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- Ecom with Jon - February 4, 2024
Ecom with Jon - February 4, 2024
What I learned this week
Here’s what I learned this week
There’s a near 100% chance that I find myself getting canceled for some hot take that I drop. In all honesty, I’m not very good about holding my tongue anymore.
If I see something I say something.
LinkedIn has turned into Facebook, which is unfortunate.
Private invite only Slack group anyone?
A completely safe space to speak your mind off of LinkedIn.
I’m in one that does this really well but you if you leak something you’d be excommunicado (name the movie reference).
As everyone seeks to establish themselves as a thought leader, it’s caused the unintended consequences of people all becoming cheerleaders rather than intelligent thinkers.
I also don’t like the character count because a lot of what I want to share requires a bit more space.
A lesson that took me too long to learn
I get absolutely gutted every time I read about someone doing something the hard way through a ton of testing.
The vast majority of things don’t need all the testing, but instead just need smarter testing and better understanding.
Start with “What’s your goal?”
Hint: It’s not about an outcome but about continued learning and leverage so that you can continuously improve the outcome.
All tests should result in an asset that can be used 3 different ways, I’ve included an example below.
So before we get going this week, I’m going to lay out a few things that CAN start doing this week to create value for your brands and clients and help you get closer to your customers:
Go find the last survey you sent out that people actually responded to, get a list of their emails and start a discord channel or Facebook group inviting that group of die hard feedbackers access
Repeat this idea for everyone that has left you a positive review, they all have email addresses attached, use them
Swap your sign up form for one that collects more data, it’s simple, it’s easy, it pays dividends across your entire customer journey touchpoints, then use all your new found knowledge and…
Go here, use this: Customer Journey Checklist improve your product pages with more context without forcing people to bounce all over your website
So for the survey example, here’s how we’re going to leverage responses in 3 different ways:
Product feedback
Sign up list to review new products before everyone else and create content for them
Community connection to build a channel of easy ongoing communication
So for the reviews example, here’s how we’re going to leverage response in 3 different ways:
Create a list of the positive review to invite people into a community
Create a list of the negative feedback reviews and use them for product improvement, possible review of new products (get them back, cheaper than acquisition)
Find the reviews that lack depth and follow up with a specific list of questions to coach out more feedback (increase context and value)
So for your sign up forms example, here’s how we’re going to leverage responses in 3 different ways:
Find out where people are in the buying journey and when they are looking to purchase
Find out what matters most to people in the products you sell, integrate this into landing pages, products pages and ads
Find out which sources are driving the highest quality audience and the improve the messaging via number 2 to improve quality of traffic
So for the checklist:
Unify the team via SOPs around each element of the website
Create a coordinated approach to unify emails, website, and ads
Fix low hanging fruit by leveraging simple fixes
This is a life skill that every single marketer needs to learn, how to create tests that result in asset creation that can be leveraged in multiple ways.
I was never formally taught how to do this, in fact it took me years to understand this seemingly simple principle.
Do work that compounds in value, construct tests that maximizes your results for the ask.
Sometimes hard work is needed
This is a theme that’s come up a lot lately.
Everyone just wants to strike it rich.
Less effort, less time, more results.
Hire someone to get them from point A to point B.
Some things just take reps.
What tends to win out though is people looking for a hack in ecommerce marketing, specifically on the brand side of things.
It’s lazy.
Want to get better at marketing I’ll give you a blueprint to use.
Go find a group of stores you want to target, people share lists of these all the time, then go to the facebook ad library and open all the links from the ads, then go to the landing pages and screenshot the entire landing page, repeat.
Do this for like 100 of them, then do a landing page breakdown 2 per week for a year.
You have content, add these to youtube, serialize them, build a nice thumbnail.
You can do the same for email welcome series, ads, whatever.
(this has been on my list to do for popups for a while, maybe I start next week)
I actually uploaded my Free Popup Course to YouTube last week.
I like the idea that like reddit the content just stays and gets recommended unlike other social networks where content dies off after a week.
The thing is, that I know myself too, knowing how to do things then becomes a matter of outsourcing things, build an standard operating procedure outsource to a virtual assistant, have a content library for days, throw it up on gumroad for $50 make back your money spend on VA from other people that want a shortcut.
It’s kind of crazy but with the right strategy, content factories could be born pretty quickly. Something I’m definitely looking into for 2024 specifically around email marketing as I think it’s the most defined in terms of limited gains beyond good baselines.
We have another battle brewing though in the email space for ecommerce, agencies are moving away from just supporting one platform which means that ESPs are going to have to get more aggressive with their advertising and spend in order to hold onto or gain market share.
None of them are doing anything special in this area, everyone is doing partner programs only…
I’m very interested in doing B2B marketing on this side of things, have a few ideas around it.
A HUGE DISCONNECT
I’m running an interesting poll right now on LinkedIn around what percentage of ad spend people should use to learn more about their audience, honestly I was looking for more feedback, but as it stands 80% say 1% or more.
Those that think they know exactly who their audience is well, I can’t help those egos, I’ve always learned something from talking to audiences that I didn’t know before.
Here's some reference material:
$10k ad spend would make that $100-300 per month
$20k ad spend would make that $200-600 per month
$50k ad spend would make that $500-1500 per month
$100k ad spend would make that $1000-3000 per month
$200k ad spend would make that $2000-6000 per month
$500k ad spend would make that $5000-15000 per month
For those that pay media buyers an agencies to run their ads it’s usually a percentage of ad spend between 10-15%. Yet they aren’t paying 1% on collecting data to better improve their brand positioning and ad creation process.
If I had to point out the largest gap in understanding across all ecommerce it’s that baked in agreed upon standard fees are outdated and allocation of those fees is grossly wasteful.
This is roughly how we price Formtoro on the low end of this.
Here’s a link to the post so you can see where the current vote tally is:
Something that excites me
Every AI report you’ve ever seen begins as a spreadsheet, then finds life as a structured report in a platform, then that clean data is fed into more algorithmic testing then thrown into an ai model.
I love 90 day rolling periods, revenue, orders, subscriptions, ad spend, I love it all.
Above is a preview of our new rolling 90 day order analysis.
Complete breakdowns by day of new v. returning orders, with AOVs, conversion rates and incorporating ad spend with CAC for 1st time and blended to incorporate repeat.
That menu on the left there is getting mighty long, might have to combine all the analysis under sub menu items.
Data is my friend though, now we can look for things like campaigns, sales periods, email pushes, etc all in one place to see the net impact across the board as it trends on a rolling 90 day basis.
We already did this for revenue analysis, but we also added subscription analysis last week and this will largely become the baseline for automated reporting and trend analysis.
Yes, I’m a nerd when it comes to data like this. We’ll be pushing this live in the near future.
It’s all leading to another important step building back in our ad recommendation engine, pick ads based on a larger intent based data set on what’s performing.
Why this is an important step in my journey
I’ve been doing this ecommerce stuff for a long time, I’ve never had access to the level of detail that I would typically look for in a company to determine where the gaps were for me to solve.
A lot of this data doesn’t exist on a rolling 90 day basis, not in a format that would be easy for me to quickly isolate and dive into.
This + AI will eliminate the need for me to do busy work related to data interpretation.
I’ve been working for 4 years on building in my experience into a software program and replace a CMO level strategist in terms of better allocating resources.
This year we’re going to be able to pull this off in a very real way and to me that’s super exciting, because I’ll be able to get back to the things that challenge me and problems I’m looking to solve rather than going through the motions.
The Takeaway
Build an asset, start today, it doesn’t take much, just a strategy and consistency.
Pay attention to market competition and changes, there’s a lot going on.
Look to technology to help you level up your game, but remember it’s all about having clean inputs.
Have a great week!
-Jon
Catch up on past posts: https://ecomwithjon.beehiiv.com/
You can learn from me: jonivanco.com