Okay, who are we as a company? I'm going to be very clear. I'm going to be tenacious. I'm going to be good at sharing this story." And so, love that you did all of those things. So how did you land on "here's our story," or "here's who we are"?

Jaime:

Yeah, that's funny. I mean, so farmer's markets, you're talking to thousands of people. I'm in seven or eight farmer's markets with the whole team after our first year and so I'm talking to a lot of people telling the story over and over again. And I'm literally shaping the the delivery. It's almost the first draft, you've got the second draft, you're writing, you're taking the truth about your story, and you're saying, "How do we tell this in a poetic way?" In a way a way that... because if I told everyone I... "I learned how to make a bar soap and then I launched a company."

Jaime:

They're like, "Oh, that's boring." But if I go back to the emotion of what was going on during that time, I was re-crafting and going deeper and deeper into the poetry of the story. That we all have that, there's a reason that we do what we do.

Brett :

And the beauty of what you were able to do is that you could watch people's faces, right? You could see the reaction. You could see, did this land, did this not land? Did people perk up or did their eyes glaze over? Did they lean in or did they start looking around? You get that instant feedback. I was reminded, I had a client dinner the other day, one of my clients who's in the automotive space, and he said he believes everybody that's going to write copy or be in marketing at all should do door-to-door sales for a little while. That concept may be a little slightly antiquated in some... because there's not a lot of door-to-door sales, but doing something like what you did or just being eye-to-eye with people, sharing a message and reading people? So important in your learning how to craft a solid message, a message that resonates.

Jaime:

Yes. You're speaking my language. I tell people all the time, I'm like, "If you're going to go straight to digital and you have no proof of concept, you need to be in a room with people." And you're talking about what I call EQ selling, being able to be responsive, and changing your inflection, and a good salesperson knows how to-

Brett :

What do you mean by EQ? I know the acronym, but for those that don't.

Jaime:

Oh yeah. So its emotional intelligence basically. EQ versus IQ. You could be the smartest person in the world and not know how to sell somebody a bar of soap. But the best salesmen in the world know how to read people, and respond, and adjust inflection, and know where people are glazing over because you have to shift sometimes, and the last person to speak takes that product home. So I learned how to respond and sell, and then be quiet. And sometimes there's three or four minutes, they're looking at my product, they're smelling it, and I'm not saying a word. I watch people talk people out of their sales just by over-talkie. I did that and went through that for four years and really came to a point where our business... And every time there's been expansion, it's been like, okay Lord, show me what's next.

Jaime:

And I knew going and scaling online. I had avoided wholesale retail. I knew that retail was dying. So we went from farmer's markets to, okay, I need to expand our digital strategies. So found Russell Brunson, long story short, went from, farmer's markets $120,000 every summer just paying the bills, to scaling from doing $1,000 our first day online once I finally had funnel hacked. And that took me about three months, figuring out my copy and my offer, the whole process. Did $1,000 our first day, 130,000 in our first six weeks. And then we've done over 5 million in less than two years.

Brett :

It's amazing. Amazing. Love it. Russell Brunson's a good dude. We actually did a project together back in 2009 so he's a friend and still keep up with what they're doing with click funnels. It's amazing. So that's awesome. So you went, you shifted online, exploded online. And so I want to really dig into this, this topic, we've been teeing it up and getting ready for it, but story selling. And I know this has its origins back in your farmer's market days when you were pitching and sharing that story, but what is story selling and why is it so important for e-commerce?

Jaime:

Yeah, that's a great question. And one of the first things I had to shift from going in farmer's markets where people can pick up my product, smell it, try it, and now you're online and it's like, how do we make this product come to life to people? And stories are the best way to do that. You can write a description of a product, and we talked about this at Blue Ribbon where I'm like, "Here's some really bad descriptions, guys. Don't do this." Don't just talk about the product because ultimately what we're doing is we're speaking to the soul of the person that has a need and we want them to see themselves experiencing our products, enjoying them, and all of that so we can make the whole experience come to life with story.

Brett :

Love it. What's some of the psychology behind storytelling? And why do stories capture us and resonate with us and in such a powerful way?

Jaime:

Oh yes. One thing I loved about teaching about this was I really dug deep into the science of storytelling and what it does to our brains. And so, not only for the audience, but for the person telling the stories. There's a chemical reaction in our brain where you're releasing oxytocin, the love drug, you're releasing all these chemicals in your brain that causes attachment. And like a high, and you're happy, and you're like... So you're hearing this story and it's like I'm making a connection now.

Jaime:

There's what's called... Oh, training, I think? Or entrainment. And it's when your mind and basically your brain connects with the storyteller, and then that product, there's just this whole engagement that happens. So the more you can tell story... And how many of us watch movies and we don't get bored sitting there in a seat for two and a half hours, but we can't wait to see what happens. The transformation in the story. But the whole chemical reaction is just fascinating. Your brain is literally like, give me more story.

Brett :

It's so interesting, and yeah, that's a perfect example, right? We binge watch different series on Netflix where we sit through three and a half hours of The End Game, whatever the new... Avengers End Game or whatever.

Jaime:

Yeah.

Brett :

Because we're made like to love story and there is a chemical release and there's a connection. There's something very scientific that happens, which you don't have to know all that to be able to leverage story. But it's cool to know that, yeah, this is why people connect to brands that... Or part of the reason why, because of the story they're telling themselves, the story they're hearing from the brand. That's what really causes loyalty and people falling in love with a brand.

Brett :

So let's talk about... You told a story, and I'm putting you on the spot a little bit here, so if you don't remember it's no big deal. But I told a story about a journalist who purchased some products on eBay and then resold them. Did you remember the gist of that story? Because I think that does have a powerful example of how important story is.

Jaime:

Yeah, so this journalist gathers a bunch of other writers together and he's like, "We're going to do an experiment." He buys, basically, all this junk on eBay, pays $200 for... I believe it was a hundred different items. So he literally paid $2-

Brett :

A couple bucks a piece, this is not valuable stuff here.

Jaime:

Yeah, exactly. And for every product, they wrote a story for each one, and he ended up turning that $200 into $8,000 and so just think about the percentage and when you... And it's true. Even in our products, going from the very beginning, I was writing descriptions, quote descriptions, where it's just like, "This is what this product is, this is how you use it" to literally personifying the experience. And we don't have any problems selling our product.

Brett :

Yeah, yeah. It's amazing. That was a 40 extra turnover, maybe if I'm doing my math right, of taking these $2 items and then selling them for an average of 80 or whatever. That's amazing. So let's talk about this: how did you, and you alluded to it just a minute ago, but how did you get story wrong in the beginning? So as you were writing your descriptions and talking about your products, what did you have off there? Or what were elements of that that were not connecting with people?

Jaime:

Yeah, for sure. I was just... When I first started, I was just giving people facts. I had a dream, and I learned how to make soap, and now here we are.

Brett :

This contains lavender or whatever is in the product.

Jaime:

Yeah, exactly. People really don't actually care about ingredients. They care about the story. And so I went from just sharing facts about, not only my story, but the product origin stories, into what was going on. The emotional aspect, the transformation that happened in me as a woman as I was beginning to go through this whole process. And of course, we know that there's a 30 second version, and there's a three hour version, and there's a weekend event where you can extend your story out. And so, for me, it was going deeper on the emotional.

Jaime:

Bringing the actual story and getting past the facts and into... Now when I talk about beeswax, because people also really don't care about beeswax unless they know it takes 300 pounds of honey to produce one pound of beeswax. And I just went out to our bee farms and met with our bees and our bee farmer who has hives all across the front range. And our beeswax smells like honey and it's bright orange and it does these three things for your body. It's vitamin A and collagen, and it helps fight acne, and all these things. And so then people are like, "Oh my gosh, now I care about beeswax because there's a story.

Brett :

And I think what's interesting about that is, and I haven't seen specific research around this, this is more anecdotal, but I'm confident it's true. When someone hears the stories... Now, they hear about you, you're traveling to the bee farm and picture that in their head. You're meeting with the bees, I don't know if you're talking to the bees or what. Observing them, meeting with the bee farmer. Yeah, but also 300 pounds of honey, one pound of beeswax. You talk about the color and what's in it and all these things. I bet you, people's enjoyment of your product goes up when they hear the story. Right?

Jaime:

It does.

Brett :

I can think of so many times when I've been to a restaurant, actually this doesn't happen all that often, but I go to a restaurant and someone's just really passionate about telling the stories. "This is how this steak was aged and seasoned and cooked and these are all farm-to-table vegetables and here's how the process goes." I enjoy that so much more than if they'd said, "Yeah, these are fresh vegetables. I think you're going to like them."

Jaime:

Yes. And not only that, but as an entrepreneur, and as a business owner, and I've heard Ezra talk about this, but when you have a brand, and especially built on story, if we're not... The businesses that aren't charging premium prices probably will not be in business long because it has to be premium.

Brett :

Yep.

Jaime:

To hold on. And so the more story you tell... I bet if you knew that this was grass-fed be from a local rancher who has been around for a hundred years and he's got a fifth generation ranch and, like you said, farm-to-table, you'd probably pay $30 for that steak as opposed to $8 at-

Brett :

Absolutely, and my enjoyment would have been higher. I would have been more grateful for that, more excited about that meal than if I'd paid less and had known less.

Jaime:

Yeah. You can charge more when you start incorporating story. Because some people are like, "Oh I understand the premium nature of this thing."

Brett :

And I think that's part of understanding what people want and what's going to maximize their value perception, and their enjoyment, and all that. And really stories is a big part of it. So talk about what are you getting right now? So in terms of story, because I think you guys are just nailing this in so many ways, but what are you getting right now and what's your process as you look to tell your story? About specific products even.

Jaime:

Yeah. So I did our set... We had our own little MIG event here. We had a resort in the mountains. And I started telling and talking about-

Brett :

And this was for your customers? Or who is this for?

Jaime:

These are for women that are basically ambassadors or affiliates for us.

Brett :

Awesome, awesome.

Jaime:

They're like, "We want to know everything." And I realize how much people want to know, "How did you come up with the lotion bar?" And when I tell people that I formulated this lotion, and the first year and a half, I didn't have the formulation right. And I was getting feedback from people over and over and over again, and I had to go back. And so I was literally... My day, when I was... Nathan was still working full-time. I'm full-time mom. I'm putting the babies to bed at eight o'clock at night, and my day began. And I sat at the kitchen for months every night, like taking my 12 ingredients or my 14 ingredients and saying, "How do I adjust these?" So just going deeper into the process, because there's so much richness. And I've been in business now for nine years as a Saturday. It was October 5th so nine years I've been in business now. And there's just so much-

Brett :

Congratulations, by the way. I think it's a tiny percentage of businesses that make it that long. So, congrats.

Jaime:

Thank you. Yeah, so everything we do in business is about speaking, in my opinion, speaking to the soul of a human being and meeting a need. And so there are things that women... Most of our community are women who are moms and they do have dreams and they want to live this powerful life. And when I can tell the story of where I came from, and the pain that I went through to get where I am and that, hey, God has put something inside of you, too. Then they're like... There's so much community and energy around what we're doing because of bringing so many of those emotional stories to life.

Jaime:

And I've heard Russell say this a lot, but don't underestimate the power of your own story. There was a lot... There were years where I thought nobody wants to hear my story. They just want products that work. And the more I've especially just learned about digital marketing more, I'm like, "Wow, people really want to know the details when it pertains to them, when they can connect with what you're saying on an emotional level. When I"... It's not just about our stories, it's because we talk about this too. Somebody comes to your About Us page, is not really about us, it's about them, about how we tell that story in a way that makes them see themselves engaged with your brand.

Brett :

I love that. So pick one of your products, and I'll leave it up to you. Pick one, and describe some of the elements you use for that product to develop this story. Both to give the details and connect with people at the soul level, which is what they want. And also then to allow them to see themselves using it, benefiting from it, all that.

Jaime:

Yeah, for sure. So first is I always introduce our lotion bar, which we're going to change it to the serum stick because it's more of a serum product.

Brett :

Got it.

Jaime:

But I give them like a really quick new opportunity statement, because people don't want an improvement offer, we've learned. They want a new opportunity. I said that right, right? They don't want an improvement offer, yep. They want a new opportunity.

Brett :

Yep, got it.

Jaime:

So the first thing is, this serum stick, you leave it in your shower and right before you get out while your skin is still wet, you're going to apply it all over. And then you don't need to reapply lotion for 24 hours. And they're like, "That's impossible. I have to apply my lotion every three, four hours and my skin is still like alligator." And then so it immediately piques... Why does that work so well?

Jaime:

So then I talk about... The next step is, well the reason it's a new opportunity is because this is a waterless lotion bar. And if you look at the ingredients on your lotion right now, water is probably the first or second ingredient. And, scientifically, water attracts water. So when you're putting water-based lotion on your skin, it's pulling water from your skin and releasing it to the air, what you need is a humectant. And that's what beeswax does.

Jaime:

And so then I talk about the three secrets. This is where my perfect webinar comes in and I talk about the three secrets of beeswax and why it's so powerful for your skin. And then at that point, people are so intrigued, and they try the product. And then I'm like, "Here's the mom story about how I came up with this and discovered this and like spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours in my kitchen burning the midnight oil. Taking care of sick babies and reformulating so that I can deliver. And meeting with farmers and sourcing raw ingredients and bypassing the whole big beauty industry and controlling our own process. Because we manufacture all of our own products."

Jaime:

And then they're like, "Tell me more about everything because I just love this story. I love the new opportunity, and then I tried your product and it actually works and now I can't live without the product." So there's this trifecta of good story. You want repeat purchases, so you have marketers. I have heard the product doesn't... People have actually told me, the product doesn't matter, and I'm like, "I want to restore the art of true business."

Brett :

Yeah, true craftsmanship. True-

Jaime:

Craftsmanship, yes.

Brett :

Yeah, yeah.

Jaime:

Absolutely. And suddenly-

Brett :

That's what people want, too. I think that is a trend and it makes sense. People want to buy quality products and I had even seen that the millennials, the younger millennials, that aren't making their full potential income yet. They're buying nicer things but maybe just fewer things. And so there's this desire for quality products and true craftsmanship, which I think is really important. And so I love what you do there. You've got this good story, this human element of mom trying to make it happen, putting kids to bed, then working late at night, full year formulating this product, and then the science of why it works. And not the science to the level of, okay, I feel like I'm in science class right now and I want to nod off, but you're giving enough to say, "Oh, that makes sense."

Brett :

Water attracts water. If I put on lotion, it actually causes a need for more lotion. Right? It's almost like it's leaching water out of your body.

Jaime:

Yes, it's dehydrating your skin, which-

Brett :

Yeah, so as you see that, and then whatever word you... Humectant or something, I've never heard that word before. But, as you're saying that, that like that makes sense. I get it. I get the science behind it. Now I feel like you've taught me something, you've inspired me a little bit, and you've caused me to say, "maybe." Maybe this is what I'm looking for. Maybe this is the new opportunity that I should be exploring for my skin.

Jaime:

Yes. Yeah. And you said something, there's... Here's what people need to do as they're building brands because we know brand is basically the essence, the character, the nature of the... It's the living, breathing, active aspect of your business. It's not packaging, it's not labels and logos, and websites. That's not brand, it's just sort of an external manifestation of what the brand really is. But you use the word quality. But part of my journey too was starting to get away from words that people glaze over. On like, "Okay, I've heard quality before. I've heard magical before"

Jaime:

So I had to start asking myself, how can I describe this in a way that doesn't use the typical buzzwords that cause people to be like, "Okay, yeah, I've heard that before. What makes you different?" Now they're causing skepticism. So as your branding, starting to change your entire vernacular. In our whole community now, I have an entire long list of dictionary words that belong to us. Almost like with what... It's kind of like what the workout people, what do they call it again? The-

Brett :

CrossFit?

Jaime:

Crossfit. They have their own thing.

Brett :

Like the WOD, workout of the day and that kind of stuff, yeah.

Jaime:

Yeah. Yes. People were like... When they get into that community, they were like, "Hey, high five." I know... there's the own lingo. And so I started to really shape a lot of our vernacular around truth. You got to hear what's true and we're going to get away from words like quality and natural because nobody believes that that's real.

Brett :

They've lost all meaning. People want quality, but they don't want to hear the word quality. Right? You got to show it, you got to prove it, you got to make them feel it.

Jaime:

Yeah, you can make what that is come to life with story, like you're saying.

Brett :

Yep. Yep. Any other words you use in place of quality or are you just trying to tell the story in such a way that it communicates and implies quality?

Jaime:

Yeah, absolutely. And this, I can tell you too, because people think... Now they see what we're doing. They're like, "Wow, she did this overnight." And I'm telling you, I tried to craft and-

Brett :

Yeah, a decade in the making, but yeah, overnight.

Jaime:

Yes. It took me years to figure out how can we say this in a way... And now my mind is a lot more sharpened too. We're going to change this from this to this because this is bit more activating. And so quality is a word that, instead of quality, we say I've created the true beauty philosophy. And so now it's like, "In our true beauty philosophy, it's about beauty from the inside out, it's about purity. It's about... We have our core pillars and seven pillars of true beauty and it's detox."

Jaime:

So now when they hear quality, or instead of quality, they hear true beauty and they associate it with detox and healing and all of our seven pillars. And we've gone deep on this idea by bringing a whole philosophy and methodology to life.

Brett :

I love it. I love it. We talked about allowing customers to see themselves using the product and to see themselves benefiting from it and living this new life or this new experience because of the product. One of the great ways to do that is through testimonials, and I know you guys get a ton of very authentic, real, powerful testimonials. How do you use those? How do you use testimonials to shape your storytelling and story selling?

Jaime:

Yeah, for sure. Sometimes on some of our testimonials, we'll actually call the customer, or a customer will call in and tell us the story behind the testimonial and we'll highlight that either in our emails or... And a lot of times, even just in our ads. It's so great to take a snapshot of a testimonial, just quote it, and then highlight the story aspect. And so for instance, a woman calls and she's like, "I have... My son has been on medication for his skin since he was six months old. We've tried everything and I've now been using your lotion bar for three days and his skin is cleared up." And so taking a little... Almost like the power phrase in that whole thing, highlighting that one thing and then going into the story in your copy, or in the email, or like, "Hey, we had a lady call." And then people are immediately like, "Oh, what happened when she called? I want to know."

Brett :

Yeah, I love that. I think one good element or one thing that a great testimonial can do is it can communicate things that you can't. You can talk about the purity and detox and this true beauty concept, but making really big and bold claims? I know some industries are limited on the claims they can talk about even with testimonials. But when someone says something like that, like, "we've tried everything with my son and in three days things were cleared up." That's super powerful. You can't say something that powerful on your own without that testimonial. So that's great.

Jaime:

Exactly, exactly.

Brett :

Yeah.

Jaime:

Yeah, they're like, "Wow, if that worked for her, will that work for me?"

Brett :

Yep. Yep. And so then how are you weaving those then, so you're sharing those testimonials and email and video content and other things? How are you using them specifically?

Jaime:

Yeah, we use them in our ads. We use it in our email. Our emails are really like journal entries. So we tell a lot of story in our email and we use that a lot.

Brett :

And how often... Just a couple of mechanic questions there, or a couple of detail questions that are interesting. How often are you emailing? Does every email have an offer in it? Is some just story? How do you go about that? Because I mean you guys do a great job of email marketing.

Jaime:

Oh thank you. Yeah, well thanks to Ezra Firestone because he does a really great format. How often do you... We actually have a whole email strategy around how often are we doing educating or inner educating, are we creating offers? How often are we just telling just the story in a way that connects with people emotionally. Our gives versus our asks, but we email five times a week and we do one ask a week and I think sometimes it's even one every week and a half. And then a lot of it is just educating people in a way where they're like, "Man, if that's the truth about that product or that ingredient, I should try it." So we don't even have to ask. All we have to do is... Ezra said this as well, he's like edu-tain people, educate them while you entertain them with story and that works really well.

Brett :

Yeah. That's amazing. So a couple things as we wrap up here, just about out of time. What advice would you give, what resources would you give for someone that says, "Okay, I believe the story of my brand and my products is a little bit lacking." What resources have been inspirational or helpful for you and what would you I recommend people check out?

Jaime:

Yeah. For me, I think it was a lot of trial and error. If I had known about story selling books earlier, I probably would've made a lot more sales a lot faster. But I know that there are some good story selling books out there. I can't think off the top of my head. But what I would do is I would go through all of, and I can share some of the slides for my presentation if you want, where it's like, here's a great example of a description-

Brett :

Oh, that would be great, yeah. Yep.

Jaime:

Versus taking that description and how do you turn that into a storyline now? Because you want to look at all of your descriptions on your website, on your Amazon and how do you... Because you don't have to write a five... You don't have to write a book. It can be like on our Pounce. There's this little, tiny, mini romance story and people were like, "Oh I want to try that Pounce stuff because now I feel the romance in the air." But it's-

Brett :

Pounce, that's such a great name by the way. I love it. That's fantastic. Yeah, so I would love it... If you'll share the slides, we'll link to those in the show notes so people can check those out at ecommerceevolution.com and look for the episode with Jaime and I think that's a fantastic idea. I will share one book I mentioned on the podcast before, but it's called How to Build a StoryBrand by Donald Miller.

Jaime:

Oh yes, StoryBrand. Yes.

Brett :

I love Donald Miller's writing. I like some of these older books as well. Just very honest, very raw. But the How to Build a StoryBrand, he does a great job of saying, "Hey, your product shouldn't be the hero, the customer's the hero. Show them how your product makes them the hero. That's when you win."

Jaime:

Yes, exactly.

Brett :

Such a good resource. I also recommend... And you've done just a great job of connecting with people like Russell and Ezra and others, and just learning from them. I think people should learn from you. So go to MIG soap, subscribe to that email list, check it out, you'll learn from it. You'll begin to see Jaime's formula and Jaime's approach in your team. And I know you've got great copywriters and stuff on your team too. So check that out. Anything else you'd recommend? What else should people check out other than going, of course, and buying one of everything you have. What else? What else would you recommend? How can people connect with you?

Jaime:

Oh, probably the best thing is the HER Effect podcast. So I'm talking a lot about marketing now and I'm just kind of getting that off the ground, but that's probably the best way.

Brett :

And it's called the HER Effect?

Jaime:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brett :

I love it. I love the trend of women having a more powerful, more influential voice. I think they've always had an influential voice, but now it just seems more public in a lot of ways, which is fantastic. I don't remember if I told you, but I have six daughters, so I'm pretty... We have eight kids, six are girls, and so pretty passionate about that process of wanting them to be fully confident and live the life they we're called to live and not to be bashful on all those things. So, fantastic. So HER effect podcast, we'll link to that. Are you on the socials? Is the podcast on Facebook and LinkedIn and places like that?

Jaime:

It will be soon.

Brett :

Okay, okay.

Jaime:

Right now it's just iTunes.

Brett :

Yeah, yeah that's perfect. So we'll link to that in the show notes as well. With that, Jaime, thank you so much for taking the time. This has been a ton of fun. It's been inspirational. It's been really, really good. So, appreciate you doing this.

Jaime:

Thank you so much Brett, it's so great to talk.

Brett :

Awesome. Thanks to you also for tuning in, we'd love to hear your feedback. So let us know other topics you'd like us to discuss. We welcome your feedback on the site or on the socials. Also, love to get that review on iTunes, that helps other people discover the podcast. With that, until next time, thank you for listening.

Brett :

All right, that's a wrap, thank you.

‍

Jeremiah Allen has been driving growth for small-to-medium-sized eCommerce companies since 1997 — before the internet was cool — and has helped hundreds of company founders grow. While he still enjoys client work, in 2017, he began acquiring and building his own eCommerce brands.

In this episode, we get super TACTICAL. It’s a deluge of tips and tricks on how to improve your checkout process. There’s so much here you’ll probably want to listen to it a few times. Here’s a sneak peek at what we cover.

Tips:

• How to use a cart slide outs after you hit add to cart and why it’s effective.
•  Simple works - larger fonts, larger buttons, larger thumbnails can all create big wins.
• What % of your shoppers should hit checkout and what % should complete checkout? If you’re below these numbers you have some work to do.
• How shipping options can increase checkout.
• 4 ways to drive post-purchase upsells - fast!
• What asks and offers should you put on your thank you page.
• How an email from the founder can be your secret weapon.
• How to handle payment options.
• Plus sooooo much more.

Connect with Guest:
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Instagram

Fat Bullfrog
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook
Via Twitter

Mentioned in the episode:
Blue Ribbon - Smart Marketer
Bombas
Rad Power Bikes - A Seattle Electric Bike Company
FIGS - Premium Scrubs, Lab Coats, and Medical Apparel
Wappalyzer - Identify Technologies on Websites
BuiltWith - Technology Lookup
Klaviyo - Marketing Automation and eMail Platform for eCommerce
Google Optimize
Hotjar - Behavior Analytics Made Easy - Website Heatmaps and More

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Sayan is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of InvigorateNOW Health Sciences, an innovative health supplement brand. He’s also the creator of Sark Media Direct, a direct marketing consultancy that specializes in helping entrepreneurs grow to seven figures and beyond in the health and e-commerce industries. Passionate about combining cutting edge online marketing strategies with traditional direct response marketing, Sayan has helped his clients scale to eight figures and beyond. He’s worked with some of the biggest names in the industry, including Martha Stewart, Organifi, Zenith Labs, and more. Sayan has a knack for finding the “low hanging fruit” in his clients’ businesses. Whether it’s newspaper or radio ads, affiliate marketing or direct mail - he quickly finds the needle movers that produce results, in some cases, helping scale companies to beyond $100 Million / year.

Through his consulting, he has helped a handful of entrepreneurs scale from zero to six and seven figures in their first year. A savvy investor, Sayan has stakes in three health supplement brands in addition to businesses he started from scratch.

Sayan lives in New York City and enjoys spending time with family, friends and his fiancee, Amy.  In this episode, we discuss buying unsold inventory in newspapers and on radio plus how to combine traditional media with digital media for profitable growth.

Connect with Guest:
LinkedIn

Sark Media Direct
Facebook
Twitter

Sark Media Direct - Case Study

InvigorateNOW
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

Mentioned in this episode:
Dan Kennedy
Gary Halbert
Dan Swords
Doberman Dan - A Gathering Place for Renegade Entrepreneurs
Macromark
Barrington Media Group - Results. That’s all that really matters.
Media Partners Worldwide - Radio Advertising and Media Buying Agency
Jordan Whitney

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For our 100th episode we wanted to do something different. Rather than one guest, we invited 6 of our most popular guests we’ve ever had on the show. Since we’re wrapping up 2019, we decided to ask these super smart eComm pros what their top predictions were for 2020. They did NOT disappoint. We cover some GREAT predictions including:

• How and why some merchants will shift some of their focus away from Amazon (we’re already seeing this with Nike).
• How merchants will shift their video strategy in 2020 (will we go short form or long form?)
• Why “profitability” may be the focus rather than scale in 2020
• How SEO is shifting away from traditional keywords in 2020
• How automation is working (and how it doesn’t replace everything)
• How new privacy laws and policies will make things harder (and easier) for marketers
• Plus more!

Ezra Firestone - Founder at Smart Marketer and Zipify Apps and Zipify Pages and CEO at BOOM by Cindy Joseph

 Blog

 LinkedIn

 Facebook

 Twitter

 Instagram

 YouTube
‍

Smart Marketer - eCommerce Courses by Ezra Firestone

Zipify Apps by Smart Marketer

Zipify Pages - eCommerce Plugins for Online Stores - Shopify App Store

BOOM by Cindy Joseph
Carousel Ads for Stories - Instagram for Business
DHH (@dhh) - Twitter
Blue Ribbon Mastermind - Smart Marketer
Josh Whiteman

Mike Stelzner - CEO at Social Media Examiner and Founder at Social Media Marketing World 

 LinkedIn

 Facebook

 Twitter

 Instagram

 YouTube

Social Media Examiner - Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

Social Media Marketing World - Social Media’s Mega Conference!

Social Media Marketing Podcast - Social Media Examiner

Molly Pittman - Digital Marketer, International Speaker, and Co-Host of the Perpetual Traffic podcast

Facebookundefined

Instagram

Perpetual Traffic Podcast Archives - DigitalMarketer

Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) - Facebook Ads Help Center

Train My Traffic Person with Molly Pittman - Smart Marketer

Ralph Burns - CEO at Tier 11

LinkedIn

Facebook

‍

Tier 11 - Grow Your Business with Facebook and Instagram Advertising

Ads Accelerator Main Event - Tier 11

Perpetual Traffic Podcast

 Tier 11

 iTunes

Perpetual Traffic Podcast Episode 202 - Merging the Worlds of Facebook, Google, and Amazon Advertising with Brett Curry

Facebook Policies - Facebook

Visualping - #1 Website Change Detection, Monitoring, and Alerts

Russ Henneberry - Founder at theCLIKK.com

LinkedIn

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

YouTube

Traffic & Conversion Summit - March 31 - April 2, 2020 in San Diego, CA

eCommerce Evolution Podcast - Episode 32 with Russ Henneberry

REI Co-op - Outdoor Clothing, Gear, and Footwear from Top Brands

Andrew Youderian - Founder at eCommerceFuel

LinkedIn

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

The eCommerceFuel Podcast - Advice for Independent Store Owners

eCommerceFuel Forum

2019 State of the Merchant Report - eCommerceFuel

The Llama Commerce Show - Demystifying eCommerce into Actionable Bites

The Llama Commerce Show - 10 eCommerce Companies to Watch featuring Andrew Youderian

eCommerce Evolution Podcast - Episode 81 with Andrew Youderian

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Molly Pittman is a bit of a legend in the digital marketing space.  Bartender turned marketing intern for Ryan Deiss, turned VP of Marketing for Digital Marketer, turned entrepreneur – Molly’s story is an inspiring one.  And she flat knows her stuff!

In this episode, we dig into some real gems.  We do go pretty deep on what’s working now on Facebook, but we also talk about the benefits of building an in-house team vs. the benefits of an agency.  We talk about entrepreneurial lessons and what life is like in Amsterdam (where Molly currently lives).

Here’s a look at what we cover:

• Why being fluid might be the most important entrepreneurial trait…and why it’s important for digital marketers
• Why curiosity and fascination are crucial in our current marketing landscape
• What is CBO and how it’s impacting Molly’s Facebook ad campaign and what you should do about it.
• What are the 3 facets of Facebook’s new Quality Ranking and how to optimize your ads
• How low quality rankings can dramatically drive up costs or get your ads shut down
• Plus more

Connect with Guest:
Via Facebook
Via Instagram

Mentioned in this episode:
Train My Traffic Person with Molly Pittman – Smart Marketer
Traffic & Conversion Summit
Ryan Deiss – CEO at DigitalMarketer.com and Founder of RivalBrands.com
DigitalMarketer – Marketing Tools and Training
Ezra Firestone – CEO at Smart Marketer Inc.
Smart Traffic Live – 3-Day Virtual Summit on Paid Traffic and Marketing
Team Traffic – Smart Marketer
Gabby Bernstein – #1 NYT Best Selling Author, Speaker, and Spirit Junkie
Super Attractor book by Gabby Bernstein
5 Makeup Tips for Older Women – BOOM by Cindy Joseph
Panda Planner – Be Happier and More Productive
Dan Kennedy
The Tim Ferriss Show
About Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) – Facebook Ads Help Center

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Charles Livingston knows a thing or two about rapid growth.  He turned a supplement offer into a 12 million per year business. And now his Coffee Company – Life Boost Coffee has grown 1,000% in less than 1 year.

What’s the secret to this kind of growth?  Good Marketing and becoming a “yes” company.  

Charles is also known for having his picture displayed in every single Ezra Firestone presentation.  And this isn’t any old picture. It’s a shirtless pic of Charles all swole up wearing a stethoscope. Yes, there’s a story behind this that we dive into in the podcast.  

More importantly, here’s a breakdown of the keys to rapid growth we breakdown on this episode:

• Become a “yes” company.  How saying yes more has led to a shockingly low 1.5% refund rate for Lifeboost Coffee.
• Why clarifying your message is key to scale. ‘
• How to find your hook and your hone in on a powerful positioning statement
• How to engineer a great customer experience framework
• How to charge a premium and make customers gladly pay more
• How to encourage subscriptions and improve your “stick rate”
• What’s better – building a brand on Amazon or building a brand off Amazon?  
• Plus more!

Connect with Guest:
Via LinkedIn
Via Facebook

Lifeboost Coffee – The Healthiest Coffee Possible
Via Facebook
Via Twitter
Via Instagram
Via YouTube

Bridge the Gap Marketing
Perfect Origins

Mentioned in this episode:
Agora Company – Marketing and Advertising Agency
eCommerce Evolution Podcast Episode with Bill D’Alessandro
Jim Collins

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I recently saw Rachel speak at an agency event in New York City.  I was blown away. Rachel has quite the resume.

Forbes listed Rachel as one of its “30 under 30 Who Are Changing The World”, Fast Company named her one of "The Most Creative People in Business", AdAge named her one of "The Most Creative People of The Year," Entrepreneur named her one of the "50 Most Daring Entrepreneurs," Inc named her to the “Female Founders 100,” and the list goes on and on.  After being the Global Director of Digital and Social Media at Gap Rachel traveled the world for 100 days and then founded MikMak, the first native commerce platform for the social video generation. 

Here’s a look at what we cover:

• Why big companies like Facebook and Google and Amazon are at war for first party data. 
• Why Rachel believes in the philosophy that if you give up your first party data, you give up your brand.
• Rachel believes that today’s funnel starts at the consideration level first and that true brand building and loyalty start after the first purchase.  
• Lessons from Kylie Jenner and Native Deodorant
• Rachel’s thoughts on Twitch and how it might be a glimpse into the future 
• Social is the world's largest mall and point of end checkout...are you treating it that way?
• Plus much more!

‍

In this episode we take a quick look into what’s new on Amazon and then we dive deep into a subject I’m quite passionate about - making better decisions.  I’m not sure of another skill more valuable than this one. This doesn’t need you need to always be right...you just need to get it right. We share a great Steve Jobs story in the podcast to illustrate this point.  

Here’s a look at a few of the topics we cover:

• Confirmation Bias - and getting it right vs. being right
• Mitigating Risks - with lessons from Sarah Blakely and Richard Branson.  Here Matt shares how he wasted $1million in Ad Spend when he could have tested with only $20,000.  Also we discuss the the Fire bullets, then cannonballs framework from Jim Collins.  
• Diderot Effect - This deals with how to handle success and how success can lead to bankruptcy.  We also discuss 2nd and 3rd order consequences.  
• Keep a decision log - Why and how and what this looks like for Matt.
• Some of Matt’s favorite books on the subject
• Plus more!

Matt Clark is the Chairman and Co-founder of Amazing.  Amazing is the company behind the most successful info product/training course of all time - Amazing Selling Machines.   He and his partner Jason Katzenback also run SellerCon - one of the leading events for Amazon Sellers.  

If you’re currently running ads to cold audiences - whether that’s on Facebook, YouTube, Google Display Network or anywhere else - you need to consider where you’re sending that cold traffic.  Do you send it to your home page? Product detail page? Those options can work, but you need to test sending traffic to pre-sale content.  

What is pre-sale content?  To explain, I brought in one of the foremost experts on the subject, Lindsay Marder.  

Lindsay Marder is a self-proclaimed content marketing nerd.  She served as Managing Editor for Digital marketer for 4 years.  Now she’s working with brands to spread their missions and engage with customers.  She’s also the Co-founder of Digital Strategy Bootcamps with Molly Pittman and John Grimshaw.  

Here’s what we cover on the show:

• What is pre-sale content?  
• Why pre-sale engagement content is PERFECT for cold traffic, especially paid cold traffic.  
• Real-world examples including the legendary 5 make up tips for older women - page used by Ezra Firestone and Boom by Cindy Joseph.  
• How Third Love used pre-sale content to show women everywhere that they were putting on their bra all wrong.  
• How do you identify topics using free Google tools and some simple online research?
• How to let customers write your ad headlines and content headlines for you. 
• What can you learn from 5-star and 1-star reviews from your competitor’s products (this is so brilliant).  
• Dos and Don’ts for the page itself
• Plus more!