eCommerce Tips for Email Marketing

[00:00:10] Andrew: Hey guys, Andrew here. And today I'm going to be talking to you about email marketing, how to combine it with your advertising efforts to create a strategy that's going to help you to grow your business without breaking the bank. So my business is a publishing business. I also of course work in, in advertising, but, I have a passion project.

[00:00:30] Andrew: It's a publishing company that's called black panel press. And for this business and publishing in general, the margins are really quite low. So let's take a quick look at them. All right. So this is a ROI calculator. I call it the publishing ROI calculator, but actually I guess it could really be used for any type of product.

[00:00:46] Andrew: so here's a book that I am going to be releasing in, June. It's called the pill bug story by Alison Conway. we're very excited about this one. And so we're going to be printing,Between 000 copies in our initial print run, but for this example, we'll just use 500. And, because obviously if we increase the inventory, our initial inventory, then that will bring down the unit cost.

[00:01:07] Andrew: Of course, that would be ideal, but,we only have so much capital to invest in new projects,let's consider it with 500 copies. And let's estimate, based on other similar titles that we've published, that we're going to sell about 50 of these per month. And we have our price of 25.

[00:01:23] Andrew: The unit cost is 3. 50. Seems like a great margin here, but, just wait. some other calculations here to take into account the APR that I'm paying on the, debt that I use. I don't always use debt to acquire an inventory, but sometimes. Alright, These are the different, I'm just going to use the one channel here, which is the distributor.

[00:01:42] Andrew: This is where most of the volume of the books is sold. So we have our wholesaler, it takes a 60 percent discount, so pretty huge. Platform fees like credit card fees,in case of Amazon, we have fees if we sell on Amazon. In this case, we don't have any. royalties paid to the authors as a percentage of the cover price is 5%.

[00:02:01] Andrew: As a percentage of the actual revenue is 12%.

[00:02:04] Andrew: Roughly 12 and so we don't have to pay shipping because that's all taken care of by our wholesaler. So it's good printing And so that's just the unit cost divided by the price and so 14 percent Okay, that leaves us with a margin of just 21 percent in the world of e commerce This is not a very strong margin a lot of times and we're dealing close margin of 50 percent plus like as high as sometimes 80 percent depending on the product and industry.

[00:02:30] Andrew: So this is very tight and it doesn't allow us, we haven't really accounted for our advertising here. So it doesn't allow us much room at all for advertising. In fact, I'd probably budget about 10 percent or so. Any more than that, we're going to really start to eat into our profit even further and make this kind of not worthwhile.

[00:02:47] Andrew: So if you're in an industry like this where It's a high capital investment or you're dealing with very low margins or you have a low budget to work with. And this is the industry that I'm in, in publishing, so I can definitely relate and, but don't worry because there are solutions for this type of situation.

[00:03:06] Andrew: you might have heard of, Facebook lead ads. is one potential option that you can use to grow your business. the only reason I mentioned Facebook ads first is because they already have a kind of ad format that's built into Facebook that will help you capture leads directly on Facebook without your users having to leave to go to a landing page.

[00:03:27] Andrew: So typically the conversion rates are fairly high. cost per lead is pretty low. you do have to be conscious of the fact that sometimes the lead quality is also not very high people might sign up accidentally, or they might just forget that they had signed up.

[00:03:41] Andrew: So it's very important to try to make sure that you're qualifying people on your ad copy and everything. And also that You're sending emails pretty much straight away to make sure that people don't forget about you, that, introduce yourself, introduce the brand, and, start connecting with these people so that, you can start building the relationship right away.

[00:03:57] Andrew: And don't waste the capital that you've invested in acquiring that lead.

[00:04:00] Andrew: So rather than bore you to death by going down through my notebook, I'm going to take a look at some of the product pages I've created on our website. we'll go over what I think sells books. And again, you can apply this to many different types of products. And please don't hesitate, if you have any feedback on the website, I'm always trying to improve it, so even if you think it's totally crappy, I want to hear it because it's only going to help me convert more users into customers.

[00:04:21] Andrew: the first thing is a beautiful, eye catching cover. And, of course, a product image, any product image, should be beautiful, should have, great photography. Okay. Especially if it's a physical, the physical product is more important than really the content of it, which is the case for a lot of products.

[00:04:36] Andrew: Of course, then you want something, your primary image or cover image that looks eye catching. I think this one does it. this is one of our best sellers. So that comes across in a blurb, and this is the same for any product description. You want to catch people's attention.

[00:04:49] Andrew: There's a book that I really like, by Bobby Klink. his book is called Emo Marketing That Doesn't Suck, and, I think about that a lot when writing blurbs, this book. And basically, his formula is to start off with a hook, something that's going to capture people's attention and make them curious, so usually just a sentence or so.

[00:05:07] Andrew: And then a bit of a story, so we want to get people down through what are the elements of a story. Again, you can use this for any type of product,something that, tells us about the conflict, the characters, the setting, right? So get us invested a little bit and what's going to happen.

[00:05:22] Andrew: What are the challenges that their characters are going to face? And then the call to action, which in this case is by this book. I think any piece of writing and Alex Hermosi says something similar to that. and I think it's inspired by this advertiser, famous advertiser called, Joseph. Sugarman he wrote a book called the ad week copywriting handbook. It's a very famous guy and Basically his philosophy is that the only purpose of the first line of your copy is to get your reader to read the second line of your copy and if You continue in that way by the time you're finished Then they'll have almost no choice but to purchase your product or service So I definitely recommend reading some of those books.

[00:06:01] Andrew: next, in terms of media, in terms of books, movies, something that's either current or classic works best. So something that's very trendy, it's a topic of conversations, topic of a lot of thought at the moment. So search headlines, see what's happening in the news and try to relate your product or service.

[00:06:19] Andrew: Again, it goes beyond books and movies because, if you can. Right content that links your product or service, even if it's not entertainment whatsoever to current trends and news, then there's something that people are going to respond to and people are going to gravitate towards. then it's the physical product.

[00:06:34] Andrew: So especially when it comes to books, people love to see the physical product and the quality of it. So in this case, it just took some photos of the book. Actually, they could be lit a little bit better. So it's something that we may work on, but, in this way, people can get an idea of how the physical product looks, because it's going to be something that's going to sit on their shelves.

[00:06:51] Andrew: It's going to be a collector item. it's something that goes towards any product, because if you have a product that is beautiful, functional as well, and you can put it in the hands of your readers and online come as close to that as possible, if you can show. What the physical product is going to look like when it arrives in the mail, then that's something that's going to resonate with the potential buyer, they want to connect with the company or in this case, the author.

[00:07:15] Andrew: So they want to know who are you? What's your personality? Are you similar to me? are you inspiring? So anything you can do, especially small brands, you can really lean into the founder story many times. In this case with books, we have our author profile. So we're telling people about our.

[00:07:34] Andrew: Our authors and our artists and many times and we also have a link to bring them to the author page Process so they want to know how the sausage is made. So when it comes to Books and people want to see most importantly I think out of anything is reviews And reviews from a trusted source.

[00:07:51] Andrew: So this is one of the things that I think made a big difference on my publishing website was adding Amazon reviews. Because before we had reviews from people who had bought the book from our website, which is very few Also sales would happen on Amazon or in a retail outlet. So we might have only a handful of reviews.

[00:08:10] Andrew: Even still, this book only has 11 reviews. This came out in September and currently in June. January. So this will increase over time, of course, but people trust a source like Amazon. So if I have my website reviews here, it could be the exact same 4. 7, 11 reviews. They will trust it a lot less than Amazon.

[00:08:29] Andrew: And that goes for whatever your product is. Sometimes, Amazon reviews might be the most appropriate, but other times Google reviews or Trustpilot, etc. might be best for you. If you're a tour operator, you probably want to do TripAdvisor, for example. Amazon started as a book company, and today I think they have 52 percent of the book sales in the United States, so it brings a lot of trust because of their review process.

[00:08:49] Andrew: So if you click there, then you can come down and you can read all the reviews, and you could click and be taken off to Amazon as well, okay? And then finally, Alex Hermosi, but also, Robert Cialdini's book influence, big David Ogilvie, Joe Sugarman, again, all of the great advertisers will tell you that urgency and scarcity is really important.

[00:09:10] Andrew: And so we don't want to create false scarcity though. So like you can see here, I'm not trying to fool anyone. we do have 74 in stock. That's not going to create any urgency. That's not a. a low stock level, especially for a small business. So there's no false urgency here. That's very important to me.

[00:09:28] Andrew: But, sometimes I will create some urgency by offering a bundle deal, special offer, maybe like a limited edition. Sometimes they do metal bookmarks with these books. I might throw that in for free, bundle that in with the book. But in that case, Yeah, if I'm going to offer you a special, really special offer like that, I am going to put a countdown timer or put a limited quantity or something like this.

[00:09:50] Andrew: So that's another thing. when I'm at physical events selling books like a comic festivals around us in Canada, then the urgency is implied because it's a weekend event. It's only a two or three day event. They know that I'm an independent publisher. They know that. They're going to save on shipping.

[00:10:07] Andrew: They're probably going to get a better deal. They're going to get some of the freebies and merch and things like this. When people come by your booth or your table and they look at your products and then they're interacting with them, you see they gravitate towards most and What makes them, and sometimes you can see it in the customer's eyes the moment they decide to make the purchase. That's a very interesting thing to observe.