The Ecom Show

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

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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!

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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!

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Juliana is the Product Growth Manager for CXL, a Digital Marketing Training center with up-to-date marketing courses taught by the best practitioners in the world.

At CXL, Juliana handles all-things lifecycle marketing. Onboarding, post-purchase communication, user guidance, the works!

Known as ‘The CLV Lady’, Juliana fell in love with Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) during her time as Head of Growth and Product Marketing at Omniconvert, a software as a service (SaaS) for e-commerce conversion and retention.

So what wisdom does Juliana have to share from over 10 years in SaaS and e-commerce?

Tune in to hear Daniel and Juliana discuss:

✔️ Are There 4 Levers of E-Commerce?

✔️ The 4 ‘P’s of Marketing

✔️ Being Real About Customer Loyalty

✔️ The RFM Model

Daniel posits that there are 4 levers of e-commerce:

1. Customer acquisition cost
2. Conversion rate
3. Average order value (AOV)
4. Customer lifetime value (CLV) 

Juliana says that it’s really important to be aware of all your metrics. Your focus, however, varies according to what stage you’re at with your e-commerce business. If you’re just starting out, you’re going to be more focused on customer acquisition and conversion rate than CLV because you don’t have any CLV in the first year of your business.

When it comes to AOV, Juliana says that you need to wait until you have enough transactional data to be able to use that average.

On the other hand, some companies have a ton of data but don’t know how to use it. It’s all very well collecting data, but, as Juliana argues, you need someone (or a team) who knows how to analyze it.

The 4 Pillars of E-Commerce are crucial to a successful e-commerce business. Each one does not necessarily hold equal weight at any one time. You need to measure and prioritize for whatever stage you’re at in your business.

Marketing changes all the time. Through it all, Juliana says, there are 4 ‘P’s of Marketing:

• Product
• Price
• Placement
• Promotion 

Everything is dictated by these.

Often e-commerce is not about re-inventing the rule. You have to start with knowing the basics inside out.

In all her experience in retention marketing, Juliana says that you cannot actually grow your retention rate by more than 10% per year.

If you have a 25% retention rate average, in a good year you might get 31%, in a bad year you may not get more than 20%. According to Juliana, this has nothing to do with the tools you’re using, or how smart you are, it’s about romanticizing how loyal customers are. People are eager to try new brands.

Daniel recalls meeting the then CMO of Death Wish Coffee and being surprised to hear them say that their retention rate was “too high”. They were at the stage where they wanted to get back to acquiring new customers.

Believe it or not, you can have retention rates that are too high. There is no exact formula for all of e-commerce. As Juliana points out, it’s about focusing on doing what’s best for your business.

Like all models and formulas, the RFM model doesn’t work for every business. If your e-commerce brand has at least 5 years of transactional data behind it, however, the RFM model is a great methodology to determine customer value

RFM stands for recency, frequency, and monetary value. If you have millions of customers, these three categories provide good segmentations for buyer behavior.

Juliana warns against being relying solely on RFM to create your VIP tier system. Segmenting your customers into VIPs when they may not yet be loyal customers can be counter-productive. Smaller e-commerce businesses need to go further than RFM to really understand their data.

Klaviyo, Juliana and Daniel agree, provide great engagement metrics and segmentation. Email flows that provide open rates, click-through rates, and conversion offer rich data on customer behavior beyond the purchase.

For anything lifestyle marketing and CLV, go follow Juliana on LinkedIn!

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

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If you’re new to e-commerce, where should your priorities be? SwitchGrocery is a Canadian online health food store for keto, paleo, vegan, and gluten-free diets. And at just four years old, it’s thriving.

For this episode of The Ecom Show, Daniel invites the Co-Founders of SwitchGrocery, Neha Charnaliaand Bryan Horsley, to tell us all about their e-commerce journey.

Shout out to the Co-Founders of Keto Chow, Chris and Miriam Bair, for introducing Daniel to Neha and Bryan!

Tune in to hear Daniel, Neha, and Bryan discuss:

✔️ How SwitchGrocery Began

✔️ When to Invest in Email Marketing

✔️ High Converting Email Campaigns

✔️ Raising Funds for SwitchGrocery

✔️ Being Human with Your Customers

Neha laughs,

“I don’t think anyone starts a company with a plan, and we fell into that bucket.”

Much like Chris and Miriam from Keto Chow, Neha and Bryan discovered a low-carb lifestyle first. Bryan’s trainer introduced them to the ketogenic diet, and it did wonders for their health. However, at the time, there wasn’t a huge availability of keto, paleo, or gluten-free products.

Neha and Bryan saw a ‘great need’ for a store that specializes in high-quality keto, paleo, vegan and gluten-free products. A store with founders that are invested in the lifestyle as well as what goes into what they’re selling.

And so Neha and Bryan founded SwitchGrocery. They’re four years in and as a company that was built on social media, they have a great relationship with their customers and US and Canadian suppliers.

Neha and Bryan began heavily investing in email marketing in 2021. Not doing so earlier, Neha says, was a ‘lost opportunity’. In SwitchGrocery’s first two years, Neha and Bryan underestimated and underinvested in email marketing. They weren’t collecting emails via pop ups, and they only launched email campaigns for sales and product promos.

Investing in email marketing has led to a ‘significant increase’ in revenue, and strengthened their relationship with their customers. Neha can’t stress enough the importance of email marketing.

“If there’s anything I would say, just stop and invest in today, it’s email. You can either spend 100 bucks a day on ads or you can nurture the customers you have.”

Neha and Bryan now use Klaviyo. They’ve set up the necessary flows, (welcome flows, abandoned cart flows, new customer flows etc), and send three campaigns a week.

“The flows really allow us to customize. We don’t send mass emails anymore, we really customize to our customers.”Their campaign emails now also include trust and content emails. These will include Neha or Bryan’s favorite piece of user-generated content (UGC) that week, or healthy recipes.

Bryan says that ‘contextual’ email campaigns are highly effective. For example, when there was a snowstorm, they sent out a hot chocolate recipe for everyone locked inside. While email campaigns are mostly planned in advance, Klaviyo also allows you to quickly respond to relevant day-to-day events, such as snowstorms.

For this reason, Bryan and Neha have planned emails as well as space in their campaign schedule to connect with customers in their day-to-day experience. These contextual emails tend to have higher open rates, click rates, and conversion. As Daniel points out, attribution is a surprisingly underrated topic in e-commerce.

Neha says that blog campaigns also tend to do very well. She recalls an email campaign she wrote titled, ‘What Makes a Good Business’. It had a 44% open rate and around 23 responses.

Founder emails are especially valuable for increasing engagement and strengthening that brand-customer relationship.

Bryan and Neha have done a few different things to fund SwitchGrocery over the years.

The first was using Clearco, a company that provides funding for ads in exchange for revenue royalties. This enabled to SwitchGrocery to grow with ad funding Neha and Bryan otherwise would not have had.

From there, Bryan and Neha moved to Clearco’s angel investment program. ‘Clear Angel’. This is invested in for longer-term smaller royalty on revenue. Clearco Clear Angel, Bryan allowed SwitchGrocery to scale beyond ads and into inventory.

“Growth is great, but you need the money to order the inventory to then get the growth. It gave us some funds to scale and grow to get to a new kind of level for the business.”

Over the COVID pandemic, Bryan and Neha also were able to take advantage of governmental support. Funding to the Business Development Bank of Canada offered low-interest loans that Bryan and Neha quickly applied for.

These funds have been used to grow SwitchGrocery’s inventory, build their customer service team, and hire developers.

Neha and Bryan always remind their team and contractors to:

“Treat people like people”

That’s been SwitchGrocery’s approach from the very beginning. Neha wrote their first 100 customers thank you cards. The next 1000 received thank you messages on their invoices.

Taking the time to write a unique message for every customer became incredibly difficult to maintain as SwitchGrocery grew. Neha and Bryan wanted to maintain a close relationship with their customers, but they had to change their approach.

So they launched SwitchGrocery’s private Facebook group.

The Facebook group consists of people that have bought from SwitchGrocery, having been invited in their post-purchase thank you email. As of early 2022, there are over 3000 members. If you’re thinking about starting a private Facebook group for your e-commerce, Neha says that you should go for it.

“I can’t recommend this enough. It just has to be genuine.”

For more incredible community-building ideas and entrepreneurial inspiration, follow Bryan and Neha on LinkedIn.

Visit SwitchGroceryfor keto, paleo, vegan, and gluten-free groceries, recipes, and resources.

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

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Jim Moore has been a marketing entrepreneur for over two decades. But 2016 marked his first venture into Shopify and Facebook ads. Quickly falling in love with the world of e-commerce, Jim became the Chief Marketing Officer of Celtic Knot Jewelry the following year. Ever the serial entrepreneur, Jim is now also the CEO of OptimizeX Inc.

OptimizeX Inc is a Private Equity group that develops Ad Tech SaaS for real-time reporting, attribution, analytics, automation, and AI, to drive customer acquisition and optimize customer lifetime value (LTV).

Let’s see what Jim’s eclectic experiences can teach us about attribution and ensuring the best possible customer experience.

Tune in to hear Daniel and Jim discuss:

✔️ E-Commerce & Creating a Positive Customer Experience

✔️ Facebook, iOS, and OptimizeX

✔️ Why is Attribution so Important?

E-Commerce and Creating a Positive Customer Experience

Before getting into Shopify and Facebook ads, Jim ran a 24 hour a day call center of almost 300 employees from 2009 to 2013. What’s his approach to customer support at his e-commerce store, Celtic Knot Jewelry, and within OptimizeX Inc?

“We look at customer support not as an expense, but as a profit center. It’s not so much support as it is creating a positive experience.”

Celtic Knot Jewelry goes the extra mile not only to ensure excellent brand-customer communication, but high-quality products, custom packaging, and gift-giving. Including a small gift bag with every order demonstrates care and attention to detail that shows a dedication to creating a positive customer experience.

A positive customer experience, Jim continues, goes further than the product you’re selling, the offers you’re promoting, and the creatives you use. All these things are critical, but it’s also about the way you manage a customer experience. Not just replying to social media comments straight away, but also privately messaging them thanking them for their comment, notifying them of your public reply to their comment, and providing further contact details.

“We treat every comment like a potential lead, we treat every engagement like a potential lead. This is how we cultivate the relationship with our audience.”

If a site visitor abandons their cart, they’ll get a phone call from Celtic Knot Jewelry after 15 minutes. The caller will address whatever reason the visitor has for cart abandonment. If, for example, the price seemed too high, they’ll offer a discount. If shipping is too expensive, they’ll offer free shipping.

Similarly, Celtic Knot Jewelry will also call a customer who has made a purchase. They’ll thank them for the order, verify their address, and confirm their order contents.

If anyone leaves a positive review, Celtic Knot Jewelry will reach out to the customer thanking them for the review, then offer a discount that they or their friends can use. To further extend their reach, the reviewer can actually earn 10% of whatever purchase their friends make.

All in all, 40% of Celtic Knot jewelry comes from their call center, 20% comes from email marketing, and 20% comes from SMS marketing.

Facebook, iOS, and OptimizeX Inc

When Jim and his team began building Optimize X Inc, it actually wasn’t supposed to be an attribution platform. It was originally conceived as a reporting and analytics platform.

Then Apple introduced their privacy updates in iOS 14.5, rendering the data inaccurate. This not only affected OptimizeX Inc, but it also affected Jim’s Shopify store. It was time for a new plan. Well, two new plans.

The first plan was to create a customer call center. Following up with customers via phone calls. These work to resolve issues such as abandoned carts and develop a relationship with the customer.

“Let’s go all-in on customer experience because if I can’t generate predictable results through Facebook, I’ve got to be able to recoup that elsewhere.”

The second plan concerned tracking. Once Apple began restricting third-party data, Jim recognized that it was time for first-party tracking.

Third-party tracking, Jim explains, means that you’re relying on a third party to track data for you. You use your script on their domain and you just get access to reporting and their dashboard. First-party tracking means that you track data on your own domain. Apple does not interfere with first-party data tracking. If they did, Shopify simply wouldn’t work.

Jim and his team, therefore, launched a server on their domain, creating a subdomain that tracks site visitor activity: how long they stay for, how far they scroll, what they click on, or if they watch a video. That data is then sent back to Facebook.

In developing this system, the OptimizeX Inc team realized that in order for all their tools to work, end to end analytics, automation, and AI, they needed to focus on attribution.

“It’s kind of like building a house. Getting the structure up takes no time at all. But it’s once you get the structure, the thing that takes time is finishing the house, getting all the fine details where you want it to make it your home.”

Optimize X Inc will be looking to keep the beta open through the end of March 2022 and make its official launch in April.

Why is Attribution So Important? (29:31)

Put simply, attribution identifies the touchpoints towards conversion. What series of actions does a customer take before converting. How important is each step?

As Daniel points out, attribution is a surprisingly underrated topic in e-commerce.

Cold audiences need data. The more customer data you can track, the more accurately Facebook can predict who you show your ads to. When you put your first-party data back into Facebook, your retargeting improves.

Jim advises anyone who is struggling with performance or attribution is to not think of Facebook as the be-all and end-all. It is not the only way to manage customer acquisition.

Focus on building a community. Engage with your audience. Understand their needs, wants, frustrations, and struggles. Produce products that speak to them a create the best customer experience you can.

“It’s great to get your data back to Facebook so that your ads perform predictably. But if things don’t work, there's always a solution. You just have to dig down and find it.”

Be the first to hear about OptimizeX Inc updates by following Jim on LinkedIn!

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

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