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E-COMMERCE
Finding the best suppliers. And emptying their warehouses.
Hola e-com runner! What’s up? How’s 2019 treatin’ ya so far? Making mucho dinero?
Talking about e-commerce… If you have been struggling to find the perfect supplier, you’re in the right place.
Are we switching to manufacturing business? Nah, it’s just some good content we got, straight from the Tan Brothers.
And once that’s taken care of, there are some cool strategies from the Purple Knowledge Lab Group, that may help you to sell as much of those goodies as possible.
Get your cup of strong coffee and let’s go through this list of strategies and pieces of advice!
First, we start with finding the right suppliers – advice from the Tan Brothers.
- Choosing the manufacturer of a well-known brand: Famous brands make product quality as one of their forefronts. So, before they finalize a supplier, they start off with their own due diligence too. Instead of going to a fortune-teller to choose your partner, copy your competitors, and have them do the research for you.
Although this is a piece of very good advice, our doubt is: how hard is it to discover the suppliers of other brands?
- The more customers they have, the better: If a supplier has a high demand, it means their stuff is of high quality and they’re reliable. Plus, the more quantity of products they have, the cheaper could be the price you’ll pay.
Totally agree, but a large number of customers to serve could mean less time to dedicate to each one of them. Think about it!
- Stay away from manufacturers with no re-orders: If a factory doesn’t have a good number of loyal customers, what does this mean? Well, you can answer this yourself.
- Go through their past: You’ll want a factory that has a long history of spanning across multiple years with a spotless track record. Some factories rise and fall. Others suddenly disappear.
Make sure to do business with someone who has some decent experience and stability.
- English matters: Especially if you’re searching for your partners in China or other Asian countries. If a factory is set up to work internationally, it’ll invest in English speaking staff.
If not, it means they are focused on the local market. What does this mean? Lower quality and difficulties in shipping across borders on time.
Well, now that you found the right business partner, you’re ready to sell your products. Do you still have some of that coffee left?
Because Kristijan Landeka has a long list of strategies to help you empty warehouses.
The exact ones they themselves used to grow their customers’ e-commerce stores. Let’s pick the best ones:
- Thank you videos: According to Kristijan, there are three reasons to make a thank you video:
- Brand
- Culture
- Relationship with the customer
But there is also some ROAS to squeeze here. In fact, he shared a client case study in the gym apparel niche. They offered a 20% discount in a thank you video, selling $2k worth of products with a $400 ad-spend.
How to make a thank you video? Choose something basic where the founder, owner, CEO or brand ambassador tells customers how happy he/she is about their purchase. And give them a reason to use their credit card again. Discount? Free shipping? Cookies? You decide!
- Instagram Giveaways: Instagram giveaways don’t just grow your number of followers. They can increase your rev too. When you’re running a giveaway, Kristijan suggests to run two Facebook campaigns:
- PPE: You wanna share your giveaway so it has more chances to become viral than just waiting for organic reach to build your brand.
- Website Conversions: This is where you should make some grain. And according to Kristijan, you’ll do much more than just break even.
In fact, the example shared in his post shows a 1.96 ROAS: $8.5k in sales with an ad spend of $4.3k. Plus 8K new followers. Sweet!
- Messenger Giveaway Competition: This is something to help you collect leads and have people subscribe to your bot. Then you’ll have a direct channel to reach them and sell your products.
- More lookalikes and interests into one ad set: This may sound weird, but according to Kristijan, having more lookalikes in an ad set, and narrowing the audience with interests, can work well.
This could probably create a debate. An obvious question is: how do you know which lookalike is working? Let us know your opinion on this.
- Personalization: Customers want to be respected and appreciated. And want to see that you care about them. You can’t know everything about your clients. But one important thing you can’t miss it’s their LTV.
Once you know the ones with the highest LTV, try to reach them with a personalized message. As they were your friends or relatives.
You want them to keep buying from you. Why? ‘Cause of the 80/20 rule: the few customers with the highest LTV are the ones that will bring your biz more!
A new way to include comments from previous ads?
Another day. Another feature rolling out for FB Ads.
Spotted by Christian Velev, this feature from Facebook allows you to “include comments from existing ads” while duplicating your ads.
So no need to use tricks like existing Post ID’s to do that?
It’s almost like Facebook has been watching us use Post IDs to retain social proof from existing ads. This feature seems to do exactly that in the background by auto-duplicating the Post IDs.
Well, this makes it feel like a more legit way of doing it. And saves a bit of time too.
Does this retain other forms of social proof like post engagements too?
Well, we aren’t yet sure either as it’s just being rolled out to ad accounts in small batches. Though, like usual, if you edit the ad creative on the duplicate ad, this feature will not work.
Another big question that springs our mind is if this will allow copying ads from campaigns with different objectives while keeping the existing ad comments. Cause if it does, we can then call it a really helpful feature being provided to marketers.
SEARCH
Finding New Placements to Target on the Display Network.
The Google Display Network is the largest and most visited website network on the internet. In fact, it has the ability to reach 90% of Internet users globally and includes more than 2M publisher sites.
Display Planner, our favourite tool, which allowed us to plan our display campaigns and choose our placements out of such a huge network is sadly gone. Thanks, Google but we ain’t giving up yet!
What if there are still some alternative ways to plan and create successful “managed placement” campaigns?
What alternatives are we talking about?
1. Referrals Report in Google Analytics: This tells you what traffic is already working for you.
- Hit “Acquisition > All Traffic”.
- Sort the traffic source by conversions or revenue.
- Look for these top converting traffic sources under GDN Placements.
- Do a manual review and you can now run ads to placements which have already been converting for you.
Now, another little roadblock. You may not find all “referral traffic sources” available under GDN Placements, but fret not! There are still other ways to target these traffic sources.
Here’s how!
2 – Custom Affinity Audience or Custom Intent Audience: This targeting option may not be as direct as placements but hey, it might still allow you to reach out to those people who have converted for you in the past.
- Enter the traffic sources not available as GDN placements in this targeting section.
- Once you have some data for these, click “Placements > Where Ads Showed”.
- Look for placements where this custom audience saw your ads.
- Add these new placements in new ad groups.
- Do a manual review of these placements to make sure they are good quality websites.
Now, you kinda have these placements which weren’t previously available.
Final thoughts:
- Avoid throwing caution to the wind and always manually review your placements.
- Not just the quality of the website. But the ad placement that you will be getting on those websites.
- Make sure it’s top-of-the-fold and not hiding somewhere at the bottom of the page.
- Preview the desktop as well as the mobile version of the placements to make sure they are both worth it. Sometimes a bad looking desktop placement may be an absolute goldmine over mobile.
Now, go and expand your reach!
GDPR
You won’t believe who got a GDPR fine…
You wouldn’t believe, but the first company in Portugal that got a fine for violating the GDPR isn’t an online business.
It’s a hospital!
The country’s supervisory authority, Comissão Nacional de Protecção de Dados (CNPD), found that they were guilty of three GDPR violations.
Although we won’t go deep in the fine details, the issues found were:
- Violation of Article 5(1)(c), by allowing indiscriminate access to an excessive number of users, and a violation of Article 83(5)(a) a violation of the processing basic principles. For that, the fine was €150K. In other words, too many irrelevant people had access to the patients’ data.
- Second, a violation of integrity and confidentiality as a result of non-application of technical and organizational measures to prevent unlawful access to personal data. Fine amount? Another €150K.
- Lastly, the CNPD fined under Article 32(1)(b): the incapacity to ensure the continued confidentiality, integrity, availability and resilience of treatment systems and services, another €100K.
That makes it a total of €400K for this hospital. Ouch! And here we were thinking GDPR is all about marketing companies…
SPONSORED
Selling in the US? You could be paying way too much customs duty!
If you’re buying products from overseas and selling to US customers, you’re likely not only paying duty but also watching your current duty rates skyrocket with the current trade wars. What you may not realize is that you don’t have to pay any duty at all!
There’s a program called the Duty Drawback Program. It’s a Trade Incentive program offered by the Canada Border Services Agency and STALCO Inc. has designed their services to allow you to easily take advantage of this.
Here’s what happens on the surface – you ship your inventory directly from your manufacturer to STALCO in Canada. STALCO then fulfills your daily US (Canada & Global) orders.
No duty or tax is paid by the consumer on orders that are below the US Customs De Minimis ($800 USD) when STALCO ships them under Section 321 of the Informal Entry customs clearance process.
Your customers get the products just as fast, your shipping costs and delivery times don’t change at all and everything is fully tracked. You also then recoup most, if not all, import duty, and perhaps even save your customers from paying sales tax.
How do you know if you qualify for this? Contact STALCO Inc.
All you have to do is fill in the form and they’ll be in touch.
That’s not all. STALCO can also help with:
- Selling Nutraceuticals In Canada
- Regulatory Approvals
- Import Logistics
- Storage
- Customs Clearance
- Same Day Order Fulfillment
- Pick’n’Pack
- Shipping Options To Canada
- Shipping from US to Canadian Customers
- CRM Integration
- Returns Processing
Contact STALCO Inc. here. Or leave your info in this form for someone to contact you!
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Ethereum Classic has an “Oopsie!”
There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold, and her Ethereum was taken for a ride!
The cost of the ride was about 51% hash rate. It happened when a private mining pool managed to increase its gold digging power to 3,263 GH/s, temporarily making it the most powerful mining tool in the world. In other words, it was a 51% attack.
During this 12 hours long attack, around 219,500 ETC worth $1.1M had already been double-spent.
To make it simple enough to understand, here’s a rough explanation, using the classic crypto-pizza example:
You buy a pizza and pay 5 ETC for it. You go home and fire-up your mining rig which has 51% of the network’s computing power. You start mining from a block that was mined before you paid those 5 ETC and start a new blockchain.
Your 5 ETC transaction won’t be accepted as true. When this happens, you get to have your pizza and eat it too. This crypto can now be spent again, this is known as “double-spending.”
Now that you know how it works, hope you keep your pizza safe’n’secure!
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