Nerd Marketing Ecommerce Podcast

In this episode, Drew talks with Andrew Youderian on the  eCommerceFuel.com podcast to explain how to leverage post cards in your business, how his companies are gearing up for Black Friday, and more.  Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher Highlights The best way to utilize post cards for a significantly higher return on investment than other marketing outlets (i.e. Facebook) What to focus on when gearing up for Black Friday How to use post cards for your business Links / Resources PostPilot’s On-Boarding Concierge  Ramit’s Copywriting Course NerdMarketing.com AutoAnything.com RightMessage.com Klayvio’s Holiday Guide Klaviyo Liquid Web eCommerceFuel Job Boards eCommerceFuel Forum

In this episode, Drew shares his favorite resources and private equity investment contacts. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights A few names to file away and pull-out when you're looking to sell Links / Resources Brian Colton, Brooklyn-Equity Carson Biederman, Digital Fuel Capital Tom Clark, Comvest Dominic Ang, Turn/River Capital Kingswood Partners Me Chris Yates, Rhodium Weekend Empire Flippers,  Justin Cooke Quiet Light Podcast, Episodes two and eight Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. Read The Transcript: Hey, everybody. It's Drew Sanocki with the Nerd Marketing Podcast. We are talking about buying and selling businesses in this short web series if you will. This one, this episode, is the final one. Here I kind of want to open up my contacts to you and walk you through some people who are doing some interesting buying of businesses like yours, so these are ... Just file it away. If you hope to sell someday, these are some of the people who may be interested in buying your business, whether you run a SaaS company or a direct-to-consumer brand. I'm going to give you some resources here, and also just want to make it clear that it's not what you know; it's who you know. Part of fetching a good valuation and being able to sell your business or raise money for your business is knowing the kind of people who would love to own your business, right? Because these buyers, these funds come in a million different flavors. What we want to focus on here is not Robert Smith and Vista Capital. He's going for the billion-dollar SaaS companies. I want to talk about people who are playing in our space, direct-to-consumer and for smaller companies. First up is a friend of mine over in Brooklyn. His name's Brian Colton. He runs Brooklyn Equities. Brooklyn Equities is his vehicle for buying just solid, good direct-to-consumer brands. He owns one called Sherrill Tree that I want to say he bought back when it was doing about $1 million in revenue and is now at $40 million in revenue. I mean, he's just had a couple big success stories. Those numbers, don't quote me on them. I'm just trying to give you a sense of what he buys. His typical checks are typically $5 to $15 million, so he writes checks that size in return for which he wants majority ownership of the company. He'll take a board seat. He's targeting growth-ready companies that are doing under $5 million in EBITDA. I would also say I've seen him go after companies that are high in recurring revenue, often from B2B, so it could be an e-commerce company with a strong B2B play. I mentioned Sherrill Tree, so they do arborist equipment, so again, lots of B2B buyers, which means high recurring revenue, which means lower risk in the business as I went over a couple of episodes ago. So, his name's Brian. He's at brooklyn-equity.com. I am an operating partner with him on his funds, so feel free to reach out to me with any questions about Brooklyn Equities. Number two would be Carson Biederman at Digital Fuel Capital. Carson's up in Boston, another friend of mine. Great photographer and great ... just really sharp digital marketing mind. Again, probably goes after deals of the same size. I would say Carson a little bit more likes companies with passionate customers where content can play really well. He's got ski.com. He's got a couple sports apparel companies where there's a passionate user base. He sees that as a differentiator versus Amazon. He also owns Vermont Teddy Bear, which is a brand a lot of us are familiar with. I've certainly heard of them, growing up in the Northeast. Carson's operation is a little bit different at Digital Fuel Capital because he is growing an internal team of operators and marketers,

In this episode, Drew talks about six things you can do to maximize your company's valuations. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights Six tips to maximize your valuation How to decide on your story Tips for minimizing risk Diversifying your traffic sources Getting your company on autopilot How to network for selling Links/ Resources: Built to Sell, John Warrillow, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber IRCE Shop.org Flippa Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. Read The Transcript: Drew Sanocki: Hey everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing podcast. This is Drew Sanocki. We're talking about investments in private companies. We're talking about maximizing your valuation in this episode. I think it's a really important episode for that reason. Everybody wants to maximize your valuation, whether you're raising money ... If you raise money, if you're going to raise a couple million bucks, you want to do it at a higher valuation so you give away less of your company. Obviously, if you're going to sell your company, you want to maximize that valuation so you can get more money in your pocket. This isn't the typical maximize your valuation list that you'll see on a number of brokerage sites. Just Google it. You'll find plenty. This is my take, based on ten or so years in the game, on the things that I see, in particular around direct to consumer brands, and SaaS brands. Really, I've tried to distill it down to six tips, six things you want to do to maximize your valuation. Drum roll please. Number one. I would say decide on your story. What I mean by that is are you going to raise money or sell off of a growth story, or a profitability story? I'll give you an example. Karmaloop. When we acquired the assets of that business, it was probably ... They couldn't tell a growth story because the company was in bankruptcy. It was a declining asset. They're in bankruptcy. You can't tell a growth story. They couldn't also tell a profitability story, because they were in bankruptcy. You put those two things together, and the business fetches a much smaller valuation. So assuming you could do one or the other, try to decide now if you are going to be selling a growth story in a couple years, or selling that profitability story, because it's going to dictate what you do, and decisions around your business. If you are going to sell the growth story, you want to put as much of your profits back in the business, step on the gas, run Facebook ad campaigns at a lower return on ad spend. Whatever it is, you want to sell that growth story, so you want to lower your profitability, and always favor growth at the expense of profits. On the flip side, you're going to sell a profitability story, you want to do what you can to maximize the profitability of the business, like your target return on ad spend goes from two to ten, or something, to just generate as many profits as you can. The growth story and the profitability story determine very different kinds of buyers, and very different multiples, as we discussed multiples in the last episode. If you are growing, and you choose that growth story to tell, you sell that in your deal book. Then, you could also argue that you get valued off of multiple of revenue. Conversely, if you're on board with the profitability story, you want to maximize that owner's discretionary cash flow, because that's the thing that's going to drive the multiple of the business, and the ultimate valuation. So, I'd say, number one, decide on what story you want to tell. Number two, you want to reduce risk in the business. We talked about how valuations go from nothing for the smallest, riskiest businesses, all the way up to the public equity markets,

In this episode, Drew talks about the three highlights of how deals go down in the private equity process. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights Three highlights on how deals go down in the private equity Links / Resources FE International Quiet Light Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. Read The Transcript: Hey, everybody. welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Drew Sanocki. I'm still here in San Diego, still stuck. East coast is being slammed by another nor'easter. My wife's watching the kids. It's always good when you negotiate with your wife like, "Hey, I need you to watch the kids because I got this business thing I gotta deal with on the west coast. It's only gonna be 48 hours. I'll be back in a couple days." You negotiate that, she signs off, and then you're there for the whole week, and every time they FaceTime you, they see palm trees in the background, and you FaceTime them, it's like dark because it's snowing. They're losing power and stuff. So shout out to my wife, Sarah. I love you. Thank you for watching the kids. But it allows me to talk a little bit more about buying and selling a company, private equity. In this podcast, I'd like to delve into kind of how it goes down. I was working on the AutoAnything deal for maybe two months. It was accelerated because AutoZone wanted to close the deal by the end of their fiscal quarter. Typically, these process ... I've been a part of deals that have gone for like six months, and those are only the bigger ones. On the other end of the spectrum, when I sold Design Public, my small first retailer, that probably took about a month. It has to do with a lot of things: how sophisticated your buyer is or your investor, how buttoned up your own business is. But today I kind of want to talk about how the deals go down and really highlight three things. Number one is the process. This is the process you will go through if you go to sell your business or raise money or, if you are on the other side of the table and you wanna buy a business. That's the process. Number two: quick sidebar on valuations, just where you get them. Do they come out of thin air or not? And I just wanna touch on the third thing: control. That obviously applies if you are not exiting a business, but if you take an investment, control becomes a big thing. How much control do you give up of your company? Again, this all applies whether you are doing the buying or the selling, but let's start with the process. The process for ... I've probably been a part of 20 different deals, some as the buyer, some as the seller. It kind of all follows the same four or five steps. The first step is that, if you are selling, you hire a banker to run your process or a broker or decide to do it yourself, but the general idea of the process is that the banker or you, whoever's running the process, creates a deal book. The deal book is, I don't know, 10 to 20 pages, nice and pretty, with a lot of charts and graphs showing just what a wonderful investment your company is. You spend some time working with the professional to kind of put that deal book together, and then you or whoever you've hired approaches potential buyers with that deal book. The idea is to drum up interest. Typically, the banker will add some urgency into the process like, "Hey, here's the deal book on Auto Anything, and if you are interested, we'd like some approximate bid or something by next Thursday." There might be a couple calls with potential investors then or potential funds, but the first step is assembling that deal book and getting it in front of the right people. That's, I'd say, the more proactive way to sell your business. There's always the reactive way,

In this episode, Drew talks about his own personal experiences in buying and selling companies, and gives a brief intro to private equity, which he'll discuss in the next few episodes. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights Insight on selling Drew's first company, DesignPublic Intro to Private Equity Links/ Resources: Robert Smith Kingswood Partners Bill D'Alessandro Turn/ River Capital Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. Read The Transcript: Drew: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. This is Drew Sanocki, and I am podcasting from San Diego, where I've been working on AutoAnything. And for like the fifth time this winter, I am stranded in San Diego. So the New York airports are down, I can't go home. There are no flights in and out of there. So what better thing to do than podcast, right? I can probably think of a million better things. But seriously, what better things than to bang out a short series on buying and selling companies? We're going to call it buying and selling companies. I call it private equity, but I think most people don't know what the heck private equity is, so we're going to call it buying and selling companies. As you may or may not know, I just recently worked on a transaction to buy autoanything.com. It's a drop ship retailer based here in La Jolla. And as part of that I've podcasted about maybe one or two times. Some people are curious about private equity, how it happens, why they should care about it, why is there private equity. And it boils down to one thing, and I think it's ... these are probably the funds, or the groups of people that would buy you someday. If you are listening to this podcast, you're probably running a small direct-to-consumer brand, or SAS company perhaps, maybe an agency. Well, a lot of those things get bought by private equity funds, or small private investment groups. And so, why do you want to know about this stuff? Well, it's ultimately to fetch a higher valuation for your company, and to know about how to exit. That's probably 90% of you. But 10% of you, maybe you want to get in to private equity. Maybe you want to get into buying and selling your own company. And why would you want to do that? Well, for a number of reasons. I think it accelerates your growth. I think you can just get to where you want to go faster if you're working with some capital, or with other people's capital. So it's of interest to you too for that reason. So I want to spend three of four episodes doing a quick overview of buying and selling companies, at least my own experience with it. And I'm going to start with a story. And the story is of a young, handsome man, probably like 10% body fat. Am I painting you the picture of myself, maybe 15 years ago? Actually no, it was more like seven years ago when I sold my first company. But I'm walking through the West Village of New York, and in my hand I've got a FedEx package. And in the FedEx package is a bunch of signed documents to sell my company at the time, Design Public. And this was my baby. I bootstrap designed Public in 2003, we started the business, and now at the time it was like 2011. And we found a great buyer who we worked really well with, and they gave us an offer we liked. So at the end of months of work, of diligence of them going through our books and a lot of legal back and forth, in that FedEx pack was the signed purchase agreement. As soon as I got to the FedEx/Kinko's, I put that thing on the counter, and that was the point of no going back. It was my company up until that document was mailed. Once it gets mailed in, it triggered all sorts of things, like the money went in ... their money was already sitting in an escrow account,

In this episode, Drew talks about buying a company, and a few major lessons he learned from doing the deal. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights The Lessons I learned from the AutoAnything deal Links / Resources AutoAnything Press Release Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. Read The Transcript: Who is tired of hearing about Karmaloop? Raise your hand. "Here goes Sanocki, the one trick pony. Karmaloop again? We've already heard about that, Drew. Tell us something we don't know." Right? Well, this is the problem when you have one big recent case study that kind of is very relevant to your audience. I mean, I've done stuff since Karmaloop. I was the CMO of this company Teamwork and I run my agency, Growth Engines. We've got a number of direct to consumer brands, but the problem there is I can't talk about a lot of them. Today I'm excited to announce something big and something I've been working on a long time. I was part of a team that bought a new company, and the company is called AutoAnything. Autoanything.com, they are in the car accessories category. They sell things like floor mats and converters and things to sup up your car or Jeep or truck. It's the reason I've been in California so much. I know I've been saying, I do this podcast from San Diego. Been here for months, going back and forth to New York, and it was because I've been working on this deal. AutoAnything, the deal was announced today by AutoZone. We bought it from a public company, AutoZone, I guess about an $8 billion company. There was a divestiture, so what that means is, any company that size owns a number of different business units and for some reason or another, they decide that this business unit isn't core to their business and they want to get rid of it or think it'll be better off as an independent entity. I was part of a group that could move fastest and put the right offer together to acquire the asset. AutoAnything itself is a beast of a business. I mean, a million plus skews. If you can imagine in the auto category there is a make, model, year of every car and if you're selling something like a floor mat make, model, year, and then that thing comes in every color imaginable. Just a huge product catalog. It's primarily drop ship, but they do own a couple private label lines and brands, which obviously have great margins. It does about, I can't get into the specifics, but call it a nine figure retailer and seven figures in EBITA, so seven figures in profits, which is great. It all depends on the deal price, on what you buy it for, and obviously I can't get into that, but we're happy with it. Obviously it made sense for all parties. Man, I learned a ton in the process of this deal, and would love to kind of start getting into it, start getting into what we're going to do with the company. Just for me as a marketer and as an online merchandiser, I look at a number of assets here that I'm excited to work with. First, there's just the scale of this business. You know, you don't get to work on a nine figure business every day. There's four million people on the email list, from what I see a lot of discounting going on and not a lot of lifecycle marketing, so that gets me excited. Four to five million visits a month, there's just traffic. You know, there's scale here. Scale that you can sink your teeth into and make changes and see results very quickly. Some of you might be saying, "Drop ship retail," I mean, this was my first reaction when I heard drop ship retail, like, if I started a business today, an eCommerce business, it wouldn't be drop ship. Right? Because you don't have anything proprietary and you're selling the same stuff your competitors are. "Drew, why did you buy a drop ship retailer?" Well,

In this episode, Drew talks in-depth about the tools that made productive work possible during a 7-month long trip across the globe with his family. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights 19 Online tools that made it possible to work and travel for 7 months Productivity tips and hacks for combining work with travel Links / Resources Download my list of Top Nerd Travel Tools Sanebox Worldwide101 (Mention Drew sent you and get 20% off your first month) Sovereign man Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. → Read the Transcript Drew:Hey everybody. Drew Sanocki here with the Nerd Marketing podcast. This is an early morning podcast. I'm recording this at 4:30am because I am on the West Coast and I'm still on East Coast time. Got up this morning at the nice time of 3:00 a.m. I don't even have my kids here with me to get me up, so what else would I want to do at zero dark thirty but bust out a podcast? I'm here working on a big deal, and more on that in an upcoming podcast episode. Today, I know I promised everybody my top tools, my top travel tools. These are apps and tools and gadgets and cool things that I really appreciated when I spent seven months on the road with my family going to Europe over the last year. We're about to go to Asia. We're thinking of a trip to Asia again for another six or seven months. These things are going to be in my travel bag or on my laptop or on my phone. They really help run my business remotely. I think I mentioned in the last episode that one of the visions I have is running an iPad business or being an iPad leader. What that just means is I want to be able to run everything off the iPad. I don't want to do it on my computer. Initially I laughed when I saw these kind of senior private equity guys show up at board meetings just with their iPads, but now I get it. There's nothing better than getting on an airplane with just your iPad and a small bag of your clothes and just kind of sitting down, preferably in first class or business class, you take out the iPad, do a little bit of work, watch a couple videos, watch some Seinfeld and that's it. I don't want to be hunched over a laptop the rest of my life so iPad leadership is kind of what I'm going for and that really has helped inform some of these tools. I started out to do a list of about 12. I think I ended up with a list of, I don't know, I want to say 30 or so. Too many to go into in this podcast, so what I'm going to do is highlight some of my favorites on the podcast and then you can go to the show notes and download a PDF that has the whole 30, many of which you probably know about, but I think what I tried to do here is be a little bit different from the standard Tim Ferris bio life hacking stuff and just talk about what a typical dad might appreciate on a trip or a typical parent. So, without further ado, SaneBox. Let me start with SaneBox, which I've talked about before. It's an app to help you manage email. The primary benefit is fewer interruptions, right? It's like reduced information that you have to process on a daily basis. This holds true if you're traveling, it holds true if you are going into your office every day, but there's a lot of evidence that shows that the more information you've got to process, your willpower goes down, you just kind of get beaten down and stressed out. The beauty of SaneBox is you can configure it, or when configured the proper way, you can open your inbox at any time and all you see is the most important stuff and it's typically, in my case, I've got the thing so dialed that it's like three or four emails that I need to respond to at any one time. If I open it at 9:00 a.m., 10:00 p.m., middle of the night, it's just the most important things.

In this episode, Drew talks about the five different observations he had while working and growing his business during 7 months of travel with his family, and the people and tools that made it possible.  Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights Five different observations I had working and growing my business while travelling How the 80/20 rule saved my life (because airport wifi is shady) If you're making more than $100,000 a year, hire an assistant yesterday through Worldwide101 How you can use Sanebox to triage your emails (and an assistant to triage your Sanebox) When you should start swinging for the fences Links / Resources Growth Engines Worldwide101 (mention Drew sent you and get 20% off your first month) Sanebox Checklist of 12 online apps and tools to use for work while traveling  Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. → Read the Transcript Drew: Hey, everybody. This is Drew Sanocki of the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Today I want to talk about the five things I learned while I was traveling and working. It's kind of funny that the number one question I get is not about, like, "What was the coolest thing you saw?" or "Where were the nicest people?" or "Where was the best food?" The number one question I get from entrepreneurs is, number one, "Did you work?" and number two, "How did you work?" To answer those questions, I put this podcast together. Yes, I did work, in short. I have a couple of different businesses I'm involved in. The primary one I'd like to talk about here is growthengines.io. That is an agency catering to direct-to-consumer brands and to private equity funds that often buy or sell those brands. That business today is bigger than when I left. I think a big reason is because I embraced these five things I'm going to talk about today. Without further ado, the number one observation that I have after six months abroad or seven months abroad is that, really, the 80/20 rule reigns supreme. I know I beat that dead horse all the time on this podcast, but you don't fully understand it, you're not forced to comprehend it until you are on some remote island in the Caribbean, and there's no WiFi, except for the one hour when you're going through the airport on the way in and on the way out. I mean, talk about a constraint. What that forced me to do is, you can't be online all the time. What you really need to do is think through what are the most important things you need to do that week, such that when you hit a WiFi connection or can get cell phone coverage, then you can log back on and accomplish those things. So, what didn't I do during those times? I mean, really, the 80% of my work that doesn't give me any results, and those were things like this podcast, for one. Actually, the podcast gives me results, but I dropped it. I stopped doing the podcast. Bookkeeping. Tinkering on my blog. I mean, how much time do I spend, do you spend, messing around, moving fonts on your blog or configuring colors or something, just so it looks nice? Really, there was no time for that at all. So, drop that. Coffees and calls. These two things are a huge time suck, especially when you're in a city like I am, where there are a lot of people, and everybody wants to meet, and "Hey, Drew, you want to grab coffee?" or "You want to hop on a call here?" If you add that time up, those are hours every week I would spend at coffees or on phone calls. So, I really could not do those at all. Those got dropped. Calls to my mother, for example, also got dropped. I mean, completely unessential, right? I mean, I don't need to call my mom. So, I would go months without calling her. No, I didn't, but reduced amount of time calling my mother. You'll block out so much non-essential stuff.

We're back! In this episode, Drew talks about where he has been the past 7 months, and 3 things listeners can expect from upcoming episodes of the podcast. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights A little look at where I've been the past 7 months The podcast is back (obviously) Over the next few sessions, I'll be talking about buying more assets I'll share some lessons I'm learning with my other company, Growth Engines, Inc. I'm developing a course on e-mail marketing Links / Resources Drew's Instagram Sara's Instagram  Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. → Read the Transcript Drew: Hey everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. I'm back. I am back. It's 2018. I have been on hiatus for seven or so months, and I have just been overwhelmed by the number of people out there who are asking, "Where's the podcast? Drew, where's the podcast, how come you haven't podcasted in a while?" That's just among my two kids, and even people on my e-mail list are asking for the podcast to come back. I don't know why. It's not something that I think adds a lot of value to anything, but some people like audio, so I'm going to roll with it. In this podcast, I wanted to kick of 2018 and set the stage a little bit, catch everybody up on what's going on in nerd marketing, like you care, but there is some things in it for you. Give you a little trick I've been experimenting with, and then we'll move on to some content in the next couple of podcasts. The big thing is, I just got back from a seven-month trip with my family. We left back in March, came back to the States in early November, or I guess around Halloween. This was awesome. It was life-changing. It was really an incredible time. We went to the Caribbean, we went over to Europe and did the Clark Griswold thing. Again, yes, this is with the kids. I've got a five and a three-year-old now, but at the time they were two and four. Brought the wife also. Yeah, it was just amazing. It's too much to put into a podcast. A lot of falconry and boating and beach time and visiting museums and eating cheese and all the good stuff that comes with that. I think the big thing for me was that it really allowed me mentally to punch out of the system, or the systems. I think when we live in a place, we are at the mercy of several systems. It can be the career system where you feel like you've got to do something in your career. There's the housing system, you've got to own some sort of housing or play that game. The school system, where in New York it's just a nightmare. You got to get your kids into the right schools, and there are all sorts of things you got to do to get that kid into the right school. It was really liberating to just eject and break free of all those systems. The rent system, I didn't have to pay rent for six or seven months. I think if you're really enlightened you can break out of those systems without needing to break out of them geographically, but moving geographically can't hurt. It was really liberating for me and my wife to leave for seven months and just be this nice, independent, mobile family unit without a lot of constraints. It allowed me to think about a lot and to plan for what I really wanted to get out of the next couple years in my life, and that brings me here. It brings me back to New York. We came back to New York for the holidays. We are planning on travelling again, maybe in a month, and this time we're talking about the West Coast, Asia, and the idea would be that we get back to the States in time for my five-year-old to start first grade. We are homeschooling him now, which I thought he would end up really weird, but he's great. Because home-schooled people are always really weird, but my kid is fine,

Drew is joined by Patrick Shanahan for another round of Tradecraft - this time featuring a tool for postcard marketing, and a chat app that reveals what your customers really want.Subscribe: iTunes | StitcherEXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode.HighlightsDrew is off to travel the world with family in tow, expect new episodes from sandy beaches and other exotic locales.A new emphasis on video contentA shopify app to trigger the sending of physical postcards to people in your databaseWho to make the target of your postcard marketingA chat app Patrick uses to get in touch with what his customers really wantHow to collect customer feedback into something actionableLinks / ResourcesMore Tradecraft in Episode 28 and Episode 30.PostPilot.comDriftTranscriptPrefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. → Read the Transcript Drew: Everybody, welcome to the Nerd Marketing podcast. This is Drew Sanocki and I am joined today by Patrick Shanahan, my trade craft partner. How're you doing, Patrick? Patrick: Good, Drew. Nice to talk to you again.Drew: Today we're going to go over some tips and tricks, what we see working out there, what's helping us do our jobs better as online marketers. You've got a couple things, Patrick? Patrick: I do, I do. I've got one I'm quite pleased with, so I'm fired up to talk about it.Drew: I think people like these episodes. They like hearing what's working.Patrick: Yeah, they do. I mean, I've looked at your stats, they're the most downloaded so obviously it's working. So, you just come off your big talking circuit, I know you talked about that in the last episode, but you're about to go full vagabond. Hit the road. Want to tell us about that?Drew: Yeah, it's something really exciting my wife and I've wanted to do for a long time so next Saturday we're packing up, and we're going to the Caribbean, and we're not coming back to New York for probably six months. I think that we're not going to be in the Caribbean the entire time, but we'll do Central America, and Europe. We're taking the kids, obviously. We're really looking forward to it.I mean, we're stressed about the packing and getting everything done and we're trying to liquidate a lot of our personal belongings that we really don't care about or want to store, but with any luck it'll all come together by next Saturday when we're on that flight.Patrick: Amazing, amazing. I can't believe you're taking the kids. That's going to be an adventure, buddy.Drew: Yeah, we debated leaving them at home for six months, but we thought we should... we thought they'd miss us so we're going to take them with us.Patrick: Well, congratulations, that's amazing. And are you going to stay podcasting? Drew: No, I'm shutting down the podcast for six months. No, I'm going to... I'm going to keep podcasting, I'm going to do some video. A lot more video. Maybe not quite as much writing, the long form emails, they take up a lot of time, so I think I can try to move a little more into video and audio for the next six months.Patrick: There we go, so the future dispatches will be from sandy beaches and other places hither, and thither, and yon.Drew: Yeah, you know, I feel like I've got a lot of things I want to cover. We've been talking a lot about this concept of a cash flow business, or a lifestyle business, and we're just scratching the surface. We're talking about customer problems and brand, and there's a lot more I want to talk about on that and what I see working for you, Patrick, for me, at Nerd, and through my own consulting. So I want to share that on the podcast.And, really, I think video's going to be a great medium for that. So, maybe you'll see a lot more of me now that I'm leaving the country.Patrick: Maybe the best thing that every happened to the podcast, you actually have the time to focus on it and [inaudible 00:03:23].

A few updates from Drew - recaps of three recent events he spoke at, the key learnings at each of them, and a preview of the near future for Drew and Nerd Marketing. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights RECAP: Traffic and Conversion Summit Niche businesses - why they're great, how they fail, and where retention marketing comes in The "Scrum" approach to growth RECAP: Brand Growth Intensive Workshop with Austin Brawner RECAP: Masterclass with ConversionXL What's Next: Build a Bigger Business Course for Shopify Catalogues - A resurgence of old school mail marketing? A couple of new courses are coming Much, much more Links / Resources Check out Drew's free, 7-lesson email course Double Your Ecommerce Touchstonetests.io More on basic segmentation in Google Analytics in Episode 16 Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. → Read the Transcript Hello everybody, and welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast, episode 31. I am Drew Sanocki, and I am coming at you from New York City, where I'm finally taking a break. A break being defined as being an hour break, not like an extended break. Man, I have been running the gauntlet of E-commerce speaking engagements, and workshops, and classes. I'm going to tell you all about that stuff today. A lot of good stuff to report. Basically I want to spend this podcast just kind of reconnecting, welcoming all my new listeners who I've met over the past month or two since my last podcast. I want to do a little bit on what I've been up to, and then where I'm going, what I'm working on next. Let's start with the former, so what I did first. I spoke at Traffic and Conversion. This is the huge E-commerce and digital marketing conference that's put on in San Diego. It was, I guess about early March, this Traffic and Conversion went on. I was one of 10 or so speakers, and it's easily the largest E-commerce and digital marketing conference I've ever been to. Thousands and thousands of people, it's put on by DigitalMarketer.com. Obviously the focus is on traffic and conversion. A lot of big speakers. We had some people from Uber, some people from Casper, plus a lot of industry people there. I was asked to speak about Karmaloop, and what went on there, and database marketing more generally. I'm happy to share my deck with you guys, and kind of what I did. Maybe I'll do that as a separate podcast. But, my big takeaway from this was that the industry is still really focused on acquisition, and traffic, and hacks, and tricks, and bells, and whistles, and things that, silver bullets that people think are going to get them 10x growth in a year. It's not to say that those things don't exist, I think they do. But, we gotta beware of survivorship by us, right? Most of the blog posts that get published talk about these things, but it's not reflective of the vast majority of other companies that are around just slugging away, just applying pressure over time, and growing slowly. It's not to say one's better than the other, it's just to say, "Hey, when you read a headline you're focusing in on what that author tries to promote, and uses to promote that post." Even within a post. You read a post on DigitalMarketer.com about some company that 10x'ed revenue in a year. Even within that company that 10x'ed, there was probably a whole mess of stuff that happened behind the scenes before they figured out the one thing that would catapult them to the next level. Just beware what you read. I think you see it in the eyes of the people, when you look out at these conferences. They're just, they want the quick win. I think I've been there, I've been in those seats when I was running my own retailer. I too, read those headlines because they draw me right in.

From taking advantage of the 24-hour news cycle, to improving your sender score - Drew and special guest Patrick Shanahan share a few of their favorite tips, tricks, and hacks. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Digital marketer Patrick Shanahan joins Drew to talk tips, tricks, and hacks in this episode of the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Learn how one eCommerce company used newsjacking to turn a hot-button topic into huge sales. Plus, resending emails to boost your overall open rates, and a clever hack Patrick calls a "Reverse LeadMagnet" to improve your sender score with Google. Highlights Drew has a new office, some hilarity ensues Newsjacking – using the 24-hour news cycle as a marketing channel Resending to unopens - an email technique you need in your toolkit Speculating on the mysterious Google Sender Score Patrick's "Reverse LeadMagnet" technique to improve sender score A tip on segmenting your audience by email client Much, much more Links / Resources Apply now for Drew's 2-day Brand Growth Intensive workshop Check out Drew's Conversion Playbook to build a proven system that explodes your conversion rate in less than 30 days More on newsjacking in this article. Check out Black Rifle Coffee's viral tweet here and the resulting wins. Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF.

Austin Brawner from Ecommerce Influence joins Drew to share four killer strategies to make the most of the all-powerful email marketing channel. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. To accurately convey just how valuable a sophisticated email marketing strategy can be to an Ecommerce retailer, Drew enlists the help of Austin Brawner from Ecommerce Influence. Both Austin and Drew have a ton of experience consulting and providing audits to companies asking the big question, “What can I be doing better?” Typically, the answer is – smarter email marketing! As Austin says in this episode, most retailers are only using 10% of the available power of their email service provider. Automation, segmentation, retention campaigns – these are the strategies the most successful retailers are using. Learn about each of them in this episode of the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Plus, an announcement of The 2-Day Brand Growth Implementation Intensive – a live event unlike anything you’ve attended before, hosted by Drew and Austin. Highlights The big shift that turned Drew’s first big Ecommerce retailer around. The role email marketing has played in Austin’s Ecommerce career. The benefit of fixed costs in email marketing. Typical list management issues that Austin discovers while consulting. Benchmarks for desktop and mobile opt-in rates. Responding to pop-up concerns. Segmentation and targeting: sending the right messaging to the right customer at the right time. ”Good dog” and “bad dog” automated emails. The only thing holding companies back from succeeding with these strategies? They don’t actually implement them. Drew and Austin are hosting an intensive email marketing workshop. Links / Resources Apply for a spot in Drew and Austin’s Intensive Email Marketing Workshop. Ecommerce Influence More on Discount Ladders in Episode 02. Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Austin Brawner: Hey, what's up Drew? How are you doing, man? Drew Sanocki: Hey, Austin. I'm doing well. How are you? Austin Brawner: I'm good. I'm pumped to be doing this joint podcast together. We've been talking a long time about doing a joint podcast or a joint project and here it is and hopefully, it fulfills everything. We've been getting lots of e-mails from people wanting to hear us on the same podcast. Drew Sanocki: Either they want to hear us on the same podcast or they want us to fight. Austin Brawner: Which is great because we're actually going to be fighting on this podcast. Drew Sanocki: We're going to do both. Austin Brawner: We'll take care of both. Drew Sanocki: Yeah, I mean nerd marketing and e-com influence have been sort of sniffing each other's butts for what? Six, eight months now? Austin Brawner: Maybe longer, maybe longer. We've had a lot in common. We've been thinking about ways to work together and this is kind of our, well, the podcast here is kind of our idea of bringing our knowledge together from spending, you spent how many years longer than I have, 10, 15 years in e-commerce. Drew Sanocki: Yeah. You're rubbing it in. 15 years. Motherfucker. Austin Brawner: Our, the last half a decade at least, in e-commerce, driving sales and we wanted to come together, bring a podcast together where we share our best tips, the stuff that we've learned that works and it's working right now. Drew Sanocki: Yeah, I think, I listen to a lot of e-commerce podcast and really, I find that you and I talk about a lot of the same stuff. We're always hammering home the importance of retention, of e-mail marketing, of lifetime value and so I'm psyched. I'm psyched that we're doing this joint podcast and we're going to talk about some cool st...

Drew and digital marketer Patrick Shanahan share their favorite eCommerce marketing tools of 2016. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. We all know that there is no one silver bullet guaranteed to push your business to success, but certain tools can be a big help on the path to higher revenue. Special guest Patrick Shanahan, a digital marketer from Art Storefronts, joins Drew in this episode to talk about just that – key marketing tools that brought him wins in 2016. Learn about PushCrew, an in-browser notification system, and hear Drew talk at-length about Drip – an email service provider with some serious automation chops. Highlights 00:20 - Introducing special guest Patrick Shanahan 01:30 - More episodes of the Nerd Marketing podcast are coming 02:15 - Where has Drew been? Announcing his new CMO role at a SaaS company. 04:55 - Recap of SaaSFest 2016 08:36 - Let's talk about some shiny objects 09:18 - Tool #1: Klaviyo – an email service provider that Drew loves. 15:50 - Tool #2: PushCrew – An in-browser push notification tool that Patrick has had success with. 24:08 - Tool #3: Drip – A fairly new email service provider with unique integrations, automation abilities, and unique features. This is the one Nerd Marketing uses. 33:15 - How to use Drip to keep your list healthy and your emails out of the "promotions" tab. 36:52 - Front-end personalization using Drip. Links / Resources Klaviyo Drew demonstrates how to use Klaviyo for effective win-back campaigns in Episode 25. PushCrew Learn more about in-browser notifications in this DigitalMarketer article. Drip Check out Drew's free, 7-part course on doubling your business. Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Drew Sanocki: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Welcome back to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. This is Drew Sanocki. I have a special surprise today. I have a guest here in the Nerd Marketing studio. My guest's name is Patrick Shanahan. Patrick, how you doing? Patrick Shanahan: Drew, good. Happy to be joining you. Drew Sanocki: For all of you who are listening right now, all three of you, probably don't know who Patrick Shanahan is. Patrick and I have been working together for almost a year now. He's actually not here in the studio in New York with me. He is out in California. Patrick, why don't you introduce yourself to the three or four listeners of the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Patrick Shanahan: Are you kidding me? We're at least up to seven. You've got seven listeners now, I think, on a good day [crosstalk 00:01:02]. Drew Sanocki: It's three. Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. I run marketing, actually, for a eCommerce shopping cart that's a neat shopping cart called Art Storefronts. It's basically a shopping cart for three legs of the stool, the niches. If you own a print studio that reproduces art or if you're an art gallery or if you're an artist. Been running marketing over there for awhile. We're kind of in startup mode but growing pretty quickly. Yeah. Drew Sanocki: Awesome. Patrick, also, has been helping me out a little bit with Nerd Marketing. He has always been pushing me more to do more podcasting and releasing more content. That is my promise to you know. I guess this is December 2016, going into next year, I really want to hit he podcasting hard. We've gotten a lot of good feedback from our email subscribers and the podcast listeners that they enjoy the podcast. I think it's worth doing. I'm going to try to be a little bit more regular with the podcasting. As part of that, I think Patrick's here to help and hopefully add some value to you guys and help you grow your businesses. What have I been up ... I obviously have not been producing content.

Average Order Value as a key multiplier to increase your company's revenue, and how to implement premium service upsells to increase your AOV.Subscribe: iTunes | StitcherThis week's campaign is so simple and effective you'll be kicking yourself for not thinking of it ages ago.It's Drew's "One-Two Punch" Email Campaign designed to increase your order frequency.It starts with asking yourself one question: "What kind of recurring needs do my customers have?"Tune in to hear the rest of the campaign implementation, as well as a little bit about why Drew favors increasing the number of purchases over the number of overall customers.Highlights00:21 – Drew may have ruined his son's reading habit by introducing him to the world of Star Wars02:40 – Recap: three multiples that will grow your revenue03:20 – Focusing in on frequency. Why more purchases instead of more customers?05:18 – The "1-2 Punch" Email Campaign07:00 – Campaign results example (10% lift!) and why it works so well07:50 – How to get started on setting it up for your biz09:18 – Some ESPs have even easier ways to set the campaign up10:00 – Recommendations for related episodes on frequencyLinks / ResourcesMore ways to increase frequency? .Check out Drew's free, 7-part course on doubling your business.More on frequency in Episode 6.TranscriptPrefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later.→ Read the Transcript Hey, everybody, this is Drew Sanocki. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast, Episode 27. I'm talking about increasing your retention today using a technique I call the 1-2 Punch.Before I get in to that, does anyone have small kids? It's my 4 year-old's birthday. He's really into reading, like loved reading the classics. Yeah, the classics of being 4, a 4 year-old classic, whatever the 4 year-old classics are.Little House on the Prairie, stuff like that, he's into it. My wife was thrilled, English major, kid's reading the classics. We're out at the beach the other day, and he's bored with the classics. He's hyped up so I decided to just tell him the story of Star Wars.I started, you know, "Okay, so enough about whatever you're reading, Pride and Prejudice, you know Miss Havisham. Okay, so there are these two spaceships. One attacks the other one and Darth Vader comes off, but there's a princess who puts the plans in a droid and fire the droids off, and Darth Vader needs to get the plans." He's, you could see it in his face.He was like, "You've been giving me Miss Havisham, and there's this other world out there of like spaceships and lasers and light sabers? There upon ensued, it's been like a week running now where he's, every time we go to bed, he does not want to read the classics anymore, and he wants me to tell Star Wars stories. Not even, he's just stopped reading, he just wants me to talk, so I kind of poned myself because I've got to tell the stories now. I'm on the hook. Before I could just toss him a book.My wife is thrilled now, by the way because that's all he talks about. He needs to know these various technicalities of what's going on in the Star Wars series as opposed to lessons learned from classics or something.Anyway, that's what I've got going on. All this which brings me back to increasing your retention and the 1-2 Punch.Okay, so we're going to bring it back to ecommerce here. Bringing it back. There are three ways, three multiples that will grow your revenue. AOV, average order size, frequency of purchase, the number of times somebody buys from you on average, and then the third one, the number of customers. Right?Three ways, only three. I like focusing on those three.I wrote a short free course about them at nerdmarketing.com/double, but today we're going to talk about the second one, increasing your frequency, your customer's order frequency. How do you get them to buy more often. In stepping back, why would you want this to happen.

Average Order Value as a key multiplier to increase your company's revenue, and how to implement premium service upsells to increase your AOV. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Want the AOV mindmap Drew mentions in the episode? ! Also includes the full transcribe from this episode. A 25% increase to your AOV is a 25% increase to your business's revenue. It's as simple as that. So how do you do that? Considering you probably don't have the next 12 hours to listen to Drew cover all the potential ways to build up your AOV, let's hone in on just one method – the premium service upsell. Listen in to hear more on AOV as a key multiplier in your business, and how to use a service-based upsell to influence AOV and identify your whales. Highlights 0:52 – Drew's recap of the Digital Marketer Content & Commerce Conference 2:30 – AOV - Average Order Value. What it is, why it's a key multiplier to increase the revenue of your company 3:25 – No spending on acquisition, just optimize what you've already got 3:40 – Case study: How Drew's friend on Shopify would implement a quick upsell to increase her AOV 6:12 – Example of a premium, service-based upsell 7:40 – Upsells can come from partnerships with third parties 9:41 – Some tricky math involved in measuring AOV 10:50 – Upsells as a great way to identify your whales Links / Resources More ways to increase AOV? for more ideas. The Content & Commerce Summit Another good way to increase AOV is through Bounce-Back email campaigns. Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript   Hey everybody, welcome to the Nerd Marketing podcast. This is Drew Sanocki. We're back in school here in New York City, which means I've got the sinus infection back that will be here until the Spring. My son goes off to preschool and he comes back with a different strain of flu everyday. He, of course, gets over it within a day, takes me weeks, and when I recover, he hits me with another one. This is the next nine months of podcasting for you. I hope you enjoy the sound of my nasal cavity. What else is going on? I just got back from the Digital Marketer Content and Commerce Conference in Florida. It was a great conference. If you went there and I met you, hi again I guess. The odds would be low, because I kind of spoke in like a broom closet. I was going up against James Altucher, who had like a million people in his conference room. I had five or six listening to me talk about retention and exciting things like that, but, you know, it's their loss. I put out some good material. I got asked a question that caused me to rethink some of these podcasts. Really, it was about getting away ... This guy asked "Hey, how can I implement this stuff? I get it, I get the database marketing stuff, but how can I implement it in my own retailer? It's just me and like two other people. We don't have time to do everything and if you could focus on making your tips a little more practical ..." Not his exact words, but ... "I would appreciate it." I started thinking, let's do a couple podcasts here about bringing these things really down to earth, some of the concepts recency, latency, tripwire marketing, and make them easy to digest and implement for the standard e-commerce, smaller company. Want to download this transcribe for later? for an easy PDF download. Today, I want to talk about AOV, average order value, the average size of a typical order through your e-commerce site. AOV is what I call the three multipliers. Three ways to increase the revenue of your company. The other two, of course, being frequency of purchase, which is a retention metric or the average number of times somebody orders from you. The last one being the total number of customers you have, acquisition, traffic.

How to treat your win-back campaign as a discount ladder, with every rung designed to retain customers and make you more money.     EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Want the win-back email template Drew shows off in this episode? as a PDF! Also includes the full transcribe from this episode. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher One win-back email is good. But even better? How about a chain of emails designed to escalate your win-back offer the further the customer slips away? Using a discount ladder is the key to making money with your win-back campaign. Tune in to see how Drew set up such a campaign for a large-scale retailer. Plus, his insights on using your remarketing audience in Facebook Ad to win-back customers. Highlights 00:30 – Discount ladders in the form of win-back emails 01:08 – The problem with most win-back emails 01:30 – Full walkthrough of an anti-defection discount ladder Drew set up in Klaviyo 03:15 – A/B testing every rung of the ladder 03:55 – Pulling this full strategy from email over to Facebook Ads 05:52 – Suggestions for more discount ladder info Links / Resources Want to use the Karmaloop email featured in this episode as a template for your own business? . Klaviyo For more on Discount Ladders, check out Episode 1 (intro to discount ladders), Episode 2 (getting started), and Episode 3 (win back case study). For more on how to use your email platform to boost revenue, check out Episode 23 on dynamic ascending offers. Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Hey everybody, this is Drew Sanocki, nerdmarketing.com, and we're talking about discount ladders on the podcast. One thing I want to do today was give you a number of examples of good discount ladders or usage of discount ladders so you kinda get the idea of what the hell I am talking about. And without further ado, we're gonna go to the screen flow, here, and I'm gonna walk you through some discount ladders. So first, you know, a great example, or great opportunity where you can use discount ladders is in Win-Back emails. Win-Back emails are the ones that are sent out to customers who haven't bought from you forever in an attempt to sort of win them back into the fold. And, you know, I Google Win-Back emails and you're gonna see a lot of examples here. Here's ones from Eventbrite with their Win-Back. And here's one from Social Sprout and Postagram, and like everybody does a Win-Back, right, you know? What can we do to win you back? Where ya been, yadda, yadda, yadda. Dropbox does one. Want to download this transcribe for later? for an easy PDF download. My issue with these is they leave money on the table, right? Maybe they are not awesome. Because they're a single email. If you take everything we've learned about a discount ladder and make the single email into a series, you're just going to do that much better at capturing or re-capturing that customer. For example, here's one I built out for a fairly big online retailer. It is a Win-Back, I am trying to win back everybody who has purchased one or, one time and has not purchased a second time, I'm tryin' to get that second purchase. And what I've done is I've figured out that these customers for this retailer order roughly every 30 days. So if 30 days has come and gone and they have not ordered, they're not likely to order from us again. Perfect opportunity for a, it's called an anti-defection discount ladder. And you can see I'm using Klaviyo here to set up this automated campaign in Klaviyo, it's called a flow. My first email goes out 30 days after purchase and it only goes out to people who have not purchased in the last 30 days. And it's a simple 10% off offer. We're now gonna think in terms of our ladder, what do you do with the ladder? You increase the promo over time. So if someone buy,

Bounce-back email campaigns as a clever and simple way to cross-sell and increase your average order size - implementation tips and a downloadable template.     EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Want the bounce-back email template Drew features in this episode? as a PDF! Also includes the full transcribe from this episode. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher Would you like fries with that? McDonald's offers a cross-sell with every order for a reason – it's a simple and effective way to increase average order size. If your shopping cart can't support advanced cross-selling on-site, a clever work-around is an email-based bounce-back campaign like the one Drew implemented at Karmaloop. This little trick takes just an hour or two to set up and will capture your customers in their most engaged state – in Drew's case it resulted in an additional million dollars of revenue across twelve months of implementation. Highlights 01:20 – Why cross-sells and up-sells work 02:11 – Email bounce-backs as a solution when your cart doesn't support traditional on-site cross-selling 03:44 – Setting up a bounce-back campaign in Klaviyo 04:20 – The offer Drew used in a bounce-back with Karmaloop 04:31 – What the bounce-back email Drew implemented looked like 05:13 – Tricks to add "fictitious urgency" with the appearance of an advanced coupon system 06:14 – The revenue Drew generated with this campaign 07:36 – Optimizing this process after you have it set up 08:10 – How to get the email template featured in this case study Links / Resources Want to use the Karmaloop email featured in this episode as a template for your own business? . For more on how to use your email platform to boost revenue, check out Episode 23 on dynamic ascending offers. Curious what else Drew did while at Karmaloop? He shares the entire story in episodes 21 and 22. Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Hey everybody, welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Got a special podcast for you today. Because we are doing full screen cast podcast. If you are near a screen, check out the podcast. Check out the visuals. You will see that I've got headbands and wristbands on. That can only mean one thing. That one thing being, I look like a complete idiot! In my co-working space right now. But it actually means another thing. The other thing is that we're gonna go into some actual customer data here. I've got the full screen going on my screen flow right now. The subject of today is, bounce-back email campaigns. What's a bounce-back email campaign? How do we use them to increase you average order size? Why do you care about this? Because it's probably one of the simplest things you can do to increase your revenue. You could implement one of these things in an hour or two. And if you have the same success I did at Karmaloop, you're gonna be making money in, in, by tomorrow, right, so at Karmaloop it took me about an hour to set this up, and it ended up generating a million dollars in revenue in the first year. So, let's dig into the case study. You're probably asking, what's a bounce-back campaign? Well, before we get into what's a bounce-back campaign, let's step back and talk about what are cross-sells, or up-sells in general, right? Cross-sells are stolen from the information marketing community, right, it's this idea that you're gonna buy something, that the customer has his or her credit card out, they're gonna buy something. And you want to get them to buy, to increase their average order size, right? So, add something to the order, or increase the value of their shopping cart, right, McDonald's does this a lot, "You want fries with that," that's the classic cross-sell. Want to download this transcribe for later? for an easy PDF download. And, again,

Competing against Hamilton, segmenting based on recency, and using dynamic ascending offers to make the most of your offer campaigns.     EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Want Drew's Dynamic Ascending Offers presentation slide deck? as a PDF. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher What's the theater around the corner from Hamilton to do this summer? Drew knows someone in just this situation, and proposes a solution in dynamic ascending offers. This is a key concept to implement if your retailer distributes offers via email, and ties together all of our past discussion on recency. Highlights 00:23 – Drew saw Hamilton 01:15 – Recency – Good customers stay good 03:05 – Example of working with recency segments in Google Analytics 04:48 – Promotions – Most retailers OVER promote. Look at your subsidy costs 06:00 – Dynamic ascending offers – sync your offers to customer recency 07:05 – Your offer doesn't need to be a discount 07:30 – An example of a real world dynamic ascending offer 08:28 – Running a theater down the street from Hamilton – how do you even market that? Links / Resources Want Drew's slide deck from this presentation? . For more on using recency as a predictive metric, check out episode 18 (intro to recency) and episode 19 (working with recency segments in Google Analytics). To learn more about data-driven strategies that grow ecommerce businesses, just . Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Hey, everybody, Drew Sanocki here with the Nerd Marketing podcast screencast. What musical is generating a half million dollars a week in profit? That's the question today, and the answer is, of course, Hamilton. I saw Hamilton recently, and like everybody else who saw Hamilton, I feel compelled to tell everybody else that I saw Hamilton. The subtext being that it makes me somehow cooler. Well, so I'm passing that on to you. I saw Hamilton, so I am cool. Seeing the musical did get me thinking. How would you compete with Hamilton? What if you're my buddy Larry, who wrote and produced this musical called Bat Boy, which is like around the corner from Hamilton. How does Larry fill the theater every night? Well, one of the things he can do is use dynamic ascending offers, and it's a strategy or a tactic that I think every e-commerce retailer can benefit from. If you're not using them, it will make you money, and they're very easy to set up and implement, and they wrap up two ideas that we've been talking a lot about in this podcast. Without further ado, the first concept is recency. We've talked about that in the last few episodes. We being me, by the way; I don't know why I'm using we. I've talked about that in the last few episodes. Recency is essentially the time since an action has happened. So usually it's in days, so how many days since I have last visited a site or opened an email or purchased from a site. Want to save this transcribe as a PDF? No problem, . Really applies to anything, but it's time since in action and the more recent the person, the more likely he or she is to repeat an action and/or respond to a promotion. That's where it's interesting to you as a marketer, because if you have the option of promoting to customer A, who last purchased last week, or customer B, who last purchased two years ago, you know, spend your promotional dollars on customer A. They are much more likely to respond to a promotion. Another way of saying this is good customers stay good. If you've got somebody who's buying religiously every week from you, they are likely to continue buying from you. If you have somebody else who hasn't purchased from you in a very long time, they're likely to stay bad, so in the back of your mind, think recency means good customers stay good. And what's really powerful,

Tune in to learn how Drew designed and executed his marketing strategy at Karmaloop. What to focus on, specific tactics that worked, and key overall learnings. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Want the transcribe from this episode? as a PDF. Now that we've heard from Karmaloop CEO Seth Haber on last week's episode, let's get into what Drew was doing behind the scenes as CMO to take the business from bankruptcy to profit in just 10 months. It starts with an "operational" framework for growth, and a commitment to improving three key metrics... Highlights Approaching growth from an "operational" framework (The only) three ways to grow a business Doubling your business by increasing three metrics by 30% Increasing your average order value – what worked at Karmaloop You might be able to charge more than you think Upselling with automated email marketing Playing with the free shipping threshold Winback and tripwire campaigns to drive frequency of purchases More traffic doesn't always = more customers Influencer marketing Links / Resources To learn more about data-driven strategies that grow ecommerce businesses, just . Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Hey everybody! Welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. This is Drew Sanocki. We're looking for new apartments right now in New York. It's a very stressful time. It's stressful when you when find several thousand, you know, $6,000 a year apartments where "two-bedroom" and the second bedroom is like a closet where my daughter's going to live. That's good times. It's good times, and the realtors use the quote sign, the air quotes, when they say, it's a two-bedroom, and you're like, "Thanks, buddy. Thanks, buddy" Sorry, daughter of mine. You're not going to see the sun for the next two years. Anyway, this is what my life is right now. It's an apartment hunt, which is never fun. Can't wait till it's over but in the meantime, let's talk about growth. Let's talk about karmaloop.com, so this is the retailer where I was the CMO. We sold it about a month ago, and a year ago, it was losing half a million dollars a month. We brought it to break-even within ten months. I'm going to start telling the story about how we did that. I think in the last episode you heard from Seth Haber, who was our CEO and he told a little bit more of the merch story, the merchandise story about how to resuscitate a retailer. In this episode, I'd like to talk a little bit more about what I did on the marketing side. If you think back a couple episodes ago, we talked about operational frameworks for growth, right? We talked about a tactical framework, strategic framework, and then this operational framework. The operational framework is the one that I adopt. It's the one that I think is the most practical. It helps me think through how to grow a company. It's the one that private equity funds love because the mindset is you're going to go in and double this business in a hundred days. How are you going to do that? The math really works out and that's as follows, so there are three ways to grow a business. Number one, three and one three. Three ways to grow a business I should say. Number one, increase the average order value, average order size. Number two, increase the frequency of purchase. This is basically retention, frequency of purchases, the number of times acing a customer orders on average from you, and then number three, increase the number of customers, so that's more acquisition. Really, only those three ways, only those three levers to grow a business and if you increase each of them thirty percent, more than doable within a year, you've doubled the business, so the math is 1.3 times 1.3 times 1.3 is two hundred twenty percent, so can you increase your average order order value by thi...

Drew talks to Seth Haber about how they rescued streetwear retailer Karmaloop from bankruptcy in just 10 months. What went wrong, how they fixed it, and what they learned from it all. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Want the transcribe from this episode? as a PDF. You may have heard about Drew's involvement in turning Karmaloop around – from bankruptcy to profit in just 10 months. But what strategies went into accomplishing this? What growth paradigm were they operating under? And how did Karmaloop get in that position in the first place? In this much-requested episode of the Nerd Marketing podcast, Drew talks to ex-Karmaloop CEO Seth Haber about that 10 month period of rapid growth. What they did, what they didn't expect, and what they learned from it all. Highlights Why Karmaloop went bankrupt before Drew and Seth came onboard How Seth ended up as CEO The things Seth didn't expect to be so difficult about turning Karmaloop around Kanye West's role in keeping Karmaloop afloat How Drew underestimated how difficult it was going to be to get the marketing platform up and running Winback campaigns – Getting back old customers vs. acquiring new ones Breaking into the footwear market What Seth is most proud of after his 10 months at Karmaloop The value of a company full of people that care about each other Links / Resources If you haven't already, listen to this episode on growth paradigms to better understand how Drew approaches eCommerce growth. To learn more about data-driven strategies that grow ecommerce businesses, just . Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Drew Sanocki: Everybody, welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. I'm here today with a guest who needs no introduction, Mr. Seth Haber, [crosstalk 00:00:15] former CEO of Karmaloop, the company where I was the CMO. Seth Haber: Thank you for having me. Drew Sanocki: How're you doing? Seth Haber: I'm good. I'll try not to talk over you for the rest of this thing here. Drew Sanocki: It's fine. It's fine. I'm used to that. Now we've got probably five or six listeners. Our listeners care about ecommerce. They're very curious about retail. Everybody wants to know the story of Karmaloop. How did they go bankrupt? How did we grow them out of bankrupty and then the process we went through when we sold the business. Seth Haber: Cool. Drew Sanocki: I could think of no better guest than you. Seth Haber: I appreciate that. Drew Sanocki: Probably because I don't know what I can and can't talk about and I'm just going to follow your lead on that. Seth Haber: Oh, man. Here's hoping I get that right. I think, for me, it's important to say that neither of us were involved in the business before it went bankrupt. My involvement started really very, very shortly before I took over on, I think it was May 27th, so really maybe a couple of weeks' head start to that. A million stories going around but I think the one thing that was really clear, after having been involved for a little while, was that Karmaloop was a fast-growing, exciting business. They took a significant amount of money from venture capital guys or private equity guys, whatever you want to call them, and they were asked to and went for broke, went for gold, and tried to build a massive company. Along the way, it didn't work. Why it didn't work, I wasn't there so I can't tell you. Everyone's got a lot of theories but the truth of the matter is it didn't work and that led them to going bankrupt. Drew Sanocki: I want to say they got up to $100 million in revenue at some point or close to it. Seth Haber: Yeah. I think one of the most ... probably over it, but I think one of the questions we'd certainly have to ask or find out is how healthy was that?

Three different ways to think about rapid growth, some resource and books to look into further, and Drew's preferred approaches to growth. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Want the transcribe from this episode? as a PDF. There is a ton of info out there about how to grow a company. Books, blogs, podcasts like this one, and everything in between. If you could use some help narrowing down your focus and deciding how to approach eCommerce growth, this is the episode for you. Drew covers three different growth paradigms – tactical, strategic, and operational – and shares a little bit about his personal approach to growth. Highlights How Drew thinks about growth when approaching a new company Three Growth Paradigms – How Drew Took Karmaloop from Bankruptcy to Profit in 10 Months Tactical growth strategies – optimizing what you're got Some Blogs to check out for good tactical growth advice The risk of absorbing too many tactics A few of Drew's favorite books on growth Leveraging distribution advantages (ie: influencer marketing) The shortcomings of marketing books when it comes to digital marketing Operational-level growth Improve three areas of your business by 30% to double your business (Three categories to focus on improving) Links / Resources To learn more about data-driven strategies that grow ecommerce businesses, just . Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Everybody, welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. This is Drew Sanocki, live. It's not live. If you're listening to this at some point, it's not live. What do I say? Podcasting from New York City. It's better if it's live from Times Square. Live from Times Square, this is Drew Sanocki, the Nerd Marketing Podcast. That sounds better. We're going to say it's live, even though it's not, obviously by the time you're listening to it, but hey, everybody, this is Drew Sanocki. I'm broadcasting live from Times Square, New York City, center of the universe. We're talking about growth. We're talking about eCommerce, and today's topic is karmaloop.com. It's going to be the next episode's topic and the next episode's topic. Basically, we're going to walk you through what happened at that retailer, so this was a bankrupt retailer last summer in June 2015, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. I want to say 500K. Don't quote me on that. I was part of the team that went in and purchased the company out of bankruptcy. I came on board as the CMO, and within 10 months, we had gotten the company to break even, sold the company for more than we bought it. I can't get into details, but this is the story. That's an amazing growth story, and probably the most important thing is I'm not an idiot. We just got confirmation that I am not an idiot because the stuff I teach on this podcast actually worked at this retailer, so there is your stamp of approval. I know what I'm talking about as evidenced by this latest case, but we're going to dig into that. Want to save this transcribe to read later? No problem, . We're going to talk about growth, how I think about growth when I go into a new company like this, how you can think about growth at your own retailer, getting some really good successful things happening in a short amount of time. I'm going to talk to a couple of people at Karmaloop about what happened in their part of the business, but the topic of this episode is really ... Let's step back a second and talk about growth paradigms. What is the perspective I have when I go into a company? I work for a private equity fund now, so if they hire me to go into a company, they want what's called 100 day plan. They want an immediate ROI in their acquisition. They want to really move the needle in a short amount of time.

Learn how to create recency segments in Google Analytics and how to use this data for predicting marketing campaign success and calculating lifetime value.   EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Want the transcribe from this episode? as a handy PDF. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher Do you know what your customer lifetime value is? Many startups are too new to have access to reliable information on this metric, but a great predictor is recency. Follow along in this episode as Drew walks through setting up a recency segment in Google Analytics which you can use to isolate your "best" customers to better understand where they came from and how you can acquire more of them. Highlights 00:00 – Introduction to recency and the lifetime value metric 00:54 – Drew's headbands 01:22 – How to create a "high recency" segment in Google Analytics 03:21 – Ignore the "Days Since Last Session" metric 04:08 – How to read the graph after you've created the segment 05:06 – Viewing aggregate behavior from your high recency users 06:54 – Using this segment to predict which marketing campaigns, ads, content pieces, etc. will work 07:36 – Breaking the data down by channels 09:02 – Breaking the data down by marketing campaigns 10:10 – Breaking the data down by individual Ads 11:22 – Recency for content businesses 12:58 – Wrapping things up Links / Resources To learn more about data-driven strategies that grow ecommerce businesses, just . For an intro to recency and some context checkout episode 18: An Introduction to Recency – A Key Predictive Metric Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Everybody, welcome to the Nerd Marketing screen cast, podcast. Today we are going to dig into recency. I'm gonna show you some really cool, easy ways to assess recency in your Google Analytics account. Why would you wanna do this? Because who knows what customer lifetime value is? Right, raise your hand, who knows what their customer LTV is? I'm betting that not a lot of you are raising your hands right now. And that's because a lot of you guys are start-ups, and start-ups have no idea what a customer lifetime is. So how can you measure the lifetime value? For those of you who don't know your customer lifetime value, which is a critical metric to know. You're gonna use recency instead because recency predicts lifetime value. I should pause right now and talk about the setup here, these are my Nerd Marketing screen cast headbands and wristbands. I don't know if it looks better. Does it look better up? Like this? Or down? I'm gonna keep it up. Alright, so now we're gonna go into Google Analytics here. Fortunately, you don't have to stare at my face through this whole screen cast. Want to download this episode's transcribe? to download as a PDF. But here's an eCommerce company I worked with and we're gonna talk about creating a high recency segment. So this is a segment of your users who are, who are more recent than the total group of your users. So these people have been on your site more recently. And we're just gonna see how you can use that segment to help you predict which marketing campaigns are really growing your business. And ultimately, answer that question of where do you wanna put your next marginal marketing dollar. And where you wanna put your effort. So what am I talking about here? Let me just walk you through this, this is looking at a three month timeframe in Google Analytics of all my traffic, all my activity on the site over the, these past three months. That's the blue line. The orange line will be my high recency segment. And to create this segment, you want to, I'll show you here. Click this plus, if you don't have this here but basically edit the segment. Call it whatever you want, most recent, high recency,

In this episode, I introduce the concept of Recency as it applies to an online business, and show how it's critical to figuring out the campaigns that will lead to growth. EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: For tons of freebies and to be notified when my next episode on Recency is released, sign up for the Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher Highlights A dating quiz from Drew's love life Recency is the #1 most powerful predictor for future customer behavior The problem with using Life Time Value (LTV) when you're a start-up A basic definition of recency Using recency to understand which customers to focus on Recency vs. Latency Using recency in your advertising and A/B tests Much more! Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Hey everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing podcast. Got a bit of a question for you today, who is Drew Sanocki more likely to marry? Woman A, the woman I dated in college who I thought was my perfect match. Intellectually compatible, smart, we had the same group of friends, we had a very stable, loving relationship, or woman B? We will call her the mildly psychotic woman B. It's a woman I dated 10 years later, who I fell head over heels for. We had a completely unstable relationship full of chases, long email rants back and forth, multiple breakups, backstabbing. That's the question I put forth to you today, and before I give you the answer, I just want to welcome you to the nerd marketing podcast, the only podcast where you can hear Drew Sanocki make the magic of data driven marketing easy to understand, and fun, and profitable for you. Want to save this transcribe for later? to download as a PDF. Today's topic is recency. Recency is a metric. It's one I would love if you could learn to love in the way that I loved both of these women. I love recency because it's the number 1, most powerful predictor of future behavior, future customer behavior. Because of that, it's a critical metric for you running your digital business. The problem with start ups is that you don't know lifetime value. There's a lot of writing online about lifetime value. "Oh, just figure out the lifetime value," "Figure out which campaigns drive which kinds of customers with which kinds of lifetime value, and put your money behind the campaigns that drive the highest lifetime value," but the problem with a start up is that you don't know your customer lifetime yet. You're just coming out of the gates. All the big LTV calculations on kiss metrics, they don't apply to you. In those cases, there's some other metrics that are very helpful, and probably the best is recency because it's predictive. Recency predicts future value. The idea is this, recency is the number of days, or the time since an action has been performed. The more recent, the more likely you are to repeat an action. The less recent, so the more days or time since an action has been performed, the less likely you are to perform that action. It's largely because you've found substitutes, or you've had your needs met, or you've found another product, or something like that. Let me give you a couple examples. First, non-business examples. I talk about the gym a lot because I'm not creative, and all I have are gym examples, but who's more likely to go to the gym today? Is it the guy who went to the gym yesterday, or is the guy who last has been in a gym a year ago? Recency means that the dude who was in the gym yesterday is much more likely to go to the gym today than the dude who was last in the gym 12 months ago. Easy enough, right? Applies to everything. Diet, who's going to eat a healthy meal at lunch today? It's the person who probably had a healthy meal at breakfast versus the person who last had a healthy meal in 1990. Okay, so that's recency. It applies to dating, also, which I'll get to.

How to access Time of Day reporting in Google Analytics to help you decide when the best time to send marketing emails is for maximum engagement.     EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Add Drew's custom Performance Over Time report to your company's Google Analytics account! + download the transcribe from this episode. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher What day of the week is your audience most engaged with your content? Are they more likely to visit your site in the morning or at night? Performance over time reports are a great way to sharpen your email marketing strategy, arming you with historical data to back up your decisions when it comes to the days and times you send emails. In this episode, Drew covers the importance of Time of Day reporting, talks about a few ways you can use these analytics to grow your business, and shares the link to a Google Analytics custom report he created that you can use, too. Highlights 00:48 – A couple of reasons you’ll want to keep track of your top performing days and times 01:10 – There’s no default view for “performance over time” in GA, you need to create a custom report 01:54 – How Drew sets up his custom performance over time report (click here to use it on your own site) 02:59 – How to analyze your custom report once you’ve created it 03:50 – Looking at the data in a pie chart 04:01 – Pulling out just email traffic from the report to determine what day is best to send your emails 05:57 – A look at an “Hour of the Day’ report Links / Resources Ready to take a look at your Time of Day analytics? Click here to import Drew's custom performance over time report to your own Google Analytics! To learn more about data-driven strategies that grow ecommerce businesses, just . Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Okay. Today we're going to use Google Analytics to investigate performance according to time. What do I mean by that? That means we're going to investigate performance on our website. It could be visits, it could be e-Commerce transactions or revenue over a unit of time, either hour of the day. For example, how does traffic or conversions at 6 AM differ from 10 PM? It could be day of the week, so how is revenue on our Monday different from revenue on our Friday? It could be week of the year. How is week three of the year different from week 52 if you want to look into seasonality? Why would you want to do this, you're probably asking right now. Well, if you've got your best offer, for example, you don't want to send out that offer on a day during which no one's on the site or during which no one has historically responded to your emails. Those are two examples of why you'd want to know this. If you go to investigate performance over time, Google Analytics, the first thing you may or may not notice is it's not really broken out here on the left hand side. There's no menu item for performance over time. What you've got to do then is create a custom report. Want to save this transcribe as a PDF? No problem, . You click on the customization tab up at the top and you're going to want to click on "New Custom Report" here. I've already built one out called "Performance Over Time" so just to speed things up I'm going to show you how I configured this report. This is the custom report interface. You see you've got a title in at the top, you add content to it in the middle, add some filters and views. Just to go through this quickly, I'm calling it "Performance Over Time" and what I'm going to walk through is day of the week. I want to find out how my revenue through email differs on day of the week, that's the challenge. We'll call it "Day of the Week". Under metrics groups you want to add really whatever you would like to know according to day of the week. Would you like to know about sessions,

Three metrics that will show you who your best customers are, where they are coming from, and ultimately how to grow your top and bottom line. Recency, frequency, monetary — RFM RESOURCE: Prefer to read instead of listen? to download the text transcribe for this episode. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher In this episode, I talk through how conduct some essential segmentation using Google Analytics. I say essential because this is it -- RFM -- the mack-daddy of database marketing that dates back to the early catalog age. These three metrics will show you who your best customers are, where they are coming from, and ultimately how to grow your top and bottom line. RFM and GA – Learn It, Embrace It, Profit From It. Screencast   Highlights 00:29 – Intro to Google Analytics segments – Why Drew uses them, and why you should too 00:54 – "Whale segments" 01:31 – RFM – A key trio of metrics that will help you discover your best customers 02:36 – Setting an RFM threshold that's specific to your business 02:48 – What an RFM segment looks like in Google Analytics 04:32 – How to create a new segment 04:46 – The metrics that are most predictive of future value 06:05 – Working with segment in Google Analytics after you've created it 06:30 – How to see what % of total revenue was generated by your segment 07:06 – What to do with this information – actionable insights Links / Resources The (sign up to unlock freebies) RFM Google Analytics Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Okay, everybody. Today, I'm going to talk about Google Analytics segments. You've all probably wondered at one point or another, "What are these things up here, this blue circle? This orange circle? Why would I want to use them? Who cares? What is Google Analytics?" You've probably wondered all those things. That's what I'm going to talk about today.Google Analytic segments, first. Why would you want to use them? Really, the question is why would you want to segment your users, and I think there's many reasons to that. You might want to compare your email traffic to your pay traffic, or users from one part of the country to another part of the country. Want to save this transcribe to read later? to download it as a PDF. Why I segment, is because I want to get a growth. The way to do that, is first identify your most powerful, your best customers out there. I call them your whale segments. These are the ones that are driving your business. Once you've identified them, grow that segment. Any business has good and bad customers. It's not uncommon to see that 20% of your customers drive 80% of your revenue. I call that 20% to your whale segment. We're going to use Google Analytics to start to investigate who those whales are, and how we can acquire more of them. The first question you're probably asking is, "How do I identify those best customers?" I'm going to give you three metrics. RFM they're called, that you can use to start to poke around and start to figure out who those best customers are. There are three behavioral metrics, and they were piling by the catalog industry in the '50's. If you want to read up on RFM, here's a great Wikipedia article. Really, in summary, recency means how recently was somebody on your site. A customer who was on your site today, or who bought from you today is more valuable than one who bought from you two years ago. Seems intuitive enough. Frequency is the total number of interactions a visitor or customer has had. Somebody who has purchased from you 10 times is probably more valuable to you than someone who's purchased from you once. Monetary value is just the total dollar amount that somebody has spent with your retailer or your site. That's RFM. Really, there are different thresholds.

SatinLinedCaps.com's Emmanuel Eleyae, explains how he used influencer marketing to grow his $1 million dollar retailer using nothing but a paperclip, a ball of wax, and Youtube. EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Get my Million Dollar Cheatsheet + the transcribe for this episode. . Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher Multiple surprise guests... Why adding a nurture sequence increased Manny's revenue by 44%... Highlights What door-to-door sales taught Manny about Marketing How video influencer marketing sold Manny's first 1,000 units. Using Famebit for influencer marketing Why adding a nurture sequence increased Manny's revenue by 44% Manny explains what small tweaks to their website increases sales Links / Resources The (sign up to unlock freebies) Satinlinedcaps.com Famebit.com Reelio.com Ecommercestruggles.com Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Drew:  Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing podcast. We are talking today with Manny from Satin-Lined Caps and also from ... Manny, what's the name of your blog? Manny: eCommerceStruggles.com. Drew: eCommerceStruggles.com. Want to save this transcribe to read later? to download it as a PDF. Manny: It's a mouthful. Drew: How do you say your last name? Manny: Eleyae. Drew:  Eleyae, Eleyae. Despite the fact that I don't know how to say his last name, I've known Manny for a couple years. He is one of the few experts on influencer marketing in the eCommerce world. Manny: You're too kind, sir. You are too kind. Drew: I hope that's what we're going to get into today. Manny, we are doing a short series on companies that have experienced rapid growth, eCommerce companies that have experienced rapid growth; ideally, bootstrapped ones, too. Slaps was one that came to mind immediately so I thought I'd reach out and just ask you about how you grew that company. I say slaps but I'm abbreviating satin-lined caps, which is how they're referred to, right? Manny: Yes. Drew: Welcome. Manny: Thank you. Good to be here. Drew: Maybe before we jump into this could you tell the audience listening now a little bit about who you are and your background? Manny: Sure, I can do that. '04 graduate of the Military Academy, so go army. Drew: Hoo-ya Manny: Finished that and went to ... had to get that in here on your podcast, there, Drew. Drew: Right. Manny: Went into the army. Did a lot of logistics. Finished that, went into Amazon and did a lot of direct-to-consumer fulfillment. I learned a lot about managing a warehouse, managing lots and lots of SKUs, lots of inventory, inventory management, all that, and realized watching all the FBA vendors shipping their product in to us and we'd do all the shipping and stuff for them while they collected the check. I was like, "Wow, I'm on the wrong side of this thing. I need to get a product and start selling on FBA and shipping it in to Amazon to do the hard work for me." At the time I was getting ready to leave and my sister came to me. She said she had an idea for a product. She had talked with quite a few people that really liked it. It was like, "All right. Let's get started. Let's try it out." We started it out on Etsy and just going door-to-door and trying to get anything going. I still remember the days where we selling one a week and we'd have a goal of trying to get to five a week. Drew:  Door-to-door? Manny: Yeah. I even went door-to-door with it. Drew:  That's random strangers, or ... Manny: Yes, literally. Well, not random strangers. We would go to downtown and go to all the retail shops and try and get into retail salons or consignment shops or anything that was geared towards women anything. It was interesting because I would walk in with this hair care product for women and I was this man with no hair trying t...

How Colorit.com 's Michael Jackness grew a Million Dollar eCommerce business in 1 year using niche selection and Facebook marketing through ads. EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Get my Million Dollar Cheat Sheet + the transcribe from this episode. . Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher You know, usually there is a fair amount of luck involved when someone achieves extreme growth. They stumbled into the right niche or made the right strategy partnership. Highlights How the death of affiliate marketing led Michael to build 4 eCommerce stores The importance of reviews and how quality products can sell themselves Testing your products on eCommerce MVP’s How viral contesting can work in a tight-knit online community Facebook Marketing – Using Facebook insights for detailed audience data Micheal’s SEO Strategy for success How eCommerece is an 8 cylinder engine Micheal's TWO pro tips for rapid growth Links / Resources The (sign up to unlock freebies) Colorit.com Treadmill.com Cuttingboard.com Icewraps.com Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Drew:  Hey everybody, welcome to the Nerd Marketing podcast. This is Drew Sanocki and now we are talking with Michael Jackness, who's one of my favorite e-commerce entrepreneurs. Micheal, welcome to the show. Michael: Thank you and now I have a lot to live up to. Want to save this transcribe to read later? download it as a PDF. Drew: Well, I'm just sort of fascinated by you because you've got, I mean your skills run the gamut. You've got a millions irons on the fire, you're flipping domains, you're starting e-commerce businesses, Amazon businesses, you're going to China, you run a podcast. Did I miss anything? Michael:  I'm a husband. Drew: You're a sumo wrestler. Michael:  Yeah, as far as business goes that pretty much covers it but, yeah and I guess you could even argue that maybe I have too many irons in the fire. It's something I've been working on a lot over the last two years. I think there's that saying, if you chase two rabbits both will get away. Drew:  Right. Michael: We've really been focusing on e-commerce lately and really just doubling down on that and I've been basically living life with blinders on when it comes to e-commerce. Whether it's running stores or running an e-commerce podcast and blog or going to events. Everything that I think about and dream about these days is in e-commerce world. Drew: Dream about. Michael: I've had dreams about it, nightmares I guess which actually came true here with one of our products, but, yeah I think when you're so immersed in it, yeah, you can even have dreams about e-commerce, which is pretty sad. Drew:  Yeah, I had a nice Shopify dream last night, it was great. The series I'm working on here is I'm talking to a lot of entrepreneurs who have bootstrapped companies up to seven figures in revenue. I say seven figures in a year but it doesn't really matter, you've achieved some sort of rapid growth with an e-commerce store and I think that is really interesting. It appeals to a lot of people and it represents another alternative to all the venture backed companies we hear about all the time. That's why you're here as my guest and I would love to talk about Color It, but before we do, it's nice to hear a little bit more about how you got here and maybe a little bit about your history in e-commerce, maybe you can talk about that for a sec. Michael: Sure, so before we got into e-commerce, the story kind of starts there really because we were affiliate marketers and basically that means that you put links in your site and if someone clicks through them and buys or signs up or whatever the action they're taking, you get a commission and you're pretty much hands off once they click that link. It was a wonderful world to live in for eight ...

How IronFenceShop.com 's Josh Manley reveals how he ramped up a 7-figure business using AdWords. EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Get my Million Dollar Mindset Cheat Sheet + the text transcribe for this episode! the PDF. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher In this podcast I continue to explore the various sets of circumstances that contribute to epic early traction online. Highlights Josh explains how listening to consumers led him to build a 7-figure company How IronFenceShop.com got their first sale and set up their sales funnel Phone conversion rates vs. email conversion rates Why tracking data down to the keyword level will put you ahead of your competitors Josh's tips for making your ecommerce retailer successful Links / Resources The (sign up to unlock freebies) Google Callroom Ironfenceshop.com Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Drew: Hey everybody, this is Drew Sanocki with the Nerd Marketing podcast and we are talking about growing an e-commerce retailer to seven figures. Today my guest is an old friend, Josh Manley, who is the founder and CEO of IronFenceShop.com and a number of other businesses. Josh, welcome to the show. Josh: Thanks, Drew. Glad to be here. Want to save this transcribe to read later? to download it as a PDF. Drew: Yeah, thanks for coming on. Josh and I worked together a couple of years ago, I've known him for a long time. He's, like, consummate entrepreneur, has started several businesses and the Iron Fence Shop, in particular, is one I wanted to talk about today because he was able to grow that from zero to over a million in revenue. Bootstrapped, right Josh? Josh: Yeah, a hundred percent self funded. Drew: Yeah, so where do we start? Maybe you could tell us a little bit about who you are, about how you got the idea to start the business and take it from there. Josh:  Sure. Yeah, so way back in olden days, 2002 ... In about 2000, I worked for Kent State University in a division that they called the web center. We designed websites for local businesses as well as teachers before they had software that did that sort of thing. From there, while I was still in college, I got a job with a local fence company. Basically just to build them, review their local website, brick and mortar website, and then maybe start them a website to start selling some fencing online. Once I was there, for about a year, I kind of got thrown into all aspects of the business, not just web design but I was doing sales and purchasing, business decisions like merchant accounts, things like that. Worked there for about seven years and then at the seven year mark, the past couple years of that I had seen that there was kind of a segment of the market that wasn't being served and that was iron and aluminum fencing that was much more authentic than what was available at that point in time. Basically, with our brand, what we do is we have a product where we weld sand cast iron finials and aluminum finials to the fence and it just gives it a much more authentic, organic look that just has a much higher value to the customer. That just wasn't available. At that point in time all the manufacturers had made changes to make the product much easier to manufacture, much faster to manufacture and much easier to install for the actual installers and kind of lost touch with what the consumer wanted. We would get ... Drew:  This is all, sort of, inside baseball. Josh:  Correct. Yeah, this was just me watching how our customers reacted to the products that were available at that time. I remember, very vividly, kind of the a-ha moment for me was a customer came in, it was just a local customer and the local sales guy had given them like a ten thousand dollar estimate for an aluminum fence and they were all excited about it and came in to look at it...

How Sam Gastro, founder of MyGiftCardSupply.com about how he grew his $1 million dollar retailer. Tons of insights on how to use retention (not acquisition) to grow... EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Get my Million Dollar Cheat Sheet + the Episode 12 text transcribe. the PDF. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher I've been fascinated by e-commerce retailers that are able to bootstrap to 7-figures within a short period of time. Highlights How Sam acquired his first 100 customers Using retention/word of mouth to grow to 7 figures How to treat your best customers differently Sam’s one actionable tip on how to grow your ecommerce business Links / Resources The (sign up to unlock freebies) Mygiftcardsupply.com Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Drew:  Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. This is Drew Sanocki and we are talking about growing a company to seven figures, which is a really popular topic on my blog, and today I am joined by Sam Gastro. Sam, among many things he works on, one is Mygiftcardsupply.com, which is a business that he took from zero to over a million in revenue in a short amount of time. Sam, welcome. Sam: Hey, Drew. Thanks for having me. Want to save this transcribe to read later? to download it as a PDF. Drew:  Sure. Thanks for being here. Sam is in Boulder, Colorado. Congratulations on the Super Bowl. Sam: Thank you, thank you. Drew:  Yeah, I was a little bit bummed because I was a New England Patriots fan. I'm from Boston, and I've got to say that was ... the Patriots gave them a better game both games than they had in the Super Bowl. Sam: Agreed, agreed. Yeah, I can't complain. It was a great ... it was a really fun year to watch football. Drew: Yeah, because everybody was sort of counting out, you know, the Broncos, because they weren't winning by ... they weren't dominating, you know, but they were winning by like a field goal, and Manning was like ... you know, he kind of was like me. He's like 40-something, like falling down, right, like slowly get up, injured all the time, right, like me trying to throw 50 yards. It was a good way to go out, right? Sam:  Incredible, absolutely insane. Yeah, during the middle of the season there, it was kind of wild with him like getting replaced, and it was like ... just a wild, wild year, but completely fun. Drew:  Congratulations. It would be great to talk about the Super Bowl for like 90 percent of this podcast and then we'll just touch on your retailer. Sam: Yeah, let's do that, essentially because I don't know a whole lot about football. I like it. I like to watch it. Usually I'm in it for the guacamole and the home team. Drew: Well, let's see. I don't know what the transition is from Super Bowl to Mygiftcardsupply.com, but did you see a spike in revenue during the Super Bowl? How about that? Sam: No, we did not. There isn't ... not a whole lot of football and gift card correlation, unfortunately. Drew:  For those who don't know Mygiftcardsupply.com, could you give a little bit of a background on the site, how you decided to start it, how long ago did you start it? Sam: Absolutely, yeah. I started it about four years ago, and I kind of stumbled upon the idea by selling a gift card on eBay. Basically when I sold it, it went to a guy in France, and I was a little intrigued because with the currency conversion, it went over what the actual value of the gift card was. I won't get into the numbers of it, but basically what I found after talking to him ... because I was first suspicious and I messaged him ... he explained that there's a large demand for United States gift cards, because people like to buy U.S. content and there's kind of a barrier. You have to use a U.S. gift card if you want to buy an album or some movies that only get relea...

Three business growth equations need to hold true for any growing business. I review all three and show you how to work them to your advantage. EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Get my Million Dollar Cheat Sheet + the text transcribe from this episode. the PDF. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher Highlights The 3 Core equations to scale up your business How to make sure your LTV > CTA Using the formula ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) > Revenue/Spend The science behind Pressure/Time Plus - A bonus equation! Links / Resources The (sign up to unlock freebies) Toggl.com Seven Essential Metrics for Ecommerce Startups (with Templates) a post from my archive Introducing: Customer Value Optimization, The Formula for Epic Growth another post from my archive. Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing podcast, the only podcast where I open by, "Hey everybody, hey." That little laugh there makes you feel better listening to this. We're having a good time, right? I'm smiling. I'm in a room all by myself talking into a microphone, smiling, talking about e-commerce. It's a good time. Hey, everybody. I'm Drew Sanocki. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing podcast. We've been talking about how to grow an e-commerce retailer to $1 million in revenue. It's something we did at Design Public within the first year, year-and-a-half. I want to take a different angle on that today. I believe in Occam's razor and, as much as I can, I like to simplify what went into building a $1 million retailer. Want to save this transcribe to read later? to download it as a PDF. Today I want to talk about 3 core equations, and maybe 1 bonus equation, that got us there. The idea is if you keep these three core equations in mind and work such that they all are true, then I think you stand a decent shot at scaling up your business. As always, I've got a related cheat sheet to this article, in this case if you go to NerdMarketing.com to this podcast page you can download some of the templates where I work through the math and the equations in an actual spreadsheet that you can copy and use at your own retailer. Without further ado, equation number 1 is: LTV must be greater than CPA, so customer lifetime value should be greater than your cost per acquisition. I've seen it as CLV, LTV, same thing, customer lifetime value. CPA or CAC, customer acquisition cost, same idea. The idea is that you make more money that you spend to acquire that customer. This is the essence of product market fit for an online retailer. Go ahead and Tweet that out. What I mean by that, coming out of the gates with a new retailer you may not know if this equation is working for you. It takes some time to find what's called product market fit, which is a good fit between what you're selling and the market. The way you gauge whether you've successfully found this is that you're going to make money on a sale. That's what LTV over CPA means at the end of the day. What your goal should be is to calculate your LTV and your CPA for each marketing channel. In other words, you've got a certain CPA for your email marketing. You've got a certain CPA for your AdWords campaigns, a certain CPA for your Facebook campaigns, even a CPA for social campaigns, which may or may not have a direct cost associated with them. The idea is each of these channels is going to have its own cost per customer that you acquire and each one will also produce customers who have different LTVs, or different lifetime values. Now, a couple caveats, because on the surface it looks like a very simple equation: LTV must be greater than CPA. It's actually pretty complicated. LTV is, to put it bluntly, a pain in the ass to calculate. It depends, often, on repeat purchases,

The 6 key success factors and actionable insights that allowed us to grow a million dollar online retailer in a single year. Part 2. EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Get my Million Dollar Cheat Sheet + the text transcribe from this episode. the PDF. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher Metrics, CRM, and Technology Highlights Developing a Metrics Mindset Building your business around your best customers Embracing technology and finding the right resources How "going all in" will make you successful Recap! Links / Resources The (sign up to unlock freebies) Duoplane.com Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Drew: Hey everybody. Welcome back. I'm joined with my former business partner, Sina Djafari, and we are discussing how we built our e-commerce retailer to $1 million in revenue over the first year and a half. Sina, we're talking about how to grow an e-commerce retailer to $1 million in revenue. Sina: Yup. Want to save this transcribe to read later? to download it as a PDF. Drew: We left things off when we talked about 3 reasons last week, finding a blue ocean, finding a flywheel of growth, and using merchandising sort of strategically as marketing to grow the business. We've got a couple other reasons left. My fourth reason, Sina, is that we were able to measure everything, or we had this metrics mindset in the early days. I think that comes from the fact that we weren't from the design industry. We had a little more analytical mindset. Certainly you did as an engineer. We lived and breathed in the analytics and had some pretty key insights in the early days, as I list in my article under marketing that we realized pretty early on that email was killing it for us. In order to grow the company, we probably should grow our email list. That became a strategic priority. We looked at things like 20% of our brands were driving 80% of the revenue. We liked to highlight a lot of those brands that were doing well for us. We put them in email marketing campaigns. We put them on the home page, that sort of thing. I know I in marketing did a lot around how frequently customers purchased. Once we figured that out, we were able to build some email marketing campaigns to keep people buying longer. That did a great job at improving customer lifetime value. Do you agree that this metrics approach was something that helped us in the early days? Sina: Yes, absolutely. It's funny actually, that you remember that it would be easy for me being the engineer, because I actually find I need to be even more disciplined about going back to metrics even today. I think I do tend to do things a little more off the cuff, but I do think it was key because the numbers didn't lie. Especially when there were 2 of us as co-founders and co-CEOs, whatever, of the company, that if there is any sort of question about what we should do, we could go to the numbers to do it. I think that was very important, just in terms of being able to move forward on different things and cut things back and double down on other things. Yeah, because in the early days especially, you're so ... Actually at all times, you're so resource constrained. There's only so much effort and money and personal resources you can put into any 1 thing. I think that understanding what's a success and what's not a success is important so that you can double down on certain things and then shelve or get rid of other things. Yeah, I actually think it's very important. The 1 thing I was actually going to add to what I saw in your article that I would recommend most people do because, and it's again what helps me become more disciplined about metrics is, even before starting something, so defining just what that metric is that's going to define success, just asking ... This isn't a multi-day or even multi-hour exercis...

The 6 key success factors and actionable insights that allowed us to grow a million dollar Ecommerce business in a single year. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Get my Million Dollar Cheat Sheet + the text transcribe from this episode. the PDF. How were we able to create a Million Dollar Ecommerce Business in about a year? Highlights The self-perpetuating cycles that drive growth in early companies How your retailer can find the untapped demand of your customers How to make integration with your suppliers work for everyone Why merchandising is your best marketing tool Reducing customer acquisition costs Links / Resources The (sign up to unlock freebies) The Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne Sina Djafari's company Duoplane -- order management for ecommerce stores Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Drew: All right. Hey everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing podcast. My name is Drew Sanocki. I am the host and today I have a co-host. A special guest, a blast from the past, my former business partner Sina Djafari. Sina welcome to the Nerd Marketing podcast. You are the first guest. Sina: Thank you. I am extremely honored. I'm honored that you still talk to me. Want to save this transcribe to read later? to download it as a PDF. Drew: Occasionally. This is like podcast episode 10 or 11. Sina: It’s the only way I could talk to Drew is if I agree to be on this podcast. Drew: Yeah. We are not going to catch up during this podcast. We are going to talk about something the audience might actually be interested in. That is how to build a retailer to $1 million in revenue. Actually historically how we built our own retailer design public to 1 million in revenue over the first 18 months. Sina that is one of the more popular articles on my blog. I think it's popular because everybody wants to be a millionaire overnight even though 1 million revenue doesn’t equal millionaire, it’s just a promise of ramping up a company pretty quickly, is something that attracts a lot of interest. As you know it's harder than you think and it doesn't often mean a whole lot. I thought that would elaborate on that article and drill down and get your two cents as the guy who went through with me. Sina: Absolutely and a fine article it is. Drew: Thank you Sina. In the article I have the five reasons. I think I wrote that now at this point to years ago. I look at that article again and I probably want to pull out a couple of those reasons may be add a couple more. We’ll start with those as a point of departure for discussion. The first reason was that we chose a blue ocean. I talked about this book called Blue Ocean Strategy. It basically argues that when you start a business, you try to find a category where there aren’t a lot of competitors. That is opposed to red ocean where the waters are bloodied with the blood of all your competitors, right? I think in 2003 if you go back to when we started Sina, there weren’t a whole lot of people selling furniture online. Design Public was there, I think they thought of themselves as a catalog first company because their website didn't really embrace any sort of best practices of SEO or anything like that at the time. We were fortunate to just choose a niche where there was a lot of search activity, a lot of people were looking to buy brands online and there weren’t a lot of sites optimized for those brands. I think that was a big contributor to our early success, Sina: Yeah absolutely. I know we talked about some of the, in the bullet points of what makes a blue ocean strategy in terms of competition and the fact that the products were essentially kind of marketing themselves. One thing I thought about when I was reading this,

Business strategies matter, but you can't grow without the right 'growth' mindset. These Three Mental Mindsets Allowed Me to Build a Million Dollar Retailer. EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Get my Million Dollar Cheat Sheet + the text transcribe from this episode. the PDF. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher In this episode, I talk about the "million dollar mindset" that contributed to my success in growing my online retailer to $1mn in revenue in just over a year. I hope they help you along your way. Highlights There are three personal factors that enable you to build a successful business: vision, focus and habits. What wins in ecommerce is pressure over time. Links / Resources The (sign up to unlock freebies) Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Hey everybody, welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. My name is Drew Sanocki. I talk about customer analytics and e-Commerce growth but today we're going to do a little bit of a different podcast. Slight departure for our usual deep dive into analytics. I want to get personal with you guys and I want to tell you a story about an unemployed guy living in San Francisco who's got a roommate, not making a dime, and a little over a year later he's got a one million dollar revenue business. That guy is me and I'd like to talk about that story, about how I grew a one million dollar revenue, e-Commerce return in a pretty short amount of time. Want to save this transcribe to read later? to download it as a PDF. Now, I started this because I was looking at the posts on my blog. Far and away, one of the more popular ones is on this subject, how I got to a million in revenue in under 18 months. I thought about that and I think, "It's not the most valuable post, in my own opinion, but it's the most popular post." It's the most popular because it holds out this promise of quick wealth or something like that. If you do the math, a one million dollar e-Commerce retailer isn't really wealth but it's succeeding, it's got traction. I thought, "It would be kind of interesting to deep dive on that topic for a couple episodes," so I called up my old business partner, Sina. He's going to appear on one of the next podcasts to discuss how we did it on a business level and what kind of factors went into that growth. What I'd like to do today is spend 10 minutes or so talking about the three personal factors I think contributed to that growth. On a personal level, what enabled me to build that business? Hope you find it interesting. I think that this episode is, in many ways, more valuable than the one I'll do with Sina. It's because I think this personal stuff is what ultimately is going to work for you. I know it's what worked for me. If I didn't have this stuff squared away, then the business reasons, the fact that we found a good niche or knew how to do SEO, whatever, that wouldn't matter. What matters is that you personally have the mindset, the approach, and the mentality to go after that kind of growth. On the subway this morning I was thinking of three reasons, three factors, back in 2003 that really enabled me to focus on the business and grow the business. The first factor is vision. I don't know how many of you do visioning but I was put onto it by Stephen Covey a long time ago. He talks in the seven habits of highly effective people about just writing out your mission, vision, and values in life. I've done the exercise since college, now I'm 44 so it's been a long time that I've revisited my mission and vision values every year. The research suggests that there's real power to writing it out. Not just daydreaming about what your life could be but actually crafting a vision in the first person about where you are, say, five years from now. After business school I was unemployed. My company had gone under,

Your customers are sending you signals. If you listen to them and run tripwire marketing, you will make money. How much? In this case study, 15%. Virtually overnight. EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Get my Million Dollar Cheat Sheet + the text transcribe from this episode. the PDF. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher I want to do a quick study here on some of the Tripwire Marketing we’re doing at an 8-figure client. I think that this Tripwire Marketing has literally created $2-3 million in incremental revenue going forward over the next year and I want to show you why I think that and some of the tests we’ve run to produce that. Screencast   Highlights Alert marketing is basically setting up alert tripwires to identify deviations and customer behavior. It's much higher ROI to spend up on the customers that are about to leave as opposed to spend generically across all of your customer base. Links / Resources The (sign up to unlock freebies) Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Everybody, this is Drew and I want to do a quick study here on some of the Tripwire Marketing we're doing at an 8-figure client. I think that this Tripwire Marketing has literally created $2-3 million in incremental revenue going forward over the next year and I want to show you why I think that and some of the tests we've run to produce that. Without further ado, let's go to the screen cast. Here, you've got... What is Tripwire marketing? Tripwire marketing is basically setting up Tripwires to identify deviations and customer behavior. We've got several typical customers that exhibit standard behavior. Tripwire marketing is about identifying deviations from that behavior and then spending your marketing dollars and effort at the point where those deviations occur. Want to save this transcribe to read later? to download it as a PDF. For example, customers order every 30 days and then stop. That would be a Tripwire. I go to get my latte every morning from my coffee shop and all of a sudden, I've stopped going for three days. That is a red flag to the coffee shop that I've stopped buying. Customers never email the help desk and now all of a sudden, you get a lot of emails to the help desks, so that's another Tripwire. It's just changes in typical behavior that really represent marketing opportunities. I said that that's a very effective way to market and the reason why is because we all have limited resources. Every business has limited resources and you want to spend at the point of the greatest impact. Say, hypothetical example, we have a thousand dollars to spend on retention marketing every month and we get a thousand customers, then we have the option of: number one, you could spend a dollar per customer for marketing that month, or option two would be you spend ten dollars on the hundred customers that are about to defect, they're about to never buy from us again. Study after study and example after example shows that it's much higher ROI to spend up on the customers that are about to leave as opposed to spend generically across all of your customer base. Second advantage of Tripwire marketing is once you model out this customer behavior, it's really easy to automate using email marketing and other SAS applications which just is great. I mean, you can set and forget these marketing programs and ... I don't know if you guys have heard the term "Lifetime Value", but what I'm talking about here is really called the "LifeCycle". A customer exhibiting standard behavior is a standard life cycle, whereas lifetime value is a much more esoteric calculation of the profit that a customer throws off over his or her lifetime and life cycles are much more actionable. If you know standard behavior and what to expect from a customer and when they deviate from that behavi...

A case study showing how to implement a great, easy customer retention program that you can use at your own retailer. Juice up the profits by segmenting your users (I explain how). EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Get my Million Dollar Cheat Sheet + the text transcribe from this episode. the PDF. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher Ron has a gym. No one is showing up. In just 60 days, Ron packs the house. Here's how he did it. Highlights Trip-Wire Marketing is the ability to market to the customers who deviate from typical customer behavior. It is super profitable. Juice up the profits by segmenting your users (I explain how). There are seven steps to a customer retention program: timing, create the offer, pulling the list, setting up tracking, delivering the promotion, monitoring, and calculating the ROI. Links / Resources The (sign up to unlock freebies) Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Today, on the nerd marketing podcast, I'm going to tell you about my buddy, Ron. My buddy Ron runs a gym, and three months ago the gym was going out of business, and today it's more profitable than ever. What did Ron do? We're going to find out but first, let me introduce myself, my name's Drew Sanocki and I want to welcome you to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. The only podcast on all the internet where Drew Sanocki talks to you about eCommerce and marketing. My goal here is to give you a hundred percent actionable information in five to ten minutes a week. I want to give you one golden nugget, one actionable thing that you can take back to you eCommerce retailer and use to make money. Want to save this transcribe to read later? to download it as a PDF. Today's topic is trip wire marketing. I'm in the middle of two or three episodes here where I'm really drilling down on trip wire marketing. What do I mean when I say trip wire marketing? I basically mean that, if I go back to the last podcast to review and get you up to speed, customers exhibit typical behavior and a great way to market is to market to the customers when they deviate from that typical behavior. Why is that? Because it's super profitable. Most customers have adhere to a standard customer lifecycle. They get into your brand for awhile, they buy from you for awhile and then they get burned out and stop buying. That is a typical, average customer behavior and so what I'm arguing is that, if you're going to choose points to market to that customer, market when they start deviating from that average. For example, the average customer buys every thirty days, and that customer hasn't bought in awhile, in forty-five days, it's a good time to market to that customer. It's really profitable to market to that customer at that time. If you need a refresher on that, go back to the last podcast. Today I'm going to give you an example of how to implement some trip wire marketing to build a kick-ass retention program. Why start with retention? Because retention is super profitable. You know as well as I do, if you're running an eCommerce retailer, most of the time eCommerce retailers are barely profitable on the first sale, often they lose money because it costs so much to acquire a customer so you're basically breaking even. All the profits are made on the second, third, fourth sale when it's easier to reengage with that customer through email or through marketing or something like that. Retention is a great place to start and we're going to start there with trip wire marketing. I'm going to get back to the story I alluded to at the beginning of the podcast, my buddy Ron Gabrisko, ,muscle bound fellow here in New York City, owns a gym on the upper west side. He's got monthly subscribers to his gym and annual memberships to his gym but we're going to talk about, today, the per diem customers.

What is tripwire marketing? An introduction to the concept of tripwire marketing and why it is a great way to approach your marketing campaigns. EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Get my Million Dollar Cheat Sheet + the text transcribe from this episode. the PDF. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher Your customers are sending you signals. If you listen to them, you will make money. Highlights Tripwire Marketing requires you to define standard customer behavior for your business, and thenidentify customers who deviate from that behavior. This allows you to focus your marketing to make it the most effective it can be. You have to identify the customers who will defect before they do to win them back. Links / Resources The (sign up to unlock freebies) Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Drew Sanocki: Welcome everyone, to the Nerd Marketing podcast; the only podcast on all of the internet where you can hear me, Drew Sanocki, talk to you about eCommerce marketing. My goal here, is to give you 100% actionable information. Give me 5-10 minutes of your busy life, and I'll give you some proven growth strategies. My name is Drew. Today, we are talking about "Trip Wire Marketing." Specifically, how you can use trip wires to grow your profits. Want to save this transcribe to read later? to download it as a PDF. Before I get into that, I have had a heck of a morning. It's 10am here in New York City, and I think I was up ... I feel like I've worked an entire day already: Got up at 5, with baby. I got her back down. Woke up again, maybe an hour and a half later, with my son, who's 3 years old. Had to get him ready for a swim class, which is the last thing you want to do at 7am on a Thursday morning; especially when he doesn't want to go, either. There's a lot of fighting going on, getting him in his Swimmi-diap and over to the pool, in the Upper West Side. A whole other fight occurs in the locker room usually, because he does not want to go down to the pool. All the while you're surrounded by naked, old guys. I don't know if it's a generational thing, but the old-timers just walk around naked all the time. I think they're a lot more comfortable with that, than my generation. This all fascinates my son, by the way, who is just ... It's just not a good scene in the morning. Get him into the pool, get him out, where of course, again, he doesn't want to swim. Get him out of the pool, take showers; that's another fight. Get him to school. Take an overcrowded subway down to Midtown, where I begin my podcast here, at 10am. I feel like I've been up ... I have been up for 5 hours already, but you know, that's life. That's life as a dad, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I mean that. Today was kind of interesting. Let me have another sip of coffee here, before we get into Trip Wire Marketing. Okay, so Trip-Wire Marketing ... The big takeaway for Trip Wire Marketing, I think ... By the end of this podcast, I think you will see why changes in your customer behavior represent huge marketing opportunities. That's my goal. In future podcasts, I think the next 2 or 3, I'm going to get more into implementation, and how to achieve those profits yourself. This one's going to be a little bit more background and context, just to rehash what got us to this place. Obviously, you run a small business, an online business, you want more profits. I think one of the best ways to get there is to, 1) Define standard customer behavior for your business, and then, 2) Do a lot of marketing when customers deviate from that behavior. That's basically what CRM tries to do, for bigger businesses. You can do it, too! It sounds complicated, but, I'm going to give you a couple of stories here. The first would be my son. Anybody who has kids knows that when they're in the other room and they're m...

The prevailing means of customer segmentation and why that's basically useless online. Then, I show you how you should think about segmenting your customers based on behavior. EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Get the text transcribe from this episode. the PDF. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher How you think about your customers will determine whether you can grow online. So you best think about behavior. Highlights There are two ways to profile your customers. One is based on demographics and lifestyle. One is based on the customers' behavior. The latter > the former. Links / Resources The (sign up to unlock freebies) Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Hey, everybody. My name is Drew Sanocki. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast, the only podcast on all the internet where you can hear Drew Sanocki, that's me, talk to you about ecommerce marketing. My goal here is to give you 100% actionable information. Give me five to ten minutes of your busy life and I'll give you some proven ecommerce growth strategies that have worked for myself and worked for some of the companies I work with. Want to save this transcribe to read later? to download it as a PDF. My name's Drew. I'm an ecommerce veteran. I live in New York City. Today's topic is why I don't care about sex and why you shouldn't either. Guess what I'm talking about. No, I'm not really talking about sex. I'm talking about customer profiling and segmentation. I want to lead it all off with a story today. The story is something that happened to me this weekend. The family and I drove upstate, get out of the city because it's driving us nuts, because the kids are driving us nuts. Put the kids in the backseat of a Zipcar and headed north up the Hudson to explore some of the towns up there. They're very cool. Day goes on. Everybody's happy. We pull into a gas station to fill up the tank and a motorcycle pulls up behind the car, Harley Davidson. A woman's driving it. She gets off the Harley, takes off her helmet. she must have been like 65, 70 years old. Grandma's driving the Harley. That made an impact on me for a number of reasons. You expect the Harley to be driven by the Harley guy. It's like big beard, Hell's Angels jacket, whatever. I think it's just a common misperception and an issue that a lot of ecommerce store owners have that they focus in on the demographics and the lifestyle factors of their customers, and they ignore the behavioral factors. What I want to talk about in this podcast, it's a short one, but I'm going to tell you there are two ways to profile your customers, two big ways to segment your customers out. One is based off of demographics and lifestyle. It's the way that we all usually do. Who's your customer? They are 30 to 35 year old females who are single professionals, who are physically active, whatever. There's another way to profile your customers. It's behavioral. It's based on behavior. That would be more like who are our customers? They are the ones who were acquired through Google. They visited our site three times and then they purchased. They haven't been back in two days. Whatever, that kind of stuff. The main point I'd like to make here is that when you think about your business and growing your business and doing some segmentation and targeting for your business, think about behavioral segments first. Instead of our customers are 25% male, 75% female, whatever, think in terms of things like recency, frequency, and other behavioral aspects. The more you do that, the easier it will be to grow the business. I thought of three ways why behavioral segmentation is better than what I'm going to call demographic or lifestyle segmentation. The first is that it's a stronger predictor of future activity. If you go and build your retailer around lifestyle factor...

Easy-to-implement discount ladders from top retailers. A specific version of discount ladder: the win-back campaign. You can model this approach across abandoned cart campaigns, welcome campaigns, etc...       EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Get my Million Dollar Cheat Sheet + the text transcribe from this episode. the PDF. Bonus Content Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher Highlights Win-back emails: single emails sent to customers who haven't bought in a while to try to win them back Anti-defection discount ladder: series of emails aiming to bring back customers who stopped buying Examples of discount ladders Links / Resources Continue learning about Discount Ladders in Episode 1 (Intro to Discount Ladders) and Episode 2 (How to Get Started with Discount Ladders). If you plan on implementing a win back campaign, you'll also probably be interested in what I have to say about Dynamic Ascending Offers. Check out some of my other Case Studies – a couple of my favorites are Episode 13 (How Josh Manley Grew IronFenceShop.com to $1 Million In One Year Using AdWords) and Episode 7 (A Tripwire Case Study, +15% in sales virtually overnight) To learn more about data-driven strategies that grow ecommerce businesses, just . Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Hey everybody, this is Drew Sanocki, nerdmarketing.com and we're talking about discount ladders on the podcast. One thing I want to do today was give you a number of examples of good discount ladders or usage of discount ladders so you kind of get the idea of what the hell I am talking about. Without further ado, we're going to go to the screenflow here and I'm going to walk you through some discount ladders. First, a great example of...or great opportunity where you can use discount ladders is in winback emails. Winback emails are the ones that are sent out to customers who haven't bought from you forever in an attempt to sort of win them back into the fold. I Google winback emails and you're going to see a lot of examples here. Want to save this transcribe to read later? to download it as a PDF. Here's one from Eventbrite with their winback and here's one from Social Sprout and Postagram and, like, everybody does a winback, right? You know? What can we do to win you back? Where you been? Yada yada yada ... Dropbox does one. My issue with these is they leave money on the table. Maybe they are not awesome because they're a single email. If you take everything we've learned about a discount ladder and make the single email into a series, you're just going to do that much better at capturing or recapturing that customer. For example, here's one I built out for a fairly big online retailer. It is a winback, I am trying to win back everybody who has purchased one time and has not purchased a second time, I'm trying to get that second purchase. What I've done is, I've figured out that these customers for this retailer order roughly every thirty days so if thirty days has come and gone and they have not ordered they're not likely to order from us again. Perfect opportunity for what's called an anti-defection discount ladder. You can see I'm using Klaviyo here to set up this automated campaign, in Klaviyo it's called a flow. My first email goes out thirty days after purchase and it only goes out to people who have not purchased in the last thirty days and it's a simple ten percent off offer. We're now going to think in terms of our ladder. What do you do with the ladder? You increase the promo over time, so if someone takes this bait and buys, they fall out of the sequence. Otherwise, at sixty days, a month later, they're going to get a fifteen percent off offer, right here, right? Then, again, I could make this ladder go as high and as far as I want but I find that after ninety days it's pretty m...

I walk you through how to set-up and run effective discount ladders. I zero in on using these ladders to create a killer eCommerce retention program in just four easy steps. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: If you want my summary playbook for setting up your own discount ladder, just and I'll send it to you. If you aren't using them, you should be. Highlights Discount ladders can help you retain customers There are four steps to setting up effective discount ladders Step 1: Determine your discount intervals Step 2: Set your promotions Step 3: Start testing monhtly Step 4: Identify your most profitable offers Links / Resources Continue learning about Discount Ladders in Episode 1 (Intro to Discount Ladders) and Episode 3 (A Discount Ladder Case Study). If you plan on implementing a discount ladder, you'll also probably be interested in what I have to say about Dynamic Ascending Offers. To learn more about data-driven strategies that grow ecommerce businesses, just . Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Hey, this is Drew Sanocki. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast, the only podcast where Drew Sanocki gives you actionable, data-tested strategies to grow your ecommerce retailer. I can guarantee this is the only podcast where you're going to get this, the Nerd Marketing Podcast. We're talking about discount ladders. The title of this podcast is My Proven Retention System Revealed. In essence, I am going to walk you through a retention system that I've used to literally generate millions of dollars for my retailer and for other retailers. That's no exaggeration. I'm not going info product on you here. I'm not going Mr. Salesman on you here. This is just a great strategy to use. In the last podcast, we talked about the idea of discount ladders and how most retailers are not doing promotional activity properly. They are either running blanket promotions to their entire list or, on the flip side, they're never running a promotion. I think the solution is somewhere in the middle. Want to save this transcribe to read later? to download it as a PDF. It's to ratchet up your promotional activity over time, in particular with the likelihood that a customer will never come back to your retailer. That's what a discount ladder is. In this podcast I am going to walk you through four steps to creating your own discount ladder; in particular, one we will use to retain defecting customers. You can use a discount ladder for a lot of different things; for example, to encourage a first purchase or to encourage someone to read an article or something like that. In this case, the discount ladder is to retain customers. These promotions will go out to your existing customers. Step One: Determine Discount Intervals The first step out of four is to determine your discount intervals. If you have existing customer data, if you've been in business for, say, a year or more, I want you to look at the average time between your typical first and second purchase, your second or third purchases, and so on. It's very easy to do in Excel. You export your transactional data into a spreadsheet and you can run a histogram analysis on that to find just your typical first and second purchase, second to third purchase, what are called latencies, some of the average time between purchase. Wanted this average time between purchase because these are the rungs on our discount ladder. This is how often we will set tripwires at these time intervals. After each tripwire, we'll increase the discount. If you're just starting out, 30/60/90 days works great. For the typical retailer selling apparel, for example, a 30/60/90-day promotional ladder is a great place to start. It worked at my retailer, which was a home goods retailer.

An introduction to the discount ladder method of running promotions and how it can keep your customers around longer and buying more. EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: If you want my cheat sheet checklist for setting up your own discount ladder, just and I'll send it to you. If you aren't using them, you should be. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher This initial episode I introduce the  'discount ladder' method of running promotions and show you how it can keep your customers around longer and buying more. STOP spending promotion dollars to create a transaction, when the customer would have bought anyway. Highlights Most retailers discount too much and why What is a subsidy cost and how to reduce it How to run promotions when you don't want to discount your brand Three advantages of a discount ladder Links / Resources Continue learning about Discount Ladders in Episode 2 (How to Get Started with Discount Ladders) and Episode 3 (A Discount Ladder Case Study). If you plan on implementing a discount ladder, you'll also probably be interested in what I have to say about Dynamic Ascending Offers. To learn more about data-driven strategies that grow ecommerce businesses, just . Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Hey everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. The podcast where I try to give you clear, actionable, data driven strategies to grow your business. My name is Drew Sanocki, and I'm your host. The title of today's podcast is 'You are spending too much money on dumb-ass promotions.' Basically what I want to talk about today, is discount ladders and subsidy costs, and promotions, and how a lot of retailers are leaving money on the table by not implementing these things properly. Bill Bain, the founder of Bain Consulting has said "Your best new customers are your existing customers." And that's a very nerd approach to marketing, and something I believe in, and what I'm going to argue in this podcast, is we should be using promotions effectively to try to keep your customers around longer, and that's just money well spent. Want to save this transcribe to read later? to download it as a PDF. The problem is, most retailers out there discount too much. Think of Bed Bath & Beyond for example, where I know I get a 20% off coupon every week. Online retailers are often no different, they discount way too much, and what they're doing here, what they don't realize is there's this hidden thing called a subsidy cost, and that's basically the cost you bear by spending promotion dollars to create a transaction, when the customer would have bought anyway. In many cases, you've got customers out there, credit card in hand, ready to buy, and you are giving them a promotion to buy something on sale, so naturally [00:02:00] will lose out on the full margin, you've spend a promotion dollar that you didn't have to spend, that's called a subsidy cost. On the flip-side, you've got plenty of retailers who never promote at all, and I get that. A lot of these are ones who really care about their brand. I was just at an E-commerce conference last month, and met a lot of great brands that are selling online, trying to really build up that brand equity, and one of the first things they said to me is "Hey, we just don't want to promo. We never want to be on promo, we never want to be on sale." I get that, too. The problem is that customers naturally have a lifecycle, and they will eventually burn out on your brand and probably defect, and stop being customers anymore, that's a very good time to use a promotion. Let's redefine the word promotion as a pretense to this podcast, it's not just a discount on a retail price. Promotion can be any sort of incentive that you give that customer to get them over the hump to buy. If you do really care about your brand,