There are thousands of companies selling t-shirts online. I know this because I actually looked into doing it myself, as a social business model. I decided not to, but Bay Yess, founder of Tagged Threads, went for it, and is now selling t-shirts online for $50!

Why Would Someone Buy a $50 T-Shirt?

Actually, my 21 year old son probably would.

But he’s not alone. And Bay knows where to find folks like him.

She has also found a wonderful way to bring street art to a broader audience.

1. Premium Positioning

Her company, which went from concept to full online store and celebrity endorsements in 3 months, works with graffiti artists and puts their work on t-shirts. Bay positions them as art, not just t-shirts. 

She has started with the art of Mr abiLLity. You can check out his work on Instagram.

To support that arty, high end, positioning, she sends them out in fancy custom packaging.

But wait, there’s more…

2. Exclusivity

In the package the purchaser gets a numbered “VIP” card that gives them special access to a private area of the website where they can get to know more about and even interact with the artists.  They become part of an exclusive-feeling club.

This works well for the artists too, because they can use this to connect with and grow their fan base.

3. Feel Good Messaging

The graffiti she chooses for the t-shirts supports her belief in thinking positively; a lesson she learned from a street artist. This message will definitely appeal to a lot of customers.

(Will she lose customers who want cynical t-shirts? Sure, but that’s not her market. Target your own niche to be successful.)

The company also donates $1 to charity for every t-shirt sold.

4. Niche Offline Marketing

As more and more online retailers are learning, it’s hard to compete with only online promotion.

Tagged Threads is cleverly leveraging where the artists hang out – the streets and edgy clubs – to spread the word. They’ve been partnering with music promoters in major cities to get the word out to their target market, and, especially, to the celebrities who influence their ideal customers.

Will It Work?

Bay has 15 years experience selling luxury goods online, so if anyone has a chance to make this succeed, she’s the one! Experience really helps! (As my mom always says, “Practice Makes Better.”)

I do wonder if the cost structure is sustainable. The company only launched a month ago, so time will tell. But for now, they are certainly off to a great start.

How Could You Position What You Offer As A Premium Product?

 

Today’s guest, Katrina German, co-founder of Saskatoon-based start-up, OneStory, always loved the idea of using video to capture and save people’s stories. But she was frustrated by the time involved in video editing, especially if you were trying to put together video clips from many people.

So she and her business partner, Dale Zak, created an application that makes it easier. It lets you pose questions to your audience (or whoever you want) and they can easily record and upload a video clip of their answers.

I know I should be using video more, but, as I confess in our interview, I hate having to bother putting on makeup and when I don’t have any outside meetings. And, I guess I just heard one time too often that I had a perfect face for audio!

If you are considering using video more, either to tell the story of your business through the eyes of several people it has affected, or for marketing research, you might want to check out the OneStory option.

Video Recording Tips From Katrina

Whether you end up using their software or not, Katrina adds a few video shooting tips to add to those we posted a while ago in my interview with Dave Phillips of Ubervideo (Inexpensive Video Tricks To Boost Your Online Marketing):

* Pay attention to what’s behind you when you are videotaping!

* Sound quality is really important. Use a good mike and keep it close to you. (Dave mentioned this too.)

* Don’t scalp your subjects! You want to leave some room above the head of the person you are filming, but not too much.

Speaking of using video, have you heard about the Reconnect Project?

I’m launching a campaign to collect stories and examples of companies that are clearly disconnected from their customers, staff, suppliers, investors, etc. (like American Apparel’s (now ex-)CEO Dov Charney) and others that are really well connected with their people (like Zappos).  Will you check out the Reconnect Project and share your examples? Happy to have words, pictures, audio or video! Thanks.

I’ve got two recent interviews for you in today’s podcast:

* Diana Lucaci, founder of True Impact Marketing, who spoke at the recent Marketing Research & Intelligence Association (MRIA) national conference in Saskatoon. She applies her expertise in neuroscience to business problems, and we discuss ways to get attention and improve a prospect’s memory of your marketing.

* Jeff Barto, Trust Strategist at Symantec, who I interviewed at the eTail Canada conference a few weeks back. We discuss how a simple security seal isn’t enough to build confidence in your potential customers, and what else you need to do.

If you missed it, also check out my interview with Briana Brownell about gamification of research surveys.

 

Tips for Getting Attention in a Noisy World

Diana discusses an experiment in which they tested peoples’ memory of a video. One group was told that they could take a picture during the video if they wanted. Turned out that those who snapped a picture remembered less of what they’d seen! The act of taking a photo switches your attention away from the content of what you are seeing and/or hearing.

She didn’t say it, but that is also why we need to get away from Powerpoint text-heavy presentations. People will be focused on the slides rather than what you have to tell them. (For a couple of really good books on presentation skills, check out The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs (I reread it frequently), and Slideology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, which focuses especially on the visual side)

Other interesting findings for marketers from neuroscience:

*

Printed direct mail has more of an impact on memory than digital!

So if you can afford it, use a combination of digital and print promotional materials and ad campaigns.

*

Getting your target’s face and name in the marketing pieces massively increases open rates

But if you have a face and a picture of your product side-by-side you’ll end up drawing attention AWAY from your product and to the face. One exception to this is if you have the face looking at your product. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s not surprising that we want to see what another near us is looking at: it might be something dangerous!

Trust is More Than Just a Security Seal

(If you want to skip straight to this one, it starts at minute 12:26 in the show.)

Jeff advises that you “think trust from the very beginning”. There are two elements to building trust from a security perpsective:

* Validation (Is this site legitimate?)

* Encryption (Is my data safe?

When looking for a security provider for your website, make sure you have both those bases covered.

Other Tips for Building Trust

* Avoid the NASCAR look: don’t clog up your website with a whole bunch of trust and security seals. Better to have only one or two truly reputable ones.

* Try to avoid sending users to another site to pay. If you have to, try to make it look consistent with your site.

* The seal should be clickable and lead to explanations of what yo...

I’m in Saskatoon at the Marketing Research & Intelligence Association (MRIA) National Conference. I’ll be posting a few interviews from the conference.

Briana Brownell, of Insightrix Research Inc., gave a talk about lessons learned in trying to use gamification in market research. Have a listen!

Key Learning:

* Don’t stray tooooo far into the gamification or people won’t get the point.

* Don’t give away the answers!

Amazon Has Flipped The Publishing Industry On Its Head

Have you ever noticed that there are trends in what the Internet marketing gurus talk about?

Not long ago Amazon publishing and building your market with Kindle e-books were all the rage. So much so that Amazon had to crack down on things like free so-called “books” that were really just thinly veiled marketing pamphlets.

But it is still very possible to make money writing and selling books on Amazon, and in today’s interview Amazon-published author, Brenda M. Collins, shares how she brought her business background to bear in switching successfully from being a high powered information security specialist to a mystery/romance/paranormal author.

Her “cozy mystery/romance” book, The Holly & The Ivy: A Frost Family & Friends Christmas Book, even got to a #11 rank in her category on Amazon.com! (And to my Canadian readers: We don’t discuss it in the interview, but she focused her publicity and review-getting efforts on Amazon.com. Unless your book would only be of interest to Canadians, you are better off targeting that larger market. But be sure you sell it on the Amazon.ca site too, because often Amazon won’t let Canadians buy from the .com site!)

When I published my first book, Canada’s Best Employers for Women, publishers typically gave the author only about 5 – 10% of the selling price of a book. According to Brenda, many have now bumped it up to about 30%, but at Amazon the author gets 70% as long as the book sells for at least $2.99. With that kind of price difference, you can sell a lot fewer books on Amazon and still make more money.

Even If You Don’t Write Books, Here’s What You’ll Learn in This Interview

Many of the marketing approaches Brenda has used apply in almost any business. For example:

Form Joint Ventures or Partnerships

Look for authors (or businesses) that have a similar target market to yours, and help each other cross-promote. She gives some really clever examples of how she’s done that in the book world. She figured out some brilliant win/win/win scenarios. (Wins for her, for the other author, and for the fans!)

Write for Other Blogs

Yes, you’ve likely heard that before, but it is sooooo important if you want to grow your audience. Brenda gives a great examples of a surprising way she customized her article to the other blog’s audience, by doing smart research about what they were really interested in. (Turns out, it wasn’t books.)

Reach Out To Your Competitors’ Customers

Instead of just asking other authors to review her book, she looked to see who was reviewing their books, and then reached out to those reviewers, noting that they might also enjoy her book. She offered them a free advance copy in the hopes they would review it. (Almost all did.) And this isn’t really a sneaky, underhanded thing to do, for the reason I discuss in the next point, below.

Don’t Be Afraid To Promote The Competition

OK, this doesn’t apply to everybody, but when you are selling words (books, podcasts, information) odds are pretty high that your customers are also consuming content from others. There’s room in their heart for more than one expert. That’s why I have no hesitation in promoting some of my favorite business podcasters. (I’ll post a list of them soon. Stay tuned…)

Last night I had the honour of attending the Edmonton YWCA Women of Distinction Awards gala with my dear friend, entrepreneurial mentor and follow small business owner, Mariana Konsolos. So I decided today would be a good day to air excerpts from an event that Mariana and I ran a few weeks ago in the meeting room at her store.

Mariana was frustrated by listening to so many small business owners pretending life was wonderful, business was booming, and they were brilliant geniuses. She wanted us to tell it like it is, warts and all.

The panel was moderated by Pam Robertson, owner of Robertson Digital Media. On the panel were 4 other Edmonton small business owners who’ve all had our share of ups and downs. (Honestly, what entrepreneur hasn’t?)

* Kim Franklin, co-owner of Edmonton’s High Level Diner.

* Katie Pearse, a former online marketing student of mine at the University of Alberta, now owner of Green Clean Squad

* Mariana Konsolos, owner of Princess Florence Handbags & More, and

* me (Tema Frank), owner of Frank Online Marketing & Web Mystery Shoppers

In the interview, we discuss things like:

* Whether work-life balance is possible (or even desirable!) for small business owners,

* Staffing and management challenges (the bane of many an entrepreneur’s existence!)

* Exit strategies – Do we have them? Do we want them?

This does stray a little bit away from my usual theme of online marketing, but many of the Frank Online Marketing Show listeners are small business owners, or are thinking about starting their own businesses, so I think you’ll find it relevant.  I hope you’ll enjoy it! And if you do, please share!

Rakesh Soni, who emigrated from India to Canada in 2006 to do a Master’s Degree in Engineering at the University of Alberta, is well on his way to becoming one of the web’s next big online success stories.

Frustrated by false signups on one of the websites he had created, he realized that if people signed in using a web identity they already had, like their Facebook,Twitter or Google accounts, the information would be accurate.

Social Sign-in: A Win/Win Proposition

Not only would that help him, it would help the customer too, because they’d be able to sign in more quickly and easily.

Turns out that 75% of users say they’d rather sign up on new websites using an existing social media account than having to create a new one. This has come to be known as “social sign-in”.

[Tweet “75% of users prefer #social sign-in to creating new accounts “]

He discovered that there were only a couple of companies already offering this service, and they were selling to big companies with big budgets. That left over 99% of the market waiting for a solution! In he jumped!

Login Radius launched in early 2012 and has already signed up 120,000 customers worldwide! And that rapid growth shows no signs of slowing.

You’ll hear more about how he did it if you listen to today’s podcast, but here are a few key points from his journey to becoming a successful online entrepreneur:

1. Keep it simple & user-friendly

Usability is key. His target clients are busy entrepreneurs themselves, and they don’t have time to figure out anything difficult. Nor do they want to!

2. Keep it cheap

If you want to sell to a huge market, you’ve got to keep your prices low. Being able to leverage a talented workforce in India helped with this.

3. Meet a real need

Sounds obvious, but it is often tempting to build what we want for ourselves, and just assume there’s a genuine market need out there. Sometimes you get lucky and discover that you weren’t the only one with the problem. Login Radius is clearly delivering a service a whole lot of people want!

Do You Use Your Facebook or Other Social Media Accounts to Sign In?

I was always reluctant to because I don’t want Facebook telling my friends what I’ve been up to. Fortunately, services like LoginRadius don’t let them do that.

If you use social sign-in, which account do you use most often?

Jamie Clarke, co-founder of Calgary-based LiveOutThere.com, is an optimist. Only an optimist would create a career of being a “Professional Adventurer”, and, some would argue, only optimists throw themselves head first into selling online in Canada.

Canada: A Land of eCommerce Opportunity

Fortunately, Canada is a land of optimists! And Canada is a land of e-commerce opportunities! Jamie noted in today’s podcast interview that 70% of Canadians want to buy online but only 17% of Canadian companies offer a viable e-commerce option.

I recently interviewed Jamie and his VP of Marketing, Dave Nagy, about how they expanded from one successful store to a booming e-commerce operation, instead of opening more store branches.

If you’ve been thinking of selling online in Canada, get going now!

* The market is still so under-developed that you’ll have very few competitors.

* You’ll have time to make some mistakes and learn from them before your competitors.

* You can establish a dominant position in the marketplace and sell to an audience that is hungry to buy products online.

[Tweet “70% of Canadians want to buy online; 17% of Cdn co’s offer an ecommerce option -J Clarke @liveoutthere”]

What Holds You Back?

Why aren’t more companies selling online to Canadians? Here are some of the reasons I’ve heard from you, and how LiveOutThere.com has handled them.

Not sure how to start

If you’ve already got a store, try what they did: put the products you’ve got in the store on the site.

With software like Shopify it’s easy to get started. (Check out my interview with Shopify co-founder, Harley Finkelstein, and for an example of a company using it well, listen to this interview with Canadian Icons founder, Aron Slipacoff).

It may not be an ideal way to get started, but it works OK at the beginning, and costs you little to start learning what online customers want.

Next, they got data feeds from suppliers, which let them show much more product on the website than they actually had in stock. Again, it’s not ideal, because sometimes the supplier’s feeds were wrong (i.e. a product ordered might be out of stock) and it would take a bit longer to get the shipment to the customer. But again, Canadians are so under-served that we’ll put up with a lot, especially from a new online store.

What if it Just Cannibalizes Business From Our Stores?

It won’t. If anything, it is likely to grow your in-store traffic. LiveOutThere found that having an online presence made more Calgarians aware of the store, so it brought in new foot traffic as well as adding online sales.

And, as Canadian Pet Connection discovered, people who were store customers but have moved away can still buy from you if you sell online.

How Can We Hire People Who Know About eCommerce?

Most important, as with a bricks & mortar operation, hire people whose values and vision align with yours. You’ll be able to attract great people if you have a strong vision that they can relate to. At LiveOutThere, it is very clear:

“We have a mission to inspire Canadians to go and play in this great playground that we call Canada”

That vision (and, I suspect, Jamie’s charm) was enough to convince Dave Nagy to work for months with no pay, even though he had plenty of well-paid job options available...

The average Canadian woman, according to today’s interview guest, buys 12 pairs of shoes a year.

I’m not a shoe fetishist, but if I didn’t have a toe injury that prevents me from wearing sexy heels, I just might join them!

A little over a year ago I ran an interview titled Canada’s Answer to Zappos Shoes?. The company was a small start-up growing out of a bricks and mortar location in Vancouver.

Canada: A Land of Opportunity for Online Shoe Retailers

Since then another Vancouver-based start-up has zoomed past them to capture top spot in the race to sell shoes online in Canada. ShoeMe.ca president and co-founder, Sean Clark, points out in today’s interview that there’s a great opportunity for retailers wanting to sell shoes online in Canada.

Only 2% of footwear in Canada was bought online in 2012 and most of that was from US firms shipping across the border. In the US 17 – 20% of shoes are now bought online, and the figure is in the high teens in Europe, says Sean.

Zappos left the door wide open when it withdrew from the Canadian market 3 years ago.

Another aggressive competitor for Canadians’ shoe money is JustFab.ca, which, despite the .ca domain, is actually an American-based company. It is promoting heavily online in Canada though, and was the first name that came to my teenage daughter’s mind when I mentioned having interviewed an online shoe-seller.

And, of course, many store-based shoe-sellers are now starting to sell online.

Will ShoeMe.ca Become the Canadian Zappos?

The answer isn’t clear.

They are certainly off to a great start, and they’ve got a superb team of investors and advisors with strong online retail experience backing them.

* They are pumping a lot of money into online advertising, and they clearly know how to do that very effectively.

* They understand logistics; at one point Sean even says “we are a logistics company“.

* They have enough investment money to carry a large inventory, so selection is a competitive advantage, for now at least.

Which Wins: Data or Heart?

But I got the feeling that Sean doesn’t yet have a clear direction for the company. Zappos has based its success on building outstanding relationships with its customers and staff. It’s all about the people at Zappos.

It isn’t clear what it is all about at ShoeMe. In the interview Sean says, “we are a data company and shoes are the widget, right now, that we’re applying it to.” Somehow that just doesn’t create warm fuzzies in a prospective customer’s mind. (Though it may in an investor’s mind!)

So the question is whether the company will find a focus that resonates with its Canadian customer base. If not, they run the risk of struggling to compete if another company with deep pockets and a strong understanding of logistics and online marketing decides to go after their market.

Either way, as someone who’s been agitating for the past 15 years for more Canadian companies to sell online, it is exciting to see this growing competition in the Canadian online space.

What Do You Think?

What makes you choose who to buy shoes from online?

 

Once upon a time, there were warehouses. The warehouses shipped products to stores. Customers bought products at those stores and brought them home.

Many years later, warehouses and stores started to merge, and turned into big-box retailers, like IKEA and Home Depot and BestBuy. People would drive to them and buy products and bring them home.

Then we tried getting rid of the stores altogether, shipping directly to consumers from warehouses, à la Amazon.

Now a new breed is emerging.

Welcome to the World of Hybrid Stores

The new store model is a combination retail store/warehouse/shipping point/pickup point.

This ecommerce trend is appearing in many places, and in today’s interview we look at how one of Canada’s first stores to get into e-commerce, London Drugs, is letting customers “have it their way”, using the stores however the customer wants.

Why Turn Your Store Into an Ecommerce Shipping and Delivery Point

As Josh Johnston, Ecommerce Manager at London Drugs, explains in the interview, there are huge benefits from taking this customer-friendly approach.

* By filling and shipping orders from your stores, you can reduce shipping costs and increase the speed of deliveries. No longer does the customer have to pay (or seller have to subsidize) and wait for a product to be shipped from thousands of kilometers away. This makes a big difference in a country the size of Canada.

* Having an in-store pickup option gives staff a chance to up-sell. When you ordered your camera online for in-store pickup you might not have thought about getting an extra memory card or batteries. Since the staff know you’ll be coming in they can have those little extras waiting beside your parcel, ready to add in quickly if you like their suggestion that these items might be worth buying while you are there.

* Giving customers the flexibility to buy whenever and wherever suits them, you’ll keep more of them as loyal purchasers. Customers just won’t let stores dictate to them any more about what they can buy, and when or where they can buy it. Stores still clinging to that model are on their death bed.

Josh will be speaking at eTail Canada, in Toronto May 5 – 7, 2014. My readers and listeners get a 25% discount! Register at  http://bit.ly/1iwzfuG and ETCA14TFRANK to get your discount!

Want to learn more about online shopping?

Come hear the experts discuss trends in online shopping at eTail Canada! 3 day passes are already sold out! But 2 day passes are still available. See you there?

Frank Online Marketing readers get a 25% discount. Use code ETCA14TFRANK

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