In this week's podcast, Trevor talks to John Horn from The Stub Group about how to Maximise your Google ads performance. Google has been increasing the automation of its ads programmes, recently introducing the highly automated Performance Max format.

Performance Max campaigns use machine learning to try and achieve a retailer's goals. They are highly automated and do not require the advertiser to specify any targets. To create a PM campaign, a retailer must specify

Google takes this info and finds customers for your business within your target.

PM campaign is a massive time saver; in John's experience, they outperform standard shopping campaigns.

In my experience (Trevor), whilst it is possible to beat automation in the short term, in the long term, performance is steadier.

The data you submit to PM is your biggest lever when optimising performance. Areas to optimise:

Creating attractive and relevant ad assets will help Google understand your products and promote them more effectively to potential customers.

With privacy becoming a more significant issue online, companies like Apple have stopped shaving customer data with advertisers. To help Google learn faster, submit audience data to Google, e.g. customer emails.

In my experience (Trevor), adding audience data makes a massive difference to performance.

Carefully choose your performance target. The most aggressive a target, the harder Google will find it to find customers at that price.

Joihn talked to Trevor Ginn from vendlab.com, an eCommerce agency specialising in online marketplaces and e-commerce sales platforms.

In this week's podcast, Trevor talks to Reinis Krumins from email marketing Agency agencyjr.com about how to kick it out of the park with email sales this Q4.

Reinis recommends a four-phrase approach to email this Q4

In any email list, there will be inactive users who have not interacted with an email recently. Send these customers text-based, personalised emails to get these users to re-engage with your business.

This email should be a 'personal' email from the founder or give some helpful information about a product.

There are two parts to this

The relationship email focuses on building the brand in the customer's emails. For example, it could be about charitable work the brand is doing. Alternatively, use value-based emails which highlight products in a non-sales way, e.g. top 3 tips on using product XX

The second side of the warm-up is the technical warm-up which ensures deliverability. Add a custom sending domain (if you have not already done so) to your email software. I.e. emails will come from XXX.com, not from the email software's domain. Email from shared domains can have delivery issues as some senders will be spamming people. By using your own domain, you avoid this issue.

To build your list, create a special page on your site so that customers can sign up to get early access to offers. Send this to your email list. To build this list, you use paid advertising and retargeting

These users get first access to Black Friday deals.

From 19-20th Nov, customers who signed up for early access get emailed. From 20-21st Nov, send 2 emails every day. It is essential to be aggressive around Black Friday as customers are getting lots of emails. If you send only a few emails, your messages will not be seen.

In this week's podcast, we talked to Matthew Holman from Qpilot about how to run a successful Subscription scheme.

Subscriptions are a part of eCommerce, which is experiencing strong growth. A four or five-fold increase is expected over the next few years.

There are two main types of eCommerce subscription

Many subscription services have been launched recently, and some commentators have suggested that subscription fatigue is setting in. However, if you can get it right, a subscription service will generate recurring revenue and help form a close relationship with your customers.

Subscriptions are typically used for consumables, i.e. things which are used regularly e.g.

These items are things which are used on a daily or regular basis and the customer is shopping for frequently. Getting products on a subscription saves the customer time.

To launch a successful subscription business, you need to understand your consumer and consider whether there are products they are currently getting elsewhere.

Details to consider are:

You will need a platform to run your subscription service. There are 30+ apps on Shopify (of which Qpilot is one option). Compare the app's functionality against your proposed subscription offering and choose the one that bests fits your requirements.

Your offer should have a dedicated page on your site highlighting the features and benefits of your subscription scheme. Include:

To promote your subscription scheme, start by promoting the scheme to customers who are already frequently buying from your site.

Qpilot recommends giving a discount of no more than 10%. Pricing too low will leave less room for discounting in future. For example, You might want to run a sales event over a holiday weekend to drive additional sales

Subscriptions can be very profitable as customers buy for several months before cancelling. Ask customers why they sign up and leave the programme to improve performance. By understanding why people leave, you can change your programme to improve performance.

Reducing churn

There are two types of churn

To reduce churn, ask customers why they leave the programme. For example, they m

In this week's eCommerce Odyssey Podcast, Trevor talks to Lauren Schwartz for The loft 325 about how to create compelling organic and paid content on TikTok.

Tiktok is an engagement platform where people go to be entertained. Posts consist of short videos (mostly less than 15 seconds) on any topic, which are consumed at a fast rate.

When strolling through a TikTok feed, users can click on a video to interact with it. You can like videos and also view the user's profile to see their other posts. On the post can be a link to their website.

Like other social media channels, TikTok has the option to post organic (unpaid) and paid content (ads). Ads appear in the feed and link to the advertiser's content using calls to action such as 'Shop Now' or 'Learn More'.

When creating organic TikTok content, look at what is trending on the TikTok app. These can be trending:

Think about how you can integrate these trends with your posts, e.g. by adding the latest hashtags to your description (e.g. #tiktokmademebuyit). Look at how people are people are talking about products and how they are talking to consumers.

By utilising the latest trends, you will begin to understand what people want to see from your content. If you are successful, your content will appear more on the 'For you' page.

Success on organic TikTok is measured by engagement. These include:

Both organic content and ads should have a hook, i.e. something interesting to get people to stop and watch the content for more than 3 seconds. Text on the screen makes people stop and read.

When creating ads, create content around the trends. Paid content on TikTok should look exactly like organic posts (look 'native'). Look at the styling of other successful posts and emulate this in your content. High production value ads are not necessary as they will not look organic.

2 or 3% is a good click-through rate for an ad. $30 is a good CPA. Ads are usually charged on a CPC basis.

In this video Trevor Talks to Maximilian Rast from Klar about how to measure performance across your eCommerce business. Businesses sell through many channels and drive traffic across numerous different advertising platforms and campaigns. By combining this data, you can get a more accurate picture of performance, enabling better decision-making. Klar is a system which centralises all your data in one place - check it out at www.getklar.com.

Jon Warren is an eCommerce entrepreneur and Coach who specialises in high ticket dropshipping. Jon teaches dropshipping at Dropship Breakthru.

Dropshipping is an attractive business model as you do not have to pay any money upfront. Jon makes a good case for launching a dropshipping business, but I have had bad experiences with dropshipping for the reasons I outline below.

Jon’s take on dropshipping is that the only way to do it is to focus on high-ticket items. This gets round the problem of low margins, as a low margin on a high ticket item can be a high dollar amount. That said, you will still have all the other issues I outline below. Some of these will be multiplied, as accepting the return of a high ticket item can be difficult and costly.

What is Dropshipping Drop shipping where the seller accepts customer orders but does not keep goods sold in stock. Instead, they pass the order details to either the manufacturer, a wholesaler, or another retailer, which then ships the goods directly to the customer.

Dropshipping pros Dropshipping seems like a good idea, and many people promote it as a get-rich-quick scheme.

It has many advantages on the face of it

No upfront costs. You pay for products as you sell them No overheads. No need for a warehouse for pesky things like warehouses or staff Access to an extensive catalogue. You do not have to worry about sourcing products, just publish the drop shippers catalogue and you have a ready-made business No work! No need to worry about troublesome things like packing Dropshipping Cons There is no such thing as a free lunch. In my experience, dropshipping is more trouble than it is worth:

Competitive. Dropshipping products are available to a lot of sellers and so are competitive and low margin Limited control. As a dropshipper, you surrender control of the delivery process to your supplier. Poor consumer experience. In my experience, dropshipping is often a poor customer experience. Slow, difficult to arrange, bad communication. Long delivery times. If you are getting products delivered from overseas, delivery can take weeks. This is not a good customer experience Returns build-up. As the retailer, you will normally need to accept any returns yourself. These will quickly build up Dropshipping I have tried I’ve tried dropshipping in various ways, failing to take off.

Books In the UK, there is a huge book wholesaler called Gardeners books. They offer a straight-through processing service which we integrated with our eCommerce system. This meant that orders would automatically be fulfilled. We set this up and waited for sales to roll in. Bingo!

Unfortunately, this failed for several reasons:

It was hard to calculate the shipping cost of each book so hear to know what to charge Low sales. Amazon was always cheaper We wanted to implement a long tail strategy, i.e. list 500K books on eBay, but eBay would only let us list 25K at one time Furniture Furniture is a massive pain! It is heavy and prone to breaking, so perfect for dropshipping. However:

Dropshipped furniture is widely available, so very competitive Hard to get stock updates from suppliers, so I frequently had to let customers down Buy to order Stock is a pain, so I thought we would try buying stock to order. I found a supplier who could provide a stock update feed. I fed the stock levels into our system, thinking this would mean that we would never oversell and put the lead time to 3 days, thinking this would work if orders were delivered the next day. Brilliant?

In my experience, suppliers do not have good stock levels and frequently deliver late. Platforms such as Amazon performance standards and if your supplier cannot meet these, the whole system fails. For example, if the max order defect rate on Amazon is 1% and your supplier can only deliver right 98.5% of the time, this will cause problems for your account.

Ben McAdam is a founder of Profits Collective,  a Profit Coach and Virtual CEO. In this podcast, we talk about the five key metrics on which every eCommerce business should focus.

Revenue is your income from sales. If you do not have revenue, you do not have a business! A healthy company should have a growing revenue.

Break up your revenue into categories or products to understand what drives it. You do not want to run out of the products which are vital revenue drivers

Margin is the difference between what the customer pays and the cost to the merchant. If you do not get the ratio between what an item costs and what you can sell it for right, you will not be profitable, no matter how high your revenue. You cannot outsell a margin problem.

With low margins, you will not have enough profit to grow the business or pay yourself. A sale price of  3 to 5 times your cost price is healthy. If your multiple is only two times the cost, business owners tend to burn out when your turnover hits six figures.

Are you spending enough on marketing? If you spend to little, you will not sell enough, too much and you could have got a better return. Spending 5 to 15% of your revenue is a healthy amount.

Owners should make sure they pay themselves so you can live. It is a balance as you do not want to starve the business of funds. You have to be able to pay yourself a market rate for the tasks you will want to delegate later. You will be stuck doing these tasks if your business cannot afford to pay the market rate. Making sure you can afford to pay someone else to do your job is a good indicator that your margins are OK.

Unless your business is profitable, you will not be able to do important things like pay down debt, pay yourself and attract investors.

Ben talked to Trevor Ginn from vendlab.com, an eCommerce agency specialising in online marketplaces and e-commerce sales platforms.

Shawn O'Neil from Speed Sense is an expert on website speed. In this podcast, we discuss how you know if you have a website speed issue and how to build an engaging website experience

Website speed is important for three reasons:

You can identify if you have a site speed issue by scanning your site using the popular site speed using a tool such as Google page speed. This will give two categories of metrics

The metrics given on the Google page speed tool will give benchmark for the site speed. If the major pages on the site pass core web vitals then that is the minimum benchmark for judging your site speed is acceptable.

Another good measure is to compare your site to your competitors.

Google has chosen the metrics in the core website vitals as they are a good proxy for user experience. They fall into three groups:

Whether you will pass core web vitals will depend on (amongst other things) our technology stack (e.g. Shopify, Magento) and the number of applications which are loaded with the page. A common problem is below the page functionality e.g. tracking is slowing down the site.

Though it is an imperfect measure, when you are choosing a new theme, test it using Google page speed. This is imperfect as the theme demo will not have any user metrics.

In a follow-up to our previous podcast on how to set up referral programmes, Trevor talked to Jay Gibb from CloudSponge about how to improve the performance of referral programmes.

If your service is good, word-of-mouth marketing will already be happening for your store. A referral scheme encourages this behaviour by incentivising your customer to sell your brand to their friends. An existing customer will click on a link, send a referral code to their friends, and receive something, e.g. discount on a future purchase, a gift or a payment.

Referral programmes fail to take off for a number of reasons.

If you do not tell your customers about your referral programme, they won't sign up! Common mistakes include:

Whilst some people want to get a reward for making a referral, others value being the hero that sent an offer to their friends. Doubled-sided referral programmes cater for both customer types.

If you make users type in email addresses, they will get bored quickly. Users only have so much patience to enter a comma-separated list of emails, especially on a mobile device.

Using a solution like Jay's company Cloudsponge, customers can import contacts directly from their email solution, e.g. Gmail. They can sign in directly to their email account and easily add multiple contacts. Cloudsponge has found by using this solution, referral schemes can double or triple referrals.

In this week’s podcast, Trevor talks to Raul Galera about how to set up a successful online referral scheme.

If your service is good, word-of-mouth marketing will already be happening for your store. A referral scheme encourages this behaviour by incentivising your customer to sell your brand to their friends. An existing customer will click on a link, send a referral code to their friends, and receive something, e.g. discount on a future purchase, a gift or a payment.

Raul recommends the following steps to launch a successful referral scheme:

There are two main difference between affiliate and referral marketing

The best referral schemes reward both the referrer and the new customers. This incentivises the referrer to work hard on your behalf and the new customer to buy.

Referral schemes work well across many verticals but work especially well for direct-to-consumer brands as they are trying to build a community. Also, products which have a sharable component, e.g. fashion, technology.

The steps to run a referral scheme are:

Referral Candy uses a metric (referral rate) which is the ratio of referral order to the total number of sales.

A good referral scheme should generate at least 2% of a company's revenue, with some companies generating 10% or even 33%.