Episode 600: 14 eCommerce Mistakes Revealed with Chloe Thomas

[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of movable costs in your business, both the overheads and the per product price. [SPEAKER_01]: And understanding how that affects both margin and contribution, whatever you want to call it, the profit per product and the profit of the business. [SPEAKER_01]: That's something you need to understand, need to be ready to recalculate when you need to recalculate it, and make sure that the people who are driving yourselves, the marketers, the marketing agencies, the ads, et cetera, and know what their new targets are when those situations change.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's the e-commerce master plan podcast. [SPEAKER_00]: Here to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e-commerce business. [SPEAKER_00]: Cutting through the highly to bring you inspiration and advice from the e-commerce sector and beyond, here's your host, Chloe Thomas. [SPEAKER_01]: Hello and welcome, it's great to have you here.

[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to this episode. [SPEAKER_01]: This is one of our hundreds. [SPEAKER_01]: Each time we hit the 100 milestone, we do something a little different. [SPEAKER_01]: Episode 100 was Ask Chloe.

[SPEAKER_01]: Episode 200, I did a solo show all about e-commerce success goals, and that was part of our 2019 growth series, yeah, with our old. [SPEAKER_01]: Then, episode 300, [SPEAKER_01]: was another solo show we went behind the scenes of how we put the podcast together. [SPEAKER_01]: Episode 400 multi guest top tips on the supply chain crisis. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, that was at that awful moment just to be with just after Covid where we had lots of supply chain issues.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then episode 500 we went a little epic and got all about profit with another multi get mega multi guest episode. [SPEAKER_01]: This time for episode 600 we're going back to a solo Chloe episode and we're going a bit dark. [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to be talking about mistakes in our world, not just the e-commerce world, not just the business world, our world. [SPEAKER_01]: We are not good about talking about our failures and our errors.

[SPEAKER_01]: We paint that shiny picture that all is well and awesome all of the time, where it's frequently not the reality. [SPEAKER_01]: Let's face it's social media. [SPEAKER_01]: It's not our friend. [SPEAKER_01]: I think it comes to this.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I know that first time, because over the last 20 years of being in business, when I've shared my feelings and some of them have been pretty epic, it's been amazing how many people have met having gone through something very similar or exactly the same thing, an awful lot to advice, often after the facts, and I really do wish I'd known who'd gone through it sooner, so I could have learnt from their experiences and often saved a lot of money and [SPEAKER_01]: and a lot of effort and energy as well, maybe even avoided the mistake.

[SPEAKER_01]: So in this episode, I'm going to be sharing mistakes. [SPEAKER_01]: In a hopefully upbeat and non depressing way, I might say this is hopefully not going to be too confessional and I'll hopefully be lots of advice for you within it, things that you can avoid. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm also going to be sharing two different types of mistakes with you. [SPEAKER_01]: First off, the mistakes I see e-commerce brands doing again and again and how to avoid them and many of these I've been seeing for over a decade if not for the whole 20 years I've been doing this.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm also going to be sharing a few of my own screwups because let's face it, we all enjoy hearing someone else's screw up, but mainly in case it helps you to or at least you get to feel smart for avoiding some of the traps I've fallen into. [SPEAKER_01]: Now I've put together a list of mistakes over the last few weeks, I've been compiling it as they come to me, and to keep it interesting, rather than try and put them in some kind of sensible order, I've put them all in a bowl.

[SPEAKER_01]: see, you can hopefully you can hear them rattling there. [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm literally just going to pick one out of the bowl and then talk about it. [SPEAKER_01]: And there's 15 of them. [SPEAKER_01]: So we're clearly not going to fit that into the section before the top tips.

[SPEAKER_01]: We've got rid of the top tips section of this episode, but do make sure you listen right to the end so you do catch all of the mistakes I'm going to be sharing with you. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, let's find out what the first one is or not killing bad decisions quickly. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, this is something which we as humans are hard-wired to do badly. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, one of the cognitive biases is, I think it's called confirmation bias, but don't quote me on that, is that [SPEAKER_01]: We make a bad decision and then we're kind of committed to it.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we will keep trying to prove that bad decision. [SPEAKER_01]: If you think about the most simplest terms, you've ordered a terrible meal of the menu in a restaurant, right? [SPEAKER_01]: It's come and it's clearly... [SPEAKER_01]: awful for you.

[SPEAKER_01]: You're not going to enjoy eating it, but you're going to keep telling everyone it's a great and it's lovely even though you hate it because you or the one who made the decision. [SPEAKER_01]: So that's one of the reasons why we're bad at not killing bad decisions quickly. [SPEAKER_01]: I've done it multiple times and probably still do it a bit now even though I keep an eye out for it because I don't believe my own gut. [SPEAKER_01]: That comes into this a lot.

[SPEAKER_01]: The worst, this is probably the worst move of my entire business career. [SPEAKER_01]: So we're starting big here, okay? [SPEAKER_01]: They're gonna get smaller after this one. [SPEAKER_01]: We're back when I was on your marketing agency, we were trying to grow and I thought, one of the ways to do that would be to hire someone who had experience in other marketing agencies who could help us improve things.

[SPEAKER_01]: So they were fairly hard to find. [SPEAKER_01]: So we used a recruitment agency, so there was their fee. [SPEAKER_01]: And we paid them a really good salary. [SPEAKER_01]: And almost from week one, my gut knew this was a bad decision.

[SPEAKER_01]: And this was the wrong person, the wrong cultural fit for our business. [SPEAKER_01]: However, I thought it was me. [SPEAKER_01]: I thought it was that I couldn't train them well enough, that I couldn't onboard them well enough, that I wasn't managing them well enough, and it was all me. [SPEAKER_01]: So I carried on with this for six whole months.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, great one, Chloe. [SPEAKER_01]: Which meant that, [SPEAKER_01]: A, and then finally made the decision we had to get rid of them, which meant that we gone past the point where I could get the feedback from the recruitment agency. [SPEAKER_01]: We'd gone past the point of their probation, so I couldn't get rid of them cheaply. [SPEAKER_01]: I had to do it extensively, and one of the things I learned after the fact when I was talking to people about it was that you can do this sort of thing using an HR consultant who's costs are in the hundreds [SPEAKER_01]: So, all in all, I think if you add it all up, it cost me about £36,000 to higher and get rid of the person I should never have hired in the first place.

[SPEAKER_01]: Despite the fact my gut knew it was a terrible decision in week one, and of course, after he left the business, every single person in the office turned around to me in one way or another and said, really glad you got rid of them, Chloe, that was a really good decision. [SPEAKER_01]: So, if you are currently sitting on something which you think may have been a bad decision or not reversing it, probably do it sooner or later or talk to your team or talk to someone you know about it rather than doing like I did and keeping thinking it's you and just racking up the tens of thousand pounds of cost.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I told you we're starting on a big one there, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Let's hope the bowl will be more kind to me and give me a and give me an easier one next. [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, okay, this one's juicy. [SPEAKER_01]: This is what I see a lot of e-commerce business is doing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Product optimization, ignoring product optimization. [SPEAKER_01]: And what I don't mean here is tweaking your product and improving the products itself, I mean inventory and how you're managing your inventory. [SPEAKER_01]: This is something I've seen back when I did consulting. [SPEAKER_01]: I've seen many businesses do badly.

[SPEAKER_01]: I had was one company I was working with who had the value of the stock in their warehouse was enough on their current sales rate in a weekly sales performance was enough to keep them in stock for over a year. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, that is a horrendous position for any e-commerce business to be in, because all your cash is tied up in stock. [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, that doesn't take into account the fact that some of this was clearly never going to sell. [SPEAKER_01]: They had too much of it.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was perishable. [SPEAKER_01]: It was no longer on trend, et cetera, et cetera. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's easy to get excited about product over by, it's easy to think you need more product than you do. [SPEAKER_01]: It's easy to think, to look at that product and go, oh but I paid for that and I think that should get this so I'm not willing to discount it.

[SPEAKER_01]: The clever businesses in the e-commerce space, especially in the fashion space, you'll see this time and time again, they are the ones who clear out the stock quickly. [SPEAKER_01]: They're the ones who turn, who keep that cash moving back into the [SPEAKER_01]: I've never worked in buying or merchandising, but I have huge respect for buying and merchandising skill sets. [SPEAKER_01]: For my first kind of three years of my career, I was sat in the same office as the buyers and merchandises working closely with them to work at what we promote.

[SPEAKER_01]: And really fascinated by how they decided what would go on sale. [SPEAKER_01]: I clearly remember working, it was either past times or museum selection. [SPEAKER_01]: And we had like a Christmas best seller. [SPEAKER_01]: that we sold every single Christmas, but we put it in the sale every single genuine.

[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, yeah, but we could sell that in 12 months' time at full price. [SPEAKER_01]: And the merchandise was like, yes, but we need the cash back. [SPEAKER_01]: We need the cash back from it now to keep to pay for everything we have to pay for in the non-gift selling months, but also to give us the money to buy the stock for the spring and the summer seasons before then we go back to Christmas again. [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, we're gonna buy it back.

[SPEAKER_01]: But now we need to clear it out to get that cash back into the business and I think there's that skillset isn't talked enough about in our industry. [SPEAKER_01]: Buys and merchandisers are not given enough plaudits for their awesomeness. [SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's one of those things especially when you're coming into the industry whether you've got one skew or a thousand skews, understanding when to re-buy and how to work on it is [SPEAKER_01]: is so critical to keeping the cash moving, keeping your customers happy, and running the adaptable quick-moving business who can pivot and who can change and who can twist and react to things nice and quick.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I was a holiday tech stuff that sits beyond behind that. [SPEAKER_01]: But I think the mindset as a thing that many businesses don't have. [SPEAKER_01]: that product optimisation skill set and I do quite a lot of work hosting webinars for bright pearl by sage and inventory planner by sage so I get to hear some horror stories and some amazing case studies as well working with them and seeing how they're software and proves things. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm they're not sponsors of this, but I am I'm quite deep in that world, despite many talking about marketing and e-commerce growth, but a lot of time thinking about product optimization and I think it's something which many an e-commerce business doesn't get the skills set around soon enough so that can be a huge mistake.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, we're too in. [SPEAKER_01]: What's going to be next out of my little ding ding ding ding bowl. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay. [SPEAKER_01]: agency selection.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, okay. [SPEAKER_01]: So I've been on both sides of this. [SPEAKER_01]: Around an agency for 10 years, marketing agency, not web agency. [SPEAKER_01]: But during that time, I helped many businesses find their web agency.

[SPEAKER_01]: Before that, I was working client-side finding agencies finding website builders. [SPEAKER_01]: I've seen some horrendous fallouts, some horrendous situations and seen many, you know, you still see many of these tales on social of horror stories that people find when they're auditing at accounts, horror stories people find when they take over a website, et cetera, et cetera, and horror stories that brands have had. [SPEAKER_01]: In my experience, the blame in those situations is equally as likely, and don't shoot me for this, is equally as likely to be on the shoulders of the brand as it is to be on the shoulders of the agency.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it's usually because they've made a bad choice of who to work with. [SPEAKER_01]: So the brand haven't got a good enough understanding of what sort of agency they need, because one out agent is very different to another, one web agency is very different to another. [SPEAKER_01]: So they're buying badly. [SPEAKER_01]: And often the agency haven't done a good enough job of explaining who they are and what they deliver and who they work best for in order to enable the brand to make the right decisions.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's hard work to find the right agency and we need to be putting more effort into that brown side and agencies need to have a clear idea of who they're delivering for and make that clear to the brand because having work to agency side, recruiting customers that are a bad fit cost you far more in the long term than that little cash flow bump of actually getting a new client. [SPEAKER_01]: There's me one for that one before I annoy everybody listening to this podcast.

[SPEAKER_01]: Ooh, this one's juicy. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, turning off the website. [SPEAKER_01]: Now many of you are listening to this going. [SPEAKER_01]: What?

[SPEAKER_01]: What an earth? [SPEAKER_01]: People turn off their website. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, people turn off their website for really, really terrible reasons. [SPEAKER_01]: So this first, I first came across this when I was consulting Gosh, it must be 15 years ago now.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I was working with a brand who sold gift products. [SPEAKER_01]: It's a husband and wife team and they were going on holiday for two weeks. [SPEAKER_01]: And while they were on holiday, they turned the website off. [SPEAKER_01]: Because they didn't want any orders coming in to cause the customer's issues.

[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't turn off the ads, the ads were still running, but they did turn off the website. [SPEAKER_01]: So no one could play someone else. [SPEAKER_01]: I think there was a home one home page holding page, but they turned the rest of it off for two weeks and turned it back on when they came back. [SPEAKER_01]: And I was just flabbergasted that they would do this, because of course it's hugely bad for your SEO.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's bad for customer experience. [SPEAKER_01]: It was slightly hard about them, but it's not that hard to set up a... [SPEAKER_01]: the warehouse is shut for the next two weeks. [SPEAKER_01]: We will deliver your products later.

[SPEAKER_01]: Same. [SPEAKER_01]: It's a really bad idea. [SPEAKER_01]: And then a couple of weeks ago, I saw someone else had done it. [SPEAKER_01]: I was so surprised this would happen in this day, and someone who was moving from their own warehouse in their office to moving to a 3PL.

[SPEAKER_01]: So there was someone who should have, I'm assuming the three PLN knew this was happening because they'd have talked about order transfer, how they agreed to that news. [SPEAKER_01]: So they just passed where protected their Shopify store. [SPEAKER_01]: So no one could get into it. [SPEAKER_01]: So again, you lose or the SEO, you lose or the customer service, et cetera, et cetera, all for being able to say we're doing a warehouse move, orders won't be processed until this date.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, mind boggling to many of us, but people are still doing it, which is why I'm including on this, please do not turn off your [SPEAKER_01]: For any reason at all, okay, please don't. [SPEAKER_01]: If you think you need to turn off your website, send me an email and say, Chloe, should I be sending it to my website? [SPEAKER_01]: And I will reply and tell you, no, you should not be turning off your website. [SPEAKER_01]: So there's no excuse for it, please, please, please don't do it.

[SPEAKER_01]: It has all sorts of ramifications you do not want to consider. [SPEAKER_01]: We'll have to deal with. [SPEAKER_01]: having no discount strategy. [SPEAKER_01]: That's the next one out the bowl.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, this seems like kind of obvious again, but so many businesses are guilty of just slapping a percentage on it in order to drive sales without actually having a proper strategy of which customers get what discounts, you know, where they are in the RFM sequence, RFM, Reacency, Frequency, Monetary Valley, the beginning of all segmentation in retail, Reacency means how recently they bought. [SPEAKER_01]: F is frequency, how many times they bought M is how much they spend on average or customer lifetime value.

[SPEAKER_01]: You can sub it for a number that works for you. [SPEAKER_01]: But to not understand where deploying a discount is valuable to you across that customer grouping, those customers segmentation is kind of mad, not testing the level of discount you're doing on your email pop-up, also somewhat insane, and not understanding how you discount products [SPEAKER_01]: based on, we're kind of going back to the inventory or product management piece earlier, but understanding what the right level of discount is to be worth doing to get that cash back into the business.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, please have a proper discount strategy, please work out where you should be doing this. [SPEAKER_01]: What levers work best for your customer base is it three for two? [SPEAKER_01]: Is it a percentage off? [SPEAKER_01]: Is it vouchers?

[SPEAKER_01]: Is it loyalty program? [SPEAKER_01]: is it free P and P? [SPEAKER_01]: Is it something else? [SPEAKER_01]: Because a discount strategy, that's pretty should put promotion strategy, is not just about cold, hard cash.

[SPEAKER_01]: It can be about many other things. [SPEAKER_01]: So, um, that's a skill set. [SPEAKER_01]: I think we need to improve in our industry as well. [SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: What are we going to get next out the bowl? [SPEAKER_01]: Hope you're liking this bowl, things coming out the bowl method. [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, this is a me one. [SPEAKER_01]: Not asking for help.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know why, but I am allergic to asking for help. [SPEAKER_01]: Still allergic, I now admit I'm allergic to it, but I think not asking for help has cost me a lot over the years. [SPEAKER_01]: You may find this slightly mad, but whilst I was running my marketing agency, having never worked at another marketing agency, I [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think I reached out to a single other marketing agency to say, how do you run your marketing agency? [SPEAKER_01]: We just guessed, which is insane, given how many people are running marketing agencies.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it was kind of mad, and I'm slightly less bad at it now, but still pretty bad at asking for help. [SPEAKER_01]: In our e-commerce industry, people are so helpful. [SPEAKER_01]: It's such a lovely space to be part of. [SPEAKER_01]: The great majority of people in this industry will help you in one way or another if you ask, you know, short questions, big questions.

[SPEAKER_01]: So please, if you're not sure what's going on, please ask for help, don't be like me. [SPEAKER_01]: Basically is what I'm saying. [SPEAKER_01]: Ask people for help. [SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: Let's see what else we've got. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, we've got margin in here. [SPEAKER_01]: which fits nicely with our product point and our discount promotion strategy I renamed it to, and I've promotion strategy, please. [SPEAKER_01]: Margin is something I think that is not well understood enough.

[SPEAKER_01]: Again, it's a skill set that's a little bit missing, especially [SPEAKER_01]: This one's kind of come to the fore as a mistake, not understanding your margins in the current climate where we've got tariffs shifting things a lot for people, which means recalculations, we've got costs going up with oil prices going up, et cetera, et cetera. [SPEAKER_01]: So there's a lot of movable costs in your business, both the overheads and the per product price, and understanding how that affects both margin, contribution, whatever you want to call it, the profit per product and the profit of the business.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's something you need to understand, need to be ready to recalculate when you need to recalculate it and make sure that the people who are driving yourself as the marketers, the marketing agencies, the ads, et cetera, etc. [SPEAKER_01]: Know what their new targets are when those situations change. [SPEAKER_01]: because even if it's not, even when we've not been in a changeable scenario, you can quickly capture cold and quickly lose a lot of money if you don't know what you're aiming for your targets are.

[SPEAKER_01]: And when things are changing so much as they are at the moment, you really have to keep a really close eye on those numbers. [SPEAKER_01]: So the mistake of not understanding a margins. [SPEAKER_01]: Right, what's next? [SPEAKER_01]: No optimisation.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, okay. [SPEAKER_01]: I was running about this with someone yesterday. [SPEAKER_01]: In fact, this is when you put something live and you think it's done. [SPEAKER_01]: It's not.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not ever done. [SPEAKER_01]: That's one of the frustrations of our industry. [SPEAKER_01]: Nothing you do is ever complete. [SPEAKER_01]: It always needs [SPEAKER_01]: This when I back was back in my agency days we did a lot of Google ads work and it was amazing the number of people we did audits who had put Google shopping campaigns live and that was it, they just left it.

[SPEAKER_01]: They hadn't optimized it, they hadn't looked at it, they hadn't set any, you know, using any of the tools we had no segmentation, nothing they just got on its life, that's done. [SPEAKER_01]: We can tick the box of Google shopping campaigns and go and work on something [SPEAKER_01]: It only works if you optimize it. [SPEAKER_01]: Same thing happens with Facebook ads, same things happens with email automation sequences. [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, we can take the box.

[SPEAKER_01]: We've done a band and basket. [SPEAKER_01]: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, [SPEAKER_01]: If I'm straighting one because you can't just go, oh it's done.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's done. [SPEAKER_01]: We've completed. [SPEAKER_01]: We've reached the highest tier. [SPEAKER_01]: No, you put live and then you optimize.

[SPEAKER_01]: So huge mistake. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to stop myself there. [SPEAKER_01]: Or I will rant about this for the next half hour. [SPEAKER_01]: Which you don't need because I've got a still got loads of these to get through.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it's a me one. [SPEAKER_01]: Working weekends. [SPEAKER_01]: I have more than once falling into the trap of working on weekends or working late in the evenings. [SPEAKER_01]: And it's never been good for me and it's never been good for my businesses at whichever point I did it.

[SPEAKER_01]: So now it's kind of like a warning sign for me. [SPEAKER_01]: If I have to work a weekend, if I have to work late, then I've made a bad decision, a bad strategic decision in the business. [SPEAKER_01]: Why do I say this? [SPEAKER_01]: Well, because I'm a big believer in constraint being a beautiful thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: And if you can strain yourself to five days a week or four days a week, or 30 hours a week, or however you want to constrain yourself, it forces you to make better decisions about what you're doing in the business. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, if you go, well, I've only got 30 hours. [SPEAKER_01]: So how do I make those 30 hours pay off me? [SPEAKER_01]: I can't work on Saturday when it's lovely and quiet in the office.

[SPEAKER_01]: So how can I create a situation that's lovely and quiet on one of the days I'm allowed to work? [SPEAKER_01]: So as I can get things done. [SPEAKER_01]: It is easy to become a busy fall. [SPEAKER_01]: It's easy to go.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I'm doing more hours. [SPEAKER_01]: Therefore, work will be good. [SPEAKER_01]: That is rarely the case. [SPEAKER_01]: Very, very rarely the case.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I highly advise you to ignore the people who are like, [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I'm hustling. [SPEAKER_01]: I've done seven days for the last three years. [SPEAKER_01]: I haven't taken a holiday in 10 years. [SPEAKER_01]: I don't take time off.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's for losers. [SPEAKER_01]: They are wrong. [SPEAKER_01]: If you want a healthy life and a strong business, then don't work the weekends. [SPEAKER_01]: Restrict your working hours.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because if you have a partner like in those very, very early stages of building something, right, when you're proving the concept. [SPEAKER_01]: Once you get past that, if the only way your business survives is by you working 60 hours a week, and the business can't afford to hire someone else to do it, then either you are doing things that shouldn't be being done because they're not valuable to you. [SPEAKER_01]: If there's no money to pay someone to do it, then it's not worth doing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Or you are fundamentally just screwing yourself over. [SPEAKER_01]: That's just put it that way. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, seriously, though it is easy, so easy to fall into that trap of more hours, more hours, more hours and then everything will be all right and it is rarely the case that that is a good decision. [SPEAKER_01]: Either you're, if you're having to do that, either your business model is broken and there's not enough margin, therefore you can't pay someone else to do it, or you're doing things that are just pointless and not bringing value to the business.

[SPEAKER_01]: and stopping pausing, letting the subconscious work something out over the weekend, so you can come back and make better decisions as a far, far better way to improve your business. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, rant over. [SPEAKER_01]: Let's see what else we've got in here. [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, test once and write off.

[SPEAKER_01]: This goes with the the optimization point I made earlier. [SPEAKER_01]: It's very easy to try something once. [SPEAKER_01]: it not work and you write off that whole channel forever. [SPEAKER_01]: This is something I've seen so many times with Facebook ads and Google ads.

[SPEAKER_01]: You'll be talking to a brand new world. [SPEAKER_01]: Your business should really do well on Google ads or we tried it and it didn't work. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, okay, how did you try it? [SPEAKER_01]: Well, we ran some, some brand ads and, um, um, uh, yeah, just it just kind of lies the organic social.

[SPEAKER_01]: Did you do anything else? [SPEAKER_01]: No, did you sort of Google shopping? [SPEAKER_01]: No. [SPEAKER_01]: Did you try PMAX?

[SPEAKER_01]: No. [SPEAKER_01]: Did you try this? [SPEAKER_01]: No. [SPEAKER_01]: Did you try some more creative?

[SPEAKER_01]: No. [SPEAKER_01]: Did you optimize your product feed? [SPEAKER_01]: No. [SPEAKER_01]: There's like all these things and it's very much the same, you know, with, you get the same thing with face because, oh, we try to campaign.

[SPEAKER_01]: It didn't work. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay. [SPEAKER_01]: Did you try different creative? [SPEAKER_01]: No.

[SPEAKER_01]: Did you try different targeting? [SPEAKER_01]: No. [SPEAKER_01]: Did you try all those many many things you can try? [SPEAKER_01]: Did you look and see if it was the landing page and the conversion on your website that was the problem?

[SPEAKER_01]: So please do not test once and write off. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm currently slamming this into my own head. [SPEAKER_01]: at the moment because we are. [SPEAKER_01]: We're on a big email list growth project.

[SPEAKER_01]: First of all on our e-commerce tech newsletter and then we're going to be rolling out what works to the e-commerce master plan news item. [SPEAKER_01]: Joy of having team news letters. [SPEAKER_01]: But we've been running a test, kicked it off three or four weeks ago. [SPEAKER_01]: On what looks like a very cool list growth system, it looks like it should be quality giving.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, because it would be very easy to grow our lists with loads of low-quality data. [SPEAKER_01]: That would be very simple, but it doesn't deliver a good quality data, it doesn't deliver engagement, it doesn't deliver the type of audience that our customers want from us. [SPEAKER_01]: But this one looks like it should be quite quality. [SPEAKER_01]: It's called sparkly people and what's going to check it out.

[SPEAKER_01]: But our first test, and we're pending results at the moment, but I reckon our first test is going to be bad, because all the emails that have come in a Gmail email addresses, which is usually a sign that they're not going to be the high quality ones, you know, they're not brand. [SPEAKER_01]: There's not a list of brand names. [SPEAKER_01]: I get the list of Gmail. [SPEAKER_01]: We've got 120 signed up.

[SPEAKER_01]: So far, the unsubscribe rate isn't great. [SPEAKER_01]: The opens and the clicks are lower than our average. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's not looking, looking a brilliant, but we're going to let it play out for a month or six weeks or so. [SPEAKER_01]: See how the engagement is and then decide how we proceed with that.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I could look at that and go, oh, that spark. [SPEAKER_01]: You just doesn't work. [SPEAKER_01]: We'll give up on it. [SPEAKER_01]: That would be a stupid idea because one within sparkly as within the ad tools, there's kind of two or three different ways you can go about running this type of campaign and we're only trying one of them.

[SPEAKER_01]: Secondly, within those different types there are lots of ways which you could lots of levers you can pull to optimize. [SPEAKER_01]: So we're not going to be, I think it's highly, highly unlikely we're going to go. [SPEAKER_01]: This isn't going to work for us. [SPEAKER_01]: I think the quick volume play isn't going to work for us.

[SPEAKER_01]: But there will be nuggets within that which do work well for us. [SPEAKER_01]: So me, just as much as all the rest of you has to remember this one, do not test once and write off optimized optimised optimised. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I think we're going to pause for the ads now and then we're going to come back and I've got one, two, three, I've got five left. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so we'll do five more after the outbreak, so stick around and don't go anywhere.

[SPEAKER_00]: E-commerce master plan is supporting by some of the greatest companies in the E-commerce sector. [SPEAKER_00]: Here's a reminder of who they are. [SPEAKER_00]: It's time for the top six round. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, thanks for sticking around.

[SPEAKER_01]: You are not going to regret that decision, because we've still got five of my mistakes to run through with you. [SPEAKER_01]: The first of which is the wrong advice and filtering, right? [SPEAKER_01]: This is going to require some explanation. [SPEAKER_01]: It is very easy in our modern world, especially around digital marketing and e-commerce.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, there's so much noise being created by the industry, and I'm say this as someone who creates noise within the industry. [SPEAKER_01]: So much noise being created. [SPEAKER_01]: It's very easy for you to get distracted by, let's call it a bright shiny object and not have done the filtering you should do to work out if there's actually relevant for your business. [SPEAKER_01]: Filters can be things like skew count.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's a big one in the e-commerce. [SPEAKER_01]: Is this a tool for [SPEAKER_01]: A business with loads of skis or a tool or a strategy or an idea for a business with not many skis. [SPEAKER_01]: Size of business is this a strategy when you're spending a hundred pounds a day on ads or as it for when you're spending a hundred thousand pounds a month on ads. [SPEAKER_01]: Where does the strategy fit within that?

[SPEAKER_01]: Is this a strategy for subscription or a strategy for single product sales? [SPEAKER_01]: Is this a strategy for fashion or for gift or for supplements or health and beauty? [SPEAKER_01]: what's the strategy, you know, where's this coming from? [SPEAKER_01]: Who's this been written by, and who is this being suggested by?

[SPEAKER_01]: Is it someone who understands your part of the industry? [SPEAKER_01]: Is it someone clearly trying to sell something? [SPEAKER_01]: All that filtering to make sure we're absorbing the right noise is really, really critical. [SPEAKER_01]: And also, you know, it's not just about consuming podcasts and blog content and YouTube videos, content at conferences and discussions with the people who call your appendously with sales ideas.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's also about the advisors you have around you. [SPEAKER_01]: So I've got two examples for this one. [SPEAKER_01]: One is a massive error I made. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not quite in the 36,000 pound realm of the [SPEAKER_01]: of the bad hire, but it was I think it was probably was at least at least five grand if not a bit more in the end.

[SPEAKER_01]: Was I had an accountant who suggested we become an LLP in the agency. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not going to get into the accounts of it, don't worry. [SPEAKER_01]: And then one of the ways we were going to benefit from this was something to do with having a car on finance and then putting that back through the business. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I should have asked a lot more questions.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let's put it that way. [SPEAKER_01]: And I merely went, I went away and bought a car that I didn't, I was too big. [SPEAKER_00]: It was just too big. [SPEAKER_00]: Beans are only one series.

[SPEAKER_00]: Why are you too big for me? [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, sorry, two series. [SPEAKER_01]: One or two, one of them, anyway. [SPEAKER_01]: Too big.

[SPEAKER_01]: I like small cars. [SPEAKER_01]: I live around a lot of lanes. [SPEAKER_01]: You can't be doing a big car on the lanes, it's a nightmare. [SPEAKER_01]: And then it had beeping reversing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Don't get me started with hedges and beeping reversing, anyway. [SPEAKER_01]: It was a bad choice, cost a lot of money. [SPEAKER_01]: The tax benefit vanished into thin air. [SPEAKER_01]: Still not quite sure why that vanished, but it did vanish.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was a myth, it was a complete stupidity. [SPEAKER_01]: And had to, because I disliked the car so much, ended up having to buy my way out of it, which then meant I lost money on all the rest of it. [SPEAKER_01]: It was a very stupid decision, a very easily avoided decision, if I'd [SPEAKER_01]: asked more questions and not taking bad advice. [SPEAKER_01]: So that's the example of one.

[SPEAKER_01]: Example number two though, is one from gosh again about 10 years ago back when I was doing consulting, but I've come across brands who do this since. [SPEAKER_01]: Whereas I was working with the marketing e-commerce marketer of a company [SPEAKER_01]: One product that came in one pack size and three different colors. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so they had three skews. [SPEAKER_01]: The entire business had three skews.

[SPEAKER_01]: Very successful business. [SPEAKER_01]: Not around anymore, but I'm still not going to name them. [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, so they had three products, three skews, that was it. [SPEAKER_01]: And she's been to a conference one run by SLI systems who don't exist anymore, but they were a search and diving company.

[SPEAKER_01]: So all about helping customers, your customers on your website find the right product. [SPEAKER_01]: And she came back from this event and was like, guys, amazing. [SPEAKER_01]: I think we're going to have to buy it. [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to put it in place.

[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, it's solving a problem you don't have. [SPEAKER_01]: You only have three skews, you know, customers aren't struggling to find the right product. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, let's not stopping them from buying because you only have three skews. [SPEAKER_01]: One product, three colorways.

[SPEAKER_01]: You don't need this product because it's built for people with big skewsets. [SPEAKER_01]: So that's the sort of filtering, I mean, you have to kind of like resist the excitement and the sales pattern and the cool case study sometimes and go, actually. [SPEAKER_01]: is this the right thing for our business? [SPEAKER_01]: And it might even be, is this the right thing for our business now?

[SPEAKER_01]: So, the big mistake is to listen to the wrong advice and not do do your own filtering and your own questioning when you go along with those things. [SPEAKER_01]: And in my case, don't buy BMW. [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, brand names. [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, this is another me one.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is getting very confessional. [SPEAKER_01]: Apologies, everybody. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so what we've got left [SPEAKER_01]: and I think we've done that one already. [SPEAKER_01]: So we've got, obviously, I had a duplicate in there.

[SPEAKER_01]: We've got two confessional ones, and then we've got a big e-commerce one. [SPEAKER_01]: So just to keep you listening, I need to do the two confessions, then we'll go big e-commerce, and then we'll wrap everything up. [SPEAKER_01]: Because I too, a bit of a salesperson. [SPEAKER_01]: Right, okay.

[SPEAKER_01]: So two conversions. [SPEAKER_01]: The first confession is brand names and this also goes for good e-commerce advice as well. [SPEAKER_01]: So brand names, I have an impressive history of coming up with bad brand names. [SPEAKER_01]: The first was, and hopefully some of these might make you giggle.

[SPEAKER_01]: The first one was Indium web management. [SPEAKER_01]: That was what the agency was first called when we created it. [SPEAKER_01]: And we had clients who thought we were called a modium, and some who thought we were called a radium. [SPEAKER_01]: It was ridiculous.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was such a bad name, because people just didn't know what the word was. [SPEAKER_01]: We then became indium online, which made more sense, shorter, et cetera, et cetera, more called logo, et cetera, et cetera. [SPEAKER_01]: But we still had the radium, iridium-emodium issues. [SPEAKER_01]: And when your clients are saying to your face, having worked with you for 12 months, [SPEAKER_01]: we're not called that.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know you've done a bad name. [SPEAKER_01]: Second bad name was this one, this very podcast name, which in some ways was a brilliant name because started off as the name of my first book and to work out the name of the book. [SPEAKER_01]: It was going to be called Ecommerce Blueprint, obviously original name of the book. [SPEAKER_01]: But then we did a, I've just removed another [SPEAKER_01]: I did run a couple of Google ads or multiple Google ads actually with all the different name ideas going to a landing page and saw which one got the best click through rate and e-commerce master plan got the best click through rate and hence that became the name of the book.

[SPEAKER_01]: Kind of cool, right? [SPEAKER_01]: However, once it becomes a podcast, we have people who I know have listened to tens of episodes, if not hundreds of episodes, who think it is and will email me telling me how great [SPEAKER_01]: And I mean... [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so master plan, terrible name in business because people think it's master class and various other things. [SPEAKER_01]: So yes, the e-commerce master plan podcast not my best name in the end either.

[SPEAKER_01]: But we love it. [SPEAKER_01]: We still love it. [SPEAKER_01]: And don't worry. [SPEAKER_01]: We're not going to be changing the name anytime.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm seeing the one I just remembered that I forgot to set that that mid that was calling a book customer manipulation, which felt like a great idea at the time and it really fitted. [SPEAKER_01]: you are a bit annoyed when words end up with different meanings that dictionary definition. [SPEAKER_01]: So manipulated in the dictionary is, you know, forming things with clay and molding things, which is great because that's what we do to our customers. [SPEAKER_01]: We help them and we guide them in the right place.

[SPEAKER_01]: Didn't really work massive flop of a book, brilliant book, since re-published as customer persuasion, but yeah, that was another bad naming decision. [SPEAKER_01]: So [SPEAKER_01]: Don't follow my mistake, don't come up with bad brand names. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm thinking them through first, and then if you need to change the name, change the name, sooner or later we go back to that one about holding on to bad decisions. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, one more confession, and then we're going to do the final e-commerce one.

[SPEAKER_01]: This one, probably TMI, but bear with me, because I've been fairly public about this already. [SPEAKER_01]: It was not being ready for the menopause. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, um, I've just had 12 very interesting months fighting the Perry Menopause, various symptoms, trying to get onto the right dose of HRT, et cetera, et cetera, and trying everything under the sun to try and feel like a human again. [SPEAKER_01]: The good news is I massively feel like a human again.

[SPEAKER_01]: I almost feel like I've got 2018 energy. [SPEAKER_01]: How crazy is that? [SPEAKER_01]: If you know, you know, but I thought I was relatively, I mean, I'm not heading the sand, but there were lots of things I wish I'd done. [SPEAKER_01]: five, 10 years ago, and known about five, 10 years ago to be better prepared in my business because the business has taken a fairly massive hit.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's probably the thing most affected by my energy. [SPEAKER_01]: The Paramanapause and the energy issues that's given me. [SPEAKER_01]: But also to know how to attack it. [SPEAKER_01]: Essentially, I was the boiling frog analogy for probably four years going into it and should have got on the HOT and really got revised to it a couple of years before I had.

[SPEAKER_01]: Then I would have had, [SPEAKER_01]: you know, things would not have got us bad last year, but I didn't know. [SPEAKER_01]: I thought I kept going, oh yeah, it's fine. [SPEAKER_01]: It's just, it's just post-COVID energy issues. [SPEAKER_01]: It's just this energy issue.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's just that energy issue. [SPEAKER_01]: It's not this and then you reach that crisis point. [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, oh no. [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, okay.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we need, we need to go and see the special dogs and now I get this sorted. [SPEAKER_01]: The other thing I wish I'd done is I wish I'd got the business best prepared for it. [SPEAKER_01]: So here at a metcomedia, I've got a team of four and a half people who are mainly on or are entirely on content production and accounting. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm the person, actually they do a lot of the marketing as well, but for the various content platforms we've got, I do all the sales and all the marketing that leads to the sales.

[SPEAKER_01]: And when your person who does all of that is reduced to some days 40% capacity, sometimes 60% capacity, and with not a lot of energy, and we all know sales and marketing, you've got to be positive as you're doing it or your misery comes through, doesn't it? [SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't, it just. [SPEAKER_01]: That has been a massive problem and despite myself being a lover of building systems, our sales systems weren't there. [SPEAKER_01]: So that's what we've been working over the last six months.

[SPEAKER_01]: But it's, I wish I'd known that in advance that could hit me this badly in advance, so as I could pull all that together because you may be paying critical illness insurance for times when you are ill and you cannot make your business function properly. [SPEAKER_01]: menopause is not included on that list. [SPEAKER_01]: It's not, you're going to get no support from anywhere if you're running your own business. [SPEAKER_01]: So I wish I wish I'd been ready for that.

[SPEAKER_01]: If you're if you're want to know more about that, I'm not going to carry on about it on here. [SPEAKER_01]: So I say, I am now. [SPEAKER_01]: back up 100% really solid and very much excited about what the next next few months and years are going to bring for the business. [SPEAKER_01]: But if you think you may need a chat about that, feel free to reach out and ask me questions via LinkedIn or email.

[SPEAKER_01]: I am more than happy. [SPEAKER_01]: to help you out with my wisdom and that goes with men as well because if I've been working for somebody I think I probably would have cut back to two or three days a week I probably would have maybe tried to take a sabbatical or something so it has a big impact with your male or female if you are employing women working with women you're going to be experiencing potentially this as well. [SPEAKER_01]: Admittedly I had it quite badly it's taking quite a lot to get it right but [SPEAKER_01]: I wish I'd known been more proactive in knowing more to be ready as soon as I saw the warning signs and I ignored them because I didn't understand what they were.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right, I said I was going to give you an e-commerce one. [SPEAKER_01]: Let's stop with a naval gazing clay. [SPEAKER_01]: Let's actually give people some more help on the e-commerce space. [SPEAKER_01]: And this one.

[SPEAKER_01]: is one it's really easy to ignore this mistake. [SPEAKER_01]: It's really easy to do it and it's a bit of a pivot on the, well the one I showed earlier with you about setting it up once and thinking it's completed. [SPEAKER_01]: That was about going back to optimise the activity and improve the activity. [SPEAKER_01]: This one, though, is about keeping the content accurate.

[SPEAKER_01]: So it's very much about [SPEAKER_01]: automated content being accurate. [SPEAKER_01]: So if you have a lovely email welcome campaign that has images of the latest collection in it, how often do you update those images? [SPEAKER_01]: Do you have a reminder in your project management tool to say, today's the day we need to go and do the quarterly change of all the images in our automated email sequences? [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, no.

[SPEAKER_01]: You do need one of those. [SPEAKER_01]: It's also when it comes to adverts. [SPEAKER_01]: We've all seen and screen grabbed it. [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, look, there's still doing doing a black Friday advert in January and all the rest of it, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: That stuff you need to make sure you are ready to bring that down when it stops performing. [SPEAKER_01]: partly because it gives people like me a giggle and something to post about if we're feet for in that kind of clickbaiting video on social, but also because it's going to be costing you money and yet may still be driving a bit of traffic, but I bet you something that's accurate to season, to collection, etc, is going to be doing better for you. [SPEAKER_01]: So, [SPEAKER_01]: Make sure your seasonal and your automated content is accurate, set those reminders, make sure it comes down at the right time to save you money and to improve those relations with your customers.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think that was 15. [SPEAKER_01]: I think there might have been a duplicates. [SPEAKER_01]: We may be down at 14, but you didn't need to listen to me count. [SPEAKER_01]: So we're not going to do that.

[SPEAKER_01]: But thank you so much for listening to Episode 600. [SPEAKER_01]: You can get your hands on our notes from the episode, including the full list of the mistakes I've just run through and links to [SPEAKER_01]: And if you add any, I'm mentioning I think it needs a link, but anyway, that we stuff over at ecommercemasterplanned.com. [SPEAKER_01]: You could also use our direct episode short links.

[SPEAKER_01]: They're available for every single episode. [SPEAKER_01]: Just put ECMP dot info forward slash the number of the episode into the URL bar. [SPEAKER_01]: And you'll go straight to the right episode page. [SPEAKER_01]: So for this one, it is ECMP dot info forward slash six zero zero for six hundred.

[SPEAKER_01]: The mighty six hundred. [SPEAKER_01]: And when you get to the website, you can also add yourself to our email list. [SPEAKER_01]: So you don't miss out on any of the other things I share to help you improve your business. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's well worth getting yourself on that list.

[SPEAKER_01]: I know I would say that. [SPEAKER_01]: I have already admitted we're working on list growth, but it would be lovely if you came and joined on newsletter. [SPEAKER_01]: If you liked this episode, then I'm not going to recommend a specific episode because we're not [SPEAKER_01]: We've done a couple of like closing businesses and things, but we've not really done anything else that fits with mistakes. [SPEAKER_01]: There's no obvious place to send you, but if you scroll back up your podcast feed, there's over 600 episodes there packed with advice to help you avoid mistakes to help you grow your e-commerce door so come pick something that looks interesting and have a listen.

[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of The Ecommerce Master Plan podcast and for being one of our awesome listeners. [SPEAKER_01]: We create all this to help you build your business at always brilliant when you tune in and get something from the show. [SPEAKER_01]: And a huge thanks to the team behind the podcast because it very much is not just me. [SPEAKER_01]: Huge thanks to April, Christine, Miriam and Chidimmer for all the work you do on our content and marketing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Plus, too, Isabella, Gaston and the team at Music Radio Creative, all the edits. [SPEAKER_01]: I hope you have a great week, everybody, and don't forget to keep up to rising.