Podcast 22: The Karmaloop Marketing Playbook – 100 Days to Double the Business

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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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

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Transcript

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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,