NAME: Ep 375 Sales- Jordan West- 6 Figures In Sales In 24 Hours – Here’s How_audio.mp3
DATE: 2023-03-17
DURATION: 2733
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SUMMARY:
In this episode of the Bringing Business to Retail podcast, host Selena Knight speaks with fellow podcaster Jordan West from Mindful Marketing. They discuss Jordan’s strategies for engaging customers and building a community, rewarding VIPs, and getting rid of old stock. Jordan also shares his secrets on how he successfully ran his special launch. Throughout the conversation, Selena and Jordan talk about how unpredictable conversations can be when two podcasters come together. Selena invites Jordan to come and host a special session inside her Mastermind for her members and encourages listeners to leave a review and share the episode with fellow retail or ecommerce store owners.

Jordan West, an expert on community building, was a guest on a podcast to discuss the topic. In today’s world, it is harder to build a community than it was when the host had her retail and ecommerce stores. In the past, she hosted events such as mothers groups and author talks, as well as providing a space for people to meet and have coffee. Social media has made it harder to cut through the noise and reach people. Jordan discussed strategies for building a loyal community, and how to make sure customers become drumbeaters for the business.

The conversation between Selena and the guest discussed the idea of building a community in this day and age. The guest disagreed with the idea that it is impossible, and argued that it is actually easier than ever due to the existence of online platforms such as Discord. They then defined what a community is: it is not one-to-many, but rather a group of people who are able to communicate with each other, get honest reviews, and complain. Building a physical community may be harder, but with the right tools, it is still possible.

The conversation covers the importance of customer service and building a community for brands. It is easy to build a community for retail or ecommerce brands, as people actively use their products, and those who join the group are usually passionate about the brand. Customer service is necessary to address any issues customers may have, but having a strong community will help limit the need for customer service. People in the community can advocate for the brand, answer questions, and offer advice on products. This can help create an atmosphere of trust and loyalty, which can be beneficial for a brand’s success.
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TIMESTAMPS:

0:00:00 Episode #1: Exploring Strategies to Engage Your Community with Jordan West of Mindful Marketing

0:04:50 “Building a Community in the Digital Age: A Conversation with Jordan West”

0:06:17 Building a Community in the Digital Age: A Conversation with Selena

0:08:00 “Building a Community for Retail and Ecommerce Brands”

0:09:35 Exploring the Eight Levels of Relationship with Customers

0:13:41 Exploring the Magic of Community Engagement: Tips for Rewarding Your Audience

0:14:56 “Strategies for Building Engagement in Your Brand’s Community”

0:20:23 “Rewarding Brand Loyalists: Strategies for Building a Super Community”

0:22:20 “Exploring Strategies for Rewarding Customer Loyalty”

0:27:39 Gated Launches: Creating Micro Commitments and Selling Out to Increase Demand

0:33:25 “Building a Community and Increasing Customer Engagement”

0:34:56 “Maximizing Customer Relationships and Return on Investment Through Gated Launch Strategies”

0:37:01 “Copy, Creative, and Offer: A Discussion on Media Buying”

0:38:40 Exploring Strategies for Increasing Sales Through Offers: A Conversation with Alex Ramos

0:42:02 Creating Unlimited Offers with Mass On My Head: A Conversation on How to Supercharge Your Offer Building Process

0:43:32 Interview with Jordan Westom: Unlocking the Power of Offer Generator 3000 for Independent Retailers and Ecommerce Stores

0:00:00 A: I always love having other podcasters on the show because you never quite know where the conversation is going to go. I mean, I do a pre qualifying conversation with all of our guests and we kind of map out where the conversation is going to go. But when you have a fellow podcaster, sometimes you can fall down the rabbit hole and just go where the conversation takes you. And that is exactly what happened in today’s show. You are going to love it.

0:00:33 A: Hey there and welcome to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast. If you’re looking to get more sales, more customers, master your marketing, and ultimately take control of your retail or ecommerce business, then you’re in the right place. I’m Selena Knight, a retail growth strategist and multi award winning store owner whose superpower is uncovering exactly what your business requires to move to the next level.

0:01:04 A: I’ll provide you with the strategies, the tools, and the insight you need to scale your store. All you need to do is take action. Ready to get started? Hey there and welcome to today’s episode of the Bringing Business to Retail podcast. I have to say, you guys are in for a treat because this episode one was super fun to make. But also, I have to say, so many mic drops during this conversation with Jordan West.

0:01:41 A: Now, I went on Jordan’s podcast a few weeks ago, talked all about all the things. I talk about the Five Pillars, moving stock growth strategies, all the things. And we had such a great time. I was like, hey, Jordan, you should come on my podcast, because after the show, we were sort of chatting about the strategies that they use in their ecommerce stores that I have seen used, but don’t often get talked about.

0:02:09 A: And so today on the show, oh, my gosh, we talk about so many things. We talk about is it even possible to build a community? Funny enough, the answer is yes. What we should be doing to engage our community, how we keep our customers engaged inside of things like Facebook groups. We talk about our customer royalty and what VIPs are and different types of strategies to reward our VIPs and different types of strategies to use to get rid of old stock. And, oh, my gosh, so many things inside of this episode. And I’m just so excited because I can just see so many different snippets that will be useful for social media to help everybody, because honestly, that’s what I love doing, and that’s exactly what Jordan loves doing as well. Our jobs are to help you grow your business, get more sales, get more customers, make more money, and especially make more money from keeping your customers so honestly, in for a treat. I loved everything about this episode, and I probably could have talked to Jordan for another hour, but I’m very mindful of everyone’s time, and I think we’re just going to have to get him back on the show. In fact, I loved his conversation so much, I invited him to come and host a special session inside of my Mastermind for my Mastermind heap. So if you’re listening and you’re in our Mastermind or in our programs, keep an eye out because Jordan is going to come and give you the secrets of how everything he did all behind the scenes on his special launch that he did.

0:03:50 A: Now, before we jump into today’s episode, just a quick request. If you are listening to this and you haven’t left me a review, I would love it if you could. You know, I don’t run any paid ads inside of this program, so the most support that you can give me is writing a review, sharing this episode with another fellow retail or ecommerce store owner. Because the more retail and Ecommerce store owners that we can help to grow their businesses, the happier place will be, the happier our customers will be, and the happier we will be.

0:04:20 A: All righty, make sure you take a screenshot DM it to me. I would love to see it. And let’s jump into today’s episode with Jordan West from Mindful Marketing. The word community is bandied around, and people think that building a community is as simple as, like, an email list or just having people that buy your stuff. I mean, there is even an app called Community where you can talk to your people, but building a community is so much more than that.

0:04:50 A: And so today I want to talk to Jordan West about how to build the community, but also not just how to build it, what you can do to ensure those loyal, what I call customer loyalty, are coming back again and again and also being drumbeaters who tell everyone about you. So welcome to the show, Jordan.

0:05:10 B: Thanks so much for having me. This is great to have a conversation. You got to be on my podcast, and now I get to come and chat with you and talk to your amazing audience. So I’m really looking forward to this.

0:05:19 A: We’re going to share the love.

0:05:21 B: Yes, we are. All right.

0:05:23 A: So you are passionate about community. I have to say, I feel like these days it is much harder to build a community. And I say that because when I had my retail and ecommerce stores, I think I was the bomb at building communities. I mean, I was having mothers groups in my store. I was having author talks. I was having so many, I guess, kind of mini events that brought people together that people would actually say, I’ll meet you at the store and we can grab a coffee. We didn’t sell coffee, but they would grab their coffee and they just browse the store and have a chat and things like that.

0:06:00 A: It’s so much harder in 2023. Social media is everywhere. It feels like cutting through the noise to actually talk to your people is so hard. So is it even possible to build a community, like in this day and age?

0:06:17 B: Yeah. Great tea up there, Selena. I’m going to let you know it’s impossible and that people cannot do it. No, I’m just kidding. Thanks for having me on. It’s great. No, I actually want to disagree with you when it comes to that. I think building a physical community could potentially be a little bit harder. I think that a lot of people in the two years of COVID or however long it was, 50 years in my mind that people really did lose a lot of that sort of physical community.

0:06:47 B: Even wanting to anecdotally hearing, like people still want to go out, right? They’re so used to staying in. But building a community online, I would argue is actually easier than ever. Or maybe maintaining a community, right? So we’ve got all sorts of ways that this is happening all around us. Look at discord, right? Discord is absolutely a goliath now in the space because of community. Do I think that moms groups are going to work on Discord? No, absolutely not.

0:07:16 B: But what I do think is that there are different places that house different communities. Before we get into that, first we need to actually define what a community is. And you and I were talking about this before. A community is not one to many, right? That is more of like a dictatorship, right? When you are telling your audience things and then you call them a community, that’s not your community.

0:07:37 B: A community is something that you are a part of as the brand that’s sort of focused around. Yes, you’re the person who started the community. But in that community, people actually have to be able to talk to each other. That is the key. They need to be able to get honest reviews. They need to be able to complain. That is a big one, right? They need to be able to be like, yeah, this actually wasn’t awesome.

0:08:00 B: Because if you have a great brand and a true community, you are not going to have to do that customer service, right? You are going to get your army of people in there being like, oh no, they probably just were miss your email or something. Their customer service is incredible. That’s community, right? When your customers start to actually advocate for you and become advocates, that’s the magic in it.

0:08:24 A: And I see that happening so often in fashion brands because I’m in a few of my most favorite things that are definitely in the upper level of affordable. I guess we’re not talking Prada, but 200 and $5300 for a pair of shoes or a dress. So I kind of figure that’s a bit more upper level. But in those communities, people will say things like, hey, I wanted to buy this pair of shoes and I’ve got size e feet. Do they work? And people will like you said it’s taking the customer service away because the people who are actually using the products can say, look, I think you’d be better off with this style, or I think that maybe this color would be better because people put outfits up and all that kind of stuff.

0:09:11 A: So I think now that you say that I’m going to retract my it’s really hard to build a community and go with I think it’s very easy to build a community if you’re like a retail or Ecommerce brand. Because you have people actively using your products. And the people who join those groups are generally pretty passionate about, like people don’t join a group if they don’t love the brand.

0:09:35 B: Absolutely. You’re not going to have 100,000 people joining your community on day one, right? Maybe if you’re a brand that does a million transactions a year, maybe you could have that big of a community, but these are the people who actually love you. Now, I’m going to explain traffic levels for a second here and levels of relationships. So I got this from Ryan Dice digital marketer ages ago, and I’ve kind of stolen it and made it into my own sort of thing because, like, everybody does with everything, and I acknowledge Ryan great, dude.

0:10:09 B: So essentially there’s these ideas that there’s these levels of relationship, right? These eight levels of relationship that you must walk a customer through and think about it in whatever world you’re in, right? So we’ve got levels one through five. This is what everybody focuses on, right? So level one is awareness. People know absolutely nothing about you, right? This is you at I don’t know where people I’ve been married for so many years. I don’t know where people meet people these days. Let’s just pretend it’s at the bar.

0:10:35 B: Yeah, okay. Online. Sure. They get your eye, right? And you’re like, oh, now I know that this person exists. Or maybe it’s on Instagram, right? They’re like, oh, I saw this nice photo of this nice gentleman. And that’s the awareness sort of phase, right? And then we go into level two, where they’ve actually interacted with you in some sort of way, right? Maybe you’ve just had, like, a really quick kind of conversation with them in Brand World, this is them.

0:10:59 B: Maybe they’ve clicked on your ad, but they didn’t really go beyond that. Or maybe they watched an entire video of yours and they’re like, oh, this is kind of cool, but they didn’t go beyond that. So that’s level two. Then we get into level three, and this is where they actually have some purchase intent, right? So they’ve actually gone to an Ecom world or D to C world. They’ve actually gone to a product page.

0:11:16 B: So now they’ve gone to a product page and, oh, they’re actually interested, but they didn’t take that next step, which is adding to Cart, right? So there is a big step there, right, where they’ve added to cart, maybe they’ve initiated checkout that’s level four. And then yay, we get to level five. And level five is purchase, right? And that’s it. And that’s where most people stop. I mean, most people know these five traffic levels, right?

0:11:39 A: I do. And if they’re familiar with me, hopefully you’re going to get to the next two, which are boomerangs. People who come back again and again. And the drum beaters, is that where you were going?

0:11:51 B: Awesome. I wasn’t going to use Australian language for it, but essentially you could just take whatever I was going to say and then translate it into that.

0:11:59 A: What would Americans say? Because a lot of Americans are listening to this. What words would you use?

0:12:04 B: First of all, do you think I’m American?

0:12:07 A: I thought you were. Are you Canadian? Did I get it wrong?

0:12:10 B: I’m Canadian, but that’s okay. I mean, I thought you were a Kiwi, so I mean, there’s that, right? No, I’m not offended in the slightest bit. I generally only ever work with Americans.

0:12:26 A: Tell me the words that you would use so that everyone who’s listening is like freaking boomerangs. What the hell is this lady talking about?

0:12:33 B: Tony and I actually assume that we’re talking about the exact same thing. So then we get into level six is really where we ascend people, right? So this is taking them from transaction number one and actually bringing them into a community. So this is where community starts in my mind, right, is they’re really excited, right? And so level six is kind of that ascension into that next level. So that ascension can be a second purchase, and lots of times that will be a second purchase.

0:13:02 B: Well, then we get into where somebody then becomes an advocate of yours, right? And this is where, and I’m assuming this is more like the drum beater, and this is sending them into this level, is where they’re going to actually start telling their friends. And this is where the gold is really made, right? This is where all of your value lies is when somebody loves your product so much that they start telling your friends. Now, level eight, I’m trying to remember what word I even use for level eight, but essentially the idea with level eight is that these are the people who are going to stick up for you no matter what, right? This is like you’re married now and your family talks shit about your spouse.

0:13:41 B: You’re going to say, I’m sorry, but this spouse is way more important to me than you are. Right.

0:13:46 A: These are the smackdowners.

0:13:49 B: Totally. Right. Our level eight that we have in our companies, they can do no wrong in my eyes because they absolutely love us and we can do no wrong in their eyes. Those are the levels that I like to talk about. Level six, seven and eight are when those communities really form. And then when somebody ascends from level five that purchase into the community. They can see, oh man, there’s a lot of people in here who really love this brand.

0:14:19 B: I think I’m going to be really excited when this purchase comes, right, if they’ve descended in there from their first purchase. So that’s some of the magic, I think, of community.

0:14:28 A: All right, I know that we’re going to talk about some of the ways we can reward our community, but I would love for you to give some tips because there are probably a lot of people listening who have a Facebook group or maybe some kind of VIP group that they share things with. But that level of engagement never quite happens. It feels like you’re just shouting out to the void and you don’t get people.

0:14:56 A: They’re happy to be there and they’re happy to just follow along, but they don’t do like you were saying, they don’t do the advocacy, they don’t do the commenting, and they don’t do the, hey, try this. So how do you get from people in a group, people in a community, to getting that engagement? I mean, that’s the buzzword, right? But to actually building the community and not just a group of people that are in the same place.

0:15:22 B: Absolutely, totally. Because there are a million, especially Facebook groups, right. And I love Facebook groups for fashion brands. I think that’s where everybody lives anyway, is on Facebook groups for the most part. So let’s talk about Facebook groups first. So first I want to go back to a principle that I really believe that people will do. Whatever they look at, whoever the leader is of something, that is what they will do. If your employees are doing something and multiple of them are doing the same thing, you need to look in the mirror because you’ve either allowed that behavior or you do that behavior yourself.

0:15:56 B: And so people look at you and they’re like, oh, I guess that this is okay to do. That’s where sort of this principle comes from. So you need to do the engaging first, right? So to build your community. Now, the communities that we’ve had and the brands that we own, we’ve had for so long that these communities just run on autopilot. People know what to do. But when somebody first comes in, they need to understand sort of what we do in this community, right? And so at first, you need to, as the brand owner, be incredibly you need to first of all know who your avatar is, right? So who’s your ideal customer and who are these people? What are they interested in? And start talking about that. Start encouraging people to share, right?

0:16:36 B: Doing the sharing yourself, especially for like, I’ll talk about the brand that my wife runs, little and Lively. It’s a baby and kids brand, and so we still have little kids. And so she’s sharing all the time these cute pictures. So what that does is then encourage our audience of about 12,000 people within the VIP community to start doing that, all of that sharing themselves as well. And so that really is a snowball, but it can also be a snowball on the other side, right. Groups can become dead really fast without engagement.

0:17:08 B: And so you need somebody to own the engagement in the community, right? Because if you don’t, the group will die.

0:17:18 A: All right, so now that we have our community, I’m just like skipping to the fun stuff because I am so excited about the next part of the conversation and people are listening going, but I probably want to more about that. Guys, he just told you if you’ve got a Facebook group and nothing’s happening, someone needs to be responsible for building that engagement. Don’t be like me who posts like once a week and kind of hopes that people comment that’s the reason why I don’t have huge engagement in my free groups, but in my paid groups where people are part of our programs, it’s a very different story, right. Because people have bought in and so same thing.

0:17:56 A: Let’s talk some strategies. I’m already jumping ahead of who we let into our community first.

0:18:04 B: Yes. So at first you want to make sure that that community is actually seeded by people who love your brand. So if you are on Shopify, which the vast majority of people listening in the ecom world are on Shopify, you can identify those VIP customers incredibly easily. You could do it through your email platform, you could do it through your SMS platform, you should be able to actually identify them. Right? So getting a good like 100 people in your community first, that absolutely love you.

0:18:33 B: That is the key. So get those 1st 100 people and start engaging and then go from there. You do not want to bring people in who don’t know anything about your brand or who are just browsing. A really bad idea is having a pop up on your website saying join our VIP group.

0:18:49 A: That irks me because I’m not a VIP, I haven’t done anything to be a very important person.

0:18:56 B: And that drags down that drags down all the VIPs. Exactly.

0:19:00 A: Well, it gives no meaning to the term. It’s like, how about just join our Facebook group? Because it’s not a VIP group. A VIP group. The whole point of a VIP group is because you are a loyal important customer, if someone has never actually bought from you, they’re not a loyal important customer.

0:19:18 B: And the same as I call these super VIP groups ambassador groups, right? We’ve got Ambassador groups and we recently had 350 people in our Ambassador group. They get a massive discount to be a part of our Ambassador group and do certain things right. And we realized that two thirds of them weren’t doing anything and just getting the discount right. And we didn’t have great tracking for it. And so, you know, what we decided to do. Kick all of them out, all three thirds of them, before yeah, see you later. Because you’re hurting the value of this group, right? Like, if you’re not participating in this group, you got to get out of here, because we need people in here who actually are doing the things.

0:19:58 B: Otherwise, then the VIPs themselves or the ambassadors themselves are going to be like, well, I don’t need to do anything protecting. It’s important. I recommend spending way more time in your community and your super community or whatever these things, whatever you want to call these things. Way more time in there than you do on your social. Right? Like, yes, spend time on social, but these are the people who are going to this is your leverage point, right?

0:20:23 A: This is your giving you all the money.

0:20:26 B: Yeah. And they’re the ones, if you look on post purchase surveys, when somebody says word of mouth, they’re probably one of your VIPs that was giving that word.

0:20:34 A: Of mouth love, like, hangs around with, like right? Like, if you’ve got these great people who love your brand, they’re going to bring great people who love your brand. People hang around with people who are like them to be part of your community.

0:20:50 B: Yes, absolutely.

0:20:52 A: All right, now, fun, fun stuff. What can we do to reward these people? Because let’s just backtrack to what, two minutes ago when we said not every person who comes to your website is a VIP. So let’s assume now that the people who are listening are like, yeah, I’m going to stop that because all it’s doing is filling up my Facebook group or my community with people who do nothing and bring the whole thing down. And now instead so assuming we now have kicked out the people that we don’t want, or we’ve started from scratch and built our super community, what can we do to actually reward them? Because let’s remember, like, I know you were talking about Ambassador Group, which is a little bit different, but the people who really, really love you, they don’t actually want a discount because all you’re doing is devaluing the experience and devaluing the product and devaluing your entire brand. And they don’t want cheap. They didn’t come to your brand for cheap. This is not Kmart, Hacks or Walmart.

0:21:54 B: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think that’s one thing that people get wrong right away is they’re like, join our group for a discount. What, so you’re going to start your relationship off by giving them a discount? I want to tell you something anecdotally here, which is really interesting. Last we were looking at some sales in one of our companies last year, last year, February, we did incredibly well, sales wise, one of our best months of our company.

0:22:20 B: And I think we’d acquired somewhere in the thousands of new customers and we were really happy about it. But we were running massive sales, massive sales last February. And Selena will tell you all about how much she despises sales. So anyway, this is really important for you guys to hear. So I looked at the lifetime value because it’s been a year now of those February customers and our normal lifetime value of a customer is over $500.

0:22:48 B: That is our average customer lifetime value. These customers on average had spent $170 this year.

0:22:56 A: Let’s just point out that does not take into account cost of goods. So you’ve just knocked out at least half of that. And it doesn’t take in your acquisition cost, what it costs you to advertise to get that, and it doesn’t take in any of your overheads of your business. So realistically, you probably lost money on those customers.

0:23:13 B: Yes, absolutely. Because they never came back because they didn’t value us the same way that all of the customers who love us value us. Right. Because we had given them incredible deals. And yes, at the time we’re like, oh, we need cash flow, oh, we need this. Right.

0:23:26 A: But sometimes that happens, right. Sometimes it is just cash flow. And so let’s just say, yes, I don’t like discounting. But you have brought up a really important point, which is having old stock sitting on the shelves is not doing you any good. So whilst it may have in the long term cost you money to get those customers, what it did give you at the time is it cleared out all that stock. It gave you the cash flow to buy new stock so that you could bring and keep those existing customers happy.

0:23:54 A: So we’re not saying don’t ever do it. What we’re saying is just know the implications and have know the reason why you’re having those discounts and also the.

0:24:05 B: Way that you can get rid of that product. I mean, Selena is the person to go to when it comes to this stuff. But let me just try for a second here. I would way rather do a give away a free product, buy something, get something for free rather than a big discount. To me, I love that. To me, that does not devalue a brand nearly as much or even sampling. Right. There are ways to get rid of products. And again, Selena is the person to go to for this that are not big discounts, that make your brand look like a Walmart brand. Right.

0:24:39 B: I doubt anybody who’s listening to this. Besides, unless you really want to be in Walmart, that’s fine, that’s great. If you want to deal with their terms, go for it. But what I mean is a lower value brand. I’m not even sure where we are right now, but I think we’re going.

0:24:54 A: To, we’ve kind of gotten a little bit sidetracked, but I think it’s been an extremely useful conversation. So we were talking about the customer lifetime value of the cheap crappy customers that cost you money to get in for the sales and how spending money I think this is where we’re going. Spending money to get cheap customers is not going to help your business moving forward. So then we were going to move on to how?

0:25:19 A: Give me some of the strategies, because I know you’ve got an awesome one, which I am just like itching to talk about. Give me some of the strategies that you use to reward what we in our business call customer loyalty. So those those superfans, the people who are giving you, we call it the top 4%. But even if we’re talking the top 20%, what are some things that we can do to reward those people for loyalty? Because I’m sorry, but gifting someone who’s never bought from you 10% off and not giving some kind of value to someone who spent 500,000, $2,000 with you, it’s not on. It’s not, right?

0:25:57 B: No, totally. So, first of all, making them actually feel like a VIP, right? So think about a really classic example of a VIP sort of scenario, and that’s the VIP line at, like, a club. If you guys can see me, I’m not really much of a clubber, more of a dad these days. But this is the whole idea, right, is that when you see a lineup at a club or a restaurant, let’s go with restaurant for us, right? Anytime I see a line at a restaurant, yeah, anytime I see a lineup at a restaurant, I’m like, oh, this must be good.

0:26:28 B: Oh, wow, this must be incredible. So what we do is we mimic that online, right? And we do that for our VIP customers online. And we call these gated launches. And so with a gated launch, we actually password protect the entire site. We’ve got a new way of doing it that doesn’t hurt your SEO. So we actually now password protect the specific pages themselves rather than the entire site because it does take an SEO hit every single time that you do that.

0:26:57 B: So I do not recommend doing that. But we password protect a certain area so that they cannot get in, so that anybody who does not have a password can get in. So then we give our VIPs only the password to get in for that certain amount of time so they get either exclusive or early access to whatever event it is. Now, interestingly, there’s some interesting things that happen when we do these. So, number one, there’s this sort of psychological idea of them having to make a micro commitment to enter the website using a password, right? I love that. I love when people have to make these little tiny micro commitments.

0:27:39 B: And so like a and I remember learning this word years ago because Gpad won but a rubicon, right, which is a door that you can go through but you can’t go back out of. It’s almost like creating that for the customer, because they’re like, oh, I’ve already entered the. Password. I don’t want to leave. The only way I’m going to leave this is if I actually check out. Right. Because now they actually feel like a VIP.

0:28:04 B: You can’t really do these unless you actually sometimes sell out, right?

0:28:10 A: Yeah.

0:28:11 B: That’s one of the keys. And again, I think that this is a Selena thing, too, is like, you need to have built up that demand. And we’re actually, at one of our companies, we really took the opposite approach for the last year, year and a half of just being like, we’re just going to have as much inventory as we can because we know everybody wants it all the time. And that didn’t work. Actually, what ended up happening was the demand actually started going down with that.

0:28:35 A: Yeah. Because there’s no urgency. It’s an urgency. It’s the reason why countdown timers work. It’s the reason why when you get down to five items in stock and you have only five left, you’ll sell out.

0:28:49 B: Yes, absolutely. This is the key, right, is the more that you are able to sell out and then create what it does is it creates demand. Right. So you will not have people coming through. If you always have stock, if there’s not a limited quantity of what people want, it doesn’t really matter. It’s not going to be fun for your VIPs because they’re going to be like, well, I could have just got that next week.

0:29:15 B: No, you can’t. Right. If we have a limited quantity now do not fake scarcity. I don’t like fake scarcity. Don’t fake it. It has to be real, right. That’s one of the keys to scarcity. And so with the gated launch, we’ve done these quite a bit in the past. Our best one that we did in the first hour, we did 170,000 in sales in 1 hour. We weren’t even on Shopify Plus. Guys. We were just on regular old shopify, too.

0:29:46 A: Do you know what the average order value was from that launch?

0:29:50 B: Oh, I think it was kind of in the 250 range.

0:29:53 A: Okay. What would the normal average order value of that store be?

0:29:56 B: About 130.

0:29:58 A: Okay. About double.

0:30:00 B: Yeah, totally. So these were super VIPs. We did end up selling out of so much stuff when it came to that. And we have done since then, done a lot of these gated launches. And one of the keys with them is don’t do them too often. Right. I don’t recommend doing more than like, once a quarter. Make sure that they are for new product launches and not just sales. So obviously, every once in a while, once or twice a year, we run a big sale. Right.

0:30:29 B: You can do a gated launch, if you’d like for those, but I like rewarding our best customers with early access to things or potentially like a free offer of something that we may have too much of that we want to liquidate. And so we’re going to give them that for free when they make a purchase, but only to the VIPs. So there’s a couple of interesting things that you can do. Obviously there’s a bunch of different things that you could do, but the whole idea, the principle behind it is making them feel special and actually like a VIP.

0:30:57 A: I love that. Can we just sidebar here for a minute? Because I have a technical question to ask you.

0:31:03 B: Sure.

0:31:04 A: So we just had, as we go record this live. One of the people inside of our supercharged Mastermind just did an extra $11,000 in a couple of hours because I asked the question. I felt a little bit bad because she came onto the call and we always start with the great thing that happened this week. And she’s like, I sold out of these jeans in like 24 I think it was less than 24 hours. And I’m like, oh my God, how much money did you lose?

0:31:32 A: She’s like, no, we sold out. I’m like, yeah, but you sold out in less than a day, so how much money did you lose? She’s like, I don’t understand the question. I’m like, well, now that you’ve sold out, we have the whole rest of the season. How much money did you lose? And all of a sudden it just hit her. And she was like, oh my God, I’ve just lost so much money. And so she rang the supplier, worked out how much she could get pre sold, so she didn’t even have to buy the stuff.

0:32:04 B: Awesome. Pre sold, that’s where I thought you were going.

0:32:06 A: Bought the stock. Well, she had a target of 6000, did $11,000 in just a couple of days, all done via email. So not an awful lot of work. And my question to you is with these gated launches, because I love the concept and you’ve sold out, do you then at any time in the future? Because clearly it’s a great product, right? It’s sold out. The best people in your customers loved it. Do you then go and get more stock?

0:32:39 B: So for all the companies that we own, we try to manufacture just in time, as much as we can. And by just in time, I mean within about two weeks. So that’s with not manufacturing in overseas, right? We try and manufacture or do as much as we can close to home. So when we sell out of items, our next step is going to preorders, right? But doing a preorder event, that’s the big thing, right, is making sure that it’s some kind of bigger event and making it not just like, oh, hey, you can preorder. Well, hey, we’re still going to limit the amount of preorders, right? There has to be something there to get people to actually take action and value your product higher.

0:33:25 A: But meanwhile, the VIPs have had their product. They’re wearing it, they’re using it, whatever they’re doing. We’re talking a lag time of probably a month between when they get theirs. You make the product, you do the launch, you advertise it, you sell it, and then you ship it out so they have the early access. I love that because we haven’t talked about this. I really wanted to know because I’m sitting here freaking out going, oh my God, how much money have they lost?

0:33:52 B: Yeah, no, but we make sure that it’s an event.

0:33:56 A: Yes.

0:33:56 B: Right? We make sure that it’s acknowledged. Hey, guys, we sold out to create more and more demand and maybe even some more price pressure going up on some of these items, right. As we rerelease them, not rerelease them in the same season, but as we continue to do price increases, we know, oh, okay, this product actually moves even better at a higher price. So there’s some fun stuff that we like to play with there.

0:34:21 A: I love that. Okay. We’ve been talking for a while, as we do, when we start chatting about all things, making money. Is there anything that I was supposed to cover with you that I haven’t covered? Or is there anything that you know that you really love to chat about? Because here’s a quick recap. Too long, didn’t listen. We talked about is it even possible to build a community? We talked about how to build the community, how to keep the community engaged.

0:34:48 A: Then we went on to the different areas of what was that beforehand? The customer essentials.

0:34:56 B: Yeah, the different levels. Yeah, that’s right. Different levels. Customer relationship levels.

0:35:00 A: What did we talk about before? The strategies? We talked about one more I think we sidebarred off to another conversation.

0:35:06 B: We talked about different ways that you can discount that aren’t discounting great.

0:35:12 A: And then we went into our gated launch strategy for our VIPs and how to then maximize the money. We have talked about some good stuff in this episode, how to maximize the return. Because just to skip back a minute, what I loved about you said you make it preorder an event is it is also hinting at the fact that you have this VIP community who you sold out to. And now I’m aspiration I’m like, what do I have to do to be in that VIP community so I can get the thing and not have to wait? So it is just creating that demand and creating that want to be I mean, that’s a status symbol, right? We all want to be something more than we are, and we want to be in with the cool kids. Never in with kids, by the way.

0:35:58 A: Always want to be in with the cool kids. Not there. So I love the fact that you’ve put all of this together to build this engaged community that you’re rewarding, but also using to continue to grow the business in all these different organic ways. So kudos to you.

0:36:16 B: Yeah, thank you. That sums everything up pretty well about what we want to talk about.

0:36:22 A: So is there anything that we’ve missed? Is there anything that you feel everybody needs to hear before we finish up?

0:36:29 B: Yes, there is one thing I need to tell everybody out there. If you are in the land of selling things and you are selling things using let’s call it Meta ads, TikTok, Snapchat, any of those, you need to be focusing 80% of your time on your copy, creative and offer. Okay. Copy, creative offer. Media buying does not matter. Media buying does not matter, even in the slightest bit, comparatively to those three things.

0:37:01 B: So most people are doing it the opposite.

0:37:03 A: I feel like we need to go offer creative copy because if you have an offer no one wants, then you can’t make it exciting. And just to be clear, when we say creative, we’re talking about the imagery that goes with it. So copy is the words creatives are the images yes.

0:37:21 B: Which are all built off of an offer.

0:37:23 A: Correct.

0:37:24 B: I have this weird thing where I just like how that comes rolls out of my mouth. I think it’s because it’s alphabetized. Copy creative offer. Yes. So it’s those three things in conjunction because they all work together. Right? Like your offer is what is going to then define what your copy and creative are. Right. You can’t do copy and creative without building.

0:37:50 A: I agree. And likewise, you can create the copy or you can create a picture, but if you don’t have something that works with it that people if you got a shitty offer, people aren’t going to buy your stuff. No, it’s this lipstick on a pig, right? Like, you can make it look as pretty as possible, but if it’s not what your customers want, which is something that you have talked about, kind of the sub theme that’s been going through here is give your customers what they want, and if you’re actually giving them what they want, then they’re going to love your offer.

0:38:25 A: Can we just quickly talk about testing different offers, testing offers in different ways? Do you use the same offer and then use it in different ways? And let me just give you an example because I don’t think I’m saying this very well.

0:38:40 B: Let me hear one of the people.

0:38:41 A: In our program said, I’ve got this old stock I need to get rid of, and I’ve got it at 50% off and no one’s buying it. Again, it’s in that upper level of brand, not luxury brand, but it’s stuff that you spend money for and you have to have a discretionary income for. And I’m like, well, why don’t you just try buy one, get one free? Because as a customer, now that you’ve made it 50% off, I’m like, well, it must be cheap crap nobody wants. Totally.

0:39:05 B: It gives no value. You’ve devalued it 50%, whereas buy one, get one does not devalue. I don’t even think it devalues your product. Whatsoever. It’s just like, whoa, they’re doing this.

0:39:17 A: Yeah. And one week later, all sold out. So my question to you is, do you and how do you test out the exact same offer but in different ways?

0:39:29 B: Totally. So that’s a really good example right there. So I’ll use an example from one of our companies, little and Lively, that we have been testing recently, and that’s with our leggings. So our baby leggings are fairly expensive for baby leggings, 29, 50. They’re very high quality, incredible reviews. People, when they get them, they love them. What we didn’t want to do is discount them 33%. Right. But we wanted to give people new customers a reason to buy. And so we did. Buy two, get one free. So the whole thing is all to.

0:39:59 A: Get the third free.

0:40:01 B: Get the third for free.

0:40:02 A: Yeah. Yes.

0:40:03 B: We make sure to send them to a nice landing page that tells them exactly what to do, how they get the discount, what the discount is going to be on. Right. You want to make sure that you just tell them all of those sorts of things. Discount is automatically applied to the lowest value one. So if there’s one that happened to be on sale or something like that, they’ll do that. So we love this. This one is converting. Just crazy. In North America, I could ramp this budget up to thousands of dollars a day. And this one is just absolutely converting. People love it, but it doesn’t devalue our brand at all. So the next step now is to use that exact same either buy two, get one free with products that now we know that we have tons of. Right? So our leggings are what people love.

0:40:44 B: We know that we have and I was talking about this before, this particular company is sitting on just way too much inventory in certain areas. So we’re going to look at some of those and now start to use that exact same offer but with different products. So we know that that one seems to work pretty well for cold audiences. So that’s how we’re going to test that offer itself. Now, just before we go, Selena, I created, and I can’t even give people access to this, but I just want to let them know how cool it is.

0:41:13 B: I call it the offer generator 3000. And the whole idea is that creating offers is actually really hard. It’s really hard to be like, wait, what? Exactly. We all know what an offer is. Alex RamosI has a great book called 100 Million Dollar Offers that I suggest everybody listen to that has all the elements of offers. What we did is create sort of a spreadsheet on steroids that you put your product in, right?

0:41:38 B: So one product, and then you list five different types of scarcity that could potentially go alongside of this product. Then you talk about why it matters now. And so you give five different reasons of why it matters now. And then you call out a specific audience, five different audiences, and then you also call out, what’s another element of an offer anyway? There’s one more element of an offer and you do five of those.

0:42:02 B: You’ve now created five to the power of five, four offers.

0:42:10 A: Mass on my head, on top of my head, is not my strong point.

0:42:13 B: You’ve now created think about this, it’s essentially unlimited offers.

0:42:17 A: Yeah.

0:42:17 B: And then we supercharged it with some macros on there, where now we’re using every different copywriting technique that we know, converts and moving those elements of each offer into that so we can take it one click. And now we’ve got our entire offer already built out that we can then create ad copy. We can go into a tool like Chat GPT to get some more ideas for headlines. And all of that already built off of an offer that we know has all of the elements of a successful offer.

0:42:52 B: I don’t know how to give this to people, but it’s something that we’ve been using, that I’ve been manually giving to people on Twitter and LinkedIn because it’s that incredible of a tool.

0:43:03 A: Yeah, I think it’s great. Like you said, quite often, it is hard to come up with the offer. And we do a lot of AB testing on our landing pages. And sometimes the one you think everyone’s going to love, it’s like a social post. You think, oh, my God, this is the bomb.

0:43:16 B: This one’s good. I had one today. It’s like, this one’s going to hit, like 100,000 people.

0:43:21 A: Nothing.

0:43:22 B: Yeah, nothing.

0:43:23 A: Yeah. So it is really about doing the testing and taking the time and testing and measuring. So I love that. I’m guessing people can just reach out to you on Twitter if they want to ask you for it.

0:43:32 B: Absolutely. Just say. Hey, I heard about that cool offer generator. Offer generator 3000.

0:43:39 A: I love it.

0:43:40 B: We’re still working on the name.

0:43:41 A: Yeah. All right, so if people want to chat to you more, then apart from Twitter, well, what’s your Twitter handle?

0:43:50 B: I think you search Jordan Westom.

0:43:53 A: Okay.

0:43:54 B: Yeah. Or Jordan t west, something like that.

0:43:58 A: And we’ll put it into the show notes.

0:44:00 B: Absolutely. And then LinkedIn. I’m incredibly active over there as well. So if you search Jordan West marketer over on LinkedIn, that is where I do my best work.

0:44:11 A: Well, I think you’ve done some of your best work on today’s podcast, so thank you.

0:44:14 B: Wait till you go to LinkedIn.

0:44:18 A: All right, I think we’re definitely going to cut this one up and use it in quite a lot of places because there were just truth bombs everywhere.

0:44:26 B: Oh, that makes me feel good. Thank you. Because you absolutely nailed it when you came on my podcast, so thank you, Selena.

0:44:32 A: All right, thanks, guy. So, that’s a wrap. I’d love to hear what insight you’ve gotten from this episode and how you’re going to put it into action. If you’re a social kind of person, follow me at the Selena knight and make sure to leave a comment and let me know. And if this episode made you think a little bit differently or gave you some inspiration or perhaps gave you the kick that you needed to take action, then please take a couple of minutes to leave me a review.

0:45:04 A: On your platform of choice. Because the more reviews the show gets, the more independent retail and ecommerce stores just like yours, that we can help to scale. And when that happens, it’s a win for you, a win for your community, and a win for your customers. I’ll see you on the next episode. Everything.