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E-COMMERCE
Depesh Mandalia talks about Q4, holiday sales, POD and FB Ads
In this video call with one of his students, Depesh Mandalia talks about Q4, Facebook Ads, and Print on Demand.
If you can take 50min to watch the full video we highly recommend you do that, if not we have a few key takeaways for you.
We are in Q4 and that means you need to prepare for the Christmas season. From mid of October to beginning of November Depesh is doing massive tests on offers, creatives and audiences.
When running tests Depesh starts with video ads only, even if he doesn’t have a video! The reason for using static images in video ads is to test your creatives and your ad copy.
If people only watch 1-2 seconds of your static video you know the creatives or the first two lines of the copy aren’t good. If they watch 10 seconds (which means they read all the text) and don’t click you know your copy isn’t good enough.
After Halloween, a lot of people will switch their mindset to Christmas shopping. Then you want to be prepared, know what products work for which audience and be ready to scale.
During that period CPMs will go up, but also conversion rates will go up. People are in the shopping mood and you want to take advantage of that by pushing up your average order value and the lifetime value of your customers.
If your AOV is more than $100 Depesh recommends nurturing your audience in a few layers, starting up with a cold audience and interest targeting, warming them up with a video and retarget them with video engagements.
When it comes to killing adsets in the testing phase or scaling up profitable adsets Depesh is a fan of automatic rules. Think about what rules make sense to reach your goals and set them up.
You cannot monitor everything yourself all the time. First understand the rules, then automate them.
Depesh also talks about a psychological trick when it comes to the post-purchase journey.
It’s scientifically proven that seeing a product you really like triggers positive emotions in your brain, but the process of paying for it feels painful.
Try to push the payment as far back as possible. Don’t say thank you for your payment (triggers pain) and then try to upsell more products.
Instead, try something like “your transaction is not yet complete” try to upsell more products or services and then say “thank you for your payment”on the next page.
Case Study: $124,685.89 revenue in 90 days with Influencer Marketing
This case study comes to us thanks to Andy Shwetzer in the Ecom Empires Facebook group.
It’s a great example of how to “do your homework” when starting a new store and make sure that the funds you have are actually put to work with a high chance of success.
That’s the reason Andy and his team went with influencer marketing. They didn’t have a massive budget, they had no Facebook Ads know-how.
The big pros of this? The relatively cheap ads, with great social proof and, most importantly, very targeted audiences.
Andy goes into the main things to consider, from researching and contacting influencers, to creating ads and copy, to tracking and managing the campaigns.
His store was focused on fashion and lifestyle-related products – that’s also what the influencers had to be about of course.
Here are the highlights:
1. They actually had 2 Instagram accounts – one main account and one for influencers/business relationships. This helped keep communication more structured. Should also have 25 posts and 500+ followers to show activity and have credibility. Last but not least, a CTA in the bio with a link.
2. If you’re dropshipping you should not promote with individual influencers, unless you have a reliable supplier who also does custom packaging. You will end up hurting both the influencer and yourself if you promote a low-quality product.
3. Goes without saying that you should look for real engagement, not those with generic comments like “Wow!”, “Cool!” or a few emojis. And 20k+ followers is also a good minimum usually.
4. Finding influencers: Search by niche keywords. For example, if you sell streetwear, try searching for “lit”, “swag”, “hype”, etc. Find influencers that meet the criteria and follow them. IG will then show you similar accounts too! Makes life a little easier for you… Have 100+ influencers, to begin with.
5. Contact them – Andy has a template message you can check out in the full post. He DMs and emails them at the same time, if possible. If you do email, make sure it’s a business account, not a generic Gmail account.
6. Select to promote your products that most match their audience and make sure it’s clearly presented as an ad.
7. To make tracking easier, give each influencer their own discount code.
OK, those were the highlights for the case study – check out the full post to see real examples of all the key points we brought up here.
GENERAL
What do you get from shredding a $1.3 mil painting? A $4mil work-of-art and a huge marketing campaign
Yeah, we’re talking about Banksy and his shenanigans. If you haven’t heard already, he installed a shredder in one of his paintings and when it was auctioned off on the weekend, he shredded half of it.
While we’re far from art connoisseurs, we’re pretty sure this is artwork is now worth more than it was originally.
From what we can see, art is pretty much about supply and demand – just look at the unique Wu-Tang Clan album that was bought for $2mil.
And now this is the most talked about piece of art of the year, if not the decade… Chances are its price went up, along with all other Banksy work in the past and in the future.
Oh, and it’s also why he shredded half of it, not all!
The biggest lesson we learned? There are some very counter-intuitive ways to generate attention and demand. Maybe it’s time to buy a Lambo and drop a Ferrari on it from 10 metres.
Here are the highlights from Snap CEO internal memo
Evan Spiegel finally starts making some sense when it comes to Snapchat but things still don’t look great for the app.
In a leaked internal memo, Spiegel (which means mirror in German), finally lives up to his name and carefully reflects on the company’s status.
First off, the redesign was trash. He says it in nicer words but we know that’s what he really meant. He also brings up, for the first time we’ve seen, the sub-par Android app experience, which many people complained about from the beginning.
Secondly, Snapchat has to focus on talking to your bestie, not on talking to everyone, like Facebook does. In other words, if you didn’t join them, don’t try to beat them.
Snapchat’s Shows are promising – more promising for mobile, vertical video than Facebook Watch and IGTV.
You should expect a redesign coming again, especially for the Discover feed, to make these Shows even more appealing.
Spiegel also finally realized that appealing only to teens who don’t have income won’t be the way to go.
The plan is to attract some of the older population (like 25+, totally old), and also look for user growth in emerging markets. In other words, they are likely to more or less give up the fight in Tier 1 countries.
The Crew’s take on it:
Without more high-value users on the platform, the proposition for an advertiser is pretty limited. Admitting defeat in Tier 1 won’t help with the value of the users, from an advertiser’s perspective.
Still, it can become a niche traffic source for some important countries. We remember BlackBerry Messenger was a “secret” traffic source for Indonesia back in 2015. Maybe Snapchat becomes one of those.
FB fights back against Safari and Firefox with first-party cookies
If you haven’t heard, some browsers really dislike that Google, Facebook and Microsoft use third-party cookies to track users and advertise to them later one.
That’s why Safari has disabled known tracking cookies, such as the ones from the companies above.
Well, the story just continues and if you’re an advertiser, it’s probably good news for you. Facebook is the latest company to announce first-party cookies with their Pixel, starting October 24th.
How is this different?
Well, in third-party cookies, the cookie is set by a source different than the website owner. So it can be an ad from Facebook, that is embedded in the website.
First-party cookies, on the other hand, are set by the actual owner of the website domain so they cannot be blocked as easily. Plus, blocking first-party cookies can mean many other features of a website being blocked.
SPONSORED
Track campaigns without the headache of maintaining a server – regardless of your scale!
It’s no secret that 2018 has been a year with many new trackers making their way into the affiliate & performance marketing industry.
As always, more competition means a better experience for the user – and one of those trackers that provide a pretty darn good experience is RedTrack… Here’s why!
It’s meticulously built for what an affiliate needs:
- It’s 100% software-as-a-service so you just sign up and go.
- It has direct landing page tracking pixel
- It’s a familiar workflow to create and optimize campaigns
- It has a traffic filter so you can split traffic based on IP, user-agent, country and all other common parameters
- It has an API you can look-up if you need to build more advanced tools on top
- You can track multiple conversions per ClickID
- Multi-user support if you’re leading a media buying team
That’s something you can look through in this live demo of the tracker – Use user demo and password demo to log in.
What impressed us the most is the passion Vlad, the one in charge of product at RedTrack, has shown.
To quote Vlad: “What makes RedTrack different is not the features or affordable pricing. In the end, every feature can be copied and every pricing can be matched. What makes RedTrack different is the focus on the user […] through attitude: prompt support, free onboarding, academy, courses & webinars, YouTube and Telegram channels. It’s about constant, 2-way communication”
OK, being real now – there’s no better way to find out if a product is for you than testing it. And you can test out RedTrack for 14 days or 100,000 events for free.
After that, the cheapest plan starts at $29/month for 300,000 events.
WAIT! You also get 25% off for the first 3 months with the promo code REDWTAFF25. Use it when you sign up 😉
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Windows 10 update – The Ultimate Privacy Protection feature.
This is privacy protection to the next level.
How can your privacy be breached if you have no files or information on your computer, right?
That’s the logic we give Microsoft and their latest Windows 10 update which was reported to delete personal files from people’s computers.
Fortunately, this was not one of those automatic updates that Windows springs on you when you least expect it.
The update was available to the brave only, who beta-test such updates. Thank you un-sung Windows 10 heroes. May your files rest in peace!
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