Tanner Larsson  0:07  

What’s up, everybody? Tanner Larsson here and welcome back to the Optimized Ecommerce Podcast. We are on the tail end of the Black Friday, Cyber Monday craziness that happens every single year. But this year was a little bit different. This year, all the normal ecom Black Friday, Cyber Monday stuff people have been having to deal with was also impacted by the post iOS advertising environment that we’re living in the post iOS start of the email environment changes that we’re living in, and the massive supply chain shortages that are impacting everybody across the board, especially people who are importing from China or Indonesia or any of the other countries. So it’s going to be a little bit different. We’re going to go over what was working, how the landscape has changed, and what you need to be aware of. To help me do that I’ve got Jeremy Friedland on here, another longtime BGS team member and customer and friend reppin the shirt, all of that. So Jeremy, thanks for being here. And let’s just dive in. Let’s talk about Black Friday, Cyber Monday stuff. 

 

Jeremy Friedland  1:11  

Yeah, for sure. So, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I did a post in Ecom Insiders, just ask people how they’re doing, how was your Black Friday, Cyber Monday? Was it better or worse than you expected? What are some hiccups that you experience, what’s the landscape out there for your Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and there’s a ton of mixed reviews, slight caveat, I’m starting with my voice here. So if it cracks a little bit, I’m not going through puberty again, just my voice is gone. So anyway, we’ve been saying this for a long time that traffic is not your problem, at least the way that most people are used to getting it. That has changed significantly over the last year and a half or so when iOS has rolled out their iOS 14 update and the iOS 15 update for the email side of it. So basically, being able to track where your sales are coming from is out the window. And a lot of people don’t really understand the concept of, well, it’s okay because I have an app like Wicked reports or Hieros, or something like that, that can track my sales. So it’s no big deal, I’ll just track where my sales are coming from with those tools. Well, that’s all great and good. You know where your sales are coming from. But that information is not getting fed back into Facebook. And I think what a lot of people are not understanding is you may be able to track your sales from your end. But Facebook isn’t getting that information. And Facebook is the one that’s optimizing your ad for the conversion event. So whether you haven’t set up an add to cart, or how to do credit card information, or hopefully purchase conversion event, Facebook, most of the time has no idea what’s happening. And so what they’re doing is a lot of times we say the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule is a great one to follow. But in this case, it is not a great one to follow because Facebook is getting 20% of the information, and trying to optimize the other 80% of people, they’re sending their ads to your ads with your money with that small piece of information. And they can’t do it, which is why you’re seeing CPMs go up, which is why you’re seeing ROAS go down, everything that you want to be good as bad.

 

Tanner Larsson  3:33  

Just to dig in a little bit more guys think about this, what Jeremy said is 100% accurate, you’re using Hieros. It’s telling you this ad campaign is generating sales. And Facebook, it’s telling you it’s a loss, you’re losing money, but on Hieros is telling you that it’s a win. So you’re gonna say I’m gonna keep running that campaign. The thing is if you keep running that campaign on Facebook, Facebook still doesn’t have the right data, it doesn’t have all that data that Hieros has. So your cost, your CPMs, your performance of that ad campaign are going to continue to get worse because they’re optimizing off the bad data because they’re thinking that it’s not a good campaign, but you’re still running it. So your CPMs aren’t going to go down, your targeting is not going to get better, but Hieros is gonna keep reporting those sales. So maybe right now, your ROAS is still acceptable based on the Hieros data or the wicked report’s data and your ad spend. But let’s say your ad spend stays the same, your sales numbers stay about the same, but then your metrics start changing in terms of your CPM and your clicks and your cost and things like that. All of a sudden, you’re still getting the sales but now your profit, your ROAS is starting to drop because Facebook has no idea what to do. And this is the world that we live in right now. And it affects everybody. So you can’t just say oh, well I’ve got wicked reports, I’ve got Hieros and I’m okay because you’re not and I’m saying that tongue in cheek because we have to leverage Hieros and wicked reports too we’re in the same boat. And it’s the best of what we have out there, but you can’t think that it’s the savior of your business, and it’s gonna make ads go back to normal because it has no impact on your ROAS, or your actual CPMs and metrics that Facebook is delivering to you.

 

Jeremy Friedland  5:14  

100%, I think that’s what people aren’t understanding.

 

Tanner Larsson  5:17  

I agree because I hear it all the time. They’re like, I’ve got Hieros, I’m good. I’m like, NO.

 

Jeremy Friedland  5:21  

Yeah, there hasn’t been a software yet that feeds back into Facebook.

 

Tanner Larsson  5:27  

The closest thing we’ve got is the conversion API that Shopify kind of pushes back into Facebook, but even that is limited.

 

Jeremy Friedland  5:34  

Yeah, totally. And sometimes double reports. And sometimes it’s just inaccurate. So that being said, what do you do? Well, you can just keep on sending people to your website. And hopefully that they started checkout, and you can hopefully get an abandoned cart opportunity there. But if you think about it, if you send 100 people to your site, and your conversion rate is 2% or 3%, then your Add to Cart rate or your checkout rate, initiate checkout rates, probably what 7%. So you’re setting let’s say you’re spending $100, a $1 per click to send 100 people to your site to cost you 100 bucks, seven of those people initiated checkout. So you get seven emails out of $100 spent, they’re pretty expensive cost per lead. So the objective should really be the two things that I start working on, I’m stealing this or borrowing this from a post that our friend David Slosh did. He has a bunch of ecom clients, he’s been in the business a long time. And that post had a lot of feedback as well from other people that have experienced it. So the number one thing you saw working best was SMS and email, those were the biggest sales came from. And if you’re not doing SMS, my goodness, you are missing out on a huge opportunity there, ROAS, ROI is crazy for SMS marketing, which means you have to build a list. So there’s a lot of different ways that you can build a list. I use giveaways, you can use an opt-in, you can do a free plus shipping, you can do a free report, I mean, what are some other ways Tanner you can think of so people can start building a list.

 

Tanner Larsson  7:14  

I mean, everything you just said for one, but other pieces of that could just be doing an awareness campaign and then doing an opt-in for content type of thing, the whole squeeze page thing that we used to use that is working again, it’s kind of funny, things come full circle. So what we used to do is the squeeze page world where we’d all get opt-ins in exchange for a free report or whatever, people are doing that again because they stopped doing it and nothing else is working. But having a good piece of content, a good piece of educational content or even something that’s working really well is what we call wizards. But a similar thing would be a quiz where they opt-in for the wizard that actually helps guide them through what product or what opportunity is right for them. And they’re giving their email in exchange for that to get a customized PDF report. We have a shoe company that we’re friends with that’s doing that right now. They switched all their ads to helping runners figure out what type of insole and shoe they need, based on the quiz questions that they offer. And then they generate a PDF report for that person, which is completely customized based on their answers. And it’s software that does this. And then they get that report. And then obviously, in the report they talk about, here are all the things you need to do, or here are the things you need for your foot. And then they suggest some of the options that they have. And if they don’t have it, they actually have an affiliate relationship with another company that they do have the option. So that’s how they’re doing their advertising now because they realize that they can’t drive traffic on a sale effectively. So they’re just trying to get the lead, giving more money to buy the lead, because at least that way they have a captive way of marketing to that person.

 

Jeremy Friedland  8:52  

Yep, exactly. And so that’s a great example, wizards. People want to feel like they’re having a custom answer, like, when you click on the things that say, what’s your personality score, what’s your Zelda character? Like everyone wants a custom response. And those things convert like crazy. And it’s a lot cheaper to lead, than sending people directly to your site. And then the other thing is you can customize the response. So now you know, you’re gathering data from your clients, so you can compare that against the people that are actually buying and say, okay, the people that are answering the questions this way, are my buyers, the people they’re answering the questions this other way are not my buyers. So it gives you a better opportunity to really hone in on your list and dial that acquisition. So that’s a great way, so SMS email.

 

Tanner Larsson  9:50  

And push notifications, we used to say never use push notifications because they’re always a distraction. Now, a lot of our partner stores are leveraging Push notifications as yet just another way to try to capture that traffic because traffic costs are going so high. They’re trying to recapture that. So push notifications are great. If you’re using Push notification marketing, but you’re doing the push notification, and then not actually following up through the push isn’t worth your time.

 

Jeremy Friedland  10:19  

Yep, exactly. So SMS and email. So build your list. That’s the lesson there, build your list the best way you know how and nurture that list throughout the year. The old way is a new way. Right?

 

Tanner Larsson  10:34  

Yeah, and the truth is through this Black Friday, I mean, we’ve been obviously seeing our own partner stores and our clients and what’s happening there. But also in our EI group, and things like that. Used to be, you could really, neck and neck your ad spend sales from new customers to your email. And they have been about even, this year what we’re seeing predominantly is three to 4x on the email side compared to the ad spend side, and most people’s ad spend, I know you’re going to talk about this, but most people’s ad spend was at breakeven or even a slight loss on their Black Friday, because the huge discounts the high ad costs, the scale doesn’t work out that well. Now, that’s not to say people didn’t have a great Black Friday, Mark Szalinski and I in a call before we’re talking about one of our other clients is in the car care industry. Amazing clients, they still did about a $500,000 Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. But the crazy thing isn’t the number there. The crazy thing is when you break down their numbers and look at where their spending came from, or where their sales came from. One of the numbers that we like to look at is revenue or value per unique session, per unique visitor, and on their ad side, their value per session was around $3, 306. But their value per email was 688. Or not value per email, it was value per session from sales generated via email. And then if you add up all emails, including the pre-email, because they used our Black Friday campaign from Econ Insider, if used all that stuff, they’re up in the $13 range. So there’s a huge discrepancy there. Now, of course, its own traffic. But the other thing is we’re already suffering from the iOS 15 issues that are just starting to take effect. And it’s still that good. And one of the things that they did really, really well, during this Black Friday was engagement, they actually got people to respond, reply to an email because since we don’t get open rate data as well anymore, we’re not getting click rate data as well. The next thing we can get to boost deliverability and everything is getting them to respond to an email. So even a Black Friday email that said hey, go buy this, there was still a trigger in there to get them to respond and hit reply to the support desk with a generic answer.

 

Jeremy Friedland  13:08  

That’s cool. That’d be interesting to look into and see how you can do that. Because most people just look at an email, click a button, and go by or whatever. But if you can get a response from it, that’s great.

 

Tanner Larsson  13:17  

There’s someone, I can’t remember who he was, it might have been, Kevin, one of our Ecom Insiders did something like that where they basically ran this crazy promo. But to get the promo code, you had to reply, the reply email was an autoresponder. So they would reply, and just the act of replying would trigger the auto-response that would say, Hey, here’s your discount code. 

 

Jeremy Friedland  13:40  

Sweet. 

 

Tanner Larsson  13:41  

And it did really, really well, obviously, because number one, their deliverability was insane, because everybody’s engaging and clearly showing the ISPs that they want that email. And then they’re getting the reaction on the back. Originally we kind of thought we wouldn’t have to do that, because that’s kind of clunky. And you’re making the person take more steps, which is never the best thing. But we’re in a new world right now where we don’t have a choice. What else can we do? So how creative can we get to do that? So that’s another angle that works pretty well.

 

Jeremy Friedland  14:16  

Yeah, that’s great because it’s going to increase your future deliverability as well. So that’s a great strategy.

 

Tanner Larsson  14:22  

I was listening to an email marketing podcast the other day, I can’t remember who it was, I’m blanking on names today for some reason. But they were mentioning that you can same day impact deliverability like the things you do on day one. It can impact the very next day or later that same day’s deliverability, I always thought it was a delayed gratification kind of thing. But they were talking about, when you get your own emails, make sure you open your emails, click through your emails. And then obviously also reply if it’s possible, even if you don’t need to reply, replying to your own emails and having your team reply to your own marketing emails will help as well, and a very small percentage of that is required to give yourself a little bit of a boost. So doing that, and then, this campaign that we’re just talking about, they started on the 13th was their presale, and they started doing that reply to get the discounts. And their deliverability was better every single day.

 

Jeremy Friedland  15:23  

That’s a great idea. I love it. Man, I got a bunch of value from this call already. That’s awesome. So let’s move on to the next strategy that works really well. It’s funny because we’re talking about the strategies that nobody wants to do. And then it goes into this the Lord down the line, it goes into a strategy that people are doing so anyway, the next strategy is the next biggest win was search marketing. So SEO, SEO, everyone hates it.

 

Tanner Larsson  15:55  

Both Jeremy and I used to do SEO for local clients and other stuff out. 

 

Jeremy Friedland  16:00  

Yeah, people hate it. But it really is the biggest win because while it might take 90 to 120 days to start kicking in, it doesn’t cost that much to do. If you compare it to how much ad spend you’re spending, like if you go get an agency to do it for 1000 or 2000 bucks a month, especially if you have a lower competition niche. Over the course of three months, four months, you can start ranking for some pretty good keywords and then just continue on with that. And the more organic traffic you can get has huge benefits. So you’re getting organic traffic in sales. Those sales are coming without you spending any additional money. So that’s not only beneficial to your bottom line, but you should always have the end in mind, most people should be thinking about selling their store. Unless you want to keep your business forever and ever never. And it means a lot to you, fine do that. But you really should be thinking about selling your store. And you’re going to get a way higher evaluation for your store if you’re getting organic traffic than if all your sales coming from paid traffic. That’s just the way it is. But also, why you have this store. It’s just going to continue to grow and grow and grow and grow your organic traffic. And that’s free sales, you guys.

 

Tanner Larsson  17:17  

You know, guys, SEO, people like oh, man I sell stuff, it doesn’t make sense to me. It’s not true. We have apparel brands that do great SEO. I’ve got a friend who has another podcast and he owns a luggage store. It’s a carry on luggage. And guess what 80% of his traffic comes from SEO. We did a podcast episode not too long ago about it. But it can be used on anything. I mean, again, like apparel stores. But if you have an interesting product like we have an EI member who has a type two diabetes product, great content, easy to write about. Also, a lot of these products that you consider boring or whatever else or you don’t have anything to say there are lots of longtail keywords that are not being utilized really in search that you could easily rank for. We’re not saying like if you sell sweatshirts, you’re going to rank for sweatshirts. That’s not realistic SEO, but if you sell Second Amendment sweatshirts, that’s a different story.

 

Jeremy Friedland  18:19  

Yep. Brad did an example last night on our coaching call. That said if you’re searching for Star Trek red shirt sweater, or hoodie, or something like that, I mean, not a whole lot of people are doing Star Trek red shirt hoodie or whatever, that’s a longtail keyword that you can get easily rank probably within a couple of days, to be honest.

 

Tanner Larsson  18:42  

And it may not have a lot of traffic, but that’s not the point. The point is that’s buyer traffic. That’s intent traffic, like go to Amazon, they type in what they want, they’re going there to buy, those keywords are typically buyer keywords as well. So it’s a thing of many small streams make a river versus just the river.

 

Jeremy Friedland  19:01  

Yeah, and that’s the greatest thing about what you said about intent is, almost all search traffic is intent traffic, there’s some that’s research, like, I’ll look up what’s Mike Tyson’s net worth. I’m not looking to buy Mike Tyson a present or anything, but I’ll do searches like that. But if I’m searching for something specific that is intent, your intent is to buy whereas with social media, you don’t go on social media to buy that’s not your intention. You’re going on there to troll somebody or you happen to see an ad so it’s way higher buyer debt for that. The second one was actually organic social media traffic. So if you build up your social media page, you’re active on there. People are active, the engagements going on that you’re posting on that page, you’re going live stuff like that. Those are big wins as well. So again, it’s lists like putting in the work. So build up your social channels. I know people that do have million-dollar stores that have like 500 people on their brand page. It’s like, what in the world? Get people to your brand page,

 

Tanner Larsson  20:13  

And brand page, Jeremy and I both also got to experience the Facebook Fan Page days when you could actually get massive organic traffic from a fan page, I mean, I used to generate three big gun pages, second page, I could generate 400,000 unique clicks a month, organically off those pages just from posting, we don’t get that anymore. So people basically stopped using it. But that doesn’t mean still doesn’t get reached. However, currently, the bigger win is Facebook groups. A great thing is building it up in your niche in general. And then you can sell them all kinds of stuff. But also could be product specific example we have Amplify client when I can actually talk about because our public, Grace, and Lace a Shark Tank brand. They are a women’s clothing company. They have a massive repeat customer rate. And 90% of that repeat customer base comes from their Facebook group and you go in that Facebook group. It is rabid fans posting like how the clothes change their life like emotional stories and they’re engaging in there and it’s this massive buyers group and people add their friends to it and the group grows organically and it allows Grace and Lace to do an easy eight figures a year just off repeat traffic not counting cold sales. Now, another brand. There’s a brand locally, I met him at cars and coffee. We were sitting there talking cars, which I like to do so he came over he’s like oh, what’s BGS? And I like Oh, cuz it was on my license plate. I was like, it’s an e-commerce optimization company. He’s like, really? I have an e-commerce store. I don’t know what I’m doing. And I’m like, oh, yeah, well, we start talking. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. But he’s generating $1.5 million a month selling eyelash extensions and stuff like that. I’m like, how much media do you run. He’s like, what is media? Ads, marketing dollars, like spending Facebook ads, he’s like, I don’t know how to do that. Like, what are you doing? Are you actually selling lashes? Or are you dealing drugs? Like how do you earn $1.5 million a month on a Shopify basic store, and then even upgrade the store, and I’m like, Oh my God. And he said, he tells me he goes, we have a Facebook group, it’s full of people who want lash extensions want to learn lash extensions either sell, have their own store, their own office or whatever you call it cosmetologist people and he’s like, that group is only about 40,000 people. But that’s generating $1.5 million a month for him. And I saw him again, another Cars and Coffee about two weeks ago right before I sold the McLaren. Actually, maybe even four weeks ago. And that’s about a year since I’d seen him. He’s still doing those kinds of numbers from the group. Still not running ads, but he knows what ads are now. Actually, he’s now a RAP client. And so he’s having us go through optimize his store. So we can like Dude, you’re just Oh my God. Let me help you, please. So that’s a perfect example doesn’t even run paid ads, just nurtures a Facebook group that grows organically and it’s not specific to his brand. It’s not his brand name group. Grace and Lace one is it’s actually just a lash extension, aficionado group, like people who like lash extensions, or working the lash extension place, whatever. So why groups specifically? Well, because when you have a group and you make a post in the group, you get to reach people who see it, you make a post on your Facebook page, no one sees it.

 

Jeremy Friedland  23:53  

Yeah, that’s why it’s funny to see people. You mentioned back in the good old days when you could get 4000 clicks to your page, you could have 30 40,000 people, 100,000 people on your page, and make a post and you get five comments, like, what in the world is happening here? So it doesn’t make any sense. So yeah, groups are a great way, and to Tanner’s point. It doesn’t have to be your brand group. It can be a niche focus group, like a second amendment group or a faith-based group, or whatever. So get creative. And the other thing you said to me that you didn’t say directly, but indirectly, the eyelashes are continuity, Tanner has been saying this since the very first BGS live in 2014. Continuity, figure out a way to get continuity in your business so that you don’t have to continue to make a new sale to pay the bills.

 

Tanner Larsson  24:49  

Yep, it’s just more and more critical every day. And that baseline cash flow that the continuity or subscriptions give you allows you to start every month with a little bit of money versus starting over every single month waiting for it to be sales.

 

Jeremy Friedland  25:06  

And the other benefit too is that when you know that you have money coming in and you know how much net profit, yes, there’s going to be churn whatever. But it’s pretty, fairly minimal month a month. So minus your churn. If you know how much net money you’re going to have every month, you can make plans. You can forecast and other things, add new products, whatever you want to do. One of our Ecom Insider members, I’m talking about the morning supplement?

 

Jeremy Friedland  25:37  

I think he’s been on the podcast Chuckie.

 

Jeremy Friedland  25:37  

Oh, Chuckie. Yeah. 

 

Tanner Larsson  25:41  

Chuckie is a guy with early to rise. We did a podcast with him not too long ago. You guys can check that out.

 

Jeremy Friedland  25:46  

Yeah, he’s doing a phenomenal job. Across the board of branding, messaging, creatives, launching new products, using his customers to launch new products. He’s doing a great job. 

 

Tanner Larsson  25:59  

That was basically a one product store. And now he’s got a morning noon and night type product, took out three different products for it. He’s got flavor drops, he’s got all kinds of things that he’s taking something that people would be like, oh, well, you’re kind of pigeon holed into one thing. And now he’s made it appeal to a lot more people and getting his exact same customers to have multiple levels of subscription with him for multiple products. I mean, it’s hard enough to get one customer on one subscription. But now he’s got them on a morning subscription. And he got them on a night subscription.

 

Jeremy Friedland  26:37  

He’ll land a 10 figure store in no time

 

Tanner Larsson  26:40  

Absolutely, and he’s doing the marketing. He’s crushing SMS. But it’s not because he’s not a wizard at ads. They’re good, but they’re not great at ads. They’re good at all the other things that nobody else wants to do. And again, I want to just say like, I love Chuckie to death, but he didn’t start out as a rock star. He literally just was like, okay, we’re gonna figure this out. He joined Ecom Insider, and he literally does everything. And then he’s like, oh, that’s cool, let’s try that. Oh, it didn’t work. Cool. Let’s try it a different way. And he’s constantly testing. But he’s realizing and he and his entire company are focused around, hey, we need to treat and nurture our captive traffic, because we can’t rely on external traffic all the time.

 

Jeremy Friedland  27:24  

Yep. And he’s willing to try everything. I mean, for God’s sake, he did an Island boys promotion.

 

Tanner Larsson  27:28  

He did. He paid the goober tattooed weirdos to do Island boys to promote early to rise stuff. I don’t know who would back out. But he will try it.

 

Jeremy Friedland  27:40  

He will try anything. So there were a lot of bad responses. People were like, for that sole reason I’m not gonna buy from him. You can’t win everybody. But you got to try. So yeah, that’s great. So just to touch on it real quick, because Tanner already touched on it. But pretty much people that just solely relied on Facebook ads and Instagram ads or advertising in general, to cold traffic, either broke even or went negative. With that campaign.

 

Tanner Larsson  28:10  

Terrible Black Friday, for the most part.

 

Jeremy Friedland  28:12  

Yeah. And according to what David was saying, hundreds of ad sets. So not just like, hey, I ran an ad for Black Friday, literally, they’re running hundreds of ads to try to get one of them or some of them to perform. So 90/10 split their 10% Working 90% not working was a loss. So the other cool thing which isn’t surprising to me was people that had Facebook and Instagram shops that went live that did Facebook Lives, Tanner knows how much I love Facebook Live for sale. So Facebook Lives with their with your Instagram shop, they killed it with that strategy. So there are a couple of different ways you can do that. You can use Facebook shops or Instagram shops, you can also do it, there’s an app called Comment Sold. That does a really great job of integrating with your Facebook Lives and your Shopify store, it does WooCommerce and stuff like that as well. But other integrations but Comment Sold is a great strategy for doing that as well going live. I know of a faith-based apparel store that goes live like three to four times a week. That’s their main strategy for sales because they just go live. And so that’s a huge way. And they actually combining SMS, email, and message marketing with the lives so letting people know hey, we’re going live in five minutes. The only way you can get this promotion is to be on live combining those two things crushed it for him. So building up those lists again, and then use those lists to get people to your live events. And then of course, creating look alike audience or just an audience in general for people that view the live. So using that because those are people that show up and buy, you know, time after time those people that show up and buy, so you can use that audience to create a new Facebook audience to market to and stuff like that. So those are the biggest those are basically the biggest wins. Let me check to make sure I’m not missing one.

 

Tanner Larsson  30:15  

While looking guys, the other thing is, there are a lot of people jumping on the Tiktok bandwagon right now. And there are all these Tiktok agencies that are popping up, most of them are a joke, there’s a couple that are good. And in fact, actually one of the few agencies for Tiktok that’s actually good and knows what they’re doing. They’ll be speaking at BGS live in January. So he’s gonna be spilling the beans on how they do it for our audience up in Dallas. Guys, if you’re not going to BGS live yet come on, like every problem we’re talking about here you’re facing and you’re dealing with BGS live is where that’s going to get solved. It’s literally where all the best and brightest ad buyers, email marketers, e-commerce people, everybody is coming together for the sole purpose of getting the collective genius in one room to be able to work through and solve this problem. Okay, Jeremy and I talked about this last week, e-commerce is headed for the roughest time it’s ever had in the history of e-commerce. And I’ve been in this ecom space for 20 years, for 20 years, e-commerce has been doing this just getting better and better with very few dips, hardly any dips. Now we’re hitting a huge cliffhanger dip with his advertising, supply chain, iOS, all this stuff. And the market doesn’t know how to recover, they don’t know what to do, the industry doesn’t, it’s going to be the people who band together and figure it out together that are going to rise and going to succeed. That’s what BGS live is about this year. So make sure you get your ticket and join us there. It’s January 10th, 11th, and 12th in Dallas, so it’s easy to get you no matter where you’re at. Even internationally, it’s easy to get to and it’s BuildGrowScaleLive.com And you can get a cheap ticket right now. So it’s the best thing in the world, we’re keeping ticket costs way low this year. Because we know people need to get there and we want everybody there to be able to be a part of it. So every all this Oh shit, whatever, like, yeah, it’s happening, it’s gonna affect you, it’s gonna get it’s honestly going to get worse. We’ve got to take advantage of what we can and everybody worked together to solve it, because we’re going to get through it. But we’re not going to get through it alone.

 

Jeremy Friedland  32:23  

And honestly, the amount of opportunity, so for the people that are willing to do the work, right, the people that are willing to do the work like the Chuckie’s out there that are willing to do the work, there’s a huge opportunity because like Tanner said, there’s going to be ECOM stores going out of business like crazy, that’s willing to do the work, you can turn those things around and make a huge profit because people are going to be dumping them, they’re gonna make I can’t even do this anymore. I’m just losing money every month, I just want to, I just want out. So if you want it, I mean, you might get three opportunities out there.

 

Tanner Larsson  32:53  

Whether it’s buying them, merging with them, or when they drop out and they leave a hole in the marketplace. If you can survive, and the only way you’re going to survive is whatever one you have deep, deep, deep, deep pockets. Or two, you get smart and you work with people like us and the other people that we’re bringing in because guys, we suffer too. But we’re determined to solve the problem and fix it. And we have a reach to bring in all the right people to have everybody like a think tank. And we’re going to do that at the event. That’s what we’re doing. But those are the only two ways you’re going to get past it otherwise as Jeremy said, you’re going to see anyway, you’re going to see droves of Ecommerce businesses folding up and closing shop over the next eight months. And I mean, it’s a prediction, of course, I could be wrong, and I hope I’m wrong. About 9999% sure that I will not be wrong.

 

Tanner Larsson  33:00  

Yeah. And so this is stuff that we know, to optimize stores. And I mean, I could do a random search and pick out an ecommerce Store that I can fix in a month. And so I just got my checkbook, just hanging out. You don’t need to hire a new team.

 

Tanner Larsson  34:04  

Yeah, it’s gonna be fire sales.

 

Jeremy Friedland  34:07  

Yeah. And BGS live, I want to plug it too because I believe in it so much. I’ve gotten everyone since the start.

 

Tanner Larsson  34:16  

Before he was even part of BGS, by the way.

 

Jeremy Friedland  34:19  

Yeah. Before the end part of BGS. I’ve been with Tanner, follow Tanner forever. And I will say there’s something unique about the people that come to the BGS live event where they are so willing to share what is working without any expectation of anything in return. Everyone there just wants people to win. And I mean, the majority of people sure there’s always going to be some people that will try to say this or say that on the side or whatever. But for the most part there’s just something about the BGS people that come to that event that they are just willing to share and learn. And you can learn so much especially if you have a struggling business. You need to show up. I don’t care what you have to do if you have to go DoorDash for three months or we don’t have three months. DoorDash for a couple of days. Just get there and get to the event, it will change your business for sure.

 

Tanner Larsson  35:17  

So last plug, guys, BuildGrowScaleLive.com be there on January 10th, 11th, and 12th in Dallas, Texas. Now, before I started that tangent, I was gonna tell you one other thing on the ad front, after TikTok that is still working. And that is Google Shopping. Google Shopping is very effective. Because it’s literally a product feed. It’s not the same as your normal search traffic and all of our search ads and things like that. The problem with Google Shopping is it’s a finite resource. You can’t scale it, there’s only so much traffic or so much opportunity there. But you should definitely be leveraging it and spending some time optimizing it because it is one little traffic channel, but I would consider that a trickle. It’s never going to be anything more than a trickle but it’s really really profitable.

 

Jeremy Friedland  36:07  

Yep, for sure. And retargeting, of course, assuming you can get your pixel to fire.

 

Tanner Larsson  36:15  

And third-party retargeting networks are still working guys. Like it used to be perfect audience now it’s called SharpSpring, Site Scout, Ad Roll, those third party networks are still effective, they still reach a different audience than you would reach through Facebook and Instagram retargeting plus they allow for banners, and they’ve got some great mobile ad environments, and even some direct TV placement type stuff. There’s a lot of really good ones out there that are worth testing. You might as well be building the audience. And this is something that I and Jeremy know because I used to teach it. But was this sequential and multi-dynamic retargeting where you have five or six different retargeting pixels on every single page for different platforms that just make it so you literally show up everywhere. And then you run sequential campaigns through those different pixels. And I mean, I started teaching that in 2015, or something like that. But most people don’t do it still. And it still works incredibly well. 

 

Jeremy Friedland  37:15  

Because it’s work. 

 

Tanner Larsson  37:16  

Yeah, it is work. It does take effort 

 

Jeremy Friedland  37:18  

On the front end?

 

Tanner Larsson  37:19  

Yes. But once it’s set up, it’s pretty easy, but it’s a pain in the ass to set up. And it looks daunting when you look at the like flowchart of it. Well, anything else on your list?

 

Jeremy Friedland  37:33  

I think that just the retargeting dynamic branded search obviously really works, that’s always worked really well. So when people search for your brand, obviously, they’re gonna find your brand. But yeah, other than that, just put in the work and get ready, the best time to really start preparing for your next Black Friday is today. Just get all your work in now. And imagine if you start doing the work now. All the stuff that we talked about, you could get done and set up in two weeks and get it building now. So that you have all those things, all that data, and all those lists ready to promote for all the other holiday sales going on.

 

Tanner Larsson  38:18  

And the other piece to two final thoughts, and then we’ll wrap this up because I don’t want this to go too long for you guys. I want you to actually listen to it and not click out of it. So number one is it’s December 1st as the tight day I’m recording this. So that means you’ve got 15 days of promotion time left realistically before your cutoff day for Christmas shipping. And it’s earlier this year because the postal mail stuff is just garbage right now too. So you’re going to have to have your cut off a little earlier, but this is your last little hoorah before Christmas. Okay. And number two, post-Christmas. That’s New Year’s in January, and most ECOM stores go through a heavy slump in the first quarter of the year. Okay, unless you’re like a Valentine store and you kick ass in February or something like that. But most stores, the more traditional niche stores are going to suffer. You don’t have to suffer if you plan it out in advance and you’re figuring out what you can do. Okay, so how do you make sure that 2022 is so weird. 2022 is better than you’re probably fairly shitty 2021 And that’s not going to be doing the same thing you did in 21. So ending on that depressing note. Thank you guys for listening. It was a great show. I enjoyed it. Jeremy, thanks so much for being here. I need you to make sure you are subscribed, whatever if it’s on audio and Stitcher or iTunes or Spotify or whatever. Make sure you’re subscribed make sure you’re also subscribed to the YouTube channel because it’s a video podcast as well. And then to get show notes and all the other things you need go to BuildGrowScale.com/podcast alright guys we’ll see you in the next episode.