How to Double Your Sales with Chase Clymer

Speaker A: All right folks, it's that time again. Episode 63 of the Needle Movement podcast is here and got a treat for you today. Our guest is the one and only Chase Clymer, back for the third time on the show. Love having him on because he's super fun and he knows stuff. He knows what works and what doesn't in digital marketing. And his agency, Electric Eye, for many years has over many years has helped a bunch of brands make millions online. Chase also has a great free ebook out called Double youe Sales, which is probably the best 25 minute read you could have related to Shopify and E commerce. Oftentimes I notice brands tend to overthink

Speaker B: things a little bit.

Speaker A: So it's great to have this resource where he distills performance into this easy three part formula that anyone can follow. I swear I paraphrase it all the time to clients and colleagues. And there's more. Chase not only has the secret recipe for ecommerce success, but also a killer playlist too. So buckle up and get ready to rock out towards the end where he shares his song picks. Can't wait to dive in. I'm, um, your host, Stephen Carl, talking you straight from Brooklyn, New York. Now let's get on with the show. Welcome to the Needle Movement podcast. Our next guest is Chase Clymer, a familiar name. This will be his third appearance on the show. He's the co founder of Electric Eye, an agency that's laser focused on scaling Shopify brands and the author of the ebook, uh, Double youe Sales, which we'll discuss in depth on the show. Can't wait. And his clients are the creators of great products looking to capitalize on niche success and scale. Familiar names like the music band the Black Keys and the apparel brand Only New York. And a few years back, he started the Honest E Commerce podcast to give a calm, strategic voice to counter what we call the E commerce advice tornado. Welcome to the show, Chase. Great to have you.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me. Uh, avid listener, longtime fan, first time caller. I don't know. Is that what I'm supposed to say?

Speaker A: Sure, that works.

Speaker B: Awesome. Uh, yeah, thanks for having me back, Stephen.

Speaker A: So what can you add to your introduction and even the inspiration behind the ebook Double youe Sales.

Speaker B: Ooh, what do I want to put on record about what's going on with that? The ebook actually, uh, is a physical book as well. And of course I don't have one next to me right now to like hold it up, but I went to a conference last year. I went to shop Talk in Vegas. And everybody at, uh, this conference, they had just BS to give away, right? And it all A, looked the same and B, was like boring, right? I'm not gonna mince words here. This stuff was so just stuffy, classic business, one sheet boring stuff. And I was like, if I was here or if I was a merchant, our ideal demographic right at the agency, like, if I was a merchant, what would I think would be cool? And I was like, well, if had like a little cool, like punk rock magazine, like that'd be cool. What would it be about? And that's when I went down this kind of rabbit hole of like, all right, well, I already have all these blogs put together and I started to just curate things that were connected. And this double your sales ebook zine that we produced over last year kind of became version 1.0, which will eventually become my actual book that I'll write with the help of a lot of friends. But, uh, yeah, it was a fun little, uh, project that we worked on. Now when I go to these conferences, we don't have this stuffy, boring thing to give people. We have this cool punk rock looking zine that, you know, people are like, what's that? Nobody else has that, that's cool. And that's half the struggle is getting them to keep the piece of paper you have and not throwing it in the garbage with their next free soft drink. So, you know, that's our goal, is to have people actually hold onto this. And then the next goal is to get them to open it because they're intrigued by the COVID And then if they consume the content, which is top notch, hopefully, you know, maybe they'll reach out if they want us to help them with like any of the stuff that's in there, which I'm sure we're gonna talk about. What's in there?

Speaker A: Yeah, and I've read it and it's great because it's not a bullshitty type of. It's not a, like a long read. Which is great that uh, you could find out in like how many pages is it? Like 40, like 50 or so.

Speaker B: We had to keep it under 64. We had to get a different printer for the zine. Which is side note, we are probably going to have to get a different printer for version two.

Speaker A: So there is clickbait that is much longer than it and gives you a fraction of the value, you know, which is, and this is consistent with what you've been, you know, we've been talking about for years and what your agency does which is just distill it down to simple things that huh, people understand and the north stars that they have to follow. Not 20 of them but just the three things that uh, you know you're businesses doing right or wrong based on.

Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. I mean this is definitely a 101 introduction to E commerce growth strategy. And it's from uh, this, the kind of framework we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about this thing called the brand scaling framework is just like a simple concept that I show brands to kind of just help them identify and just keep it simple. Be like, all right, you want to grow your brand, right? Here's how your brand works as math. Which one of these do you feel is the easiest one to attack to get the highest ROI from your activities? Be it time, investment money, you know, anything like that. And it kind of helps you steer your uh, boat as you would up uh, to what you're going to focus on for the next whatever. Right. I'm using a lot of generalities.

Speaker A: Yeah. And we know like how the industry kind of set you up and for founders and you know, leadership teams, what they have to. It's all about filtering the noise and just getting to like the real meat of how to. Yeah. Like I just want to grow my business. What do I have to do? Tell me in a short amount of

Speaker B: time leads into what you kind of said earlier. Right. This idea of the E commerce advice tornado which was just a phrase that was thrown out there. And uh, to be honest, I don't know if it was myself, it was Leanna Patch or if it was Krista Walsh who were the two copywriters that helped me with a lot of this. I don't know which one of us kind of came up with it but it really, it really helps because there's a lot of noise out there as you alluded to. And it's a lot of tactics. It's a lot of one trick pony apps. It's a lot of strategies to do certain things. And while those tactics are great, you as a business owner really need to understand your business as a whole to understand which tactics are actually going to move the needle for you. Like here's a perfect example, right. If you have a E commerce brand that sells accessories for Harley Davidsons, right. And you read a some blurb that's all about maximizing your return for pinned posts on Pinterest. Right. While you might learn something cool, you got to understand like is that where my audience is? Is that a good tactic? For me. And the answer is probably no. Right. So this helps you separate which things you should be focusing on and what things you shouldn't.

Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. So, okay, so let's, let's get into it. What is the simple formula for E commerce joy and E commerce success joy?

Speaker B: I don't know about that. All right, so look, the needle moving stuff that is already. These numbers are already in the back end of your store. Here's a caveat here. We're talking about brands that have gotten going already. If you're just getting started, this kind of whole thing we're going to talk about here isn't really going to work much for you, but it's good to know, right? This is for brands that have kind of found that product market fit. They're actually making sales. You'd argue this is a real business versus a startup.

Speaker A: So is it like a million dollars a year?

Speaker B: Um, that's a, that's a good line in the sand to draw. Right. But you know, you can have this stuff a little bit sooner on as well, you know, Definitely. If you're doing tens of thousands of dollars a month in sales, you know, it could be as low as that. But it will definitely not help though if you're going from zero to one that you know, there's other stuff to focus on there. And here's the answer. Just focus on sales. A hundred percent on sales. Let's move on here. Right. So what is the needle moving stuff? It's these three KPIs, right? It is your conversion rate, it's your average order value and it's your sessions. And if you're familiar with the backend of Shopify, those are the terms that they use in the back end of Shopify. Some different apps use different terms, but those are the ones that we're going to want to use. And why are those important is because E commerce is math. And if you take all three of those numbers and you multiply them together, you're going to get your average for whatever that timeline is that you're talking about. Right. So if you're looking what we usually do at the agency is the average of the last 30 days. So you look at your average conversion rate for the last 30 days, your average order value for the last 30 days, and the number of sessions you have, and you multiply them together, you're going to get a number that's pretty dang close to like whatever your total was for that month. Right. And that just helps you establish a baseline and then you start to break these KPIs down. And we're going to get into those a little bit more here in a second. But before we get into them, M individually, I always like to highlight the number. One way to improve your return on ad spend is to actually improve the experience on your website, which is directly correlated to your customer experience, your conversion rate, and your average order value, which are the offers that you're presenting in front of them. So I'll leave it to you. Which path do you want to go down? Do you want to talk a little bit more about fixing your website first and why, or do you want to talk more about the specific things to do to those three numbers?

Speaker A: So let's first go to, like, how do I keep track of my stuff really quickly? And then go to website. Is it going into the Shopify dashboard and just looking at it on a consistent basis?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, if it's not measured, it can't be input. We've all heard that. But you don't want to look daily. Daily is not a good timetable. Weekly it would be the fastest. I'd want to look at these numbers. Monthly is a better cadence. Right. Especially if you're a younger brand, you don't have the traffic to where your numbers are going to change that drastically. Like, some people out there will argue you can't do CRO if you're doing less than $5 million a year. Right. And there's arguments both ways. And that's not what this podcast is about here. But people that are watching these numbers daily, like, do you have. You have infinitely better things to do with your time because you're not making changes daily to your website. So how. Why would your baseline change daily?

Speaker A: Totally.

Speaker B: Does that make sense?

Speaker A: As someone who has looked at my website stats daily or just of clients, it can get a little too much at times to not be doing what you're trying to do, which is just identifying the opportunities. Okay.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, you know, based upon your brand, if your brand's got a lot of seasonality, like Q4, you guys are going to gangbusters. Maybe you look at the trailing 12 months of your business, and you get the average for those months to kind of set your baseline. Uh, if every month, you know, there's no seasonality to your business, it's just like you guys are always selling. You know, just look at the last 30 days and, uh, you can extrapolate from there. We've actually got a really cool, uh, little giveaway. It's free for anybody that's listening to this, I believe if you go to brandscalingframework.com, scroll and you can find the, you can get our Google sheet where you can just plug in your numbers and it will do this math for you and then it will show you there's a cool column there. It's like, well, if I can impact my conversion rate by X percent, what happens to my top line over the next 12 months? It's a really fun little thing. You can go make a copy of that and do this all yourself as well.

Speaker A: And we'll, we'll put brand scaling framework and whatever else in the show notes as well so that people can see it.

Speaker B: Awesome. Awesome.

Speaker A: But is there like, so with the dashboard, is there time to be alarmed? Like, Cause you know, like, I know in that Shopify dash, if you're not that familiar with it, it just, you can get a little bit lost in it because there's even the, the analytics tab. There's 15 different things on it. Yeah, but just like, it's more like, just like when do I know that I'm not crushing it besides that I'm hearing crickets or I'm not hearing I'm not getting enough sales to satisfy me. But just what's the like the science alarm or to.

Speaker B: Well, the science for alarm would be like, if you have a low conversion rate, it means that your website's broken or something's broken on it, right? Uh, yeah. That's why I was saying, like, if you have no sales but your business is brand new and you don't have a marketing plan or a salesperson, like, your business might not be broken. You just might not be doing a good job of putting it out there. But if your brand's like established and then like you install an app and then overnight your conversion rate tanks, like, that's probably cause for alarm to like investigate what the heck just happened. But yeah, you, you go into Shopify and you get to that analytics section and you set it for the last 30 days. You just want to put on blinders really for this exercise. And look at your sessions. Sessions are the amount of unique users that have visited your site in the last 30 days. Right. So there's a unique browsers of your website. Right. Then you're going to look at conversion rate, which is another square. It's right there. It's really easy to look at. And then you look at your average order value. Shopify just changed how they calculate it. It really doesn't matter at the end of the day. But take a Look at that bad boy. And those are your three numbers. And you can plug them into this little spreadsheet or make your own spreadsheet to get kind of your baseline of like, oh, this is like our monthly average. And then you start to dive into each KPI individually, which is really, really fun.

Speaker A: Let's go into the website. So your website conversion rate is, you know, I've always played with the idea of like under 2% as just a throwing darts against the wall sort of metric for brands. As if it's under 2% then we kind of know that the site is not performing great in terms of conversion rates. But what are your thoughts on the website and how you improve?

Speaker B: It depends, right? Yep. So here's the first thing, right? Your numbers are your numbers and your competitors numbers are their numbers and their numbers have absolutely nothing to do with your numbers. And learning what those is. And striving for numbers is a fruitless endeavor because at the end of the day what you have is what you have and you can only improve what you have. Knowing that your competition is better in some regard. It doesn't really help you. Now you can talk about benchmarking and you can be like, well, we're pretty similar in offer and product, like what are we doing? Like that can help you drive hypothesis, uh, to test within your business. But it's definitely a fruitless activity to be like, well, they're at 3% and we're at 2%. Like we have to be at 3%. It's like, okay, well what are they doing that you aren't doing? And now you're getting into conversion rate optimization. Another thing that people often overlook with competitors is their margins are different than yours. Their long term goals are possibly different from yours. The level of investment that they have from backing either VC or private, they may be taking a loss on their first sale completely to get new customers because they believe in the lifetime value of the brand or vice versa. They might just be dumb and they might be losing money. Like you don't know what you don't know. You know, the grass is always greener. You're going to see the better things with your competition. That was a whole tangent there that were you supposed to do?

Speaker A: But okay, so for conversion rate, I think a hot topic this year that's come up is, uh, recently is landing pages and landing page funnels that, you know, I'm going to bring someone. So if someone's coming from email or someone's coming from paid search, I can create this curated landing page sure to with social proof and other stuff to, you know, and optimize that. But that's just one thing. What are your thoughts on that and other ways to improve website performance?

Speaker B: Landing pages are dope. We offer that service as well and it does work. Right. But like here's the thing, so you've got your main website which is like your brick and mortar store of the Internet, right. So most people are going to visit the store first before they know your brand. They're gonna visit the store, they're gonna know it and then they're start to like and trust it kind of using that interaction. Now uh, what landing pages are is an express lane where they already know and like the brand. They're just coming to buy the thing and dip. Right. It's just a lot faster of a process. They serve different purposes. They're kind of two different like methodologies behind the marketing. Right. Like you don't want to send cold traffic to a landing page while potentially maybe you can convert like it'd be better to send cold traffic to something that educates them about your brand. But I digress, like that's a whole different thing as far as just your normal website experience goes. Not utilizing a landing page. We're talking about just like your basic Shopify build. What's going to move the needle is going to be making the user experience better. And the top ways to do that is a performance make it faster. All your guys websites are slow as heck because you have too many apps. And I'm just going to repeat that again. The more apps you have, the slower your website is. The more you try apps, the more junk and spaghetti is vomited into your theme. And when you press uninstall that code still there. Congratulations. You just ruined that 30, 50, $150,000 custom website you just built because you don't have patience. Stop installing apps willy nilly please. That's the biggest thing we run into. So after performance it's the customer journey. There's navigation, there's searching, there's filtering on the collection pages, like helping me as the dummy get to the product that I want faster and intuitively. Now some people get frustrated about this one, but the further your experience is away from the million dollar babies out there, the Walmart's, the targets, the Amazon's experience as just ease of use and functionality, the further away from profit you're making your business, it is, we are subtly being trained by these behemoth monsters of businesses. Just these natural thought patterns and usability patterns on the Internet. So just because you want to be quirky and cool, do you want to do that to the detriment of your bottom line? It's up to you. But most people money talks, right? So you sometimes you gotta be play bad cop and be like this looks great but it is performance wise it's terrible. So you gotta find a happy medium to where you can still express your brand but give people those the ability to shop without getting frustrated. Right. The more friction you put in that journey, the more you're chopping your own knees off.

Speaker A: How about the major pages of the website? I mean is that you know, like the product?

Speaker B: Want me to list the major pages of the website? Because I will. Here's your customer journey.

Speaker A: What are the most important things to focus on?

Speaker B: Homepage number one, you have too many sections, I guarantee it. Moving on. Collection page number two, how do I get to the junk I need? You got a lot of work to do there with filtering, sorting all sorts of stuff, tagging your products correctly.

Speaker A: Sometimes there's choice overload on collection pages. That's what I notice that you're just like you see it and there's like 30 options and that's just.

Speaker B: No, people just will dump all. Like a lot of people will shop all and then like to browse down into stuff. But if I don't have filters or things up there to select into what I want, I'm a male, I want it in black, I want it in this size, I want it in this price point, I want it with this clothing type or something like, you know, like that makes me get to the product I want a lot. Some people just have a giant thing and they think people like to browse by scrolling and no, nobody likes to browse that way. People like to get to the product that they want. So once you've worked on making your collection page better, it's your pdp. That's when you need to dial in about features, benefits, pull in testimonials, pull in reviews, pull in all sorts of got, you know, fun proof. You got uh, videos, photos. Just make, make me learn everything about your product before I actually get it. And then you will have A, you'll have happy customer, B, you'll have less returns. Right.

Speaker A: So the product detail page is something that you would have a few screens of content to show. Yes, the because and this has changed over the years too where you know, you've of course you're going to have your picture and you're going to have your basic description. You're going to have reviews on the bottom. But now there is more detail about the products. There could be like, right, like your best customer review, the one that you know you want to show to everyone.

Speaker B: Yeah. Now this is getting a little more hard to give some like concrete tactics to the people out there that just want something to take away from this podcast. If you got a small like SKU count, less than 12, you should probably have just like custom copy for every single product page. And that thing should be a beautiful sales letter basically. It should be kind of maybe similar to your landing pages with a header and footer to be honest. Right. If you're less than 12 SKUs and it's not going to really change much now if you've got something where you've got a bunch more products and you're going through inventory a lot faster, maybe some of these sections that help drive value and trust are more brand oriented versus just that individual product. And that's like the nuance of the game there. But that's definitely high, uh, value page to optimize on your website. And all this stuff we're talking about is like conversion rate. But also like now we're kind of getting into uh, the offer and average order value, which is where your side cart. Mhm. Your offers presented near the add to cart button, your cart page and in the checkout of the website. There's a lot of opportunity within there to offer upsells, cross sells and bundling. Right. Those are the ways you're gonna move the needle on getting more money in the cart. So if your average order value is say $75 at a 2% conversion rate, you get 60,000 sessions a month. Your monthly sales are gonna be roughly $90,000. But you hire Chase, I come in. Actually I'm not gonna do it. Let's be real, my team's way smarter than me. They're gonna come in, they're gonna look at stuff and they through looking at your product and understanding how your customers are buying, they're like, by the way, anyone else can do this, but we're just sweet at it. I don't. You don't have Tyrus. Um, so you work with somebody or you do it yourself, I don't care. And you find an opportunity to add a upsell, cross sell or bundling kind of uh, thing. That's a terrible term. But somewhere within that customer journey. So now it's taking that average order value and it's bumping it up. So from like $75, 26 lift, right. And it goes up to $94.50 is kind of like your average order value for the month. Because most people are taking you up on this offer. You're presenting them because it makes sense to them and they like it. So you did nothing else to your website. You didn't pay any more for traffic. You didn't do anything to the experience either. You're still converting at 2%, so you got 2% conversion rate. $94.5 is the average order value in 60,000 sessions a month. Instead of $90,000 a month, you're now getting $113,000 and some change. And instead of making just over $1 million a year, you're going up to $1.3 million a year. Right. So that's the cool thing about these numbers is they're really. These are the levers to pool.

Speaker A: Yeah. So definitely with, um, average order size. I think a lot of brands are very conscious of it. I think the question is, like, they don't really know how to do it, and they bring on your. They bring on Chase's team. I think the question is, like, how do you like, Sounds great. Okay. How the hell do I do this? Between the tools and like, let's just say I have 400 products. Is that a merchandising team? Are they going in? Is it an app that doesn't fuck up your site?

Speaker B: But it's my homies. Okay, so there is an app that can help you with this. Depends again, it depends on your product, depends on your brand, whatever. If you're on Shopify, you can go get triple whale and it will show you frequently purchased together products. And, um, just take that information and go build your own bundles. There you go. Like, people are already buying these things just make it easier for the customer. So that's a fantastic thing to do. If you've got a small sku count, bundling might make sense depending on your price point. Buy three and save buy two, get one free stuff like that bogo route or free gift with purchase or a very, very, very powerful motivator is having a free shipping threshold or a free gift threshold or yo get baller with it. Have a couple thresholds and a progress bar in your sidecar. Now you're cooking. There's all sorts of things you can do, but it really depends on your product. Right. Because if you want to do a buy one, get one deal, that's fantastic. But if you're selling $1,400 couches, I don't have room for two couches. I don't need a couch. Right. So you. So it doesn't fit another couch.

Speaker A: Yes, it doesn't fit everything but there's.

Speaker B: It's got to be specific to your brand and your products. And this is where you probably go see what your competitors are doing. That's a great idea to get some, get some ideas and start testing different offers. Yes.

Speaker A: You know you could always go to a site and just see. Yeah like these are the types of upsells and cross sells that are happening in there and what you can do.

Speaker B: But if you want to get boss with it, I would put you can do upsell starting on the like product page. I've seen some brands do like the upsell into either a bundle or upsells into a larger size. Like right there, either next to the add to cart button or a add to cart button that's just right next to it. So it's just like or add three and save or you know what I mean? Like right there is where you can start this upsell thing. And this is what is going to separate the true brand plays from the people trying to get a buck is there are not a lot of app based solutions out there without heavy modification that look good. Right. Your customers love to buy. They hate to be sold. So what that means is if you are giving me an offer that's truly valuable, me as a customer, I will probably take you up on that and I will, I will thank you for that. But if it looks off brand and jars me out of my journey as a customer, I will be more likely to abandon cart as opposed to taking you up on that offer. So you need to make sure that where you're putting these things in the journey which you know, you can put it just right there on the PDP on the product page, you can put it in the sidecar, you can put it in the cart, you can put it in checkout, you can put it post purchase too. Like you can put them all through this and some brands do and you might not even notice because they're doing such a good job of it. Here's one that does a terrible job of it. Anytime you buy a rental car, everything, they're asking you for stuff and the only reason you move forward is because you need that stupid rental car. Imagine if you put that much friction in the process or m that much jarring like just give me more money like with your brand. Like your customers might not appreciate it much.

Speaker A: Okay. I could offer other critiques of the rental car business but it's a nightmare Here in Brooklyn.

Speaker B: Yeah. After this podcast, let me tell you about what happened in Austin.

Speaker A: Okay, okay, fair enough, fair enough. Uh, all right, let's go to, um, let's go to sessions. We haven't really talked about that. And then. So I think with sessions, there's the point of. Yeah. If you don't have enough people coming to the website, you know, you're not going to hit your numbers. That it's essential. But what would you add to how you tackle sessions and.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So I just scrolled. I'm like scrolling through the ebook on my screen right now, and there's just so much stuff we didn't cover in just those two sections. I'm very proud of this little, little punk rock magazine. All right, so we're on the sessions, right? Sessions are the number of unique visitors to your online store. This comes in two ways, right? You've got your organic sessions, which is a fancy way of saying people that find you on Google or just type in your name. That's organic. Then you got like your paid and marketed sessions, which are your owned traffic, which is like email and sms, people that follow you on socials, and then your paid traffic, people that are coming in from paid ads. Right. Should I break that down anymore, Stephen? Is it confusing? No, I think that's good.

Speaker A: That's good.

Speaker B: All right, now everybody, the sessions part of this book breaks down the three step funnel and like a lot of the nuances of where you are in the journey. I'm going to do it really fast. There's top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel. Top of the funnel is cold traffic. They don't have a clue who you are. Middle of the funnel is warm traffic. They have heard of your brand before or maybe purchased in the past. And bottom of the funnel are people right on the cusp, uh, of purchasing. These are people that are, have a product in their cart, right. Or are frequent purchasers. Like, this is a very highly engaged piece of the funnel. Within this ebook I break down where these people are coming from. What types of like, marketing can affect these things. It's not that I don't. It's not that I'm trying to drive you towards this stupid book. It's just that there's a lot of content to cover here and we only have so much time on this podcast

Speaker A: and it really, like, it's a great book and it doesn't take that long to read. It just doesn't fit.

Speaker B: I think you can knock it out in 20 minutes, right? And Then please email me and tell me a what I left out or call me a liar. I don't care. Uh, it's a fun book, but here's really what's happening with your sessions, right? The only things that you can really impact with sessions would be kind of your marketing or your organic content strategy or your advertising. You can't really rely on just one day. There's going to be more visitors for no reason. If you don't, like, make any investment into your website, sure, Kanye could wear your T shirt, but you can't rely on something like that. What you can rely on is building an influencer outreach campaign and reaching out to 500 influencers a month and trying to give away your product or build a relationship with them to try to get more views in through like an influencer outreach play. That's absolutely something you can do. Or you can break into paid media and start to turn up your budget on your Facebook ads campaign. Right. Caveat here. With Facebook ads, if your traffic is really low or zero, Facebook ads won't fix your business. You need to go find organic traffic. Don't waste your money. And then the same thing with email marketing is, you know, a lot of people are scared to email their customers more if your unsubscribe rate is less than 1%. I think you told me this. Keep sending. Yeah.

Speaker A: No email. Uh, yeah, we could talk more about email. Yeah. I think with sessions it just makes sense to. Well, I guess let me go to this. There's a lot of talk about paid media and with ITs privacy and all that stuff. But, like, what are your thoughts on like, the opportunity and the caveats with

Speaker B: paid media, it still works just fine. I know brands crushing it. I know agencies crushing it for their brands. It's just a new path we have to navigate.

Speaker A: Is it just that it has to be more sophisticated? Is that the thing where I wouldn't

Speaker B: even say it's more or just like. I would say that the biggest. You just have to understand that the numbers are goofy. But at the end of the day, you take a step back and you look at like your marketing efficiency ratio and your spend diverse, your profit, there is a direct correlation and you just have to kind of trust the process. If we're going to quote Dr. J, like it's going to happen. There's some cool tools out there, like triple whale. Who? This is the second time I've mentioned them. I just came back from their conference. They are from Columbus, Ohio. I really like the team. I am not endorsed. I Do think I have a coupon code though, if you want to ask me for it. But I just think the product's great and if you are getting more heavily into paid and you want to understand your attribution a lot better, they have an amazing little tool there that can help you.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm seeing their name come up a lot too, and especially like sites. They're getting more popular in Shopify land. Are they Shopify exclusive or other?

Speaker B: I believe so. I believe right now they are Shopify exclusive. They also just got a $25 million investment from Shopify that was announced last Thursday and they had the number one fastest growing app in the App Store ever.

Speaker A: Excellent. Excellent. So one more question kind of related to E commerce's math and growth is what are some real life mistakes that brands make when. When they're trying to scale and with

Speaker B: this framework, favorite mistake, which is they try to do too much. They like, take this shotgun approach to marketing and if everything's important, then nothing's important and then it fails. And then you'll get people like, oh, we tried that and it didn't work. And I was like, well, what do you mean? And they're like, oh, yeah, we tried like every different ad thing at once. We threw $500 at each, turned it on for a month and it didn't do anything.

Speaker A: Yeah, I see that with email all the time. Yeah.

Speaker B: And I'm like, whoa.

Speaker A: Uh, like that sounds good, but I'm already doing it. And no, I don't, I don't. I don' know what happened there.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's like going to the bar and going up to every girl you see and asking each of them out on a date in front of each other and like, it's a recipe for disaster. Yes.

Speaker A: So it's okay. So it's Right. Focusing on too many things. I think also just the not giving it enough time where. Yeah, you know, it'll be.

Speaker B: I think, I think everybody is impatient because they just see these like crazy case studies about like just the power of direct response in email or not email, sorry, but like paid ads. And it's like, yeah, that exists, but it also is like, that's probably after years of failing trial and error, or they're using a team that really knows what they're doing. If you're out there, then you're looking to hire a freelancer or a consultant or an agency to help you with paid ads. Ask them specifically, like, do you have a case study of someone, um, similar to my business and if they Say no, go find someone that does, because it's easier to do something you've already done before. Right. Breaking a brand with paid media is extremely difficult. And that's why a lot of these agencies just have agencies. They don't start their own brand because, like, finding product market fit and breaking a product is like such a crazy task. I'm just going on tangents all day, man. I don't know what's going on here.

Speaker A: Well, that's why, I mean, I think, I believe we might have talked about this last time, how the marketer has a role, but the person that's manufacturing the product, there's a unique talent there that we're taking from them and we can't necessarily do it ourselves.

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, the best marketing in the world can't fix a garbage product. Right. You have to have a good product for anybody, any consultant, to really be helping you to grow things. Consultants, literally all they're doing, call them whatever you want. Freelancer, employee, consultant, agency partner, I don't care. All they're doing is pouring gas on the fire if they're smart people. But if there's no fire to begin with, they're just wasting gas.

Speaker A: Right. So it's like the kindling.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: That's what we are. Right. Because you have to have a good product. Because if someone doesn't have a product that's interesting, then it won't be a repeat purchase. Definitely.

Speaker B: Yeah. If the product's not there, it's just like nothing's going to fix it. You gotta keep going. And sometimes the product might be there, but the angle to which you are describing it, the offer or the way that you're writing about the thing or the market you're going after might not be it. There's a lot of stories out there about people pivoting, which is a good idea, pivoting into a market where they see more traction.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's just ultimately the adaptability of, uh, brands is really important that, like some of your stuff kind of. I've seen examples of it where, like sessions. Okay. You gotta have enough sessions. And if you want to grow to a certain business size, you have to grow the audience. And if you don't, you're not going to grow. Like. So it's. I've seen on the, on, um, even on websites with conversions. Like, I think a common thing that I've seen is that when things don't work, I think it's very hard for. Internally, we all have pride and it's like, oh, Facebook doesn't work. Like, I've seen a big problem where if your brand isn't persuasive enough, if you're not giving the arguments and breaking down objections and showing benefits, then all the marketing stuff isn't going to work as well. And a lot of times it's just easy to be like, oh, well, maybe it was the agency, maybe it was Facebook, maybe we're not an SMS crowd. And I think internally it's easy to build that lineup instead of saying, well, if something doesn't work, we're all a part of it. If something isn't successful, it's the agency's job and it's also the company's job. You just got to do something different.

Speaker B: I'm picking up what you're putting down, right? So let's go back to conversion rate, which is, uh, arguably kind of just the KPI that we most play around with at the agency. Conversion rate can be impacted by all sorts of things, right? You could get a celebrity endorsement that can shoot it through the roof. You could run out of stock that could plummet it to the bottom. You could get a bad review. You could have like a, an issue with your uh, QA on the product. Imagine if you had a deodorant that had a piece of metal in it, right? That can ruin things, right? So there's a lot of outside factors that can affect this conversion rate beyond things that the agency can do. It's a team sport, right. And everyone needs to kind of be working in tandem. And that's why we find ourselves more and more getting looped into marketing and advertising teams and meeting people that are, uh, we're all working for the same goal of making more money. Right. For the brand. And so that kind of what I'm looking forward to doing most this year is meeting more like minded brands that are either doing paid ads or marketing for our clients. And really like, all right, let's build a fucking bitchin offer and a sweet landing page and like, let's really crush it for this Black Friday campaign or whatever we're doing.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah. This has all been great. We will put the link to, um, the Double youe Sales book. And we look forward to future iterations of the book as well since it's. There's already.

Speaker B: I don't know, I don't know when I'm allowed to draw my business partner Sean away from that Again, like, all the templates are done. Adding pages shouldn't be too hard. Uh, we'll just see. I'M ready for cover two. Maybe title two. The title might change.

Speaker A: Okay, maybe. Maybe by the next episode we do together, we'll have it all.

Speaker B: Yeah, there'll be some. There'll be some. I will be diving in a lot more on the technology choices onto getting started in E commerce. How to find product market fit. I'm mining all of my old episodes of the podcast to find exact examples from people I've interviewed about how they found it to try to help people learn what it is to find product market fit and give them some tactical ways to try to try to get it.

Speaker A: Yes. Looking forward to that. So, wrapping things up. Let's talk about music. The Grammys just happened, Whatever that means.

Speaker B: You know what? I don't know who won. I wasn't paying attention.

Speaker A: I know I've never really been that into the Grammys, but I mean, who.

Speaker B: Like, there's like lots of people when like dozens, maybe hundreds of people win Grammys.

Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, I guess it's an interval that you can learn about more music artists that you might be interested in. I don't know. I mean, it's something. I mean, apparently have great performances as well.

Speaker B: That's what I've heard.

Speaker A: And great fashion.

Speaker B: According to some, the Grammys are a scam and it's a pay to play winning thing. And that's all I'll say about that.

Speaker A: Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. So. But we're music lovers here, so tell us about your favorite song over the past year. Like, like last time, we. You gave us a couple of good picks from Genesis and Wigwam. Are you there, Chase?

Speaker B: I've had it do that to someone once before. I don't know what happened. I might need to clear my Internet history.

Speaker A: I think the Grammys did it to us.

Speaker B: Yeah, they heard us talking.

Speaker A: I know.

Speaker B: Who did I say last time? Because I definitely didn't prepare for this time.

Speaker A: Last time you said you did Wigwam. Do you want to taste it? From the show Peacemaker and Land of Confusion from Genesis. All right, What's a song that you've enjoyed recently? I think a lot of people. I mean, I was. I was going to say this, like, a lot of times when I asked this question. In the past, people tend to say, like, one song, yolo. So they'll always pick a banger. But, uh, you could pick. Could be just like a great slow song. It could be a fun pop song, whatever.

Speaker B: No, I'm going to hit you with the top three songs. I played on touch tunes at bars because I Remember it? Because I got that email last month, right. Coming in at number one.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Number one, Easy Lover by Phil and Phil. The most banging song out there.

Speaker A: Phil Collins and Philip Bailey. I know the song well. Yeah, yeah. It's great harmony between those two.

Speaker B: Yeah, that one is just such a good song. I mean, just go listen to it, everybody. If you haven't heard that song by Philip Bailey and Phil Collins, it is so sweet. Philip Bailey's from Earth, Wind and Fire. Phil Collins, obviously, from Genesis. It's awesome. I think I even claimed it was a Phil Collins song. Last Time was one of the ones I was talking about. You've noticed a pattern here. I love Phil Collins. All right, number two, this one is a deep cut. It's 157 Riverside Avenue by REO Speedwagon. Okay.

Speaker A: Have not heard it.

Speaker B: It's a jam. Stephen. Please go listen to it after this.

Speaker A: I will.

Speaker B: And then email me and be like, holy crap. And that's gonna be really, really up there. So it's my uncle's favorite song, and I realized it was on touch tunes, and I would just start putting it on more for me and less for the rest of the people at the bar. Uh, but it was definitely. That's a good one. And then the last one, this one is definitely to show you a little more of my humor. It was Kiss from a Rose by Seal.

Speaker A: Who doesn't know that song? Yeah, they nuts.

Speaker B: Half the people at the bar. That one's really good. But no, I'm really getting into, uh, like, rock and soul. 70 stuff. Lately is kind of like. All my playlists have been. And there's a playlist out there on Spotify that I'll recommend. It's called the Yacht rock playlist. It's really good. A secondary one is like kind of just the Guardians of the Galaxy playlist. James Gunn is a fantastic. It does such a great job when he's making his movies about finding the music to go about this. I think we talked about this last time, too, maybe.

Speaker A: But, yes, he writes to the music.

Speaker B: Yeah. From that yacht rock playlist. Another just super deep cut that I'm addicted to is this song called Alibis by Sergio Mendez. That one is not on Touchstones, or I'd be playing it all the time. That one's a really fun one.

Speaker A: Awesome. Um, so you have given us now four songs and two awesome playlists to go with. The one thing I would add to the playlist is like. And I think you're, uh, probably the same way that it's just I get so bored of my own, like, catalog of music that I need new stuff. And it's hard now because it's like there's just no. It's easy to find out about a new movie or to find out about a new TV show. Like, we're plastered with that. But to find out, like, good music that will just make you happy. Like, it's not as easy, but I think Spotify has some really good resources. One trick that I've done is at the end of the year or the beginning of a new year, I just check out the best songs lists of the year from a curator that I like. Whether it's like wfuv, it could be npr, whatever you choose, it could be a genre of music. But if you go that route and just listen to like, It'll be a 30 to 50 song playlist. Usually, like, you'll come up with something that you like that's in your taste.

Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, a little more direct in curing it. Curating some new stuff is for example, like, I really like that Sergio Mendez song alibis. And I'll start a playlist off that song. And if the algorithm's doing its work, it should like start to present me with songs that have similar kind of feel and things that I like to then just kind of drive the growth on the new stuff that I'm getting into that. And then I always, all my friends, I ask them like, hey, what are you listening to? What's got your ear?

Speaker A: Exactly. So we can. Yeah, that's a good one. So I will get back to you very soon about your picks. I love checking out everyone's stuff.

Speaker B: Awesome. Cool. Thank you so much for having me on, man. Yes.

Speaker A: So I'll ask you a question you're familiar with. If people like what you're saying, how can they reach you?

Speaker B: Awesome. All right, here's the easy thing, right? If you enjoy my hot takes and smooth voice, you can listen to me@hestycommerce.co is the website for the podcast. Please subscribe on whatever thing you like. Podcasts. We also have a video component on YouTube if that's your jam. If you like to get notified it like the old fashioned way, you can sign up for our newsletter there@honestycommerce.co as well. All the stuff we talked about today is from this ebook currently called double your profits or double your sales. I should remember that I wrote it. But you can figure out more about that at, uh, brandscalingframework. Com. You can download the ebook for free. You can get access to that cool Google sheet I was talking about there. And there's some links out to some other fun stuff. We maybe covered like a fifth of what's in that book. So go check it out. And then lastly, if you are an e commerce brand and you're looking to scale your business this year, if you're looking to migrate to Shopify or redesign your site or hook up with a team that really understands iterative optimization in CRO, that's what Electric Guy is really good at. You can check us out at Electric Guy IO.

Speaker A: Thanks so much for coming on. It's great to have you again.

Speaker B: Absolutely. It was a blast. I'll see you next year with four or five more songs.

Speaker A: All right, perfect. This episode is sponsored by Needle Movement. This is Steven again, the founder. My agency Needle Movement specializes in done for you email marketing and SMS services for Shopify stores. I've generated $20 million worth of E commerce sales through email campaigns and automations alone. A few growth stories I've been fortunate to play a part in are Lafayette 148, a women's apparel brand where we were able to grow the email revenue from $1.3 million annually to 12 million over a three year period. BAD, a Scandinavian retailer which just launched on Shopify Plus a few months ago and now is generating $110,000 a month on just one abandoned cart email series that needle movement created and ECRU, which grew five hundred and eighty percent to become a multimillion dollar Shopify brand for the first time. And they had welcome series and abandoned browse emails before working with Needle Movement. But there we learned the power of well crafted email automations. Want to be our next growth story? Go to needlemovement.com and sign up for a free strategy call today. Limited slots are available.

Speaker B: Sam.