Welcome back to The Ecom Show! Today, instead of focusing on the world of eCommerce, let’s take a look at the world in general. For example, did you know that globally over 5.7 million children under the age of five are at risk of starvation each year? And this number, like our global population, is only increasing!

As humans, it’s our responsibility to make the world we live in a better place. In this episode, we will explore how businesses can do their part to make a difference with our podcast host and founder, Daniel Budai and Paul Cunningham, the CEO of Notch, a socially responsible apparel brand.

Notch is a headwear apparel brand specializing in creating hats that don’t interfere with your glasses. Committed to resolving world hunger, they’ve managed to put food on over 600,000 tables through the revenue from their sales.

Tune in to hear Paul and our podcast host and CEO Daniel Budai discuss:

✔ The story behind Notch.

✔ The key to creating a socially conscious brand.

✔ Paul’s advice for eCommerce business owners.

If you’re a fan of Shark Tank, you’ve probably noticed that the most successful pitches are by entrepreneurs that identify problems and create a product to solve them. Notch started the same way.

Paul has always been an inventor. One fine day, as he sat at home watching a game of golf on his television, he stumbled upon a problem that changed several lives along with his own. The need to prevent his eyesight gave him the foresight to create the perfect hat, one with a notch on the side that allows you to comfortably wear your sunglasses along with your headgear.

After researching, Paul and his wife realized that their product was a one-of-a-kind solution to a very common problem. They perfected their design and immediately applied for a utility patent. After five years of hard work, their patent was finally approved! Notch is now a patented eCommerce headwear apparel brand with a wide global reach.

Paul and his wife Terra have always believed in giving back more than they receive. Hence, since its inception, Notch has been proudly affiliated with Children’s Hunger Fund, where they contribute to resolving the issue of world hunger with every hat they sell. Let’s explore this more deeply in the next section.

Every human has one thing in common: We all live on the same planet. Sharing this planet also gives all of us a sense of shared responsibility to treat it kindly and do our part to make things better. In the last couple of decades, there’s been an increased awareness of creating socially conscious brands. But, what are socially conscious brands?

Socially conscious brands are for-profit organizations that provide products or services to consumers while maintaining a not-for-profit objective that aids the welfare of society. These include brands that promote ethical and slow fashion, greener production practices, and brands that contribute a part of their revenue to NPOs.

Giving back to the community is an act of goodwill that will positively impact your customers. However, it shouldn’t be used as a marketing gimmick. Paul and his wife Terra deeply believe in giving back to the community and hence have donated a part of their revenue towards the Children Hunger Fund. Through the course of their business, they’ve been able to sponsor over 600,000+ meals to hungry children across the world. Their purpose has always been to help the children that need these meals the most, and hence their funds go towards sponsoring kids on the brink of starvation.

Social welfare is something that should be woven into the culture of a business. While businesses can increase or decrease the amount they choose to contribute towards goodwill, making it a practice from the start is more impactful than waiting for your business to reach a certain level. You can start smaller than you’d like and increase your donations as your brand grows.

Social entrepreneurs should also practice transparency. Partnering up with a verified NPO and disclosing your contribution helps your customers know how authentic your cause is. For instance, Notch has partnered up with Children Hunger Fund since they know that this NPO donates most of the proceeds towards the meals themselves. If they contribute $100, they know that $99 will end up towards children’s meals. Sharing this information with their customers not only makes the customers trust Notch more but also incentivizes them to look up more about Children Hunger Fund in general.

Paul has always been in sales. He started off as a real estate agent and used his savings from real estate to build his eCommerce business from the ground up. As a successful business owner with ten plus years of eCommerce experience, we thought it’d be interesting to get his take on several common hurdles all eCommerce entrepreneurs face.

What is your approach to attracting customers?

We realized very early on that we can’t be putting all our eggs in one basket, which is why we diversified from depending solely on Facebook ads as a way to spread brand awareness. Currently, we use a combination of paid ads, you know, Facebook, Instagram, and then a lot of email marketing. We also have a lot of customer affinity. So we have customers, you know, that will take pictures of their product and tag us from all over the world, and so we’ll try to leverage that as well. And we’re always learning about how to engage the customer better on social media. So that, you know, we’re not at the mercy of paid ads, but we do use quite a bit of paid traffic. We’re also constantly researching how to improve our SEO.

How did you build a global presence for your brand? And what platform did you use to build your business?

All our business is done through Shopify Plus, 100% of it! About 70% of our revenue is generated from direct-to-consumer sales, and the other 30% comes from our wholesale side. We used to sell through Amazon up until early 2021. However, we discontinued this to gain more autonomy over our returns and customer engagement. With Amazon, you lose out on the customer data. As a brand, we decided to sell exclusively through our Shopify website and wholesalers.

We created a global presence by partnering with retailers across the globe. We offer them wholesale prices for reselling our products. And we have dealers in countries like Japan, Thailand, South Korea, the UK, Greece, Germany, and Spain.

How do you approach hiring? And what’s the secret to successfully running a business with your life partner?

So, we have five full-time employees apart from my wife and me. What I’ve learned is we need to hire the right type of person, and then we can train him for whatever we need because you can’t teach personality.

And so we always hire people that are low drama and easy to get along with, and then we fit them into the positions that best fit their qualifications and interests.

My wife and I have been working together at Notch for the past five years, but because we’ve been married for so long before it started, we have a solid foundation, and we know how to get through disagreements without blowing things up. She’s great with handling the day-to-day operations and systems required to keep Notch running smoothly, and I like to focus more on the other end of the business, so it works out well since we balance each other out.

That’s all for this episode of The Ecom Show. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to check out Notch to learn more about the brand, you can also follow Paul to keep up with his business journey. And don’t forget to check out the Children’s Hunger Fund and all the amazing work that they do!

Stay tuned because we come out with new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. You can also check out our previous episodes here.

Before we end this, we’d like to give a shoutout to one of our clients, High Dive Apparel. They’re also an eCommerce apparel brand with a strong global presence. You can read through our case study to know more about their story.

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Social Media is the most powerful tool that businesses have at their disposal. It enables them with the power to go from being a business to a brand. Social media has erased the divide between consumers and brands. Brands can now have conversations with their customers and create a strong and loyal community of like-minded people that resonate with their business.

Today we’ve got Adam Brown, the CEO of Sircle Media, here with Daniel Budai, our podcast host and CEO, to discuss how businesses can use organic social media strategies to build their brand.

Sircle Media is a social media agency that specializes in helping CPG and beverage brands dominate their online and in-store sales through organic social media strategies. They focus on content creation, social media management, and community engagement.

In this episode, we will discuss:

✔ Adam’s Social Media Story.

✔ How To Stand Out On Social Media.

✔ Social Media Mistakes Brands Need To Stop Making

So let’s get started!

The year was 1999, and it was the age of the “.com Boom.” Adam had just finished graduating from college and was starting out life as an early twenty-something in the world of advertising in New York.

He spent his initial years switching between multiple ad agencies trying to grasp all the knowledge that he could and found himself at 24/7 Media; which was one of the first two ad networks—it was a DoubleClick and 24/7 Media represented websites and sold their advertising for them.

He also worked at the first pay-per-click search engine called GoTo.com, which predated Google back in 2000. This is where Adam got introduced to the world of digital marketing. It took a hiatus from working in the financial sector for Adam to realize that his true passion lies in digital marketing. He founded Sircle Media in 2012, and since then, their focus has been on brand building through organic social media management and content creation.

Sircle Media focuses on helping high growth brands in the CPG and beverage niche scale their business through.

"How can my brand stand out on social media?"

This is one of the most common questions asked by brands when it comes to digital marketing. And the answer is honestly quite simple: By representing their brand in an authentic way!

You don’t need to be selling a one-of-a-kind product, you just need to have an approach that’s unique to your brand to find your USP! Shoutout to Oatly, an oat-based beverage company, that’s managed to create a cult following through its humorous social media presence.

If you really want to stand out as a brand that’s built to last, like an Oatly, you have to have memorable content that makes people want to share it.

Nik Sharma, the king of D2C brands very popularly, once tweeted out saying:

“Create content that makes people want to screenshot and share it in their group chats.”

When we say create memorable content, we mean to create content that’s valuable to your audience! And don’t be afraid to mix it up; focus on a mix of high-quality photography, graphics-based content, videos, and user-generated content to keep your social media fun and engaging.

Engagement is another vital part of building your brand organically on social media. Social media platforms allow for two-way communication for a reason!

Your audience won’t feel like they’re a part of your community if you don’t engage with them and create content that is tailored to their interests. The best way to do this is by asking yourself: Would you want to consume the content you create?

Be quick to act! Social media changes by the second, so you need to be quick to act, adapt, and learn to keep up with social media. This involves consistently researching trends, auditing and reworking your strategy, and conducting multiple trial and error campaigns to see what’s working for your brand.

Creating memorable content, engaging with the audience, and always being on your feet are the foundation of building your brand on a digital platform. If you can crack this code and stay consistent, you’ll see some remarkable results.

Let’s debunk some of the most popular misconceptions brands have about social media. Here are some of the most common mistakes people make:

• Hiring an expensive social media expert: If you’re a small business looking to find someone to manage your brand’s social media presence, don’t spend all your money on one resource! Social Media involves a plethora of roles like designing, copywriting, running paid ads, engagement, and management. While you might find a professional who’s experienced in multiple roles, it’s not practically possible to be great at everything. Instead, allocate those funds to hire multiple digital native junior resources with different acumens.
• Trying to be everywhere: Spreading your brand’s presence is great, but don’t spread yourself too thin by trying to be on multiple platforms at once when you have limited bandwidth. Instead, focus on creating a dominant presence on one platform like Instagram, and then repurpose your branding efforts on LinkedIn.
• Measuring organic social media efforts with ROI: Organic social media activities aren’t a numbers game! Instead of focusing on quantity, measure your growth by analyzing the quality of the content that your team is publishing, and focus on your brand’s overall messaging. Organic marketing requires patience, as it takes time to build a community that trusts and vouches for your brand.
• Not capitalizing on your story: Everyone from the founder of a business to its employees are advocates of the brand. Sharing your journey involves showcasing your achievements, failures, and all the little moments in between with your audience. Doing this helps build credibility and makes your brand more appealing to your audience.
• Trying to do it all alone: Organic social media marketing is all about consistency! If you try to do it all alone, you can’t be consistent with growing your organic social media presence. Having a team or even an additional resource helps you as an entrepreneur to put your focus on other business aspects. This doesn’t mean that you should just completely remove yourself from the picture! Ideally, you should still be involved in important aspects like setting the tone of your brand’s messaging.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of The Ecom Show. If you’re a CPG or beverage brand looking to scale your organic social media presence, make sure to check out Sircle Media.

You can also follow Adam Brown for some more stellar tips on digital marketing.

We come out with episodes that venture into new avenues in eCommerce every Tuesday and Thursday, so stay tuned!

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There’s a lot of talk about marketing and brand building surrounding eCommerce. However, that’s just one side of things. In today’s podcast, Greg Howlett from Cobblestone Trade and our podcast host and CEO, Daniel Budai will unbox the behind-the-scenes operations of an eCommerce brand. This episode will highlight the importance of logistics and fulfillment in enhancing customer experience.

Cobblestone Trade is an intelligent logistics company that delivers custom eCommerce solutions like warehousing and logistics, website development, customer service, Amazon specialist services, and end-to-end eCommerce consulting to increase a brand’s customer lifetime value.

This episode of The Ecom Show takes us through:

✔Greg’s journey into Logistics.

✔The different kinds of logistical solutions for eCommerce businesses.

✔How to enhance customer experience through logistics and fulfillment.

Let’s dive right in!

Greg started his career as a software guy, working for Delta technology. It didn’t take long for Greg to realize that he didn’t enjoy software, and he quickly made the move to starting his own eCommerce store in 1999. He started by reselling retail products through his own online platform. Over the years, Greg has successfully built and sold multiple companies.

He also built an eCommerce brand from scratch and successfully exited it within the span of six years. That experience in particular made him realize that his strength lies in logistics and fulfillment, which is what drove him to start Cobblestone Trade.

Cobblestone Trade is an intelligent logistics solution for eCommerce brands that are looking for help in fulfillment and increasing lifetime customer value. They take over the day to day operations of a company by assisting with inventory management, customer service, fulfillment, brand management, price management, and advertising.

Let’s start by discussing how logistics and fulfillment can affect your brand before we jump into the different kinds of solutions available out there. There are several things involved in running your business. While having a good product and great marketing is essential, you can’t miss out on logistics and fulfillment when you look at delivering excellent customer experience.

Quick deliveries, great customer support both during and after sales, product availability, and brand transparency are qualities that all customers look for when they’re shopping online. This is precisely why Amazon is one of the most famous brands across the world.

As an eCommerce brand you have three options when you look at outsourcing your logistics and fulfillment:

1. Third party logistics: These are third party brands that offer warehousing and shipping solutions. They usually charge a monthly membership for warehousing, and charge a per order fee for providing shipping solutions. eCommerce brands can easily create an account and get started. This is ideal for brands looking to get their inventory out of their basement, and outsource without heavy investment costs. However, third party logistics often have hidden costs, and brands rely heavily on the service of their third party provider. The brand has to take accountability for order delays, and lost shipments.
2. Amazon: Amazon provides eCommerce brands with a listing spot on one of the busiest websites on the internet. Brands can leverage advertisements to secure higher search volume on the website. They also offer fulfillment and shipping options which make it convenient for sellers to get started in the world of eCommerce. Customer retention is the main issue with Amazon. They don’t provide the sellers with information about the buyer, this means that it is much harder to get repeat customers on Amazon.
3. Cobblestone Trade: Cobblestone Trade goes beyond the traditional duties of logistics and fulfillment. They partner up with businesses and take over the end-to-end operations of an eCommerce brand. They assist with everything from optimizing the website, to setting up systems and processes for scaling eCommerce logistics, and customer service.     

Logistics and fulfillment are the two pillars that all eCommerce businesses rely on for smooth operations. It’s no secret that having smooth daily operations will help you create a trustworthy and credible brand in the long-term. Both of these terms cover a broad range of elements ranging from product availability to deliveries and after sales support.

It basically comprises all the backend work that goes into providing customers exactly what they need, such as:

• On-time delivery: If you’re a brick and mortar store shipping out of your basement, handling even 10 orders a day can seem time consuming. This gets even more complicated when you add express deliveries, and returns/exchanges to the mix. Outsourcing logistics and fulfillment enables brands to seamlessly scale the number of orders they ship out, and in turn reduces the order processing time. There’s nothing customers love more than quick shipping.
• Order fill rate: Order fill rate is the percentage of wholesale orders that are filled. This is a metric that enables eCommerce businesses to calculate how much inventory they have in hand. As a brand you don’t want customers to turn away from your website because 70% of your products are sold out, on the other hand you don’t want to be sitting on a huge pile of unsold inventory as well. Inventory management is a skill that can make or break your eCommerce business.
• Customer support: There’s nothing customers hate more than a complicated customer service line with too many touchpoints. While automation is great, it’s essential for businesses to know what they should automate, and use human support for customer escalations. For instance: Sending out order confirmation and tracking details can be automated, however, customers would prefer having human assistance if their order gets lost in transition.
• Brand management: There are a ton of eCommerce brands selling similar products. Infact, the market is flooded with individuals selling counterfeit products from popular brands. As you grow, it becomes increasingly important for you to police the internet and keep a lookout for counterfeit products, or unauthorized retailers that are trying to misrepresent your brand.
• Exposure: Having an omni-channel presence for your products increases your visibility and makes it easier for customers to buy your products. However, each platform has their own set of regulations and compliances to list products. eCommerce businesses need to have a flexible and strong logistical solution in place to supply to multiple platforms like Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc.     

Check out Cobblestone Trade for more expert advice on logistics and fulfillment.

If you liked this episode of The Ecom Show, please feel free to leave any comments you have on our YouTube channel, contact Daniel on LinkedIn, or check out another episode!

We release new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

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Entrepreneurs put in their blood, sweat, and then some to scale their dream business. But, there comes a time and point in every business owner's life when they decide to take the next big step - cashing in. However, too many online business owners leave the game too soon and miss out on their big payday because they lack a good exit strategy!

Today we've got Josh Dittrich, the Founder and VP of BrandedSeller, here with Daniel Budai, our podcast host, and CEO, to discuss how businesses can maximize their value before exiting.

Branded Seller is full-service management and consulting firm that helps e-commerce businesses grow and plan their exit strategy. Josh Dittrich founded BrandedSeller after successfully selling both his e-commerce ventures for millions of dollars. Josh is also the writer of "Aggregator Navigator: The Ultimate Playbook for Selling Your Amazon Brand Successfully."

In this episode, we will discuss everything from why businesses should sell to planning your successful exit strategy. Tune in to find out:

✔ Josh's multi-million dollar success story.

✔ Why sell your business.

✔ When to sell your business.

✔ How to prepare your business for a sale.

Josh's story begins in a sales job where he ran into someone that worked at Amway. Fascinated by the prospect of generating recurring revenue without any glass limit, Josh was determined to get a job at Amway.

After two/three failed attempts to get a job working at Amway, Josh decided to try an alternate route that led to him dabbling into eCommerce. He started by reselling products he'd purchased from China on channels like Amazon and eBay.

However, he realized that he wouldn't go too far without a good strategy. Josh then joined forces with a growing startup to get some industry experience before venturing out on his own again. In the short span of three years, he moved his way up the ladder from being a salesperson to managing their business development and advertising. He helped the company grow from a 3 million dollar business to a 50 million dollar business.

He achieved this by focusing on multi-channel growth. As a result, the business started selling everywhere, from Amazon to eBay. He also onboarded the help of experts to nail down their advertising campaigns and SEO.

During his time there, he learned eCommerce; end-to-end technology, supply chain inventory management, tech, digital marketing, eCommerce, and the whole nine yards in private label. After seeing what an enterprise-level eCommerce organization looks like, he was inspired to leave and start his brand.

Josh then started two e-commerce ventures; Essential Values and Sniper's Edge Hockey. The first business provides a versatile range of liquid homecare products and follows a multi-channel strategy. The second caters to the hockey niche and dominates its sales through specialized Amazon marketing. Within six years, Josh has built and exited both brands with a multi-million dollar valuation.

While this may appear like a short time to build and exit a company, it took Josh 15 years to acquire the knowledge and experience that helped him successfully scale both his ventures.

Before we jump to how you can sell your business, let's cover why an entrepreneur might want to give up their corporate child. Every entrepreneur is aware of the risk and rewards of running a business. Cashing out means you eventually reap the rewards of your hard-earned labor.

Change is the only constant, and every product has its lifecycle. So if you can sense changing regulations or restrictions that will affect your business, it's a smart idea to consider selling out.

Your personal life is another great reason to consider calling it in. Sometimes the reason to sell can be driven by your personal circumstances. For instance, if you're looking to retire, spend more time with the family, or even if you want a new challenge to chase after.

Growth is one of the most common reasons entrepreneurs consider selling their business. There comes a time when you need to stop and ask yourself if you're satisfied with not taking money out of business. If you find yourself in a constant crunch with cash flow each time you try to grow, it's a sign that you should be considering selling your business, especially if it's stopped giving you personal joy and returns.

You've decided to sell. That's great! But, how do you actually know when's the right time? There's never a clear perfect time to make these decisions. However, there are certain factors that can help business owners make a more calculated decision.

You have to start by evaluating and being truthful about yourself and your business. And it's really important because if you cannot answer why you want to sell, your buyers will get skeptical.

You also need to ask yourself if you have the bandwidth to sell? Once you've got your answer, you work backward and start calculating the value of your business, predict its growth trajectory, and your goals post-exit.

You need to have all your data points in place and books in order before you consider selling your business. Think of selling your business as a marathon; it requires patience, persistence, and perseverance!

Once you have decided to sell your business, step back and focus on your exit strategy. You can't be planning for growth if you're constantly occupied with the day-to-day runnings of an office. Every decision post the decision to sell should be focused on how you can maximize your business's current value.

In order to do this, businesses first need to get their books in order and shift from the cash accounting model to accrual accounting.

Businesses also need to reevaluate their expenses and goals. You need to consider whether an expense will benefit in short-term or long-term growth. If it's a long-term growth benefit, you need to stop and consider how this will affect your profitability at the time of sale. While selling, the focus needs to be on maintaining profitability, not on product development, unless a business owner is planning to retain their role or maintain some involvement in the business post-sale.

The last piece of advice would be to analyze your data and identify trends. As a business owner looking to sell, you need to know what your profit, add-backs, and sellers' discretionary earnings are. You should also be able to identify trends.

For instance, your profits for the last 12 months will affect your business's valuation. So if January of the previous year was your least profitable month, you can take that month off your books by waiting until April of the current year since your trailing 12-month period would be February-April.

There are a lot of resources and help available to business owners looking for assistance with selling their company. If data and negotiating aren't your strong points, you can look into bringing a broker to help you facilitate your deal, do keep in mind that this would be an expensive ordeal. Alternatively, you could also do some more research, network, and consult other business owners that have made a successful exit.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of The Ecom Show. If you're interested in knowing more about selling your e-commerce business successfully, make sure you check out Josh Dittrich's playbook.

You can also check out BrandedSeller for more information on selling your business or reach out to Josh Dittrich.

We come out with episodes that venture into new avenues in eCommerce every Tuesday and Thursday, so stay tuned!

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Welcome back to The Ecom Show. We're extremely excited because this marks our 100th episode, and we've got a special guest, Ezra Firestone, here with us today to celebrate this milestone.

Ezra is the founder of three highly successful businesses, Boom, Zipify, and Smart Marketer, that generate over $40M+ in annual sales revenue. He specializes in e-commerce, digital marketing, flipping businesses, and wealth creation.

Join our founder and podcast host, Daniel Budai and Ezra Firestone in a very interesting conversation where they discuss:

✔️ Ezra's early years in online marketing

✔️The power of content marketing

✔️SMS marketing 101

✔️ The 3 steps to creating a wealthy business

Ezra first stumbled upon online marketing in 2005. He began his journey as a freelance consultant, offering services he was interested in learning more about to other brands and professionals. His first client was an online life coach who needed assistance with paid marketing. Ezra assisted him in generating millions of dollars by marketing his e-books and course through optimization of his landing pages and google ads.

However, he was more interested in a product that consumers could physically consume, pushing him into the world of e-commerce. So, he started his journey through drop shipping, all kinds of things. As this was before the existence of Alibaba, he had to source directly through American manufacturers. His first big success was in 2007 with costume wigs like, Elvis wigs, clown wigs, and troll wigs, which worked out well in the early years.

Dropshipping was still in its nascent years, and Ezra identified that this model had many problems. For example, there weren't proper systems for tracking inventory, order status, and quality control. So seeing a better business potential in making products on his own, Ezra founded his e-commerce brand called Boom!

Content marketing is huge in today's world. Social media has given each brand the power to build its own narrative surrounding its products. Let's look at how Ezra created a cult following for his skincare and makeup brand Boom using content marketing.

Ezra launched Boom back in 2010; however, his business generated its first multi-million only in 2016. He partnered up with his friend, who was a makeup artist, to create an organic skincare and makeup line catered to women from every generation. Drawing from his experience of working with the life coaching business, Ezra implemented the influencer or newsletter business model.

"The idea behind that is that you are talking to a group of people about a collective experience they're sharing and creating content about an experience that is helpful to them. And then eventually, you're going to say, Hey, if you like me, check out my products and services."

Boom has always been a philosophy company. And their philosophy has been:

"You're right the way you are, you're beautiful, just as you are, you don't need to change, you don't need to try to hide, you don't need to, you know, use cosmetics to cover up. And we have products that support that idea."

Boom started a blog back in 2011. And that blog grew into the reason why they now have a 50% repeat customer rate. Through their blogs, they've created content that resonates with women of all ages.

As a D2C brand, you're only going to make it in the long run if you coalesce a community through content to create repeat customers.

The key takeaways from Ezra's experience would be to leverage content and create a community based around your products. This way, you can engage with your customers.

And always remember the three C's of creating content: creativity, consistency, and composure. Boom has generated multi-million-dollar revenue in annual sales because they've been consistent and composed with their efforts to produce creative content over the years. It took them six years to establish themselves as a credible brand in the makeup and skincare industry. So if you're an e-commerce entrepreneur, be patient and don't lose hope!

SMS marketing is a powerful tool that all e-commerce businesses should be using. Instant messaging can help recover sales and push your customers to shop more. It's an essential marketing tool that you should incorporate into your multichannel strategy.

SMS marketing doesn't need to be complicated. You can make the most out of your SMS marketing by following three simple steps.

⭐ Build your database: Add phone numbers in your store pop-ups as a criterion. A two popup approach where you offer additional discounts for signing up with your phone number can help you increase your opt-in popups. Also, make sure to have a popup when customers try to abandon your website or check out while shopping.

⭐ Set up automated flows: Once you've got your database, use a good tool to create automated flows for abandoned cart recovery and post-purchase contact.

⭐ Content-based messages: Send out an SMS sharing the best content or your current sale once every week. This way, you target your list frequently without spamming them. Offering them customer support through instant messaging is also a great way to retain them.

Following these three fundamentals can help businesses nail down their SMS marketing.

Besides being a wildly successful serial entrepreneur, Ezra Firestone is also a venture capitalist. He recently acquired a $30M/year eCommerce business that's been generating losses for years, and made it profitable in just 90 days. Take a look at how Ezra's formula for generating wealth.

There are three key steps to scaling your business. The first is hiring and training! Ezra Firestone has a team of over 150 people to help manage and run his multiple businesses. Scale comes from outside yourself. 

"If you're on the road driving, you can't see what's up and up in the distance. You need to let somebody else drive because you need to get up and navigate. You have to make that shift from driver to the navigator. And if you never make the shift from driver to the navigator, you will not scale your company. It took me seven or eight years of my career to do this, and now I'm in a much better position."

The second involves setting up systems and processes. For businesses to function smoothly you need to have, for them to function, you need to have repetitive systems and processes in place that run consistently.

The last one is money management. You need to figure out where and when to scale your business. As businesses start to pick up, they go through a snowball effect. And the most common mistake people make is pulling out of their business when it begins to snowball. And so the snowball can never really pick up steam if they're just pulling money out of business and making unregulated spends.

"What you should do is get a part-time job that pays your bills, which is what I did as well. And then just reinvest 100% back into your business so the snowball can build. And then eventually, when you start pulling from it, it's big enough that it can sustain that. So many people cut the legs out from under their business because they pull the money out as soon as it begins to make money. Whereas if they had just reinvested 100% Back in, it would have been able to get big."

Another great way to generate wealth is through asset liquidation. Build your business to sell it one day. Then, use that money to acquire other valuable assets that you can optimize further and sell. Each profitable business reaches a point where they have enough revenue to grow by either building or buying. Buying is a quicker way to grow your business and achieve your goal.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of The Ecom Show. To know more about scaling your business, venture capital, and e-commerce, follow Ezra Firestone on LinkedIn.

Thank you for listening; we release new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

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BOOM by Cindy Joseph

Zipify

Smart Marketer

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Everyone starts their business with the dream of it becoming a multi-million dollar empire someday. Today, we’re going to be jumping in on a real-life success story of how you can scale your business to achieve limitless success.

We’re so excited and honored to have Cale Owenhere with us today. Cale is the CEO of Gym Launch and the Prestige Labs. Gym Launch is a wildly successful fitness coaching business that simply put, “helps other gyms make an ungodly amount of money.” After transforming the fitness industry one gym at a time, the co-founders of Gym Launch started, Prestige Labs. A business focused on helping gyms provide fitness supplements to their customers.

Join our founder, Daniel Budai and Cale as they discuss:

✔️ Cale’s Journey to Becoming the CEO of Gym Launch & Prestige Labs

✔️ The Secret Sauce to Building a Multi-Million Dollar Business

✔️ How To Create Multiple Sources of Revenue From One Successful Business

✔️ Advice for Entrepreneurs

Cale stumbled onto Gym Launch as a client. As a proud owner of two gyms, he approached Gym Launch in 2017 for advice on scaling his business. After spending a year implementing their strategies he realized the value that Gym Launch provides, and joined their team in 2018. Cale has worked his way to the top from the ground up, starting as a salesperson, and graduating to the position of the CEO as of December 2021.

Gym Launch grew from being a boutique fitness consulting agency in 2017 to a full-scale business with over 30-35 coaches. Currently, they’re present in both the USA and Canada. After successfully establishing a network of gym distributors, the co-founders Alex and Leila started their second successful venture, Prestige Labs.

Prestige Labs is a health supplement business that creates premium and GMP-certified supplements. Prestige Labs was born to provide a healthy alternative to mainstream supplements that use unnecessary fillers, copious amounts of caffeine, and blends that don’t offer any real benefits. Prestige Labs has managed to build a notable presence in the health industry through its wide network of gym owners and affiliate marketing.

Creating one widely successful business is not an easy task, creating two is a true work of art. Let’s deep dive into how Gym Launch & Prestige Labs have grown into multi-million dollar businesses.

There are a lot of factors involved in making a business successful. Number one is, of course, having a passionate founder. Alex and Leila are two brilliant co-founders who completely understood the game and the industry that they're in. They spent a lot of time flying out to gyms and helping them turn around to become successful. They must have done this over 30 times themselves, before building their wider team.

Another key thing is timing. When you enter an industry it’s important to see where you’re at, and who the key players in the space are. The timing of the industry can massively impact your growth and scale as well.

The final piece, of course, is learning. Both personal and professional. One of Gym Launch’s core tenants is you either grow or die. And personal development is a big piece of that. You can only grow your business if you and all your team members keep upskilling as well.

Let’s talk about how Gym Launch has taken the success of a service-led business that focuses on gym distribution channels and used that to build and navigate into a successful e-commerce business that provides fitness supplements.

So when you look at businesses, and you look at helping clients, you look at things in regards to vertical spinning verticals, basically you find ways to expand into avenues where your existing clients will spend money.

If a client goes into a gym, they're spending money on a service, which is the gym, right? And whether it's access or coaching, whatever it might be, that same client is spending money on other avenues related to working out such as supplements, so they're gonna go buy supplements, which in itself is a multibillion-dollar industry. And then you've got a spending wallet of apparel, right, and then you've got a spending wallet of food. And then you got a spending wall of massages or other things that happen within the health and fitness industry. Our goal is to teach our clients to be able to dip into those spending wallets so that that money isn't going somewhere else, but can stay in house.

Prestige Labs was born by applying that same idea. When Alex created Gym Launch, he created the service side, where gym owners are taught how to increase service revenue and service profit, and then to look at the other spending wallets in the fitness industry.

Clients often ask gym owners or their trainers for advice on fitness supplements. So Alex designed a supplement brand and company with the idea of creating the perfect fitness supplements. Prestige Labs provides gyms with premium high-quality fitness supplements at no extra affiliate marketing costs.

So now, the service-based clientele at Gym Launch also double up as our product ambassadors. They receive a 40% commission on selling the supplements, and in fact, our clients have earned over $70,000 in just 7/8 months of selling our supplements. Prestige Labs has made over $17 million in sales in its first year.

This is entirely through creating value for the affiliates, as well as the customers that the affiliates will target. Our affiliates are motivated to sell to customers since they’re receiving a 4X higher commission than standard industry rates, they’re also able to incentivize their customers by offering them 40% off on their purchases. The secret sauce to creating a successful business lies in creating value for everyone involved with it.

Don't be afraid to scale! There is no timeline to success, so don't be afraid to push harder and scale faster. Especially if you’re cash-flow positive. If you're ROI positive, double down on your profits. If you invest all your time, energy, and focus in finding avenues to scale quickly your efforts will pay off. If you act quickly, aggressively, and quickly you’ll be able to create a wildly successful business.

The key is to keep your focus on growth and not get comfortable or complacent with success.

Thank you for listening! We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Ecom show. Follow Cale Owen, Gym Launch, and Prestige Labs to know more about the fitness industry.

We come out with new episodes every Thursday!

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None of us like being told what to do. Especially when we’re shopping! The key to keeping your customers happy is in getting to know them inside out. But, how does one go about that? Do we stop telling customers to sign up, how and where do you listen to what your customers want?

Find out in today’s episode of the Ecom show. Join our founder, Daniel Budai, in conversation with Adam Kitchen. Adam Kitchen is the founder of Magnet Monster, a UK-based agency providing experiential email marketing services to e-commerce businesses.

Tune in to hear Daniel and Adam discuss:

• Adam’s journey with Magnet Monster
• The Success of using Lead Magnets to attract customers
• Data-driven email marketing
• Effective e-commerce strategies to attract customers

Adam started his e-commerce journey quite young at the tender age of 17. He first ventured into digital marketing and e-commerce by selling nutritional supplements online. Back in the days when everything was custom-coded and built from scratch. And it was still a relatively novel thing.

“I was actually really interested in content marketing and community building. And that was the main focus of my digital marketing experience for the company I was working with in the UK. And email was always involved in the mix, even back then, in fact, it was a power channel, just like it still is today. So I was always doing a little bit of email.”

Ultimately, he gave up his full-time job as a kindergarten teacher and set off to explore the world as a digital nomad at the age of 25. Adam ultimately returned to the UK and started his own nutritional supplement store, however, his partner and he saw more potential in running an agency, and together they started Magnet Monster.

Magnet Monster started as a company focusing on providing e-commerce businesses with beautiful lead magnets. However, over the years they transitioned into the niche field of providing email marketing to e-commerce businesses using tools like Klaviyo. With a team of 17 people, Magnet Monster is a boutique agency focusing on intricate CRM strategies to help e-commerce businesses exponentially scale their sales.

Lead magnets are a strategy where businesses use a gated approach to provide customers with content. For example when businesses make you sign up to receive a discount code. Since Magnet Monster started its e-commerce journey by providing beautiful lead magnets we were curious to know Adam’s opinion on how effective they are in acquiring customers. Here’s what he had to say:

"In my opinion, a lot of them have become obsolete, because gating content for the sake of generating leads, just does not make much sense. Instead, when you give the content out for free, it builds credibility and reaches a broader audience."

This is precisely why we started off this episode by saying you need to stop telling your customers what to do. When you make valuable content readily available your customers get curious to know what more you have to say. Hence, they’ll more willingly subscribe to your newsletter. The key here is to chase qualitative lead generation.

You’ve got your basic setup of flows for new customers, abandoned carts, and various other segments, and you’ve got your monthly campaigns for holidays and promotional products. Is that all there is to email marketing? No, there’s so much more that needs to be done to ensure that your brand is making the most out of email marketing.

Daniel and Adam discuss the role data plays in understanding consumer behavior which in turn affects your email marketing strategy.

It improves the zero-party data capture fees and optimizes a brand’s front-end acquisition strategy.

It also helps in automating more user-generated content, promoting brand collections, and establishing ambassador programs to build customer retention. This entire process works when data is used to create intricate flows and adjust for consumer behavior. You see the value-added when your emails trigger customers to engage in conversation and more frequent interactions with your brand.

Speaking of holistic e-commerce strategies let’s take a look at some beyond the world of email marketing. Let's talk about loyalty. How do you make customers more loyal, and keep them coming back to your brand?

There’s no one formula fits all approach to increasing your customer loyalty, however, there are some best practices you can keep in mind. You need to have a good product that works. You need to have good customer service because these are the main two drivers of encouraging people to come back. Post this, you need to focus on your distribution channels. Email marketing is one, but having an omnichannel approach is what ultimately helps brands grow.

Increase your presence with messenger marketing, SMS, WhatsApp, and even retail distribution to truly get your brand noticed.

“So if you look at a brand like Coca-Cola, I'm in South Africa at the moment, I go downstairs, and there’s Coca Cola in the lobby like it's in my mini-bar here, it's in the convenience store. It's the same with Nike and Adidas. The retention and repeat purchase rates are higher because one, it's a good product and second, it's absolutely everywhere and easy to buy.”

That being said, let’s bring our attention back to email for a second and talk about an extremely integral role that email can play that people often overlook. Email plays a huge role in discovering bottlenecks as to why someone's not making repeat purchases, It's a touchpoint to get feedback on where the gap between the delivery and expectation of an end-user is and finds out what’s stopping them from making that repeat sale.

Lastly, your strategy will depend greatly on your content and incentive. Offering your customers a complicated rewards program won’t get them excited, it’ll only confuse or drive them away. However, segmenting and focusing on rewarding your VIP customers will help build loyalty toward your brand. Great content and design also play an important role in keeping customers hooked.

If you’re interested in e-commerce and email marketing, visit Magnet Monster, and follow Adam Kitchen on LinkedIn.

Before we close this episode, we’d like to thank you for listening! We come out with new episodes every Thursday, so stay tuned!

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This month our focus has been on the best email marketing practices. Keeping in tune with the theme, we’ve got an exciting episode for you. Join our founder, Daniel Budai, in conversation with Andriy Boychuk, founder of Flowium.

Who better to talk about customer retention and loyalty strategies, than two email marketing experts that are captains of their leading email marketing agencies.

In this episode Daniel and Andriy will uncover:

✔️ Andriy’s email marketing venture

✔️ Best marketing practices for e-commerce businesses

✔️ Effective strategies for customer retention

Originally from Ukraine, Andriy’s journey began with running a website for Ukrainian immigrants. His curiosity to find innovative and cost-efficient ways to promote this blog landed him in his early experiments with email marketing. Most of his early knowledge came from listening to podcasts.

After spending three years as an engineer in a tech company, Andriy realized that he wasn’t passionate about his job. Determined to find where his passion lies, he quit and began to explore the opportunities that Upwork had to offer. He soon realized the untapped potential in email marketing and dove right in, to focus on providing these services for all kinds of businesses and professionals.

Enamored by the result-oriented, and data-driven approach used in email marketing for e-commerce businesses, Andriy found his niche. Starting as a solopreneur charging on an hourly basis, he experimented with various payment models and structures, before landing on starting an agency with a retainership customer model.

Flowium is now a full-scale email marketing agency with over 40 employees. Similar to Budai Media, they offer specialized email marketing campaigns and strategies to e-commerce businesses across the globe.

Having worked closely with various e-commerce entrepreneurs, both Daniel and Andriy are here to share their two cents on marketing practices that can help e-commerce businesses succeed.

We asked Andriy if there is any piece of advice he’d like to give e-commerce businesses.

Here’s what he had to share:

“A lot of business owners try to act as marketing directors, but they have so many more responsibilities. Having a project manager for all their marketing can help provide direction and help agencies align with the company goals because we can deliver, but we need to know what the needs of the company are.”

As an e-commerce expert, Andriy has rightfully identified how customer loyalty programs help boost sales and increase customer lifetime value. However, email marketing is just one part of this strategy, a marketing director helps enforce an overall strategy ensuring that landing pages, SEO practices, and advertisements all align with the email campaigns.

In order to succeed, e-commerce businesses need to outline their goals and objectives.

Running an email marketing agency, one of the most common questions we get is about customer conversion and retention.

“Businesses want us to focus on converting those one-time buyers to two-time buyers, two-time buyers to three buyers, and so on to continue increasing the lifetime value of the customers. One of the most effective retention strategies to do so is a customer loyalty program.”

After conducting a case study analyzing 25,000 email subscribers, Andriy found that loyalty members spent $400 on average, whereas regular customers spent only $90. His experiment revealed that the lifetime value of loyalty members was 4X more than that of regular customers.

This observation has led him to focus on enhancing customer loyalty programs through email marketing. Loyalty software like Smile enables businesses to track loyalty points. E-commerce businesses can then segment their customers to personalize email campaigns giving marketing a more targeted and goal-oriented approach.

Email marketing is all about understanding your customers. Loyalty programs allow you to incentivize them as you learn more about them. To know more about best practices for email marketing do check out our previous podcasts, and case studies. On that note, we’d like to bring this episode to a close.

Thank you for listening! We come out with new episodes every Thursday, so stay tuned!

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We loved chatting to Chris and Miriam from Keto Chow so much that we’re back in the Ketogenic E-Commerce niche!

Today, we’re delighted to welcome the Co-Founder of Ketonia, John Terry, to The Ecom Show. Ketonia is a bakery dedicated to followers of the ketogenic diet with low carb high fat baked goods. John runs Ketonia with his Mom and Co-Founder, Geri.

Now, that’s wholesome.

Tune in to hear Daniel and John discuss:

✔️ John’s Ketogenic Journey

✔️ Diving into the Deep End of E-Commerce

✔️ Product Strategy

Growing up with what John describes as delicious Texan comfort food that was ‘not always health centered’, John and his parents have had their struggles with weight.

Until John finished university and began working for a pharmaceutical company in the diabetes field. That’s when John discovered the science behind low-carb dieting and ketosis. Five years later, John convinced Geri to try keto. She lost 60 pounds and began making some really delicious keto food.

“Eventually I just told her, ‘Hey, I’m gonna quit my job, you quit your job, and let’s start a small business.”

John and Gerry began by selling out of the back of their car at farmers' markets, selling out every single weekend. Then they began selling to local vendors who - you guessed it - started selling out every week. They had to look for new ways to scale the business.

Amazon’s Prime Day coincided very well with a large keto convention John and Geri attended to launch a new product. Their coconut macaroons went to number one. These tasty treats quickly got Ketonoia picked up by Walmart.

While John describes the e-commerce keto space as ‘brutally difficult’, it’s well worth proving your right to be in one of the most competitive spaces online.

“Me and my Mom beat out this company that has $30 million worth of funding and 45 employees.”

Ketonia sources its revenue from a number of online spaces. Amazon, Walmat.com, and Shopify.

John and Geri also use Shopify to get a verified account on Pinterest, where Ketonia has around 5000 followers. On Facebook, they have over 31,000.

So why did Ketonia start on Amazon? John always likes to do tackle the hardest project first.

“It’s one of my strategies in pretty much everything in life. If you try to knock out the most difficult task first, then it makes the rest a little easier.”

This strategy certainly worked out for Ketonia, they’re now brand-registered on Amazon. Unsurprisingly, Amazon makes delivery a breeze.

Ketonia currently sells 2 products. One more is in the pipeline, and 15 more are waiting in recipe form.

Bringing a new food product into the market is expensive. So John has to be pretty strategic about it. John and Geri leverage their relationships with different buyers and say, “This is our catalog, what are you interested in seeing.”

Asking the buyers directly want they want is a great way to cut out the middle man and save your store a ton of money.

Visit Ketonia and followJohn on LinkedIn to find out more about Keto E-Commerce and entrepreneurship.

Ketonia’s delicious coconut macaroons and super handy Keto Bread Mix are available on Amazon and Walmart

Thank you for listening! We come out with new episodes every Thursday, so stay tuned!

Follow Daniel Budai:

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We’re no strangers to the art of storytelling. A few episodes ago, Daniel chatted to the master of video advertising campaigns, Benton Crane from Harmon Brothers. Today, we’re delighted to welcome renowned commercial filmmaker and video marketer, Josh Henry, to The Ecom Show!

Josh is the Owner, Producer, and Director of LampHouse Films and host of the Marketing Conversations podcast. LampHouse Films specializes in film-driven marketing campaigns that sell with storytelling. If you want to get into top-tier video marketing, you don’t want to miss this episode!

Tune in to hear Daniel and Josh discuss:

✔️ How Josh Became a Commercial Filmmaker

✔️ Josh’s Approach to Video Advertising

✔️ The Difference Between TV Ads and Social Media Ads

✔️ Common Misconceptions About Video Marketing

Surprisingly, Josh didn’t grow up watching a ton of movies. He did however grow up telling stories. The first instance he remembers occurred in elementary school. Josh was riding his bike down a hill when he fell and scraped his knee. A minor injury, but a great story.

“I remember the next day telling and retelling the story of me falling off my bike 10 times or more, realizing where I would get reactions and finessing the way I controlled the narrative to make it more surprising or funny. I was just addicted to the adrenaline of telling people stories and capturing their imagination.”

In high school, Josh discovered film as the medium that he could tell stories most effectively. He was doing a weekly YouTube comedy show when he met Michael Schmucker, a commercial filmmaker. They partnered up 8 years ago and founded LampHouse Films - now they’re thriving together in the commercial film industry.

LampHouse Film primarily focuses on commercial film. Increasingly, much of this has been in ‘cultural videos’. Over the past two years, many companies have been struggling with growth, often finding it difficult to retain or find new employees. Increasingly, CEOs are turning to films to explain company culture.

So what’s the approach to these kinds of videos?

For any type of video, Josh says, you must know your audience. Who are you talking to? Imagine you’re in the room while your audience is watching your video. Are there parts you’re going to cringe at? Read your script out loud - are there parts you hate saying?

The challenge is with ‘culture videos’ is that your audience is people who know the company. Unlike a product promotion, you’re not introducing yourself the first time. You cannot stretch the truth at all. Josh sees this as a great exercise in video marketing, ‘culture videos’ suggest a new level of scrutiny you have to rise to.

Generally, Josh’s clients with the biggest ROI are the ones who are running their ads on TV. However, these ads cost millions of dollars. Marketers with a lower budget of 100s of 1000s or 10s of 1000s are going to get a much better ROI online. It only really makes sense to go to TV, Josh explains, if you’re trying to spend a lot of money.

One of the biggest differences between TV ads and social media ads is that people can’t skip a TV ad. In a social media ad, the marketer has 3 - 5 seconds to hook their audience. While Josh finds it a ‘fun challenge’, he also finds it ‘creatively stifling’. TV ads give him the freedom to explore a long setup and reveal.

You also have to make sure that your video advertisement belongs on its respective platforms. TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram and very distinct styles of video advertising. TikTok, for example, is very heavy on user-generated content (UGC) and vertical video. Putting a high production style ad on TikTok will seem rather intrusive.

Whatever platform he’s advertising on, Josh is passionate about making LampHouse ads as authentic and honest as possible. Manufacturing some controversy around your product could go viral on TikTok, or it could alienate consumers.

“With LampHouse we’re not trying to create ads that don’t look like ads, ads that are tricking you into thinking that it’s organic content. We make ads that feel like ads, they’re not pretending that they’re not trying to sell you something. They feel like they belong where they are.”

Josh has met a few clients who believe that a good video advert can be spliced together with footage all around the same idea. You need to know your goals before you start filming. Understand your core need. This is integral to creating a clear video marketing campaign that your audience will understand and love.

If you’re interested in filmmaking and video marketing, visit LampHouse Films, follow Josh on LinkedIn, and check out the Marketing Conversations podcast!

Thank you for listening! We come out with new episodes every Thursday, so stay tuned!

Follow Daniel Budai:

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