The Ecommerce Influence Podcast

One of the most common questions Andrew gets from his clients is: how do I optimize my Facebook ad account?

Today he talks about RCAB-P, his five-step process for optimizing and improving Facebook ads. We'll cover the number one thing you need to do before you start optimizing, and walk through each of the five steps in detail to help you successfully optimize your ad account.

Enjoy!

• 3:41 The first thing you need to do before you start optimizing your Facebook ad account.
• 5:13 How much you should be spending before you start thinking about optimization.
• 6:10 Step one in the optimization process: Reporting Metrics.
• 7:23 The fundamental questions you want to answer with your metrics report.
• 9:01 Understanding secondary metrics, and a common metric that Andrew doesn't recommend tracking.
• 11:01 Step two: Optimizing Creative (your most important lever for optimization).
• 11:33 The new creative ad feature Facebook just rolled out.
• 12:57 Creative optimization: using different creative at different points in your funnel.
• 16:23 Step three: Audience Optimization.
• 17:02 First Time Impression ratio - what it is and why it's important.
• 18:57 Dynamic vs static custom audiences and how to optimize each of them.
• 21:31 Step four: Bidding Optimizations
• 23:50 Using manual bid overrides during Black Friday.
• 24:53 Step five: Placement - the huge optimization many people are not taking advantage of.
• 27:46 What to do if you get through the five step optimization process and you're still not getting results.
• 28:18 Another new Facebook feature to try: campaign budget optimizations.

• Brand Growth Experts
• Foxwell Digital

If you liked this episode, you're going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership. It's a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we'll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I'll help you execute it.

If you want to make sure you're growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!

This episode is also brought to you by Klaviyo. If you're running an ecommerce business and sending emails to your customers, you should be using Klaviyo. It will help you find out who your best customers are and target them one-to-one to make more money.

I've been using Klaviyo since they were just two employees. Now they have a team of 150 and are rolling out new features almost weekly. If you aren't already a customer, head over to www.ecommerceinfluence.com/klaviyo and you'll get a free trial + priority on-boarding.

What if you could make more money in a single day than your business previously made in its entire lifetime?

That's what happened for Mark Arruda last August, typically his company's slowest month.

Mark, owner and CEO of Constantly Varied Gear, joined us earlier this year to talk about how he uses Facebook Messenger in his business. Today, he's back, and in the eight months since we last had Mark on the show he's continued to ramp up his Messenger marketing and is seeing incredible results.

In this episode, Mark shares the Messenger strategy he used that fateful day in August, and the other tactics he's using to grow his list and drive sales.

Enjoy!

• 7:13 The Facebook Messenger tactic Mark's using to gain Messenger subscribers and how it connects with his on-site lead capture.
• 9:56 When Mark got started with Messenger bots and how long it's taken him to build his current system.
• 11:09 How allowing customers to vote on products via Messenger has been incredibly successful for Mark.
• 14:39 A good thing to do if you're just starting out with Messenger.
• 17:27 What is a Facebook Messenger sequence?
• 22:04 How Mark maps out his Messenger marketing plan.
• 23:48 The first thing you should do before getting started with Messenger marketing.
• 26:08 The chatbot Mark is using to grow his list and stop potential customers from leaving his site.
• 28:45 Why Mark is shifting almost all of his prospecting efforts to Click-to-Messenger ads.
• 31:22 Using Messenger across different business verticals.
• 33:35 The best copy for Click-to-Messenger ads.
• 36:18 The Messenger strategy that led Constantly Varied Gear to do more sales in a single day in August than during the entire lifetime of the company.
• 39:25 The importance of reaching your customers through a variety of different platforms, and how Messenger can tie into all of them.

• Messenger Mastermind Podcast
• Constantly Varied Gear
• ManyChat
• Brand Growth Experts
• Foxwell Digital

If you liked this episode, you're going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership. It's a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we'll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I'll help you execute it.

If you want to make sure you're growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!

This episode is brought to you by Justuno. Justuno is a visitor conversion suite that offers pop-ups, push notifications, offers, and more. It's highly personalized and customizable and is awesome for capturing leads, recovering abandoned carts, and increasing sales. They recently launched an integration with Facebook Messenger so you can create a seamless experience from offsite to onsite with unified messaging.

If you haven't used Justuno yet, we absolutely recommend checking it out. Lots of our clients are using it and it integrates well with Shopify, Klaviyo, and more. Head over to www.ecommerceinfluence.com/justuno and you'll get a 15 day free trial + 15% off.

This episode is also brought to you by Klaviyo. If you're running an ecommerce business and sending emails to your customers, you should be using Klaviyo. It will help you find out who your best customers are and target them one-to-one to make more money.

I've been using Klaviyo since they were just two employees. Now they have a team of 150 and are rolling out new features almost weekly. If you aren't already a customer, head over to www.ecommerceinfluence.com/klaviyo and you'll get a free trial + priority on-boarding.

Earlier this week Andrew shared his story, and now we're turning the tables.

Today I talk about how I went from pursuing a career in investment banking to realizing I wanted to become an entrepreneur and eventually starting Ecommerce Influence.

Digital marketing has evolved so much over the last decade, especially for ecommerce, and my career has evolved along with it. I'll share how I built a business I'm excited about while also creating a lifestyle that gives me freedom and flexibility.

Enjoy!

• 3:54 Why Austin started Ecommerce Influence
• 5:07 Moving away from the typical agency: The birth of Brand Growth Experts
• 7:09 Austin's early career pursuits begin in China
• 8:14 When Austin realized he wanted to become an entrepreneur
• 9:38 Start-up life and learning how to become an entrepreneur
• 12:02 If you can sell a $100,000 product with triggered emails, you can sell anything with triggered emails
• 14:25 How working for a start-up provided the best education for growing a business
• 16:42 Austin starts building his own business
• 21:19 An evolution in personalized, lifecycle marketing
• 24:43 The inception of Ecommerce Influence and why Austin decided he didn't want to run a traditional agency
• 27:31 How Austin's created a business that reflects his core values
• 31:10 Helping business scale with the Brand Growth Experts Membership
• 35:23 The project Austin's most excited about right now

• Brand Growth Experts
• Brand Growth Experts Membership
• Brand Guild
• Foxwell Digital

If you liked this episode, you're going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership. It's a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we'll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I'll help you execute it.

If you want to make sure you're growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!

This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. If you're running an ecommerce business and sending emails to your customers, you should be using Klaviyo. It will help you find out who your best customers are and target them one-to-one to make more money.

I've been using Klaviyo since they were just two employees. Now they have a team of 150 and are rolling out new features almost weekly. If you aren't already a customer, head over to www.ecommerceinfluence.com/klaviyo and you'll get a free trial + priority on-boarding.

One of the questions we love asking our guests is: how did you get where you are today?

It's a question our listeners frequently ask Andrew and I too, and in today's episode, Andrew is going to share his story.

Andrew has been working in digital advertising since before the inception of the Facebook News Feed in 2009 and he's learned a lot along the way. He shares his first experience working in "new media," tells the story of how Foxwell Digital was born, and talks about what success means to him.

Enjoy!

• 3:18 How Andrew got started in digital marketing
• 6:04 A congressional campaign leads Andrew out East and into "New Media"
• 8:11 Andrew's experience working in Congress during the invention of Facebook Ads
• 12:45 When Andrew launched his first newsfeed advertisement
• 14:29 When social proofing meant getting the most Likes
• 15:46 The birth of Foxwell Digital
• 18:15 How Andrew and Gracie went from teaching seniors how to use iPhones to getting their first official clients
• 21:06 How Andrew and Austin connected
• 22:34 When Andrew official joined the Ecommerce Influence Podcast
• 26:39 How documenting and synthesizing makes you more creative and a better teacher
• 28:34 The future of Foxwell Digital
• 31:24 Why you don't have to make $100 Million to be successful

• Foxwell Digital
• Brand Growth Experts

If you liked this episode, you're going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership. It's a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we'll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I'll help you execute it.

If you want to make sure you're growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!

This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. If you're running an ecommerce business and sending emails to your customers, you should be using Klaviyo. It will help you find out who your best customers are and target them one-to-one to make more money.

I've been using Klaviyo since they were just two employees. Now they have a team of 150 and are rolling out new features almost weekly. If you aren't already a customer, head over to www.ecommerceinfluence.com/klaviyo and you'll get a free trial + priority on-boarding.

Happy fall. Happy Q4. Andrew and I love this time of year. It's when so many of the companies we advise make the majority of their revenue. A lot of you that are listening know how high the stakes are.

It looks like things are, as we predicted, even more competitive than last year. But so far, things are going good. We're getting ready for the big show here so we decided to bring in the big guns. Today we've brought back Justin Marshall from Adhoc Media to talk about how he's getting his clients ready for the holidays.

Justin is a 2x guest. His first episode was one of our all-time most downloaded and this one doesn't disappoint. Enjoy!

• 6:10 How Justin explains the phases of Q4 to his clients.
• 7:43 Why you shouldn't just be pushing traffic to your site without a focus on conversions.
• 10:11 The offers you should be considering through the holiday season.
• 14:30 Not sure what creative you should be using? Checkout what's working best for Adhoc Media and their clients.
• 18:36 Why you should be driving your traffic to these landing pages for Q4.
• 21:00 How to make sure your ads are seen during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday rush.
• 27:56 How to Optimize your ads for peak performance during Black Friday/Cyber monday.
• 36:22 When you should be notifying your fans of the holiday deals to get them ready to shop with you.

• AdHoc Media
• Justin's First appearance on Ecommerce Influence: Episode 136
• Brand Growth Experts
• Foxwell Digital

If you liked this episode, you're going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership. It's a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we'll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I'll help you execute it.

If you want to make sure you're growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!

This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. If you're running an ecommerce business and sending emails to your customers, you should be using Klaviyo. It will help you find out who your best customers are and target them one-to-one to make more money.

I've been using Klaviyo since they were just two employees. Now they have a team of 150 and are rolling out new features almost weekly. If you aren't already a customer, head over to www.ecommerceinfluence.com/klaviyo and you'll get a free trial + priority on-boarding.

When you're just starting your business and running it small and lean, it's easy to implement new projects right away. Right?

If you go to a conference and get a new idea, you can go in and execute it. As your business and team scales up, it's no longer possible to implement your ideas immediately. You need to plan and get your team involved.

Many businesses get stuck here and never move forward. They feel momentum but can't take advantage of it because they can't effectively manage their marketing at scale. This leads to stress, burnout and missed opportunities.

How do you transition from doing everything right away to having to plan it out and delegate it out? This often requires taking a step back before stepping forward. In today's episode, we're going to share a 3 step process to help you manage your marketing at scale.

• 6:03 What it means to be at scale.
• 10:29 The questions you should be asking when planning to scale you business.
• 11:54 How discovering your Kolbe score can unlock your potential to scale your business.
• 14:00 How documenting tasks can shine a light on what you are really doing in your business.
• 16:18 How templating projects or tasks can bring about improved creativity.
• 17:20 The most important thing you should consider if you are listening to this podcast.
• 18:20 What to look at first before delegating out any documented tasks.
• 19:32 Your business is not different, you can delegate tasks too.

• Kolbe Score
• Brand Growth Experts
• Foxwell Digital

If you liked this episode, you're going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership. It's a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we'll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I'll help you execute it.

If you want to make sure you're growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!

This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. If you're running an ecommerce business and sending emails to your customers, you should be using Klaviyo. It will help you find out who your best customers are and target them one-to-one to make more money.

I've been using Klaviyo since they were just two employees. Now they have a team of 150 and are rolling out new features almost weekly. If you aren't already a customer, head over to www.ecommerceinfluence.com/klaviyoand you'll get a free trial + priority on-boarding.

I first met Jack Meredith in January when I hosted a Private Intensive here in Austin for him and his team. He was the first employee at Kettle & Fire, and they've been on a rocket ship of growth - mostly fueled by affiliate marketing. For most companies, affiliate marketing starts out as exciting opportunity but ends in disappointment. Not so with Kettle & Fire. If you are familiar with the paleo world, you'll quickly notice they've got all the top health influencers and affiliates as supporters. Today, Jack shares the process that led to actually getting those people to support and promote Kettle & Fire. He also shares challenges they've faced as they have scaled, how to think about growing a team, and a framework for thinking about new projects. I had a great time recording this episode and I hope you enjoy it!

• 10:31 The first step Jack took to setting up measured growth for Kettle & Fire.
• 12:50 How Kettle & Fire tested the waters of affiliate marketing.
• 15:00 Why Kettle & Fire has seen such success with their affiliate program.
• 22:00 How changing up their email flows and layering in segmentation significantly increased the ROI of Kettle & Fire.
• 24:00 The approach Jack takes to testing new channels and how to tell its time to hire a person to manage it.
• 28:30 The best teams don't have to be in the same room: How the entire staff of Kettle & Fire works remotely.
• 33:10 Why raising a funding series can open up opportunities to test and try new avenues of marketing
• 36:30 A few of the key tools in the Kettle & Fire toolbox that you can use too.

• Kettle And Fire Careers
• Jack Meredith
• Asana
• Things App
• Media Rails
• Brand Growth Experts
• Foxwell Digital

If you liked this episode, you're going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership. It's a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we'll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I'll help you execute it. If you want to make sure you're growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!

This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. If you're running an ecommerce business and sending emails to your customers, you should be using Klaviyo. It will help you find out who your best customers are and target them one-to-one to make more money. I've been using Klaviyo since they were just two employees. Now they have a team of 150 and are rolling out new features almost weekly. If you aren't already a customer, head over to www.ecommerceinfluence.com/klaviyo and you'll get a free trial + priority on-boarding.

About two weeks ago, my wife and I moved into a 100 year old bungalow here in Austin Texas. When you decide to move into an older house you expect certain things aren't going to work. Each day you start adding to a checklist of all the things you're going to need to fix.

That's the easy part. The hard part is getting the right people out to fix what's broken.

In addition to managing my team here at Brand Growth Experts and producing the Ecommerce Influence podcast, I've been coordinating electricians, plumbers, and painters to fix things at our house. Construction workers in Austin are so busy right now that getting people to show up is like herding cats. It's been a lot of work and inspired today's episode about managing a team.

In this episode, I'm going to walk through the framework I use to accomplish more with my team in much less time. Enjoy!

• 6:10 The Scrum methodology and how it works for Product Management.
• 8:12 Step 1: The Data Dump: Getting all of your ideas on to paper
• 9:56 Step 2: Identifying the roles of your organization and their responsibilities related to the project.
• 13:42 Step 3: weeding through and prioritizing all of the projects you've previously put down on paper.
• 16:00 Step 4: How to break down the steps needed to complete the project(s)
• 21:50 Step 5: Preparing for the sprint and defining the size of the tasks to complete the project within the sprint goal.
• 26:45 Step 6: Daily check-ins and the 3 questions each team member needs to answer during the check-in.
• 28:20 Step 7: Sprint review, also known as the show & tell of the project sprint.
• 29:31 Step 8: Reviewing the sprint and deciding if the product/project is done and what to do if it is not complete.
• 30:19 The one part of Scrum you should never skip

• Productivity Sheet (Need Link)
• Brand Growth Experts
• Foxwell Digital

If you liked this episode, you're going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership. It's a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we'll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I'll help you execute it.

If you want to make sure you're growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!

This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. If you're running an ecommerce business and sending emails to your customers, you should be using Klaviyo. It will help you find out who your best customers are and target them one-to-one to make more money.

I've been using Klaviyo since they were just two employees. Now they have a team of 150 and are rolling out new features almost weekly. If you aren't already a customer, head over to www.ecommerceinfluence.com/klaviyoand you'll get a free trial + priority on-boarding.

About four years ago, Allan Shoemake was Skyping with his daughter and hated how the poor lighting was impacting the video quality. He strapped a couple of LED lights to the side of his phone case and LuMee was born.

Two years later, Kim Kardashian West picked LuMee as one of her "selfie secrets" and the company exploded from there.

Our guest Jeremy Horowitz is LuMmee's Ecommerce Manager. He attended my email Intensive last August and then he went on to have a ton of success with email. In today's episode, he shares what they've been working on, what's been working well, how they think about growth. I think you'll really enjoy this tactic and results heavy episode. Enjoy!

• 7:03 The email strategies that are currently working for Lumee.
• 8:50 The pages you should be placing pop-ups to increase your sales.
• 10:15 Why you should be using heat maps to find the holes in your funnel.
• 13:46 How Lumee changed their approach once Kim Kardashian West started promoting their cases.
• 19:50 How surveying your customers at these points in the funnel can lead to improved growth and a better customer profile.
• 24:11 The KPI's that Lumee focuses on and the book that changed their approach to tracking performance.
• 27:39 Lumee's plan for Q4 and the 1 holiday secret weapon they plan to use and you can too.
• 32:00 Why Jeremy is "nerding" out on Chatbots and messenger marketing right now.

• Lumee
• Measure What Matters - Book
• Dot Com Secrets - Book
• Manychat
• Brand Growth Experts
• Foxwell Digital

If you liked this episode, you're going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership. It's a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we'll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I'll help you execute it.

If you want to make sure you're growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!

This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. If you're running an ecommerce business and sending emails to your customers, you should be using Klaviyo. It will help you find out who your best customers are and target them one-to-one to make more money.

I've been using Klaviyo since they were just two employees. Now they have a team of 150 and are rolling out new features almost weekly. If you aren't already a customer, head over to www.ecommerceinfluence.com/klaviyoand you'll get a free trial + priority on-boarding.

I'm not going to let you get to the end of October without a plan for the holidays. Not this year. We're going to start early so you can avoid that annual freakout.

In this episode, Andrew and I share the key differences between Facebook and Instagram advertising this year and last year. There are a lot of similarities (creating good offers, creative, etc) but we've noticed some big changes and in this episode we'll help you approach Q4 with your Facebook and Instagram ads the right way. Enjoy!

• 5:17 Here are the big differences between this year and last year when it comes to marketing with Facebook & Instagram.
• 13:11 Why you should be separating out ad placement and setting up ads that only run on Instagram in Q4.
• 14:35 How to social proof your ads and why this process is so valuable.
• 17:45 The changes in how Facebook lets you bid in the auction and the approach you should take during Q4.
• 21:10 Andrew's 3 phases of Q4 and how you should approach your ad objective through each phase.
• 24:34 Facebook inventory in the Newsfeed will max out during the holidays. Here are a few other placements you should be considering.

• Brand Growth Experts
• Foxwell Digital

If you liked this episode, you're going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership. It's a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we'll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I'll help you execute it.

If you want to make sure you're growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!

This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. If you're running an ecommerce business and sending emails to your customers, you should be using Klaviyo. It will help you find out who your best customers are and target them one-to-one to make more money.

I've been using Klaviyo since they were just two employees. Now they have a team of 150 and are rolling out new features almost weekly. If you aren't already a customer, head over to www.ecommerceinfluence.com/klaviyo and you'll get a free trial + priority on-boarding.