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Hello everybody! Welcome to Awakening the Entrepreneur Within. I'm Michael E Gerber speaking to you from Carlsbad, California in my little home office just dying to bring the knowledge, the wisdom, the passion the energy that's needed for you to grow beyond where you are to do things you in fact haven't even imagined you have the capability of doing. As always in awakening we have our guests and our guest here is quite astonishingly successful he's Justin Singletary and he's the founder of fulfillment dot-com. I don't know how in the world Justin you acquired the name fulfillment but maybe you can tell us the very beginning how you do that. Absolutely it's good to be on with you Michael. First off by God's grace is how we acquired that domain name. So I'll tell you a little bit of our story and that'll help fill in the gaps on how we got that wonderful domain name because it's opened so many doors for us. My story is I was brought up in Savannah, Georgia; beautiful Savannah Georgia by the way and I was brought here due to the fact the military station been here. I joined the army and became a ranger at 1st Ranger Battalion and became a sniper team leader so is it what it is. Justin, you join the army became a what it's an Army Ranger 1st Ranger Battalion now everybody doesn't get to become an Army Ranger right? They don't they don't there's this turn ring yeah they don't get to become and I mean you don't go to the Army's I want to join become an Army Ranger. So I'd love to just talk about that for a second here get on to fulfillment.com because becoming an Army Ranger in my mind has something to do with your enormous success. When you left the army to come on the street and go into business for yourself. mm-hmm. The two don't seem to fit but they absolutely do based on the conversation you and I were having just before we came on. Absolutely we get people to care. How do we get people to want to? How do we get people to desire to? How do we get people to do the impossible work that it takes to do? You become pre-eminently successful and you became an Army Ranger. So tell me what an Army Ranger is, tell all of our guests feel like. Well an Army Ranger is simply a glorified grunt. We the operation is really it used to be Airfield seizures but our mere agents. They're , it's a special operations unit and we just do a lot of great and creative missions and the people we work with are really high speed top-notch guys and that's what I probably miss the most about it is is the guys that we served with. So I mean it was just a joy to be able to be around comrades you know, that that have that went through kind of that sacrifice to get there the US Navy SEALs but in the armies and and we don't do a lot of swimming. And you're like the Top Gun pilots in the Air Force . I would I would say we're we're not at the top you know we're quiet professionals you know we have a good time doing what we're doing but we're very mission focused. But every time I speak to a Navy SEAL or every time I speak to a Top Gun guy he sort of downplays how extraordinary they are so I completely understand when you do that but I simply want people who are listening to us your that absolutely variance of working with the best guys on the planet. Absolutely. There was a lot of people that tried to be you know an Army Ranger and I'm not just saying graduating Rain Ranger school but being into a Ranger Battalion there's a lot of guys that tried to do it. The guys that made it were the guys that had a bigger y-you know, they they had a bigger purpose it wasn't that hey I'm gonna go try out for this. It's this is just one stepping stone in my journey of life that I'm gonna be an Army Ranger. That's just what I'm gonna do. There's no quit there so you tend to find guys that have that sort of attitude are the ones that actually make it through to become an Army Ranger. So it wasn't a little bit of a gap on, you know what it takes, you know it's it's some prayer and you know you know just being able to put one foot in front of the other and enjoy it. Yeah yeah yeah . But it's how you put that one foot in front of the other Justin, let's not diminish that because the same thing is the greatest entrepreneurs of all time. When they just in codes put one foot in front of another. It's not just that they put one foot in front of another. It's that they're on fire. That's where it's their ability to focus is what I think. Focus on the outcome you're looking for instead of the activities, you're focused on the outcome. So I think I learned that early on is really as where you put your focus that's where your Energy's gonna flow and if you put your focus on the pain that's where your energy's gonna go, that's that's what you're gonna be thinking about. If you put your focus on well this is this is what this is. My outcome that I'm going to achieve that's what you're thinking about you put your folks there it's a lot easier to achieve it and the way you speak about it sounds easy but understand no it isn't what that outcome is. Absolutely. It's seeing it you your business you see it before it ever happens you already know what's gonna happen and they they're just like I said put one foot in front of the other until you get there. No I got it, it's really hard to describe that to people and you you know more than most Michael, it's it's it's really first I feel like you got to work on the way that you see the world you know, the lens in which you see the world and if your lens is a negative type of lens then that's how your life usually turns out if your lens is always seeing that glass half-full then usually your life just turns out a little bit happier than the next guy and I think that really says a lot about the guys we served with. They were always more positive than the rest you know they focused on the good. I got it and of course we can then talk about Steve Jobs and we could then talk about Bill Gates and we could then talk about Ray Kroc and we could then everybody whose cup wasn't half full have whatever absolutely completely full bring their vision, their purpose, their mission the picture they have had an internalized in their minds eye as the outcome. They're there to produce. That's right. I think it's something I've been writing about, speaking about teaching about and doing all of my life and what I understand and what's so staggeringly painful to me is how difficult it is to get people to see it. Absolutely that mental preparation is one thing that people like to skip over, they just like to get into it. Well there's you've got to be mentally ready for what's to come or you know you're not gonna be prepared for it. Do you see a lot of these greats that they drop out of college because that vision is so it's they don't need college anymore it's it's already happened in their minds they know how to execute. Okay so we sort of get what is to be an Army about. Getting fulfillment time, okay so I started after the military a couple things happen. What's important to discuss is I jumped into internet sales of health and beauty products. I wanted to be an entrepreneur, I wanted to make money when I sleep because I had so many other goals and aspirations that were outside of money that I thought you know being an Internet retailer really helped me accomplish that so I did really well with that but I had a pain point to where I couldn't find a good fulfillment solution. The fulfillment solutions that we were using and I was back in 2011 they didn't really have the transparency I needed, they didn't have the follow-up, I need to have somebody I could talk to about if something went wrong there was a lot of issues I was dealing with so I decided to do my own fulfillment. Now wait a second because define for everybody what you mean by fulfillment. Absolutely, so fulfillment the way I'm defining it is is ecommerce order fulfillment. Let's say you have a product that you sell online and somebody orders your product. Well they buy from your website the information comes to a fulfillment center possibly like ourselves and then we ship it out to the customer that purchased the product and we send you back the information tracking number all excess so it's it's really we handle your product for you. You never even get you don't even have to touch your product, we receive it from a manufacturer and we ship it out to your customer. So we store, we pick pack and we ship your product. That's what the fulfillment that I'm talking about is defined as. Got it and the problem was as you began to sell stuff. Mm-hmm. You said you couldn't find a fulfillment capability that was too much neater. To be honest when he went to my standard we were doing our own fulfillment we're like okay we got to scale this thing. When we got to about fifty to hundred orders a day it was like okay well, let's have somebody else do this so we can focus on other areas of our business the marketing side of the house, customer service side of the house, there's so many relationships you know that we wanted to to entertain that we were busy packaging packages and you know and just dealing with the fulfillment and the poster side of the house that we're missing opportunities so at about 50 orders a day or so maybe maybe it was a hundred orders a day we said okay well it's time for us to outsource this. It was a good time for a sound source and when we did we searched around for a couple of good fulfillment centers. They were good for a couple of months and then you know we started having problems, people weren't getting their packages, there was mispacks, the packages were coming in late. There was numerous things and we couldn't, I couldn't really take one invoice and reconcile it to exactly what happened, what got shipped out it was really hard to see what we're paying for, so at the end of the day I decided you know what I see there's a void in the marketplace. There's this this isn't I don't know somebody other than Amazon that is doing a great job at fulfillment right now . This is something that we can really do a good job at. Well that's interesting when you said other than Amazon yeah this happens to be the biggest fulfillment center on the planet. For their own products. For their own products that's right right, so you decided you're gonna create a fulfillment center as excellent as Amazon's for other people's products for independent online retailers people that have their own website and they're they're not using Amazon and they're selling it amongst other means I mean right now we have 65 different ecommerce platforms that we support so there's a lot of different ways to sell products these days so really to make a long story short it was called at cost fulfillment right, so we charge less than all the competitors around and we got a large percentage of the marcus year i had eight hundred square feet above a pizza shop and and we were we had so much product in there i thought the floor was gonna cave in and going on top of the pizza shop. But it was were the good days man you know we were we were actually trying to figure out a way to have a shoot from the second-story out of the window into the delivery or the the USPS truck when it came everyday so it was a fun time but we really focused on. I had a ranger buddy of mine that actually become a developer and we spent many a nights you know working on our art technology so that we can add more value to internet retailers or our clients so we actually we're the cheapest guys on the block Michael and soon we figured you know we don't want to be cheapest guys. We want to spend more time and development. Spend more time developing this business out to where we were adding more value to our clients so we were like well this name act cost fulfillment isn't gonna fit anymore. So you didn't want to be the cheapest guys you want to be the best guys. That's right that's right. You know if we got into the game being the cheapest guys cuz honestly I didn't have the bankroll you know to build an Amazon or something that could compete with another large fulfillment center so we're like well let's just guys they just don't care you know where they care but they just they want the cheapest price on the block let's help them out and their friends so we'll know we'll take care of them and let's just grow this business how I like to say slow is smooth smooth is fast. Let's not grow it too fast to where we self implode let's not take on we have no debt still at this time so we just wanted to do it in a way that was methodical, in a way that we knew we can build a very strong foundation so the business can grow and still be strong at the end of the day. So you essentially utilized your determination to be in quotes the cheapest cars to make access readily available to folks who didn't understand the difference between the cheapest guys and the best guys. Yep they wanted the cheapest and they gave you an opportunity then to go to work on the systems through which one achieved the result that you wish to achieve on your way to becoming the best we are still supplying the same the same service or maybe in a better service because we didn't have that many clients at the time but with 800 square feet there you don't have a lot of bills, and when you have to or you know one two three four employees you know you don't have a lot of payroll so you can charge a lot less for your services. We're doing with that handful of people that handful of space . Yeah was figuring out the mechanics of it way that enabled you to rise above everyone else right because you were working on it the e-myth phrase that we continually use because we invented it what just doing it doing it doing it doing it that's right I was in the business every day I was in the business you know and try it trying to troubleshoot and trying to figure out what systems can we put in place so we can move to a new activity in the business and eventually you know so I can be working on the business. So I spent a lot of time working in the business and and there was some times where I probably should have outsourced where I didn't if I if I would have known what I know now I probably wouldn't be able to do it two or three times faster. Yeah but Justin when you speak about that I want to give you just an insight about it when you speak about it working in the business in my vernacular the way you were doing what you were doing was literally working on the business inventing the systems of the business . You're exactly right here never enable the systems to liberate you feeling it doing it doing it that's right. I had to be in the weeds listening to what the customers were the clients were saying you know seeing how all the operations were going in though is kind of in the trenches working on everything but you know you're right while I was working on everything you're also building systems to make those things and fix things forever and make things more efficient, faster for for future projects or future shipments and that's a very very very important thing for everybody listening in because that's really what the e-myth is all about when I talk about working on it not in it I mean not being the system yourself but inventing the system that's going to ultimately make you an ordinary person significantly more effective at what you produce which means you can then attract novices to do the work that needs to be done because it's already orchestrated and was system that produces that result that's right in people and attract people that are that are prepared to do what I need them to do that's they're at in their life cycle you know I mean maybe it's it's something that is very easy for them to do but that's what they want to do you know yeah so I absolutely that we were working I correct myself you know on the business it seemed like at the time we're in the business because you know everything's being thrown at us sure absolutely of course you were but you got to understand this language we're using yes we're literally designing a business to work that's right in a way that would make that business significantly more effective than the competition that's correct you were designing a role for your company in the world so that you would become fulfillment calm innards that's right when we felt like we had the right tools or we got to the point where we added enough value we decided that we didn't want to be the cheapest guys in the block anymore so it's it's hard to make money be the cheapest guys in the block unless you know it's at scale but we decided well we really want to change the way that fulfillments done we see a lot of things or we're anticipating things that are coming down the road where one facility is just not going to be enough so let me backup but based on the fact that we thought we had enough value it's like okay we got to change your name now at cost and film it isn't gonna work it work anymore for the for the well what we stand for then our name was at cost fulfillment then cost fulfillment which represented us perfectly at the time yeah so we found that um you know at the time I had a business partner and we talked about it we're like you know what what could be what's the best name out there that we you know swing for the fences on this you know and we found that eBay enterprises just I believe they acquired GSI commerce and brought along a domain name fulfillment coms so they're holding this domain name not really doing anything with it so we offered him $50,000 for the domain name and we didn't get a response from him so we went back to the drawing board I want this domain name how do we just get their attention you know I I mean we're we're thinking about throwing a blind you know bid not even having the money to figuring out how to get the money so we're excited ok what's the number where they'll get back in touch with us they'll call us back so we threw a number 500 thousand dollars for that domain name they called us right back and it we ended up doing the deal and I think you know I think at the end they said okay just as long as you don't sell the Amazon in the next 24 months we'll do the deal but it was funny how you know we got no response and then we got a call right back so I'm sure we overpaid for that domain name but it has paid us dividends based on the fact dollars come from all over the place the sofa you know grandma you know I mean we pulled it together we needed to get it , we got it but you know between me and a partner. That's right that's right so we had assets that we had a good internet , a good online nutraceutical business at the time so you know we found the money you know eventually and we paid for it and it was like okay now we've got to deliver on where fulfillment.com now . Now we have to be the best you know we're making ourselves be the best with that domain name. That's incredible I just absolutely love that I hope everybody heard that I hope everybody took that in, guy picks an impossible name finds out who's got it offers them an outrageous amount to buy it and they don't even respond so you develop ten times that amount no one you would get the response and they immediately call you. That's right that's right. There you are without $500,000 having offered $500,000 and I've seen amount of money for a name lady yes is mm-hmm because our Ranger knew that name would become who he was. Well I'm gonna tell you, you know in theirs I understand there's a lot of people that have different religious preferences but I like fulfillment.com Jesus fulfilled the Scriptures and I believe there was a lot of Prayer that helped us get that domain name. Wonderful okay so now I know you got the name now everybody knows how you got the name you bought the name. Absolutely. You've paid through the nose for the name. We did, it was we had big shoes to fill now if you google fulfillment I mean just the word fulfillment we would sometimes be above the dictionary the dictionary definition so as far as just the organic traffic from the search engines when people are searching for us it's helped us out tremendously, it's helped us in the beginning, it helped us seem like we're a much bigger company than what we actually were and it really. What's that of course, yeah. Does it attract an enormous number of leads of people who want your services? Let me say I think it's just the right amount because we've adjusted to the lead generation, we've adjusted the business to it and it's allowed us instead of to spend a lot of money on pay-per-click ads and you know social media and other marketing tactics that people just throw a lot of money at. It's allowed us to spend that money in kind of other directions on yeah I'm getting the know you have standards that you've already established yes signs of customers you will accept that's right we've got a target we tend to see a lot of people aren't truly ready for a fulfillment center it depends on your product of course we tend to see is about 50 orders a day when we have people that we used to you know our doors rope and we'll take anybody when people are ship one or two orders you know a day or they're shipping one or two orders a month you know we restored a lot of product here and we've got to charge them for that product so we feel like under about 50 orders they may not be a win-win for them we're actually developing out so we can widen our funnel to help those people that are not shipping 50 orders a day we're actually launching hopefully this year a program that's that's a posted printing platform so people can actually if they're at their office or in their garage they can go to film accom and print postage and then when they get to that 50 orders a day they're still in the same platform and they can use us for fulfillment maybe on the other side of the country that they're not on or they can use us for you know all of our locations so we're going to be expanding that funnel probably this time there sometime this year so does everyone who is shipping 50 a day get to use your fulfillment center we we've I would say we ship everything from pills in a bottle to beds in a box so we've got a very wide range of people well we've what we tend to look for is independent online retailers what that means is if somebody has a website and they've got a product a tangible product that they ship out and it's about 50 orders a day and they're connected to an e-commerce platform and even if they've got their own custom code we've got all restful API so we can really integrate with anything that's really our target market and do they have to fill out a questionnaire when they contact you we we like people to go through our request a quote on fulfilling comm it helps give us a little bit more information and see if there's the right fit but we tend to like to reach out to everybody at the end of the day we like to place them in places like or give them access to our education blog that we have on phone comm that'll help them maybe get to that 50 orders a day there's a lot of great vendors in that free education vlog that they talk about their services not only allowed vendors on there that are actually helping clients that we already have so I know they're legit so we try to try to help them in other ways they can get to that volume I got it so that's a critical part of your company yes I'm in short the way in which you move someone from here to there that's right understanding that it's not as easily done as I've just said moving somebody from here to there because in order for somebody to become in quotes a ranger to the qualify to become a ranger they have to go through a very very specific process that's right that enables them to do that Mike well I didn't do it on my own yes I'm saying the guys around it we helped each other right we helped each other get from A to B so starting out in an e-commerce I needed the help and it's not like who I knew it's it's I like to say it's not who you know it's who knows you so the network that I tried to establish or even in Ranger Battalion. That the guys that I hung out with were the guys that were gonna succeed those are the guys that I went to when I had a problem where I wanted to to talk through things with I made sure that the people that I hung around with especially in e-commerce were people that were successful that people that that knew what what to do now and not what to do five years ago because the landscape is changing so fast. No I got that but let me suggest another piece of this puzzle, then we're not really talking about that there is a very specific process one has to go through and there's a very specific process one has to go through to become a ranger to be kind of a US Navy SEAL even if I'm a Top Gun to become whatever a true entrepreneur absolutely epic set of skills and and systems that are critical for one to move through that process the Quran says somebody it's not just getting motivated and jacked up by somebody it's getting motivated and jacked up by somebody who's in fact paid the price of going through that very critical process and has the right system for you to follow that's right you've got it and so I'm going to that without even knowing because we haven't done a lot of work together you've only spoken a few times together um you were attracted to what we do and we were attracted by what you've done yeah and we ended up in this conversation together but what I really want to suggest is there is a significant way to go beyond where you are by in fact developing what it is you possess internally by developing that in people who haven't a clue what that is mm-hmm another sand they haven't a clue what that is because nobody's ever even suggested it to them there was no method to that madness so I'm gonna suggest not only do you Justin but to everybody listening in that's really the work we've been doing for the past 40 years that is truly determining what it is that transforms a company of one to a company of 1,000 what it truly takes to awaken the blessed entrepreneur within the Creator within to go beyond where he or she is and we love to say that um if we're born in the image of God as it said and I know you believe this if we're born in the image of God then we were born to create mm-hmm and if every single human being is born to create then the question that drives them to create what well to create a world fit for God mm-hmm and each of us are called to do that in one specific way mm-hmm so effectively you found your calling leaving the military coming to good earth planet USA you discovered your calling and began to be a US Ranger in the work that you set out to do mm-hmm but in your heart in your heart you know you were born to create you know you were born in the image of God you know that's what in fact your work is telling you to do and that's the great result that you're setting out to produce absolutely he wants us to do the best at whatever we do no matter what we no matter what we touch we need to have passion for it we need to do we need to do it our best and I'll be honest with you what I've seen people around me what I've seen successful entrepreneurs what I notice if somebody gives if somebody shows me their last 24 hours or a 24 hour period I can tell you or you can tell if somebody's gonna be successful based on where they spend their time they spend their time in educating themselves mentally preparing themselves you know those are the guys that are gonna or guys and gals that are gonna be successful the ones that spend their time wisely like I think it was Arnold Schwarzenegger said sleep faster you know I mean he said that he spends like six six hours of sleeping and if some people need eight sleep faster so I it's just like where do you spend your time if you're not spending your time in a program or if you're if you're not actively doing something you need to be preparing to do something and you know what this brings me to I read the e-myth your book after your your beautiful wife handed it to me at Board of Advisors I went on my honeymoon and I brought the book with me and I shouldn't have you know I shouldn't have read started reading a book because it led me on my honeymoon to start developing a new blueprint for the next three years of filming calm I was I was doing that on my honeymoon so I don't think my wife will be watching this I think what I was working on she knows now but you know it's it's really I learned a lot from reading your book Michael and exactly what you're saying there there's there's systems that I didn't think that I didn't think I was doing the things that I was doing in the beginning but when I read your book I realized I was doing those things and I realized there's more of those things need to be done in order for us to get more efficient more SOP we need to have a product that it that can be duplicated and can be improved upon so I just want to say you know that story as far as reading the book and then coming up with a new vision or more precise vision for the team was crucial and it's gonna be crucial for our next three years that's wonderful and understand while you say that it's going to be crucial for the next three years understand it will be crucial for the life of your company absolutely so today somebody who fires it and then of course it's up to them yep absolutely working on your business is tantamount to working on your life absolutely effectively Jason you are I'm Justin I'm sorry you are a born again entrepreneur working on your life and you do it persistently oh its consistency and I enjoy it you gotta enjoy it you gotta enjoy the hard road you know what I mean that the easy road gets hard and the hard road gets easy I have tended to my hard pass and I learned early on that I enjoy the outcome of the hard pass more than the outcome of the easy pass but folks on that as every single one of you to click on Justin's website Justin will you give everybody that absolutely is fulfillment com if and be honest we I'm really easily easy to reach I enjoy helping people and talking through strategy on things there's so many pieces of the puzzle when it comes to e-commerce so many pieces that people just don't know exist out there so it you know I'm my email address I'll I'll just give it out I don't know how many listeners are gonna be listen to this but my email address is Jay Singletary s ing le ta ry at fulfillment comm if somebody wants to chat they've got an idea we'll schedule some time and you know I'll you can bend my ear for a little bit and we'll see if I can help out adjust that's really really gracious of you I want to give everybody who's listening to us a gift and it's my latest book and you can get it free at free book dot Michael eager burr dot-com go to free book dot Michael Gerber dot-com and the name of that book is making it on your own in America or wherever you happen to live a joyous path to radical self-employment which effectively is what Jason did, Jason I'm sorry Jason my brother's name Jason - my mom does that all the time so don't worry about that Justin has done and is doing and every single one of you can do it - and it will then introduce you to radical you the only entrepreneurial development school on the planet online for every single one of you to enter into what we call the Eightfold Path that's the process by which you learn what Justin is practicing every single day of his life you get to do that too you get to and hear me it's a five-year school online for only four hundred and seventy nine dollars and 40 cents a freaking year how much does Wharton School of Business charge right how much does Harvard charge that's right yeah seventy thousand dollars a year that was Stanford charge $125,000 a year. Four hundred seventy nine dollars and forty cents to provide you with the 40 years of experience I've created working with over a hundred thousand students of ours and now it's available to you right now just do it! So Justin thank you thank you thank you very much for joining us. Thank you Michael I love talking to you and like I said if I can just comment on that please you need to be mentally prepared for for this game and and that round for you University will do that for you. Thanks and you know where to reach me that's Michael Gerber at Michael Gerber dot com or Michael at Michael Gerber dot com but you can find me. Let's find me I'm here love you all. Thank you all, see you again bye-bye.Thank you!
How do you reduce your shipping cost, automate your fulfillment and expand into new markets? It's easy with Fulfillment.com when you partner with Potomac comm you can leverage our technology and logistics infrastructure so you can focus on your core business. Whether you're a startup or an established business, you've probably considered handling logistics in-house maybe even tried it. That's okay. A lot of businesses do until they realize that managing logistics the right way takes a lot more time and resources than they anticipated. Think of it this way just as you're an expert at what you do, at Fulfillment.com we're experts at worldwide logistics that's right worldwide. It works like this, let's say your base of operations is here but you need to ship products quickly and accurately to customers here here here and even way over here. At Fulfillment.com we have facilities strategically located near parcel processing hubs throughout North America and internationally saving you time and money by reducing transit times and postage costs for your shipments. We keep your products at the facilities you choose and when an order is placed Fulfillment.com is ready to pick pack and ship the order within minutes. Powered by proven technology Fulfillment.com helps you monitor your inventory, choose the most efficient shipping method, group orders for reducing shipping costs, validate addresses to improve the customer experience and much much more! Now that's worldwide fulfillment made easy!
Attention ecommerce store owners and advertisers! Are you tired of attending the same boring trade shows that never produced lasting relationships? Are you looking for a break from the computer you're staring at right now? Would you like to shoot an unlimited amount of ammo from some of the coolest guns you could ever imagine? Would you like to shoot ground targets from a helicopter? If you answered yes to any of those questions then stop what you are doing right now and register to attend the third annual ghosts and guns e-tailer appreciation event coming up on October 25th and 26th. Rub elbows and buttstocks with the other top selling ecommerce store owners and hang with the brightest e-commerce minds on the planet. Before we got here at ghosts and guns we had no idea what to expect. I was just happy about the free breakfast! So past that point I was like this is gonna be amazing and it has been a game-changer I mean Brittney how's it been for you? I never thought that I would get on a helicopter or ever shoot a gun from a helicopter, so I survived it was amazing yeah I'm like ready for another round. It's all-you-can-eat and all you can shoot. See how you stack up against your peers on the sniper range. Or test your skills while hanging out of a helicopter well engaging targets on the ground, or maybe you might like to shoot at night with the same night-vision equipment that our military special ops use. So if this is you then you don't want to miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attend the most unique networking event of all time. Doesn't that sound better than hanging around some boring hotel all day and listening to speakers drone on and on. You've worked hard to get to where you are you would deserve to check off some bucket list items. So if you're an e-tailer or e-commerce store owner that's currently selling more than a hundred physical products per day and you can prove it, request an RSVP right now before the last spots are taken by another lucky chap! Mike Calhoun here founder and CEO of Board of Advisors dot-com the world's greatest mastermind for entrepreneurs and CEOs. The experience with Mr.Justin Singletary's Ghosts and Guns engagement is far more than we expected our first time. It's fun, it's results-driven and it's designed to bring the top econ guys and girls together. The innovators in the industry to converse to collaborate to bond and just share a unique experience. Originally we were pumped just to come and shoot guns out of a helicopter and I mean who wouldn't be right and we learned that there was far more available, lots of options, and a wide variety for everybody really. My favorite personally was the long-distance sniper shoot where I got to pretend like I was a Mr. Singletary for a moment. The night of the reception, Justin before the event was personally connecting us with relevant meaningful relationships to our organization which I thought was pretty special and I I know the complexities of what it takes to actually do that based on what we do at Board of Advisors. Plus this is not just a Boy Scout meetup it's designed for everybody husband's bring your wives wives bring your husbands. And if you're looking to bring the team together and create a tighter bond and a special experience for your clients or maybe just have some quality time with the top ecom guys and girls in the industry, Justin Singletary's Ghosts and Guns is where it's at . Again my name is Mike Calhoun if you find yourself showing to Ghosts and Guns I'd love to meet you just come up introduce yourself and I'll show you around, I'll make you feel like family. Mike Calhoun Board of Advisors dot com. Love to see you there
[Music] Hey I'm Justin Singletary. Welcome to FDC's ecommerce education vlog. As a young entrepreneur I remember the challenges I faced trying to find mentors and experts to help me wade through the mountains of information about starting an e-commerce business. Sometimes the information I found was good but other times it wasn't so good. There's nothing more frustrating than investing time energy and even money into a fruitless idea. Let's face it, most people who offer business advice don't really care if you succeed or you fail. If they're interested at all they're in it to make a buck and that's all. I believe that it's our responsibility as influencers to pay it forward. A quote that resonates with me is by Sir Winston Churchill, "We make a living by what we get but we make a life by what we give". Our goal is to encourage and inspire new and determined entrepreneurs to reach their potentials by providing education and insight from top industry influencers. We will be sourcing short three to five minute videos from those who have done the hard work of becoming successful entrepreneurs. Each video will highlight a specific high-impact instructional point that can be implemented by the viewer right away and remember when you're green you grow and when you ripe you rot. This is Justin Singletary signing off. Stay green! [Music]
How do you reduce your shipping costs deliver your products faster and expand into new markets? It's easy with Fulfillment.com. Just like you're the expert at what you do at Fulfillment.com we're experts at high-volume ecommerce fulfillment. Here let me show you! Let's say you're currently shipping from a single location but you need to ship products to customers all over the USA. Did you know that your shipping location can affect the cost and the time it takes your products to be delivered to your customers? What if you were shipping your products from our fulfillment centers that are strategically located to ship your product faster and at a lower transit cost? We've done the math and our clients save as much as 15% on their postage cost and their products are being delivered up to 48 percent faster by using our network of fulfillment centers. This is one of the many ways that Fulfillment.com is empowering smart ecommerce businesses with the most efficient network of fulfillment centers across the U.S. all managed by our proprietary real-time cloud-based order management system and when you're ready to expand into new markets it's simple with Fulfillment.com. We also have fulfillment centers in Canada, the UK, Europe and even Australia. Now that's worldwide fulfillment made easy. Get started now!
[Music] Hello and welcome to Fulfillment dot com's educational vlog. My name is Adam Pifko and I'm the Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at DFO Global Performance Commerce. We're one of the world's leading performance marketing companies, delivering superior ecommerce software marketing and brands to the world. I want to focus this vlog on how to build and scale your brand while maintaining a high level of marketing compliance it can be done and it's easier than many people believe it to be. It requires a marathon mindset not just short-lived money. The ability to reduce your exposure to risk via false and misleading claims and the ability to view your content from your customer's perspective. The not so secret secret is, if you care about your customers and if you make one of your goals to improve the lives around you, you'll find the results you're looking for. Revenue is critical but we'll explore a bit here today it shouldn't come at the cost of negligent compliance. In simple terms, marketing compliance is the rules and regulations that protect consumers from being lied to or misled or having their privacy violated. It also governs how consumer data can be used. There are a few things that harm businesses more than compliance violations, fines and other monetary penalties while they may be steep are the least of your worries here it's the brand equity and damage that's scarring in an information rich world like ours it can happen at lightning speed what's really lost in this scenario is trust the goodwill you've built with your customers your potential customers, your employees, your business partners, your stakeholders , all of it evaporates instantly it ties up cash flow, funding, sales, hiring and it's a difficult situation to recover from. So let's spend a moment on content itself content refers to the actual collateral and tactics used in marketing namely ads images descriptions testing and scientific claims urgency widgets testimonials terms and conditions privacy statements and your website as a whole often if something in this realm looks or feels funny you should ask yourself: can i substantiate this claim, this future, this feature, this comment or this review depending on what your answer is you should be prepared to go back to the drawing board and ask yourself again at the end of the day if you've made a great product done the research and applied critical thinking to your marketing there is no need to lie to your consumers they'll convert good advertising pushes boundaries but does so responsibly the most common mistake we make in the performance marketing industry are typically related to deceptive advertising or inert inauthentic product information these may include scarcity claims you've seen those countdown timers and limited time tickers these are fine to use if they're real and authentic free shipping promises these require that customers are informed of any shipping cost in advance of making purchases and that there are no hidden or disguised fees product origin and quality if something is not stainless steel you can't market it as such in the same realm if it's manufactured in italy your marketing can't say it was made in the united states inauthentic founder or inventor claims again just stick with what you can substantiate if you can prove it and it's real great it should be good for marketing testimonials and endorsements this is a huge one and you see it misused a lot this is one many companies just don't take seriously enough marketing that gets portrayed is often not typical experience of a user testimonials should be comments from real people not that hard if you just want to be compliant so let's talk about scaling and scaling while maintaining compliance believe it or not it's possible in order to make a lots of sales brands need brands and products need to be seen by lots of people this is where ad platforms come into play and regarding compliance dfo's chief commercial officer said it best so let me just read it traffic and ad platforms like Google and Facebook have built their own compliance technology and hired armies of staff to enforce their standards legislation and law making still play a role but they can't keep up due to the volume and speed at which e-commerce moves this is the reason why it's so important for brands and companies to police themselves in this area it's easy to get caught up in the e-commerce whirlwind especially when using affiliates to scale speaking of affiliates they're a great way to help drive volume to your product portfolio and something we use for our own efforts as well at dfo there are a number of steps brands can take to ensure compliance with these independent media buyers like establishing your kyc or know your custom know your clients know your customers guidelines for all new partner relationships keep in mind those brand equity issues we talked about earlier ensure brand guidelines are crystal clear and disseminated immediately upon establishing a new relationship and lastly ensure your company's internal compliance team is set up to monitor not only your own marketing but that of your partners this includes all marketing assets like ads pre-sales interstitials checkout pages and more we can even take it a step further when scaling globally when doing so keep these points in mind compliance needs to be deeply embraced both vertically and horizontally across your organization if project managers sales people customer service and everybody understands what's appropriate as well as the writers and creatives you'll be better off and anyone should be able to or be enabled to spot and catch compliance issues ensure your company and teams are up to date with the latest regulations and standards laws and practices change very quickly and what is mandated by countries that are not the United States often require jumping over a few hurdles or extra steps. Let's quickly recap the most important things to remember: marketing compliance is crucial and often has longer lasting equity effects than just fines and penalties. Since content is king make sure it's compliant, avoid common mistakes by ensuring everything you're showing and saying can be substantiated. Understanding how ad platforms work and ensure media buying partners have clear brand guidelines that's huge there are great untapped markets outside of the United States but they require know-how and understanding of domestic regulatory laws and requirements in order to be successful. That's it DFO is not only an affiliate network and a performance marketing agency but we are an advertiser of our own products and brands too. This puts us in a unique position to talk shop, share insights, and be helpful team that you can discuss your challenges with or bounce ideas off of. I'm personally happy to talk to just about anybody up or down the ecommerce value chain so please don't hesitate to reach out to me on your preferred medium. Thanks for listening hope this benefits you, your organization and the industry as a whole. Compliance is not that hard so gear up for the fight and you'll be and you'll do just fine. Thanks, have a great one. Bye! [Music]
[Music] Hello there and welcome to Fulfillment.com ecommerce education vlog. My name is AJ Yeager with Praxismetrics.com and I'm going to be your host today. So over the next five minutes I want to go over what is I believe is to be the number one mistake that 90 percent of e-commerce brands are making when they're tracking their revenue online. I've worked with a lot of brands uh in the world over 150 different brands in e-commerce and their data so I'm coming from a lot of experience here and this continues to come up like 99% of the time. So marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed I hope you agree with me on that we can't steer the ship if we don't know our numbers so today I'm going to go over three things. One is the actual biggest mistake when it comes to tracking e-commerce data . Number two is exactly what utms are and how they can take your marketing data to the next level and how to build a utm link in the most effective way so you can utilize them in your business. So one of the biggest mistakes is assuming that everything is tracking in your business. Okay what I mean is that all these different applications you're using um are are not tracking exactly what you may need and I mean that by out-of-the-box software limitations. Some of the apps like Shopify what you may be using are yes tracking certain things automatically but there are other softwares out there that are not tracking the fields that you need ultimately to answer your business questions the technology is just not set up properly. SOPs may not have been followed by your team when setting these up and getting all the extra custom values filled out and also some of these platforms are lacking uids which are unique identifiers. Email's a big one, address, phone number you know exact name we need something to make sure we tell the whole story of the data and many of these don't don't tie it together and they don't work together. Google analytics I mean I know many of you probably use it, some of you may hate it, some of you may love it but it is one of the best free tools out there. It does not come set up the right way, putting code on your website does not handle everything you need most people think it's set it and forget it meaning they they set it, they install it and they're like oh good i don't have to deal with it. I feel like they never have to log in there now. I don't recommend logging in there because it's not actually a really good dashboard unless you are trained to use it it does not work the way that you want to especially for business owners and marketing teams it's too complicated. Now this is all about ROI I want to make sure that you can get ROI out of this training and what you're going to, what I'm going to teach you. Now the number one mistake is not properly using organized utms for all of your marketing efforts online. Okay we've got to be able to prove ROI from all the different channels we're using and that is super important and this is very very um detailed and I think many companies get lazy and or don't follow a certain structure. UTMs stand for urchin tracking mechan or module uh I won't go into the history but it's a very simple term, it's a free link that you can create all it is is a parameter it is a encoded suffix that you append and add to your url and it can be quite long and made up of various various parameters but basically it's providing very specific information about where that link is coming from and by stringing these parameters together you're able to track online marketing campaigns with a tremendous amount of detail and granularity. So uh this is it may seem simple uh you might have heard about these before but it is literally one of the most powerful ways to track your marketing sales and any activity you're doing online and I highly recommend you listen to this so here's an example my buddy justin goff is doing a promotion for us he sent out an email to his list and if they click there or where the other red arrow is it would be the link was actually this one now it's long it's ugly but here's what it means it tells us six different things one the url two the source three the medium for the campaign name five the content and then last not least the term now i'm going to break these down for you real quick url is very simple that's where you're driving them to usually going to be your e-commerce domain campaign source this is where the clicks are coming from is it a search engine is it another specific site is it from maybe even a newsletter that was sent out for you this could be a lot of different things campaign medium is how the link was presented to them uh search end results pay-per-click ad email affiliate link whatever that may be this is a very important part social media you there's a lot of different um ways that you can add in medium but uh it's really different for each business campaign name here let me move my my video up here campaign name is the marketing campaign that the link belongs to traditionally this is done in succession of campaigns like a black friday sale campaign content is the specific part of a marketing campaign that got them to take action this is very optional you don't have to use it but it's good for testing sometimes ad copy a b split test between emails or other things campaign term the keyword used in paper click advertisements that generate the click and the substance subsequent visitor or what specific words were clicked in an email this is again optional you can make this whatever you want to i'll show you how i did it next is uh so so basically ours was the one above is is was justin goff so we know who it was he was an affiliate the campaign that he was specifically sending out that week and again that was justin goff email that way we just made sure but this is very simple because we know the affiliate and we know what relationship it is and how he sent it out now there are different ones he sent and the campaign term we changed later to include email one email two email three email four et cetera so um the website url is simply the website we're tracking right the campaign source examples for you for to use in the future are google facebook twitter the affiliate or affiliate name being adroll etc you can you can change that however you want to so these are examples for source here's some examples for medium cpc you know cost per click email um social post affiliate referral and you're going to come up with your own structure i don't have time to go through all that today but this is just some quick examples campaign summer sales social and then the date up the specific name of the product or a promo code uh also content email subject lines controller variation content a content b for term multiple links inside of an email different actual number of links you can put link number one link number two actual keywords or other further things that you could use to describe what you're doing that marketing activity so when you should not use utms let me move my face again this is not using what you should not do never put a utm tag or a campaign variable on an internal link you're not doing this on your website this is all external outside driving to you do not use utms when creating internal links on your own internal website i just said that if you start using utms to link to various parts of your website you can artificially multiply session counts this means that you're going to double up or triple up the traffic coming through google analytics and you do not want to corrupt any of your data we do not want bad data so to wrap up and give you a few action steps the only way you can know the true roi of your online marketing activities is by using utms on every single specific online activity you're doing it doesn't cost anything it doesn't matter uh just it's just a matter of taking the time to do it so there is a cost internally to pay somebody to do this but it is so worth it and you're going to have to make mistakes along the way and figure out a system that works for your company there is a way to go ahead and use these you can use track funnels.com or you can just go create these inside of google's tool by itself sit down with your team and map out your hierarchy have a whiteboarding session to get very clear on each of those six different uh parameters how you're going to use it in the future with your marketing channels determine a way to stay organized keep it in a spreadsheet or use something like trackfunnels.com that we created for free or choose one campaign i want you to just choose one campaign right now and begin immediately okay utms can take your marketing to a whole new level all the channels analytics tools out there work with utms for the most part 95 90 of them will pass utms through um and you can use utms to have better data in your all of your marketing campaigns and you can use this data to track return on investment for anything and everything you're doing i hope you enjoyed today's video if you have any questions go ahead and let me know and i'll go ahead and answer anything in the comments thank you so much you
[Music] Welcome to the FDC education blog. I'm Vinnie Fisher the CEO of Fully Accountable and I want to talk to you today about you the business leader the top executive in the company and your financial fluency. See I am a leader in a business and I resonate with titles like CEO, founder and I was really and I am really good at actually growing enterprises from six to seven to eight figures. One of problems I always had and half the battle against is giving a lot of the dollars back. I naturally with lean towards growing more gross revenue a marketer and a salesperson it's where I live probably I lacked just enough financial fluency to understand the elements of the business to keep more I learned one day it's not about how much you bring at the top it's how much you keep at the bottom. While that might sound very basic to you I want to help you with three tips to really improve your financial fluency as the leader of the business. One what I would like to talk to you about is this mindset, the mindset of running your business what it took what it actually takes for you to go from six figures to seven figures or two totally different mindsets they were from seven to eight. The gun-slinging things you do to get into seven figures are necessary but those are also the things that are not going to help you when amateur operation and grow into an eight-figure business with better cash flow profit margin and net asset value. And so first and foremost your mind has to change, there are six operational elements then departments to a company. One of them is your back-office and when you always have an attitude of growing the top-line and not winning on the bottom line the first issue for me then will be for you is starting with your mindset. My number two tip is there is mature operations in every company I wrote a book about this call the CEOs mindset and it's yours if you want just write us to a we care and fully accountable and we'll send you a copy of the book but I care about mindset so much I made it the first chapter in the title of the book but additionally I talked about an operational mindset to a 7 and 8-figure leader, how you can run a back office and run it like a profit Center so that you can actually win margin will have more cash flow and actually build your net worth in your business. And finally my third tip sits around this idea of looking to maturity and how you are taking that profit center to build your networks. One of the problems we have as leaders is we start with this mindset of us, everything that flows through to us, where we save taxes maximize cash, that comes to us and we don't really defend the margin of the company. If we look to investing in our back office and have the financial fluency to understand what key indicators to watch what production of expertise you want in those areas you'll start to clearly see where you will have a problem in the profit of your company so for example I had a health supplement company before while we were at the ending stage of building fully accountable and I found out that I was making eight percent profit margin when in reality I should have been making twenty percent. Well with this idea I started to say oh my gosh I'm losing twelve percent monthly! So quickly I started having a profit center mindset. I'll promise you that if you do that you will build your cash you will have more margin and you'll build up your net asset value faster than ever. Reality is it takes these three things to build your financial fluency and I started thinking about how to invest in a back office so that I'm manages from my 1040 backwards because the real savings starts with your business and having the mature act aspect of running it that way will immediately lead to doubling your profit margin. Financial fluency is the key to leader truly building your network so those three tips and the gifts along go with you I'm Vinnie Fischer from Fully Accountable. Hope that option [Music]
[Music] Hi welcome to FDC education vlog my name is Damon Wright, I'm the head of the advertising an e-commerce practice group at the law firm of Gordon Ries. You want to build a company that's gonna be around for a long time that you also can enjoy. You can enjoy your success, you can sleep better at night, your employees can feel better because they know their jobs are secure. So to that end it's important to protect yourself from forces that can be disruptive to your business so I want to talk about some simple, easy things you can do to accomplish that. First let me talk about the Federal Trade Commission and how to prevent getting in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is enforcing a law very aggressively called rasca, ROSC, a it applies to businesses that sell products and services on a subscription billing model so it could be subscription boxes, it could be flowers, it could be health and beauty dietary supplements, informational products. The FTC goes after companies that violate rasca with a vengeance. They will have receivers, appointed temporary restraining orders entered freeze assets it's not much fun. It's much more fun as a lawyer to help companies avoid all that in the first place and it's really easy to do. rasca requires three things. So imagine your checkout page first thing is on the checkout page you need to have clear and conspicuous disclosure of the billing terms and cancellation terms. How much are people going to pay each month? And then the second is you need to make sure the consumer is agreeing to those terms, they've elected to subscribe as opposed to buying the astrayed sale. So if you're selling a product via straight sale or there's a subscribe and save option the consumer can check one box where they can check another box they've thereby agreed that they want to subscribe. And the third thing Russell requires that there be is that there'd be an easy way to cancel. That people can send an email to cancel or they can call a toll-free number. If they're calling in, they don't have to wait I'll hold for a long time. So if you comply with rosca if you don't have deceptive advertising like fake testimonials and of course if you keep consumer complaints low it's very likely you'll never hear from the FTC. Let me talk about another force that could really be bad for your business and that is consumer class-action lawyers and serial plaintiffs. There are folks that spend their waking hours surfing the internet trying to find companies that are selling products that don't have some magic language on their site because those are companies that are really vulnerable. You don't wanna be one of those. The magic language really easy again on your checkout page I agree to terms of sale hyperlink and the terms of sale of course are a contract by checking the box the consumers agreeing to the contract and in that contract in the terms of sale two key provisions class action waiver language and mandatory arbitration language. This means that the consumers are knowing that if they want to see you they can't do it in court, they can't bring a class action it has to be a single claimant arbitration. If you had this on your website it's very likely that you will never face a class action or if you do you'll quickly be able to get the case kicked in favor of a single person arbitration. In five minutes of fixing this site here your site to add this you can literally have saved yourself millions of dollars so I can't emphasize enough how important that is. Last thing that could be really disruptive to your business is when you have a dispute with another business. Maybe it's a service provider or maybe either some type of revenue sharing agreement you have. You need to have clarity in your contracts . You know Pennywise pound-foolish made sense 200 years ago it's still true today make sure your contracts are tight and make sure you're protected focus on these types of provisions representations and warranties. You want the other side to make representations and warranties to you, for instance they will comply with advertising law and other applicable law limitations of liability you want to make sure that your liability is limited the other side not so much you want to be able to get full relief from them if you have to sue them and then indemnity patient if they do something that causes you harm you get sued because of social media that you have the ability to go to them and say you have to pay my damages again. Having a sharp clear contract will prevent confusion disruption and disputes down the road and you know actually save you a lot of money in attorneys fees so with that you'll be on your way to having a stronger brand, becoming more valuable, having a place that your company's employees again feel secure working that and again enjoying your success and sleeping better at night. It's a pleasure to talk with you Thank you very much take [Music] you
[Music] Welcome to FDC's ecom educational vlog. My name is John Maddox I'm the marketing director here at Engine Commerce. If you're like me you consume a mountain of content on the latest strategies, tips and tactics that you can use in 2018 to grow and scale your store. There's a lot of really sexy things that are tossed around influencer marketing Facebook Ads Google arbitrage all of these things but what I want to share with you today are two really unsexy pillars of e-commerce marketing that are staples that the largest brands in the world use to continue to scale and grow their revenues year every year. Those two tactics are abandoned cart flows as well as basic behavioral cascades. A recent study by Omni sense shows that targeted abandoned cart emails are opened 20% more than any other type of email, not only that but they convert at 5% making them the best type of email you can send within your cascade. Let's say that you had a thousand abandoned carts a day, now sending these automated flows if you were able to bring back 5% of those abandoned carts at an average order value of about $80 that equals out to a $4,000 increase per day in revenue. To get you started I want to share with you one of our most successful cart abandonment flows and what that looks like broken out into days. Now the first day that they abandon that cart you're gonna wait two to four hours and then you're gonna send them an email reminding them of what they left with beautiful imagery and persuasive copy asking them to come back and you've saved that cart just for them. A day later you might add in other products, other curated sets things of that nature to increase the average order value as well as show the different styles and how it would look on them if they purchased it that day. On day three we want to help them really pull out that credit card by offering either free shipping or a percentage off if they go ahead and purchase it in the next 24 hours and then if they haven't purchased from there we're gonna put them on that behavioral email cascade based on the creative and based on the products that they looked at and we're going to nurture them throughout that sequence and then rotate them into our daily newsletter. If you're looking for more sequences you're looking for some inspiration on this I highly encourage you to look at your favorite brands whatever they be. Barkbox is a great example, go through their email lists abandoned cart and see how they retarget you over the next week, take that, model it for your own store and implement those changes. [Music]
[Music] Hi welcome to the FDC ecomm education online. I'm Joe Burton CEO and founder of our lay marketplace and today we're going to talk about the top three reason you're hoping to be buying native marketing. First and foremost what is native marketing? lead up marketing you probably see it every single day of your life is content built right into news articles and pages on major news sites that's meant to look and feel like it's part of the actual news site when I'll have to ally it's actually an advertisement. Normally is a small headline with a graphic and image or a video that directly leads to a third party web page major companies doing this today are companies like tabbouleh. I'll brain you know I would jam and a handful of others so but top three reason is this is beneficial for your business. Reason number one it allows you to directly tell the story that you want to consumers to understand about your product or service and here's what I mean by that let's say you've got a certain health product of item and it's got a certain aspect and a helps out in your daily life that gives you more energy or it helps with anti-aging fatigue or it helps with you know hair loss or something along those lines you can write a content piece that you would actually control the content for that tells that story exactly how you want it to be told. that's extremely powerful for obviously potential customers here's the example I always used for new clients Anderson windows is a big window retailer in the u.s. they can run a simple banner ad on a page and says Andersen windows you know click here for more details right but probably get some leads that way and that's phenomenal however they can write a content piece about like Anderson Windows can use the cause of eating your own like 15% and also raise develop your home by 25% and here's the reasons why then they can take that article directly link it to their lead form and drive a much more targeted user that way and it's hugely powerful and hugely beneficial and so you can't do with search or Facebook and their kind of marketing out there. Reason number two that this is probably the coolest thing about it you can actually customize exactly where you want your ads to show up so you can hand pick sites that meet your target demographics and only serve your ads on sites that meet those target demographics so if you know your audience skews 50 plus you can handpick sites and audiences that show up on sites there are 50 plus maybe that's a long time maybe that's not enough Sun com maybe that's the smaller sites that you know you know where it's gonna fit for you and get hugely powerful and a great marketing tactic you can use to make sure you're spending your dollars is about official as possible. Reason number three it's a great alternative to Facebook and Google owned any marketing plan probably has Facebook and Google and in some capacity at this point in time however you can't rely solely on Facebook and Google for every dollar you want to spend online Facebook and Google are constantly changing their rules and regulations if they're constantly updating their policies and if you're putting all of your eggs in one basket at some point in time it's going to be an issue for them. I can almost guarantee it's going to happen so maybe there was a great way to diversify your portfolio a little bit and offer massive scale that you simply cannot get install their news channels it's greatly beneficial for clients looking for even small campaigns but also in a large scale so that's the top three reasons I think you coming to you by native marketing. Any questions or comments feel free to reach out to our marketplace. Thanks! [Music]
[Music] Welcome to FDC's Ecomm education block my name is Chad Bacchanal and I'm the Director of an alert set why might CRM today I want to share with you som thoughts on a topic that is often controversial in our industry. It's one of those topics that I know some of you will agree with me on and some of you will discourage rarely do I find a consensus agreement on this topic but the hope is that when the video is over you'll have a stronger understanding of the subject. What is this controversial subject? How to calculate customer lock on value. I'll cover three methods including the one that we found to be the most accurate and recommend for our clients. Why is this controversial? Well first there are many ways to calculate CLTV and the results you get can vary dramatically with each method. Second no business is the same, this obviously complicates things when we're trying to use a single measurement to evaluate businesses with widely variant attributes. With that let's jump into the topic: there are three different popular methods for calculating CLTV. Method one is the method we use to calculate CLTV outline and is widely used by businesses that have high customer turnover or churn. This method leverages gross revenue and cogs to determine gross profit and divides that by the unique customers. A unique customer is most often identified by a unique email address. For example if I have 1 million dollars in gross revenue and [ __ ] of $40,000 returning a gross profit of nine hundred and sixty thousand dollars. I have eight thousand unique customers and therefore the CLTV is a hundred and twenty dollars. It's a pretty straightforward calculation but can be criticized for simplicity. Method two has been around a long time and it's used quite a bit with several industries but it's not widely accepted by the subscription industry because of its reliance on churn ratio. Churn ratio is a useful measurement but the common argument is that churn ratio has no place in the CLTV calculation because it adds in variability to a measurement and ultimately muddies up the CLTV calculation. This method uses the returning average order or our AO / the turn ratio. For example let's say your RAO is $80 and your truth is 40%, this method is going to calculate your CLTV to be $200. So this method is also very straightforward but like method 1 it also is often criticized for being too simplistic. Method 3 is very popular it is widely used across many different industries but it's really meant for companies that are cross them throughout the customer lifecycle. Let's run through this calculation once again we start with our AO multiply gross margin with an $80 our AO and a gross margin to 40% we get a net REO of $48 then we consider a 40% churn in a discount rate of 0% this method leverages growth rate to arrive at the same $120 of method wah so then we are comparing apples to apples as much as possible across all three methods. Growth rate refers to the customers growth rate during the lifetime as a customer. If you're growing a customer's value over time this is an important number inside of the CLTV calculation the criticism of this method is that it is too complex and it leverages growth rate which is speculative it can water down the CL TV calculation. Now that we've reviewed all three methods let's talk about why we use method 1 at Lime Light and why we think this is the right approach for advertisers and subscription businesses. Method 1 is straightforward and while it can be criticized for its simplicity it gets praised for hosts customer lifetime analysis, accuracy mean that when we analyze customers after that they have cancelled the calculation often proves to be more accurate we have analysed our entire global transaction database millions of as actions over more than 10 years and we still have found method one to be the most accurate method for calculating CLTV. My goal and my life's goal is to stay on top of the industry and provide advertisers and e-commerce merchants the best analytics and revenue maximization tools for their businesses. My priority is to stay up-to-date on the best metrics and calculations specifically for CLTV. I'm always looking for various CL TV calculations and analyzing and considering their merit for Limelight's clients so don't be surprised if in the future we offer multiple methods to calculate CL TV keeping a handle on all the data and metrics of your business is complex. Leveraging is sophisticated and intelligent but relevant analytics is how you can not only compete but scale. If you watch this video to this point you've been bitten by the bug and are most likely a data junkie like me. This curiosity is are you all what do you think will happen if you can't get a quick handle on where your business is at at a moment's notice. I've been there and it's scary it's a very scary thought that's where a solid analytics package comes in. Whether you are using the solution that we developed at limelight or you have your own homegrown bi solution stay curious and continue to fight the good fight my goal and Limelight's goal is to equip our clients with the best features integrations and revenue maximization tools and of course analytics to not only stay on top of the industry but to help you succeed that's why we continue to work hard to build a flexible and reliable CRM solution so you have all of the information you need to make the right decisions for your business. I'm Chad Bucknam, Director of Analytics at one I wish you the best of luck growing your business and achieving your dreams [Music]
[Music] Hey welcome to fulfillment dot coms online educational vlog my name is Jay Mack I'm the president of Six Division. We are a marketing automation company that helps entrepreneurs and their teams get more out of their market automation to create more predictable revenue in their business. I want to talk to you today about the top three mistakes that entrepreneurs make with marketing automation. The first one is the word marketing. The second one is the word automation, and the third one is blimp lamentation which I'll talk to you more about in a moment. So what's the problem with marketing, when it comes to marketing automation most people assume that market animation is solely for marketing and they think of things like funnels and marketing campaigns and ad spend and lead acquisition and marketing automation is much much more than that marketing automation is a different way to think about ultimately your client journey which I'll talk more about in a minute. The second thing is the word automation so a lot of people assume that because automation is in the word marketing automation they think that it's set it and forget it and that it is building a machine that is gonna run itself in perpetuity without any maintenance and so forth and a lot of times that can take the human element out of it as well and the benefit of marketing automation is to automate the mundane things it's to automate the experience that you want your clients to have so that they have a consistent experience and they've got the experience that you actually have design essentially you're creating the best day your sales rep or the best day that's your marketer or the best day that you can create for your clients you're repeating that over and over and over again so when you automate those mundane things it leaves space in margin for you to create very personal experiences for your clients so rather than automating everything you can actually automate somebody to remind some of your company to do something personal like a handwritten note or send a t-shirt or whatever that is. So automation is what creates space for personalization that's actually more meaningful and it'll be able to leave a lasting impression for your clients and so forth and the third thing is this word we called blimp lamentation which is the blend of blueprinting and implementing at the same time imagine a team of contractors trying to build a home and everybody showed up at once with no blueprint and the concrete guys are trying to lay concrete and the plumbers are trying to do the plumbing and the drywalled and framer guys are trying to do their thing and so forth you would end up with a mess in an unstable house and something that wouldn't be very good and most people start their market automation by getting into a tool get into their campaign builder of whatever that is and they start trying to design while they're actually implementing and they end up with a mess. They end up with a lack of visibility and lack of reporting they end up with unstable campaigns that create an unpredictable and often under lightful customer or lead experience for people so we want to plan first and then blueprint so the solution to all this is having a clear plan creating a strategic plan of what you're trying to do so you know where you're going secondly its to get really clear on what the journey of your leads prospects and clients are by mapping that out before you start to blue in blueprint and then implement and to do that this is I think the the secret sauce pro tip here is to do that from the perspective of your clients marketing automation is about creating a journey and journeys are ultimate about experience which is getting them to know the things they need to know to believe what they need to believe to take the action that you want them to take and so you create that language and you create that journey to be as effortless and seamless as possible so that they have a great experience to do what you need them to do and tell their friends and keep coming back for more. So hope that's helpful if we can ever help you at Six Division please reach out to us and let us know how we can help you with your marketing automation in your company, to grow your sales, to save you time, and amaze your clients. Good luck! [Music]
[Music] It's Tanner Larsen, I am the CEO of Build Gross Scale and this video is the first in a vlog series of videos that I'll be doing for all you awesome peeps over at fulfillment dot com. Now I've got a ton of cool training and education and you know tips and tricks and all kinds of stuff to share with you guys but this video is going to be kind of an intro, a quick who are we, why should we listen to you and maybe if you should listen to me kind of thing. First okay so while bragging about how awesome we are and how cool we are over at BGS and how just amazing we are. I promise to also share some pretty cool tips and tricks along the way that will make this video valuable for you and make sure you get something cool out of it. All right? Now again, my name is Tanner Larsen I'm the CEO of Build Gross Scale and I've been doing direct response style, ecommerce stores, funnels things like that since early 2001. Ok? I'm basically a dinosaur in the world of online marketing and e-commerce. There's you know very few people out there that are but have been doing it longer than I have and this kind of stuff and that makes me an old man right? But at the same time I also learned a few things I learned all the crazy stuff not to do I did everything wrong but along the way I also learned a few things that worked really really well alright and I also wrote a book. I wrote the e-commerce evolved, this has basically become the Bible of e-commerce books out there. I wrote this in 2016 and it still is as true now as it was then. We've also learned some really cool stuff since then but this book is awesome. So if you need a way to put yourself to sleep at night, I highly recommend you read it or get it becasue it'll definitely put you to sleep and then if it doesn't you can always you know use it as a doorstop or something to whack you on the side of the head and to really knock yourself out. Alright now with that book okay that kind of set the stage for what we do at Build Gross Scale. Now what do we do exactly all right well we do this thing called data-driven ecommerce. Okay now that doesn't really mean much. We're a data-driven optimization company that really doesn't mean much okay but what we do is we focus on taking stores that are good and making them great. We can start with stores that are a little bit less but are real you know special zone is taken a good store and scaling them to be great . Okay now the way we do that is by making data backed decisions okay so we analyze and interpret all the data that these stores have most of these stores don't even realize they have this data or how to use it they may collect it but they don't know what to do with it. Right well that's where we come in we make sure they're collecting it the right way that the data is accurate and then we make all kinds of data back decisions using that data okay now to do this it's not just me it's not just my partner Matt we actually have 12 full-time revenue optimization experts that we're all internally trained by us that do nothing but analyze data all day long make interpretations run split tests on all these different sites okay we also have 18 full-time developers a combination of front-end back in you know GA and all these other different kinds of developers that we have in programmers that but combined with our staff their entire job is to work across a network of 12 sites running split tests and crazy tests like page layouts and functionality user testing all this different stuff all to basically help us dial into these stores and which we have basically a network of over two dozen eight-figure almost one almost nine figure stores that are all you know leveraging our team to manage their data figure out the optimizations using that data interpret the data and then create wins and stuff along the way now as a result of that you know we have roughly a thousand man-hours a week okay a thousand man-hours a week of nothing but revenue optimization data interpretation to make data back decisions the amount of data that we collect off of our stores in one week is more accurate and usable data than a normal store will probably ever accumulated in a lifetime and even if they did accumulate it most of them wouldn't know what to do with it all right now the result of this is that we've kind of become men by we I mean Bill Gross scale has become the 800-pound gorilla in the e-commerce optimization space and we work with some of the biggest clients in the world including Guffey ranker Men's Health, Discovery Channel, Scientific American, Wild Turkey whiskey and more. Okay a lot of these bigger brands we look with the smaller brands too but the big guys come to us as well because we're really the only ones who are any good at this okay and really the only ones doing it right now the secret sauce that we have that bgs so special and all of our ro spend all the time doing is a process that we developed called revenue optimization now when I say revenue optimization what people actually hear and what they think about is conversion rate optimization all right now conversion rate optimization while similar tends to really focus on like the name says the conversion rate okay and now conversion rates they're important but it's not a real truly telling metric and when you focus on CRO and the conversion rate becomes the all-important metric that you're trying to optimize for you get this kind of tunnel vision and you don't see anything outside of this tunnel. Okay but it's everything out here that's where the magic happens. Okay this is where all the really important stuff happens in a business it's outside of that tunnel vision so revenue optimization is a systematic process for optimizing the entire customer journey. Okay they land on the site, they browse the site, they make the sale and then they continue on into the back end. Okay right we optimize the entire process from start to finish, end to end okay and it's all about: presenting the right information to the user at the right time and only the right information okay because too often people focus on what they think is delivering all the information or the right information but it's actually the wrong information and they presented at the wrong time which creates roadblocks. Which creates disconnects and anytime there's a disconnect or a roadblock in a site or the buying journey you create exit points where people bounce or leave and you know just disappear from your site so our job as revenue optimization experts is to smooth that road out so it's a nice smooth racetrack and allows your business to pick up speed and grow crazy fast right. So why is revenue optimization magic? I thought I told you how. It's our process we coined the term all that stuff but why does it really matter? Okay well the best way I can describe it is to talk about something completely unrelated. Okay so this author Gary Keller he wrote a book called The One Thing. He's one of my favorite authors I'd specifically love this book the one thing now the book really is just about the simple truth behind extraordinary results okay and how everything in life really falls under there's these principles okay and it boils the book itself in he and Gary specifically boils this book down to what's the one thing that you can do such that by doing it everything else in your life or around that result becomes easier okay so what's the one thing you can focus on that makes everything else easier now in fitness and health people go to the gym they work out they diet they or they try to die they do fad diets they buy pills they do all this thing but they really focus on even they focus on new workout clothes or the newest workout routine and cardio interval training all these things right but when it comes to health and fitness the one thing that makes everything else better and creates that chain reaction of Awesomeness is diet but nobody wants to focus on diet because diet is hard now an e-commerce revenue optimization is the one thing everything your traffic your sales your retention supply chains growth and scale all of it becomes easier when you focus on just revenue optimization people go oh I got a traffic problem I just need more traffic no you have a revenue optimization problem because you can't afford to buy all the traffic that's already out there okay traffic is not your problem the problems on your site okay what happens after the click so an example all right we see thousands and thousands and thousands of brands and different ecommerce stores every single year on all kinds of platforms they're not all Shopify just all over the place now everyone like I said thinks they have a traffic problem if I could just get more traffic if I could just get my ads perform better everything would be better okay but the reality of that is you're probably already better at traffic generation then you need to be because you're working with a broken behind process that may is not optimized and if you're able to get that to work with the traffic you're already doing you're way better at traffic than you truly need to be there is an infinite amount of traffic out there but trying to hyper optimize or over optimize almost like micro manage your traffic is what you're trying to do okay and that's not helping alright because the problem isn't getting the click you can get the click the problem is converting that click into a sale that's where your problem is your problem is in the buyers journey what happens after the click once they land on your site to the time they leave your site that's where you're failing okay the real issue is that what needs to be focused on is not traffic if you focus on everything that happens after the click first traffic becomes easy it's a non-issue you can buy all the traffic that you want if you focus on after my optimizing what happens after the click first let me give you a visual to drive this home ok this is I always do better with visuals so think of your e-commerce business as a bucket okay so in this metal bucket right here now think of the traffic that that comes into your bucket as water so we're filling up our we got our bucket here we're filling up our bucket with water coming out of the hose right so all the traffic that you're saying your site's coming out of this hose into the bucket now the water that stays inside the bucket those are your sales the water that falls out that's your lost sales okay now in a perfect world we turn on the hose keep opening it up and the bucket fills up we just keep pouring more water into it and hopefully we can just keep getting a bigger bucket right it's not how the world works right it's not reality in the real world the way reality works is that your bucket your business is full of holes it's like Swiss cheese all right holes of things are that like bounce rate browse abandoned scarred abandonment issues browser segments underperforming pages tech stack issues lack of clarity and about a dozen other issues okay every single leak reduces the amount of water that stays in your bucket right you got a bucket and you poke all these holes in it okay you're still pouring traffic into it but as you're pouring traffic into it all this water it lost sales is pouring out of the bucket and the sales the one that stays in the bucket keeps dropping. Okay, so what most people do instead of fixing the bucket and sealing all the leaks, they don't do that right you don't do that what you do instead of fixing it is you try to turn up the flow. Okay let's switch from a garden hose to a fire hose let's turn up the traffic thinking that it will fill up the bucket faster then your bucket can leak okay and you just get more sales that'll solve it I'll just get more traffic well the problem is that's not how it works it's the opposite that occurs okay just like in the real world when you have a hole in something or erosion happens things like that right the more force more pressure the more water you put into the bucket the holes just get bigger the more traffic you get to your store the bigger the leaks get and the more money you ultimately lose whereas with revenue optimization you actually will stop those leaks you fix those leaks so that your bucket now they're never gonna be a perfect bucket but the idea is to patch it as much as much as possible and seal it up so that you keep more sales and lose less right so if you focus we're on revenue optimization well that stops the leak so you focus on patching those leaks so more sales say in the bucket right beat that dead horse enough right okay now the magic of doing this is without spending any more money on traffic than you already do your and your ads burn stays the same but you will make exponentially more money simply by focusing on revenue optimization and patching the leaks that means more money from the exact same traffic you're already paying for okay no increase in ad spend now most of our clients honestly they double or triple their revenue within 90 days of switching their focus from this tunnel vision or this I got to get more traffic focus to just revenue optimization so double or triple their revenue within 90 days from just switching into the focus making the one thing they focus on revenue optimization and that's all without massively scaling their ad spend. All right now to wrap this up I don't want to keep make this video any longer than it needs to be right. The secret behind being able to scale a business is maximizing revenue so that you have the cash on hand to scale now we've all heard the same right, he who could spend the most to acquire a customer wins right if you can outspend your competitor doesn't mean you have to but the ability to means you can go out there and buy more traffic that other people can't afford because your site your store is optimized. All right it's a hundred percent true this is not true no fluff but the way to do that two way to be able to actually afford that more expensive traffic is by using revenue optimization to first stop your business from losing and bleeding money. Alright so I encourage you take a step back start looking for areas in your business where you're currently leaking instead of looking for ways to keep bumping up ad spend. Fix the leaks first the ad spend will take care of itself I promise you that. Now guys I've got a lot more training promised and prepared for you guys we've got a whole bunch of videos I'm gonna make for you, Justin and I've been talking we know what we're gonna map out for you guys but this was just a real quick intro to get things going. The new videos for you guys are gonna help you implement revenue optimization in your business but for now let's wrap this intro up I hope you enjoyed this little video my name is Tanner Larsen I really enjoyed talking to you today and I'll see you in the next video! [Music]
[Music] Welcome to FDCs econ vlog my name is Chris Hibbs and I'm one of the Head Accountants at Easier Account. I'm here to share with you my experience on accounting of bookkeeping in the e-commerce industry to help you learn more so that you can earn more. Some of the most common deductions for e-commerce business are banking and merchant fees, home office, subscription cost, shipping costs, a good soul expose, the list goes on and on. Using a cloud-based accounting software makes it easier to track these expenses so that you can maximize your deductions at your end people who start an e-commerce business usually don't love accounting but have the desire to make additional income or to replace their full-time job. The number one problem that I have seen in e-commerce companies is that they don't know where their books are at on a monthly basis using a cloud-based accounting software is a great way to allow you to know how your business is doing throughout the year and streamline your account one of the most user-friendly softwares that we have found as a company called 0x e ro there are others such as wave or QuickBooks Online also GoDaddy as bookkeeping software available all of these are solutions to keep you in a great position to be able to file taxes on time and claim all the deductions that you can all of these solutions can most major bank accounts credit card companies and PayPal. One of the reasons that 0 is our preference is because it allows you to connect to your accounting solution with the other systems you are currently using such as your CRM, inventory, point-of-sale, shopping cart, invoices, billing and so much more. Monthly bookkeeping is more important than you may think because it allows you to know your numbers. Being able to make an informed decision is paramount to running a business. Jeff Bezos certainly doesn't run Amazon without having a good grasp of where the financials are. If you want to achieve success knowing your numbers is the first step bottom line to be able to reach your goals and to pay the least amount of taxes you have to know where you currently are, track progress, identify problems and make adjustments so that you can adapt and plan throughout the year. We wish you the best of luck on all your ventures. This is Chris Hibbs signing off staggering [Music]
[Music] Hello and welcome to FDC's ecommerce education vlog my name is Justin Christensen the co-founder and president of Convergent Fanatics and the number one best-selling author of Conversion Fanatic: How to double your customer sales and profits with a be testing. And today we are going to discuss the benefits of conversion rate optimization so in my 15 year career in digital marketing the only thing that I have really found to help companies get and keep a competitive advantage is conversion optimization and the only thing that I see in the marketplace is everybody screams that you need to just get more eyeballs. You need to get more traffic you know traffic is a sexier topic than getting more out of your traffic through optimization. Now the benefits of optimization are more than just improving your conversion rate. You can some of the byproducts of that are reduction in your cost per acquisition, making traffic and your paid advertising spend more effective you can get increases in average order value you're gonna lead to happier customers, less refunds, less chargebacks, and better engagement overall on your site. Now what we look for in conversion optimization is really how your visitors interact with your brand and your marketing message so we're gonna go in and measure what elements on every step of the process hold the most weight, you know? What button colors, what headlines, what layout, what images, what structure number of steps in the checkout process, the number of cross sell items, how you cross sell items ,abandoned cart issues, all of these things can be addressed with optimization instead of just pouring more ad dollars on it. Imagine if you were spending twenty thousand dollars a month on advertising or and you got say a 1 percent conversion rate. But what happens if you increase that to a 1.1 percent conversion rate on the same exact advertising dollars but your cost per acquisition goes down by 10 percent and your average order value goes up by 15 percent . How much more benefit to your business will that have? How much bigger of an impact will it have for your business? You know you can spend more to acquire customers you can spend more on traffic it becomes easier to scale your marketing campaigns versus just pouring more ad dollars on it. You know a good example of this was a company that grew very well recently and we took their conversion rate initially from 2% to 3% but then they turned on 70% more traffic and it reduced their conversion rate back down to about 2.1 percent but they had 70 percent more traffic converting at a higher rate than what they were initially and that resulted in helping the company grow over 300% in revenue over the course of the year and compounding conversions takes effect in that way. Perry Marshall the great author of you know many great books including the definitive guide to Google AdWords and the 80/20 rule of marketing, he states that optimization is the only true way to get exponential growth and we've seen it by helping over 80 companies over the last four years improve their marketing results so if you have an e-commerce company and an e-commerce store and you want to exponentially increase your results, you need to ploy the need to deploy effective conversion rate optimisation practices. Don't let a day go by that you're not actively testing something to learn and we're not just testing random things here either we're actually going out to be strategic and we're trying to find out the answer to the question, why? Why are we testing those certain things instead of oh yeah a green button converts better than an orange button, but why is that does it have better contrast to the remaining color of the pages? Does it help lead the visitors down that path of least resistance to the end goal that you want achieved? Does it lead to better engagement? And you want to figure out what those bottlenecks are and then test every possible combination and element to better understand your visitors as a result your traffic is going to become more effective your customers are going to spend more with you they're gonna be happier they're gonna convert at a higher rate you're gonna make more money and it'll lead to exponential growth in your business so don't let a day go by that you're not actively testing and figuring out and answering that question why it's the only way to get and keep a competitive advantage in today's noisy digital world so again this is Justin Christensen the co-founder and president of Conversion Fanatics and you are watching FDCs ecommerce education vlog we'll talk to you again on another video. Hope you enjoyed it, thanks! [Music]
[Music] Welcome to FDC's ecom education vlog. My name is Mike Fleming and I am the founder of Michael J Fleming & Associates. We also are known as sales tax and more and what I'd like to share with you today are some sales tax basics and why the most recent Supreme Court case this South Dakota verse Wayfair that was decided on Thursday June 21st. Why it has such an impact not only on the sales tax world but for e-commerce sellers as well I'm going to use a term called Nexus you may have heard of this before and when we use this term we simply mean some sort of link or connection with the state and it's the linker connection that has to be present before state can require you to collected sales tax or pay its income taxes and for the last 50 years when we're talking about sales tax there's got to be some sort of physical component to this linker connection so we've disagreed as to what exactly a physical component is but you know people have been protected sellers have been protected that a state just can't go out and say okay you know you need to collect our sales tax because of this. There's had to be that physical component of this linker connection now this case overturned national Bella's Hess which is a 1967 case that introduced the concept of physical presence and then quill in 1992 reaffirmed the need for physical presence you know this court didn't overturn just overturn those two cases I mean they eviscerated the whole concept of physical presence they said that the court should have never introduced it. It's an artificial construct it's it's a it actually creates problems rather than solves problems so the court erred when introducing it now what this opens up the way for is what we call an economic Nexus in other word you can have a link with a state now just by making sales into it you know and that is an absolute nightmare you could now have a responsibility to potentially collect tax in all 45 states that charge a sales tax plus Washington DC the state of South Dakota which was you know going after wayfarer and utilizing this economic Nexus they had a threshold of a hundred thousand dollars or two hundred trees actions now a hundred thousand dollars of sales in South Dakota that's a lot of money but 200 transactions that that could be a very small amount of money let's say you're selling $5 items that's only a thousand dollars so you know this can. You can see how this could get very disturbing now some people out there are saying you know the Supreme Court is going to step in unfortunately we don't have time to go into all the reasons why I don't believe this is going to happen it may happen but I just think the deck is stacked against ecommerce sellers and we will not get any movement from Congress or at least any movement that's going to appreciably help ecommerce sellers. We can you know for the Amazon sellers that can wait for Amazon but that's not going to happen overnight I think that that's a three to five year process for again a number of different reasons we can go into when we have more time. At this point there really aren't any good solutions so I think we have to start resigning ourselves that sales tax is going to be a bigger part of our lives and that we need to start planning and putting it into our budgets and into our business models one of the first things that you want to do right now is evaluate your sales by state. Second thing you want to do is start counting the number of transactions that you have and then the third thing is look at those states out there that already have thresholds in place. By the way there's only about 23 states that we need to look at right now pretty much all the states are going to start implementing this but it's going to take them you know some of them maybe 30 days but some of them may be a good 12 - 14 months. So this is going to be constantly evolving over time it's nothing to panic about there are ways forward we got to use common sense when we're looking at this in the case I mentioned earlier if you're 200 transactions only equals a thousand dollars you know who cares what the state says if it doesn't make good business sense than why do it. We have to use common sense when we're doing this. However I think the states are going to be very aggressive enforcing not only this but all the other types of neck is Nexus that are still out there and if your sales are material in any state your exposure is material then I suggest you take some action and start protecting yourself. Thanks very much I appreciate your time and look forward to sharing again soon. [Music]
[Music] What I'd like to share with you today, what fulfillment dot com asked me to come and share with you today are two revolutionary things that can change your business instantaneously and put more money in your bottom line and that's what I want to do with you I want to make you more money so we have a rebate program that we're gonna facilitate with you and we also have an issuing platform that you can take advantage of okay now I'm gonna go ahead and explain these through my stick figure drawings and hopefully you can follow along if not just watch this video again and again and again and just get my face and plant it into your brain. So you know what goes where to go back and take advantage of these programs. Number one the merchant you you have a store, now this is an e-commerce store that you guys are selling whatever it is that you're selling there there's there's an interchange cost that's associated with taking credit cards and everyone has to use a credit card because that's the only way that you can take payments online so you go ahead and generate a cost this goes to the pay certify gateway and because of the fact that we're so large and we aggravate these volumes what we actually do is we have a virtual card platform that allows us to give a rebate back to you as the merchant now this is a very exclusive program this program you have to be doing at least thirty million dollars a month in order to qualify. Now you probably don't do you thirty million dollars a month but because the fact that you deal with pay certified we're able to aggregate all of our volume and give at least give you guys the ability to participate in this program. Now what we do is we generate a virtual card that generates an interchange value of about 2.7 percent now you paid about two percent on the front end okay goes to the pay certified gateway we automatically issue this this virtual card which the consumer doesn't know about the generate it's a virtual card and we paid the third-party suppliers and we pay the third-party supplier. This interchange is generated now because you paid two percent on the front end what we're gonna do because you're such a good client we're gonna give you a portion of this rebate there's two point seven percent back to cover that initial cost so if your first if your front line cost is two percent and we're giving you two percent back we just eliminated 100 percent of your costs even if we're giving you one and a half or 1.7%. If your frontline cost is two-and-a-half to three percent we're still taking a big chunk of that problem that monetary problem at the end of the month away from you and we're adding padding massive amounts of money to your bottom line it's a very very cool program nobody else has it you only find it here at Pace certified and you can get it as soon as you click into our funnel. The other platform is our issuing platform now this is revolutionary as well we built this for the travel space but this is also built for e-commerce stores so anyone that's selling a product online like you can take advantage of this particular solution. So this guy right here is me when I wake up in the morning and what I do when I wake up in the morning is I go buy Starbucks and let's just say I'm buying Starbucks online okay or whatever it is I'm hiding online and buying it online I'm making this purchase now when I make this purchase I'd go through the gate a certified gateway which is connected while all these shopping carts out there yours included what we do is we we instantly offer a reward subsidy okay so because I'm a shopping consumer online and I'm spending of $500 or $1,000 or whatever that number is I can instantly generate generate a reward subsidy. Now we have back in channel partners that allow us to instantly pool kyc an offer and a make an offer to a consumer so at the checkout page and this doesn't affect consumer checkout or the experience of the consumers so they can take advantage of the offer or they don't have to take advantage of the offer but if your consumer and you're building up a checkout page of $1,000 okay and I'm offering you two hundred two hundred dollars off that purchase most consumers will take advantage of that now the advantage to you is because you're still getting your full thousand dollars. That subsidy is covering that discount that we're giving to them and why would they do that? Because they want that consumer as a customer to continue to spend money so we offer this discount at the purchase and when we offer this discount the purchase and convert that customer to a to now a customer of the the issuer we're generating affiliate Commission. That affiliate Commission is in split up between pay certify and you so not only are we adding value on the front end by giving your consumers a discount we're also giving them incentives to come back to your store and continue to spend money and you make a piece of that spend that the consumer does you also make a piece of that funding affiliate commissions. So if you're doing thousands of transactions a day we'll be converting about 25% of those into discounts which in which results in about twenty-five to forty dollars to you and per consumer so you can do the math and if you can you can look at your own statistics and see how much money you're actually generating as an ecommerce store then you can decide if this program is a fit for you but what I can tell you is that if you're looking to pad additional revenue and you want consumers to continue to shop at your location and spend more money day after day, month after month this is a solution that's going to put this into high gear for you and put more money in your pocket guaranteed. [Music]
[Music] Everybody welcome to FDC's Ecomm education vlog. My name is Dan Stewart and I'm the founder Happy Grasshopper. We write and deliver emails every single day of the week and I've got three tips for you they're gonna make all of your emails better. First and this is super super important make absolutely sure that you know your purpose for sending the email there's a big difference between a first touch and a message that's going to someone that's weeks deep in your sales call. So be very clear about who's reading the message and why and know what your number one outcome for that messages and you'll get a much better result. Second you've got to know your audience understand their pain why is it that they've reached out to you in the first place? Why is it that they've raised their hand and out of all the places they could go in the internet they're looking at you? If you can speak to that conversation that they're already having you're gonna win with your email so know your audience and finally and this is super important keep your message short. You want to make sure that every single message you send is easy to read on a mobile phone. That's where most emails are consumed today, so keep your message brief. Boil it down to one specific point, be absolutely clear what your goal is and by that I mean what is your most desired action on their part what is the thing you want them to do. Structure emails to where it will achieve that thing and nothing else and you'll get a much better response from myristic so enjoy the vlog. [Music]
[Music] Years ago I was asked to represent a line of cleaning products on a national network and it was the first time anybody had seen these cleaning products before. They they've never experimented with them, it didn't have a big following, it wasn't a brand anybody recognized but the products really worked well. However I told the vendor I was working with this package is not going to sell and he said to me, why it's a great product it, works well. I said yes you're right we have great demonstrations, we have good testimonials, but it's not gonna sell regardless of how good it works and he said why? I said because it's too complicated when we came out on the air at the beginning of our presentation and we were trying to tell people what they were going to get when they ordered it it was a cleaning product that came in a bottle of concentrate and could be diluted into three different mixtures one for light duty medium duty or heavy duty each one would make a different number of bottles it also came with a sponge it came with a microfiber cloth it came with two different sprayers one that would spray inverted 300 180 degrees one that would foam when you sprayed it it also came in four different flavors you could choose like Abba lavender scented or the Apple scented or all these different things. Oh my gosh there's no customer on the planet that's going to do the mental calisthenics to try and figure out which one they want to buy! Nobody would! They will tune out, they will walk away rather than do the mental work. You need to make your offer very easy to understand the moment it becomes complicated you've lost just about everybody because they don't want to work hard they want it to be easy. Now what he was offering might have made sense if he was doing a big event and it was going to be shown all day long and he had a very well-established brand and he really didn't need to educate people on who he was or what the product was about it all just made sense he had an enormous following I mean if selling vacuum cleaners and he is Dyson it can be about as complicated as he needs it to be it doesn't really matter it's Dyson, right? Well it was a problem with this new brand and if you're trying to draw in new customers if you're trying to draw in people who are gonna use your product or service for the first time but your offers are not really easy to understand you're shooting yourself in the foot. Make your offer extremely easy for your customer to interpret make it so that they can choose the one they want in ten seconds flat here I have a cleaner it comes in this bottle you can choose this one or this one pick the one you want BAM done. We would have sold a million of them. We didn't sell a million of them as a matter of fact no matter how many warnings I gave that particular manufacturer before we went on air with his product it didn't matter he wouldn't change the offer and the offer went through the floor but guess what it was brought back later with a very simple offer and it's skyrocketed. I have to get myself a little pat on the back for that one. Make sure your offer is simple it'll mean a huge escalation in your sales. [Music]
[Music] Follow the FDC's ecom education blog. My name is Katherine I'm an office administrator here at Avensis. Partnering with the right call center is critical because it's likely the only physical real-time contact your customers will have with your brand. Unfortunately you don't have the time or resources to run your online business and build out a high functioning call center. That is why so many successful online and traditional businesses partner with boutique domestic BPOs to engage their customers. Follow these eight steps when partnering with the call center to achieve consistent high-quality user experience that will differentiate your business. Step one: create a culture of trust. For your feedback to be successful your customer service Account Manager and your internal auditing team must be on the same page before beginning examine your company's core values as well as the bodies of the team you're using to communicate on behalf of your brand to the whole world. How do they influence your culture and guide behavior? Our team members focused on other successes as well as their own is your Account Manager rewarded for helping your business grow professionally in a recent study by Paul Jay Zack a Harvard researcher, he discovered that compared to people at low trust companies, people at high trust companies report seventy-four percent less stress and 40% less burnout. High quality support starts with high quality employees. So creating a culture of trust is key to any outsource to customer service model. Step two: defined quality. Including your new team and conversation that that defined quality creates a shared understanding. Use real life call examples to generate discussion. For example, if everyone agrees that empathy and listening are important, how to call responses , demonstrate empathy and listening if the customer shares an experience or an emotion, does the team member responding to the customer reflect that emotion? Does the team member create a rapport with the customer? Step 3: create rubrics and determine benchmarks. Create rubrics and weigh the criteria according to your values. If you have decided in steps one and two that professionalism is important add this to your rubric determine if it is more important than correctness or empathy for example rubrics work best when there are no more than four to five criteria some of the best rubrics we see include correctness is the response correct completeness did the team member answer the customers questions empathy the team member or personalized their response it acknowledged the customers feelings and professionalism. Did the team member demonstrate good email etiquette? Find a range of customer responses that you can use as benchmarks, as a group evaluate the responses based on the rubric you created this benchmarking exercise generates a second discussion of quality and gives team members practice using the rubric. Step four: make your team reflect on their own customer responses. Research in the fields of business and education has demonstrated the importance of reflection and learning in your article why you should make time for self reflection even if you hate doing it Jennifer Porter asserts that reflection allows us to pause, sort through all of our experiences and observations and create. Meaning which then becomes learning. Researchers found that call centres demonstrated that employees who spent 15 minutes the end of each day reflecting about lessons learned performed 23 percent better after 10 days than those who did not reflect making time for reflection in the peer review process prepares team members to learn. Step 5: make sure your account manager trains your team on how to provide feedback. Make sure your account manager knows what good effective feedback looks like sharing specific examples. Good feedback should focus on what their team member did what the effect was and what steps they could take next feedback should be specific and in the case of criticism it should include suggestions for improvement here's a couple of examples when you told the customer that they were having an issue they immediately became defensive. Next time consider placing the blame on the device rather than the customer which diffuses the situation when you share your personal experience with the customer you reduce the tension. Great work. Step 6: begin your review and share feedback you or your own Quality Assurance team should be proactive in defining quality and giving your contact center the opportunity to reflect on their own responses. By doing this we avoid surprises in the feedback process team members know how their calls will be evaluated beforehand. Once your review process is done it's best to make sure your team is afforded a second opportunity for reflection that captures what they learned during the peer review process. How did the call centers self-assessment compare to your assessment? Use this reflection to guide goal setting as well as training for Optimax a prototype optics manufacturer with revenues of 30 million dollars the answer is team based performance reviews. They avoid potential pitfalls by giving the reviewers clear guidelines and by contrasting the employees self review with peer reviews so they can compare self perception with team perception that also helps the reviewers to stay objective in the process they act as coaches relaying information step 7 provide training based on the results of their review it may seem like common sense but I can't tell you how many contact centers drop the ball on this. Use your feedback to train and retrain your call center team tying their training to your review process demonstrates the relevancy of the quality assurance process collecting data enables you to offer training opportunities to a whole team if for example we see patterns that indicate that more training is needed on the etiquette alternatively individual team members can pursue training to strengthen specific areas based on feedback from their peers. Tracking this data over time demonstrates growth for both teams and individuals. In conclusion remember to repeat steps four through seven as often as possible you're creating your own well loyal customer service machine you'll find that by doing this that you're consulting your rubrics and your benchmark standards that you already created less and less off well MPs ratings might be great rubrics it doesn't really answer the ultimate question that you as an entrepreneur need to answer is your customer service up to your business's standards by partnering with the right customer contact term by holding them accountable in the right way you're gonna keep these bells ringing and your customers happy all the time. Thank you so much for joining Aventis today at FDC University we're really happy to have you and share some of our knowledge with you. [Music]
[Music] Hey welcome to FDC's ecom education vlog. My name is Tom Suckman and I'm the Business Development Manager here at Clickbank. Today I'm gonna share with you the top three questions I get when I'm helping new clients and new entrepreneurs get spun up on Clickbank in the direct response space so that I can help you learn more so you can earn more. So first question I get almost all the time even if I'm out on the road or from you or come across from this is like hey is my product a good fit for Clickbank? Is my product a good fit for affiliate marketing? Is it a you know is it gonna convert well with your affiliates? And my answers also is almost always yes like yeah it's a via the products great right there's very few people out there who really make bad products, if you believe in something and you believe it can help people it's gonna be a good product. Like I have no doubt the issue is is that it's not about the product it's about the pain points your product is solving for the customer and how you're marketing that product. Okay it could be a shed like I don't care like it's like a diesel shed and direct-response you can't get a good copywriter, what are those pain points for it? Okay so it's about the copywriting it's about the front-end sales page that's gonna drive that cold traffic to a conversion. The next one is usually, what commission do I need to pay an affiliate? That's a great question like it sits I wouldn't know to answer that you know three years ago before I kind of got on board here at Clickbank. So what commission do you need to pay? It's also the wrong question. Okay because it's a big variable that changes a lot. What I at my short answer to this is get comfortable paying up to a hundred percent of your margin. The reason for that is competition, quote unquote, is different for any niche and even some you know sub niches are different so that guy might be paying forty five bucks but your product might be so unique and address such a different pain point that this affiliates gonna email for both of you and it's not gonna compete with one another in his pipelin, okay? But but if you are a weight loss offer going up against a weight loss offer both are talking to keto and very specific in similar ways then yeah you might need to bump your commission up ten more percent to get your average cart value or to get the average cart value to the affiliate higher so the Phillies wanting mail for you more versus this guy over here, right? So it's variable but be comfortable going up to hundred percent. Next thing and final question is kind of like do you know any affiliates? Will test my offer? Hey, you have put all this money into copywriting and put all this money into or you know Ries time and energy into copywriting or whatever it might be and building out this funnel. Do you know any affiliates who can mail for me? Who can test it? Yeah I know a lot of affiliates like any big network or anyone working in a big network or who's in the space for wellzyn. I know some big affiliates to test it I don't want an intro a big affiliate or even a new affiliate to an offer that hasn't been tested already though, right? When you give someone a referral to an offer you should know and if it's your offer you should have a very high degree of confidence that if they've got a decent audience for it and they can be the judge of that right but if they have a good audience for it it's going to convert because you've done your part you've done your testing. Okay so it's I don't want to burn any bridges for myself and I don't want to I certainly don't wanna burn any bridges for you and making connection to an unproven offer that's not gonna convert well and then that affiliates gonna go off and he's never gonna promote you again or that would suck so how do you get affiliates the test and how do you get traffic to test if you don't have a traffic source already Network get out there go to traffic and conversion and go to affiliates summits go to all these industry events once I click Bank hosts and other platforms host meet affiliates meet vendors and offer owners with similar lists to yours or similar audiences to yours right and help them first so they'll help you later okay there's gonna be knowledge you have that you can impart or do something that you can do for them that's gonna unlock something and they'll be happy to send for you and happy to test traffic for you so those are the questions I get most commonly but I would love to hear from you and what questions you have so leave a comment below let me know what questions you have about affiliate marketing it can be as beginner or as advanced as you wanted to be I'll go cut my teeth on them yeah it's been great, it's been real, it's been real great. I'm Thomas, stay green. [Music]
Reading the book, you got an amazing quote that I think fits so if you take everything you're talking about now, it's just a theory, if I gave it to someone, their business would fail, but you immediately continue with all these specific things, and I I think the first thing I learned from the book was to understand that I was at the beginning of my journey, I was a technician who had an entrepreneurial fit, and I was not an entrepreneur, so explain to these guys what you mean by this list of each business owner and those, who is our technical manager and entrepreneur - these are three personalities, but when you realize that most people going into business are not really entrepreneurs, they don't have a dream, they don't have a vision, they don't have a goal, I don't have a mission, they want to get a job, they want to be self-employed, so they want to get rid of the boss so get rid of the boss and create your own, everyone knows what I'm talking about, because you believe you know how to do the job, meaning your photographer, so I can get rid of the boss and become a photographer, open my own establishment and take pictures, and you know how to accept photos, so it's obvious that you are a photographer, you open your doors, but what you didn't realize is that you are a photographer, a technician suffering from an entrepreneurial fit, but you have no idea that there are all these other functions of this photographic business called manager, marketing, sales, money the problem of most small businesses is that the founder of the business - a technician suffering from an entrepreneurial fit, and that's why most small businesses fail for that very reason, so we need to develop manager skills, and we need to develop odd skills, if my business is not here to do something for someone else that is important to someone else, then this is the wrong business.
[Music] Welcome to FDC's ecom education blog. I'm Nikki Peraltas Senior Account Manager here at Aventis. Today I'm going to go over three hints that every merchant needs to know in order to optimize their relationship with their customer contact center. This will help you learn more so you can earn more those three hints are scripting and deployment, technology integration and taking the partnership seriously. First to talk about scripting and appointment let's get with Scotland. Hey how are you? Good, how are you? Good, so why don't you tell me a little bit about the importance of scripting for our e-commerce clients. Yeah so it's really important three C's customized, consistency and compliance. So when we talk about customization it's really important that it's based on the product, it's based on a client and specifically, you're able to make adjustments for a conversation so it's not about just reading it, it's about being able to use transitional phrases, it's about being able to customize everything based on what the product does, what it looks like everything you're able to do there. So when we talk about consistency we want to make sure that all of the agents regardless of the location they're in are telling the customer exactly the same information. You don't want all different information being made up or anything going out there that's not the message that you want for your brand in fact that when we talk about compliance you don't want rogue agents out there talking about all different things you want terms and conditions in the script so that everyone's saying exactly the same thing. Wow that was some really good stuff let's go with Brain Pharaoh and talk about technological integration hey ray miss pross hi sorry I'm doing very well thank you, have a seat. We were just talking to Scott about the importance of scripting for our e-commerce entrepreneurs that's some good stuff definitely and we wanted to give the importance of technological integration. Well that's excellent that's excellent that we came to buy today's ecommerce entrepreneurs need that call center is integrated as possible with all their vendors that includes CRMs, fulfillment centers, even manufacturers to KPIs you have to look at when you're integrating with the call center is integration in optimization. 1. Can your agents integrate with your existing platform? 2. Can they improve upon the status quo? If your agents are worried about anything else like trying to learn a new piece of technology but your business has already been using you're already behind the eight ball you need to make sure your contact center works in partnership with all your other major vendors and can do that in concert whether it's verifying addresses for the fulfillment provider or going in and programming these SKUs in their CRM your contact center should be there for you to help you every step of the way. Wow those are some really informative points thanks. Right would you stop my enjoining me in the conference room so we can talk about our third and final point which is taking the partnership seriously absolutely for our third point and our most important point I wanted to talk to you guys about taking the partnership seriously. What do you think from our experience is most critical between a client and its call center? I think calibration is probably one of the most important pieces because you want your contact center to be an extension of your brand. Scott's 100% right and Nikki you do bring up a great point that that is the most important thing finding the synergy between client and call center. Ken that call center can that contact center being extension of your brand do they know in your business model can they integrate with all your vendors and actually be that ambassador that extra extension of who you are was actually on the front lines fighting with the customers the people providing you with that revenue that's the most important point to look for when you're looking for a contact center remember everyone companies that have figured out how to delight their customers but their service are winning in the marketplace so keep empowering keep challenging and keep innovating because when you're green you grow and when you're ripe you rock. This is Nikki Peralta signing off. Stay green! [Music]
[Music] [Music] So it's really really important here is like so many people right now running traffic fall under this little cool growing leaf that I've so beautifully illustrated here everyone's focus is I got a product I'm gonna drive my ads to my product page and I'm just gonna keep hitting people buy my product buy my product go here by this and that's the bubble that they they live in right just driving traffic to product page. Hopefully they buy and they don't going to retarget out of them until they either say it's unhelpful my fruit my brother and score goes on to to or until they buy. The problem is that already had a problem before what happened with Facebook and last we can have it is getting more and more expensive to run. Facebook traffic it's an auction-based platform and as all of you know we take an economics class in college or high school; supply and demand right supply on facebook on the ad side has remained pretty constant fix rule hasn't grown that much. Newsfeed inventory has been saturated for a while now Facebook's basically like hey can't serve any more ads without ruining user experience we're capping it demands kept going up demand keeps going up and up and up that's why the holidays you see ad cost spike and so ad costs have gone up. CPAs are gone, ops got more expensive and so driving people to a product page,it's just it's too expensive to work. That coupled the fact that if you don't have a brand, if you're not Apple or Coke or Nike or Pepsi,Under Armor, people don't know your brand they don't know who you are then although you're selling and they're buying a solution to a problem at that point unless your Nike or Apple when it comes with oh wait in line to buy your new iPhone which I do every time luckily I got a business right now so I don't do any lines anymore but I used to. People are don't care about your Aliexpress product they don't care about that print-on-demand t-shirt people are buying solutions to problems, right? I think we all get a little too focused on the platform like Facebook is an app platform you can do dynamic product ads and you can pixel and you can do manual bidding all the stuff at the end of the day Facebook's a medium it's a way for brands and businesses to get a message to people and to nurture and sell those people right so whether it's direct mail TV billboards which Billie Jean still runs billboard you use the billboards works right Facebook there's a way to do that. So you need to be able to actually agitate problems you need to actually educate consumers they need to know that they're looking for your solution and that your product is just a solution they don't carry a product at the point because the problems been agitated so effectively that they see your product, hey that's the solution this guy's been nurturing you with content he's gonna hit me videos with articles and at the point now where I'm actively looking for a solution and there's our product. [Music] Thank you
[Music] Welcome to FDCs ecom education blog. My name's Oliver Kenyon and I'm the co-founder a landing page guys calm and today I want to share with you our top five tips on how to build high converting landing pages. Let's get straight into it okay so you're joining me on my screen and I'm going to break down the five most important that we feel most important conversion tips to increase your conversion rates on your landing pages this is five of many over here the landing page guys but these are the five that we feel you can get some quick wins with and and you will see some results very quickly we'll jump straight into it. Number one is page speed I'm going to read this stat one second increase in load speed is a two percent up the lift in conversions so what that means is for every second your website loads quicker or landing page blows quicker you'll see a - it's actually we've tested this two to seven percent up lifting conversion which is crazy really really quick way of upping your conversions how do you do it head to GT metrics common input your landing page URL it's going to spit out how quickly your page loads and then going to break down how you can increase those speeds it's that simple. Number two responsiveness now responsiveness is nothing new obviously mobile and tablet has been around for a long time now however we're not just talking about making your landing page adapted to mobile and tablet resolutions we're also talking about making adapted to all screen resolutions so making sure that it looks good on all different sized screens whether that's an iMac 11 inch or 21 inch screen any size monitor make sure that your page is adaptive to to those screens the other thing here is we're not just talking about responsiveness we're talking about actually optimizing your mobile version so if you've got a mobile version of your website that or landing page make sure it's actually optimized for the mobile experience. You can do this by kind of breaking down hiding elements and making sure the user experience on the mobile and tablet is as good if not better than your desktop don't just make it don't just make it responsive make it optimized responsive for mobile and tablet. Number three cross browser compatibility and this is one we see a loss of our clients to get make sure that your landing page is cross-browser compatible make sure it looks good on all of the all of the browsers in front of you on this picture. 71% of users still use so I use Chrome and that's probably a little higher now but the rest use these other browsers so make sure that your page loads good on all of these browsers test it yourself download all these browsers. But another thing you can do is Google browser shots use that tool it's a really good tool you again like GT metrics put in your landing page URL and it's gonna spit out how your landing page looks across all these different browsers we've had clients come to us especially target the older generation and who still use the dreaded Internet Explorer and stuff like that and their buttons call to actions forms everything are missing from those browsers so always double-check number for positioning making sure your value proposition is very very strong 84% of your visitors won't scroll further unless you're above the fold proposition is strong. So what this means is you need to get across above the fold is exactly what you do hit hard hit home make it obvious don't put any distractions and pique their interest now speaking on this I'm going to take you to the next slide because this feeds in but making sure that value proposition is strong is crucial otherwise people don't scroll down. ADA principle now this one is one of our favorites is probably the the one that we feel is most important. Now to use a psychology and user journey flowing them through that page to that call to action whether that's at the top at the bottom you should always repeat that call to action what's this stands for attention interest desire action and I'm going to quickly run through these attention making sure you have that strong value proposition. Look at our example this is our old website. Increase your business sales and conversions so people come into the landing page guys want to increase their sales through landing pages that convert we've already got that attention by having that clear you know title at the top then we pick their interest with the features and benefits and you want to focus more on benefits and features. Yes show your features that's great what your product does but always talk about benefits to the user we've outlined them and we get their desire how do we do this while using trust and social proof so for us it's a portfolio, it's testimonials. When it comes to testimonials always use all organic testimonials get real people people, real persons and you don't want real quotes, no stock photos nothing like that and use this trust and social proof to lead people down to that strong call to action we've got them now we want them to take action let's give this the them the easiest route to do whatever it is. Click a button to buy a product, a form to submit, whatever it is give them the easiest route to do it and call to action and that's the ADA principle and you should definitely be using this in your landing pages so that's five of a lot of tips that we can give you to increase your conversion rates on your landing pages. Thank you for listening please get in touch. Thanks to fulfillment dot com and always stay green and I'll speak to you soon. Thank you [Music]
[Music] welcome to FDC's ecomm blog. My name is Chris Hibbs and I am one of the Head Accountants here at Easier accounting. I am here to share with you my experience on accounting and bookkeeping in the e-commerce industry to help you learn more so that you can earn more. After 26 years the Supreme Court has ruled on June 21st, 2018 that States can impose sales tax on ecommerce sellers the vote was a five to four decision that was in favor of brick-and-mortar businesses who have long complained at the disadvantages of having to charge sales tax while most online retailers haven't had to those who will feel the biggest pinch are the small to medium detailers instead of the big companies who have been paying sales tax because of their warehouses and stores in almost every state. This is how it can affect you for example if you are located in California and sell a product to someone in this state of Utah you then would be required to make sure that the state of Utah gets the sales tax for the product you sold just so you're aware there are five states that don't have any sales tax Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon. All other states will have some sort of sales tax and each state could be a different amount, this is what makes it hard to track it by yourself or in a spreadsheet. Don't panic there are several software companies that are available if you plan on tracking it yourself. The three main software providers are tax jar, tax a five and a Valero tax jars built for small to medium sized companies and we have found it to be a better software for our e-commerce clients tax. If I and a valera are built to support the larger companies and with that said also have a larger price tag to go with it if the thought of tracking your own sales tax is too daunting or you just don't have the time to do so we would recommend the use an accounting firm that you feel the most comfortable with that specializes in sales tax like all things in the e-commerce industry sales tax laws will continue to evolve and it is important as an ecommerce entrepreneur to keep up to date on the new rulings and laws. We hope that this helps you put in place a system that works for you. This is Chris Hibbs signing off staggering [Music]
[Music] Welcome to FDCs ecommerce education blog. Hi my name's Richie Hale and I'm the Chief Innovation Officer. I've touched CR in this video I'd like to share a patent-pending process to significantly reduce, well actually eliminate chargebacks. That's right is eliminate chargebacks. As we all know chargebacks are the digital poison of any e-commerce company. You generate a lead, convert them to a customer and ship the product then days or weeks later actually up to six months your customers that decide that they didn't want the product in the first place so rather than call your company and ask for a refund which you gladly and cheerfully fulfill. Your customer calls their bank and disavows any knowledge of the transaction taking place in the first place. Of course the bank sides with their customer and immediately issues a charge back to the merchant, you and exceed the 1% threshold when you have a digital target on your back but what if theres a way to change the chargeback game. Well if there's a way to stop charge backs at the source before they ever leave your customers bank. Well I'm happy to say there is, by using a technique well known to the industry and applying it properly to the front end transactions we can actually eliminate charge backs. The secret is simple: two-factor authentication Two-factor authentication is a method of confirming a user's identity by utilizing a combination of two different factors, the first factor something they know; the password credit-card details, their address; the second factor is something unique to the transaction in this case a six digit code sent to their mobile phone that the answers have verified their identity. So let's review the process as part of your order form be sure to require the customers mobile phone number this is critical to the process then when the customer proceeds to the next step they fill in their credit card details and select the Pay Now button then the fun begins the customer receives an SMS message on their mobile phone with a six digit authentication code they're asked to enter this code on the checkout screen which now contains a pop-up like this the customer enters the six digit verification code and they're done of course you can gamify this process if you like buffering a free gift exciting information a contest and so on once entered the confirmation page appears and the transaction is complete. Congratulations you've just processed a credit card transaction validating the customer's identity using two-factor authentication. Now to be clear this will not eliminate true fraud and the credit card stolen. However what this process does is prevent the customer who made the purchase from committing a fraudulent act by filing a false filing. A false claim in other words the bank knows this is a two-factor authentication transaction therefore if the customer calls the bank with no knowledge of the transaction the bank has a fiduciary responsibility not to allow the customer to file a false claim nor can the bank so the bank will most likely suggest that the customer call your company and ask for a full refund. Of course this is a simple quick overview of the process if you'd like more details on how to use this for your company please contact us at info at touchier. Thank you very much. [Music]
[Music] - Jeremy Adams here co-founder of Unicorn Innovations and co-founder of Unicorn IQ which is the hat I'm wearing. And today I want to talk about one of our favorite subjects to talk about it's how we live our lives and how all the people we have partnerships with a new consulting with and do training for it's something we stress all the time and that's customer lifetime value and to really just break down customer lifetime value into three steps you know and I'm gonna share those three steps but actually let me backtrack you know customer lifetime value if you don't know is pretty self-explanatory but it's either in depending on how you calculate it at different businesses are different the amount of profit made over the lifetime of a customer or the amount of revenue which could be one purchase it could be three months it could be three years business models vary but it's the lifetime value either profit or revenue that customer will give you and focusing on the lifetime value is what typically separates the eight and multiple a figure businesses and above and the six and seven figure business is an actually shooting this with like a crazy storm going on right now so three steps. Number one: stop worrying so much about your initial cost acquire customer you can't be looking at random Facebook ads and things seeing these four or five X returns and you're at a two X return and you're super mad about you can't scale your campaigns at four X just we do a lot of like high-level paid traffic consulting and you know our most successful customers sometimes only are only making a little bit of money around a break-even sometimes even losing money on that initial purchase but that's okay because you want to pay a little more to get a quality customer so don't worry so much about your initial cost to acquire customer and that leads them to number two which is the reason you don't have to worry about it that much is because you have your long-term game. Your long-term game figure it out now, we spent weeks and weeks just for our unicorn cube rain coming up with a year-plus automation of upsells for affiliate products that we use internally and for service providers that we use and you know it's very value focused this isn't just selling. Selling its we put videos on how we use them in our business and how they've been able to help us know we have a super long term focus you know if you have a product of any kind you know if there's a continuity option put a continuity option in place or upsell the continuity right if you didn't get it on that initial purchase if there are higher priced items you can solve that customer that you offer great if there's Christmas specials if there's Easter specials break. You know this is an opportunity to build out your long-term game if there's strategic partnerships you can make with companies that offer other products that sell to the same type of client you have, great you know, figure out your long-term game so you can make money off that customer for for hopefully years to come and then again you're not so much worried about the the initial costs to acquire that customer. Number three and this one is is a very important one and it's one of the the hardest ones that even sometimes personally I've had challenges with the last couple years have been different and it's been huge in our success and businesses value things like brand equity and quality word of mouth in your industry even though you may be breakeven on that that that front end and you you know may not be making as much as you want long term yet you're still trying to test things. You know when people are seeing your ads when people are telling their friends about how good your product or services there's so much value to that and eventually that's gonna snowball to additional opportunities for example we run a lot of traffic to our unicorn IQ Academy to our Facebook. Of course there are days when we are not profitable and we're really mad you know we're not like we don't print goal here we do very well we've had a lot success and we're scaling really nicely now but we're not perfect but from that brand equity people will reach out and say hey we saw your ads we did some research would you like to partner up in this company of ours or hey would you you know we're uh you know twenty million dollar company we're looking to scale 250 million would you like to partner with us and help us so there's there's so many things outside of your initial offer so many benefits you know we've actually brought on some of our team members because they loved our mission they reached out do you have any opportunities and we hired them and they're great team members because they just love their mission a level we were doing so just value things like your reputation and brand equity and all those things that you really can't put on a profit and loss statement. So hopefully this was helpful definitely reach out to me if you want to connect any anybody with fulfillment dot com is awesome so we were always looking to connect with people in that community and thanks for watching! [Music]
[Music] Welcome to FDCs ecomm education vlog, my name is Justin Christensen the Co-founder and President of Conversion Fanatics and the number one best-selling author of Conversion Fanatic: How to double your customer sales and profits with a/b testing and today I wanted to talk about the anatomy breakdown of what goes into creating an effective product page on your ecommerce store. Now we're in the world of Shopify and we're in the world of all of these other elements but a few of the key things that you need to pay attention to are first, very high quality professionally taken product images and the more the better. So the problem we have with e-commerce is that we don't have the luxury of people coming in and trying on our product or touching and feeling it and holding it and experiencing it before they make that buying decision. So we need to take the best approach that we can to let them experience it through the images so show the image or, show the product from all angles, show comparison size of the product, show people you know wearing the product or using the product the more that you can provide that to them the better off you're gonna be. The next step is do a clear and concise title of the product, don't give be gimmicky or you know sales are you're tricky just tell them exactly what this product is next is if you have reviews on the page be sure to highlight those reviews up near the title. You know a star rating usually in gold, take a page out of Amazon things like that but then move on to a very short description and don't talk about too much of the features of the product but tell exactly what that product is going to do leading with the benefits of those products, then make sure we have a very simple and easy to consume and easy to digest and easy to use selection option so if you have size and color breakdowns and things like that don't be tricky in that process you know make it very simple for your visitors to select and know that they need to make that selection next or first before they can move on to the next step. Another thing that you can do is or one thing you should be doing is make sure that you have a very strong contrasting big bold call-to-action button that helps lead that visitor down the next path you can also leverage things like your guarantee shipping times you know, security , you know satisfaction guarantee, made in the USA all of these other things but leverage them as icons because people on the product pages don't necessarily read so the shorter breakdowns that you can have on your paragraphs and the imagery and things like that the better off you're gonna be. Next below on for a little bit further down on the page make sure that you are recommending additional products. Another way to really ramp up your average order value is to actually create bundles you know take a page right out of Amazon and say frequently bought together you can actually create bundles on that specific page and we've seen up to 30 or 40 percent increase in average order value, just by giving them an additional complimentary product for sale directly on that page. So hey buy the bundle you want to buy this product but why don't you just buy this bundle instead and save 10% or whatever you can do to incentivize them to push them down but next break it down a little bit further by your product description and features and you know maybe a little bit more about your guarantee and anything you can do and then have your reviews break down further on the page then on mobile one thing that people don't pay attention to is they have a mobile responsive site so they just think they're good. Well in fact you're not good the way things stack up specifically on stores like Shopify is the theme doesn't always stack things in the right order so on mobile make sure that you have your title and your reviews above the image. Chances are that will help increase your results. Show the images, have an easy breakdown on mobile with a carousel the image not too big allow them to zoom, mouse over zoom, something incredibly effective versus a click to zoom and then make sure your call-to-action and your and stuff is up higher on the page so it's a very easy to see if you can get it above the fold the better off you're gonna be there. So that's just a few tips that I have to make an effective product detail page. Be sure that you're testing those elements and not just making the changes and if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me. Myself and my team are happy to help and help you get more results out of your product detail pages. Thanks for watching [Music]
I discovered years ago before I started my company in 1977 - yes that's how old I am - that businesses don't work, the people who own them do. Get this again businesses don't work the people who own them do and unfortunately the people who own them are doing the wrong work. Yes, you. Please don't take this personally unless you would truly like to have the circumstances of your business and your life completely transformed. Now I don't speak about this again academically I speak about this from the street we have worked with over 75,000 small business clients in 134 countries, my books have been read by over 8 million readers - not nearly the same as pastor Rick but the fascinating part about that is that Pastor Rick read my book and Pastor Rick was the first to tell me that when he introduced me last year to TEDx and said I wanted to introduce you to the man who wrote the book I built my church on. Well he built his church on another book but if you're going to build a church that's got to work in the world there is no more important book to read than my book. Now hear me please when I say this, I'm a wandering jew. Pastor Rick did say this in a meeting that i can fix that but when I say that by reading my book you can transform your business I don't mean that sort of I mean that absolutely. People come up to me and said I read your book it changed my life I read your book had changed my life. When business people come up to me and say this please I'm not selling books, if you understand this is not to sell a book if you didn't know the e-myth when you came here and all of you owned a business then you really have a problem. What I'm really saying is that the book speaks about very specific point of view that in fact will alter the way you think about your business from this day forward. My intent here in the hour that I have is that you will walk out of this room if I never meet you again with the most powerful idea you have ever heard that in fact is more than an idea it's an absolute fact and is at the core of every great company in the face of this earth. Core of McDonald's the cola core of Walmart, the caller core of Starbucks, the core of every extraordinary company in the face of this earth and you might say yeah but I'm not in the hamburger business, I'm not a retail store, I don't sell coffee, I don't sell tea yeah but none of them do either so this is what I want you to write down, please write this down every single one of you. If you're seriously here for a serious reason - seriously understand in fact what it is that enabled Pastor Rick from a word old perspective to build the most extraordinary church in this country this is the expression go to work on it not in it please write that down go to work on it capital o n not in it. I've been saying this for years, I implore you to hear it, go to work on it not in it [Music]
[Music] [Music] E-comm Education Blog my name is Ben and I'm the marketing director at No Issue. Today we're gonna talk a little bit about custom packaging. So what is custom packaging, what different types and methods there are of using custom packaging and finally how custom packaging can help you. So first things first let's talk about what custom packaging actually is so, ordinarily a box will arrive at your doorstep it'll look something like what, that's a regular brown box. What you want is something a little bit more special, something that says a little bit more to your customer. Looks something like this, a custom box isn't necessary for your brand but it does say a lot about what your brand represents it gives your customer something special, something a little bit extra and it makes it almost like a little surprise when it comes to the doorstep they'll be happy to get it. What are some different packaging types? Let's see, you've got tissue, stickers, boxes, tape, ribbons, a personalized note, packing peanuts or styrofoam. Pretty much anything that goes into that box when it's on its way to the customer, including the box that's the type of packaging. With all those different options for packaging there are a few more variables you're gonna have to consider when it comes time to making a decision on what you want your custom packaging to be. The first one is always gonna be cost because you're printing something customized and special for your brand it's gonna cost more than just a regular brown box package or plain tissue paper. The next thing you have to think about is the time so it takes a little bit more time to print on a box especially when that's a custom printed item for you and that means they have to make a new dye line and ship it to you so that's always gonna take a bit longer than a typical brown box and last but not least you've got to think about the quantities of the packaging that you're ordering. So this will influence both the cost of what you're finally gonna go with and your choices as to what packaging you use. For instance a box might come in a minimum order quantity of a thousand boxes. That's a lot of boxes, especially considering that a box can cost up to five dollars per unit, with that whole order you're paying about $5,000 just for your packaging. On the flip side you could go with ribbons which obviously cost a lot less but they don't really cover your entire product so trying to wrap something in a ribbon isn't really practical. Tissue on the other hand is a great little middle ground where what you get is something that can wrap your entire product at a low cost. Your minimum order quantities are important to think about because if you can get something at 250 units that can end up influencing what you go with in your packaging decisions. One last thing to consider is the environmental impact that your packaging has. Now this is just a note but there's a lot of plastic in current packaging and if you can reduce the amount of plastic you're using or in some way use recycled materials or anything else that has a positive environmental impact can be beneficial for your brand and for the Earth. And that brings us to the last point which is what can custom packaging do for your brand? Well the first thing is your customer is going to get an amazing unboxing experience. That's when they get the package, they open it up and it fosters a sense of curiosity and care that you've put into your packaging. In a dot-com distribution study this actually proved to increase customer loyalty as well as repeat purchases and those repeat purchases as you know are always going to be better than trying to go out and find a new customer. I bring this to our next point which is that people are gonna share it on social media any time you see someone having an unboxing video on YouTube that's because they've gotten a package that's amazing and looks great and they want to share that with their friends. Now the last point is that as a brand when you send out a custom packaged item you're actually making your brand seem more upscale. You're impressing people with the thought and the time that you've put into their experience and that's always gonna be beneficial and look good when it comes to your brand. Hopefully you've learned a little bit more about custom packaging, what it is, what to think about when you're ordering it, what different types there are and ultimately how it can help your business. From us at No issue that's a wrap! [Music]
[Music] Welcome to Fulfillment dot coms ecomm education blog my che for the sales whisperer. Today let's talk about the five proven steps to make every sale. As you can see here I have the traditional looking funnel, this is something we have all seen if we've been in sales for any amount of time. The funnel is obviously wider at the top, it's more narrow at the bottom. Now in traditional selling, you cast the net wide you have a big open funnel at the top because like they say you throw enough stuff against the wall something's bound to stick, same thing with fishing you throw this big wide net it increases the chances you'll catch something the problem is when you go out into open waters sometimes what you catch along with the fish include tires, plastic bottles, license plates, things you don't really necessarily want or need but as you notice here with this traditional funnel it's top down it's one directional. Yeah at the bottom you might be able to get some referrals and testimonials or whatnot but traditional companies, traditional salespeople, are not looking for that they're thinking about the sale and that's it. Throwing enough stuff in the top not even patching the holes in the leaks that come through the funnel along the same lines you'll see a lot of times people talk about a pipeline, I equate this to dating because everyone has either been on a date, been asked out on the date, told someone know they're going on a date or been told no going out on the date but you can relate. But this is literally how I met my wife 24 years ago, at a country bar we made eye contact I asked her to dance, asked for her snapchat I was very advanced back then I knew snapchat was gonna be a thing and buy them a dinner right go on dates too, you meet the family figure out range attire or not. There's a process there just like with the funnel, you have stages, you have steps. There's a natural progression that you try to follow to make sure that the deal you're working on is on task, it's on it's on time, it's moving along the way that it should. Now there's not a right or wrong in so far as how many steps that you need but in general the the kiss process applies to, keep it simple stupid, right? You need just enough steps and know more to ensure that you're tracking things as you should. Being from the south I like to keep things simple I call it ABCDE. You attract, you attract people to your place of business, to your storefront, to your website, to your to your trade show booth, you want them coming to you but it's not enough just to get a visitor you need them to identify themselves so you offer them something you know a free dinner on your birthday, get our free report, free samples whatever, as long as they opt in, as long as they provide you their phone number, their email, their address something to help you stay in touch with them from there you can bond with these prospects. Preferably it's multimedia, multi step, don't assume just because they ask for something that they really wanted it or that they have time to read it or that they understand what it is you've given them or that they're taking action which brings us to the next step the conversion, the close , decline at the cash rookie sales people think this is the end goal. Get the money and run. That's why their rookie, amateur sales people. Professionals know to to think beyond the sale, deliver that Wow experience, delight to the upside. I'm getting into it right now with a guy I've known for many years, he's been my mechanic, we spent three thousand dollars fixing a car with him the radiator busted on my daughter's old car it took them multiple trips to get it right I never even looked at it. I'm finally helping her replace a light bulb you know a headlamp and I look this has been after over a month I really two months of working on it at least five times and there's radiator fluid you know just residue all over the engine so after paying this guy $3,000 he couldn't be bothered with hosing down the engines you know the engine compartment now he's probably gonna lose a customer and there's obviously other things that go on there but we've been a customer for 14 years probably referred 20 or 30 families to him all with multiple cars probably he's probably worked on a hundred cars because of our referrals, but he didn't delight, he didn't deliver a WoW experience, took him multiple times to fix the car that's fine he stuck with it but it couldn't be bothered to spend 18 cents throwing some goop on the engine and hosing it down. Okay think beyond the sale. That's where you adhere yourself to your customers, that's where they now are in love with you and they are singing your praises but even though I have this in a pipeline going left to right, the reality is it's a cycle, it's a circle. Okay the hip bones connected to the leg bone, everything's connected . That's why I say to make any sale you have to make every sale. How do you attract business to you? How do you bond and stay in touch? What's the sale like, the actual closing process, the transaction, the handing over of money? How do you make them feel? Buyer's remorse is a big thing, just because somebody gives you money doesn't mean they're happy about it. What do you do to ensure that they're happy? What are you insure? What do you do to ensure that they're thrilled, they're delighted, they're overwhelmed in a great way? So now you endear yourself to them, now they're giving you five star reviews on Yelp, they're they're singing your praises on Facebook. Somebody's asking you know for a mechanic, or chiropractor, for a dentist, for a roof or whatever. And they're like you got to go see Joe, you got to go see Mary, they're the best. Now you're back to attracting, now that business comes to you just about free and they don't need three quotes, they don't need to think it over because three of their friends, 10 of their friends said you got to go see them so the business comes easier, it comes faster, it comes at a higher price, higher margins because these people are happy. Okay so think through this look at your business and do you have a system? Do you have processes?Can you boil it down to these five simple steps? And of course you see in here I have multiple steps within the five steps but in the overarching picture you know where you are. You're in the attraction phase, you're in the bonding phase. Okay do you have this down to a system, to a process that everybody understands and can execute? Because if you can measure it, you can improve it. Alright this is how you improve your sales attract bond convert the liver in deer. Thanks for watching, now go sell something! [Music]
[Music] You [Music] All right with no further ado please hit this isn't real for Mr. Berg! Give him a round of applause as well he's been called the man behind the brand's the chief brand accelerator and the six billion dollar man . Burne Coleman is one of the world's leading experts in brand development management licensing and business acceleration trusted by iconic moguls and CEOs such as Donna Karan Daymond, John Russell Simmons, Eddie Lampert Kevin, Harrington and Tommy Hilfiger having created collections for the Rolling Stones, Steven Tyler and American Idol. Mr. Ulman is the go-to man to skyrocket business growth and shatter yearly projections his astonishing achievements include launching the Adam Levine and Nicki Minaj brands for Sears Holdings earning over 200 million in annual sales as president of fast fashions he propelled retail sales from 80 million to 800 million as CEO of mesh he developed a Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony collections for 1,100 Kohl's stores the largest celebrity brand deal in history worth 3.5 billion and as president of booboo international he drove yearly revenue from 100 million to four hundred million dollars. I want to acknowledge my buddy here burnt almond who was my company from 100 million to 4 the man in the genius this guy foul out as the CEO and co-founder of celebrity lifestyle brands Mr. Ulman employs digital marketing and social media to incite massive well through the power of brand equity. Berndt is also passionate about helping entrepreneurs utilize the same tactics that have launched a billion dollar businesses his mentorship quickly uncovers the story and strategy behind a brand to transform followers into devoted ambassadors proficient marketing lucrative licensing and distribution savvy product development. No one understands how to grow compelling and authentic lifestyle brands better than burnt almond and now mr. Ulman is ready to share his wealth creation blueprints with you so you can supercharge your business build an empire and leave a legacy a customer they may forget what you say they may even forget what you do they will never forget how you make him feel ladies and gentlemen please welcome the chief Business Accelerator himself burnt almond [Music] All right thank you good morning good morning thank you Nate, Thank You Franklin, Thank You Cory Bergeron. Okay guys so before we get into it, hey you know what makes our fulfillment company unique? The fact that I've been in your shoes looking for an excellent fulfillment center. That's right I had a successful online business when my company started to grow I went searching for a fulfillment center that could meet my high but very fair expectations you know what I found? That that was very very hard to find all I wanted was a fulfillment center that could ship the right product to the right address at the right time at the right price should be easy right it wasn't I couldn't buy what I needed so I built it fulfillment com not just for me but for thousands of other businesses just like yours hey we can't help you if we don't talk to you so we're not going to take too much your time just a short call to gather some information so that we can delight you that's right its fulfillment dot coms goal to delight all of our clients. Book a call today with Fulfillment dot com because we get ship done [Music] They already pick up on the fact that I speak with an accent so I'm gonna try to take it slow so you can follow and even though I work in New York City my accent is not from Brooklyn. I am actually from Norway and I know what you're thinking I'm supposed to be tall and blond but that didn't really happen for me. However as you all know as entrepreneurs, it can be tough and when I started out early on before my journey in entrepreneurship I was actually six foot five blond with blue eyes and I have a picture to prove it so this is before and here you have the result after. Okay let's get into it what's a brand right? So a brand is named the sign a symbol anything that distinguishes a product from the rivals in the eyes of the consumer that's a brand, okay? Why does it matter? Because what we're going to talk about today is of course the seven steps of brand building which ultimately leaves leads to wealth creation the creation so what's the power what's the difference so here it says what makes a consumer willing to pay more for the same item it's a basic white t-shirt right and in the example on the bottom it's the haints 3-pack the Hanes 3-pack you can buy for $8.50. Nautica it's a brand a little more elevated they have a basic white tee for 1950 Ralph Lauren higher level bren 3 or 3950 up to 55 and lastly John Varvatos at the sign a t-shirt yes $98 to $148 dollars basic white tee. So what makes people willing to pay more for in essence the same product? Well it's brand equity. Brand equity is the value of your brand in the mind of the consumer and that is a folks is how you make them feel about your brand. when we now start on the seven steps: why? why did I create the 7 steps ? what's the value in having a brand and brand equity? well if you don't have anything that sets your product or your services apart from the competition, what are you left to compete on? That's right price. Your only left to compete on price and if all you have to compete on this price you will find yourself in what I like to say or call a death spiral race to the bottom because there's always someone out there that's willing to work on a lower price or lower margin. So that's why we brand. step one : one this one mission one brand so first start with a mission statement. it's the company's core purpose it's what we do it is what problem do we solve you focus on what's important it identify core markets and communicate corporate direction to all stakeholders and here's a good example. Google to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful clear mission everyone can rally around that now let's go to division so the vision is your aspirational description of your objectives it's what you're aspired to do it's to what end why and of course if your why is to become filthy rich quick that's good and your mom might like it but you are often and I always find you're better off when you're providing a service or a value for others here's a good example Ford to become the world's leading consumer company for automotive products and services make sure though that you make the vision statement realistic because vision without execution as you all know is hallucination. So we were talking about the Harley earlier, well that's another great brand and what are the most important aspects of great brands they have to be authentic credible and aspirational. Here are a couple of very successful brands I bring them up primarily because as we are all here as entrepreneurs I want to remind you these are some of the most successful brands of our times so Nike for instance it was founded by a college athletes and his coach that college athlete was Phil Knights it was back in 1964 they had an idea for an athletic brand their market cap today is somewhere between 120 - 130 billion dollars depending on what day you check with the market turbulence. McDonald's Ray Kroc he was a milkshake mixer salesman but one day he got an order for multiple mixers to one location he thought that was odd anyone to check it out as they say the rest is history and McDonald's has a market cap of 130 billion dollars, if we go to the tech space Apple , Steve Jobs have they've topped a trillion and of course Jeff Bezos and Amazon they're hovering somewhere between eight hundred and seventy five and again to eight hundred seventy five billion to one trillion dollar market cap so the point is these were individuals these were entrepreneurs no different than any of you in the room they had an idea they had a vision and this is the end result so if you can dream it you can achieve it. Step 2: Concentration dominates. You have to analyze strengths and weaknesses of your business people. Don't plan to fail, they fail to plan and hope is never a strategy. You have to do your planning so the SWOT analysis is start by looking at your strengths. what is your unfair competitive advantage? Maybe it is your brand. Maybe it's an algorithm maybe it's unique product you should identify it to optimize your business weaknesses. Well for instance if you are selling apparel online the return rate typically hovers somewhere between 30 to 35 percent; in the brick and mortar, return rates are somewhere around 8%. That would be one thing to look at, how do you mitigate that? There are new technology sales opportunities. Are there opportunities in new markets new products . what about voice search and lastly what are some of the threats again if you're importing products from China come January if nothing changes there will be tariffs slapped on of 25% what will that do to your business so these are the things that you have to look at. so we have a little bit of a system where we said does your brand pass? So first we look at product quality. we anticipate customer needs, we obviously wants to have superior distribution, we want to optimize the distribution and lastly strategic pricing and it comes to strategic pricing I always like to institute a treat here to price strategy does not does no matter what product what level it can be luxury it can be open end I always do three tiers good better best. So for instance let me give you an example show of hands how many people thinks $128 dollars for a pair of jeans is expensive? Yeah I'm getting hands yes $128 dollars that's pretty expensive now I'm gonna assume that I know the answer to this how many people thinks 498 dollars for a pair of jeans is expensive there you go so it is expensive what did we do when we wanted to sell 128 dollar coogee jeans all day long we created coogee Lux and we priced the Coogee Lux gene at four hundred ninety eight dollars and then we took every coogee customer and we walked them past the Coogee Lux gene and each and every buyer had to hear that this is the Coogee luck gene for four hundred and ninety-eight dollars by the time they got to the Coogee gene and they were ready to make a purchase the hundred and twenty eight dollars sounded outright cheap and we sold a ton of jeans business jumped out to over 100 million dollars in less than one and a half years. Okay brand the feeling so these are the initial components of building a compelling brand so brand DNA so the brand DNA is in essence what makes your brand unique so you tried to identify what sets the brand apart what makes it special what are the aspects I once you may have seen in the video I was part of doing the largest celebrity deal ever done three and a half billion dollars for Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony would Kohl's and I once spent two days locked in Jennifer Lopez's closets it was quite exciting it was all for the purposes of identify what was the brand DNA what was unique about the brand and what determine what it was supposed to look like and I have no fair her closet is larger than the room that I'm staying in and and it's catered to 24/7. So we look at when we look at brand DNA we look at product design for D then brand name and lastly the brand assets DNA first here's an example of what we do with the design so we might just mentioned coochy coochy was originally a sweater a multicolored multicolored highly patterned sweater here models died by Dr. Huxtable so when we now created the street where Brad we captured dose the movement we captured a color and this is what coogee streets were looked like and as I said it worked and we built a hundred million brand literally in 18 months. when you're looking at product name please make it simple make it clear make it work . I ran Phat fashion's Phat farm and baby phats and once upon a time when Russell Simmons formed the founded Phat farm. Phat was the coolest thing you could ever be that you could ever say because Phat stood for pretty hot and tempting Phats so this was pretty hot and tempting and it came from the farm that's where you grow stuff.However by the time the brand hit mainstream, by the time you were ready to go into every single department store there wasn't a kid out there that used to term phats so the only thing that happened was aid the brand now dated or the name dated the brand and number two no one used to term anymore and the reality is too mainstream buyers from the large national retailers retailers originally thought we were coming with some formal weight loss products. Another example, who in here has heard of Justin Timberlake? Almost everybody right okay good. Who in here has heard of william rests william rests ic0 hence william rests is Justin Timberlake's clothing collection. it is what happens when you over think it's so william r ass it's the middle name of justin's and his partner's grandfathers names so it's so cool that nobody knows the connection and they're getting none of the benefits from Justin's very large following and fame so keep the name simple and straightforward. Lastly Brant acid packaging so I always say nothing sells products as well as product. However you need more than just product if it was true that you only needed the product cereal would be sitting in the clear plastic bags you could just see the product but as we all know that's not true is it so packages packaging is important and in the Director consumer space it is specifically important because you actually have to sell your product twice. First you're selling it when you make the emotional connection and they're on your website or they're interacting with a brand the first time and they make a purchase then the product gets shipped out by now they've had a fight with their spouse it's raining outside and the other shitty day at work and your product arrives and it needs to sell itself one more time it needs to look unique it leads to look appealing so you can rekindle that emotion so that's packaging emotions they matter emotions make decision nobody needs some other products so we're buying because of the feeling your products creates have a Coke and a smile or Apple think difference which was a play on IB ends think so or Amazon the world's most consumer centric Brent these are all emotional statements that you can connect with so as you heard me say in the video it says here to your customer will always remember how you make them feel I'll take that a little further and say they may remember what you say they may even remember what you do they will never forget how you make them feel okay master to touch so this is about brand consistency strong and powerful brand maintain consistency throughout so for physical its logo its signage letterhead and business cards products shop concept events and experiences and all of these attributes says something about you and about your brand so I brought our celebrity lifestyle brands business card and this is what our car does so not so unique not so special however it sets us apart it says something about us and our business you need to of course maintain brand consistency also in the digital space your website ecommerce apps social media and even the smaller things like the email signature I just mentioned our company celebrity lifestyle brands and here you see how we sign off and the reality is consistency in brands should permeate everything that you do and it includes you it includes your brand ambassadors it it includes every single consumer touchpoints alright innovates communicates so you've all heard if you build it they will come but I've added really because the reality is in this cluttered marketplace if you build it and you don't tell them about it nobody will come not one single soul they don't care there's too much information so and in this group you're all sophisticated so you know you need to deploy all of these resources video viral campaigns consumer engagements social media blogs editorial paid and targeted ad campaigns Facebook everything you can think of guerilla marketing all of the above way back when before we had all these social media I launched my first business back in the mid eighties and it was Scandinavia's first home delivery of pizza so it didn't exist until I launched my business and I thought I had corner tomorrow kids when I got the write up on the cover of the business section of the weekend paper and the phone started ringing as soon as people picked up their for their papers by early morning even though we didn't open little tooth until 3:00 by early morning my phone system had broken down and later in the afternoon one of the pizza trucks broke down we ended up delivering soggy cold pizzas three to four hours after people called for him it was a disastrous way to launch a business and if it wasn't for the fact that the idea was so good we would have been out of business before we ever started so you only get one shot at making a first impression you might as well make it a good one this was a terrible launch on to a couple of really powerful launches this thing is amazing so this is referred to as the hangman hangman ad and this is how the Tommy Hilfiger brand actually launched this is a billboard from New York Times Square and as you can see it says the four great American designers from n R and then you have the R and L and everyone knows Ralph Lauren the next one you may not know that's Perry Ellis Calvin Klein and then no one knew what the T&H was so that's how the Tommy Hilfiger brand launched and it got instant credibility by approximation the neighborhood of those other leading designers led to an affirmation of the brand now it pissed them all off but they got over it and the Tommy Hilfiger brand is today a brand that enjoys seven and a half billion dollars in annual sales another great launch was the launch of Daymond John's FUBU so as Damon said in his book the power of broke they had no money so they had to be really creative when it came to promoting the brand back in Hollis Queens where they are originally from there are metal gates in front of all of the stores the FUBU guys offered to clean and paint all the gates in return for putting their logo on the gates a lot of the store opener owners agreed and at nights this start of brand FUBU would have his logo on every single storefront all over Queens but that wasn't the launch Damon then spoke to his friend LL Cool J. LL Cool J became a brand ambassador and then they did two things they went to a trade show called magic and they had six salespeople and they told every single one of those guys to call every single one of their buyers and invite them all to come to the booth at nine o'clock in the morning on the first day of the show and every single one of those salespeople said can't do that they won't work but of course they did and fear is a phenomenal motivator so every other buyer that hadn't gotten the call came in to the trade show and so this one booth completely mobbed and surrounded by buyers and they were all petrified of losing out and that was part of the launch the second part of the launch was the gap commercial yes gap commercial a 30 million dollar gap commercial and gap reached out to the FUBU spokesman LL Cool J had asked if he would appear in a commercial forum they did not had a headwear on the time and ll asked could he bring his own hats so I'm gonna play that commercial for you I want you to look out for LLS hats and I think you will be able to see F beyond the hats and then I want you to listen to the lyrics because foo BER is an acronym and it stands for for us by us so listen for for us buyers on the low in the middle of a 30 million dollar gap commercial yes so as it says the price goes to innovative I will take it one step further innovate or die a 30 million dollar FUBU commercial launched a brand even though sponsored by the Gap okay step 6 cover your assets this is important because as you start building your business and building your brand you don't want it to be all for naught so there are trademarks you used ads for brands logos slogans etc copyrights for all the creative work books lyrics and then patents for innovations processes this is what can happen if you run afoul of it so Jennifer decided that she wanted to launch a fragrance with Cody a million dollar multi-million dollar company in the space and they wanted to call it glow it was glow by j.lo and they were so set on it that even when they found out there's a company out there called glow industries they went ahead anyway well glow industry file filed the suits they blocked the launch of Jennifer and Cody's fragrance they held him up tied him up for over a year and glow industries a tiny company had their biggest payday when they collected millions of dollars before Jennifer and Cody were able to launch don't let that happen to you ok we're at step 7 pedal to the metal so we talked about brand equity quick reminder it's the intangible asset that gives a branding for mental value in the mind of the consumer and it's of course created through implementing the branding process now here's a quiz so why show hence it says which comes with a premium price thanks to brand equity the wants to think hits the green box show hands I see no hand soap here in delights the grey box show ends I got half ahem purple box no okay how about the turquoise box okay I'm getting a lot of hints that's right so Tiffany the high-end jewelry company has in essence made their turquoise color cinnamons with their brand so it's a powerful message known by by discerning consumers everywhere so strong brand equity this is why we love it that is a profit faucet do we all want a profit faucet of course we do we get it through strong brands so what does a strong brand and brand equity allow you premium pricing increase cash flow it lowers customer acquisition costs and the asset can be sold or licensed so that's what's so powerful about brands I have the utmost or respect for anyone that builds a business anyone that is in business is wonderful but if you have no brand and if you have nothing else as we talked about you're forced to compete on price not only that you have to reinvent your business over and over and over again and you're just as strong as your last transaction with a brand not only do you get to benefit from the business you build a today you are creating an assets fad fashions - remember I said I ran fat farm and baby fat the company was sold no I take that back the company wasn't sold the IP the intellectual property only was sold for a hundred and forty million dollars to a company called Kel woods and Kel wood had to put a hundred and forty millions on their books as an assets under goodwill that's the power of building a brand that's what Russell Simmons did I am NOT working closely with Bethenny Frankel one of the original housewives from Housewives of New York she has created a brand called skinny girl skinny cocktail Skinnygirl margarita maybe some of you heard of it she gave birth to that brand while on the TV show and a couple of years later only a couple of years later she sold the alcoholic beverage rights only again just the IP there was no company she just sold the alcoholic beverage rights to Bheem Centauri for a hundred million dollars that's the power of brand and brand equity now the brand equity can be enhanced how step one with celebrity endorsements target the right celebrity influencer structured optimal deal leverage their fan base every celebrity worth their salt has now a massive social media following top right that's Gigi Hadid Gigi Hadid has around 45 million followers on the Instagram alone she did a partnership with Tommy Hilfiger they created the Tommy Gigi collection we heard earlier Tommy Hilfiger was mentioned that's one of the format's Tintin for most influential men's collections or men's designers was never asked relevant with women went out and did the deal with Gigi and overnights they had instant credibility they blew the business up now this may sound complicated but we are here to help have no affair so celebrity lifestyle brands our company we have a booth outside if anyone is interested in working with celebrities please see Greg Ryder my partner or myself outside and we can help you with that and it does a lot hey what are other ways you can put this brand equity on steroids and blow up your business with licensing two ways well if you are one of those guys that I would forced to compete in price get yourself a license you can license a strong brand name and all of a sudden as you could see you can charge a lot more for your products or your service if you have built a brand or if you have a brand well sign licenses these are brand extension you grant another company the rights to manufacture their product but on your own brand name and they pay you a royalty of fee so there are product licenses their territory licenses this is what you can do if you sell apparel you can add other items add fragrance bags shoes for instance when I took over fat farm and baby fats the company was actually losing a couple of million dollars a year I changed the operating model to 100% licensed and overnight. literally we went from losing a couple of millions to having between 40 and 50 million dollars in annual royalty revenue licensing. why do we love it? it's easy it's fast its cost-effective and its profitable so the last way to put your brand equity on steroids simple get yourself a board of advisers they provide non-binding strategic advice and they leverage their rolodex for your benefits as we often often say your network is your net worth it's informal it's flexible and it's a revenue multiplier let me give you one other example a lot of people have sought out tommy's Hilfiger's advice over the years Michael Kors legendary designer came to Tommy back in early two-thousands not for advice on how to grow his business no for how he could seamlessly actually end it all go out of business Tommy said not so fast firstly I think you should do this this and that to your business which entail focusing more on eye on accessories secondarily he leveraged his rolodex he called two of his former backers Lawrence troll and Silas chow he got them involved they deployed the necessary capital and michael kors have gone from being on the verge of going out of business in early 2000 to having a market cap of nine and a half billion dollars today so that's the power of having a good or strong Board of Advisors so on that note we have gone through the seven steps and my timer here in front of me is now blinking red so I will leave you with just one final time one final thought hmm I had wanted actually to add for another thing and that is just I went through the licensing part a little quickly I want to say if any of you are interested in talking to us about that we can help with that as well and then on to the last final thought and the final thought is really very simple: build a brand, create wealth, leave a legacy. Thank you [Music]
[Music] [Music] Alright alright alright how are you guys doing? Mr. Franklin Cruz everybody! He and I go way back so he likes to make fun of me it's okay! So uh let's just get into it huh let me take a pulse of the room, okay I thought I was getting some feedback. Raise your hand if you consider yourself a beginner marketer? You're kind of just getting started getting your feet wet haven't really got it going. Okay okay, because this presentation can go a few ways I want it to be as valuable as possible. If you consider yourself intermediate, you got going, you have some traction, you feel like you're getting the hang of things but you know you can go further. Okay, advanced marketers, you're crushing it, you're taking names and you want to take it to another level. Okay perfect! So it's a it's a good blend. I promise you there is something here for everybody. Okay i'm a little bit about me how does this work, okay so today we're going to be talking about what I consider the future of marketing and we're gonna cover three quantum leaps that you can make to your marketing and we're actually going to divide it in three kind of stages according to the question I just asked. If you're a beginner there's a quantum leap there's some quantum leaps you can make if you're at that stage, intermediate, advanced there's something here for everybody. Um okay so a little bit about what we do, a little bit about me. So what we do my company which is ten-minute funnels, it's an alternative to click funnels that's why he was making fun of me. It's an alternative to click funnels but it takes things to in other levels and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about so what my company does is we make marketing simple. We build technology that helps you turn a great idea into a successful online business and we do that through a software called ten-minute funnels which is basically a do-it-yourself easy-to-use sales funnel builder. So this is actually the first screenshots of the new version that we're gonna be releasing starting next month so this is I've never showed this to anybody but this is basically it, we provide a catalog of pre-built marketing funnels that you can just drop into your business and get results immediately. Now what makes it unique is, it takes the picture in your mind about what you want your marketing to look like, how you want it to flow and you can literally drag and drop it, connect it in the flow you want it to - how you want it to behave and it will just execute it for you automatically. Hey I'm Justin Singletary. You know what makes our fulfillment company unique? The fact that I've been in your shoes looking for an excellent fulfillment center. That's right I had a successful online business, when my company started to grow I went searching for a fulfillment center that could meet my high but very fair expectations. You know what I found, that that was very very hard to find. All I wanted was a fulfillment center that could ship the right product to the right address at the right time at the right price. Should be easy, right? It wasn't. I couldn't buy what I needed so I built it Fulfillment dot com not just for me but for thousands of other businesses just like yours. Hey we can't help you if we don't talk to you. So we're not going to take too much your time just a short call to gather some information so that we can delight you. That's right its Fulfillment dot coms goal to delight all of our clients. Book a call today with Fulfillment dot com because we get ship done [Music] mission two that we provide you with pre-built funnels for all different kinds of industry niches. Everyone has been proven in real markets with real dollar values so you know whatever you use is going to produce a lot of value for you so this is the drag-and-drop funnel builder and then of course you have a drag-and-drop ready, easy to use, what you see is what you get page builder. Okay so it's very very simple way to get powerful marketing techniques in in in a very short period of time and what we're about to release and you're the first audience I've shown this to, takes it to a level which no one has seen and I'll get into all of that today. Okay so a little bit about me, who am I? I am your typical geek turned marketer but I'm a I'm like I'm like a geek of geeks I've been programming since I was eight years old. If you if you slice my wrists ones and zeros would pop out, that's who I am at my at my core. When I was eight years old my dad introduced me to one of those super old computers with the green words on the screen and I just fell in love so while everybody was playing at playing sports and stuff I was hacking away at a computer and that's who I've been and you haven't been able to pull me off of it since. Now I fell into the world of marketing and online marketing through through web design so around '94 the world wide web kind of came onto the scene and my dad said hey why don't you try to figure this thing out people might be wanting to get on there so I started to build websites for people and I was like twelve years old and the money at that time was really really good so the whole appeal of like working for someone trading time for it never appealed for me to me because of how lucrative it was at that age so I pretty much been doing that ever since. So around the time I went into college is how I kind of put myself through college I had a couple of clients and they were asking me certain questions about hey can I, how can I get in there and do things myself how can I get in there and and and edit my website all by myself? Now I was in a pretty intense engineering program so I couldn't be as available as I wanted to be so one spring break I spent the time basically building a software that would help people get in and edit their website themselves now this is back at like 2001 2002 so there was no WordPress there was no anything and so I built what at least I consider based on what I saw was the first drag and drop visual page builder so all the stuff that you see right now. You know not to brag cause I don't know one day someone will prove me wrong but I think we had the very first drag and drop page building technology and I just kind of gave it to my clients and said here's a way you can do it and I gave him a little PayPal link and then left it alone and it just boomed into this thing that is basically what we are today it just took on a life of its own and that's kind of how I fell into the world. Well the next question was okay I can build my site I can get in there and do it, well how do I make it work? How do I make it succeed? And so that's where we were basically forced as a company to really learn online marketing and so through that we built a product called 10 minute pages and that was all about marketing and then that product evolved into what we are today which is ten-minute funnels which is all about giving powerful proven marketing funnels to people easily easily. So it's built, we've built over 275,000 landing pages about a hundred thousand funnels for almost 40,000 clients and through that we collect a lot of data obviously so we have certain insights that most people don't and so we've observed certain patterns about marketing that seemed to work and a lot of those patterns aren't necessarily what the Guru's tell you is the right thing to do. So everything I share with you is based on real world data this is stuff that we've seen and we have a huge data set to to to tell you this. So would you like to know some of what these are? These are very actionable things that you can do in your business. So I'm gonna share three quantum leaps you can make in the next 90 days based on our observations if you just take I'm gonna be going through a lot of them and you might not be able to take in everything but if you just take a few just like anything that jumps out at you and just make a note I'm gonna implement this it will help you these are these are fairly Universal they're not unique to individual situations. Okay so these are powerful, okay so the first quantum leap is just all about the funnel okay so I'm talking to beginners but if you have if you have a funnel pay attention because we're gonna get extreme in advanced really really quick okay a funnel we've seen can three to 10x your business when you do it right okay and some of these strategies are some of the better strategies we've seen and easily approachable strategy. Okay so we have a unique way we view funnels it's not doesn't follow the the typical paradigm and so I'm gonna give you kind of a top-level overview of how we look at funnels so you can approach it the right way so instead of specific little tactics hey put this on your page put that on your page it's better if you approach it strategically first and then of course I'll give you a few tactics. Okay so first off understand it's gonna sound basic but we're gonna build up the goal in any marketing campaign is to influence behavior. That's really what we're trying to do, someone gets to our sales page or our hour order page they're either ready to buy or they're not so they either take that behavior of buying or they don't so we're trying to influence that behavior always. Okay funnel marketing is a structured way of how we influence behavior okay we're starting real basic but we're gonna build up now behaviors are a reaction to someone's belief system. Okay what do they believe at the time if someone does not buy when you want them to buy it's because they did not believe whatever it need whatever they needed to in order to buy so every single marketing campaign in every single business anytime you want someone to do something it's based on this. Okay, customer journey is basically a representation of different beliefs at different times. Someone who goes through your entire marketing process has to go through a sequence of belief changes in order to be ready to buy, opt in ,etc and that's why we have you know an opt-in page where I put my email that's why a lot of the stuff the speaker was just talking about with SMS and stuff it's all about trying to change someone's belief to get to to to to take the action you need them to take. Okay so your customer journey is the journey they take on the way to arriving at the belief you need them to have, a funnel is just a map of how we intend to influence that behavior that's all. It is so in a little I'm going to show you some funnels and they might seem a little complicated and I'm doing this on purpose because the funnels is just a map of the different ways we're influencing different behaviors that they have at different times. Now most people have a very simple funnel and nothing's wrong with that they do very very well and it's basically a linear a journey you want your customers to take in order to buy and maybe buy again and those are great however if you want to go to the next level you want to track or or or take inventory of the different belief systems they have in the customer journey and then you'll create what I call little micro funnels to influence each behavior. I'll give you examples so here's how we design a funnel I'll probably have to breeze through and if we have some time at the end I can do a deeper dive but this is the foundation, this is how you construct the funnel okay so we start out with what is the primary belief that they need to have before they buy then we go backwards what do they need to believe before this and just keep repeating so if you can map out the belief system sequence that they need to have and you design little micro funnels to counteract each belief or to produce each belief you will see results you've not seen before. Okay so we're setting up this foundation now once we have the belief mapped out we need to ask ourselves what can we say or provide to bring about that belief? The absolute best way that I've seen to change a change belief there's many ways to do it is to provide proof okay some proof you need them to believe that your product is better than the show proof okay so I talked about micro funnels which is how will we influence this belief so every behavior that someone takes on your site or on that customer journey there is a micro funnel framework to influence that behavior and what I've seen is the funnels that do mediocre versus the funnels that absolutely kick butt it's how many of these little micro funnels that they're using to change these beliefs because if you think about it why doesn't someone buy why doesn't someone take action it's because they don't believe they don't they're not there yet and so if you have a little microphone to influence that belief and and every belief they can have now you have a you know a funnel. So a couple examples let's say someone lines at your shopping cart your checkout page and then they don't buy okay most checkout pages 10% at best 90% of them leave, why? Well we can ask them and once we know we can have what we call an abandoned cart micro funnel that will change that belief okay let's say at the beginning of the funnel you have people they have an urgent problem something's wrong, that's why we have a lead capture funnel, okay because we're gonna deliver some value to fix their urgent problem and that will get them through the funnel. Okay if they're ready to buy we have a shopping cart funnel, let's say they want it you they've been with you for a while but they're just not taking action. I we have what we call a Rainmaker funnel which is basically a flash sale where you just say hey there's now no reason not to buy let's just get you in there. And these work extremely extremely well. So here's a couple these are screenshots of our software of some of these micro funnels that you just get with you know one-click so we have the lead funnel sales funnel you know there's dozens of them, upsell funnel, fulfillment funnel, event funnels. There were tons of them but basically every single belief system or behavior that you want to change there is a micro funnel that can do that. Okay so this is the part we're gonna have to speed through but this is the this is the process these are the steps so you can take a picture and if there's time just shout it out I'll go through this in more detail but this is the structure we follow to bring about a change of belief. Okay we find the problem we produce a promise and we then we give a little offer and then we could go and you see the proof of how to do that and then what you see here you don't it's not about what it's doing it's the structure okay we're basically taking people through different belief changes. Okay so to get the sale we have to change you know beliefs and underneath each one is how you bring about that change. I'm happy to give these slides to you but basically that this is this is how you do it the best funnels follow this strategy. Okay then of course there's ongoing optimization this is a little acronym grow how you grow you gather insight and ideas so that's talking to your customers putting feedback mechanism so you can see why they're taking certain behaviors. You do your research on that calling them up on the phone, you go on surveys and see why are they doing that, you look at your data, your analytics okay then you validate your ideas of how to do it. So what microphone is am I going to introduce and then what works you scale as in widen and what doesn't work you suppress it's simple it is simple you follow this process you get extraordinary results. Okay so here are a few tactical things that you can do take any of these and drop it in your in your funnel right now and you will see results you will see results the great thing about this and everything I'm about to go through is these are all additives why by that I mean by putting these on your page and on your funnel you can't hurt sales it's very very hard I should say to hurt sales by doing these. Okay so by adding retargeting it's very hard for that for you to lose by doing that, by putting an upsell after someone has already bought something it's very hard it's impossible for you to lose so just adding these alone will grow your business. How well you do that is another story but it's if you don't have it you need to do so follow retargeting upsells having a proof bar out I can show you that. Daily emails if you're not sending emails it's an absolute must okay and bimonthly rainmakers you can expect $20 per open so just do the math on that and these are these are things you can do at this stage. Okay hopefully that was a little bit valuable if you have a funnel and you do these things you will you will see growth let's take it up a notch because this is what excites me okay this is where we get into the world of automation okay done right I've seen three to 10x growth on top of everything we've we've already talked about in the first step. This is all about influencing more behaviors okay this is about taking inventory of more behaviors that are people are doing and influencing them in other creative ways. Okay so a few tricks for this for this stage we can trigger various sequences or campaigns based on video watch time someone who watches 10% of a sales video is very different from someone who watches 90% of a sales video you should be communicating with them very very differently so triggering different micro funnels or campaigns based on that we'll always help okay an abandoned cart sequence lots and lots of people are getting to your buy page your checkout page and they're leaving what are you doing about that okay adding more mechanisms of communication that last presentation touched on this webinars SMS a call center Direct Mail wingless voicemail these are all things that you can use to communicate the the sales element to change that change those behaviors okay we can go through any of those here's some examples this is a campaign by a marketer a very smart marketer he's out in Australia and he had he had a an event like this right and he did over two hundred thousand dollars in two weeks with this funnel this is a screenshot of our software I've actually printed this out and if you want a copy of this just go to the back where you did the checkout and and you can have one of these but basically this funnel is an example of what we're talking about you can see he's bringing traffic in a few different traffic sources and they're going to a sales page typical funnel behavior however he is basically segmenting his list based on how they respond so for example he might send out an email that's that that has one angle of why they should attend his event the people that click on that email will receive a different message on the sales page then the next email he might send out which is another reason they should attend the event so essentially he's segmenting people based on who they are and what they are all about so one might be we're gonna talk about paid advertising the people that click on that email are different from the people who click on the one about e-commerce marketing or something else you get what I'm saying this is very very powerful in two weeks with a local segment of his list he did over two hundred thousand dollars here's another one that illustrates this this is my buddy Jason Hornick this is an 800 percent ROI a campaign very very powerful what he does is he has again he's segmented his audience and he's sending out different communications so these are blog posts he's sending about in different categories of who his customer is and he's sending Facebook ads to each one so essentially he's attracting different types or different segments of his prospect audience and he's sending them through the funnel for different communication uses so using retargeting he's able to send them back through the funnel with with a messaging based on who they are so it's like a conversation for each person very very powerful and then if you follow it he basically takes them through a sequence of upsells step one step two then he has a webinar step one step two and that's it it's not complicated it really isn't so even though there's a lot of pictures on the screen what it is is different behaviors different beliefs and different little micro funnels to bring about that last one is Ryan Levesque super smart guy he's doing way better even now but this is a campaign that does one hundred and fifty thousand leads per day okay very simple funnel he takes them through he asks them certain questions are you a male or are you a female in many markets this a big difference if you're a female that the conversation is very different if you're a male different so there's a process of uncovering what are the different segments of your audience and you want to basically bring different communication sequences different customer journeys for each segment this is how you take a a mediocre performing funnel to an advanced high level and I'm not talking about little bumps I'm talking about two three four X growth of a typical marketing funnels this is a quick funnel that we did super super powerful it's a it's it's modeled after a friend of mine and I'll tell you his numbers this campaign is basically four videos that goes out okay and he's selling a product for four for $2,000 okay he found that if people get through and watched the fourth video ninety percent of them zero percent of them will buy okay I've never seen conversions like that at all okay the way he's able to get 90% conversions buying a two thousand dollar product is by sending these follow-up emails based on video watch time simple if someone watches 10 percent of the video these are the sequence of emails that happen if someone gets through 90 percent these are the sequence so all he's doing is if you didn't finish the video he sends two follow-up email saying hey go back and watch go back and watch go back and watch by the time they get so he gets a lot of people to watch all his videos and that triggers that 90 percent conversion rate I hope you're seeing this is this is unheard of this is very very powerful and also not not complicated okay is this making sense making sense are you ready to take it up a notch because what I'm about to share nobody's doing nobody's doing so where we're at in the marketing space at least how we see it is what I just talked about is the peak or the extremes of marketing okay where we have sophisticated automation happening based on what people are doing on and off your website and this can this can explode your business where we're going now as a market is to the next level and this we've seen we're starting to see the results this will catapult your business again and this is where we use intelligence by intelligence I mean artificial intelligence and I know that word might sound scary but it's not as scary as it sounds is that yeah okay to me this is the holy grail of marketing because all we've been trying to do as online marketers is we're trying to replicate what we know works the best at scale what works the best is when I'm talking to someone face to face and I can mirror everything I can see what they're doing every eye twitch everybody move I can adapt my presentation to them based on what I'm seeing okay a lot of you are might be sales and coaching and so you get high conversions that way it's not uncommon that three out of four people you talk to on a one-on-one basis we'll do business with you okay and that's because it's one-on-one adaptive marketing all we've been doing since the internet began is trying to find a way to replicate that at scale and what I've seen in the research and the testing that we've done is that I think we're finally here or really really close and this is extremely powerful this is where we can adapt to the behaviors people are exhibiting in real time okay so it show your funnel is just is just like a conversation so in the last quantum leap we talked about how you can predict you can document the different behaviors that people are taking with this is you can detect the behaviors that you see happening and the intelligent system can automatically adapt to it I'll give you some examples Amazon Prime there are trillion-dollar Amazon is a trillion dollar company what right now and I think it's enlarged Lee in part to what I'm talking about they've been doing this for many years and they've exploded as a result in 2013 five years ago they were getting seventy five percent conversion rates thirty five percent of all their sales came from what I'm talking about intelligent adaptive funnels so they will look at your browsing patterns of what pages you're seeing how long you stay on the page and they will basically give product recommendations based on that they will look at I remember and I flipped out when I saw it I was in the market for a television and I was browsing a couple then I started getting emails about that television that I was just looking at checking out and what did I do I ended up buying the television this is extremely powerful because it's talking to me and only me based on what I'm doing intelligent adaptive predictive funnels give you a couple examples we can watch the mouse movements that your prospects are taking through your funnel we can see people who are little who are hesitating they're exhibiting the behaviors of a buyer or a non buyer and based on algorithms you can say hey this is that we classify this person as a non buyer let's introduce a behavior microphone will change okay a little pop-up window says hey you might so you may have seen things like call them exit Papas where the mouse is moving to leave the screen and something comes up and that works really well this takes it to a whole other level where someone can just be scrolling down the page doing what they're doing behaving the way they normally behave and the system can pick it up because exceeds what everyone else has done and says hey this is this is someone who's getting ready to leave when you do things like that it's just it's insane okay for example how many of you know that your landing page speed is a direct correlation with your conversions the faster your pages load the higher your conversions okay well what if you could predict click behavior so you can look at your funnel and see what pages are people likely to click on next and what if you could preload that page in the background so you get instant page speeds instant so our technology we have what looks to be there like some of the fastest page speeds on the planet because we're able to predict what people are gonna do next so just by taking an existing campaign that might be on a different technology and using something like ours you can get conversion increases email look-alikes this is powerful a lookalike audience on like Facebook is where you can upload a list of your customers and using its network it's always its intelligence more artificial intelligence using its network it will find other customer other people who are like that and you and if any of you have experimented with that it's very powerful well you can do that yourself with your email you can say here are my customers who are the people who I want to find others like and so now you can send emails to those people who are likely to be customers before they're actually customers another one LTV prediction this is also very powerful based on behavior matching you can predict the lifetime value with a good level of accuracy it's not perfect but it doesn't need to what their lifetime value is gonna be if you do any of this stuff you know how powerful that is it takes many many months to know what the lifetime value of a customer is well you can predict that and so your marketing changes if some if a brand new person comes in and they are matching the behavior characteristics of someone who who spends ten thousand dollars with me I'm gonna market to them differently I can take more risks with that person so this stuff is extremely powerful I could go into more detail but there's lots and lots of things that you can do to start to get to that holy grail of that one-on-one marketing and what we're seeing is that there is quantum leaps improvements with each of these which each of these categories of things that you can do when you do these things so in summary I'm gonna just summarize all this and show you guys how you can get some of this technology the minimum cost to do this yourself is like a hundred thousand dollars because a lot of this technology is brand new it's just coming onto the market and there's just a few providers to do it we've built tech we spent all this here building tech and testing to do all of this stuff for you automatically and we're starting to see results that are you know they're they're very very very powerful and so where we're at in our phase because we're gonna be launching this in 2019 is we're trying to do case studies to validate the results that we're seeing okay so if you'd like to have this done for you we're doing the case studies because we need to prove the numbers that we're seeing okay so I'm just gonna go through because Nate asked me to a couple of ways that we can work together if you're interested so if you want everything we're working with a few people one on one to produce case studies with what I've been talking about because this is this is where we do all the work for you so we've been doing case studies all this year and we're at the final leg and we have a few more spots if you're interested basically to qualify you need to have a hundred thousand transactions of some kind orders email us because that's where you get the maximum value okay and so in this we build out and launch a campaign that will beat your best marketing campaign over the last six months by 50% or more that's basically what we're what we're trying to do for you okay if this is you and you're interested it's simple just text me and we'll see if it's a fit or not okay quantum leap one and two this is advanced funnels and extreme automation so this is where you use our technology and then we work closely to help you reach success so we're doing a pre-release of our Xtreme automation software the first week of November official launch is January but like I said we need we're looking for case studies so if you wanted it's 497 a month but Nate asked me to offer a special deal for add some people and so basically for the price of 10 months you'll have it for 16 months we've never done a deal like that so basically if you do that you won't see a renewal payment until March 2020 so 10 months up front you get it to March 2020 I've got the link down there it's not going to be a big pitch but basically if you're interested if this is something that could be a value for you there's an opportunity to get it no one else has it this is right now because we're launching next year if you want quantum leap number one which is just a funnel building part this is where you do the work we still help and there's just basic funnels it's not automation but it still can get you great results it's 197 a month but also same deal applies price of 10 months you have it for 16 months so if you're interested simple go to that URL down there 10 minute funnels comm slash event if you're interested in us actually working hands-on with you we're not an agency but we're doing just a couple of case studies before the end of the year text me we're only gonna do it for probably about five more people so it's kind of first-come first-served if it's interest you can text me my things right there a couple bonuses if you're interested we've got pre-built funnels 1.3 million dollars of pre-built funnels in there at any level if you get these are plug-and-play funnels that have worked in our businesses that you can just plug in yours we're doing a five-week funnel building workshop where we go into detail on this stuff and this is the first time that I'm offering myself for one-on-one assistance because again the goal is getting these case studies in place for what we're trying to do next year okay personal guarantee is six takes sixty days to try an ROI 100% risk-free money back the goal isn't to pitch or to get a bunch of sales that's not what we're trying to do my personal selfish goal is I want to prove this out I want to really prove that the numbers we've seen we are seeing are as good as we're saying they are and no one would believe us unless we can show real hard evidence we've been doing it for three quarters so far this year and so we're on the last leg if this is of interest to you just let me know okay and that's it I'm out of time but if you've got any questions I'd be happy to answer one or two maybe one one [Music] you [Music]
[Music] Hey guys it's Brit Lane with Ingenious Marketing and today on FDCs EECOM education blog we're going to talk about is SEO and e-commerce. So I will bring to your attention three tools that will help you rank your site and get it to be much faster so you can have the opportunity for ranking for more keywords at Google so the first tool is called SEM rush com. This tool is really cool in that they will enable you to conduct an SEO audit for your website which will give you detailed information as to what you can do to get your site to be optimized. You're going to have 30 to 50 different data points as to what you can do. I highly suggest running the tool, getting the information and then fixing what it says to fix and then rerunning the tool to see how high your score has become. The second tool is Google's page insight tool, now this tool will enable you to see how fast your website is to users on desktop applications and mobile phones. Google is gonna enable you to put in a URL. You hit the submit button and within literally thirty seconds you're gonna get a lot of really good information as to how you can get your site to be faster in the eyes of Google. Why is this important? It's important because Google now says for your site to be able to rank you have to be able to have a better user experience and if you have a site that is fast you're giving consumers a better user experience, so at the end of the day faster is better for Google's users.The third is called GT metrics. GT metrics dot com, this tool is also another site speed tool that will enable your users to get to content that much quicker which also makes your site look even better in Google's eyes so if you look at using these three tools in conjunction with one another you're gonna have a site that is architectural sound. It's gonna be way faster when a user visits it via a desktop browser or a mobile phone application so I highly recommend using those three tools, spending a good amount of time to implement the changes that they recommend and then rerunning the tools to see how much better your scores have increased. This is Brit Lane from Ingenious Marketing. It's been a pleasure providing you with this information and I look forward to creating new videos for you guys in the future [Music]
One of my biggest concerns when seeking a fulfillment service provider was the ability to implement domestically but also scaling for international. My name is Michael Gardner I am the founder and CEO of Thin Energy, a health and wellness brand . I was in need of a company that can handle a to z customer service delivery domestically but also with the ability to scale international. One of the things that attracted me to Fulfillment.com was not only could they go to b2c but also they can actually help implement my brand into the fba amazon platform. One of the things that i was very impressed with was that the staff was very helpful from walking me through dashboard to implementation to fba for amazon very user-friendly and understanding that everything's a process so it's good to be part of another team that can actually enhance and amplify the success that we're seeking. From the setup to the billing, expectations were set very clearly and for me that meant something. Beyond just the services but also the integrity of the company which was really important for me in choosing a service provider. I would recommend Fulfillment.com to anyone that's looking to grow their business and also more importantly maintain their customer service at a high level and be able to set those expectations for themselves. The amount of success that we've had in a short period of time has been tremendous with Fulfillment.com I now have a true fulfillment partner.
My name is James lingk, I live in Los Angeles, California. Working the e-commerce space operating about 70-80 small websites some of the problems that led me to Fulfillment.com were my previous providers lacked in communication, their CRM integration lacked with me in kitty with our CRM samba comm was the second or third I reached out to and ultimately after speaking with their team and organization it was kind of a no-brainer at that point I'd say the process getting started with them was actually pretty easy I mean it just filled out their online inquiry and they reached out to me within 24 hours we did apples for apples comparison of my current fulfillment invoice and worked on pricing together to make it work and from there I was able to have an easy person to make a decision I think what stood out the most is their web presence and their user interface is extremely friendly very simple to use for a business owner and I can always see where my shipments are and if there's any issues kind of where to look and what to do my dream outcome was to get a solid team behind me to have any issues should arise to be able to solve them together quickly efficiently and try to get my cost down and I saw the infrastructure in place that I don't have to be constantly monitoring all my shipments that's what I'm able to do is become calm and the lifesaver for me everything all around been pretty solved I would highly recommend Finland [Music]
The logistical issues that we had had revolved primarily around speed of delivery of products, maintaining how quickly we can get a product out the door and managing all of the information so that we can actually be a more data driven company. My name is Michael Cantrell, I own a company called Next-Gen Mobile; we provide premium car care products. The main reason or problem that we made the move to Fulfillment.com was that we were growing at such an exponential rate our current fulfillment house was unable to keep up with the order magnitude we were bringing in and we were able to work with Fulfillment.com in such a way that now we are not having an eclipse which is term issues in our previous set up it was really just shifts the product and wait for it to arrive. Now with Fulfillment.com we're able to ship products, track products, we're able to see warehouse inventory management in real time. Those are all things that we were looking for is a company continue to grow the thing that goes well beyond what I anticipated is that Fulfillment.com has been able to allow us to grow in a way it does not matter how fast these. We started with one warehouse with Fulfillment.com we're now in - by the end of May we'll be in a third warehouse and I imagine by the end of summer, we'll be in a fourth warehouse so I know that from the top down Fulfillment.com has invested in their clients. They are invested in our success. I believe that a large part of our success as the company has come from partnered with a fella back home. [Music]
When there would be an increase in orders something would always have to give, and it was typically the time with my family which made it more difficult. My name is Dan Baer, I live in Charlotte, North Carolina. On a daily basis I'm either writing for my blog or thinking of new product ideas that use duty war military fatigues that allow me to give back to the veteran community and creative and sustainable ways. Before I found Fulfillment.com I had historically always done everything myself I was having a really hard time managing my time across combat flags the corporate job is my family when things got to the breaking point I ran a couple google searches and found a couple of other companies but they weren't as responsive as Fulfillment.com and I felt like Fulfillment.com was able to really kind of address each of my pain points and actually answer my questions without talking around an answer. Once I decided to move forward with Fulfillment.com it was remarkably easy. There was a hand off during the onboarding I met my account rep and now things are running extremely smoothly I just launched a new product last week and I sold I had a couple hundred orders come off a little in a few hours I knew that I didn't have to do anything Fulfillment.com had the product and they had everything mapped and ready to go and most of them are arriving today. So it's been really great I would say Fulfillment.com is perfect for anybody who's running an e-commerce business. Having them take the daily weight and stress of having to constantly fulfill and watch orders off of my plate, off of my shoulders has been amazing. I highly recommend looking into Fulfillment.com because it is well worth the investment to get that mental and physical energy back so that you're able to adequately put it back into your business. Fulfillment.com has definitely exceeded my expectations it's nothing short of awesome! [Music]
So I just got done with my second dive. Getting dive certified here in Bali and as a business owner if you don't have things automated it can be hard to break away. So one of the ways that I've been able to fully automate a section of my business is by using Fulfillment.com and what I mean by that is, it's really hard to manage inventory levels while selling online, as well as outgoing orders and I actually used to do all of that stuff in-house, managing employees and it also took a lot of my time to manage myself . So it simply switched over to them it was about two years back I've been able to work with an Account Manager that does everything for me. I'm able to break away for 16 days at a time and not have to worry about my outgoing orders. I have to worry about returns and not have to worry about label printing and inventory levels so thank you guys. Thank You Fred,my Account Manager over there and I just wanted to shoot this quick video and just say thanks, appreciate y'all!
We have an explosive business we can't handle this on our own and we needed somebody who can execute better than we could. My name is Matt Silver, I live in New York City and I own a health brand. I was expanding off of Amazon and I needed a 3pl with killer logistics with a killer interface and also we're looking for a fulfillment facility that can expand with our brand worldwide. We had problem fulfilling volume we have problem with logistics we had probable shipping and we needed a platform and a company that had all the pieces in one place for us to execute our orders. I had met Justin through general Boston I came highly recommended and fulfilment come work for us in flying colors he had a very good onboarding process, give us an account manager and worked with my team to get everything in place it was a pretty seamless process with a Fulfillment.com. We're better organized and we're postured for worldwide expansion. We're already available in twenty eight markets around the world I think Fulfillment.com is perfect for any aggressively growing e-commerce brand. I would recommend Fulfillment.com to any of my e-commerce friends and I already have and well Justin has a hell of reputation in the e-commerce world is also veteran. For my end is no better person to run logistics than Jewish military veterans. We're very happy with Fulfillment.com and the attention to detail that is company gifts to our company. We're happy with the service 100%!
We were shipping all sorts of stuff out of his garage we have no idea how to figure out and optimize different shipping costs and it was challenging to say the least. My name is Chaz Shively, I live in Denver, Colorado. I'm an entrepreneur and I own a couple of companies. One of them is Legendary Ventures which creates and sells health supplements and the other company is Prosper Wellness which creates CBD products. Back when we got started seven or eight years ago I started fulfilling my own products in my house with my two-year-old and four-year-old son in my life after awhile we grew to where we had so many products that wouldn't fit in a garage and luckily I had met somebody from Fulfiolment.com at a conference and the rest is history. At the time we started doing less than a million dollars a year in business and now we're roughly around ten million dollars a year so it's grown a lot. As a bit of a non control freak I did have some concerns about outsourcing a core component of our business and make sure that it worked well but it integrated so quickly and easily and out of all of our vendors, out of all the years that we've been in business well Fulfillment.com has never been a concern. Don't worry being an entrepreneur for twenty five years and just realize how things work and the things break and there are always issues and with Fulfillment.com it seems like there are never issues. Once you outsource to them everything is taken care of you don't have to worry about it. There's no question Fulfillment.com has fulfilled all the expectations that I had and exceeded them.
We're taking time away from saving a dog and saving a hero's life by shipping these materials out across the country. My name is David Sharpe, Founder and CEO of Companions for Heroes. We are a charity that saves shelter dogs and has them adopted by wounded veterans, active duty military spouses, gold star families and first responders across the country. We started selling apparel about two years ago and the process was convoluted to say the least. We had to get all these orders together at once, we had a very difficult time of sending that out and taking up a lot of our resources so now with our partnership we are now able to do that through Fulfillment.com's network. They take care of all the processing, our team doesn't have to worry about shipping out the order that's being done by Fulfillment.coms team now and our team is more focused on their job which is to save a dog and to save a hero from taking their lives or being killed. The process was simple and structured their welcome packet laid out step by step what we need to do and getting our product shipped out and spend tremendous Fulfillment.com is perfect for any scale business for the first time in the charity's 10 year running we're prepared for any type of orders that come our way thanks to Fulfillment.com