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Tag: Marketing

Diagnosing Your Sales Funnel

I received an email from a reader who needed some advice regarding the diagnosis of sales funnel. I’m going to keep this short as I’m busy with launching some more campaigns right now, but I hope that I leave some value here.

There’s no rocket science here. The first thing for you to do is to be aware of all the steps that your potential customer is going to take in order to purchase something. Starting off from seeing your ad on Facebook or other platforms, watching/engaging with it, clicking on it to reach your landing page, reading the product description, adding the product to cart, initiating checkout, adding shipping/payment info, and eventually committing a purchase. These are the steps that the customer goes through in most of my advertising. It can be different for everyone.

The second thing for you to do is to find where the breakage is. If you’re failing to see results, you need to identify the point where something is going wrong. If you’re doing video ads and have good watch time, your creative and your targeting should be okay. So you’ve diagnosed this step of the funnel and should move forward. If you have a good CTR (1%+ for Facebook), it means your ad copy was convincing and the customer is interested in knowing more about your product.

If your bounce rate is low and your time on site high, it means your landing page was engaging and informative. If over 10% of the people on your LP add the product to their cart, it means your ATC button placement, color etc is good. If over half of those who added the product to cart then initiate check-out, it means your cart page is not broken and created as it should. If over half of those who initiated check-out, purchase the product, congratulations you’ve made it.

Key metrics that I really like to focus on: average video views in seconds: 10 seconds or more. Average video views in percentage 25% or more. CTR minimum 1%, ideally 2%+. ATC rate, I like it over 10%. Initiate check out rate, I prefer having over 5% and conversion rate should ideally be 2.5% or more. Below are the today’s stats for one of my stores

I hope you find this useful.

Why Using 2-Step Opt-In For Web Push Is a Must

For the past few years, many websites have been relying on adding an extra traffic source for desktop and android users by enabling web push notifications.

Browser sends notification to the users asking them to opt in into future web push notifications. The users can either allow or block the notifications. Once a certain number of users block your push notifications, browsers start to mark your notifications as spam or try to curb your push notification marketing efforts.

The solution is pretty simple; and all website owners should do it.

The solution is a 2-step opt-in for web push notification and you may have noticed that many websites do it already. Before the browser sends an opt-in notification, you send a native opt-in notification from your website. This looks something like this.

When a user selects “No thanks”, he simply doesn’t subscribe to your notifications without penalizing your website. When a user selects “Allow”, he is presented with the 2nd step browser opt in

Since the user has already accepted your invitation to opt in on the first step, it’s unlikely that the user will select block at the 2nd step. If many users click on block at this step, your website has a likelihood of getting penalized by the browser for future web push notifications. 

It is why it is highly recommended that you never present the browser opt-in as your first line of invitation. The web push opt-in should always be hidden behind the website’s native opt-in.

What is Dropshipping & How It Became $700 Billion Industry

I was asked by one of the readers of this blog to write in detail about our dropshipping business. This is the first part of the three-part series of posts that I plan to write on dropshipping. Since this isn’t a how-to blog, I can’t get into too many specifics or step by step guides which there are many on the internet. A simple Google search will lead you to many tutorials. However, I’ll try my best to give you the birds-eye view of what dropshipping is, it’s several advantages, and the top strategies we use to scale this business.

Dropshipping is only a fulfillment method but has many advantages over standard fulfillment. In short, it’s a retail business where you keep no inventory. Instead, when you receive an order, you have your wholesaler or manufacturer ship directly to your customers. Today, over 20% of all e-commerce fulfillment happens via dropshipping making it a $700 billion industry. Below I’ll elaborate the several advantages of running an e-commerce business with dropshipping fulfillment.

No Inventory

Since a 3rd-party ships orders on your behalf, you never have to maintain inventory. This saves warehouse costs, dead-inventory risks, and you only buy what you’ve already sold.

No Stock Investment

This is a very obvious advantage of running a dropshipping business. Since you only buy what you’ve already sold, it means you never have to invest in inventory or stock. This saves serious capital as most businesses end up spending a large percentage of their entire investment only on product, leaving very little to nothing for marketing. As a marketer, I believe this is missing out on everything.

Unlimited Listings

The founder of the 2nd largest e-commerce store Jeff Bezos started Amazon by selling only books. Although Amazon is an “everything store” today, it was started with books for only 1 reason: the large number of titles available. He said

Books were great as the first best because books are incredibly unusual in one respect, that is that there are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category by far.

My takeaway from this is that he focused on listing large number of titles from single category. With Dropshipping you can do that, and more. You can list virtually unlimited items from any amount of categories you like. Essentially, you only need product photos.

Marketing Budget

Almost 90% of your total capital can go into marketing since you don’t have to invest in product giving you an opportunity to run your marketing campaign on steroids. As you get a sale, you can use that money to buy the product.

Business Structure & Taxes

Your business can be structured in a way where you may not be paying sales taxes on your orders, and the burden may also not be passed on to your customers. While in some cases, customers may have to pay customs duties as packages arrive from overseas, generally that will not happen on smaller cheaper products that are invoiced by wholesalers at the wholesale price. Please do your own research on taxes and structure as different rules will apply with different countries involved in the chain.

Disadvantages

As with any business strategy, there are obvious disadvantages too. The single biggest disadvantage of dropshipping is long-shipping times, as items often ship from different countries, and primarily from China. But this varies on case to case basis. Once dropshippers figure out their best-sellers, they start to keep inventory and stock at 3rd-party-logistics (3PL) in the destination country. The other disadvantage, also linked to the first one, is customer experience. The delayed shipping times can result in bad customer experience. However, experienced dropshippers can address this issue too using 3PL, providing real-time email / phone support, and by being up-front about their shipping times.

In the second part of the series, I’ll talk about the strategies we use to scale this super lucrative business.