One Stop Shop

1. Finish the process. It’s like planting a tree: it’s better to plant a coconut tree first and take care of it until it grows fully, rather than to plant a coconut seed first, then change your mind and replace it with a mango seed, then with an avocado seed, then with an orange seed – if you do it this way, you’ll never see your tree grow because you didn’t stick with it long enough. Focus on a single marketing strategy first and stick with it until you reach the point of learning where you’ll learn one of the following: How valuable something is to your business’ growth. For example, this strategy is effective since it added $500/month into your revenue. Great! How can you work on this so it’ll grow to $1,000/month or even more? Or; How not valuable something is to your business’ growth: If it’s not moving the needle, and you don’t see any significant results happening, then great! At least you learned from it so you can now move onto testing other strategies that may work for you. You can only reach this p

Consolidate your customer communications in a central inbox. Simply put, use a help desk software so you have a central platform that focuses solely on customer service needs. I know what you’re thinking -- you need to spend money! But before you close this tab on your browser, hear me out first: a) there are lots of help desk solutions out there so you’re guaranteed to find one that fits your budget; and b) it’s worth investing in this platform because you don’t want any customer communication to fall through the cracks, do you? If you don’t have any central inbox to consolidate your customer communications, there’s a higher chance that a customer’s message will be forgotten, overlooked, or even accidentally ignored. The #1 reason why customers switch to a new brand is because they feel underappreciated. Not replying to your customer’s message sends them the message that you don’t care about them. And you don’t want this to happen, do you? It’s also more convenient to onboard other team members to help you

Figure out your skills and focus on the business-related activities you enjoy. The idea of “do what you love and you never have to work another day in your life” seemed to be a lie - when you were starting out in business, you didn’t have the luxury to do only the things you love because you had to do a lot of things, even things you don’t necessarily enjoy doing. Now that you’re scaling your business, though, you’ll have the joy of sitting down, figuring out what your greatest strengths & enjoyable tasks are, and delegating them to someone else in your team. Do you want to focus more on sales and spend less time on bookkeeping? Or spend 80% of your time on product development to build a sustainable business, so you want to delegate your inventory-related tasks to someone else? Find out what your weaknesses or your least enjoyable tasks are. Then, delegate them to someone who’s more qualified than you are. Your investment on doing proper delegation will be worth it. After all, you’re in it for the long

Monitor your bad reviews so you can respond on a timely manner. Have a system that notifies you each time you receive a bad review. For example, with Conversio, you can choose to be notified of reviews which achieve a certain rating (or less) and you customize the rating level. So you might pick 3 stars or less, or 1 star ratings only. Strike while the iron is hot so you can increase the possibility of your customer engaging with you. This can also diffuse the tension and communicate how much you care about your customers. On average, 53% of customers expect businesses to reply to their online reviews within seven days so can you imagine the positive impact to your customer when you reply to their online review in less than an hour? Empathize with your customer and never ever be defensive. Be sincere when apologizing but be objective when assessing the bad review you’ve received. Start with a sincere “Hey, John, I’m really sorry about [reason why they’re upset].” This statement shows that you’re listening

As an entrepreneur for nearly 13 years, I’ve had two life-changing realizations: One, wow, has it been more than a decade already? And two, there’s no such thing as a perfect entrepreneur or a 100% successful venture. Spending all your time, energy and resources to achieve perfection might not be viable anymore, considering that your to-do list as an entrepreneur is seemingly never-ending. Sometimes, the last 5% is probably not worth it. Talking about this reminds me of the blog post that Derek Sivers, CD Baby founder, wrote entitled “Relax for the same result”. Derek used to bike 15 miles every day. He used to do full-on biking, as in pedal to the metal, red-faced, rockstar biking that left him exhausted. Doing this -- giving his full, maximum effort -- gave him 43 minutes. Over time, though, he started to link exhaustion and tiredness with the act of biking, so he felt tedious and less enthusiastic about it. That’s why he decided to give 50% of his usual effort instead. Doing so made him notice things, live

Note: Before we go to the main course, here’s a tasty treat for your appetizer: I’m giving away ONE ticket to the “Running Remote Conference” where I’ll be speaking in this June in Bali, Indonesia. If you’re interested in remote working, this is one conference you can’t miss. Make sure to join here as this giveaway ends in a couple of days! Everyone wants to have a slice of the remote working pie. After all, being a “digital nomad” who can “work from anywhere” so they can live the “laptop lifestyle” gives them the freedom to earn money and still enjoy their time with their loved ones, right? You don’t even need to log on to Instagram to check out the remote working trend. Stripe, the payment processor, recently announced that they would have an office exclusively for remote workers, even though they have offices worldwide. Additionally, a Citrix study shows that 50% of the workforce will be office-free by 2020. Can you imagine a world where half of the working population will be working from the comforts of t

Should content be king, and strategy be the king’s advisors, then visual identity is definitely the queen. Sure, the most important element in your email is your content since it has to resonate well with your target customers. Compelling content helps motivate your customers to do whatever action you need them to do, right? Whether it’s buying, referring or subscribing. Now, for the great content to be engaging, it also needs to be sent strategically by optimizing it via personalization, timing and segmentation. These elements, as discussed in my podcast, “4-Step Checklist To Effectively Boost Your Engagement in Email Marketing”, help drive email engagement up and boost your sales over the long run. But these aren’t enough. Visual impression of the email matters, too. This is why 51% of B2B marketers prioritize visual assets creation as part of their content marketing strategy. In this week’s podcast, I’m going to help you design beautiful, engaging and great-looking emails. Spoiler alert: I’m definitely not

Revenue -- such music to an entrepreneur’s ears! After all, it feels extremely great to know that implementing a strategy results in revenue to your company, right? But did you know that revenue can be achieved directly and indirectly? You ran an ad campaign and your target customers purchased from you so you got $13,000 in sales? That’s direct revenue. You implemented an abandoned cart recovery campaign so you made an extra $5,000 in profit? That’s direct revenue. Direct revenue is the obvious result of your marketing strategies: an increase in profit. Beyond direct revenue, though, there’s another magical realm where fairies, unicorns, Doctor Strange and indirect revenue exist. And it’s good if you implement a marketing strategy that results in direct revenue. But isn’t it better if you can run a strategy that achieves both direct and indirect revenue at the same time because it’s optimized for both? Your time, investment and efforts will be the same but you get to hit two birds with one stone. In this week

Sure, knowing that customers rated discounts in email as the biggest influence on their purchase decisions counts. But this doesn’t mean you should just hand out discount coupons to everyone in your mailing list, of course. Consider your prospects who recently gave you their email addresses to sign up to your mailing list. At this stage, they’re still warm leads, right? They gave their email addresses as a way to engage with your brand, so you’re not necessarily required to give them a discount code at your first contact with them. You already got their attention. Now, the story changes if after a week or two, they still haven’t bought from you. At this stage, they’re becoming less warm: there may be less interest or less engagement with your brand. This is when sending a small discount -- $10 off their purchase or 5% off -- makes sense. This is what the Heat Map Method of Better Discounting is all about. Take every customer category (prospect, first-time customer, repeated customer, inactive customer) and pl

How do you eat an elephant? Do you open your mouth as wide as possible and hope you can eat it all at once? No, of course not. That’s crazy! You eat it one bite at a time. The same principle applies to improving customer experience on your website so you can increase your conversion rate. You don’t do a major makeover and hope your conversion rate jumps from an average of 2% to a whopping 20% overnight. That’s impossible. Instead, you tweak your website’s elements bit by bit and aim for a realistic improvement from 2% to 2.2% conversion rate. Sure, the figures may seem small when you look at it superficially. But have you considered the extra revenue you can earn just by doing small changes in your website? You can start improving your website – and your customer’s experience – by doing these small tricks I talk about in today’s podcast. Imagine walking into a brick-and-mortar store and just being bombarded by 20 different employees asking you what you want to buy, how they can help you, why you should sign u

If you’ve done everything (shipping coupons, social proof, product reviews, etc) and you still haven’t seen an increase in your abandoned cart recovery rate, it may be time for you to change your tactics so you can view different results. As my imaginary friend Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” and we don’t want this, do we? Because here’s the truth: sometimes, your website may be great, and your email sequence may be top-notch, but if the customers coming into your website aren’t a good fit with your brand’s target market profile, then you’ll still see no change in your abandoned cart recovery rates. If this is the truth, then, you shouldn’t change your website or your email marketing strategy. They’re already effective to your chosen target market. Sometimes, it’s not HOW you talk – it’s about WHO you’re talking to. Instead, you need to tweak your traffic acquisition channels so you can get customers who are more likely to final

First, identify your top 10% customers in terms of Customer Lifetime Value. Once you know who these customers are, find out the initial products they purchased with you. Look for products that they bought for their first purchase with you. Then, rank these products according to how many top customers bought it. The more it was purchased by the top 10% customers, the higher it’ll go up in your list. Will a single product top the list? Or will you identify a product bundle that most customers buy because it provides the most value for their money? You’ll only find out once you do this exercise. Knowing which of your products are loss leaders enables you to strategize a marketing strategy that works in your favor. You can push your loss leaders to a prospect who’s recently signed up for your mailing list. After all, you may just break even on your loss leader’s sale, but theoretically, this first-time customer will also make repeated purchases over time, based on the purchase history of your top spenders. There’

Don’t get me wrong here: I get it. Sometimes when we’re given access to our prospect’s emails, we can’t help but think that people are already overloaded, so when they open our email, we need to put everything there so they can get as much information as possible, don’t you think? After all, more than 59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI. And knowing that around 76% of subscribers make purchases from email marketing makes you feel pressured to say everything you want to say in a single email so you can convince them to buy from you, right? The problem with this approach, though, is that everything’s too cluttered and unfocused. Your reader will have a hard time following the content’s flow and eventually lose interest in what you’re saying. Here’s how you can use the “one action rule”: before writing your email, figure out the one action you want your reader to do from this email and work towards this by providing relevant content that helps you convince your readers to fulfill this goal.

1. Asking website visitors to “spin a wheel” You get to spin a wheel. I get to spin a wheel. We all get a chance to spin a wheel! Come on, we all know how these things work, right? After all, when you get to see this “spin a wheel!” offer pop up every other day when you’re visiting different websites, it becomes a bit meh. Personally, too, I just don’t think that profitable and sustainable Ecommerce brands are built on short-term trends like this that deters from customer experience. 2. Marking all the products in your catalogue as “on sale” If you went to a brick-and-mortar store and saw that every product was marked down without any mention of a special holiday or anniversary sale, you’d be pretty skeptical, wouldn’t you? As a customer, you’d be wondering if you’re really getting a discount or if the company’s just inflating the products’ worth and selling them to you at their original price… Why? Let’s be real here: would a sustainable company actually put all their products on unlimited sale just because

1. Provide product recommendations Product recommendations generate 33% higher average order value. You can include product recommendations in both your product pages and cart pages. In your product pages, you can include the phrase “Other customers who view this product are also interested in these products…” And for your cart pages, you can include a list of products with the title “This product you’re buying is frequently purchased together with these products…” How do you figure out which products to include in your recommendations? You can do this manually or by simply using a recommendation algorithm. 2. Upsell or cross-sell complementary products You can get an immediate 15-30% increase in revenue from upsells. If you’re not doing this tactic, you’re stealing from your company by limiting its potential to earn more revenue. If product recommendations mean you’re encouraging your customer to add popular products to their purchase, up-selling & cross-selling mean you’re encourage your customer to add

1. Double your prices. As long as you don’t lose more than 50% of sales, you’re coming out ahead, mathematically. Imagine, you get higher gross margin since you’re selling for a higher price. Also, you’re selling enough products that doubling their prices increases your revenue without necessarily increasing the volume, too. Not yet convinced why you should do this? Customers usually associate higher price = more value for their money. Just check out how Apple prices their products: according to a recent study, it costs Apple $247.51 to create an iPhone, yet they sell it for over $1,000. Higher revenue and less volume of transactions translates to less overhead expenses. You get to enjoy the benefits of increased profit with decreased costs - how sweet is this? Doing this enables you to get that extra 1% or 5% that’ll help you increase your bottom line profit. 2. Increase your prices by 10% Compare your conversion and profit every time you change your pricing. For example, increasing your prices by 10% this F

“The tipping point” is a term coined by Malcolm Gladwell which means that this is the critical moment when an event, trend, idea or product ceases to be marginal and becomes massive instead. You can check out this helpful summary of Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” book to learn more about it. Basically, the tipping point is when you or your business crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. It’s the moment when your idea, business or brand becomes viral because it’s spread by “connectors”, “salesmen” and “mavens” and simply because your brand is memorable enough to encourage people to take action. Surely, you’d want your business to reach the tipping point, don’t you? However, simply learning about the tipping point isn’t enough. You need to understand why certain people act a certain way and respond to certain brands, too. Seth Godin exemplifies it best on his book This is Marketing when he says: “For most of us, from the first day we are able to remember until the last day we breathe, our

So I can teach you all about automation in email marketing… But I can’t teach your brand to be your brand. It’s the artist that makes the artist. It’s who your brand is that makes your brand stand out from the crowd. And this is also exactly why you need to learn about your customers first before you automate. You can use the best software, you can hire the best copywriters and you can even test for the best subject line. But if you don’t understand your customers fully, you’ll always be one step behind because you’re not directly addressing their concerns, their fears, or their needs. Let’s talk about how this applies to abandoned cart recovery. I had a conversation with an ecommerce brand that had “flat” recovery rates for abandoned carts. Their first email sequence was a simple “Hey, you abandoned this cart…” And then their second & third emails offered free shipping to encourage the customer to finalize their purchase. Guess which email had the best conversion rate? The first email converted the best

Assuming most of you have answered d, which talks about building mutually beneficial relationships with your customers and increasing their CLV over time through up-selling and cross-selling, you’ve nearly hit the nail on the head. After all, it costs 5x as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one, remember? Additionally, selling to an existing customer has a success rate of 60%-70%, whereas it’s only 5%-20% when you’re selling to a new one. Now, let’s be real here: you already know about the concept of maximizing CLV, right? Maybe you’ve even memorized some of the statistics I’ve mentioned above. In fact, this was the topic of the ebook that I wrote for Conversio — 4 years ago! — and the tactics are still relevant today. To successfully scale your business over time, you need to maximize CLV. And to maximize CLV, you need to upsell and cross-sell to your existing customer. Yes, you can maximize CLV if your first-time customer becomes a regular, repeat customer. But did you know that you ca

Identify your most engaged customers. Customers who are fully engaged represent a 23% share of profitability, revenue, and relationship growth compared to the average customer. Additionally, your most engaged customers spend more. For example, in the consumer electronics industry, engaged customers spend $373 per shopping trip, while actively disengaged customers spend $289. You can find out who they are by including top-of-mind customers. Or you can check your past product reviews and look for the top twenty customers who gave in-depth, comprehensive and helpful product reviews that discussed product improvement. These people are the key to helping you with your product development. Interact with your most engaged customers during the product ideation and prototyping phase. Let them join the conversation. Ask for their initial feedback on your ideas. Show them sketches. Tell them the product’s benefits and ask if these will be helpful to them. Show them product packaging ideas. Heck, ask for their thought