On this 68th episode of The E-Comm Show, our host and BlueTuskr CEO Andrew Maff is here to help you understand your metrics better plus some marketing strategies you can use to get more customers.
In this episode, you’ll learn where to source more leads, what forms of content you can use, how to execute your post-sales marketing plans, and of course, which KPIs you should be paying attention to.
If you enjoyed the show, please rate, review, and SUBSCRIBE!
Have an e-commerce marketing question you'd like Andrew to cover in an upcoming episode? Email: hello@theecommshow.com
How to Measure Your Metrics and Expand Your Sales
SPEAKER
Andrew Maff
CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com | Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff
Andrew Maff
As a marketing expert with over 15 years of experience in e-commerce, Andrew Maffettone (Maff) has not only owned and managed multiple marketing companies in the e-commerce space but has also worked in-house at multiple online selling companies, driving brands to new heights.
With his knowledge of marketing and business strategy, love for staying ahead of the curve, and ability to execute effective marketing solutions, he created BlueTuskr, a team of specialized experts dedicated to the growth and success of e-commerce sellers.
Transcript:
00:03
maybe not your entire customer base, but a certain segmented profitable area that you would want to focus on for your podcast and that would be something that you can bring in your new audience Hey everyone this is Nezar Akeel of Max Pro. Hi I'm Linda and I'm Paul and we're Love and Pebble.
00:21
Hi this is Lopa Van Der Mersch from RASA you're listening to and you're listening and you are listening to The E-Comm Show.
00:34
Welcome to The E-Comm Show, presented by BlueTuskr, the number one place to hear the inside scoop from other ecommerce experts where they share their secrets on how they scaled their businesses and are now living the dream. Now, here's your host, Andrew Maff, my
00:52
My name is Andrew Maffettone, I will be your host, and today we are talking about why marketing shouldn't end after the sale. This one is a very interesting topic for me because I've found this in almost every brand I've ever worked in, where they do all this hard work to get the sale to get the lead to get caught up in whichever way, and then it just stops and it ends there. And that is simply just not how it should be done. And one of the reasons I say this is because the most obvious one is buyer's remorse is a real thing. You don't want someone to feel like they had their handheld all the way up to the point of purchase or basically the conversion of any leader however you want to look at that. And then feel like Alright, okay, bye, I got what I wanted. You're basically like one-night standing. This person just kind of messed up. So one of the things I've always referenced, is there's a ton of things you can market to them after. So you have the obvious stuff, right? Like, alright, you can upselling and cross-sell, you can do all this extra stuff or after but sometimes when you do, specifically, I found this obviously for ourselves when I was doing agency stuff, or when I'm doing more like b2b or service related where Yeah, I can upsell them. It's not yet it's not ready for that. And one of the things I always like to do is to find other ways of things that I can provide some extra value to them after a sale so that they feel like oh, I, they just gave me, you know, what they what I bought from them. So they got what they wanted, but they're still giving me some extra here. And it really makes them feel more comfortable than what they just did. So a couple of examples I had for you. Works really well in b2b, specifically where you can do posts. So you need to postconversion, and post-customer acquisition ads, in some cases. So it can work pretty well. For some b2b, it does work well for E-commerce also. But it kind of depends on which ecommerce, but there are a lot of other areas this could work, but essentially, create either some kind of some, some kind of community. So a Facebook group if you're doing social ads, or you could also do like a Slack community or something like that, where you try to bring everyone into one place. So for example, when I was targeting ecommerce sellers, we did this where we created a Facebook group that was specifically for E-commerce sellers. And then we would break off that group for, you know, eight-figure sellers and things like that. Then I've done slack communities for staffing agencies, where we did Hey, join this Slack community. And if you're for it's strictly for staffing agencies, and things like that, and those were all ads that we ran after the conversion, when you're doing b2b, and you have that kind of personal conversation with someone, you don't necessarily need to do that you could, those could, those could also be ads that you run after someone has converted with just any other gated content. But if you do ecommerce, and maybe you're selling more b2b related ecommerce equipment, so like bigger machines or something like that, it's another great way to have some kind of community. And honestly, I think the best thing about those groups is that you can, you can control the conversation if you want. Or you can just sit back and listen to what all your customers are talking about. I mean, it's a great way to come up with like ideas for like blog posts and stuff that you want to write you just go into the group and be like, What's everyone talking about? Alright, let me write one of those. The other thing was case studies. So I think this is great for an upsell. It's also great for you to be able to explain to a client that the decision they made was great. So a lot of SaaS companies do this kind of thing where they'll send out an email with Hey, we have this great story about this company that used our software to go from x to y from or Y to X, X to Z, A to Z. Let's do that. The alphabet. And so you can do things like that where you can show them, you can show them a case study, you basically like, hey, look, look, this worked really well. And then this is their opportunity to go, Hey, mate, why is this not working? For me, it's probably what they're gonna say. But that's your opportunity to go, you know what, let's look into your account, let's see what you have set up. And then that's your opportunity to either upsell them on other stuff or to help adjust what they're doing in their account, which hopefully will help them be better at business, which then becomes a referral situation, which brings me into the next one, referrals. So doing a referral program, somebody running some kind of campaign after an acquisition, and explain to them that they can join a referral program. And yes, maybe there's some kickback, depending on how you put that campaign together. But there are a lot of things that can still happen, that are not necessarily upsell opportunities, upsell opportunities seem pretty obvious. So I don't want to touch on those. But assuming that they bought everything from you that they could possibly buy, so maybe you offer certain services, and they bought every friggin service so great. What else can you do, there's always more you can do, and that idea, of bringing them on to a group and controlling that conversation, or having them become a referral or anything along those lines, or even just sharing case studies with them just so that they know, like, hey, the decision you made to work with us was a good one, we did it for so and so we can do it for you. These are all great ways to market people after a sale, or after they become a customer.
06:30
You're talking about the most important KPIs that you should and shouldn't be paying attention to. And I love this episode. The reason I'm gonna love this episode so much is that it's gonna stir up some shit. And I love cars. And I love seeing marketers fight and comment. So I did. I made a list of five that you should be following. That, to me, seems obvious. And then five that you shouldn't be. And I'm gonna give you some insight on why I think all this isn't one of the things I've always said. I think I've said it several times in this podcast in the short time we've been doing it that the most important KPI next to conversion is email, how big? And obviously, you're gonna want to, again, there's going to be things in here that are dependent, and there's going to be things on like, oh, yeah, well, I don't care how big your email list is if no one responds to an email, but I'm going to say, your ability to create an email. So the size of your list, it's very, it's very relevant to a phallic response, in which case, it's not the size of your list, but it's how you use it. And if you don't use it, you lose it. And wow, there was another one; there was another one that my buddy told me was hilarious. Like, that is disgusting. But essentially, you know how to use it too. But moving on to email list size, your email list is very, very important. It is dependent on how you use it and how engaged everyone is yes, but your ability to grow emails is the second most important thing outside of an actual conversion. The second one I was going to do is conversion rate, that one's pretty obvious. Again, I think all these general ones are obvious. But these are like the ones where I go, Okay, if I had a dashboard, on a TV up in the office somewhere, and I want to know what's going on. These are like the top five are where we are with this. And the reason I say conversion rate is because it can tell you a lot. If your conversion rate is consistent, you know, at a certain number. And then the next day it tanks, and one of two things can happen, your website may have gone down, or you could have gotten a baton of traffic from something that you don't even know. There are so many things that can cause a conversion rate to fluctuate. That if you see a conversion rate fluctuation, you immediately know something has changed what has changed. And obviously, the better the conversion rate, the better you're doing. But you want to know what has changed even if it went up. So if you walk in one day and look at your board, you go wow, my conversion rate is double what it was yesterday. That to me, even though it's a good thing, could be a red flag because it could also mean that some of the traffic you were driving before that normally wasn't converting as well. Maybe that traffic is just not being driven right now. So now you need to look at your lead Flow account or what your sales rep is for that day or something like that. So it can still show you a lot about what's going on. Lifetime value. This one is very important. And I'm shocked at how many people didn't have an answer for this when I talked to them. It's the next one. I'll jump ahead a minute. Here is your CPI, so your cost per acquisition. And if you are spending x to bring in a customer and that customer is you know first order with you or their first thing that they buy from you is why then all of a sudden you can go great I made x on this on this sale. But a lot of times, what so many companies don't think about is the lifetime and value. Because if that customer costs you $5, getting a customer to spend $10 is awesome. So you got $2 For every dollar that you spent. But if that customer, on average, shops with you, or you know, stays with you for several contracts, or whatever the business is that you have, for a longer time, then who gives a shit if it costs you $5, if it cost you $10, it may cost you $20, to convert for a $10 order. But if that person consistently orders with you for so long, that's much more important. So your average order value is interesting. But I really want to know what the lifetime value the customer has because that's going to tell me, on average, I'm gonna make x on this person, if I spend X, it's basically Amazon's whole thing is why they spend so much money acquiring customers and putting out so much content and are okay with charging significantly less, because they know they're going to keep that customer and that they're going to spend X Y over they're gonna stop doing alphabet show with this. They're gonna keep spending so much over a certain period. And then the next one, CTR, your click-through rate. And the reason I picked this one is kind of it's basically your conversion rate for your paid advertising, right? And the reason I chose this is it does tell you a lot about your impressions versus your clicks. It tells you if the content and or your copy is good enough. And it will also give you some insight into many other things. So as I mentioned, the conversion rate can tell you what's working and not. And if your click-through rate fluctuates, it can tell you that something really good is happening or something really bad is happening. Even if the click-through rate has improved, it doesn't always mean that the solution or, I'm sorry, the cause was positive. So I always keep an eye on the click-through rate. And so now I'm gonna go into the five things that I personally never really give a shit about. And one of the first ones is my favorites, or reach or impressions. So here's the deal. I have only I don't work with very, very large companies. Often I'm not. I'm not the marketing agency for Coke. I wish I was. Pepsi won't take me, either. But your regional impressions mean nothing to me. If there's nothing else tied to it, there is the most BS manatee vanity metric that I've had so many marketers say, Yeah, but we reached 2.4 billion people in the past month. But great, I don't care how many of those bought like; it means nothing to me. I know brand awareness is very, very important. And brand awareness is something that needs to be focused on. And I'm always interested in how many people we did reach, but I'm never adjusting my copy or my creative or anything like that to try to reach more people just to hone in on that one metric. Basically, I use that metric as a great we reached a lot of people, and we brought some brand awareness. But I'm currently more focused on how's my conversion doing. How's all that other stuff? The next one, social media followers don't care. Great. You have 5000 million followers, which isn't even a number but it's a thing. And you have 400 million people following you on Instagram. And when I make a post for people like it, bite me. I don't care how many followers you have. It means nothing. Your engagement rates a different story because that will tell me your followers versus how many people care. But I don't care about how many social media followers you have. And that stands for businesses and brands, not just obnoxious influencers. This one's interesting. gross revenue, I don't care. Only because it's a vanity metric. Like great. We did $1.2 million this month, our biggest month ever. Awesome. How much did we spend 1.4? Well, that's crap. Like who? I don't care. And then, oh, it's ecommerce. Oh, we did $500,000 This month, awesome. But how many of those did we give us? 60% discount coupon to be like, all of them are great. That means nothing to me, and we lost money. So the gross revenue is interesting. It's definitely a vanity metric. I like using it to more kind of help with company culture. Just because to me, it's a little bit easier to kind of understand, like, hey, we hit this new milestone of this much money. And as long as our profitability remains, then great. So gross revenues are interesting, but I always like to know not necessarily the bottom line, but somewhere in the bottom line, and you can't live off the bottom line which by the way, will probably be another podcast we'll do CPM, your cost per viewing 1000 people I don't care. Great, awesome. Obviously, CPMs are all up and down right now because of the earliest on Facebook ads because everyone is leaving Facebook for a little while there. But it doesn't mean much to me. It is something I look at all of these I definitely look at them. I don't ignore them. But they're not something that I make rash decisions on CPM is kind of telling me more where the platform I'm using or where the industry is and less about my ads. Unless I look at one specific ad and it's got a great relevancy score and showing significantly more, it's a different story, but I usually don't care much about CPM. Last but not least, website traffic from social media. So this one's interesting. And the reason this one's odd is that it kind of counter is counteractive to the first one I did, which was the impression and reach. So the traffic you're getting from social media is not what social media is for unless you run many ads. And obviously, you do want to drive some traffic to social media, but it's much more of a brand awareness play. So if you're doing if you're able to reach several million people on Facebook, but none of them are clicking over, I would still tell you, Yes, you need to continue to do that and build brand awareness, maybe I won't put as much like Tableau behind it. Or maybe I won't put as much work behind it. But I don't care how much people are driving to my website because a lot of people, they'll see you on Facebook, but then they'll go Google you later. And then they're coming from Google, and you go great, I spend more money on Google, but it doesn't work that way. So a lot of these people are gonna disagree with so feel free to email me Tell me whether you agree or disagree or if you have any questions you want me to go over this week, next week, or any other week.
16:04
Super stoked about this one. I liked this one. I wrote this as a blog post and realized I had to do this as a podcast. So I'm gonna fly through this one like I did yesterday. But so these are my eight b2b strategies that obviously we use ourselves that work well for b2c. And every time I tell an E-commerce seller, like, Hey, you should try this, they always go fuck you, that's not gonna work, and they're wrong. So here's what we're gonna go through eight of them. So live webinars, gated content, making your influencer a founder thing. LinkedIn partnerships with other companies' informative newsletters in personal events and podcasts. So like this podcast, hammer through examples for all those. So live webinars. So if you are an e-commerce seller, let's say that you, I'm going to use a guy I worked with before for years of sales, collegiate apparel; what we did is we set up a live webinar where we got some of the coaches from Alabama, to do a q&a. He had a very big audience of Alabama fans, and we just segmented them into one email list, reached out to them, and said, Hey, we're doing a live q&a webinar with so and so and so and so from Alabama before the season, sit down and ask them any questions that you want. It worked. Amazingly, obviously, we were able to do a giveaway in the end. We had all their emails, and we could reach out to him and put them through a different funnel, but worked awesomely. That's one example of that. I'm just going to do one example of all these because it gets out of hand. So gated content, tripwires, ebooks, white papers, calculators, quizzes, all that stuff where it's great. Every ecommerce seller thinks okay, fine, I get it, I'll do a blog, but my popup is still going to be 10% off when you sign up for a newsletter, well, bite me, I'm so tired of doing that. Because most of the time, what's going to happen, is someone's going to sign up, and then they're never going to. They're going to unsubscribe, probably. So, gated content ebooks are super easy, especially if you like food. So a massive e-book of recipes or something like that. Everyone, a lot of sellers, doesn't want to spend money on it. But honestly, you could spend 1000 to $2,000 on an e-book and get a nice ebook for that size. It's a ton of beautifully designed content, and you will get many downloads. And then you are getting emails for less than giving away your percentage. So if you do the math on okay, I gave away 10% over X amount of time, that's going to be much, much more than the $1,500 you spent on an ebook after several months. So consider it an investment, making your founder and influence or something like that. So this is something a lot of b2b companies do. I'm doing it right now. So basically, take your founder and make them the face of the company. This works well for products that people want to buy from a person and maybe not so much from just a company like a no-name face. So if you think of a lot of athletes when they sell protein or when they sell gym clothing or things like that, any athletic apparel, having an influencer as your founder really can kind of help because a lot of people will start to follow them and listen to them more than they will the company. LinkedIn works well, especially for b2c. You have the option of retargeting, I still think it maintains a b2b environment. So if you have a product line that fits that, and that could be apparel, so even people who are timeout clothes that you wear in an interview, or maybe business casual party stuff that you're wearing or anything like that, but anything that needs to be relevant to the audience, as long as you know, the audience is sticking to LinkedIn can work very well. Of course, you can go that route on a b2b e-commerce side too. But for the sake of this podcast, I'm not going to go there. on partnerships, these work well, company partnerships. So blog exchanging doing guest blog posts, Google says that they don't help. I think they're lying. And yes, I realized that I said I think Google is lying, but I do. And so guest blog posts and things like that work great. But what I've also seen well is partnerships where people will work with other companies that aren't competitors but have the same audience. And they'll do discounts in each other's newsletters. So this, you know, this Friday, we're sending out a discount for so and so's the company, not ours. So now they're the consumers more inclined to stay with your newsletter because they don't know what they're gonna get, they may get a discount for something else that they're interested in it so it'll keep your subscribe rates pretty high. But it will also allow you to get in front of a new audience if you're the one partnering, or you can do things where buy one of these and get one from so and so company free, depending on the relationship you put together. But they can work phenomenally informative newsletters, not every newsletter has to be a promotion, you can if you're putting enough content together, you can do a monthly newsletter of something that is not offering a discount. If you are in instruments. I've seen this done very well as a drummer myself. I see it all the time when I get a monthly newsletter of just new cool YouTube videos that are out or maybe new products in the industry that are coming out for certain companies, and E-commerce may not work. But other concerts that are going on, things in your area, or something like that is not always promotional. But you're always reaching out to your consumers so that they know they're on your email list because the last thing you want is to go for four or five months without doing your promotion. You send an email, and now all of a sudden, they have no idea who you are, and they unsubscribe to more we're almost there in-person events. So this would be doing like a conference or a meetup. And again, this is very similar to the collegiate apparel guy I worked with. So, you don't need to always focus on your entire customer base. If you can segment your audience enough, you can still get them to show up somewhere. So even if we use him again, as an example, we did set up a booth and an Alabama game, and we set up a booth at a Notre Dame game. There's a ton of different ways that you can do that, where you're doing meetups, I've also seen companies that will do a trip that will hit five or six cities and do giant like happy hours or something like that. It's a little bit like they are showing off the product. But it's more of just bringing like-minded individuals into one place for a good time. And obviously, the company is going to benefit from that. Last but not least, podcasts. So, of course, I'm doing one now, but I would still suggest them for b2c. And the reason is that there's so much you can talk about your product in your product line, the collegiate apparel guy, obviously, same thing again. But you also have the benefit of a ton of other product lines. You have hobbyists who are always interested in discussing many different things. You have anything in sports, where you could do a sports talk show, you have murder mystery people, so I don't know what you're selling. But it could work there too. You have to think about maybe not your entire customer base but a certain segmented profitable area that you would want to focus on for your podcast. And that would be something that you can bring in your new audience about how you can scale your ecommerce company by purchasing other companies and by potentially paying $0 for them. Yes, it does sound like a scam. No, it's not. I'm gonna give some credit to Roland Frasier for this brilliant guy who met him through a friend at a conference traffic and conversions. A couple of years ago, obviously would have met him again, probably this year, but you know, COVID But he does he's just a brilliant guy listening to him speak was nuts. And one of the things that he's always kind of preaching was the other ways to scale things like the tricky ways to me he's a growth hacker. I don't know if he likes to be called that he's a bit of a growth hacker. So
24:08
acquiring other ecommerce companies, why would you do it? So expanding your product line seems pretty obvious that you're going to take on some more assets, but you're also going to take on some more liabilities. And so that can get a little bit messy, but it is a great way and an easy way to expand your product line. If you have, let's say, you do pet products and you sell, I don't know, leashes and harnesses, and you go out and purchase someone who creates collars like custom-made collars. It's a great extension of your product line. It can help. Fantastic, awesome it seems pretty common, right? The other side that many people don't think about is what else you can get out of that. Yes, you can learn some of their infrastructure, maybe their manufacturers are great, maybe their three peels are great. There are some other things there. But the one thing that I find a lot of people don't think about is you can expand your list. So again, we'll use leashes and harnesses as an example. And then you go out, and you purchase collars Well, what if they weren't selling as much as they wanted to, but they had a list of 500,000 people that buy seasonal dog collars, all of a sudden, you have 500,000 extra people that you can reach out to about a leash or about a harness. And so now you've expanded that. So now it's not so much about whether can I continue to sell these collars. Now, it's more about how can I leverage the existing audience of the callers' purchasers and use them for me or my brand. So that is a fantastic way. Now, the tricky way that Rohan has always talked about how you do it at basically zero cost or a minimal cost is to work out a deal with some of these smaller companies who aren't doing as well. They're looking for a way to exit, but they may be in a certain situation. So there's going to take some searching, there's going to take some extra things that you need to do to do your due diligence and make sure that you're finding the right person and the right company for this fit. But you can work your work out a deal with them and structure something in a place where you are offering them a profit share of either everything that you sell or you're offering them a profit share of their product line. So if you were to buy the collars, you could say, I'll give you $1 For every caller I sell until you make $500,000, which is fantastic. You just bought an entire company and did nothing, you paid nothing, and you're gonna, and you're gonna end up paying this guy for the next several years. But you're gonna give them $1 per unit. And depending on your margin, of course, that may be worth it. Then I lost my train of thought. Then on the other side of it, you might be willing to completely allow I'll give you 100% of the profit from the collars that I sell. So you're not going to make $1 off the collars. However, you can upsell them with your leashes and your harnesses with other things. So your current business is going to expand, and then eventually, you're going to pay off the previous owner. And now you have both. So there are really ways that you can get creative with some of these structured deals. Some people are so afraid of purchasing from another company. And they're so worried about Oh, how's it going to go, and there's so much it gets so messy and it can, and it does. But once you've done several of them, it starts to ease up. And you can start to structure and template out how you purchased someone and what you have to do, and there will be some lessons you'll learn along the way. Maybe reach out to Roland Frasier. I'm sure he'll help you with that. But it's a fantastic way to grow your list. It's a great way to expand your product line, and maybe even take on some existing capital if it's coming in, depending on how that looks. But you can get creative with this kind of stuff. So check out places like Shopify exchange. If you're a Shopify seller, that's a great way to go. So Shopify exchanges people looking to sell their Shopify sites and their businesses, be careful with it because some people just create a shitty website and then try to sell the site itself. Biz buy sell is another great one, and exchange marketplace is another great one. So check out those places. It doesn't even hurt to even look into it. Sometimes you can just set up alerts and a lot of these places, and you can find out, oh great, there's a company in, you know, pet supplies it's interested in how I can go purchase them. It's a great way to grow your company. Great way to expand it; think about it and look into it. I don't want to ramble on about the same thing. And, of course, go check out Roland Frasier, but if not, I will talk to you all tomorrow rate review subscription, and I will see you then.
28:50
Thank you for tuning in to The E-Comm Show head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The E-Comm Show is brought to you by BlueTuskr, a full-service digital marketing company specifically for E-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to BlueTuskr.com Now for more information. Remember to tune in next week for another amazing episode of The E-Comm Show.
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