Nerd Marketing

To accurately convey just how valuable a sophisticated email marketing strategy can be to an Ecommerce retailer, Drew enlists the help of Austin Brawner from Ecommerce Influence.

Both Austin and Drew have a ton of experience consulting and providing audits to companies asking the big question, “What can I be doing better?”

Typically, the answer is – smarter email marketing!

As Austin says in this episode, most retailers are only using 10% of the available power of their email service provider.

Automation, segmentation, retention campaigns – these are the strategies the most successful retailers are using.

Learn about each of them in this episode of the Nerd Marketing Podcast.

Plus, an announcement of The 2-Day Brand Growth Implementation Intensive – a live event unlike anything you’ve attended before, hosted by Drew and Austin.

We all know that there is no one silver bullet guaranteed to push your business to success, but certain tools can be a big help on the path to higher revenue.

Special guest Patrick Shanahan, a digital marketer from Art Storefronts joins Drew in this episode to talk about just that – key marketing tools that brought him wins in 2016.

Learn about PushCrew, an in-browser notification system, and hear Drew talk at-length about Drip – an email service provider with some serious automation chops.

This week's campaign is so simple and effective you'll be kicking yourself for not thinking of it ages ago.

It's Drew's "One-Two Punch" Email Campaign designed to increase your order frequency.

It starts with asking yourself one question: "What kind of recurring needs do my customers have?"

Tune in to hear the rest of the campaign implementation, as well as a little bit about why Drew favors increasing the number of purchases over the number of overall customers.

A 25% increase to your AOV is a 25% increase to your business's revenue. It's as simple as that.

So how do you do that?

Considering you probably don't have the next 12 hours to listen to Drew cover all the potential ways to build up your AOV, let's hone in on just one method – the premium service upsell.

Listen in to hear more on AOV as a key multiplier in your business, and how to use a service-based upsell to influence AOV and identify your whales.

How to treat your win-back campaign as a discount ladder, with every rung designed to retain customers and make you more money.

Bounce-back email campaigns as a clever and simple way to cross-sell and increase your average order size - implementation tips and a downloadable template.

 

 

EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Want the bounce-back email template Drew features in this episode? Click here download it as a PDF! Also includes the full transcribe from this episode.

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Would you like fries with that?

McDonald's offers a cross-sell with every order for a reason – it's a simple and effective way to increase average order size.

If your shopping cart can't support advanced cross-selling on-site, a clever work-around is an email-based bounce-back campaign like the one Drew implemented at Karmaloop.

This little trick takes just an hour or two to set up and will capture your customers in their most engaged state – in Drew's case it resulted in an additional million dollars of revenue across twelve months of implementation.

Highlights

01:20 – Why cross-sells and up-sells work

02:11 – Email bounce-backs as a solution when your cart doesn't support traditional on-site cross-selling

03:44 – Setting up a bounce-back campaign in Klaviyo

04:20 – The offer Drew used in a bounce-back with Karmaloop

04:31 – What the bounce-back email Drew implemented looked like

05:13 – Tricks to add "fictitious urgency" with the appearance of an advanced coupon system

06:14 – The revenue Drew generated with this campaign

07:36 – Optimizing this process after you have it set up

08:10 – How to get the email template featured in this case study

Links / Resources

Want to use the Karmaloop email featured in this episode as a template for your own business? Click here download it.

For more on how to use your email platform to boost revenue, check out Episode 23 on dynamic ascending offers.

Curious what else Drew did while at Karmaloop? He shares the entire story in episodes 21 and 22.

Transcript

Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also download it for later.

→ Read the Transcript

Hey everybody, welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Got a special podcast for you today. Because we are doing full screen cast podcast. If you are near a screen, check out the podcast.

Check out the visuals.

You will see that I've got headbands and wristbands on. That can only mean one thing. That one thing being, I look like a complete idiot!

In my co-working space right now. But it actually means another thing. The other thing is that we're gonna go into some actual customer data here. I've got the full screen going on my screen flow right now. The subject of today is, bounce-back email campaigns. What's a bounce-back email campaign? How do we use them to increase you average order size? Why do you care about this? Because it's probably one of the simplest things you can do to increase your revenue.

You could implement one of these things in an hour or two. And if you have the same success I did at Karmaloop, you're gonna be making money in, in, by tomorrow, right, so at Karmaloop it took me about an hour to set this up, and it ended up generating a million dollars in revenue in the first year. So, let's dig into the case study.

You're probably asking, what's a bounce-back campaign? Well, before we get into what's a bounce-back campaign, let's step back and talk about what are cross-sells, or up-sells in general, right? Cross-sells are stolen from the information marketing community, right, it's this idea that you're gonna buy something, that the customer has his or her credit card ou...

Competing against Hamilton, segmenting based on recency, and using dynamic ascending offers to make the most of your offer campaigns.

 

 

EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Want Drew's Dynamic Ascending Offers presentation slide deck? Click here download it as a PDF.

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What's the theater around the corner from Hamilton to do this summer?

Drew knows someone in just this situation, and proposes a solution in dynamic ascending offers.

This is a key concept to implement if your retailer distributes offers via email, and ties together all of our past discussion on recency.

Highlights

00:23 – Drew saw Hamilton

01:15 – Recency – Good customers stay good

03:05 – Example of working with recency segments in Google Analytics

04:48 – Promotions – Most retailers OVER promote. Look at your subsidy costs

06:00 – Dynamic ascending offers – sync your offers to customer recency

07:05 – Your offer doesn't need to be a discount

07:30 – An example of a real world dynamic ascending offer

08:28 – Running a theater down the street from Hamilton – how do you even market that?

Links / Resources

Want Drew's slide deck from this presentation? Click here download.

For more on using recency as a predictive metric, check out episode 18 (intro to recency) and episode 19 (working with recency segments in Google Analytics).

To learn more about data-driven strategies that grow ecommerce businesses, just sign up for my mailing list.

Transcript

Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also download it for later.

→ Read the Transcript

Hey, everybody, Drew Sanocki here with the Nerd Marketing podcast screencast. What musical is generating a half million dollars a week in profit? That's the question today, and the answer is, of course, Hamilton.

I saw Hamilton recently, and like everybody else who saw Hamilton, I feel compelled to tell everybody else that I saw Hamilton. The subtext being that it makes me somehow cooler.

Well, so I'm passing that on to you. I saw Hamilton, so I am cool. Seeing the musical did get me thinking. How would you compete with Hamilton? What if you're my buddy Larry, who wrote and produced this musical called Bat Boy, which is like around the corner from Hamilton. How does Larry fill the theater every night? Well, one of the things he can do is use dynamic ascending offers, and it's a strategy or a tactic that I think every e-commerce retailer can benefit from.

If you're not using them, it will make you money, and they're very easy to set up and implement, and they wrap up two ideas that we've been talking a lot about in this podcast. Without further ado, the first concept is recency. We've talked about that in the last few episodes. We being me, by the way; I don't know why I'm using we. I've talked about that in the last few episodes. Recency is essentially the time since an action has happened. So usually it's in days, so how many days since I have last visited a site or opened an email or purchased from a site.

Want to save this transcribe as a PDF? No problem, click here to download it.

Really applies to anything, but it's time since in action and the more recent the person, the more likely he or she is to repeat an action and/or respond to a promotion. That's where it's interesting to you as a marketer, because if you have the option of promoting to customer A, who last purchased last week, or customer B, who last purchased two years ago, you know, spend your promotional dollars on customer A.

Tune in to learn how Drew designed and executed his marketing strategy at Karmaloop. What to focus on, specific tactics that worked, and key overall learnings.

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EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Want the transcribe from this episode? Click here to download it as a PDF.

Now that we've heard from Karmaloop CEO Seth Haber on last week's episode, let's get into what Drew was doing behind the scenes as CMO to take the business from bankruptcy to profit in just 10 months.

It starts with an "operational" framework for growth, and a commitment to improving three key metrics...

Highlights

Approaching growth from an "operational" framework

(The only) three ways to grow a business

Doubling your business by increasing three metrics by 30%

Increasing your average order value – what worked at Karmaloop

You might be able to charge more than you think

Upselling with automated email marketing

Playing with the free shipping threshold

Winback and tripwire campaigns to drive frequency of purchases

More traffic doesn't always = more customers

Influencer marketing

Links / Resources

To learn more about data-driven strategies that grow ecommerce businesses, just sign up for my mailing list.

Transcript

Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also download it for later.

→ Read the Transcript

Hey everybody! Welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. This is Drew Sanocki. We're looking for new apartments right now in New York. It's a very stressful time. It's stressful when you when find several thousand, you know, $6,000 a year apartments where "two-bedroom" and the second bedroom is like a closet where my daughter's going to live. That's good times. It's good times, and the realtors use the quote sign, the air quotes, when they say, it's a two-bedroom, and you're like, "Thanks, buddy. Thanks, buddy"

Sorry, daughter of mine. You're not going to see the sun for the next two years. Anyway, this is what my life is right now. It's an apartment hunt, which is never fun. Can't wait till it's over but in the meantime, let's talk about growth. Let's talk about karmaloop.com, so this is the retailer where I was the CMO. We sold it about a month ago, and a year ago, it was losing half a million dollars a month. We brought it to break-even within ten months.

I'm going to start telling the story about how we did that. I think in the last episode you heard from Seth Haber, who was our CEO and he told a little bit more of the merch story, the merchandise story about how to resuscitate a retailer. In this episode, I'd like to talk a little bit more about what I did on the marketing side. If you think back a couple episodes ago, we talked about operational frameworks for growth, right? We talked about a tactical framework, strategic framework, and then this operational framework.

The operational framework is the one that I adopt. It's the one that I think is the most practical. It helps me think through how to grow a company. It's the one that private equity funds love because the mindset is you're going to go in and double this business in a hundred days. How are you going to do that? The math really works out and that's as follows, so there are three ways to grow a business.

Number one, three and one three. Three ways to grow a business I should say. Number one, increase the average order value, average order size. Number two, increase the frequency of purchase. This is basically retention, frequency of purchases, the number of times acing a customer orders on average from you, and then number three,

Drew talks to Seth Haber about how they rescued streetwear retailer Karmaloop from bankruptcy in just 10 months. What went wrong, how they fixed it, and what they learned from it all.

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EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Want the transcribe from this episode? Click here to download it as a PDF.

You may have heard about Drew's involvement in turning Karmaloop around – from bankruptcy to profit in just 10 months.

But what strategies went into accomplishing this? What growth paradigm were they operating under?

And how did Karmaloop get in that position in the first place?

In this much-requested episode of the Nerd Marketing podcast, Drew talks to ex-Karmaloop CEO Seth Haber about that 10 month period of rapid growth. What they did, what they didn't expect, and what they learned from it all.

Highlights

Why Karmaloop went bankrupt before Drew and Seth came onboard

How Seth ended up as CEO

The things Seth didn't expect to be so difficult about turning Karmaloop around

Kanye West's role in keeping Karmaloop afloat

How Drew underestimated how difficult it was going to be to get the marketing platform up and running

Winback campaigns – Getting back old customers vs. acquiring new ones

Breaking into the footwear market

What Seth is most proud of after his 10 months at Karmaloop

The value of a company full of people that care about each other

Links / Resources

If you haven't already, listen to this episode on growth paradigms to better understand how Drew approaches eCommerce growth.

To learn more about data-driven strategies that grow ecommerce businesses, just sign up for my mailing list.

Transcript

Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also download it for later.

→ Read the Transcript

Drew Sanocki: Everybody, welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. I'm here today with a guest who needs no introduction, Mr. Seth Haber, [crosstalk 00:00:15] former CEO of Karmaloop, the company where I was the CMO.

Seth Haber: Thank you for having me.

Drew Sanocki: How're you doing?

Seth Haber: I'm good. I'll try not to talk over you for the rest of this thing here.

Drew Sanocki: It's fine. It's fine. I'm used to that. Now we've got probably five or six listeners. Our listeners care about ecommerce. They're very curious about retail. Everybody wants to know the story of Karmaloop. How did they go bankrupt? How did we grow them out of bankrupty and then the process we went through when we sold the business.

Seth Haber: Cool.

Drew Sanocki: I could think of no better guest than you.

Seth Haber: I appreciate that.

Drew Sanocki: Probably because I don't know what I can and can't talk about and I'm just going to follow your lead on that.

Seth Haber: Oh, man. Here's hoping I get that right. I think, for me, it's important to say that neither of us were involved in the business before it went bankrupt. My involvement started really very, very shortly before I took over on, I think it was May 27th, so really maybe a couple of weeks' head start to that. A million stories going around but I think the one thing that was really clear, after having been involved for a little while, was that Karmaloop was a fast-growing, exciting business. They took a significant amount of money from venture capital guys or private equity guys, whatever you want to call them, and they were asked to and went for broke, went for gold, and tried to build a massive company. Along the way, it didn't work. Why it didn't work,

Three different ways to think about rapid growth, some resource and books to look into further, and a little bit about Drew's preferred approaches to growth.