The E-commerce Leader

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[00:00:30] Intro: Hey folks, welcome back to the e-commerce leader, the place to be. If you wanted to be the best e-commerce leader, you can be today. We’re in the middle of talking about Jason and Kyle’s latest challenges. That five day challenge, not a 30 day challenge. This time, all about Replens, which is a, an arbitrage and online arbitrage.
[00:00:50] And retail arbitrary, specifically a strategy. So we’ve been talking about the lessons learned from this, and we’re going to continue with that today. So without further ado, let’s plunge in and see what we can learn from the whole business of trying to run a challenge, things that worked things that didn’t work so well.
[00:01:07] And overall lessons that you can take home and start acting on yourself.
[00:01:11] Michael: I guess most people, you get the idea there of it’s $5 that you might well be offered something else, but that’s a little bit different from being sort of heavy soul to in the group itself. And I guess, but all I would say as well as, irrespective of the exact price point, which is a tactical thing, getting known for goods, free content or low price content.
[00:01:28] Is actually a great branding building. Cause I’ve seen two or three people in this industry, one of whom I used to work with, but I’m no longer in a fit, so I’m not going to give him this because he started competing with me in a way, but he’s done really, really great events. And he used to fill a free webinars with 3000 people and.
[00:01:44] Do so with a great reputation and other people. I know like my friend, Danny McMillan, who I will mention cause we, we help each other out in the life for different ways here in London. And he’s really done a lot of work speaking at events for free and has really built a brand of trust. But it’s taken him years.
[00:01:58] I watched him for several years thinking, dude, why are you doing this? You’re got to go broke and liking him and wanting to, you know, wanting him to do well. But I think it’s really paying off. So I think that, you know, for what it’s worth, right. Building really solid content and a reputation for that. The word does go around cause cause people quite quick, quickly, or suss you out and have a word in the forums and know is this so-and-so and he goes, oh no, it’s a page Fest.
[00:02:20] Don’t bother kind of thing. So yeah, I think that there’s nothing wrong with that ever. So that’s the first thing. Now I know you were talking about the messaging and I know you had a little bit of a challenge with some of your. Top of funnel to get into this with the ads and things. So tell me a bit about that.
[00:02:36] Jason: Yeah. I mean, I think the way we approach these things is you full disclosure. Is there sort of three sources of, participant, you know, engagement and traffic? One is our own email. Efforts in our own communications. Second one is our, our advertising and third one would be affiliate partners. And I think we learned, some about each of those four, you know, in this challenge, it’s like where you would, every time you try to do an event like this.
[00:02:57] And in particular, on the Facebook ad side, the challenge we ran into in April when we did our last event was we just ran out of time. We didn’t have enough time to do advertising and yeah. Let it find its own way, you know, find it success. And so this time we deliberately had the event page and all the details out ready earlier in the cycle of when we were going to launch the event so that we could do more Facebook advertising, but, Facebook’s done a lot of updates and they’re doing a lot of stuff in response to apple.
[00:03:27] And so. Part of that was all of our, audiences and Facebook had been obliterated our custom audiences. And so we didn’t have those to immediately put this in front of, so, w which we were like, oh, dang, we kind of knew that we had heard that, but then when you actually have to lean into your Facebook advertising, that’s one of the tools you want to, you want to go to.
[00:03:48] So, and that then takes just more time to rebuild. So we kind of found ourselves in similar circumstances time. We weren’t happy with the Facebook advertising. So, now I’ll probably get pitched by a million Facebook advertising experts, as I say that, but that was one of the, you know, that was one of the lessons here was okay.
[00:04:06] You know, we, another event where we weren’t happy with our Facebook advertising outcomes, which, you know, that’s why I always say to everybody that you, whenever you. Marketing, never do one-off marketing. Do it, do it again. And again, keep, you know, keep doing the same thing long enough to learn lessons and become good at it.
[00:04:25] So that was one of the takeaways this time.
[00:04:27] Michael: Yeah, never do one off marketing. Yeah. That’s very, very wise advice. And especially things like Facebook ads. I mean, people, sometimes there’s the same people that are about to pitch you, but sort of touts it. Like it’s a sort of one size fits all easy and I think it can work.
[00:04:43] I know some people who work at wireless at all, but I think it’s quite tricky to get right. I mean, my experience is it’s not an easy one.
[00:04:50] Jason: I think my response to that just as a side note, which maybe we should do a whole episode on is what I think I see happening. Cause we run ads, in various ways, for clients and, and some of our clients just have products that just.
[00:05:06] It just works on, on, on Facebook or on Google other clients that we have, it just doesn’t work. And I think that’s part of the lesson and the thesis and it going into it is will my product and what I’m offering work effectively on, on Google or on Facebook or social media ads. And if an expert says, oh, it’ll always work.
[00:05:28] They’re just not, it’s not true. It’s a. It’s detailed dependent outcomes and a, there you go. Yeah, but nonetheless, that’s a little nuance into the world of advertising. I guess I’m going
[00:05:40] Michael: to guess it, there’s sort of a wider lesson from that is that you can’t just copy what has worked well for other people in your industry or the rhythm of your business.
[00:05:47] And you can try copy copying Russell Brunson’s idea of, you know, same events, you know, with the frequency, maybe the frequency was wrong, maybe, and it works. Maybe he’s got some of the users or prospects that he doesn’t matter. The secret behind that could be something else in the stack of the funnel.
[00:06:04] Right. It could be the fact that these affiliates are very well paid to encourage people to use click funnels, for example. So yeah. There’s, you have to look at the situation as a whole. I agree with that. Yep. Yep. So, yeah. Tell me about the branding side. So I know you had some other issues around branding you’ve mentioned already that you felt that messaging was a bit broad and, and also you had the idea of, You know, is this, this, this, repeat the same thing?
[00:06:24] Jason: Yeah, that was part of the challenge. Th the, the name of it, we also kicked it off on labor day. So, and so we’ve started to call it the labor day challenge. Because it started on labor day in the U S if you’re outside the U S you won’t know, but in the U S labor day is a national holiday and it’s, you know, so everybody takes a day off.
[00:06:40] It’s I tell my kids that stayed that day. You’re supposed to work. They all laugh and say, no, it’s to honor the workers. And I say that socialism and. Whatever, but, but nonetheless, it’s a holiday. And so the question was, should we launch an event on a holiday or is that a stupid idea, but it’s labor day.
[00:06:57] So it kind of thematically seemed like it would fit, but we mixed metaphors two or three times. We had labor day that we were camping on, but then it’s still called the Replens challenge. But, then it’s really retail. Arbitrage is a theme. So we got all kinds of sloppy and, and it just was not, In terms of the focus.
[00:07:16] So that was part of, part of the challenge or dynamic, as well. And, so that played itself out sort of in our messaging and on our, our landing page. But you can go see what we have. It’s Replens, challenged.com. The other thing I’ll just mention is that Replens is a product, for ladies. And so one time somebody Googled, just replied to me and said, Why what’s your, what’s your challenge?
[00:07:39] I just Googled it. What in the world? And so there’s just brand confusion with the phrase Replens, because it is a product and, people in our industry know it as replenishable products for retail arbitrage. Well, that’s a very niche use case of the phrase and. At some point you might get a cease and desist letter from a, you know, large consumer packaged good company that says stop using this phrase.
[00:08:01] Men, we, you know, so we might need to go away from it eventually, but there’s that bit of branding confusion as well. So again, we had all kinds of sloppy going on. Sipping
[00:08:10] Michael: fair. I mean, trademark. And brand names are a real nightmare. They are, they are category specific when it comes to the legal sides.
[00:08:17] As I understand, I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve looked into it with clients recently and been educated by lawyers, including American ones. And it is category specific. So somebody is called Replens and they do, I don’t know whatever it is. I have no idea what it is. So it’s like a feminine hygiene products or something.
[00:08:30] But if you’re in the space of incident marketing, they’re clearly very, very different products, tend to confusion. So I’m not sure you’re going to get the cease and desist letter if you do. I don’t know if it will stick, but nevertheless. For people who are, again, this comes down to who you’re trying to attract.
[00:08:43] Doesn’t it for somebody inside the avatars world, you’re trying to draw deeper into that world. It would be an obvious thing what it means, but it’s kind of dog whistle copy is Dan Kennedy would put it right. But if you’re not trying to call out the dogs, it’s a bit too specialists maybe, which is an interesting thing.
[00:08:57] We ended up stuck in our own little bubble. Don’t we in, in the e-commerce world sometimes. So you talked about the date of the launch. What about the duration then? Do you think that five days is ended up being a better day than better than 30? Or is it still something that you’re going to?
[00:09:13] Jason: I think it’s faster, obviously.
[00:09:14] I mean, the first takeaway is it’s faster, but we’re definitely in crunch mode. I mean, you know, it’s, it’s a sprint, not a marathon of 30 days was a marathon. This is a sprint. So we don’t know. I mean, we’re learning, we’ll, we’ll get feedback from the community and see how they feel about learning, in five days.
[00:09:31] And. And, and go from there. So yeah, it’s a, it’s a discovery process for us.
[00:09:37] Michael: Yeah, which is honest. I think that is how it all is. And there’s no one size fits all out of the box. Having said, all this, we focus on didn’t work. Let’s talk about the stuff that did work. So obviously you’ve got 400 people there.
[00:09:50] There’s a good vibe in the community. You know, I’ve been getting your marketing messages and, and there’s a lot of energy behind it. It feels to me. So there’s a lot. That’s going well. So what’s going well. And what’s behind what’s driving that. Do you
[00:10:00] Jason: think two things worked really well this time? I’ll just, mention ClickFunnels first.
[00:10:07] It just works well. I just become, I’m continuing to become a fan. We built a team. Now we have, kind of our, I guess you call engineer, I guess a web web master, I guess you could say, or almost like developer site developer for our ClickFunnels. You know, when Russell does his funnel Fridays and he shows in 10 minutes building a funnel, it makes it.
[00:10:26] Easy. I was going to say deceptively easy and that’s not fair to him, but it makes it look easy and it is easy. But to actually build a fully cooked funnel, I think ours has like 21 steps or something like that. It’s a, and it’s rigged up in a lot of ways to fulfill on, you know, the offers and to track things like with pixels and, and all that kind of.
[00:10:46] It’s complicated. So, but it works really well. I guess all that to say it works really well, and we’re excited to continue to lean into using it as a platform tool. You know, we run our whole business pretty much on Kajabi, for our coaching consulting business and group business. And, click funnels is just sort of this one-off event tool.
[00:11:04] And, we’re, we’re just continuing to see it work well for us. So, couldn’t be happier, honestly. I mean, it’s, it’s. Nicely for us. And you’re right. 400 people is fantastic outcome. And I would say that the bulk of that really worked from, I think, effective email marketing. I really tried hard to, Explain what we were doing via email.
[00:11:26] And there’s this always this tension or for email marketers frequency of, of sending and, and, you, you really run the risk of people. Well, you know, leaving you and offending people and people, you know, unsubscribing or being, put off by frequent communication. But nonetheless, we were doing a big. And I had a bunch of details to explain, and I realized there was a lot of confusion.
[00:11:48] So I just did for the week prior, almost a daily, like here’s what we’re going to do on Monday. Here’s what we’re going to do on Tuesday. Here’s this topic, that topic, because we had so much, we were going to talk about in the event and each one, as I said, could have been its own event. So I just used that as a tool in essence.
[00:12:06] And. And that that worked really well. I got one person who responded back one time with a snarky unkind message to me. He told me I should change my profession. She was funny. Well, th that was, it was so fun. It was so it’s such a funny insult. It made me laugh and I didn’t mind it so much,
[00:12:25] Michael: by the way, to the very polite audit, because you’re such a polite and Christian man, that kind of audience.
[00:12:32] So that’s, that’s not bad. I think pretty much every marketer has, has this sort of tale of horror of the way they’ve been responded to by somebody, right? They say, yeah, I think one snarky message for a lot of clarity and good responses. Participants is a, is an incredibly good pay off. I mean, it’s interesting what you were saying about articulating the email Mustang that it sounds like because you felt you had to, you articulated things in quite a cut down bite size, chunk way in the email.
[00:12:59] So I guess maybe that’s kind of a, if that’s the piece that worked well, maybe that’s the hint to take from it. Next
[00:13:05] Jason: time, I suppose. I think so. I think I learned, another tool that I used. I’ll, I’m happy to cite my source and give people a recommendation for this book, because I saw this book being recommended by Chris green.
[00:13:17] I’d never heard of it before. And then, then I got the book as the audio edition and the first chapter was. Turn off to me because it was like I’m 20 and I have a a hundred million dollar business I built in the last two years. And I was like, I can’t take this. But, but then after that, it got amazing.
[00:13:34] And I was like, man, this guy’s really good at his trade craft. And, and, and actually, as a very systematic way of approaching, industry and, offers and that kind of thing. And so, I really enjoyed the book and, and he had in one particular section. A good, a good thesis, a good, a good tool for copywriting.
[00:13:54] Now the book is called, 100 million offer. How to make offers so good people feel stupid saying no, it’s number one right now in sales and selling on Amazon is by Alex. Hormoz easy. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that book or interact with him, but it’s a good book.
[00:14:09] Michael: Yeah. I didn’t know if I know anything about him at all, but yeah, that’s a very instinct.
[00:14:16] I mean, I think the art of making great offer is one of those wonderfully timeless things. Isn’t it? That it doesn’t depend on technology. So click on us is great. Now in five years time, maybe it’s another technology. Or something else, but, but the art of crafting offers still the aircraft to offer. Right.
[00:14:30] So that’s, that’s really nice to hear. So your main.
[00:14:35] Jason: Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. You were going to
[00:14:36] Michael: ask me what you were going to say. Your main learnings were that may have been exactly what you were going to say.
[00:14:40] Jason: Yeah, exactly. So he just said something at the book at one point when we were, we were driving to California and back.
[00:14:45] And so I listened to the book. And then when I was working on this email marketing, campaign work, I remembered what he had said in this one chapter. I was like, oh, that was so good. So I went back and listened to it again and kind of used it as a framework. And it’s a very. A copywriting technique. I hadn’t heard it.
[00:15:00] I don’t know where he got it from. He references Dan Kennedy a lot. So maybe it was Dan Kennedy copywriting strategy, but he basically said make a list of all the objections in the mind of your customer that, you know, they’ve either expressed to you or that you know, that they have top of mind as a concern.
[00:15:17] I don’t have enough time. I don’t have enough money. This won’t work for me. I’m in a unique situation because dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, make that list. And he said, if your product fulfills those things. Literally right. How to in your copywriting bullet points, right. How to, and then reverse that, that, fear, concern or doubt.
[00:15:38] So for example, I don’t have enough time. The bullet point would be how to do retail arbitrage quickly. And I knew my, I knew this five day challenge was needed to deliver on all these things. So it was like, oh, I can totally do this because I knew Kate and Danny and Jr. And the other, you know, other content, the VIP sessions and all of it would totally answer all of the fears, concerns.
[00:16:04] Literally they’ll answer people’s questions. If, you know, people say I don’t have this or that they’ll, they literally are answering questions in every session.
[00:16:11] Michael: I was just screaming voice in my head. Just kind of dealing with that because he’s so kind of brightened on it and quick. So for example, it happens though, so I can totally imagine you’d have complete faith in that.
[00:16:22] Yeah. So
[00:16:22] Jason: I just did a whole long list. What could I think that people are stopping saying yes to what what’s stopping people from saying yes, just made a huge list and I just made them all how to do this, how to do that, you know, secrets of the secrets of death and it’s honest copywriting, I would complete integrity.
[00:16:39] I knew those issues would be addressed in the event. And so I think that’s a good copy technique just as a total side note. Well, you know, for our listeners here, if you’re selling any products, Make a list of all the objections and, and then go get that, you know, book a hundred million offers. 100 M offers.
[00:16:58] So, by Alex Hormoz easy. It’s good. Yeah, it’s a good book.
[00:17:01] Michael: but I think I’m always excited by the most evergreen stuff, because it’s just, if you hone that crop to your point, never do anything once. Absolutely agree.
[00:17:08] But the more evergreen, a skillset. And Dan Kennedy, but he was anti-technology if famous, these delicious really grumpy copywriting start. Cause I think it was delicious grumpy man, and it’s really full of carrots. And when he was texting or something, he is larger than life for British standards. He’s just off the scale, kind of like a main character.
[00:17:25] I mean, for example that you, through his mobile phone, out of his car, literally into a valley after a week as he just hated it. And, but yeah. The fact is that the stuff he taught back in the day? Yeah, absolutely works now. And that I really love that because it means if I hone my craft as a copywriter now in 20 years time, that’s going to be honed to perfection and still valid, I think, because it works on psychological principles, doesn’t it?
[00:17:47] Which I, I just love that stuff really smart. And so how would you say, would you say that was the backbone of your email marketing success then? Or what, what else would you describe that to me?
[00:17:57] Jason: Well, the frequency was definitely a thing, but also frequency with topical changes. I mean, I changed the topic every day and just gave people another reason to jump into the challenge.
[00:18:08] So, and, and I took each part of the challenge apart and made it a cause for joy. And, and so the, I guess that’s, that’s an essence was my approach to it. And, and so, yeah, I think it worked, I worked pretty well and, and I, you know, we try to do this stuff with integrity. We try, we do it with integrity and intent with intentional integrity.
[00:18:26] We, we don’t want to over promise and under deliver. We want to do the opposite of that. We want to, we want to promise a good outcome or a good product, and we want the customers to join and, and. And and say, yes, this was great. And so, you know, that’s, that’s part of the pre-marketing and you got to deliver on what you say.
[00:18:44] And so I think there’s a dance there. Well, so those are, I think those are five or six things that are lessons, a couple of negative ones, a couple positive ones. Hopefully this has been helpful for people, who, are considering challenges. I will just say that any marketer who’s doing physical. Or niche marketing with a private label into an industry could figure out how to do a challenge or a virtual event for your customers.
[00:19:08] And it could even be like a selfie challenge or, you know, some challenge with your product, do something with the product. And it could be a mix of education and fun activities. And so if this is completely weird and different to you and you think, oh, it’s just for information marketers, it’s not. So, you know, be willing to go a little bit meta with where you’re at, think about what could work differently for you.
[00:19:31] If you’ve never looked into challenges, Pedro Deus, sort of the expert, these days on challenges, he’s been, featured a lot. He’s speaking at ClickFunnels live, in a couple of weeks, I think, and he’s become sort of the guru of challenges. So you can check out his stuff. And his last name is a D a O Pedro a day O and M 100 X as his community.
[00:19:53] So you can Google around and find that, but there you go. So that’s my midpoint. Check-in on our challenge and hopefully this has been helpful. Yeah, I
[00:20:00] Michael: really liked that any marketer could do a virtual event and. What strikes me as well is that people divide worlds into business, to consumer marketing, which is all the impulse led in business to business, which is more corporate and numbers led.
[00:20:11] But that middle ground of people who are sort of curious about that kind of thing, or, info amongst marketers, I think has also got a lot of overlap with certain types of physical products. For example, I know somebody who’s. Got a business with sort of a baking type products involved. And obviously some people who bake stuff do it for money for other people.
[00:20:29] And then other people do it for their pleasure. But those kinds of middle ground people who are doing it for other people, if you set them a challenge that helped them to accelerate from it, you know, it was just a kind of hobby to a bit of an income stream. I think, you know, there were many, many thousands of products that could have that kind of community.
[00:20:43] And if you really put your thinking cap on, if that happens to coincide, I think that that’s a very overlooked opportunity in my opinion.
[00:20:50] Jason: Absolutely. Right. Yeah. Let me just mention one last thing, which was just another little wrinkle and then we got to wrap up, the, the other piece of this was all the participants get a copy of Danny’s book, the new book, second edition that he did, become an Amazon selling legend using retail arbitrage.
[00:21:03] So that. Was, you know, the whole challenge was in support of that book. It’s currently in the top 20, and it’s a category sub category on Amazon. So that was another benefit and see, like, even explaining all this I’m like, but wait, there’s more. And it’s like, it’s just a complication, but it was a neat part of this in his book is out there.
[00:21:24] And I’d love to have people check it out if they want to know kind of what in the world he does and how he does it and what he teaches people. So there you go. Bit of, of info for the community here.
[00:21:35] Michael: Brilliant. So if you got time to just quickly summarize what you would say, your, your main learnings were from this experience or your second, or is it third bite of the cherry now?
[00:21:44] Jason: Sure. Happy to do it. Yeah. This challenge is been, filled with learnings, both good and bad up and down positive, negative. And it’s exciting to do though. And so the, the gist of it is, 400 people are happily learning a new trade school. As it relates to retail arbitrage and finding replenishable items.
[00:22:03] And they’ve gotten great training. And in an event that was done through ClickFunnels and then done through a private group, the takeaways really are challenges are exciting and they work, and, you two should learn how to do one, I think, or just, you know, understand the mechanics of it so that you become a better marketer for your own product.
[00:22:25] No matter what you do, how you sell. I think there’s a lesson or two for everyone in finding out about challenges and how to do them. So that’s the takeaway. And hopefully that’s a great conversation today. Yeah.
[00:22:37] Michael: Great. Thanks man. Really fascinating stuff. Really great to hear about.
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