TEA 2: The 3 Rules of Profitable Marketing - podcast episode cover

TEA 2: The 3 Rules of Profitable Marketing

Dec 13, 202135 min
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Episode description

Profit is the oxygen for your business. This is why I don’t believe in doing marketing efforts that aren’t focused on growing profits. In this episode, Josh breaks down the 3 rules of profitable marketing that, if followed, will ensure you continue to scale your business without losing money.

These are the 3 rules that we apply against the Marketing Operating System (MOS) at all times. If you haven’t yet listened to episode #1 (You Need A Marketing Operating System), then make sure you do that first!

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Transcript

Welcome to the eCommerce alley podcast, where we believe that great brands are built on passionate leadership, smart operations, and of course, powerful marketing. I am your host, Josh coffee. And I couldn't be more excited that you're, you're watching this, or you're listening to this right now, which yes, you can watch this on YouTube and you can kind of see me sitting here in our entire alley as well as see the highlights. Now, today we're gonna be talking about something.

I call the three rules of profitable marketing that if broken will bleed your business dry, let's do this. Profit is the oxygen of your business. When I first started my business, I didn't really realize how crucial um, profit was, because what would happen is I would generate profit in my business. And my first instinct was to then go and reinvest it and plow it back into my marketing efforts or plow back into other aspects of my business.

And what would happen is because marketing is an ongoing process of testing and figuring out what's working and what's not working. I started to bleed my business, dry. My profit margins started to shrink up. And then I realized that we weren't as profitable as I thought. And so today I have created a framework that allows us to continue to market both our business and our clients' businesses.

And it allows us to market to ensure that we're profitable in everything that we do because without profit, just like oxygen, we will die. Our business will die. And so I personally, our team personally does not believe in marketing if it's not focused around generating profits. And so before we get started, what I do wanna say is if you haven't listened to the very first episode of the e-commerce Ali podcast, I

recommend you go back to it. Uh, because in that episode, I talk a about something that we call the MOS, the marketing operating system. And the reason this is important is because today rules of profitable marketing that is going to be your gauge, your measuring stick against every step in the marketing operating system. So if you go listen to it, you'll learn. There are three levels to the marketing operating system.

And in each of those levels, what you're going to apply against those are the rules that I'm gonna teach you today because we wanna make sure that as we ascend through the three levels of the marketing, uh, operating system, we wanna make sure that we're profitable along the way. So let's get started with the very first rule. The very first rule is simple. If it's not trackable, you don't do it. But Josh Iowas 14 in Iowas, 15 in what? No more cookies in third part.

And it doesn't, it doesn't matter. Uh, there was a guy in 1911 by the name of David Ogilvie. He was considered the father of advertising and David Ogilvie helped companies and organizations that you probably use know and love today, whether that is Disney or Coca whole, uh, or it doesn't matter what it is he has worked, or probably worked with some of the largest companies that you love. And he helped them make

billions of dollars. And back in the day, billions of dollars was a lot more than it is today. So that's actually billions and billions of dollars that he helped them generate. And in the efforts that they did, they were still able to track without digital, without the internet. There were still things they were able to do to track the results of those efforts. And so what I see a lot of businesses and brands, and it's really common in the marketing world, uh, especially the agency world.

And this is probably one of my largest pet peeves is that at people will justify their marketing dollars in the name of brand awareness or activities that don't generate profit, but we feel good about ourselves. So we're gonna do it in the name of reach and brand awareness or whatever that might be. And so really it's kind of like a vanity piece. And so I don't believe that you should be running marketing if you're under 25 million in revenue for anything other than profit driving

activities. And even beyond that, you have to focus entirely on profit driving activities. And so it doesn't have to be purchases. And I wanna talk about this because if we're tracking the results of what we're doing and if it's not, well, we don't do it. Then the question comes, okay, well, what are we tracking? Well, you should always be running marketing campaigns with the goal of driving purchases, but sometimes, sometimes you're gonna run campaigns that are a step before that. Uh,

you might be trying to drive leads. You might be trying to grow your email list. This is really common. Uh, in Q4, we recommend building a wait list for, for example, a black Friday cyber Monday. And so you can build a wait list of people who want to get V I P exclusive early bird access to your black Friday deals before black Friday. And so you might be driving leads to that.

So purchases is not your metric leads are, but you need to be able to track the leads because if not, you're not gonna be able to know what's working and what's not working. And so what you need to do is you need to establish what that measurement of success or what that metric is that you're going to track. And you have to make sure that it's trackable. Now, when it comes to, uh, tracking from a digital standpoint, certain things are possible.

Certain things can be tricky, but the reality is even with a little bit of manual work, you can get pretty close on your tracking. It's never going to be 100%. You'll never be able to track all the marketing efforts. You do 100%, but you can get 80%, 90% tracking, uh, tracking accuracy. And in the marketing world, we call this another word is attribution. We're trying to attribute our sales, or we attribute our results to a particular marketing

outcome. And going back, if we were look back 50 years and say they didn't have digital marketing, they didn't have pixels and cookies and things like that. They were still able to track coupons. They were still able to, uh, bring flyers into buildings and people had to bring those flyers to the event to get the special deal or go, or they would have a certain phone number on a billboard or a certain number that they used for a campaign in a radio ad.

And so the reality is you can track more than you think, but I think that we just get lazy and it's a lot easier to, uh, throw up our hands and say, tracking isn't possible. And attribution is all over the place, and it's really difficult. So I'm just not going to make that a priority for me, but you need to, you need to, because without knowing what works, you're going to amplify and try to scale the wrong thing. And I'll give you, I'll give you

a real world example of this. Um, I'll give you a real world example of this. We actually had a client whose attribution within their campaigns was not set up properly. And unfortunately we didn't know this. When we started running this campaign and the attribution, the tracking was not set up properly. So first you need to be tracking. But the second thing is you have to make sure that it's tracking properly and accurately.

And we ran a three day holiday sale and we spent a little more than seven. It was almost $8,000 in ad spend just on Facebook during those three days. And our tracking, our attribution was showing us $24,000 a little more than that in sale. So it was, it was like a 3.1, 3.15 return on ad spend, which for them that's, I mean, that's great. That's on, that was on cold traffic that we were running and that's wonderful. We had really great, uh, really great three day weekend. We're like, okay,

we're happy with this. We had a three X return on ad spend, especially when we know that tracking is always a little bit less. And it under reports, uh, just from the things that have been happening in the iOS world lately. And so we were really happy with it. But as we dug deeper, we found out that the, uh, that the attribution was off in the, it, it was doubling almost doubling the conversions. There were two different pixels and there were all these different things that were happening.

And so what happened was we amplified something that we didn't want to amplify. So over those three days, the budget started, there was like a thousand dollars a day. And then we bumped it to like 2,500 and then ended it by over $3,000 a day in that third day. And so we amplified something that was not good, but if we had proper tracking and if we had made, if we had tracking and it was correct, we would've amplified better things and would've had better results.

And so just like anything in market, you take your lessons, you learn, you take the punches to the face and you move on. So you have to ha track what you do to attribute, to sales to your efforts. And then the second thing is you have to make sure that it's tracking properly because marketing is an amplification. And if you are tracking, you'll be able to amplify the right things. If you do not track your results tangibly, then you're going to amplify crap. You're gonna amplify the wrong thing.

And so that's why tracking is so important. So whenever we are looking at any form of marketing campaign, whether it's email even social or it's SEO, or it's, uh, paid advertising, whatever that is, we need to make sure that it's tracking. And we believe that if you can't

track it, you shouldn't do it. Now, if you're Coca-Cola and you're doing a hundred billion dollars a year or 50 billion a year, and you're an enormous leading brand on the planet, then sure you can have Coca-Cola signs up at baseball fields and, and teeball fields and things that that will be very difficult to track outcomes of you'll be able to do that. That's fine. But the reality is most of us are not at that point. And you should always make sure that your efforts are 100% to your greatest

ability. Trackable. Sometimes they'll fall below that. Now speak of attribution. You need to take the time to figure this out. But one thing that we've learned with attribution is that not everything is the best. There are different ways to track attribution, but your goal should be to take these resources, whether it's Google analytics, maybe take your Facebook ads, maybe take your shop off a, your, and, or glue or whatever that tools you're using.

And you want to try to get the most tangible results that you can. But one of the greatest challenges that we see with paid attribution tracking is that oftentimes after that initial click, we lose steps in the customer journey, whether they opt out of tracking or maybe their devices fall outside of that seven day attribution window, or one day attribution window, we lose tracking. That's why I recommended a tool called seme.

So se metrics allows you to see how much your marketing is really worth with lifetime value attribution across your entire funnel or your entire website in all of your campaigns. For example, let's say that you had a prospective customer click on your Facebook app, and then rather than buying, they ended up joining your email list. And then two months later, they

ended up completing a purchase. Well, because it's outside of Facebook's attribution window, you would actually not know that they came from a particular Facebook campaign, an ad set, an ad. And so what's gonna happen is email is gonna take credit for it. Facebook's not gonna get anything for it. Even though Facebook was the one that originated them. And without the Facebook ad, we never would've had them as a customer.

But with segments, what it does is it will integrate with your ad platforms, your email marketing tools, your payment processors, and it will centralize all of your data for much more accuracy. And it'll track their journey, not only from that first purchase, but well, beyond that, if you have a subscription business and they purchase once, and then they purchase another 18 times, segments will continue to track all of those purchases and send that data back to Facebook.

So we can have proper attribution for the lifetime value of those customers. So if you wanna double your, at your accuracy within your attri for your paid ads and including your emails as well, then I encourage you try Semetrics out, go to Ali podcast.com/semetrics to start a free trial. Again, that's Ali podcast.com/s E G M E T R I C S. All right. So first we need to make sure that we're tracking and we have to make sure that we're tracking properly for any marketing

campaigner effort we're gonna do. Now, the second thing is, if it's not profitable, so rule number two, if it's not profitable kill, it sounds extreme, but if it's not profitable and I want to emphasize how important this is, uh, it needs to be yes or no. It needs to be in KPI or in, in profitability or out of profitability.

There is no in between or gray area of just continuing to do something, not knowing if it's profitable or not, or, or keeping something out of profitability and thinking, oh, it's, it's going to become profitable. Just give it another month or another week or whatever that is. It has to be profitable. Now I say, kill it. But what that means is stop the, go back to the drawing board, refine it, optimize and continue pushing forward.

It doesn't mean if your FA first Facebook at campaign completely bombs, and it doesn't do really well or whatever the campaign is. Doesn't do really well that you just throw up your hands and say, Facebook ads doesn't work, or Google ads or email marketing or social or whatever that is. Doesn't work. That's not what I'm saying, but what I mean is you need to stop amplifying something if it's not

profitable. And the reason, and this is called the three rules of profitable marketing is because your goal in business is to make profit. And so I'm trying to save you from not lo from losing profit and not, and not being profitable. That's what we're trying to save ourselves from. So if something is not profitable after a determined amount of time, and this might vary based on your business size, you might, you might determine that this campaign we want to run for one week.

And at the end of that week, seven days, if it's not profitable in hitting at least a break, even in profitability or, or greater, then we have to kill it. We have to go back to the drawing board. We have to queue up the next campaign, the new assets, the new audiences, the new strategy. We have to queue that up and continue testing because marketing is a process of testing, refining and optimizing.

You're gonna go through this whole process over and over again, and you need to try to fight to get the best results. But the thing is everything doesn't win right out of the gate because, and if you expect for everything to win right away, you're gonna be wildly disappointed because marketing is a process. And if I were to look at 10 campaigns, six are gonna bomb. Two are gonna do pretty good, and two are going to knock it out of the park.

And so if you can fall this process, you're gonna be able to mitigate losses, save yourself from investing in things that are not profitable to know if you're profitable, you need to first identify and determine what your break even numbers are. And this is gonna vary across the board. So whatever the marketing strategy is, it's gonna kind of vary across the board. I typically will look at breakeven numbers when it comes to ads.

And I look at it like that because ads, you have to pay to acquire customers. So I need to know what's the maximum amount that I can pay to acquire a customer. And that's kind of that first that's that first stage, because breaking even at the beginning is okay. If we know we're gonna generate lifetime value and additional purchases on the back end, because we need to constantly be acquiring new customers. And it is seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain

one. And so I'm okay with breaking even, but I'm not okay with losing money. Uh, so breaking even is like a good starting point, but ideally it on cold traffic and your new acquisition campaigns, you do want to be profitable in those. And if we're not profitable, then we're just gonna kind of leave them. And so what we wanna do is we need to determine, break even numbers, because if you're acquiring customers for less than your break, even then technically you'll

be profitable. For example, let's say you sell a $20 product and cogs, the cost of goods, uh, sold completely shipped to the door. So from the manufacturer through you, after processing fees and everything and shipping to the customer's door, let's say that you're running a 50% margin, which is a, is a, is just a simple number for this case. And that's a good margin to have.

So if you are running and you had a fit 50% margin, then what that means is you have $10 of profit to kind of work with within a single product sale. And I'm doing a really simple here. I'm not talking about blended, uh, blended cogs or blended product and blended breakevens. I'm just talking about single product. If you had a $20 product, 50% margin, you have $10 to work with. Meaning you can pay up to $10 to acquire customer before you start losing money.

And so if I'm looking at it from an ad standpoint, so to apply this to an advertising standpoint, if I'm running Facebook or, uh, Google shopping ads, then it means I could have, I need to have at least a row as a return on ad spend of at least two to break. Even now I would wanna have more I'd wanna have like a, a 2.5, a three or higher to really be profitable. Because if I had a two, it means that I paid $10 to acquire a $20 sale.

And I just basically broke even. And, and so a simple calculation for this is to take 100 divided by your profit margin. And this will give you your break even return on ad spend. And the reason I'm talking ads is because ads are the, are the greatest way to acquire new customers predictably in our expert opinion. And from our experience for doing this for over eight years, actually almost 10 years, which is crazy. Uh, but as of the most predictable way to acquire new customers.

And so I like to think in terms of break, even ROAS, because that's primarily how you're gonna be acquiring new customers. So 100 divided by your profit margin. If it's 50%, you take a hundred divided by 50, which is how I got to two X return on ad spend for that example that I gave you. But in doing all of this, you need to know that you're either profitable or you're not profitable.

So in all your efforts, as you're tracking, and as you're ascending through the marketing operating system, as you're ascending, you're marketing to marketing greatness in Zenum, as you're doing it, you need to use this as your measuring stick. First, am I tracking this second? Am I making sure that these are profitable? Because then I should not be amplifying it. I should not be scaling. I need to go back to the drawing board.

I need to identify how I can improve, how I can optimize and how I can make sure that my marketing is profitable. Speaking of profits, if you're running ads and you want to, uh, you wanna calculate your break, even return on ad spend as well as determine target with numbers and see, and insert your margins. Uh, then I, I wanna invite you to, uh, download our free ad profit planner, uh, no cost to you. We use this for our clients and it is we update this, uh, sporadically as we continue to see

better ways of tracking and testing. Uh, but what this tool does is it's going to allow you to insert your average order to values. Uh, you're blended. We're gonna help you, uh, identify blended cogs and your blended row, as you should achieve as well as individual product based row ads. If you're running single product campaigns. But if you wanna download that, it'll help you at least determine what your breakeven return on ad spend is.

And then also what the potential is if you achieve higher targets of return on ad spend. So if you wanna download that simply go to Ali podcast.com/profit hyphen planner, that's Ali podcast.com/profit hyphen planner. And you'll be able to Del on that spreadsheet, insert your own numbers, and then be on your way to running and managing profitable ads. So we've made it through the first two rules rule. Number one, if it's not trackable, we don't do it.

Rule number two is if it's not profitable, we kill it. And of course the only final one is rule number three, if it's profitable going to scale it. And so I, I do wanna talk really quickly about the word scaling. Um, I have to be honest, I've heard this word so much, uh, in the last 10 years, and it it's kind of cringeworthy, I think at this point like, oh, we gotta scale this. We gotta scale that we gotta scale. We gotta scale it scale. And I think that, uh, it's overused.

I think it's over hyped. And I think it's really not what people think everyone thinks in terms of scaling. But the, the, the interesting thing is a lot of people don't know what scaling is, uh, because scaling is not linear. Uh, everyone likes to think of scaling has

linear. They like to say like, okay, if I could achieve a four X return on ads, if I put $1 and I make $4 out on my Facebook ads or whatever that ad platform is, if I had a four X return to ad spend, I'm running a hundred dollars a day, I should just increase it to $500 a day or a thousand dollars a day. And I'm gonna five X or 10 X, my revenue, but here's the truth. The unfortunate truth is that scaling is not linear, meaning it's not gonna go up in a straight line.

And the way that I like to think about this is, is very simple. So I like to imagine scaling, uh, like a mountain. Uh, if you were going to climb a mountain or you were gonna climb, let's say mountain Everest, the, the, one of the greatest feats on the planet, if you were to do that, it would just be an amazing feat. I a always thought it'd be cool to do. And also incredibly challenging because it takes over two months to do.

But if you were gonna go and you're standing at the and you're about to climb Mount Everest. You would not just start going straight up. It's not like that. You wouldn't just start taking one foot and step of the other in front of the other, in front of the other, and then just start climbing the mountain straight up. It's more a series of switchbacks. It's more a series of going around certain parts that are dangerous.

And sometimes you have to backtrack a little bit and then you gotta go up a little bit and then you find another way around. And it's the same. I, I, it's the same thing with marketing. It's the same thing with growth in your business. Like if you're gonna start experiencing, uh, scale, you have to realize it's not linear.

And so it's an and process of switchbacks and, and punches to the face and failed campaigns, but then also campaigns and offers that are just killing it, products that are killing it, add copy and angles that are killing it. Uh, email campaigns that you learn really resonate with people. And it's an ongoing process. Marketing is never done.

And so when we talk about rule number three, if it's profitable, you scale it, there are different ways to scale, but I need to, you need to know that it's going to take time and that it's not just like, okay, I'm just going to increase my budget and I'm going to start scaling. And so the definition of scaling and I have to Google this issue. So I get this really correct is that scaling is when revenue increases without a substantial increase in resources.

So processes that scale are those that can be done on a mass scale without extra effort. So to give you a couple examples, if you send an email to 10 people or 10,000 people, the effort is essentially the same. Sure. Maybe you segment it and you just change a couple personalized things in it, but ultimately the effort is going to be not, it's not gonna be 10.

It's not gonna be a thousand times more work to send a 10 people, uh, uh, to send to 10 people, or whether you're sending to 10,000 people. It's not gonna be a thousand times more work. And so this is what we call scale. When you can insert the least amount of resources to accomplish the greatest level of impact. That is what scale is. Email allows you to achieve that even social media, whether you're posting to a hundred followers or a million followers, it's the same amount

of time to develop a post. I mean, if you had a hundred million followers, maybe you're running it through an editor and you have someone who is like a PR person giving you some additional advice. I don't know, but it's not, I don't have a hundred million followers, but it's not gonna be a hundred million times. It's not gonna be a hundred million times more. It's not gonna be a hundred or a million times more work just to do that. Uh,

same with ads. I will tell you this from experience, whether we're managing or we're, we're running $10,000 a month in ad spend, or we're running 25, or we're running $50,000 in ad spend. There's not a significant amount of additional time that you need to invest. As long as you have good frameworks. Now it'll increase the, the amount of resources and time you spend, but it's not gonna be five or 10 times more. And so that is the true definition of

scale. So when I say, if it's profitable, scale it, I mean, how do you take, what's working in try to squeeze as much out of it as you can. How can you achieve the most impact for the least resources? And so this is kind of the mindset you have to think in. And if you were sitting in on almost every meeting at flight media at our office, or with my team, you would hear me talk about those two levers all the time. You have resource and you have impact.

Those are the two things that you have and in all the OFS that you do. And I think this applies way outside of marketing. I believe this applies in so many aspects of life, but I like to apply this to marketing. And of course I do it everywhere else. But in marketing, you have impact and resource and your goal. If you want to truly scale something is to achieve the most impact in this case, profit or revenue that you can with the least amount of resource.

And that looks different based on whatever the marketing strategy you're doing. And so after you have validated your campaign in your marketing and it's past rule, number one, it's past rule, number two, like, Hey, this is profitable. Uh, and not just like breaking even profitable, but this is at least 150% over, uh, what our breakeven is. So we at least have that additional margin in it that we could start. Then we move it into this point of scaling it.

So rule number three is if it's profitable, then we, you scale it. And you can scale really in one of two ways and you have vertical scale and you have horizontal scale. So vertical scale is primarily, it's kind of the easiest to do. It's increasing your budget, right? You're going deep. Like let's say you launched Facebook campaign, a, B, and C and a didn't do really well. It was breaking V B was not profitable

and C was super profitable. Well, you would kill and refine and optimize B, cuz it wasn't profitable. You would let a just run. We're not gonna scale something that's breaking even. But if C is profitable, one of the easiest things you could do is you can increase the budget. Now it doesn't mean it's going to linearly, just increase revenue, proportionately, uh, but you can increase the budget for that particular, uh, campaign. Uh, you can create more ad angles within that.

If you were running a product based campaign, you can create more ad angles to dive or to dive deeper into that audience that maybe you're running it to. But the ultimate thought process behind vert call scaling is going deeper. Now the interesting thing is, uh, when it comes to scaling vertical is actually the least scalable because what happens is vertical is where you start to experience fatigue, the fastest.

And a good example of this is if you had a thousand dollars month or a day budget running to a particular subset of a a is with a particular product, and then you start to increase that budget. And then over the next month, if you're running 5,000 or $10,000 a day toward those particular audiences, well, you're gonna experience fatigue and your profit margin is gonna come down and your return on ad spend is gonna come down. And so you can't vertically scale those super super well.

Now the second way is horizontal scaling. And this is where you begin to, uh, you begin to offer or run to new audiences. You begin to market to new, uh, new products or to new markets. You might only be selling in the United States, but at a certain point, you're, you'll want to start to expand into another, maybe a graphical market. Uh, maybe you have fulfillment in the United States and you grow to a certain level, you're doing 30, 40 million.

And you're like, Hey, we need to now get a warehouse, do some fulfillment directly out of Canada. And I'm using this as an example because I'm from the states and Canada's right north of us. And it's most people kind of start there before they start going overseas or doing other places. And so in Canada you could open up a fulfillment. You could start doing warehousing there and you could start fulfilling within Canada and have campaigns that are running there.

And so horizontal scaling is taking a proven concept that works and then scaling it to new new audiences, scaling it to new products, scaling it to, uh, scaling with new product lines, creating new offers. There are more ways to scale horizontally in, in, in when you think of marketing because it's an ongoing process, you will ultimately have to scale horizontally. You can only go so deep before you, the fatigue, audiences, fatigue offers fatigue, products, fatigue, ad fatigue, add angles.

And then eventually you're gonna have to start going horizontally. Our recommendation is typically go deeper and then go wider. Cuz once you go deeper, you have good data. And you know that this offer, you know, that this product, you know, that this messaging works. And so now let's take that and let's amplify this horizontally to different audiences and, and markets, et cetera. So scaling is optimizing your campaigns to produce the most impact for the least resource.

And so when I say scale, that's what I mean when I say scale and I do wanna give a word to the why so or a word from the whys that have gone through this a couple times. So, uh, when your marketing is really taking off, when you're starting to gain traction and something is starting to scale and you'll know this because you'll find something and it's gonna click and it's gonna work and you're gonna realize, Ooh, our clickthrough rates are great on this or this particular effort is really,

really working. And when you have that happen, you need to remember that your marketing efforts must align with your operations. Because if you scale too quickly, if you increase the volume too quickly, you can run into, uh, you can quickly run into inventory. You can run into fulfillment issues. And if those go down the drain, then what has to happen is you need to pull back.

So when people talk about scaling, like, Hey, I went from a hundred thousand a month and I wanna go to 3 million a month. It's not like that. Again, it is not linear. It's going to take time. You have to be dedicated to it. And you have to remember, you're going to run into hurdles other than acquiring customers. You're gonna have to satisfy them, make sure your backend is proper. Make sure your fulfillment and make sure your supply chain management is under

control. And I'll give you a story to kind of close up rule number three, here, we actually had a client and we were running a thousand dollars a day on a single campaign, uh, to their top t-shirts and the client was, uh, on fire. The, these ads are killing it. We're like, oh my goodness. These are past rule. Number one. Uh, they are, they have pass rule number two by two times more than our, uh, breakeven goal. And we're, we're really crushing this and now we're ready to scale.

And we pulled it in and we started running a thousand dollars a day on this ad campaign. Well, what happened unfortunately was they ended up running into fulfillment issues and then their warehouse, uh, wasn't able to fulfill in time. And we had to stop allowing people to purchase for two weeks. And so we didn't have the foundation, uh, to support what we needed from a marketing standpoint. So you might be able to get something and just start pumping the fire.

And who knows, maybe you, you do five X to budget and it maintains that scale and it maintains profitability. You still have to think about operations. You have to think about backend customer experience and you have to make sure that all of your fulfillment and inventory is planned and working properly. So to kind of recap here, we have the three rules of profitable marketing. If you wanna be profitable, follow these to a T, repeat them over and over.

They will look different based on the marketing effort, but I promise you that if you follow these, if you adopt these, they will work and you will grow your business predictably. So rule number one, if it's not trackable, you don't do it rule number two, if it's not profitable, you kill it in rule. Number three, if it is profitable, you scale it horizontally or vertically. My name is Josh coffee. You have been listening to the e-commerce alley podcast produced by the

legendary Dylan counts. You can find show notes for this episode, as well as additional resources on profitable marketing. By going to Ali podcast.com and please, please drop us a review on iTunes. Follow me on Instagram at Josh coffee and on behalf of the entire team and for being a listener and making this world a better place. We thank you. We will see you again soon.

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