Here’s what I learned this week

More fights with agencies.

I’m usually pretty pleasant but if something doesn’t make sense and you dodge questions…

You probably don’t want to be on the other side of me.

Our client signed on with an agency to do affiliate marketing.

I really cautioned against it given what I was hearing…

They promised the world - of course.

They said they had worked with companies like his before.

They never asked about how the marketing strategy was setup.

They never asked about the customer journey.

They never asked about the existing discounting strategies.

Then I was added to the threads.

There were a lot of little things that didn’t make sense.

They were pushing software demos for products some that competed with stuff we were already using including Formtoro.

(Don’t get me wrong I’m all for using software to improve things, but maybe you start with understanding the software that people are already using?)

The client politely declined, but it was suggested a second time.

(Ok so it’s not that they suggested software it’s that it was declined, then suggested a second time that was the telling sign.)

Real questions would go unanswered without responses.

After letting this play out for a few weeks, I decided I would just layer in some easy questions:

Are the claimed affiliates cannibalizing orders that were going to happen anyway?

Are the time periods properly setup for tracking activities?

How are the affiliates being added impacting our organic search results and causing confusion among customers?

Guess who didn’t like any of these questions that came along with screenshots from Google Analytics, Formtoro, and Google Search?

Rather than answer the questions and come to the table to have a discussion, they instead decided to cite some studies that weren’t relevant, fall back on the length of time they had been in business, and deflect.

So here’s the deal, case studies, research, and everything else is the equivalent of best practices, sometimes interesting, most of the time flawed, and to be reviewed on a case by case basis.

But here’s the kicker.

Then the client was emailed separately by someone at the company to tell them that I wasn’t being productive and I should be removed from the account and the call they had scheduled with me for next week was cancelled.

So guess who decided to provide notice.

I’ve been around long enough to know when something doesn’t add up.

When things don’t add up, you start asking questions, if in the course of asking questions, you don’t get the answers you’re looking for or any suggestions as to create tests to prove or disprove things, you come to understand that it’s far more likely that people don’t actually know why they are doing what they are doing.

The problem with this one is that the contract requires 45 day notice.

Some of the “work” they’ve done needs to be undone to prevent damage to the brand long term.

All of this could have been avoided multiple times throughout the interactions.

But the focus wasn’t on the business they were trying to support it was on making themselves look good instead.

Stay critical of the services that you pay for.

You should be asking questions constantly.

If you’re an agency, you should have an outline of your strategy complete with pros and cons of the actions you’re planning on taking and you should have an understanding of how those actions impact other parts of the business.

No service can operate in a vacuum and what worked for one client may not work for another one.

Because I feel like people have been taking advantage of people the last few weeks, let’s change this up.

Here’s my never released framework for building an audience that can be leveraged for sales, business development, and a number of other things.

My framework for building an audience

I wasn’t going to give this one away, it’s been something that I’ve been holding onto separately because it works so well.

So in ecommerce there’s a lot of talk about building an email list and most people that have been doing this long enough know that what’s more important than the size of the list is actually the quality of the list.

So there are mixed feelings around doing things like giveaways etc.

You get a lot of people that want free stuff, but the quality of the signups tends to take a bit of a nosedive.

The knock on effect of this is that the type of traffic that signs up for those offers is being tracked by your Facebook Pixel as being a positive event sign.

Meaning Facebook will start optimizing towards that result.

There’s a way to do this though that leverages an existing format that works really well if you build it on a separate website.

Step One

Build a directory of brands within a lifestyle space.

You’re going to need content to share with your soon to be created community/newsletter.

Step Two

Create a social media handle on Instagram for that lifestyle.

Follow all the companies in step one, Instagram will suggest similar companies to follow, do that, then add them to your directory, things will start growing organically.

Our goal is around 100 companies in a lifestyle space.

Step Three

Call your newsletter the [lifestyle] Weekly or something like that.

Reach out to a few companies and see if they want to be part of a giveaway to your audience.

Step Four

Create Facebook Ads promoting this giveaway to the interest group that you’re looking to attract.

You don’t need conversion, you can do link clicks for this one, if you have a good landing page you’ll have a really high sign up rate.

Limit your signup for to show once per IP if possible, learned this the hard way.

If you’re pushing people into Beehiiv they are actually really good about removing bad emails.

Step Five

Direct all this traffic to a landing page, make sure you have your terms of service done proper for your giveaways.

Have people fill out their information for the giveaway, use a tool like Formtoro to collect multiple data points relevant to the lifestyle that you’re focusing on.

Data like this:

Step Six

Pick a newsletter format that has three main parts to it, that spotlight a brand and a product.

You just need a small blurb, what it is, who makes it, what you like about it.

That’s it.

Send out that email every week, once a week.

You’re open rates will be around 25-28% with click through rates around 3%.

Now for those of you in ecommerce you’re going to say lower open rates, higher clickthrough rates, that’s just the way these things go with acquiring an audience this way, so you can hedge and cull the list for 3 consecutive non-opens to improve the open rate.

Additionally, in running this test I saw a 1% unsubscribe rate per week again because of how the email was brought onto the list.

Overall Results

Way cheaper than running Facebook ads for conversion.

You can build a list around a lifestyle hobby in days and weeks, not months and years.

Asking questions helps your understand the type of content people want to see in the newsletter, it’s a window into the soul of a market.

You can slide your own products into the newsletter.

It becomes a standalone asset.

Other notes:

We were using software to automatically create and post products from any Shopify store complete with all the images and product descriptions, so it became a manicured feed of new drops.

I stopped doing that a while back on this project to reset my thinking about how to approach it.

If you’re an agency going after a specific subset of clients, for less than $3000 you can have an entire asset that you can reach out to companies and add value to their acquisition efforts via product and offer placement.

Pretty much all of them will agree to be marketed to your list of 10k plus people.

Given that these contracts usually start at $4k a month for services, and investment of about $10k will yield a list of around 30k people with data about their buying habits.

You’ll close more than that in one month via client outreach from warm intros with brands you want to put in front of your audience.

As someone that was brand side marketing, I would get on the phone with anyone offering us free exposure to a list, it was a risk free way for us to grow and a great intro to someone providing value before asking for anything.

So when people say, “Just provide value” this is what they are talking about.

There’s a lot to unpack in this email, in truth this is probably a service that one of these appointment booking agencies should just create, it would help them to build actual assets and get a ton more qualified calls lined up for people.

It’s the approach I did take and am building to rethink what outreach looks like.

It’s work, but it’s also asset building work and if done properly very cost effective.

Once you have scale, brands can donate the prize and you’re only on the hook for the ad spend to keep the list growing until you can build in viral loops to help with list growth.

The Takeaway

Most things take time to build, but you need a good framework and architecture to build them. This is the gap for most businesses, the inability to think outside the box and create things that matter in ways that are efficient uses of resources.

This post came from a conversation in our slack community.

Join the slack

Have a great week!

-Jon

Catch up on past posts: https://ecomwithjon.beehiiv.com/

You can learn from me: jonivanco.com