2X eCommerce Podcast

Kunle Campbell:
So welcome, welcome, welcome to the 2X eCommerce podcast. I'm your host, Kune Campbell and Chaperone. And my promise to you, anytime you listen to this podcast is you're gonna get fresh insights you can deploy as an experiment to grow, or in fact 2X, a specific aspect of your eCommerce business. This podcast has been specifically produced to support growth. of your brands, right? And the primary way or channel we speak to is e-commerce through e-commerce as a channel. So you'd either be hearing from me directly as is the case in this episode, or from interviews with other operators or experts who are or have been part of remarkable growth stories. Speaking of which, today's episode, very, very interesting one. I want to talk about rewriting your growth story, that is your e-commerce growth story today. There are some caveats in this conversation. I strictly want to focus on e-commerce and I'm going to skew a bit towards CPG brand as that is where my interests lie at the moment. But I will be giving a, I promise to give a generic example. I think one of the examples top of my head is it's not a CPG brand so that would really really hold through in this episode. Now let's first of all talk about the current situation of business in general. We have gone past quarter one, congratulations for making it past Q1 of 2023 and we're well beyond the first month in Q2 which is April. So we're about to get into May. You'll be listening to this in May. This episode is going to air on May the 2nd. It's airing on May the 2nd. So we are in May, in the month of May, and what we've seen year on year, from a lot of the accounts I have access to, is order volume has gone down. And in many cases, because many merchants have increased their prices, year-on-year performance is either stabilized, right? So just static year-on-year growth, or they're seeing like top line growth, but when you look underneath the hood, in terms of like order volume, it's down. So say you were selling 5,000, you were processing 5,000 orders on average last April. This year you might be processing 4,600, but because you've increased prices, your revenues look like they might have gone year on year, which is okay, but what are you doing differently? And that's what I want to talk about in this episode. How are you going to rewrite your growth story? Because it's from these doldrums that you really dig deep to figure things out again, and form that basis, that launch pad to truly, truly grow. Some of these things I'm talking about is what we're applying to our e-commerce businesses and we are seeing remarkable, you know, improvement in sort of these experiments we're running. And I want to share some of that with you. Where everything is going to gravitate to, with what I'm going to talk about is this concept of an ideal customer profile. I put out a LinkedIn post about maybe two and a half weeks ago, speaking to this specifically. And it was also a reflection of some of the conversations I had or I've had on this podcast. And some of the real breakthrough brands we're seeing like Athletic Greens, you know, just... just those kind of like examples and many other brands. I'm gonna start this out with saying, I want you to kick things off from a blank canvas perspective. Start off like you know nothing. You know nothing about your customers. You know nothing about the market. You know nothing about product market fit as yet. You know nothing. Approach this like a child, right? That's all I ask for you from a mindset standpoint. Be very, very open and malleable to understanding what is going on. Now, once you start up with that sort of approach and perspective, you want to begin to question or begin to ask questions or ask the right questions more or less to three groups of people. your existing customer base, your customer base that have essentially lapsed. So people who are no longer your customers but have patronised you in the past and potential customers. I'm going to speak to how to address these. But the objective is you want to extract three to five motivations. people actually buy from your brand and you long term want to convert those motivations into benefits and individual funnels. Now, this is how you're going to sort out your e-commerce funnel. So let me paint a hypothetical situation here. I came across a brand called, I think, All In Vault. All In Vault. All In Vault. It's O-L-Y-N-V-O-L-T. It has a product called like a Pocket Muscle Massager, which is primarily used for like pain management. This is just an example. And... I'm imagining I'm the e-commerce marketing director or I'm part of the e-commerce team and we're trying to just revive this brand. Not to say that this brand is dying. I'm just giving you an example. It's a pocket muscle massager. You could use a DIY massager, a convenient you could put in your pocket and put it on your muscles, on your tense muscles and all that stuff. for pain management, you know, if you have strained muscles, that's the idea. It's usually a recovery device, right? So using this as an example, if we wanted to sort of rewrite their growth story, you know, which is what we're talking about in this episode, how would I start out from a clean slate? How would I be almost childlike? First question is like, how do we identify ideal customer profiles. Now, the easy thing is like, let's focus on like, people go to the gym, everybody goes to the gym. Many people go to the gym, not everybody, but many people go to the gym. And let's just focus on that sort of customer base and let's write copy, let's create ads, speak to that demographic. But I want you to think a bit deeper here. Start off with the hypothesis, with the hypothesize what's going on. In this case, ask yourself the question, who really needs a pocket muscle massager? Who really, really needs a pocket muscle massager? And for my hypothesis, I think sports people. and you could group sports people as either pro athletes or perhaps amateurs. But you don't want to stop at that, right? You want to say, okay, what sort of sports would these athletes likely be into? Here, you could go a bit broad. You could say they're athletes or triathletes, right? So anything like track or field from an athlete's perspective or perhaps they're soccer players or football players. or they could be into a racket sports, right? They could be golfers, they could be into combat sports or MMA, right? You start to think about, you know, how broad these categories within, you know, athletes or sports people are, and you categorize them in groups. You don't want to go to one specific group, unless if it's really, really big, like football, you know, soccer and... in American language, but if you go to like football, it's huge. If you go to like basketball, it's huge. So you really want to sort of look at the sports and sort of segment them out. And then you could then hypothesize on say, could they be younger than 30 so at their prime of their career if they're like pro athletes could they be approaching their 40s where they're you know about to to retire or could they be retired essentially or could they just be be amateurs in that bracket just just have have that in mind right because at this point you don't know you're hypothesizing essentially right So another group of potential ideal customer profiles could be, say, time-poor professionals that have developed like a neck and back pain as a result of sitting at their desk for extended periods of time, right? You might just want to sort of take that. And another group of ideal customer profiles could be health professionals or massage experts. who want to show up their range of equipment or they're looking to recommend equipment to their customers. So it's really taking those broad groups. And then the next thing you want to do is essentially ask the questions from these people, right? So this is where surveys come into play, right? Surveys are so important. So a lot of people think of surveys as just like one-off questionnaires. you send to your email list and you get a customer survey out there. But there are three critical places to embed surveys and collect information all the time. I mean, every freaking time. The first and easiest way of collecting surveys is post purchase surveys, no doubt. So every time you get a... a purchaser coming into your... Every time you get a purchaser exactly, you could run a post-purchase survey. So in this case... you could with this example I have with this massager, this Olin Vault massager, you could ask them, right, these people, your customer, someone who's just purchased, you know, are you an athlete? You know, best describe yourself, give them the options that we've hypothesized, you know, whether they're athletes. And then if they choose athletes, are you a pro amateur, you know, part-time? you know, do you work at an office? Do you, are you a regular gym user? Are you a professional? Give them those options and you could further trigger further sort of sub questions on there to better understand who they are. customers are. And you could also serve post purchase surveys, two different post purchase surveys to like profiles who are at the first time customers or repeat customers, right. So it's really key to ask these questions. So you start to understand and prove your hypothesis, you know, right or wrong, and always have that other, you know, button. So they are more descriptive so you could further refine these questionnaires further down the line. If you have the means, work with a statistician to help you really shore up those questions. It's not complicated, but it could help. The second way of collecting customer data, or collecting data that's going to, you know, plug into this ideal customer profile, are your pre-purchase surveys in exchange for something like a voucher or coupon code. So rather than essentially saying, Oh, we're going to give you 15% off. What have you, you could say for 15% off your first purchase. Just answer these, these questions. Don't go too, you know, deeper or else you have, don't, don't, don't ask too many questions or else you have, you essentially will have, you know, fatigue, you know, you have drop offs essentially, but ask the right questions with, with the pre-purchase, you know, who are you? what you intend to use this device for, all of that stuff, and try and make it multiple choice with obviously the option of another every now and then, or make it almost two choices, like binary, yes or no, a lot of the time. So they go through that process, you're collecting a lot of pre-purchase customer data. There are many other ways to do this in terms of you could... If you sell multiple products, you use the pre-purchase survey. Obviously, the primary use of the pre-purchase survey is to guide them. There's almost like a guided search for the products that are most ideal for your customers. But the essence here is you're gathering data. You're gathering data, zero-party data from customers or people about to meet customers. The third really is email surveys. Now segment your email surveys to customers who've lapsed. Say you expect customers to return to your store every 90 days and you have lapsed customers, you could email those. You could also email post purchase. You could also email recent customers who did not complete the post purchase surveys. And then you could email your general email list. When you have all these three, you start to get a solid picture of who your customers are. And you start to get a solid picture of the segments. You start to see patterns on the broad segments your customers fit into. And their motivations, and then you can convert those motivations into the benefits for the motivations. And now, which is the juicy part, when you've split them out, you should split them out to about three. So in this case, let's say we realised that like combat sports people, like boxers and MMA fighters, you know, use this pocket massager quite a lot. What you wanna do is two things. And let's say, so we figured out combat sports triathletes and, you know, office over 14. office or desk, you know, job people, desk professionals, you know, seem to be really, seem to be key, key targets, right? Or, yeah, let's put it that way. So what do you want to do then? Well, you have to then start to look at them as different customers, right? So if your marketing opt-in has been very general, you're now going to granulate your marketing and your messaging so that it is very specific to each of these groups you've identified that are key addressable markets, right? For your solution, your brand, your product. Now, when you... do that, you're going to have to write copy, right? And this is like landing page copy, I'm going to get to landing pages. So copy that really address all the pain points, the benefits and their unique situation. So in this case, with the combat sports, their unique situation, the the the triathletes, and the over 40, you know, over 40 desk professionals, all of that stuff. You're addressing every one of them, all their needs very specifically. Now, this is the real fun part, which is where you're trying to rebuild your funnel from ground up. In today's day and age, the two things, the two channels, the two things you should be doing now in 2023, one, you must be working with creators. Right, very specific creators and you must have custom landing pages. In 2023, if you're selling direct to consumer. Now, when you have those two locked down and you have your ideal customer, you know, segments, you with the profiles, with key interest, with a key focus, then you can start to focus on markets that are really, really channeled down and work with. whatever social media platform you're trying to advertise on, whether it's Meta, which is the mothership, or platforms like TikTok or maybe even Twitter, whatever. So I'm speaking largely to Meta ads. So what are the things you need to do here? Key thing you need to do in this instance is with... with that data, find creators, right? So in this case, I'll look for combat sports, sport creators, I will look for triathletes, I'll look for professionals, over 40 professionals who share a lot of content on TikTok, particularly TikTok and Instagram, and then engage them with the copy and with your benefits and your motivations. you know, engage them with scripts and guidance for them to create content around your product. In this case, it's a pocket muscle massager. Work with them on that. Right. So they're creating content for you for two reasons, both organic and to maximise through paid. And then within your own remit of of content creation, the content creation you're doing internally, you'd need to obviously create content around specifically for the combat sport person, for the boxer, for the M&A person, for the triathlete, create content that would speak directly to that over 40 professional. And then landing pages, you then create landing pages that show and speak to each of these groups. so that when you're buying media from, you know, from Metta, you're targeting, you know, combat sports people, people who have interest in boxing and M&A, and then they're seeing ads with their interest in action, and they're taken to landing pages that speak to them, to that tribe of people. And you rinse and repeat with this. You keep... improving, you keep adding more creators to each of these interests from the top to the bottom and that's how you create a very robust flow. Right, there will be overlaps but it wouldn't be that much because it's all siloed. It's a siloed e-commerce funnel system you're deploying and brands I'm seeing do this brands that we're working with that are doing this are absolutely killing it they're being they're just a bit they're just a lot more robust and they're fewer points of failure in their markets and funnel because it's decentralized it's siloed and that is how really you listeners are going to essentially rewrite your growth story this 2023. So just to recap, pretend you know nothing or just know nothing, ask the right questions, figure out groups, key groups, not too broad, groups of people that will patronise what you're trying to sell, work with creators. what we copywriters to speak to these groups of people, create landing pages, right, that speak to these to those groups of people, focus your media buying with people with that interests, set of interest and silo it through, silo the interest to the traffic to the landing pages and just see much, much, much improved. conversion rates. So you're maximising essentially the traffic, which is getting more and more expensive, let's face it. into conversions. All right. So that's it, folks. That's today's show. And that is how to rewrite your growth story this 2023. Now, I'm working on getting some toll-free SMS numbers you could essentially put in questions to. working on that. If you know any solution, let me know. But essentially from the next episode, or in a few episodes from now, what would happen is I will give you a toll free number. It might be one for the US exclusively, US and maybe Canada are exclusively, and another one would be for the UK and the EU. You just text to you, you text questions, you know, your name questions and to that toll free number. And yeah, we'll just, we'll make it more interactive and I can answer specific questions. Specific questions, the next episode I want to actually address now is since I've given you sort of this blueprint, essentially, I will go through what makes landing pages actually work. So what elements should be on an e-commerce landing page. I think that piece of information is very, very critical. I might get an expert. I'm trying to get somebody on the show who's created tons of landing pages. I don't want to mention him yet till we get something concrete. But these principles I've spoken to in this episode are the way... to really be just foolproof in 2023. And you just need to dial these down. It's a lot of work infrastructure wise because you need to do a lot of writing. You need to do a lot of landing pages. And the benefits upside obviously is the fact that you can scale more, right? You can scale more. So there's also media buying lessons to learn. you know, from with this sort of methodology. And I'd also implore you to listen to my, my interview with, it was Nerov Shef. Shef, it was episode 12, season eight. Really, really good one. Really, really good one. And he speaks to. to this also because they build landing pages for the likes of like Athletic Greens and Rothies and the right and I think they've even done landing pages for Dollar Shave Clubs. So it's, it is real but you need to sort of, it's not just landing pages, that's the thing. You need to get the strategy all nailed down first and once you get the strategy nailed down from an ICP. ideal customer profile standpoint and just starting off from a blank canvas, right? You go from an unbiased point of view and you really start to suck in data from the right places so you build out this ICP because that's your target essentially. And the beauty of all of this is really the narrowing. as well as the broadening of audience targets. Sometimes you need to, you realize, oh wow, we were too narrow in our targets. And then sometimes you say, oh, we're too broad and we need to find that balance. So yeah, chaps and ladies, if you do have any questions, give us a shout. I'm always available. My email is kune at 2xecommerce.com. And yeah, I will catch you on the next episode. Cheers.