In today’s episode the guys talk about the long game of investing in your company. They dive into the importance of lead generation, what it takes to acquire an email, testing your email list, and the true investment cost of your email list. Developing a long term relationship with your customers brings more sales long term than focusing on short term sales.

Don’t forget to text us to get your business set up with converting email flows! Text E M A I L to 8 4 4 – 6 4 3 –  0 7 4 5. 

This is a direct transcript. Please forgive any grammar or spelling errors.

Jason: That email list can now be used during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, uh, all the holidays throughout the year.

Kevin: So much opportunity to just invest, bring people in and test a bunch of shit.

Jason: Today we understand that you’re not wasting money by spending money. You’re actually investing into the company so that you can make money.

Jason: you’re listening to eCommerce Uncensored with Kevin Monell and Jason Caruso

Kevin: Hey everyone. And thank you for joining us. On another episode of eCommerce Uncensored. My name is Kevin Monell and I’m here with

Jason: Jason Caruso.

Kevin: Jason.

Jason: So for five years, we have been trying to get our audience to connect with us outside of this podcast.

Kevin: Yes. It’s been a difficult thing.

Jason: It’s been a difficult thing until recently.

We’ve been recently, as you guys probably know, we test a lot, a lot of things and the only way you’re really going to know. Uh, what works and what doesn’t is just testing as much stuff as you can. So we use the podcast to test things, obviously just to get a feel for what our audience is looking for, what they want to hear about.
And, um, we’ve tried like Facebook ads and we got people responding, but that’s kind of been something that’s sort of died down a little bit. Um, but this email thing has always been something. That we knew people wanted to hear about, but we were just too stubborn to listen. So we started this new campaign where we asked you, we’re asking you guys to reach out to us, uh, via SMS, via text, um, for a service that we are offering, uh, to help you guys with, you know, with email. Kevin, am I breaking up because you are?

Kevin: No, I’m not. You’re fine. Okay.

Jason: So, um, We we’ve been putting out this campaign and we’re getting a lot of people reaching out to us. One thing though, Kevin, that we’re finding is that there are, there are people that are not filling out the survey. Um, if you’re one of those people listening and you’ve reached out to us via text and you have not filled out the survey, I just want you guys to know that we will do.

Respond to any texts without a survey attached to it. If you have a, uh, an e-commerce store that like, we just had someone to reach out to us who, who is a, almost a multi seven figure business. Um, and her email is literally almost. You know, nothing, um, in terms of her overall sales and, you know, we built this program for that person.
For those of you who have a store, that’s doing well, but you just haven’t figured out the email side. Um, so if you want some help with your email, what are you going to text us, Kev?

Kevin: text the word, email 2 8 4, 4 6, 4, 3. 0 7, 4, 5. And you’ll get a autoresponder back to you that will ask you a couple of questions about your business, and we need to gather that information so we can actually see, you know, how we would help, how we would fit in with your company.

So you’ve got to make sure that you respond back with that information,

Jason: right. And we will not, like I said, we will not reach out unless we have that information. So if you’re interested, I highly suggest that you do it. So Kevin. Jason. We have been starting businesses for a really long time

and

Kevin: that starting and stopping them and working with clients and starting them again and going back and forth.

Jason: And what’s interesting is that when we start a business today, there is probably like a 95 to 99%. Uh, a better chance that it’s going to work now than it is in the past when we’ve tried. Right. Um, a perfect example of this is our golf business. Okay. We started this golf business. I think I started it probably two months ago.
We’ve probably been running ads for a month and recently we were getting as much as five orders a day. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re talking about creating a business out of thin air, so basically walking up to your office, Walking into a wherever and just thinking up a business. And then in two months, you’re, you’re making sales. That’s, that’s pretty damn good. I think a lot of people put a lot of pressure on themselves or too much pressure on themselves thinking that things are going to work instantly and it does take time, but we are at the point now where we kind of know the signs, we kind of understand how this, this, this game works.
You know, everywhere from like the messaging to the type of product, to who to niching down, you know, all

Kevin: those kinds of things, especially like with the state of Facebook ads and paid ads in general right now, and how difficult it is for you to put a business out there on Facebook or an, you know, an ad or a video or something on an, uh, on Facebook and to actually get a sale at this point.

We understand what that takes five years ago, we might’ve spent, you know, $50 a day and not getting a sale or gotten, gotten a sale and being like, Hey, this isn’t working, but now we’re spending that money and we’re getting a sample like, wow, that’s a huge accomplishment. And it means a lot more than it did back then.

Jason: Absolutely. And what what’s interesting is that. You know, there there’s a lot of ways of running a build the business, right? You could start off organically. That’s the longest way you can possibly do it. Um, where we are at this point, we like to just use our money to run ads and, um, hopefully we don’t run out of it.

Kevin: Uh, well we do consider Oregon. Organic is always something that we’re building over time. You’re building over time. As you create content, it’s not something we, you know, uh, Put our total, our efforts toward, you know, it’s just something that happens, you know, quote unquote, organically as, as the building business grows.

Jason: Well, yeah. Right. But the point is, is that like, you can build a business faster when you can pay when you can pay for traffic. And now that’s kind of like, was my point is like you can build it organically. Over a long period of time without spending any money. And it will take much longer, but if you have some money and you have to be okay with spending money, I mean, we’ve probably invested, I don’t know, like $4,000 up until this point, maybe 3000, 4,000. We’ve probably only gotten back, you know, you know, uh, most of it, not all of it, I would say, nah, maybe not all of it. Maybe not most of it, maybe half of it, but the point I’m trying to make is that, um, we understand. In this stage of the game, you know what, we’ll make something work and what won’t make something work.

And even though most people kind of given up on Facebook, I would say maybe not most, but a lot of people have given up on Facebook. It’s still like our go to paid.

Kevin: Because you have to, you have to have the certain, you have to look at it a certain way. You have to understand what to use it for. Right? I mean like, like you said, we rely on paid ads to, to build a business or to grow a business. You also, it’s such an easy way to test things, right? Like, um, I sit here with our, one of our other businesses and I create a new process for something, a new lead generation process. And I want to test it like the best way to do that is to send tons of. To it from Facebook ads, then you can see, you can get that data right away.

You can see if it works. It doesn’t. Yeah.

Jason: And we, we do that a lot. Like we’re actually doing that right now with the golf business, trying to test different price points, right? Like we’re trying to see like it’s a hundred dollars better. It’s $50 better, whatever we’re testing all these price points and you can do that with paid advertising because you can send people to your sales page and see which one works the best.

Um, but. You know, we started this podcast, Kevin, because we wanted to tell people about our experiences and not really kind of make anything up. We just wanted to tell people what we’re going through. And the golf business has been going exceptionally well up until last week, I made a change to the landing page, the sales page.
I don’t even know what that change was, which should be a, another red flag. I should have never just changed the page that’s working, which is a stupid, you know, I don’t want to offend anybody, but it’s a rookie mistake. Yeah.

Kevin: She never all the time I do it. Yeah.

Jason: Should never just change something that’s working.

Kevin: So, cause you’re always looking at it. You’re like, okay, it’s. And you’re like, okay, how do I get it to like, work a little bit better? And it’s a good thing to do, but to not have that thing that was working unquote, to go back and reference it as a bad move. So always keep that and know what your, you know, your constant was and test against that.

Jason: Right. And that’s, uh, I kinda thought I was changing things that wouldn’t make a difference and apparently it made a difference. So last story. Um, this morning, Kevin and I were talking, okay. Should we go back to that strategy where some days we’re getting five orders, some days are getting two orders.

Some days we’re getting six orders, some gays, again, one order where it’s very like volatile, or do we just go back to sort of like simplifying this because your business, quite frankly, By the way Ashley just wrote us back. What’s up Ash. Um, and, um, so one like your, your email list is, is an asset of the business, right?
But we were getting so excited and we were getting these orders on Facebook that we kind of abandoned. What we know is the right way to do this. And that’s basically lead generation. Right. Facebook ad to lead gen to email, like we were getting all these orders on Facebook. So we were like, oh shit, like maybe this is we’re just going to do it this way. And then we got slapped in the face, like we normally do. And, uh, We figured

Kevin: out a active, what we always say is the constant, which is your, your lead generation to your email marketing. I did the same thing, you know, with a client of ours that selling a supplement is like for, and this was the Facebook’s change was really apparent for me with them.

Cause I could see I was running the exact same ad. To the exact same sales page. And like when, you know, the Facebook algorithm and all those things change at the beginning of, I think last year it was the first quarter of last year. I saw a dramatic change and we weren’t getting the cost of acquisition where we needed it to be.
And we kept trying, we kept trying everything to try to force that. You know that round peg into that square hole over and over and over again. And then, you know, we just ended up back to where we, you know, it’s funny because I, we ran lead generation ads for this company, you know, six months ago or so.
And I just figured, you know, I’d try to look at the numbers back to when we were running some of the lead generation ads. And I noticed that we were getting a positive return on those emails. It just took know. An extra month or an extra two months or even three months to get our money back. And that’s what I think it’s so difficult to understand and to come to grips with when it comes to doing the lead generation strategy.

Jason: Especially when you’re working with clients because they want results today, right?

They pay you a retainer or they pay you a commission or whatever they’re paying you. And. They want a return on that money right now. Um, but it’s not necessarily the best way to go because that email list can now be used. During black Friday, cyber Monday, Christmas, all the holidays throughout the year.
Mother’s day father’s day, whatever, whatever holidays, labor day, Memorial day, whatever you can use that list, even though you collected those people, maybe six months ago, you can use that list forever. And with. Change, uh, to apple, you don’t really need to watch the numbers as much. You want to see how much it’s costing you per lead, but you don’t necessarily have to watch, uh, there’s not going to be as much fluctuation.
Like there’s literally like a dollar in cost per lead. Right. Like, there’s a dollar difference when it’s doing well and when it’s doing poorly, but you’re still getting emails.

Kevin: Yeah. It’s hard to tell. It’s it’s still hard to tell, even if you’re looking at the cost of acquiring an email address, it’s hard to tell what that email is going to be worth in the long

Jason: run. Right. But you’re not worried about, you’re not worried about every single visit turning into. Right. Like you have an email address. And even if it costs you a little bit more money, even a question, $5 to acquire someone which is really high, even if it cost you that much money, hopefully you can get $5 back from them in the lifetime of their journey.

Kevin: Right. And I think you said it the best. It’s like you have to consider that as an asset of the business. It’s like almost like buying anything else. It’s an asset that will go with you. You know, obviously they can unsubscribe or whatever and keep an eye on that and see. But for the most part, that person is now in your ecosystem and you can communicate that to them whenever you want.

So, If you think about it like that, and you’re like, oh, I’m not getting any, if you either put a value on an email address, you know, from the, from the, from your other emails that you have that may have generated some money, if you can put a value on that and kind of use that number as a gauge against what it should cost to get an email address, I think it can make you feel a little bit more, more comfortable about spending money to acquire an email and no. Like you said that is an asset that comes with you, that the business then owns.

Jason: Yeah. And, and, and so I think one of the biggest questions we’re going to not want the biggest question, but I think what a lot of people are probably thinking is like, well, how do you do that for an e-commerce brand? Right.

Because you know, most people will think, or most people think that. I don’t want to give anybody the wrong impression. If you’re a $20 million business, $50 million business, $10 million business, and you have budget to blow on Facebook. Like for example, one of our other clients just doubled our ad spend on Facebook.
And it’s not even like when we first started working with them, it was all about ROI, ROI, ROI. Now they just want to spend the money. For eyeballs, right. Just for awareness. So they’ve just doubled now. And then they’re spending money. I mean, this is not like, they’re not, it’s not no slouch. They’re spending a lot of money.
Is there, is there a place for that? There’s absolutely a place for that. Um, is there, is that, you know, is that the only thing you should be doing? Absolutely not. I think in. In a perfect world, you would do lead gen and you would do straight sales. You would do both them at the same time.

Kevin: And that’s what we’re doing for that specific client.

Jason, that I didn’t mention it to cause I was going over the numbers is that we ran a lead gen campaign back in August to separate. In August and October, they were giveaway campaigns. And we were just spending money on, uh, on collecting email justice to enter into this giveaway. And, you know, they were a sale here or sale.
There was trickling in, but like I said, it was August, October. And what you said, you can use that email address when it comes to black Friday, cyber Monday holiday that has now passed in between the time of that giveaway. And now, and I can see the. Well, it was 10 X Roaz from what we spent to acquire those emails during those two campaigns.

Jason: Right. So you may not get it today, but you know, in the future it may hit big. And that’s what happens with that client because that specific client has one product. So like, it’s like, ah, if they don’t want to buy it right now, they kind of just like they’re lurking or watching you, they’re reading some of the emails that you send out and then boom.

You may just have some off offer on one on a day, labor day, Memorial day, whenever black, Friday, whatever. And then boom. They buy.

Kevin: Yeah. I take a product too. So that’s even more unlikely to be sold on the, you know, right up front the first time they see you.

Jason: Right. And, you know, I think, um, I think that you can, this can get confusing if you’re new at it, or if you’re doing it all by yourself or doing everything by yourself, it could be a lot.

But at the end of the day, you know, testing different things, trying different things, see what works, see what doesn’t work. You know, when you, our mindset, Kevin, I think today, Is much different than it was three years ago. Even today, we understand that you’re not wasting money by spending money. You’re actually investing into the company so that you can make money later.
Right? Like, so even though we spent $4,000 on this new business and only got back 2000 or 3000 or whatever, the number is. That’s an investment into the business because now we know what works. Now we know what doesn’t work. Now we know, uh, what somebody is worth to us on our email are on our email list.
So you got to look at this in a lot of different ways. You can’t just look at it through, you know, like these blinders you got. I understand this from a holistic standpoint, that you’re not wasting money, that you’re actually in, it’s an investment into the business.

Kevin: Yeah. And the amount of money, the amount of things you can test as you’re bringing people in, it’s like you’re bringing them in and they’re going through a flow.

You know, you can just keep testing different messages on these people that are coming in fresh. And then once you, you SU hit on something that maybe works really well. You have high open rates, high click through rates, high conversion rates. You can then move that over into like your, your evergreen approach to your entire list because those people are coming in.
If they’re responding to something more than likely, you know, your customers or your other email list, people who are on your Lima list will respond. So it was just total as so much opportunity to just invest, bring people in and test a bunch of shit and see what works and what doesn’t work. And once you got them on your

Jason: list, it doesn’t matter. You could try all kinds of shit, you know?

Kevin: Yeah, exactly. Sorry, before we go

Jason: now, before we go text us, if you have, you need help with your email, what do you, how do you, how do you text us

Kevin: Text us the word, email, the word. To 8 4, 4 6 4 3 0 7 4 5. Respond back with some more information about your business so we can kind of see how we would fit in and we’ll go from there.

We’ll reach out. So thank you guys so much for listening as always, you can check us out at ecommerceuncensonsor.com and we’ll talk to you guys real soon.

Jason: Later.

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