Here’s what I learned this week

Last week I said that benchmarking was stupid and it seems that everyone released an update to their benchmarking tools this week. 👀 

This is what we call chasing a a ghost.

For instance I ran 3 miles today at the ripe old pace of 9:15 seconds per mile.

For the record my fastest mile ever was around 5:35, in fact just a few years back I was around 6:15.

I’m nearly 40 though now, more than 20lbs heavier than I was when I ran those paces especially the 5:35 one, and I definitely don’t recover as fast as I used to because I sit in front of a computer all day (shoot me).

But I do believe in aggregated data.

The future of A/B tests?

What if instead of A/B testing things we just gave people options instead then tracked the results of those options in terms of conversion?

What would you pick? Keep in mind that the goal is for them to convert, not to save the company on margin or increase sign up rates, though technically, I think this would increase sign up rates be providing options for people to choose rather than just assuming we know what they want.

We’ll have to test…

This a test I need to queue up after I’m done with my current one which removed all popups from our website that don’t come from utm_source=facebook_ads.

Yeah no popups on the website if you don’t come from our ads, going to observe this for a few days and see what the results are, give me a bit clearer measurement on the quality of the audience we’re driving after some changes made to our campaigns yesterday.

I’m not afraid to break things for the purpose of learning, unfortunately you kind of need your own store to test things like this, these things don’t fly for a lot of the brands.

Which brings me to something else I think is broken, access to quality information about how to approach ecommerce.

There’s a metric shit ton of bad basic advice, but nothing mid market higher strategy, I want to help bridge this gap, aggregate the best of the best and build a real resource for people.

Which brings me to…

Email for Ecommerce is being created and you can be a part of it

It’s super simple for now, if you write a post on LinkedIn about email marketing for ecommerce just @emailforecommerce in the post, unlike random pod traffic, it will be added to an email only library of posts on emailforecommerce.com (still being created) attributed to you with backlinks to your website and LinkedIn profile. You can link to it for authority as well with a collection of your posts and eventually podcast appearances.

In the future, we’re going to create a directory of email marketers along with posts that they have submitted (yes we’re going to let you resubmit your posts from where ever directly on the platform as a resource for anyone looking for email help).

But you won’t get penalized because we’ll peer annotate them to add extra value to them.

The goal, democratize all strategies out there.

If you want to help out with this idea, you know where to find me.

And of course Formtoro will be used on every new subscriber that is added to the platform so eventually agency members will get a full breakdown of who’s subscribed to the list with data.

Something like this.

It’s a pretty cool implementation of Formtoro, and yes this is on a Wordpress blog, and yes if you run an agency you could build something similar with us for your lead generation on any website.

(Not saying you have to this isn’t a pitch, but it’s what I would do)

Ultimately, this will be a great resource for beginning, intermediate, and advanced email marketers to come and contribute.

Data collected will help prompt the community on what type of content people are looking for and who the audience is which also helps you improve your content creation.

Also the goal is to start up a podcast so if you’re interested in chatting with me one on one and talking email marketing I want to develop an entire podcast around one big email idea per podcast - less than 20 minutes per episode.

Bite sized content so that brands can get to know you better with some personality behind it but something actionable every single time.

Format:

1. What was the concept

2. How did you come up with it

3. What worked about it

4. What would you do differently next time

This showcases how you strategize, what steps you take to hypothesize the strategy, the ability to set goals and track against them, and humanizing the marketing experience though continued growth.

NOT ENOUGH MARKETERS FOLLOW THIS FRAMEWORK.

But it’s what every brand hiring wants to hear.

Ok, why am I doing this, there isn’t one really good source that’s peer reviewed for advice about doing emails in ecommerce, it’s just a bunch of people talking about results and sharing frameworks looking for business, as a brand you can get overwhelmed with the same promises but it’s hard to be able to cut through the fluff.

The goal is to give everyone a platform to peer review the content provided, I’m going to personally peer review every post that’s submitted and write comments on them in a very positive manner.

See I know what you were thinking, this guy is brutal on LinkedIn calling people out, well that’s my LinkedIn persona to challenge, for this I want to help people grow so the follow up comments will always be:

What we like about it…

What we want to know more about…

That’s the format, it will also make for a great conversation on the Podcast too.

I love this format because we all have further questions about anything we see but LinkedIn is too much just support and not enough real conversation, a few snapshot podcast appearances on Email for Ecommerce: One big idea should not only be entertaining but work really well to compliment these sorts of posts so we can link the post to the podcast etc.

We’re going for good solid organic on this, none of that pod, recycle run ads to just build a list stuff.

I know how to do that through ads, but I’m working on a massive outbound engine for Formtoro right now that will end up feeding naturally into this asset for nurturing.

Remember what I said about building assets and maximizing the value of every effort you put out there, always have another way to repurpose actions.

So quality content over quantity, content so good people would pay a membership for access.

The good stuff isn’t all on YouTube for free ;)

So now onto the topic of the week…

The topic for this week is arbitrage.

How can you outflank your competitors customers and turn them into your own for pennies on the dollar?

Juicy right?

If it’s too good to be true you should question it. I’m going to test this first though and I’m still on the fence of telling people how to do it.

BUT…

Real topic that’s come up a few times this week as the head of Black Crow’s Product is now following me on LinkedIn.

There’s been a lot of talk about AI popup timings in the last week

Black Crow AI is touting a model, Klaviyo released a model so now you know I have to weigh in on how this is absolute nonsense right.

So their theory is they can use events in order to predict when the right time is to show someone a popup.

Here comes the data!

For the record if you really want to get aggressive with this:

1. Home Page Popup at 8 seconds

2. Product Page Popup at 45 seconds

3. Landing Page Popup at 30% scroll

4. Cart Triggered Popup based on $ amount in cart

This will out perform any random A/B test these people are performing, but here’s why it doesn’t matter in one screenshot.

You see that, not everyone is looking to buy “Today” so those that don’t say “Today” are less likely to purchase, so signing up a bunch of people that aren’t looking to buy today, it’s going to help you.

But you have to go a step further and look at where the traffic comes from in terms of source. I could go on here, but I think this conversation will turn super nerdy.

1. Source of traffic

2. Quality of traffic

3. Device of traffic

4. Popup used to collect signup

5. OFFER? DUH?

All these things matter, not to mention my favorite one, data associated with the signup itself to rank the quality of the subscriber and the likelihood of conversion.

Let me be abundantly clear on the above in all of the existing models they are only operating off of an email address, no other direct data combinations provided from a user tied to revenue and conversion rates to make their predictions.

Now when you peel back the layers of the onion and start to realize that there is 100% no data available for you to study these company’s “AI” models for prediction, you’re going to start realizing that it’s a bunch of smoke and mirrors.

Case in point (this was taken on Feb 27, 2024 at 9:28pm PST)

Love that my next order is in the past!

This is the problem with all the models that I’ve seen up to this point and everyone claiming to use AI in their predictive models, they simply don’t have enough reliable intent based data to make accurate predictions.

This is why Klaviyo requires you to have a list of 400,000 - talk about data needed to train your model, with changes to seasons, sales periods and everything else it’s going to take a lot of data within a time period with limited data points to make decisions, our models work with about 250 subscribers as a baseline to change things that matter to drive conversions, like all those touchpoints for people not on your email list. But even then we’re limited.

The ones that do have more of the right data, the marketplaces.

I’d be betting on Amazon to actually have a better idea of these things they just have more purchase data.

Interestingly enough, I talk to a lot of people outside of ecommerce as well, most of them don’t know what a popup is on a website. Not even joking, those are the kind of people I’m around, they shop on Amazon and that’s it.

These are people that work normal jobs, these are people that are retired in their early 40s and early 50s.

We take for granted our familiarity with things in ecommerce, the industry is super small for those that know each other and a lot of these things aren’t normal for people to come across in a meaningful way.

That takes us to marketplaces

Marketplaces are the only way forward

It pains me to admit this, but it’s just far less hassle. The fact that I can’t have multiple addresses on my existing Shopify accounts to check out to send things to other people is why I’ll always use Amazon to do that.

I have so many saved addresses the same ones I have saved for DoorDash for when I go visit.

Shopify has been shooting itself in the foot with these gift card things instead of just making it easier for people to send stuff to other people they know.

(If you know an app, I’ve been looking for a while)

But it needs to work like Amazon, you log into an account pull from existing people and addresses and you’re good to go, bonus points if you can sync with Amazon’s existing ones.

The future of DTC is going to be curated marketplaces for niches from the types of hard to find stores that are too small for marketplaces.

There is space there.

The Takeaway

Thanks for listening to my rant this week, lots going on, lots of build mode currently, looking to connect a lot of dots.

Join the slack

Have a great week!

-Jon

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

You can learn from me: jonivanco.com