Question
Siddharth P.

I have a store that I work in and we are facing problems with getting enough orders to be in profit. We are selling Free+Shipping with the product costing $9.95 and every added product $5 extra like $14.95 for 2 units, $19.95 for 3 units and so on. The store was doing really well in the months of November and December. The ad budget in those months was $300/day and we were regularly getting orders of $600-700. We even had a few $1000+ days in those months.
Things have changed dramatically now. January was a disaster as we even struggled to reach $400 on some days with $300 ad budget and on few days we went past $500 but never went past $600. In Feb the ad account was put under review by Facebook and after submitting some doc it was finally released after 2 weeks. We have reduced our ad budget to $100 and we are making about $147 but its still a loss and we need to a make a min of $160 to make any kind of profit. I would really appreciate all suggestions and help so that we can start making profit again.

Answer:

Normally when I do a F+S offer it is using a product that costs less than $1 to buy and make up for that + whatever your cost per customer acquisition is ($2) so charge $4.99 for shipping e.g. credit card knife (e.g. SurvivalLife.com did it with the folding credit card knife) and charge only enough on shipping to cover your cost for acquiring ‘buyer’ customer emails. Once you have a break even funnel, just continue to build it up. The point isn’t to make money on it but to grow your subscriber list. When you have a subscriber list of 10k+ emails there is a lot that you can do from there.

Once you have the subscribers, you can then market higher end products. Market low ticket items as you would a high ticket item that costs $1000 with nice videos and so forth and your conversions will go through the roof (since they are impulse purchases).

$9.95 is high for a F+S offer. I think you’d have better results marketing a lower priced F+S offer even if you are losing some money on the front end. The real money is made on the back-end.

The bigger picture is attracting sales from people who are already spending money on larger purchases. Build a relationship with them through email, social media, video, and so on. Eventually they will trust you and also buy your higher ticket items. Get referrals, continue to tweak your offer/landers, test new traffic sources… Later you can use pipemonk/quickbooks online integrations as your business grows… Then congrats, you have a good business…

Ecommerce makes up only around 6-10% of all transactions with around 90% of all purchases made in store. There is however a difference on black Friday which I believe for the first time ever, ‘clicks beat bricks.’ in sales which means more people were buying online than offline. There was some article on it that I’m sure you can find.

The reason people still pay more is because they either don’t know about alibaba/aliexpress, would rather deal with a company in their region, and want to be able to return items or get customer service support. Ecommerce stores that provide loyalty programs, customer service, money back guarantees and so on have a better chance of getting customers. If you take on the risk of bad inventory (which you should) then you can continue to build trust with your customers.

I would much rather deal with a company that ships their products to me directly as it also offers ways to differentiate them (e.g. special package inserts/gift cards/thank you letters). Shopify has a good article on that with a PS remote controller game player product company that included ‘rockets’ candy in their packages. If you are a small store and not differentiating in some way then chances are you will waste a lot of money on advertising. E.g. you raise awareness on a product and then the person goes and buys it directly from the supplier.

Here is a tip, download an app called “photolock” which can be found in the shopify apps store. I is $2 but prevents people from copy pasting text or ‘right clicking and searching google for this image.’ People can still get around it by saving a screenshot, cropping, saving the file, and then searching google by image via manual upload to find where else that image appears online (e.g. your suppliers website), but this drastically cuts down the amount of people that bounce from your site. It can definitely help your conversion rates by squeezing out competitors who might have better pricing/branding/freeshipping/etc.

I’m sure more people will start buying directly from China especially as Amazon recently revealed they have ocean license from China/Azon – http://fortune.com/…/amazon-china-earns-its-ocean…/

The key is really to differentiate what you offer to your customers.
If you are selling the same product e.g. a yoga mat, then create a value packed course/guide/resource manual/mini video series that you offer free to people that buy your yoga mat. You advertise the digital program/download as $24.99 – $197 or whatever and give it away for free. It doesn’t cost you anything extra because it is a digital download. Or, you can always include additional physical products (but digital downloads that are specific to your brand are perceived as being more valuable).

People overpay for things all the time. Some do it out of convenience, others do it because they want the ‘prestige’ for lack of a better term or… The ‘feeling’ that buying a certain product gives you. Beats headphones may cost $400 to buy but they cost maybe $15-$20 to produce and there are comparable products on the market for less. As a smaller ‘brand,’ one of the easier ways to win more customers is by offering more value… This is why I mention the digital download method which also works with Amazon sales (include a PDF guide). Nutribullet gives recipe manuals for example.

If you can give the customer a major WIN and help them overcome their problems in other areas then you might just have won a customer for life.

http://yahoogemini.tumblr.com/

Time and time again, providing valuable content, engaging (optin) and retargeting those that took some action (but perhaps didn’t optin) while also retargeting those who did opt-in with other content e.g. video.

For example, someone is scrolling through the yahoo homepage and clicks on a sponsored post. Rather than sending them to a product offer, give them helpful content that provides a solution to the original advert headline.
Blow them away with great content that is free but at a quality that most other companies are charging hundreds of dollars for.
Have your premium offer on the back-end that is also free in exchange for a name and email.
Build your mailing list to a respectable number. Keep in mind that an email list of 100 highly engaged and targeted subscribers is worth more than 10000 unengaged and untargeted subscribers. In fact, having a large email list can work against you as it can hurt your deliverability if not managed. So it is recommended that you do some Spring Cleaning from time to time and remove dead emails from your list. One way to ‘revive’ dead email subscribers is to send an email saying you don’t want to pester them and you noticed they haven’t been interacting lately. Say you will remove them from your list but if they wish to stay subscribed, they can do so ‘enter link’. This can give you some indication on the health of your subscriber list. Don’t expect people to buy at all or buy right away. Just focus on providing value and building relationships/changing lives. If you build up emotional equity with your subscribers then they will eventually buy something from you – sometimes even if they don’t want the product but just because they like and want to support you or your business/cause. Those who don’t buy might know someone who will and will be a referral source. In a way, email marketing is like network marketing. I believe it is still more powerful than social media as people still like to check their emails. Most times, their email is where everything gets consolidated (including social media profile update alerts).

Build a mailing list and leverage retargeting options that are available. Facebook and Google have retargeting pixels/platforms that can be used directly. Or, if you are lazy, efficient, or want to do something more advanced then use Adroll or Perfect Audience.

If you like what a certain company is doing with their marketing use www.builtwith.com or datanyze.com to check what softwares they might be using. You can also search in builtwith’s tab to check what other sites use certain softwares or what web platforms they use and so on.

Good old Gary Vanderchuck

Do you know German?

Gotta catch up on all the great info

The Art of Building a Buyers List (Pt 2) – 50 Proven List Building Strategies

https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2343048/escape-google-with-these-12-search-engine-alternatives

http://beebom.com/2015/07/google-alternatives

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