Gift biz unwrapped episode three hundred and fifty nine one and build a business on the back of it. Attention gifters bakers, crafters, and makers pursuing your dream can be fun. Whether you have an established business or looking to start one. Now you are in the right place. This is gift to biz unwrapped, helping you turn your skill into a flourishing business. Join us for an episode, packed full of invaluable guidance, resources, and the support you need to grow. Your gift biz.
Here is your host gift biz gal Sue moon Heights. Hi there. It's Sue. Thanks for joining me here today. If you're listening to this right as it's gone live. So today being Saturday, February 26th, tonight is the night that maker's MBA closes for this next
class. I'm actually out in Colorado spending time with the family this weekend, but I am accessible if you have any last minute questions on the program and whether it's right for you, probably the best way to reach out to me right now is by email sue@sumoheight.com. Leave a message if I don't answer. And I promise to get back to you right away, as always wondering about maker's MBA for next time, then you can get on the wait list over at gift biz, unwrapped.com forward slash M M B a waitlist.
And then I'll let you know when the course opens for enrollment. Again, today's conversation is about the headquarters of your business, especially if you don't have a brick and mortar shop, but even so I say, this is your home base, the Cod off of which everything else for your business connects and expands. It wasn't like this in years past, but now an online presence is essential and make no mistake about it. Your own website is what you want to be striving for.
It's great to have a shop on Etsy or sell through Amazon, but long-term you want your own self controlled site for the most stable business structure. My guest today is a Shopify expert.
So you're going to hear a lot about that platform, my preferred one, by the way, but don't click out if you've got a site somewhere else, because we're talking in depth about websites overall, including the most important first question to ask before you even go one step further Today, let's talk with chase climber chases. The co-founder at electric eye, where he and his team create Shopify powered sales machines from strategic design development and marketing decisions.
He's also the host of honest, e-commerce a weekly podcast that provides online store owners with honest, actionable advice to increase their sales and grow their business. Chase. Welcome to the gift is unwrapped podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm excited. I am really looking forward to this conversation too. I was telling you earlier, I am a huge Shopify fan and you're connected intimately with that platform.
So that's going to be a good conversation, plus just e-commerce overall, regardless of what platform you're on. So looking forward to that, but before we get started, I have a question for you that I ask everybody. And that is to have you describe yourself as a motivational candle. When, if there was something that really would resonate with you in terms of a color and quote that turned into a candle, what would that look like for you? Ooh, a motivational candle.
So as far as color goes, I would go with like a light blue ish for two reasons, one, it would match my eyes and my mom would be excited about that. But two, I would say that it kind of goes with the smell that I'm going after, which would be like a sea breeze or a Bahama breeze type oceany smell and ocean, and the beautiful sky that's blue as well. So there's all that. And then the motivational quote would be, imagine yourself here, something like that.
Honestly, one of my life goals is to buy a house on the water and that's kind of why I work so hard and try to help other entrepreneurs is to try to get there. I literally have a mini painting on my desk. I'm looking at it right now. It's off to the right of me, which is an island up in I'm from Columbus, Ohio, and lake. Erie's above us. And there's an island there called put-in bay. And my family friends have a lake house up there and it's just like inspiration to kind of work harder.
I love that. And I really liked the idea also that we're not just in our business to make money, have more followers sell all of our product. There's another reason we're there, right? Like something else, that's lifestyle enhancing. And this is your vision to have a place that where you can imagine yourself, the island or on the water, whatever. Absolutely.
I think that's really important because I don't know about you chase, but when times get tough, it can't just be all about the numbers and getting more sales. There has to be another reason why you're dedicating your life to whatever your business is. I am pretty sure at this point, I could maybe, I don't know. I could probably go make money if I sold out like worked for a bigger company and not to toot my own horn, I'm pretty smart when it comes to e-commerce.
So I'm sure that someone would want to hire me if I just wanted to clock out and not do it, but that's not me. I love entrepreneurship. I've got an amazing team that were supporting me and my partner have a bunch of families that depend on us. So, you know, I'm not giving up on this. This thing's awesome. Wonderful, perfect. And I can't wait to tap into all of that genius. Give us a little background of how you decided e-commerce was the place where you want it to be. You know what?
I would probably give all that credit to my business partner. So many moons ago, I was in a band and traveling the country. I didn't pay the bills at all, but I saw a lot of cool stuff. And the whole time I was doing that, I was like freelancing. And just learning a little bit of this, a little bit of that things that I could do from the road remotely, which kind of is funny because I still do everything remotely these days.
But anyways, as I was doing that, I actually met my business partner, him and I designed the album artwork for my band together. And that's like how we first met 12, 13 years ago. And through that friendship was born. And then when he left his company that he was working at, he was like the third hire at a pretty notable direct to consumer like vintage apparel brand out of Columbus, Ohio here. And he had a lot of experience in e-commerce and in kind of design and a little bit of Shopify stuff.
So when he left there, he was like freelancing and making every mistake in the world. I was just trying to help him out originally just because it was like, oh, I've made all these mistakes before. Cause I've been doing this since, before I was 18. Like, don't do this. This is how to position yourself this way and all this stuff. And kind of just threw me trying to teach him the entrepreneurship ropes and we're tag teaming, these Shopify projects together.
He was kind of doing a little bit of the design dev stuff. And I was coming in with the marketing and really kind of struck a chord there. We got a bunch of clients really fast and we realized that, you know, we were onto something. And next thing we know, we kind of had an agency as far as getting into e-commerce specifically. I'd give a lot of that to my partner, Sean, but I'd been in digital marketing and kind of like strategy and paid ads for the last 10 years.
See about Shopify specifically that made it your platform of expertise. Yeah, that's a great question. So when we got started, we kind of always knew we wanted to do e-commerce, which is funny. Cause I was kind of scared of e-commerce before. Like, cause it was, people are allowing me to make improvements to their website. What if my improvement I make is wrong or what if I ruin their website? And then they lose all their sales and their livelihoods over.
Those were things terrors that I had in my mind. And then we started to use Shopify and I was like, wait, you can't break. This just is so cool. Like all the hard things are already taken care of by Shopify because it's a hosted solution. Why don't you get the payment providers set up and you're good to go. It's pretty hard to break this thing. So it gave me a little more faith in kind of the strategies that we had and what we wanted to do for our clients.
So technology wise, that was cool because it gave us the confidence as young entrepreneurs. So like really tackle this platform. But outside of that, they are honestly the best ecosystem to exist in from like a partner's perspective. I've got mentors and other agencies that I'm friends with in the community.
And then there are people at Shopify that have championed us since, before we even started the agency, like giving us advice, introducing us to people that needed help doing beta programs with it was just something I'd never felt before. Historically, I kind of had some experience in the WordPress world and it was just the responses I was getting from people at Shopify and the stuff that was happening in the ecosystem.
And the partnerships was just like on a whole other level than what I had experienced from like WordPress. So I was like, this is pretty cool. Let's try this. And then it got to a point where the majority of our clients were on Shopify within that first year. And we were just like, why even build out processes and systems for another platform when this one is clearly a winner. I totally agree with you. And I am a huge Shopify fan as well.
My other business, the ribbon print company is a Shopify site. Gift is unwrapped as a WordPress site. So I can speak from both sides, but I would always recommend to our audience here to go with Shopify. Clearly the platform is choice for a product-based business, hands down without a question. And it sounds like you really found community there and then liked what you were seeing with everybody, the support and just the platform overall.
Yeah. And honestly, when we started the business and like niche down into Shopify, it was not the Shopify of today. It was a little over six years ago, they hadn't even gone public yet. They didn't even have their marketing team doing brand awareness marketing yet. Right now you see their ads everywhere. But back then it was nothing.
It was scrappy the team probably 10 X over there at Shopify between when we started and now maybe even more, the growth that they experienced was just like a happy coincidence with us. Kind of like hitching our wagon to them. We were just like, well, we like this. We're going to do this one. And then it exploded Timing was everything for you.
Chase. That sounds amazing. It just worked out beautifully for someone who isn't sure that they'd like the platform they're on right now or knows about Shopify doesn't really understand what the differences are or how you would get started. I don't want this to be a whole conversation just about Shopify. I really want to talk about e-commerce specifically also, but I feel like it would be who've everybody to understand the platform a little bit better.
So if someone was thinking of converting, just give a little spiel about Shopify for us. I would say if you, like you said, if you're selling a product based business, if you're selling an actual product physical, good, maybe you can get into digital too, if you want, but let's just stick with those. If you're selling a physical good, there's like no other platform out there that's going to do it better than Shopify.
It takes a lot of the annoyance of a custom site out of your, kind of what you need to deal with. But also you can do anything you want on Shopify. It's fully customizable. If you can build it, we can dream it. Like don't worry about that. It takes some of the more technical nerdy aspects of it off your plate, which is actually a benefit, but not a detriment.
And I think that I literally just interviewed someone yesterday on my podcast and he said that one of their biggest mistakes starting their business was building a custom website when they first launched. And then they turned around and they had wasted money on it because they just turned around and set up a Shopify instead and kind of leaned more into best practices instead of trying to be a wild card, which is really saying something it's easier. Yeah. It sure it definitely is.
I mean, and you can have someone else build your site on Shopify too. Like if you decided that that wasn't something that you wanted to focus your time and intention on, but I'll tell you chase. So for the ribbon print company, I think we changed over. We did exactly what you said. And I don't know if it was a mistake because I didn't know about Shopify before, but I'm going to say, do you know when Shopify started? I think they are coming up on 10 years.
Maybe. I want to say like we changed our website eight or even almost 10 years ago, like right in the middle. That was like a Shopify like 0.01. It's definitely not the monster. It is now. It is so fully robust these days. Well, for sure, because we're obviously still in there making changes, adjusting things, doing different things, adding other apps, all of that. But what I was going to say is, so there must have been up for a couple years, so let's say eight years ago we switched over.
I don't even remember for sure what year, but we saw an increase in sales almost right away. And I don't know if it's because of the reputation of the platform or what I went from a WordPress custom design site hosted by a well-known hosted and company. So it wasn't just like one of those private hosting groups that used to be around if they even are anymore, because there's so many options, but immediately we saw an increase in sales.
I would guess little bit of an educated guess here is that happened to a lot of our clients that switched over from legacy platforms to Shopify. And the two things that we noticed is a, the Shopify sites were faster and the faster your website is, the higher conversion rate is that's a fact, that's not an opinion. You can Google that there has been millions of studies on
that. But the other thing is this was Shopify his claim to fame for the longest time, which was that they had split, tested that checkout flow to the millionth degree. And it was like the most highly optimized checkout experience on the market. And people were familiar with it and comfortable with it and it would kind of help lead to higher conversions because it was like a trusted checkout flow.
These days you can get a little more custom with the checkout and they have opened it up a little bit more. And I don't think they're harping on it in their marketing as much as they used to. But those two things definitely I think, were some of the advantages to see that increase in sales kind of right off the rip. Got it. Okay. All right.
So we can get off the Shopify bandwagon, but you and I could sit on this point forever because I'm totally an advocate and always recommend this platform Job to talk about Shopify and talk about e-commerce. I do this every day. All right. But so there's always the opportunity.
You can always change over if you're not happy with where you are right now, but let's talk now about e-commerce overall, apart from the platform, what would you say is the biggest challenge people are having when it comes to econ? Oh yeah. This one's easy. It's finding product market fit. That's the hardest thing in the world. I think that some people have, it's a misunderstanding that if I build a website and I put a product on it, I have a business and that's not true.
You have a business when that product is selling and paying your bills. There's a big Delta between those two kind of statements. Finding product market fit is extremely hard. I honestly say consultant or freelancer or agency for that matter can help you find product market fit. And for those that don't know a product market fit is it's oddly hard to define, but it's basically like, does the market want to buy your product? Is your product solving a problem?
And that your market people are actually buying that product. And it's one of those things it's kind of hard to like, know if someone has it or not, but founders kind of figure it out. And they're like, yeah, we have it now. But it's basically like when you're organically getting sales and you're actually seeing conversions from trying to sell your product. But that whole challenge is kind of like an uphill battle. And a lot of founders don't realize how much work it
is. And if you want to be an entrepreneur and you want to build a business, but you just want to hand somebody a fist full of money and say, make me a business. That's never going to work out. Right. And I talk about this a lot in the handmade product industry already, I call it validating your product. So we'll go out. I suggest people like before you even name your company almost is go out to craft shows, get interaction from the community, get feedback from them.
See what products that you are making. If that's your area, what they're gravitating to and what they're buying to see that there's actually people who want to not just say your products beautiful, but actually exchange money to get your product. That's the key right there. You got to get paid just because your friends think it's a good idea or your significant other, if a stranger isn't willing to give you money for it. I don't think he validated it yet.
Exactly. A hundred percent. And I agree with you also, and I see this, not just in products, but in, well, I'm going to say virtual products, but that doesn't as much apply here. I don't know that I want to go there, but when you click into the right thing, you see automatic results and you're not having to like push it out, push it out, push it out and like try to convince people that it's valuable when it's the right fit. That just starts to flow your way easily.
It makes everything easier when your product resignates with your audience. Right. All right. So let's say someone who's been out to shows, sticking with what my audience can relate to the best they have validated the product. They go out to craft shows and they create products and people are buying them at shows, but they recognize that they need an online presence as well.
And this wasn't even going to be my question, but I think I have a new question for women, but are we've flown with this conversation. Why would an e-commerce presence in this situation be important for Absolutely. I mean, the, your local market is only so big and the world is huge. And just the market share that you could get from putting a product that has some kind of validation online is massive.
And I would actually say that another thing you could do, maybe your talent is smaller or you kind of live a little bit further away from people, whatever you can kind of do almost like a virtual ask kind of craft show, which is like, I've seen people stand up like dummy products on marketplaces, such as like Etsy or eBay or Amazon. And they validate it that way.
And that'd be a great way to get feedback and to kind of iterate upon your product at the beginning, but also, you know, there's nothing wrong with continuing on those channels. There's pros and cons to marketplaces over like an owned website, like a Shopify. If it allows you to get products out the door faster and you kind of hit those economies of scale and you can get cheaper resources to produce your sometimes it's worthwhile.
Absolutely. First of all, I would call your own hosted website, your home base. That's the headquarters really of all your business online, but having an Etsy shop as you're talking about has a whole different audience. Perhaps there'll be some overlap, but a different audience than those people who you're going to attract and bring to your website. So it's kind of like you sell your product direct to consumer, and then you also have your product in a local boutique to sell.
It's just different avenues where you can intercept with a potential customer who could then buy your product. Yeah. And if every time you order all your products, like you can produce a hundred units on your own website. It takes you forever to move through those hundred units. Whereas you could like benefit from the traffic that these marketplaces get and move through those faster and reorder. And that's just, all that's doing is growing your brand exponentially faster.
Absolutely. And selling on Amazon is a different strategy than selling on Etsy, which is a different strategy than selling on your own hosted website. Absolutely. All totally different. And we've gone into some of that detail in some of the other podcasts episodes here. Okay. So that's the importance of e-commerce now some people, and I'm speaking from experience with my audience, understand all of this. They go through all the effort of getting their website up. It's working, it's loading fast.
They have a checkout, they have their about page. Some of these elements that are really important for them to have, but they're not getting any sales nothing's coming because they think like what you were talking about before, if I just build it and put a website up, people are going to come to my site and they're going to buy from me. It doesn't work like that. It doesn't does it. No. My question to those people would be like, cool. Did you tell anybody about it?
Right. Well, but it's online. So aren't people just going to find it because now I have an online presence. That is something that is a hard pill to swallow. Especially if they're seeing success on a marketplace, they're like, shouldn't it just be the same thing. And shouldn't, I get a better margin. It's like, well, you know, the reason that you're seeing those sales on a marketplace is because the marketplace has worked so hard to acquire all those
customers. And by the way, those aren't your customers. Those are the marketplaces customers. You're just a vendor and you're selling your wares on their, in their marketplace while acquiring a customer is expensive. And it's hard to do at the beginning. But I asked this question a lot on my podcast. It's like, Hey, how did you get your first couple of customers? Like, what were you doing? Like what was your go to market strategy? And a lot of the answers are kind of the same.
And they were a little bit of work. They were like, do the things that don't scale. They were like, we were going to marketplaces like in-person we were going to fairs and et cetera. I was hanging out in mommy forums and talking about my new baby products. We were in Facebook groups and like just communicating with potential customers and learning how to talk about the value proposition of their product and the features and benefits and the way that resonated with our audience.
And just really getting the word out there in a more organic fashion at the beginning five years ago, seven years ago, maybe you could possibly build a business on the back of paid ads, but you can't do that. Now, if your plan to grow your business is I'm going to dump a lot of money into Facebook or Google or Tik TOK, et cetera. You're going to go bankrupt. That's not a growth strategy to like, if you're trying to acquire your first customers that way and then grow from it.
Like it's not a sustainable strategy. Well, and I'm going to suggest that most people aren't even looking at ads, they're just feeling like it should be up. And so then they're just going and posting on social. And we know the organic reach with social these days. It's nil. I mean like if, okay, you have a website with no traffic and then you have a new Instagram account with four followers, do you can do the math,
right? You need to get the word out about your product, get it in front of more people in a way that's a little more scalable, paid ads is one way. But I think that, especially when you're launching a business and I'm assuming a lot of your listeners might be a bit more scrappy, the ways to do that would be like influencer is still an option. These days do some product sampling with people that have audiences that you think are made up of people that are potentially your customers.
And then kind of some of those non-scale things I just talked about, like the Facebook groups and going to actual craft fairs, et cetera, there's a million strategies out there. And honestly it can be overwhelming. And I really like to tell people that when they're first getting started is just like pick one and build a business on the back of it. And then once you kind of see that traction and things are working, then explore some other avenues for marketing.
So a you don't have all your eggs in one basket and be certain avenues are better for certain steps of the funnel. Absolutely. A hundred percent agree with you there. And so here's the thing. And I'm talking to everyone who's listening right now is I think so many times building a website looks like, and feels like such a big project. But once that website up and running, that was like, step one. Now you have that home base for yourself.
Now you've got to tell everybody about it and you merge them together. So if you're at a craft show, make sure people know about the website. So you can go and you can reorder from the website or there's different sense of the candles that you sell on the website. You've only brought a portion of them to the show, things like that. So that's where I start to talk about the website is your home base or your headquarters. And so you want to drive everybody there at some point.
Yeah. And that's almost a strategy that's similar to how you can utilize the marketplaces to drive traffic to your website. I see that people at a certain point, they'll pivot their products and have a lot more exclusive product on their home base, as you would say, versus their marketplaces. So maybe like on Amazon, you're only selling like a bundle. That's bigger because that makes more sense for your margins there or on Etsy. It's a certain color way.
But then like all the other ones live on your website to make it unique and to try to drive that traffic to a different channel. That's a really good point. And I could see for people who have an exclusive line, maybe you have a more generic line. You have a lot of people working in helping you with that line, but there's a specific line that you are making yourself and it's maybe even branded a little bit differently, but it's still under your umbrella of your business.
Like that only sits on your website. So you will drive people over for a purpose. It's not a repeat of what you have and everywhere else, right? Jace. Exactly. Got it. Okay. Because you have to have a reason. If someone's can see everything on Etsy, what's the point of going to your website? And also some people, not, some people, all people are lazy and they're going to buy things the way that is the path of least resistance.
And if they're a native Etsy shopper or an Amazon shopper, they're just going to kind of check out that way. But if your goal is to increase your sales on your home base, you need to make a reason for people to go over there, right? And you want to be able to talk to them too.
So I see a lot of times, especially with product based businesses, they'll give a first time customer discount or they'll enter people into a sweepstakes or all these different types of things in exchange for their email so that they can continue a relationship with them versus just hoping they land. Once again, in the Etsy store, Just getting an email or a phone number in general is like valuable to a business, especially at scale.
And people even have metrics against it, like costs for acquisition. They might even just be talking about like getting new email signups, and some people can do the math to see what an email is worth to their business and see if that is like a profit generating activity from a paid perspective. But to your point. Yeah. And that's why having your own home base and having your own website is so important is once you get those things, like some people aren't ready to buy just yet.
Basically it's like thinking about this. If you had a boutique, they walked in your door, they like were looking at things for quite a bit. And then you just watch them walk out the door. And you're like, oh, I could've got that. Person's email and told them more about our products and try to kind of walk them down the funnel. Like now they know about us. Like now let's get them to like us and talk about the benefits of our products and the features of our products.
Now let's get them to trust us by sending them some social proof and some reviews. And you can do all of that through email marketing. But you know, if you just let people kind of come to your website and leave, and you're not getting their email or their phone number, you're leaving money on the table. Absolutely. And I think it's a good point that you bring up too, is that not everybody is in the market for your product at the time you intercept with them.
And what happens if someone saw your product really, really like it, like in their mind, they're like, yeah, but I don't have any purpose for it. I don't need it yet. And then a month later, one of their girlfriends has a birthday and all of a sudden they're like, what was that company? Again? This would be the best gift. And they have no clue how to get to you.
Yeah. But if you would have spent the time to write like a beautiful, welcome series, and you got that person onto your email list, because you had like an incentivized kind of email popup. Now they probably have gotten two or three emails from you. And they've learned about like the cool wood that your products made out of and like the cool technique that you use to create it. And they're like super jazzed about it. And now they have a reason to buy. Yep. Oh great.
I would even say an email is more important than follow us on Facebook. First thing you want is the email. Yeah. I would a hundred percent say that. I think that email and the phone number are basically a kind of money. I would say social followers are definitely a secondary. Okay. So you've said this now twice. So I have to talk about it. Chase. I'm going to challenge you only because I know my listeners are thinking the same thing. Okay. You keep talking about this telephone number.
I I'm talking to as if I'm a listener. Now I don't want to start spamming people by sending them text messages. What would you say to me about that? Stay tuned to hear Chase's answer to my question about text messages. We'll get to that right after a quick break to hear from our sponsor. Yes. It's possible. Increase your sales without adding a single customer.
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You want to market to your customer and the way that they want to hear from you. And I guarantee that some of your customers do want to get those text messages and they do want to hear from you that way, because they actually like your brand more than the 10,000 unread emails they have in their email inbox. And that is their preferred way of communication. So they would actually enjoy to hear from you that way. Some people even say the same thing about email marketing.
They're like, I can't send more emails. People don't want to hear from us. And I'm like, Sue, what's your unsubscribe rate? Well, it's truly very low. And I'm like, yeah, because you're not sending any emails, it's marketing people and you need to get the word out there and your customers will tell you when you're doing it too much to the point though, of like email versus SMS, definitely send less texts than you're sending emails, but it's a huge channel.
Okay. Perfect. Okay. So you don't even know that all your emails are actually been delivered to the inbox unless you're getting responses from people, unless they're your customer. So just like social media, but I think more in your control is the deliverability of email. But now let's talk. You were starting to get into this. So I have some questions for you about it, chase. Okay. So you get the email and you get the phone number from somebody. Okay? Cause we're trusting you chase.
We believe what you're saying, and we want to get both of these now, do we send the same messages to both places? Do we do phone numbers more than emails? How would you advise someone to work with both those two ways of communicating with customers? Short answer is no, you should be very strategic about what you're saying. In what channel we find that with SMS it's things that are a little more urgent. So like a flash sale or a product drop where email is a little more casual.
And the cadence on email can be a lot higher because people hit so many emails. You could have a customer that literally gets every single email that you send, but someone else is probably sending them more email and they don't even notice like how frequently your kind of reaching out to them and saying things in their inbox. But with text messages, it is a little more personal and it's a little more noticeable. So you'd probably want to keep the frequency a little bit lower on the SMS.
And I think I sidestepped your question. So I want to make sure I answer it. No, I like that you say that the SMS is more urgent. So it's special and SMS, I feel is even a subset group of the emails. It's the people who really, really want to hear from you. You want to have respect for those people and send things that are only really valuable. And I think they're almost direct to sales things.
Really. Yeah. It's very direct response, but here's another thing that I think people need to realize it's not email or SMS. It's email and SMS. Your campaign is your campaign about your product release.
But then you are like, okay, we're going to say this on SMS at this time, we're going to say this on email at this time, you'll write the strategy and then drop in the channels and the touch points and what you want to say kind of after that, it isn't like, well, we're only going to release this on SM while you could do that, but that's a more advanced strategy, but it's like, they work together. You could even send the things to the same people, but maybe at different times.
So it's maybe like the product announcement is through email and then like, oh, the sale ends. You're going to say that through SMS. Cause that's a little more urgent. Okay. So really what you're saying is you need a strategy. You need to put yourself in the recipient's shoes. If they've given you both their email and their phone number, some people won't. Let me tell you this. It's mind boggling. The amount of businesses that have just like this plethora of user data.
And they just don't use it because there's no strategy behind it. It's like you're sitting on money. You could be printing money. Your sales could go through the roof. It's like, just cause you're collecting the stuff you got to send the emails. You gotta send the texts. You gotta be saying something. You gotta have a communication. You gotta talk For sure. When you say customer data, what are you talking about? The contact information, emails, Email, SMS, a little more advanced.
You have people pixeled in whatever kind of ad platform that you're using. People set everything up. And then they kind of just like, well, we don't use that channel or they have these hesitations to talk to people. That's I think another thing is just in the email, it doesn't have to be perfect. Like sending the email is better than not every time. All right. So email phone numbers, you need a strategy. It might be a similar message.
It's also the content of the message because email can be a lot longer than a text message is going to Be. Yeah, you definitely want the text to be to the point and easy to understand. And that goes almost to your offers to make sure that your sales are straightforward and like easy to comprehend. And they explain to somebody like, imagine that your customer is drunk and in a hurry is just like, you need to be able to explain to them what your sale is and they need to be able to get it
quickly. Right. And do you have a platform that you use for delivering your text messages? We are Klaviyo gold partners, or even maybe higher than that, where you, we love Klaviyo. Okay. I am not a Klayvio user. Will you tell everybody what Klaviyo's Cool? I would say the 800 pound gorilla is MailChimp from like a email perspective. And then from SMS, there's a few other contenders out there, but the easiest way to describe is that MailChimp is a Toyota Corolla and Klayvio is a Ferrari Enzo.
And which one would you rather drive if you want to win the race? Okay. But what if there is somebody who is using MailChimp, doesn't want to leave it because at least they're getting those emails out to your point earlier. Is there another text delivery system that you can use that is in conjunction with email or a standalone? It doesn't have to be the same one. We're just kind of fans of the simplicity for our clients, but some of our clients do have competing platforms.
It is not competition, but they have different platforms to serve different purposes. Postscript is another great SMS platform, especially for Shopify stores. And there's a few other alternatives out there, but those two are the best. But the cool thing about Klaviyo versus MailChimp is Klayvio was tailor made for e-commerce. So not only is it like a campaign, email sending engine or whatever you want to call it, it also has the automation arm of it. And automations are crucial in e-commerce.
So you can send your customer tailored messages specific to their unique customer journey. So like an easy example is abandoned cart, but like a more advanced example would be like, you can send someone a gift card on their birthday, or you can say, Hey, like a replenishment email will be like, you bought this product six months ago. It's probably empty. Do you want another one? And the power of those automations is they're just always happening in the background.
And that message is so much more targeted to the customer than a kind of like campaign, which is a little more, not like a shotgun approach, but it's a little more blasty of like, everyone's getting the same message, Right? You can really, really super segment your list is what you're saying down to one, if it's your birthday. Yeah. You can do some really cool stuff with the segmentation and a platform like that.
Yeah. I mean, even think of this is the anniversary of the first time I was able to send you my product First purchase anniversary. Yep. And you do like a first purchase. Thank you. You do a second purchase. Thank you. You can do like a VIP type series. If they buy X amount of dollars of your product. If you can tie it to a binary attribute, you can probably send an automation. Yeah. All right.
Well it sounds Klaviyo is a whole separate podcast topic in terms of how you do it, how you get into it. All of that. It is cool. Let's Dive a little bit more into your website and just setting up and having an e-commerce presence. And I want to kind of back it up for people so that they can kind of in their mind be checking off the list, what they have now versus what is optimal. Let's talk about what your site should consist of. Like what types of pages should we have? Things like that.
Absolutely. Well, the cool thing about Shopify is it kind of, doesn't allow you to build a website that doesn't have the pages you need. So that again, it's just making it easier for you. But the website in general is I get to think about the kind of the purchase flow. So you're gonna obviously have a homepage and then you're going to have a collection page. And this is where it gets a little bit interesting per kind of like product line or brand, et cetera.
It's like, do you have a high SKU count store with like multiple things? Or do you have a low skew count store? And maybe you can actually just circumvent a collection page as you can just go right to a product page. Cause you only sell one thing. And then the next step of the funnel is obviously the product page from there. You're getting to the cart and then you're checking out,
right? So that's like your typical customer journey, few things within that journey that are going to help with your conversion rate is people are curious, who's making these products. So you definitely want an about page that tells your story and why you're unique and the cool stuff about you. And then another thing is like on that product page and kind of sometimes the checkout page is now they're curious about your shipping and return policy.
So it should definitely have a page built out for that. And then from a customer journey perspective, that's like brass tacks, the minimum that you need to kind of get started and get going. But then there's all sorts of other stuff that you can start building out. You're selling a food product. That's in a certain category. You can build out a bunch of pages about recipes on how to use your product. And all those are doing is trying to help sell your
product. But honestly, on Shopify, once you kind of build it out, it's going to stand up the pages that you need. And then you kind of need that journey to make sense. But to that journey in to that point, I see a lot of people putting a lot more stuff in their top line navigation than they really need to. Everything is an important, the only things that are important are things that are gonna make you money.
So be very cognizant on like what is going to end up in that top line navigation on your website and then to a store that has a high skew count where filtering and sorting would matter. You absolutely need to build that into your site the right way. If your site doesn't allow me to get to the product that I need as fast as I want to I'm on your site and I want the size large black t-shirt and I can't drill down into that. I'm going to go to an experience. I'm going to go a website.
It allows me to get to what I want faster, Which also falls in line with the loading of the site. Yeah, I definitely just looked over performance, but like performance is crucial. That's something that I see a lot of people having issues with on Shopify is because they are very good at promoting the Shopify app ecosystem, but something that isn't really as widely known. And I'm try to tell everybody is every time you install an app on your Shopify store, it's installing code into your theme.
It's also installing another JavaScript call, which means it's loading an external file as well. And when you press on install, that app loses the ability to interact with your store and your theme. So that code's still there. Now, if you repeat that a dozen times, you've slowed your website down, like probably not noticeably, but like really have you slowed it down.
So when you're testing apps, there's like a way to do it the right way in a way to do the wrong way, which the wrong ways with 99% of people do, because they don't realize what this does. And so what happens is people kind of just end up with this code base that's full of spaghetti and depending on the size of your business and kind of your sales and whatnot, there are ways to fix it.
But nine times out of 10, it's probably like start over on a new theme and just like rebuild what you have, because that's just going to be infinitely faster than like pulling the string on a sweater. I E your code base. And like it just unraveling to a project that no one wants to deal with. That's really interesting that the code stays There. Yeah. They don't really tell anybody about that, but I'm out here saying it.
And I got my friends in the industry saying it too and telling everybody, but that's a really common thing. They're like, my website's slow. And I'm like, how long have you had this theme? They're like three years. And I was like, okay, well a, there are more modern technologies to build Shopify themes now. So that is a check. And they're like, this is a detriment. This is probably why it's slow. And it's like, let me check out your apps. And they've got 60 apps installed.
I'm like, well, that's way too many to begin with. And I'm like, if I see that, I know you've tested another 60, probably I was like, your code base probably looks like Swiss cheese and it won't make any sense. And we won't be able to make any sense from it to like, make any improvements. We might tell you that you probably need a new theme. So explain what a theme is for people who are totally unfamiliar. Cool. So basically Shopify is the backend of your e-commerce business.
It's basically runs all the e-commerce functionality of your store. And then the theme is basically the front end of your store. And it's the look and feel and the functionality it's like the website in most people's eyes, but the design, the look, the feel kind of like what it looks on mobile versus desktop, all that lives in your theme. And if you keep injecting a bunch of code into your theme, it's going to be slow, especially on mobile. That's something to kind of keep in mind.
We're starting a Shopify. Let's say you're starting from scratch and you're building a Shopify account. The very first thing you'll do is select a theme. So then you see like the flow of the homepage and some things come with the theme and these themes are all third-party created, right? No, actually, so there's a few things I can say there. So one, there is like a Shopify theme store and there are free
options. And then there are paid options, but all of them are kind of like off the shelf and they're all a little bit generic and they are kind of built for the general public and nothing is super tailored to your business or your customer or your unique customer journey.
With that being said, if you're not making a million dollars a year, use something off the shelf because the performance enhancements that you'd get from going with a custom designed theme from like a reputable agency or whatever is nil kind of like sub $1 million. But if your business is doing great now you're kind of out of that startup phase, I call it zero to $1 million, probably like the startup phase.
And then like one to 10 in e-commerce is like, you know, you're scaling once you kind of turn that corner around seven figures, it's the advantages that you'd get, which are fractional increases like percentage increases from going to a more performance theme that's custom and tailor made to your customer journey and your products, et cetera. Those like relate to like thousands and tens of thousands of dollars in margin.
Perfect. I thought that each of the themes was third-party created and then approved by Shopify to be in the selection base. Some are some aren't, but if it's in the Shopify theme store, it has been through a rigorous kind of process. Anything that isn't in the Shopify theme store? No, You just don't do it. That's it? Because there's so much selection there you don't need, And there's no Shopify.
Isn't like looking at the code or looking at how it's built and like, it could be slow or it could be a lie, whatever, like just don't trust anything. That's not on the Shopify team store. Yep. Okay. We won't go down that rabbit hole. Some things are older than others. Some are less supported than others. Don't be afraid of that. Cause you can also change your theme.
You can change your theme and then any theme you can customize, if you hire a designer and developer that know what they're doing, so you can always start one place. That's the thing. I think people get too bogged down in like the design of their website before they started marketing it.
And it's like, that's not really like as big of a deal as you think, especially at the beginning again, you got to get product market fit, you got to get customer feedback, like just start selling and trust me, there'll be time later on to redesign the website. Yes, absolutely. Okay. And so tell me a little bit then about electric. I, do you help build the sites for people then or share with me the services that you provide there?
Absolutely. So most people come to us for custom designed websites. So we're doing a whole design process with them and then developing it out on our framework. That's lightening fast. It's All connected with Shopify. Yeah. We're building you a custom Shopify theme at the end of the day, if we're going through that process. Okay. But it's unique to your business and to your branding and all that stuff.
And our framework is like constantly updated to be like as nimble as it can be with the current Shopify releases and all the cool stuff that we can do there. And then the other kind of offerings that we have, people come to us for like CRO or email and SMS marketing, a lot of Klaviyo stuff. What's CRO conversion rate optimization. So what that basically means is you've got a website it's fantastic. There's always room for improvement. Your website's never done.
And so conversion rate optimization is kind of like using the scientific method to make hypotheses around. If we move this button here, we think it's going to increase conversion. And then you do an AB test and you send a bunch of traffic to it and then you get a result and there'll be a significant difference. Once you hit a certain number, it's a statistical difference. That is like, well, that one wins. But in reality, seven times out of 10, your hypothesis won't matter.
And that's just part of the game. But the one time out of 10 where it's a home run is going to change the business. So coming into it with like a testing mentality, something to do, but brands that are kind of sub a million dollars a year probably don't have the traffic of velocity of orders to do those tests. It's definitely a little more up market to do conversion rate optimization. Okay. All right. And what will we learn if we listen to the honest e-commerce podcasts?
So what I've really started to focus on these days is interviewing brands and getting their journey in their words and asking them questions about like, how did you come up with the idea? Where did you get your first couple customers? What advice would you tell your younger self was very heavily inspired by how I built this. It's kind of like how I built this for Shopify brands. Perfect. Well, I think that's definitely a show that we should be listening
to. So it's called honesty, commerce, probably everywhere. Podcasts Are everywhere that podcasts hang out. Have you put your podcast on Facebook yet? You can do that. Yeah, I have not. Yeah. You put it on your Facebook page and it's a tablet to drop down so people can just go to Facebook, click on the podcast, drop down and then get any of the episodes full. You don't load them in it automatically goes There. Look into that. Yeah. Chase. This has been incredibly informative. Thank you so much.
I really appreciate taking a look into the expertise of e-commerce overall and specifically shopping. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. Hm. What's your opinion of messaging? Chase's comments have me rethinking my position and I'd love to hear your opinion. How do you feel about messaging your customers? Do you have a system already set up?
Do you like receiving messages from businesses you deal with direct message me with your thoughts or comment on any of the social posts connected with this podcast episode? It's an interesting point to consider since messaging is being used more and more these days, I can't wait for us to dive into next Saturday's show where we talk with a business owner whose physical product is only half of the mission of her company.
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