Your Shopify Growth Problems Are Math Problem (Wearing Marketing Costumes)

28:50there's really four layers of trust there before the sale because people think i run an ad they go to my website and they buy but the first layer of trust is that first contact that first advertising contact where they see your content and they go you know what this looks like a cool product i trust that maybe it could be effective for solving my problem or helping me achieve my goal. But so they go, maybe, right? And then they go to the website and then the website has to telegraph the same thing. Product demos, good copy, the way you write it, brand messaging and the color scheme and everything has to be aligned to that first point of contact.

29:25And they have a little bit more trust. And from there, you want to capture the email, right? So you could build a lead list and have some prospects. So they have to have enough trust from the ad to the website to go, you know what, I'll give this a chance. They're offering an incentive or free content or a discount. I have enough trust with this that I'll exchange my email to learn more with whatever they're sending me, a free series of emails or content, of course, whatever. And so they go there and you got that third layer of trust, fourth layer. Now you're finally at, okay, I think I will take out my credit card and buy.

30:00So once you reach that point, the game's not over. They have to have good experience every step along the way from the purchase to the fulfillment to the unboxing experience and then like you said and you say a lot at sub summit that is not yet a customer a member a subscriber that is just a lead who you now had the opportunity to build that trust with you're just getting started when you make that purchase man i'm so glad you were listening at sub summit it's so true it's when we when your customers buy something from your site they're not really a lifelong customer by any stretch of the imagination they're trying your product they're testing it out they're because remember you're not you're not a retail store they can't pick it up they can't hold it so they they want to see it they want to touch it feel it and then you've got this opportunity from the moment they buy to really optimize the whole experience like from day one from actually from second one from when they purchased to that order confirmation what's that experience the two to three emails i believe that they should get day one not just one but then scale it down after that and you educate them you build trust you tell your story you reinforce the value of the product so by the time they get it they it's like someone telling you about the wine you're about to drink or the steak you're about to eat and how it's farmed or raised or the grapes by the time you get that wine it's going to taste better because you know so much about it and the whole experience versus just if they came out with a glass of wine and here's our house red that house red could be amazing but they just called it the house red and you you won't i just it's a proven fact you won't appreciate it and value it you won't tell people about it you won't recommend it to friends because the story is not there yeah that just helps them feel better about their purchase you know exactly yes besides on the quality of the product yeah i want to dig into one another area like that comes up a lot and you've probably got some insight onto this is just traffic acquisition last few years obviously there's a lot going on every i mean the ios updates that was a couple years ago now but i think some brands are still feeling the effects of that but more recently like timu buying up every ad on facebook and instagram rising the costs 30, 40 % acquisition is becoming like traffic acquisition is becoming harder and harder.

32:22What are some of the strategies you're hearing for, for generating more like good quality buyer traffic? Yeah. Buyer with high intent and exactly, you know, something that's not eating you alive, essentially. There's lots of ways to do it. Now, one of the, one of the things I really like to talk about, cause I didn't know this when I brought him on, but some people know this guy, He's a little bit maybe more behind the scenes, but not at the, not at the Google events. But so Frederick Valets, I interviewed Frederick and basically I learned because I'm not, I don't play in that sandbox in the front end advertising.

32:58I never have a voice done. The way I've always generated traffic is through partners, partnering essentially. But he comes on and he says, not a lot of people know this because they don't think about it much, but that's just because Facebook has a captured audience on social. Facebook has the largest social audience in the world. Everybody's on there. So when they think of advertising, they think of Facebook because that's what they see all the time. And so Meta is huge for that reason. But the truth of the matter is, is that Google has a much larger advertising platform than Facebook does. Facebook has the social audience, but Google still has a larger network.

33:35And so there's a lot of opportunity there to get it right. But Frederick was one of Google's first 500 employees, and he was the executive who led the creation of Google AdWords. So if there's anyone who knows AdWords better, it's Fred. And so Fred left and he ended up starting a software company that where Google aggregates the data kind of goes back to what we talked about earlier with numbers. Google aggregates your data. So you don't actually, you can't separate what's performing, what's not performing as well as you could. And so he created a software that actually now splits that data back apart and it does it automatically.

34:16And so kind of sort it back to dashboards. It sends you the information and it tells you what to do to optimize and where your areas of opportunity are. And so since he's launched, he now has 12 offices and 12 continents across the world, more than 70 employees or something. And, you know, similar to your companies being large from doing smart things. And he's managing like$5.3 billion in ad spend for his clients. And so I said, that's cool. Can you give me an example of a company that, you know, you revolutionize their marketing on ads? And he said, yeah, we have lots of them, obviously, because we're managing so many billions of dollars.

34:56But so a good example of this for e-commerce, a lot of our clients are e-commerce, he said, was a company called Barbecue Guys. guys so like bbq guys and by splitting this data using software automating the because you can see okay my ads are performing really well on these types of platforms and not so well on these ones but sometimes they're not performing so well on these ones because we don't we haven't optimized for it but the numbers are good they're just small and so if you're on videos by accident and they're performing but you're not doing anything with it you could double down on it And so that's what they did with them.

35:32And 300 % lift in ROI doing that. And don't sleep on Google, basically, is a big tip. And then Ron Schaub, this was super cool. Ron, if anybody knows anything about Ron, he's got the chew on this podcast. They pump out a newsletter. They're very big on building in public, which I love that sort of like sneak peek behind the curtains of the numbers, what's working, what's failing, because they had a couple of brands that failed, a coffee brand and a pet brand. They're like, you know what? Sometimes you don't always win. But for what they discovered very early, he said to me, I've never really shared this before much.

36:11So I was like, okay, that's crazy because you share everything. He's like, yeah, so here's the thing. You asked for the biggest thing that we do, that we've done, that's like sort of moves the needle really big, is from the very beginning, we met a guy that was doing international. So international logistics. And we got in with them. And what we accidentally discovered is that we could copy and paste, literally word for word, duplicate our ads on Meta and run them in other countries on Meta. As long as it was an English speaking country where the culture aspired to be like a Western culture, we could run the same exact ads with no changes and they performed.

36:55And so every year we did from the very beginning of our launch, it just continued to grow every year because we handled logistics properly. He gave lots of tips on how to do that. essentially he's 32 % of our business, our 60, 50, 50 to$60 million per year business. A third of it's international. You don't have to do much with the ads if you're already on meta other than run them internationally. And I shared that with a guy that I met at SubSummit, Watch Gang, you know, we're game planning and he's, yeah, we want to get international. Who is it that you should connect with? And so I told him and he's, oh yeah, that guy's on our radar.

37:34So we're going to be doing that but you could just copy the ads i'm like yeah you could just copy the ads and just translate them but keep the same no they're not even oh if they're english speaking english speaking countries same exact ad huh crazy yeah i mean it's i think there's a lot i'm i'm i'm in canada so we typically buy from a lot of places in the world like it's i ran an online store since 98 and i would say that only usually about five percent of my customers were from canada right so it's quite normal that we are used to shipping across border buying across the border half the stuff we buy comes from the u.s it's just a normal part like we go back and forth with the u.s all the time but a lot a lot like i don't know what the percentage is like it's the vast vast majority of brands that we work with at bold that are in the u.s they only sell within the U.S.

38:29Right. And they kind of, and to be fair, the U.S. is 10 times the population, more than 10 times the population of Canada. So you can build quite a big business just within the U.S. In Canada, you kind of, Canada is the same population as like the state of California. So like you, we kind of have to sell outside of Canada if you really want to grow big. But I think because of that, a lot of brands just don't look outside the U.S. because they think it's too much work or it's not, it's, but it's, it's not. Yeah. You look at the world, right? I mean, what is there like six, seven billion people on earth?

39:03Not all of them speak our language, obviously, but there's whatever 300, 350 million people in the U.S. If you can find English speaking countries overseas that aspire to be Western, then you increase your total addressable market. it yeah and there are some considerations i'm actually going to find a good guest for this because there's some things you want to as far as like logistics and taxes and regulations and all that but it's it's everyone i know that's done it said it's generally always been worth it and there is a bit of effort but you know what that bit of effort is often what your competitors aren't willing to do so that's what that's what separates you and that's what get like the guys at obvi that's obviously it's worked for them yeah obviously that's a great Right.

39:47Yes, Lee, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I see what's there. Yeah. Right. But so there are things you run into because you do go up your shipping, handling, fulfillment, logistics process does increase as it has to. And then you do have to treat those customers differently. He said to speak to like subscriptions and members. They found that they could not get them to stay sticky just because they purchased differently. And this might come down to just their total allowable dollars that they have. he said they buy but they don't buy the way we would like them to buy traditionally in the u.s they won't stay subscribed as far as we've been able to discover but what they will do is they'll save up for a purchase and then they'll buy when they're ready so they had to do they did have to modify like their email marketing campaigns on the back end to adapt to that so that's getting more traffic quick win consider international what about converting more traffic that comes to your site any any learnings from from your guests on how to either just you know maximize the conversion increase it optimize it any any things yeah so it's i mean it's a marketing series marketing and sales business series focus so there was a lot of conversion experts there was a lot more traffic experts too but so those are the two biggest ones that i say big wins easy and also in most brands wheelhouse because a lot of them are doing paid advertising but there's things you could do with seo that were in there you know to optimize for that but so with conversion though aside from traffic don't like kurt elster came on which is one of my favorite guests i was very nervous actually to meet kurt and it came across in the video i just came right out and i was like I'm very nervous to meet you because Kurt is very charismatic, funny, tells really good stories.

41:34He makes e-commerce like engaging with his personality. So I always inspire sort of the model that basically. He's awesome. I agree. So and he also basically created in many ways the e-commerce industry because he's like the first podcast ever. And I mean, he started back in like 2012 and he's just been weekly ever since. And so he really kind of like inspired people to get into e-com. Hey, if you want to have life, financial freedom, like get into e-com, there's a huge opportunity. And so that is just obviously snowballed to this day. It's become a very different landscape. And so that's kind of the bad news.

42:15Like the bad news is you can't just run ads, get a customer. Like you said, that's not a real customer. It's just a lead. Back in the day, you could get away with that. You sell your product and you say goodbye. but the bad news slash good news is now you got to be a real business and so if you become a real business then there's huge opportunity for people who do things properly but don't sleep on your website foundationally like kurt said he's we see this so many times brand comes to us and they want to increase their conversion we start with foundationally what's your website doing when it loads.

42:51Like he said, his favorite test for a brand is, and this was like Thanksgiving, I think around the time that we actually spoke. And he said, here's my favorite test. Can your drunk uncle on Thanksgiving, when you hand him your cell phone, can he understand and navigate the website so easily that even he can make a purchase? And the other thing was, is like, if it's your, and it has to be like your grandmother's old phone, right? Because he's, you'll be surprised how many consumers are still operating on an older phone box. Oh, totally. And if your website doesn't load quickly on an old phone, you are losing so much money.

43:29So he said, fix your navigation process. Don't put about me at the top, make everything above the fold. You need a lightning fast website that operates on these old phones. And just doing something so small, because like over time, a lot of brands, the more you build, the more like tools and software you have and the more bloated it gets. And it really does impact your conversion rates. Now to speak to that, speaking of Kurt, he actually started his company with this guy named Nick. Nick DeSavado was his first episode. And Nick's kind of a kooky guy, but so is Kurt. These guys are childhood friends.

44:06And Nick comes on and he was like, you asked for my best thing, I'll give you it. I call, like when a break he does design so nick says he's i hate the term cro i don't like it at all but unfortunately because of that i've developed a reputation for it because i have quadrupled the conversion rate of my competitors more than two dozen times in five years doing design that converts and he said my secret is is i call the customer all right so we we incentivize the customer to get on the phone with me. I peel back the curtain and I asked them about their experience. And he's always, I want the customers who really care about the brand.

44:46So they're kind of like, if they're kind of upset, that's good because they believe in your brand, but they know that you can do better. And so you'll ask them, you'll go deep on some questions after being a little light, creating some space for them to open up. And he said, I don't do anything with your website until I talk to them. And then we get on a call with the executive board and we say, based on what they are actually saying, here's what we could potentially do. And so here's the biggest thing that we've done to really move the needle aside from optimizing design and like heat maps and stuff, is we just take the actual words they're saying and we put those into the headlines and the product descriptions.

45:28And so that one simple thing has quadrupled conversion he's driven he's contributed to billions of dollars in sales across brands doing that so that's the two best things i love that

45:47i'll just add one thing to expand to that because because i've seen a number of brands use chat gpt and they load in all the product reviews and so they'll take like thousands of reviews, you can be hundreds, it doesn't have to be that many, put it in a spreadsheet, doc, PDF, whatever, throw it into chat GPT, ask it to find all the benefits and reasons people buy and things people love about this product and create a product description using a benefit first language rather than like features and whatever and position it against competitors in a way that that kind of freaking how the wording was but like calls out how competitors are not as good tearing them down don't turn them down but it's like a usb yeah yeah so what they do is they take the positive reviews from your product take all the negative reviews and this involves a little scraping but take all the negative reviews on a direct competitors a product things they don't like out so i don't know say you sell a coffee maker and the negative reviews on your direct competitors are all around if you go to all the one stars and it's all takes too long takes a minute to warm up i could get coffee faster through a drive-through or i don't know they take all these summarize them and then you take the benefits of yours and it's like coffee when you want it that takes great tastes great and doesn't make you and you don't need to read a book while it brews or something like that so like you can hint at it's better than your competitors without saying unlike our competitors i do this it's you know what i mean that's that's a good point and it reminds me of something that alex marmosi said that i watched in the video the other day because the other thing you were doing is you're being hyper specific about their experience yeah so that that builds trust when when you understand like their actual experience of using that product.

47:47And he said, you know, a lot of companies, they do like marketing speak. So it's just like the same old, same old that everybody else is doing. So his example was like, you're selling weight loss. Don't say, are you overweight? Cause that's so trite. And that's what everybody does. You know, it's so you're trying to sell me something basically. And he was like, he was like the way that you say it in a way that connects with them, that makes them understand where you're coming from is do your legs rub together when you walk up the stairs and it makes a rash? Or do you ever find yourself out of breath and sweating in places that you didn't even know you could?

48:21Things like that work a lot better than just like this trite marketing phrase, are you overweight? And you sort of just did that there kind of naturally, right? Where you're like, yeah, no, I'm waiting for the coffee to brew, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I thought that was pretty good. While you read a novel? Yeah, I did one of the daily 1 % episodes today was about the first 60 seconds. I have this kind of belief that the first 60 seconds when someone hits your website, I don't know for anyone listening here, go back. I think it's number, the 1 % win number six or seven. I can't remember. But when someone hits your website in the first 60 seconds, they need to feel three things.

49:01So yes, there's like trust, authority. You need some logos, your messaging, but they need to feel three things. they need to feel that oh my god that's me they need to like say that in their head oh my god that's me so like what you just said is bang on not are you overweight not do your leg are you tired of your legs tired of the burning legs after you walk around all day from your from in your thighs or whatever it is right yeah oh my god yeah i can't take credit but so it's a very common thing in direct response marketing is the more you understand the customer's problem and what they're experiencing, the more they have this sense like, oh, this person gets me.

49:43So if they understand my problem really well, then clearly they probably understand the solution really well too. Totally. And you'll see, excuse me, you'll see in our Mosey's videos, like in the comments all the time, people are like, man, I feel like this guy just speaks to me in every video. Like he knows exactly what I'm going through. Yeah. It's okay. So it's the June 4th one, but yeah, so it's, Oh my God, that's me. And then the next thing they need to feel is I'm not alone. And then the third thing is you can lead me. Ah, Oh my God, that's me. And then I'm not alone. There's others going through this.

50:20So too, all the good news is, you know, 42%, like 42 % of America, not the good news, but 42 % of Americans actually struggle with the same thing. So you're not alone. And then something along the lines of this is actually why we developed this cream because I suffered with it and family members and it affected my daily life. I couldn't play with my kids. I couldn't jog. I wanted to get back to the things I love. So I developed this. So it's, oh my God, that's me. I'm not alone and you can lead me. And they need to somehow feel that. Like it's, you know, yeah, I love that. I love that concept.

50:54when we have a problem a lot of times we get kind of like myopic and in our own world and we feel like separated you know sort of in survival we're trying to solve a thing but we're embarrassed or we feel shame or guilt so we don't really want to open up about that and it could feel like you're you are all alone when you're not sharing or reaching out to others because you're just scared that maybe someone won't understand you so i could see yeah that's super powerful yeah Yeah. And, and just so many websites, if you go to right now, like I, they'll, all they're doing is talking about how great their benefits are, how great the product is, how great the features are.

51:32And I don't like land on their site and go, oh my God, that's me. You know, like in this, it applies to everything. It can be, say you sell a drink and, you know, maybe you're tired of waking up hungover and not functional the next day. and then maybe you're selling like a non-alcoholic drink or something so it could be like yeah that is me okay i other people are the same and this is the solution it applies to everything yeah so it blows my mind though how many e-com websites don't do that you get so in the trees that all you want to do is sell sell sell and your website isn't just to sell your website is to identify and build a relationship they need to see that you're a solution see that they're not alone and see that you can lead them.

52:17Time's right back to trust. 100%. Before we run out of time here, I want to ask you, what was what's your favorite strategy? Because we've pulled a lot. And even if we ended this episode 20 minutes ago, I feel you know, I say there's, if you get one piece of advice from an episode, that's a win. There's probably been like six here already. So we could hang up and that's good. But before we go, what is your what's been something that you really thought was like, from anything, any, in any category of any episode that you think is the most important or that you just appreciated the most? So, you know, what I do is I focus on one thing and one thing only as a service provider.

52:59So I have a specialized knowledge where brands, companies, businesses, service providers, it doesn't matter what you sell, who you are, who you sell to. they many times they're doing all of these things that we've talked about because that's what it takes to make sales and build customers is tap into these different layers of trust so they're doing all of this because that's what's required but they sort of nobody really takes advantage properly like an ethical moral way of that trust that they've built with that customer right they just really undervalue what happens after the sale they don't they don't realize that this whole process of creating that sale is to create that trust and then once you actually deliver like they they see your advertising it's good content they have this little layer of trust so that's the first layer the second layer they go to your website it's a line it's very well designed it speaks to them their problems their their needs you know it indicates that there's a solution here that can solve their problem.

54:04Hey, you're not alone means you're not the only person with this problem and we've solved this problem. And so they're like, I'm still on the fence. I need a little bit more education. I'll sign up for your free doohickey so I can get maybe a discount or an incentive, but maybe I'm still not ready to buy, but thanks for the incentive. So they sign up and then that welcome series or whatever starts to build that foundation of your brand story, who you are, why you're doing this. And then they finally purchase, they get a good experience of receiving the product, they unbox it. And then if they get a good quality product from you, and it does make an impact towards achieving their goal or solving their problem, like you said, you have a lead, you have a lead for life if you do it right, because there's no sale ever occurs in a vacuum.

54:55Any single time we buy a product to solve a problem, and it's good, and we're like, we start to see the vision that our problem can be solved. It's human nature. We immediately start thinking of what are like other things that I could purchase to make this even better or faster or less stress-free or solve additional problems. It doesn't matter what you sell. You're not the only person selling to that customer. So you can actually add a lot more value to their lives by thinking of the entire customer journey. So once they purchase this one product, they're willing to take action to solve their problem.

55:35They're willing to take out their credit card and make a purchase. That's when you have a hot prospect. Not because they buy and don't, You have a customer, but you have a you have the beginning of a relationship. And so one of the things that I like to do with the only thing that I do is my specialized knowledge is helping people maximize the value of that customer by leveraging that trust that they have with them to increase their LTV, which obviously helps lower their customer acquisition rate in the long run. And so if you can identify what else they're buying that they love that you don't sell because nobody has enough time, money or energy or resources to sell every single product or service that a customer will ever purchase along their journey.

56:23So turns out your competitors, your indirect competitors can become some of your best collaborators. And so a lot of people, they overlook that value of trust that they build with the customer. They don't think about it after the fact. They just think about, hey, I want to sell more products that I sell to this customer. But a lot of people want to collaborate and work with other brands because you get this halo effect of being associated with these other brands. And so rather than going to these other companies and saying, hey, you have a great product, we have a great product, let's trade these.

56:57I'll promote you, you promote me. That mentality of what can I get from this brand up front stops those deals from ever taking place. So if you go to another brand who you identify that your customer is buying this product, they're having a great experience, they've already done the product development, right? And they have great customer support. All of their logistics are dialed in. Rather than going through all of that process yourself, you can leverage that by surveying your customers, finding out what they're actually buying that helps them in addition to what you sell, and then bringing those products into your backend marketing to add a lot more value to the customer.

57:35And if they get a really good experience out of that, they had a good experience with you. 92 % of customers, right? And you know this. You talked about this at SubSummit. 92 % of customers, when they're finally willing to buy because they're committed to solving their problem, they are open to additional recommendations for other products that will help them achieve their goals faster. And so if you can get those into their hands, now you've really done three major things. Number one, if they had a good experience with you and now they have another good experience with another company, you've just increased your customer loyalty because you're a curator.

58:14You're helping them sift and sort through all the noise. And then obviously, because you have these deals, if you have a good company, quality product, sizable list, you have purchasing power built into your customer base. So you can negotiate pretty fair deals, win-win deals with these guys and send them the customer. They do all the order taking, the fulfillment, the processing of the credit cards, the customer service. You don't have any logistics or overhead in that process. You get a commission. That commission is straight to your bottom line. And we see companies, they actually produce more profit doing that many times than they do on their core business when they do it.

58:54And so if you can build that into the back end of your business, it gives you a halo effect because you're associated with these other brands. And the third thing is it really breaks up the monotony of your email sometimes because customers, when they buy from you and you just keep giving them content about what you do, eventually they sort of get it. They open your emails and they're like, OK, you're selling to your company. I get it. It's going to be about you. But I'm interested now that I bought your product, I'm interested in solving ancillary related products to this. And so if you send them some stuff like that, they get another reason to open your emails that's new and exciting and fresh because they have something to look forward to.

59:41So it helps with retention. Yeah. So that's my favorite thing. Imagine if you got an email from a brand that said, five products we love that aren't ours. like just completely not self-serving but more doesn't take much it doesn't take much right because if you have one good if you have just one good company that you promote you're sending one or two emails a month to promote them and then that's once a month if you can do that once a month for 12 months you can really drive like easily you could drive 20 to 30 percent more revenue but the fun part is that revenue is profit and once you have a number of these partners going maybe do twice twice a month excuse me like recommendation of the month but so to break up that monotony of the recommendation of the month every now and then like you just said you get maybe a grouped offer our five best recommendations and then so it gives them something like oh wow this is awesome because you just saved me a lot of time if i do a google search on any of these i'm gonna get a hundred thousand plus results i don't know what's good what's bad who to trust you've done that work for me oh and it's a good quality brand that i've seen around before you guys are associated with that brand that's so cool so it does a lot of cool benefits yeah i think that's neat and i mean it kind of ties into something i talk a lot about that i didn't make this up i heard this from seth godin he said it's better to find rather than find more people for your products, find more products for your people.

1:01:15And we often spend so much time trying to find more people, find more people, but, but we have a pretty decent audience. We have a pretty decent list of customers. We need to find more products for our people. And that can be your own products by adding more complimentary SKUs that you can sell or through partners, which is a great, great suggestion or both or both a hundred percent. It's not exclusive. Because one of the best ways, because a lot of times people will survey their customers and they'll be like, what other categories of products are you interested in? Or they'll think about their customer experience and try to identify what they're actually buying.

1:01:52So they'll go, you know, because smart brands, obviously the ones that scale to seven, eight figures, they realize it's not just about acquiring your customers. You want to monetize the customer on the back end. but so they'll go through all of this investment and product development before knowing for sure that that product will work and a lot of those products will fail so even sometimes even if you find out exactly what your customers are buying because that's what you know that's one of the that's one of the secrets to this is you don't survey them about what they might potentially buy because they'll give you a lot of answers that might be on the right track but it might be not on the right track.

1:02:29But if you find out specifically, what have you actually purchased in like the last 90 days, 90 days to 180 days that, you know, change your life similar to what happened when you bought our product, how did something that helped you other than what we sell, you can identify, okay, this is probably going to be a big win if I promote this. But so you promote it, if it is a big win, and you are interested in making new product SKUs, Now you just got paid to do that market research. And you're pretty sure if you come out with your own, now you can do like a pre-order and you can find the, you could literally find all of your product development.

1:03:09Yeah. Genius. Mark, this has been fantastic. Where can people go if they want to give me all the details of your podcast? I know you do some consulting. Where can people go to learn more about you? Yeah, best way, if you'd like to learn some things, one or two things that you can potentially use, good ideas are great. But if you want to move the needle, you need to implement. So I interviewed 20 leading experts so far. I'm on a journey to continue to do that. I want to interview all of the best guys in the game. And so I've got you in there on SubSummit stage with Andrew and Andre Rebrov from Sandberg.

1:03:50I mean, they only grew to a million members per month. You know, you might know a thing or two. Yeah, huge company. Paul Chambers and you and Andre were on stage with me and giving your best tips. That was a panel of you three. So it was a 30 minute episode. But the rest of these episodes are 10 minutes. what's your most profitable tip technique strategy that's really you know move the needle for your company because there's brands or your clients if you're you know an expert and so that's 10 minute ecom success like the number 10 10 minute ecom with one m success.com forward slash j for anybody who listens to this and then you sign up for that you get the full series immediately 20 episodes but like i sort of said in the beginning that can be like even though they're 10 minutes it can still be overwhelming because they're in chronological order so i made a little index by topic so depending on where you're at in your journey as a brand maybe you need some foundations maybe you need to know your numbers maybe you need to identify areas opportunity or drive traffic or convert or do some back-end retention each one of these guys they are a proven expert in their field and you can go straight to that index and find what works best for you.

1:05:05So that's where I would send you. Yeah, and if you sign up for that, obviously I'm going to email you. And if you want to, if you have any questions for me, just respond to that email. Awesome. I'll make sure those links are in the show notes as well. Appreciate it. Mark, thank you so much. This has been a ton of fun. What a great episode. Now, as you know, at the end of every episode, I like to give a 1 % win tip on how you can improve your store at least 1 % because listeners know that if you improve 1 % a day at the end of the year, you're 3 ,700 % better. So here's your 1 % win for today. Holidays are coming up.

1:05:38You need to dress up your subscriptions for the holidays. Now, I know not everyone offers subscriptions, but I know that roughly 75 % to 80 % of my listeners do sell subscriptions. So this is important for most of the listeners. So here's a wild stat. 30 % of all annual subscription signups happen in Q4, specifically right around Black Friday and the holiday shopping season. But most brands, they miss this opportunity. They have subscriptions, but they're just the regular subscriptions they sell all year. So if you're running a subscription, what I mean by dressing it up for the holidays is make sure it's ready for someone, a first time buyer who doesn't really know you that well.

1:06:20They're thinking gifts and deals and trial runs. They're not thinking subscribe forever. They might have just heard about you on an ad. So what are some things you can do? Kind of have three ideas for this one. One is I would definitely have a big value starter bundle. So let's pick anything you sell, like coffee, cosmetics, whatever. Month one, they should get basket of all the goodies. So let's just say it's coffee. Month one, they should get a few different flavors, a mug, your T-shirt, hat, whatever, the seasoning that you put in the coffee make a irresistible offer now you can make it well I don't I can't speak for every subscription app but with both subscriptions you can make so they can't cancel a subscription for three months or six months so people don't just get that free gift the first month and then don't keep it we have a feature called convertible subscriptions so the product switches month one and month two so the first month they get their gift and something else and then month two it switches to just the coffee ongoing this is a great thing to do during the holidays to really increase conversion and maximize all that traffic second thing make sure you have a gift option on your subscription so someone can send it as a gift in fact i think it's 35 percent of subscriptions bought during the holidays are for gifts so if you don't have an easy way to do that you're missing out and of course you want to make people send a subscription as a gift because that's another way to potentially get a subscriber.

1:07:49We, with both subscriptions, integrate with Govalo and Givy, two great options for gifting. And one of the things we do that is special is that when the gift period is over, it automatically continues for the recipient. You want to make sure that the recipient doesn't just get a three-month subscription and it's over. You want them to have a subscription control panel where they log in and they manage it themselves. And then if they want to continue, they can. because ultimately you want to get a long-term subscriber. Make sure gift option is there. And then the last one is you're going to be getting a lot of traffic that maybe doesn't know you super well.

1:08:26So it eases shoppers into a subscription. A great way to do this is with a trial size or a steep month one discount. Now, we have a feature called dynamic discounts that lets you offer a different discount month one versus the rest of their subscription. So you know how often subscriptions have a 10 % subscribe and save. So what you could do is you could have a 50 % discount month one, and then it switches to 10 % subscribe and save ongoing. So this is a great thing to do to just get someone over the edge over the holidays to convert to a subscription. Yes, you're running a 30 % off sale in your store, but get 50 % off when you buy a subscription.

1:09:04Cancel anytime, blah, blah, blah. Or you, again, you could make it so if you have a really steep discount that they have to keep it for three months or something not to cancel it. So, OK, now I know you can do this with probably a lot of subscription apps. I mentioned bold subscriptions a few times just because I'm speaking about features that I always work with our brands to implement. And if you aren't selling subscriptions and you want to, we would, of course, love to help you with both subscriptions. So but it's not to promote that. It's more just to talk about what the strategies are for dressing up your subscriptions for the holiday.

1:09:34So that's my one percent win for today. if you sell subscriptions at all think about what is your special subscription offer for the holidays do you have gift subscriptions can you add some stuff in month one and can you ease them in with any type of a first month discount that switches to the regular one so thanks so much for listening and just a quick favor to ask here if any of these ideas and tips are something that you might implement can you say thank you by leaving a five-star review in either spotify or apple or wherever you're listening to this podcast. That's how you can say thank you for the great advice that you're going to be implementing on your store.

1:10:12And if you can leave a comment in the review, email me and let me know that you did. I have a special gift for you. Thanks so much. We'll see you on the next episode.