Master Email Marketing For Dropshipping with Steven Wagner (Episode 60)

Get your copy of Lewis’ new book - The Home-Turf Advantage ➡️ https://htabook.com/?el=podcast-60-email-marketing-with-steven-wagner

Find out how Sales Ignition can improve your Klaviyo email marketing ➡️ https://www.sales-ignition.com/ 

🗣 Lewis Smith and James Eardley welcome Steven Wagner from Sales Ignition to discuss mastering email marketing for dropshipping. 

With Steven's expertise in e-commerce marketing, particularly with platforms like Klaviyo and Shopify, listeners are in for valuable insights into driving business growth through effective email strategies.

👉 Prefer to watch this on Youtube? Check it out here  ➡️ https://youtu.be/QWDpS4MusEk

---------------------------------------------------------

Topics Discussed:

★ Cutting-Edge Email Marketing: Steven shares advanced email marketing techniques for scaling e-commerce businesses.

★ Overcoming Common Challenges: Common hurdles faced by e-commerce owners, such as unpolished email content and follow-up sequences.

★ Actionable Advice: Steven offers actionable advice for e-commerce entrepreneurs.

---------------------------------------------------------

For Aspiring Business Owners or Side Hustle Seekers Based In the UK…

New Book Reveals How To Launch A Low-Maintenance High-Profit E-Commerce Business Using The UK "Home-Turf Advantage”…

While also enjoying more time with your family, being free to travel, and setting the hours you work.

Click here to get your copy >>> https://htabook.com/?el=podcast-60-email-marketing-with-steven-wagner

---------------------------------------------------------

Links and Resources Mentioned:

Get Shopify for £1 a month for 3 months: https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/shopify 

Get a free trial with a professional phone line: https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/circle 

---------------------------------------------------------

Key Takeaways:

★ Power of Klaviyo: Klaviyo is highlighted as a powerful tool for e-commerce entrepreneurs.

★ Shopify Strategies: Implementing key strategies on Shopify is essential for enhancing store performance and driving sales.

★ Cutting-Edge Email Marketing: Steven shares cutting-edge email marketing techniques.

---------------------------------------------------------

FOLLOW:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dropshipunlocked/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/DropshipUnlockd
• LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/company/dropship-unlocked
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/dropshipunlockedlewissmith
• Website: https://www.dropshipunlocked.com

Thank you for listening to the Dropship Unlocked Podcast! Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review on your favourite podcast platform.

---------------------------------------------------------

★★★Dropship Unlocked - Lewis Smith★★★

🌏Watch Our Free Training ➽ https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/training?el=podcast-60-email-marketing-with-steven-wagner

Transcript

0:00

The most profitable email flow that I've set out with clay Vo is email is the one thing that if you build a list, the bigger your list, the more successful you can be. When I started, I set up clay VO. But I didn't realize the value of setting up at the time. I'll give you an example from our business that built our lists far greater than we ever saw. Welcome to the dropship unlocked Podcast. I'm Lewis Smith, the founder of dropship unlocked and with me is our Client Success Coach James Adly. Now when we're not recording the podcast episodes, we're running our own e commerce businesses and helping aspiring entrepreneurs launch their own high ticket drop shipping businesses, keen to build your own six or even seven figure business. My book the home turf advantage is your blueprint for launching a profitable online store. Grab your copy and HT a book.com to date. And let's get you started. Now sit back, relax. And let's unlock your potential with the dropship unlocked Podcast. Today, we are thrilled to be joined by Steven Wagner from sales ignition, who is going to be joining us on the dropship unlocked podcast. Now sales ignition specializes in all areas of marketing for E commerce, and they've got a specific expertise or specialist area within Klaviyo for Shopify itself and just driving overall business growth. So really excited to talk to you today. Steven, welcome to the show. Thank you I'm excited to be able to talk with you guys and and help share some of my bumps and bruises along the way and expertise with your audience. Definitely, yeah, I'm sure we can learn a lot from those. So with your extensive background in E commerce and digital marketing, can you kind of talk us through a little bit around how you found your path into starting sales, ignition, I guess that's probably a good place to start. And what drove your passion initially to even get into E commerce? Sure. My background came from originally doing software as a service. And so I had founded and started a company and we were helping a lot of different retailers do online marketing, because they weren't very good at it. And they needed help from a lot of the products and brands that they carried. And what I found was that that's a very long road to haul, because typically you're building software and you're selling to customers, and you're servicing those customers. And quite frankly, with subscription, you don't make that much money because obviously, your customer doesn't want to pay for the full amount of that. So what we found was that over time, we had to be very good at being able to nurture and develop those people that bought our product. And I was lucky because we had a big client that came to us one day and asked to buy the software platform. And so here I am, I had sold that off, and I was looking for what I was going to do next. And I just happened to bump into a friend who was doing Amazon fulfillment at the time. This was way before the big rush game. And I listened to him and I thought about it. And I said look, would it be awesome, like a startup business where one of the biggest, most successful brands does the marketing does the fulfillment, all I really have to do is pick products and put them on and sell. And so I got started really because it was a hack or whatever you'd like to call it a shortcut to selling online. And let's face it, everyone's going online far more than anything else. And I've learned that with my last software as a service company. So fast forward, and we were doing that. But one thing that we learned or I learned especially was one of the biggest challenges when you do online, is if you're spending a lot on advertising to get people to your site, you have to get very good at converting them. Otherwise, you're going to have a hole in the bucket and the bucket will always drain out faster than maybe you can pour more water. So I looked at every alternative for us to do that. Whether it be optimizing websites, copywriters, AV testing on websites, all this stuff that we've all probably seen or heard or maybe are vaguely familiar with. But the one thing that really rang true was that email is the one thing that if you build a list, the bigger your list, the more successful you can be. And so if I spend $1 today or I spend in email them over time, I'm able to retain the possibility of selling to them far longer than if I don't retain them and I don't send them anything and I don't automate that. And so that's really what got me started in it. It was actually a survival tactic. It was just to say, how do we keep doing some of the categories of products I picked were very competitive. And so I looked for all the products that were out there and I stumbled upon clay vo because it was the one where you could actually connect it to Amazon and you could contact your cost summers and you could send them thank yous and you could ask them for reviews. And it would tell you where they came from. So if they were from Amazon, or you had paid advertising dollars on Facebook, or Instagram, or Google Pay Per Click, you kind of knew where they were. And so that's how I got started with CLEVEO. And started to really try to do that for my own business. And so we were successful in growing that business, became number one on Amazon, and won a bunch of awards got a bunch of media and things from it. And so that's what started it. And as I helped others, that I was friends with want to do email marketing, I realized, most don't have an idea of how to set the whole thing up, it looks like a giant box of parts. And honestly, what happens is, too many people use the tools to dictate their customer journey, rather than saying to their figuring out what they want their customer drain to be, and then making all of this software, all of this stuff, do what they want it to do. So bending it to their will, instead of what their deal is with their customer base. And so that's what really I started to find. And, and I really found that, and I enjoy the helping and being able to elicit that from people who are really passionate about starting a, you know, an E commerce business, whether it's to escape their daily life of maybe they are in a job, they don't enjoy anymore, maybe they want extra income, maybe they have a great product, but they just need a better way of marketing. Because, you know, there's all sorts of motivations for people that go in the car space. So that's part of why I really enjoy this to sell people achieve their interests and dreams. Fantastic. Yeah, it's great, you're able to do that. And I think CLEVEO or email marketing becomes a real cornerstone of E commerce businesses, because you can build up your own list. And it's an audience list that you actually own. And nobody can take that away from you necessarily. So I guess let's dive into more. So the importance of email marketing for somebody that's just getting started with an E commerce business side to sell physical products online? Why do you think email marketing is so important? Well, I think it's very important for the biggest thing that you're going to run into when you run an e commerce Store over time. And that is, you have to find a way to find the economically convert people. There's lots of different ways to do that. But email is one of the most efficient ways to do that. And it's the one thing that you own, at the end of the day, and when you sell a business, it's the thing that you own. So if you have a large list, it adds value to your business, if you are able to say I have 10,000 people or 100,000 people on my email list and that I can sell 20% 30% of them. Every year a product, there is a model that you can you can work on and that you can always monetize. And so one of the things I find is that a lot of clients who will we work with, or we help coach on this is that everyone in the early days is thinking about just getting customers, they just think about I got to make a sale today, right? I got to pay for what I've got, I've got to sell, you know, and so that's great. But the problem is that a lot of times, what they don't think about is how do I maximize my ad spend, how do I maximize whatever I'm doing to get traffic. And the only way you can do that is really through email marketing. Because it's the one thing that you own, and you can constantly go back to. And I think that's one of the things that over time, more experienced entrepreneurs and people who have stores for a while start to really hone in on. And so I see and work with people that have $10 million stores or $5,000 stores or$1,000 store. But the thing is that the earlier you start your email list, and the more that you keep at this, the bigger your list gets, and then the more you can go back to it ultimate. And so I think that's one of the reasons why email marketing is so pivotal to it. And let's face it, you know, if the average bounce rate is over 60%, and you have that people are coming to your home to your site a day, then six have already left. And maybe one buys. So what are you going to do with the other, the rest that come to your site, you've got to find a way to do that. And so CLEVEO and platforms like it have a really good way to be able to show you and get you to capture that person, nurture them, convert them, personalize what you want them. So those are some of the reasons why you want to really want to hone in on email marketing. I think entrepreneurs a lot of the time they when they first get started with the business, you put up your Google ads campaign and you think that will do all the work for you. But then like you said in the analogy I loved in your the first part of that you mentioned was that like a leaky bucket if you can't capture the water that you're, you're pouring into a bucket, then you'll just it'll just pour out the bottom as fast as you're pouring into the bucket. And that's similar. If we're not capturing emails for a lot of the people that are on our website, you're losing a lot there and you're wasting or you're missing out. So with with klavier, then more specifically, first of all, you mentioned about the importance of building a nice large list because then it can be no add a multiple on to your business, if you decide to sell it. How would you go about actually building a large list, we've got some tips for us. Yeah, I think that one of the biggest ways you can do that right off the bat, is to put an offer a pop up is typically what you see on your site to collect that information. Now you can be either free information you want to give them let's say, I sell knives, then I could create a way to maybe use a knife could be camping knife, it could be for carving, you know, meat, or could be anything of that nature. So it could be a free, you know, offer free something or other to get people that are interested in it. The most common one you see, and the one that most CLEVEO users run into right off the bat is they offered 10%. Now, that sounds great. And we'd studied over 500 Klaviyo stores and 10% off is usually the way that everyone starts off that way. And it's a good way to do it if they come to your site. Or you can also use that to go out and make that coupon and put it on other places on the internet. Whether that be social media could be user groups, it could be whatever Mark target market, you're going after and say, Hey, we've got something here, come and get it. And then that way, you're getting people to subscribe to something of value, it has to be an equal trade. So if you're going to offer a discount on your product, or if you're going to teach them how to use it, or maybe a pain point that your target audience has with something, offering it as like a guide or a PDF, or whatever that is, you want to offer that so that people can do that. I'll give you an example from our business that built our lives far greater than we ever saw. So one of our product lines was in health care, and beauty. And what happened was, we used to send out a little sample pack inside the packaging that said, Hey, come to the site, you can register and get free samples. And so it was only for customers, they bought it they got it, it was really so that we could start to test and validate that. Well, somebody posted it to some Facebook groups. And all of a sudden, we had a massive run on all these people who wanted the free samples. And all of a sudden, we went from having a few 1000 people on our list to having over 30,000 people on our list. And so now what do you do, you've got 30,000 people who got free samples, you don't want to say no to them. But then you got to figure out how to pay for all this. And so that kind of is how we did it, we were able to use the free sample that was just really a mistake, or at least one of those things in life that happens. And so we had to figure out a way to monetize it. And that's how we were able to do it. I think that far too often when clay vo especially if your audience is new to clay VO and you see what they offer. I think that one of the things that I see too often when they ask us to come in and help them improve it is they don't think about doing anything different than what they've been told because CLEVEO shows you only one point of view which is 10% Off 50% Off 20% Off your product. Sometimes that's not the biggest thing that could be a good trigger for your audience, it could be a bundle, it could be something that adds value, it could be saying, not only do you get an iPhone, which you get an iPhone with a charger and the cable and the case and the car mount, like you don't always have to make it just a discount. And so I challenge anyone that's saying, hey, this doesn't work well, for us. Well, think of other ways to make a better offer. Because that's really what you want, you want to make an offer that gets people to, to fill out that list. And then and then put that offer everywhere free, you can at first you know, go post it wherever you can, and tell them, hey, come to our site and fill this out. And you can either get a coupon for it or you can, you know, immediately take action. So there's lots of ways to do that. But that's how I would start our you know, getting started in this and had to think about economically easy ways to build a list because that's how you could do it without having to put all the money into advertising and experiment with advertising and and try to get good at advertising and targeting and all the complicated things. That's why you know, advertising is highly effective, but also expensive, especially if you're just starting out. Yeah, absolutely. I love the creative strategy that you went with the free sample option. And then like you said, it kind of went viral in this group of enthusiasts and before you knew it, you had a fulfillment problem, not a sales problem. And so is is a great way of reframing it and I think you're I spot on from what I see like loads of entrepreneurs starting out. And I don't know if it's just because like clay vo has like a template where they suggest that you offer 10% or something, but everyone seems to go for that percentage discount, which, firstly, let you say is a bit lazy because it's like, well, you know, you could actually save that percentage margin, rather than just giving it away and offer them something that they really want a value that just adds to the value rather than just trying to compete on price. So that that I totally see. But the other thing is with high ticket products, like people who are using this model, the home turf advantage model, if you're selling a product, let's say 2000 pounds, and you have a 30% profit margin, which is fairly typical, you might make 600 pounds in profit on that sale. Well, when you give away 10% might not sound like much, but that's a that's a huge as a third of your, your margin, right. And that's like that can be the difference between being able to scale effectively hire a team, you know, pay for additional ads really run the business effectively and make things quite unnecessarily difficult. So I totally agree. I think having that creativity at the beginning is is is great. And I love what you said about the importance of building a list early in your journey because I know when I started, I set up clay VO. But I didn't realize the value of setting up at the time it was only months later where I'd like the dust had settled the business was up and running sales were coming in. And I went back into our thank goodness, I set that up at the beginning because now I've got someone to actually market to otherwise. Yes, I bet so many entrepreneurs get six months into their journey a year in and they're like, right, let's do some email marketing. And then they look and it's a zero subscribers and they think is because I never set up a pop up or a coupon of any kind. So great, great point. And I think having that second bite at the cherry that you get with email or third or fourth or fifth bite. So under appreciated. In a perfect scenario, entrepreneurs would think you run ads to the site, someone buys great, you earn your profit. But the reality is someone might not buy the first or the second or the third time. And if you have an email, it's that constant, free follow up mechanism, isn't it? So I know that's a an important aspect of our business for sure. And many successful ecommerce businesses. I've just wanted to move into Shopify discussions for a little bit if we can, Steven. So I know that Shopify is the platform of choice, certainly for many of our listeners, and for James and myself in our businesses. In your experience, what are some key strategies that ecommerce business owners should implement on Shopify to make sure that they're enhancing their stores performance and the sales associated with their store? Sure, it's a great question. And I think that it's one that we're all in the E commerce space, always trying to maybe catch up to sometimes because it seems like you're either ahead of the Carter behind the cart, so to speak, I would say let's look, you just mentioned something, I think it's really important with Shopify in general, out of the box, it won't naturally even when you have customers buying, pass them along to CLEVEO. So you have to do that. And if you don't, what I've seen, I've come into stores that have been in business for years, and they may have hundreds, if not 1000s of customers, and they never actually said that they're opting into marketing when they checked out. So now you don't have the ability to check out. So first and foremost, I would say make sure whatever platform you're you're using was Shopify, connect it so that it can actually do that. If you don't, it won't allow you to, especially with privacy laws increasing, you just have to be like that's one of the BI first things I would suggest you do. I would say the second thing with Shopify for optimization is get your default emails that Shopify can send or that you can send to clay vo ask whoever's making your design for your website or find somebody to help you with that. Because the more professional your communication is, the greater your trust goes up right off the bat. The third thing I see is I see clients who really, really go for conversion, do very well with Shopify, if you try to remove as many of the hurdles, like multiple logins, multiple steps to checking out I think one of the most underrated things I see on shops is only accepting one form of payment. I think that is a big cut off that a lot of stores could benefit from whether it be adding paid PAL or you know, some of the buy now or you know, buy now pay later style, like those should be the things as a business, you want to make it easier for people to buy from you. And so those are some of the things with Shopify that I see that you know, starting people may not have the experience and understand the impact it has. So for example, allowing multiple payments, not asking them to always go and create accounts that are in Some cases almost unnecessary. And getting that checkout really fast, you want to go from being on your site to checking out. So what that does is when you're doing all this email marketing, or also other stuff, you know, we're worried more about you getting an email and coming out to the site. And the site's good at checking you out. So now I can work more on like abandoned cart. So the abandoned cart series becomes important because we know you're going to come and you're probably going to put it into your checkout. Now I'm working on that abandoned cart, or that abandoned checkout to get you to convert. So my email marketing doesn't have to be like, all focused on just winning you all I'm really worried about is getting you to the site, the site will do its job. And then the if you don't check out then the abandoned cart will do its job. So that that's one of the things I think with Shopify that I see that could really help. I think the other thing that was Shopify that far too often, stores don't get right is they don't put their unique selling points on every page that the customer is going to interact when they come to buy. So what do I mean by that? A lot of times, you'll see stores that have really cool programs, free shipping after a certain amount, easy returns, fitting and style or whatever it could be like customer support on making you pick the right product, subscription programs. So if you want to be buying it more often, you can get a discount, and you don't have to come back to the store all the time. These are all different things. And they don't merchandise it, they don't put it out there so that as a customer, if I'm on that page, I see it, they put it maybe on the front page, they put it maybe somewhere else on the site. And I would say take every page that somebody's going to be buying a product from with a very novice look at it and say why would I want to buy from? What are the what what does my risk? How do I mitigate my risk? What can I do? What do you as a store offer to make it easy for me to buy. And checkout, because you want to add to cart, you want them to check out. Because then they've shown interest, they've shown intent. And email marketing can be very effective, then if I have 10 products, and you come to my site, and you put two in your cart, those are the two I'm going to focus on, I'm not gonna focus on the other eight. And that way, all the stuff you do becomes more effective. So that's what I would recommend with Shopify. Fantastic. Yeah, so being clear on the USPS or making that clear to customers, and suddenly you touched on, which I think is important, especially just for beginners getting started, probably the most profitable email flow that I've set up with clay Vo is the abandoned cart flow. I'm sure it's the same for most ecommerce businesses. So I'd say that, and let me know if you agree, Stephen is the first one to focus on in terms of the first flow to set up in clay VO. So do you agree? That's the first one to set up? And secondly, if so, how would you go about setting up an initial abandoned cart flow? Sure, that's a great question. It's also the one that's honestly the one in Klaviyo, you don't get out of the box, you have to add this to your Shopify theme. And I think that's one of the things that oftentimes is missed is that you have to add code to your site to actually have added to cart work. If it doesn't, you, you won't be able to use that flow. So that's first and foremost, add it to your theme. That's probably the most impactful thing you can do. Next, I would, I would write down, this is what I would do. And so we have a free worksheet that somebody can use and get from us. But I would say write down what you want someone to do after they've added to cart but didn't check out. What would you tell them? If you and I sat down and had a cup of coffee in America tea with, you know, in the UK? What would you tell me were the reasons why I should buy it, write them all down. And then you have your foundation, your outline for what you would want to write. And that's what I think is missing a lot of times and some of our best clients. That's where we put all the effort into. So it's your unique selling points, remind them, hey, it's free shipping, if you hit this dollar amount. We do returns, you know long terms or free returns, whatever that is that you offer to incentivize them. That can be an email. I think what happens with email is a lot of early, you know, novices to try to put everything into every email. So you're added to cart your abandoned cart doesn't have to do that. You can send as many emails as you want. So break it down. And I like to call it like you know, spoon feeding them or squirrel feeding them send a little bit every day because the difference between you know, a big store and maybe a brand new store is that typically it's not so much That one is using email more than the other, it's just they're sending more. And so they do that. So if you have three or four things, let's say it's payment options, maybe you've got different ways to buy it, maybe you've got free shipping, that could be one email, free shipping, the second email, maybe your return policies, a third one, maybe it's how your stuff is made, maybe your stuff is organic, maybe your stuff is made in a special factory, whatever that is. So you're added to cart is doing that, and then show them what's in their cart. I think that's the other thing with an added card series that is often lost, is I see and hafta kind of help repair a lot of added carts that were more like campaign emails that are just like one topic and one big splashy promotion, instead of letting them know they've already got it in their cart. And the last thing I would recommend, is if you have product categories, and there's a reason why you have product categories, for whatever reason that is, then make an email for that category. And then when someone adds that category into their cart, you have three or four unique selling position. So for example, I'll go back to selling a knife because I think it's a very basic thing that most people don't understand. It's just a knife that cuts things, right. So you have a knife, but somebody adds a sheath, or some kind of protective covering in it. Right. So now you have an email an Add to cart that shows the value of that sheet. And whatever it is three or four things, you can carry it with you it'll protect it, it'll keep the knife from rusting. You know, I'm not making these up on the fly. But I don't see enough of that. And that's the thing that you have the power to like, beating people to just understand your products and communicating that like it's very simply through added to cart like we know what you've got in your car. Like I said, before, we sat down and had a cup of coffee, what would you what would I tell you to make you interested in it, and then do that over a series of emails, you have up to 30 days to keep your cart? Keep that person's cart cached. So you have an entire month's opportunity to market to them. So use it wisely. Yeah, wise words. And like you say so many early entrepreneurs, it's so tempting when you're building out that CLEVEO flow to just go straight for the jugular and think I'm going to just Okay, second email, this is it, this is my last chance like sell, sell, sell. And then I think often what happens is you you kill the rapport with the customer, because they're like, Ah, this company are pretty desperate, like, why are they hounding me so much in the inbox? Unsubscribe, and you know, they got, whereas I think some of the most successful Klaviyo campaigns I've seen are, they actually look the most unpolished and the worst, like, they don't look like professional branded emails. And because of that, they kind of sneak in like a Trojan horse into the inbox, don't they? And I'm sure you see these all the time, like people just sit, they open them because they're like, Wow, that looks like a friend has written that to me or something. And, like you say, the importance of that nurture, that follow up rapport building and relationship building with the customer, if you can lead with value, because sometimes it's really easy to jump to, like, oh, price must be the objection. The reason that they didn't buy was priced. So let's just hound them with a discount discount. But there are so many other objections it can be right. And so, yeah, it's a it's a wasted opportunity not to use that that 30 day period, like you say, to start just unpacking all these different objections and be like, was it this was at this angle? Like, do you not know how to use it? Is it to do with like, aftercare? Is it to do with assembly? Is it you know, there's all these reasons that might be the factor? And, yeah, really interesting. With your journey in terms of like building and scaling ecommerce businesses, I'm sure you've had your fair share of challenges. I know you mentioned one of them about the free samples dilemma where you were inundated with free samples, and then had that that dilemma you were faced with? Based on your expertise and what you see in the market, what are some of the most common hurdles that ecommerce owners face? And how would you recommend they either overcome them or avoid them in the first place? So great question. I think the first one that most stumble upon is knowing their customer, or figuring out who is going to buy their product. And I can give you a good example of this that just happened. So I have a client they do over $10 million. They have been very successful, even getting people to buy on preorder, you would think that somebody that's done this knows their audience really well. And so, after the holidays, they were asking me to her and I help them figure out their next path forward as they use that to find products. And I think this is really important for what you're trying to do. So if you're doing drop shipping and you're trying to figure out your kind of menu or your portfolio of products. This goes I think in the same vein And so they made the assumption that their customers were them. And they're young. And they're into certain things, they live a very urban lifestyle. And they did this. And so what I was able to do is take their complete customer list and actually match it. In America, I could match this for them. And you can use other tools to do this. And I showed them that it was somebody who was much older than them lived out in the rural area. And was not exactly them. It was somebody much older than them, it was somebody more conservative than them, it was somebody that was definitely not educated to the level they were. And that 50% or a little less than 50%, were female, which wasn't who the owners are, and who, who was driving a lot of strategy. And so I think that's a really big thing. Because if you don't get that, right, your advertising is going to suffer because you're going to be targeting the wrong people. When you do promotions, or you do offers, you are not connecting with them. And so what I was able to do for them was show them in the US, we have a Veterans Day. And I said you need to really double down on Veterans Day holiday, or you know, that promotion, and it was their most successful of the year. And they were like, Well, how did you know that? And I said, Well, once you start to look at it, look at the age, look at the demographics, you can match that and you can start to almost like a lion tamer, you can kind of say, hey, now I know what motivates you. Now I know what gets you going. And so I think that's one of the things that unfortunately, as entrepreneurs, you have your vision when you start something. But once it's out there in the real world, you have to have the humility to say, well, I thought I knew who my customer was. And so this is who actually is my customer. And I find sometimes they fight that, you know, and that's one of the things I see is like they do it in their marketing, they do it in their website design, they do it in their advertising, and they're like, we're not getting the results we want. I'm like, because you want you're trying to bend your customers to who you are. So when you send stuff, the things you benchmark, the designs you want in your stuff, like your emails and your ads, it just doesn't it's not resonating as strongly, because who really wants your product might be these old people, like in my one clients example. And you're wanting to do the hip young stuff. And it was working for them. But they were at a critical point where they had to start to pick other products and things and I was like, Hey, you, you're not you're gonna miss the ball. So that's one of the things I think that happens the most with it. Yeah, it's fascinating. So actually building out your customer identity. Now, what do you say is the best way about doing that for a brand new person that's starting an ecommerce store? Do they need to guess initially, before they have the analytics from their website and start to get some order data? How would a sort of new e commerce business owner, understand the audience that they're selling to? I'll give you a personal example. So we were selling. And one of the things I think that people don't do enough of let's say that you are selling dog toys, and we'll just pick a new category, give different examples here. We'll then go to their Facebook pages, go to the Instagram and find out who follows on right off the bat. Is it men? Is it female is where do they live? What do they also follow? Like, at least if you are in that category, and you're picking products? So like drop shipping? You're like, I'm not sure exactly who my caught my customer is. There's at least enough groups out there that you can find out, at least to profile to get your initial assumption as to who you're going after. Yeah, love that doing the proactive detective work before you even start selling is great. And looking at people's, like which pages people in that audience also follow? Great. You'd never unearth some of those secret gems would you have great audiences to target. But also I think once you start selling, a great thing that I know we've done is, is start putting post purchase surveys out to people and be like, so what what did make you buy? Like, what was it that you liked? What didn't you like? What would have made it better? What other things are you now in the market for? And then even feeding that that data into a AI tool like chat GBT or Google Gemini or something and trying to get like, insights from that bulk data to say, give me the summaries of like, what are the 10 most reoccurring pain points in the survey responses? And how could we potentially overcome some of those in our note, like our abandoned cart flow, for example, or our welcome sequence? So it's a really good stuff and it's great to to hear because I think so many people miss that. So that's a great, great tip for anyone starting out with it in terms of reflecting on your journey into the vast experience that you've gained throughout your experience in ecommerce. What piece of actionable advice would you give to an E commerce entrepreneur at the moment who's maybe looking to build and scale their first e commerce business in today's competitive market mired? advice would be, build your own audience however you whatever natural for how you need to do that. I see a lot right now of companies who try to use the algorithm to advertise and don't know why it's getting them customers, and try to use influencers to impact their business. And I think that a lot of entrepreneurs who are getting started, if they took the extra effort to actually go that route and start to try to build their own audience will have greater success, it may not be immediate, because you're not getting to just spend money and put money in and hope that the slot machine gives you customers but being able to do that, so what would that look like I would have any, I would have some way to capture emails, because I still believe that that's one of the most important cost effective things that you can do. And then secondly, I would find a way to like, if I were doing a dropship product or a product, I created my own, I would use it, I would show how to use it, I would use it any which way from Sunday into your point, if I did a bunch of homework, and I said, people on Amazon that buy this product complain that it doesn't have this or it doesn't have that or can't do this or it can you know, it's missing this, I would make content for that, whether that be a video, whether that be Tik Tok, whether it be whatever your preference is, I would make something showing using it. Because oftentimes, we're our own worst promoters, we know all the faults of the business or what we're trying to bring to market. And so we use that to kind of temper our lens as to what we want to do or be aggressive with. And you'd have to have the confidence to just say, Look, I'm starting this and I need to be successful with it, let's go, let's just show it to everyone. I'd rather fail faster that way than I would if I were just kind of maybe creeping along and hoping that this is Matt and everyone's gonna magically figure out our products really good or great. You just gotta go for it and build your audience. Do it on whatever platform you're you like, whether it's, you know, there's soup to your today of all these different social media platforms. But, you know, do that and then say, hey, come, come check it out. You know, I mean, you could do an infomercial, you should be doing an infomercial for your business all the time, whether it be an email marketing, or whether it be on the social media platforms. And I think that's probably the biggest thing I could say for someone starting out and just do it. Because there's a lot of impostor syndrome, I find that a lot of people have. But if you're gonna put your time and effort into it, you're not an impostor anymore. You're somebody who's actually in the arena, and you're the one that's doing it, and more power to you. You know, I love that great, great way to finish our chat on it. I think that's a great message that will resonate with a lot of people, you've put the effort into this stage, right? So don't be afraid to now promote it, stand behind the thing that you've built, be proud of it. And the nice thing is, with a lot of the systems, you talk about Steven, they're automated, right? So we're setting up automated flows, we're not going out there, hammering out these promotion emails every day of the week to people, we can set up a lot of these things to be evergreen as as ad campaigns as email sequences and stuff. So really, really powerful stuff. So Steven, thank you so much for joining us on the dropship unlocked podcast today. We've had some really, really valuable insights and expertise from you. And I just wanted to ask where people can find out a little bit more about sales ignition should they like to do so? Yeah, if they go to sell ignition.com. So that's sa le IG ni ti o n.com. They can find out more information. And we've got a free resource that they can come and get, like I said, whether they want to figure out how to map their customer journey, or creating their first emails or what those would look like we have a blueprint for that too. So they can come and check all that out. Amazing. Well, thank you very much for joining us, Steven, we really enjoyed the chat today. Q. What a goldmine of insights that was from Stephen, he really shared some great strategies there for leveraging marketing platforms that I know many of our listeners are going to benefit from hugely, I love the way he broke down customer segmentation within Klaviyo. And how better to tailor our marketing messaging depending on the customer's needs, I thought it was really, really impactful. And I think our listeners are gonna get a lot of value from that. Absolutely thoroughly enjoyable conversation with Steven there. Thank you so much for him for coming on and sharing his expertise, fantastic to speak to people with real expertise and email marketing as it's such an important part of your ecommerce business. And he really got that point across in there. He let us know strategy. So we now can take away things that we've listened to today and implement them into your own e commerce journey. So just follow on with that step by step approach. You're used to getting your best pop up form to then putting your flows together and taking it from there and really implementing it to make a big impact on your business. Last And to all of our listeners, this is your moment to take action. Stephens advice coupled with a solid framework can really propel your business forward. And if you want to take the fast track and get things up and running quickly with your business, why not pick up a copy of my book, the home turf advantage, it's designed to complement the strategies that we discussed in today's interview, and provide you with a step by step guide to building your own successful e commerce business. Remember, every big journey starts with small deliberate steps. And let's make those steps count. You can be taken that very first step in the next few minutes, simply open up a browser and head to H T A book.com. Enjoying the podcast, we'd love to hear from you leave a comment or a review. And we might just feature it on an upcoming episode. Also, for detailed show notes and resources, head to dropship unlock.com. Forward slash podcast. If you found value from any episode of this podcast, please take just 10 seconds to leave us a quick five star review on your podcast app of choice. It helps us more than you could imagine. And who knows, you might just hear your comments on the show. Thanks for being part of our community. Your support helps us keep delivering a new episode every week. Now let's answer a question that we've had in from a listener. So if you want a question answered on the podcast, all you need to do is leave a comment beneath the YouTube video version of this episode. And you might just hear it answered in an upcoming episode. So that's exactly what Joshua has done. So thank you, Joshua, for asking this question. And he's asked, Do I need insurance for my drop shipping business? Thanks for the question, Joshua. So first thing to say as always, we are not insurance professionals. So this question is definitely best answered by insurance advisors and insurance professionals. However, I can't say what we've done. The majority of the liability with this business model sits with our suppliers. That's who create the products, that's where the products come from. But what we've done as a responsible retailer is we would always take out insurance for our businesses, so our retail businesses. Now the types of business insurance that we usually take out would be product and public liability insurance. And also, sometimes you might want to take out employer liability insurance as well, if there are more than one director for the business is something that we'd usually set up at about the point where we're starting to make sales and things are starting to happen. It's not a large expense, because we don't take any stock here. We don't have employees as such in these types of businesses. And those are just some other advantages, really of this drop shipping business model. So Joshua, first specific recommendations for your business, my advice would be to contact an insurance company or advisor and ask for a few quotes and try and get their advice. Absolutely. Fantastic question. Thank you, Joshua, useful for anyone thinking about getting started. But it is something that is only a very small expense, really, and in comparison to most business insurance. So it's a benefit again, of the business model that we're in. So we'll highlight a review that we've also had now from a listener. And again, this is coming through a comment on a recent YouTube video. So if you want to let us know what you think of the podcast, then leave a comment below. So a big thank you to Erasmo TT 2114, for the YouTube comment. And they have said, I want to thank you a lot for your videos, podcasts, emails, and books, myself and many like me very much appreciate this because unlike some other business gurus, you use your platform to encourage people and spread wisdom, giving practical solutions for real life problems over you keep it up because it massively helps. Wow, thank you very much for your review. Erasmo always great to hear that you've been enjoying the podcast and we will do our best to keep it up. So thanks for letting us know what you think. Before you go. How would you like to join our elite masterclass program and community completely for free. To be in with a chance to win free access. Simply leave us a review for the podcast on your favorite podcast platform. And check out episode 52 of the podcast for full details on how to enter that competition. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the dropship unlocked podcast. We hope you're walking away with insights and inspiration. to kickstart your E commerce journey. Grab a copy of my book The home of turf advantage at eight t A book.com is a distilled guide based on real experience to help you build your E commerce venture. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button for more strategies and success stories. If you like what you heard a five star review would mean the world to us and you might just get a shout out on an upcoming episode. And finally, thank you for deciding to spend your time with us today. We can't wait to bring you more insights on the next episode of the dropship unwrapped podcast.