Search, Social or Email? How to LOWER Cost Per Acquisition w/Dixxon Flannel's Robby Keller! | Ep. 321

0:08Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately. You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwetelson. Let's do this, not that.

0:40we are back for do this not that podcast presented by marigold and we have an awesome guest he's actually cool i am not cool he is cool who do we got we got robbie keller so he's running marketing over at dixon flannel company first of all they're cool you you want to buy a cool flannel shirt you want to look like you have a clue unlike me dixon flannel you go to the website i'm telling you it's awesome. But Robbie is running a lot of their marketing stuff over there. When I say he's cool, I mean, the guy grew up as a skateboarder. I'm like the guy who tried to Ollie, couldn't figure it out as a big loser.

1:13And he knows all about, he actually went to school for all this fashion stuff. And now he's crushing it at Dixon flannel, doing all this direct to consumer marketing. Robbie, excited to have you on the podcast, man. Thanks for having me, Jay. I'm super stoked to be here. And we'll have to get you in a flannel. I think you'd be a little bit cooler in a flannel. I can't argue that. I think it's the one that I didn't wear. Yeah, you're not wearing one. You're wearing a hoodie. I know, I know. To fail. Yeah, any step in the cool direction, I'm all for. So before we get into the topic of the day, which is about like testing and cutting your cost per acquisition costs for marketers out there, how did you wind up becoming this guy over there doing all your marketing stuff at Dixon Flannel?

1:55Oh, man. Um, live story short is basically raised in business by two parents that were both entrepreneurs. One's an artist, one's very business banking minded, um, started a clothing brand in high school, took me into a fashion school. It did well. And I thought, Hey, I could do this for the rest of my life. And I wanted to learn how to grow it and grow it and grow it, you know, beyond my local friends and local high school and stuff like that. Did fashion school. And right as I'm finishing up fashion school, decided creative and production and all that stuff I had a good grasp on. But I really wanted to master marketing.

2:32So I graduated, got into the agency world, and spent eight years right out of school basically spending other businesses' money learning how to market, how to write copy, what a split test is, what SEO is, what PPC is. When I was hired, I didn't even know what any of that was. fast forward you know we've done you know hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spend for fortune 500 businesses but tons of mom and pops along the way to um smaller agency out of uh north north scottsdale arizona and i got that experience basically in the weeds every single day for seven and a half eight years and one day just kind of wanted to get back into fashion and um And Dixon is, you know, about 30 miles away.

3:20And I gave the owner a call and I said, hey, you looking for a good marketing person? And he said, dude, we're about to lose ours. And he gave me a shout and everything kind of stars align. So I'm here. That's awesome, man. And I'm curious about something. You know, your brand that you're working at at Dixon is cool, right? That's what I mentioned before. If a nerdy guy comes along, like me, and he comes in for an interview, is he not making it past that first round because you all are sitting across the table like, this guy's a tool? Or will you guys accept somebody who's kind of like a nerdy dude, too?

3:55You'd be surprised. I am probably the most on-brand person here. And for the record, Dixon is heavy in the motorcycle world. And I don't even ride motorcycles for personal reasons. um but pretty much everything else i do but a lot of people here like aren't the most on brand or cool people like you know you have your fair share of like music enthusiasts kind of like one of the girls on my team that helps style stuff like that she's like in the rave scene which is like very off brand for us but like i think the thing at dixon is that we are kind of the outsiders um And we are kind of not your typical cool person, just like kind of, I don't know, scary, cool or whatever.

4:44Like as far as like a ton of people here have like gnarly tattoos and face tattoos and neck tattoos. And my hands are clean. I got some stuff. No, dude, I think we were open to anyone. Like we just we want the top talent and the skill. so uh i don't i don't you know some of the art guys some of the production guys are a little nerdy but they're cool i will say if i did come in for an interview there i would let everybody know because this is the truth my number one favorite tv show of all time is sons of anarchy and if nobody's watched that please go watch it it's a motorcycle uh show it's the best am i right or am i wrong you're 100 right i'm super add i can barely sit down and watch a movie so like sitting down and watching a series of tv shows i'm like the odd ball of this entire world i just don't do it sons of anarchy and yellowstone are the two that i could sit down and watch nice but like all the other popular ones i'm like no i don't know i've never seen it so love it all right i'm in a dixon all right let's get into setting up split tests so you've tested a million things all through your career talk to us about how do you do it why is it important and is this really the secret sauce to cutting your acquisition costs?

6:00Yeah. So someone told me early on, a mentor of mine, that marketing is always just like reaching the right person at the right time with the right message. Sometimes that message is complemented with an offer. And I, for the rest of my career and to this day, pretty much whenever something's not working, I asked myself, am I reaching the right people? Okay. Yeah. Am I reaching them with the right offer? And am I reaching them at the right time? And usually if something's not working the way it should be, one of those or two or three of those could be off. And so high level, like I just got into, you know, pulling levers and ad accounts, both PPC and on the search advertising side and and uh social media on meta and stuff like that and the more campaigns you build the more tests you run the more familiar you get with it but basically i said all right um we got to find as many constants as possible in this experiment and once you have a constant locked in which first usually being the audience then i'm going to start testing different things to say to them or creatives to show to them and and with digital advertising it's literally too easy you get real-time data being fed back, you know, with cost per impression down to the penny and conversion rates down to the, you know, 10th of a percent point.

7:25Like it just, they make it too easy. So I kind of obsessed over those numbers early on in my career and started to build out these experiments and chalk them up on, you know, literally whiteboards or, you know, scratch pad a notepad and I said, okay, so if I do this and this becomes a constant, this is the winning audience. I'm not going to mess with any other audiences until I get my messaging right with this audience or my offer right with this audience or my creative right with this audience. And as you run down these A, B, C, D, and so on split tests, you ultimately will get to the point where, all right, you're running an effective campaign.

8:06You will be able to cut. I've taken on ad accounts have taken on campaigns uh that you know you've cut by like a thousand percent cost just like i i said how to cut your cpa in half um but like really it's like you can you can do drastic stuff especially with smaller brands that um and we did a lot of service-based industry stuff too at the last agency i was at and um you can cut it way way way back and then you get to the point where, okay, now how do we scale this? And so then you kind of go back to square one and it's just like rinse and repeat. Okay, let's find a new audience to test. Let's find new messaging that's going to work with them and whenever what's the right offer and what's the right time.

8:51So when you find a winner on Facebook, can you just take what you did on Facebook and run it on, you know, TikTok or even just run it on Instagram simultaneously? Or do you have to treat each platform as its own kind of test and figure out thing? There's so many different like optimization settings within each platform that you can mess with from TikTok to Snapchat to meta to Google. But for the most part, like the audiences should translate across the messaging should translate across platform to platform the offers the timing etc all right now i want to ask you i've never asked this before on podcast but i feel like i could ask you because like you're cool i want to play f marry kill with marketing for a second all right this is terrible but f marry kill you ready for email search social marketing email search social marketing oh man so first i'm gonna answer it at at dixon but the answer would definitely vary size of business market industry everything like there a lot of service-based stuff um it's google all day long like i had so much success in ppc with law and home services and stuff like that so i'll answer it for dixon so we are going to

10:33you're struggling what is it you said f means like uh you're into it but it's not not so long term marry this is my go-to i gotta be with it forever and then kill is like i can live without it even though i don't want to and my three options are google search no search social email Okay. I will F email. I will kill social. And I will marry search. Wow. Search is really, I mean, it's amazing how powerful that is. So let me ask you a question search is it a constant you know bidding battle different times of the year where you're like oh man the word flannel that's going for a zillion dollars now is it like an everyday battle no so it's all obviously all demand based right like you can't hold a gun to someone's head and say hey go search for flannels right now or go search for a competitor go search for us right now um it just I think it's I think it's where people go to they go out of their day-to-day routine they go to google they go to whatever search engine they want to use and they're going out of their way to look for an answer or look for a product or look for something with intent to you know if you're looking for a men's flannel shirt like are you just doing research on blended patterns versus buffalo but not really no you're probably somewhere deep down looking for a shirt you don't you don't hop on facebook and start scrolling and you're just on your break or late at night in bed or whenever you're on facebook scrolling and you're like oh yeah i remember why i came here now i was looking for an ad to buy a flannel like no it just happens it's impulse buy it's you know it obviously it does really really well for us it's you know probably 20 of our revenue comes from meta but also it's a different level of intent than somebody hopping in a search engine and that's why i say i'd keep that for sure for life totally makes sense so let me ask you a question i want to talk about email for a second because i get your emails and they're awesome and i like your subject lines you guys crush you with your subject lines.

13:06I'm a subject line guy. So hit me with what you're like, listen, this is my favorite subject line tactic. This is what I stick in the subject line when I, this is going to work almost every time. What is your go-to that you think gets your emails open more than anything else? Man, we're so, we have it so easy at Dixon because our emails is our drop announcements for everyone that doesn't know dixon is a limited edition flannel brand and so every time we do a drop things sell out fairly quick we'll never restock stuff and so there's this um plus or minus half a million people on this list waiting to get these drop announcement emails check the flannel hey i like it buy hey i don't i'll pass i'll wait for the next one totally you know totally not everyone's cup of tea every single time, depending on colors or collabs that we're working with on that said flannel.

14:06But we have it so easy. Urgency is like, it comes with every email we send, like it there's built in urgency, everybody that signs up for emails knows, if I don't act now, I might miss the opportunity to buy that flannel. And then later, I got to pay double on eBay or some marketplace group or something like that. Um, and then during holiday season, we do a ton of discounted flannels. And so I love throwing in like the old$29.99 is basically half off flannel plus, you know, full collection of discounted goodies. Those have been crushing the last, uh, we do 13 days of Dixon. We're, we're coming in on our last day here, but, basically anytime we throw out an offer in a subject line, urgency is built in, so they go and snag it.

14:58And then collab stuff, we'll do a collab with Metallica or Sublime or Bob Marley or big, big, big names, and we get to drop those names. And as soon as you can do that in our world, it makes it a ton easier. So I just, I always use emojis and subject lines. I think it's like the more friendly way to play. I always like to keep it human. Not so I don't think I've ever. I don't think I've ever been so stuck or my team's been so stuck that we go to chat GPT and get like a list of 10 subject lines. Although that could be a good starting point to at least get your wheels turning. I like to just humanize it as best I can.

15:40Always create urgency. Ours is built in and always throw in like the personalization, you know, an emoji, tie it back to the product or the price or whatever it might be is pretty foolproof recipe. Yeah, man. I encourage everybody, and we'll put in the show notes, you've got to sign up for Dixon Flannell's emails. They are different. They're different. They're awesome. I really dig them. So before we wrap up here, I've got a question for you. Back to you're now a 16-year-old kid. You've got your skateboard there. Was the dream to do the X Games? What was the dream when you're sitting there? Were you that level of skateboarder?

16:18Yeah, it's pretty crazy how my life changed. I play golf now. It's like so boring. But yeah, I mean, you asked me, I think I skateboarded every day unless I was in crutches or a wheelchair for 13 years. And if you asked me, I was going pro and tons of kids that I grew up skating with. Jagger Eaton, one of them, he's won like now two gold medals in the X Games. The dude's like the face of our new skateboarding. He's Red Bull sponsored athletes, stuff like that. And a ton of other friends like take it and run with it. But I idolized a lot of those guys. And a lot of them turned into smart business owners or some sort of entrepreneur, like in their different little niche where they either started a skate company or partnered up with somebody or like the barracks and what they're doing is this basic community of, you know, keeping skateboarding alive.

17:19So I, I, I, at 16, I mean, I, I actually started, um, getting kind of phasing out of skateboarding into motocross and into some other action sports like wakeboarding and wake surfing, some off-road stuff. I, I kind of was transitioning from, you know, one group of friends to another. And meanwhile, I could still skate well. And then I started to learn this other stuff. And then, you know, along came golf three, four years later. And, you know, now I'm, you know, playing a ton of golf and enjoy that. It's it's it's probably, you know, between that and like snowboarding, you know, there's like there's like a few things that get me completely out of reality.

18:05And those those things I enjoy doing. It's my escape from everything. So, well, I imagine somebody on your text chain with all your old skateboarding buddies is shredding you every time you say I'm going out to play 18. They're like, you're an old man. You're a tool. Why aren't you at the skate park? And every time I'm on the golf course, I'm like, man, I used to make fun of myself. That's 100%. That's amazing. All right, listen, this has been awesome. We're going to put everything in the show notes. But where should everybody follow you, follow Dixon? What should they do? Oh, man, follow Dixon.

18:36We do all the fun stuff, stuff that you really shouldn't be doing from a marketing team. We do. We always like to push the boundaries a little bit. and we don't have any red tape here so we get to and then my Instagram too I post a lot of our work there just what I'm doing and up to and happy to chat with any of you guys so my Instagram is Robbie Cartel R-O-B-B-Y C-A-R-T-E-L and then Dixon Plano Co just at Dixon Plano Co Awesome and we're going to put all the show notes this is great Robbie really appreciate you being here man thanks a lot Yeah likewise Jay great talking with you man You did it you made it to the end nice But the party's not over.

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