- Sam Ovett
- Co-Founder of Mobile Pocket Office
Notes:
5 buckets
- Attract
- Convert
- Fulfill
- Delight
- Refer
Bio:
Sam Ovett is the Founder of Mobile Pocket Office. Sam is a professional guide turned automation mega nerd, Mobile Pocket Office is leading the way to help new and established businesses augment their human and technological resources to leverage growth and streamline productivity. As a previous professional whitewater kayaker and guide Sam has translated his experience navigating Class V whitewater and mitigating life threatening risks and hazards into the business world. He leads a team of 15 to a profitable bottom line over $1M ARR.
Sponsors:
Links:
Transcript:
Charles(00:00):
In this episode of the business. E-Commerce I talk with Sam Ovett about using automation to grow your e-commerce business. This is a business of e-commerce episode, 161. [inaudible] Welcome to the business of e-commerce the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their e-commerce business. I’m your host, Chelsea [inaudible]. And I’m gonna tell you what Sam Ovett, Sam is the co-founder mobile pocket office, where they help businesses grow and streamline using automation. I asked Sam on the show today, talk about using automation to grow your e-commerce business. He goes through a five-part framework. They’re really segments, where should we auto using automation, some of the best places. And he kind of has a nice nice way of thinking about it in this interview. As you know, I love talking about automation. So I get, you know, don’t, it’s not often I get to geek out with someone on the same topic. So I had fun talking to Sam Herr, and I think I think this would be good to listen to, and it gets you thinking about where are some places in your business. You can start adding some automation to really improve the customer experience, not just standard chat bots and that sort of thing that take away from experience to really enhance the experiences, what Sam’s in here for. So let’s get into the show and listen to what he has to say, Hey Sam, how are you doing today?
Sam (01:28):
Good. I’m excited to be here. I’m hoping we can share some stuff that people can dig into and use.
Charles(01:33):
Yeah. I’m excited to dig out about some automation. This is kind of my thing too. So I saw that and I was like, Oh, let’s let’s chat about this. So yeah. What are you guys? So mobile pocket office just real quick. You guys help folks automate, is it more on the marketing side typically or
Sam (01:53):
Yeah, so we help people automate their marketing and sales customer journey. That’s our core focus and then that’s where it starts. So we, the, the big picture view of how we work with people is we look at a business that has a lot of manual steps. Usually people are overwhelmed and they’re deciding whether or not to hire more people or to invest in some technology. And then that’s usually where the limitations are as well. What do we do? How do we set this up? How do we think about this? So we do a, an engagement with people where we actually like, think about and consult on what is the journey that you want somebody to have. And then from there it’s process, and then understanding from the process, what of that can be automated and taken off your plate to create a better customer journey, to follow up with people longer, all those kinds of things. And we can get into the details, but that’s the big picture. And then we actually have helped people. We, you know, we do it, we implement it for them.
Charles(02:50):
Yeah. I mean that whole customer journey, right? Like from when somebody first engaged with the brand to, you know, after the purchase, post-purchase all the way down to follow. There’s
Charles (03:00):
A lot there. And if you’re not, if you’re not automating it, it’s very easy to go off the rails. Right. Like it’s very easy. Yeah. You can have a great experience. One day someone else’s, it’s like, there’s all these things and like that
Sam (03:12):
And consistent. I think that’s the word, the word.
Charles (03:16):
And having that consistency, then you start being able to dial it in and say, okay, like when should we fall off? Okay. Is it, should it be three days? Should it be five? Like, and you get to, if you run enough of those tests, you get to really start. I like automation. So
Sam (03:31):
No, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And, and we break it up into buckets cause it’s like, well, how do I think about this? So that’s, I think the hardest thing for people is how do you think about automation? It relative to your business? How do you guys, you know, there’s clear think about that with the different movements. There’s clear things that come to mind like, Oh, if I could automate this, that would save me a bunch of time, but then there’s other aspects of it that people just completely don’t even think about. And so we break it up into, into five buckets that work for any industry or business. And so you have attract, right? You have to attract new business. That’s whatever you’re doing to get the word out, to get people aware that you exist. That’s generally the hardest part to automate and not always fully automateable, then there’s convert.
Sam (04:18):
Right? So you’ve got to from attract, you’ve got to convert that interest into what I just said is leads in sales, right? And ultimately you have to convert it into sales. Otherwise you don’t have a business. And so that part has a huge opportunity for automation and dialing in, like you said, and there are things that you can do with automation that you would really struggle to do. If not impossible to do, if you did it all manually, right. Especially if you have any kind of volume, if it’s small, maybe you can do it, but with any kind of volume, it just physically wouldn’t be able to keep up with the journey that you’re trying to create for people. And I think this is automation that we’ve all experienced, but we don’t necessarily know how to build it and how to think about it. Then you have fulfill, right. And that’s kind of where you start to come in. So a tool like yours with spark shipping is like, you have to fulfill whatever you promised in that marketing and that attract and convert stage, right. They bought something. Now you’ve got to fulfill it.
Sam (05:22):
There’s a lot of opportunity for automation there. And those are usually the obvious manual processes that are the backend automation that just bog you down. But they’re not the ones that make you money. They’re the ones you have to do to just not fail on your promise or whatever somebody bought. And then from there, you’ve got a delight, right? So most people just stop it fulfill. Maybe they send like one email or they send the order notification. And then they kind of forget about people. There’s a huge opportunity once someone’s bought from you and trust you to delight them, which can take a lot of different forms. But ultimately it’s the opportunity to sell them more stuff that gives them more value out of whatever it is. That’s where you make money at it, right in that stage. And the other thing is like, it’s a great opportunity to connect with the customer for the next stage, which is referred.
Sam (06:23):
So like you’ve sold something, they’re happy. They got it. Whether you delighted them or not, they’re happy with whatever they bought. If your product is good, if it’s not, then that’ll take care of itself in a matter of a couple of months. And like, you’ll be out of business, you know, but if it’s good, it’s going to figure it out. People are excited about it. And they want to refer people, especially in the e-commerce, right? Like that’s a very natural space for a referral. Some industries don’t have as much natural opportunity for referral, but e-commerce does when me bought something, they’re excited about it. I think there’s a great opportunity for them to let their friends know. And so automating and making sure you have process around your referral process so that you’re asking for that new business is essentially free marketing that you can do to grow your brand.
Sam (07:13):
People have heard of net promoter scores. They’ve heard of all this stuff. And the bottom line is that if you’re not, don’t have a systematic way to get new business from people who’ve purchased from you. You’re missing out on a lot of opportunity. So you have attract, convert, fulfilled the light and refer. Those are the five stages. And so you can look at those and you can start to think, where am I feeling like I could improve? You know? And that’s the first step. And also what is sucking up my time that if I got rid of it and I did automate it, then I could think about the other pieces of it.
Charles (07:50):
Yeah. I think that the issue a lot of people run into is the first three. Right. or even, even just number three, even just fulfill, but definitely the first three, you kind of split,
Sam (07:59):
It feels like generally the most challenging, right? It’s like the most logistically challenging to figure out.
Charles (08:03):
Yeah. It’s just a lot of data and stuff and there’s a lot of work. Right? The other ones, especially the delight and refer, that’s kind of the big moneymaker, but a lot of people are so bogged down with the first, at least number three, some people just get bogged down with three and like, yeah.
Sam (08:18):
And if you could get attract and convert dialed in like even 50% awesome, you know, like that could be an enormous amount of business that now your fulfill stage is like super cumbersome. And you’re like, I don’t have time to think about delight and refer unless you solve that problem,
Charles (08:36):
Unless you solve that. And those lasts delight in referrals, that’s where you make all your money. Right. That’s what the business actually starts building. And kind of you read that, reach that growth phase versus yeah. You can just plateau because you can just, you know, like you said, hit a, you know, hit a hit a double right on the attracting converts,
Charles(08:56):
Stuck, getting stuck, getting some leads. And then all of a sudden you bogged down fulfillment and you’re now just in a hamster wheel and there’s no kind of getting out of it.
Sam (09:04):
Yep. And so the first step is, and that’s what we do with people. So people are usually in some kind of hamster wheel. I think that’s like a great, great way to describe it. And it does, it, it e-commerce is you know, there is the audience here, but it’s really anybody who’s going through those stages. And if you’re bogged down in your fulfillment process, whether it’s physical or a service, cause that can be equally time-consuming, but we’ll focus on e-commerce because that’s the, your audience is that you got to get yourself out of that hamster wheel of fulfillment. So you free up your time because your other alternative is just to hire people to do this. And so if that is profitable great, but oftentimes it becomes less and less profitable, very rapidly to hire people, to handle the fulfill stages at any of the stages for that matter.
Sam (09:55):
So if you can use a piece of technology to automate that, then that’s a fantastic thing. And now you’re freed up to think about, okay, to, you know, now you’ve got the other two sides of the five, right? So you’ve got the attracting convert because you can probably always make those better and bring your ad costs down. If you’re doing advertising or put out more organic content that is working for you to attract people and then work on that convert stage. So that of the leads that are coming in, you’re converting a higher volume of them. But then that like magic thing, like you talked about, which is after the fulfill, how do you increase the lifetime value of a customer, right? And that’s the light and then that’s refer, that’s how you like blow it up. Right? You spent that money, you got that customer, or you spent that time, you got that customer with organic information.
Sam (10:46):
Now you, you want to do the work. That’s going to get them to buy more and more of your stuff. That’s relevant to them and refer more and more of the people they know that would also be interested in whatever it is that you have. And like, that’s the moneymaker, that’s the magic. That’s how you blow these things up. And that’s why people love subscription based products because they sort of take care of themselves in that way, if people stick around on them. But I think the big thing here is that not everybody’s. And then probably the majority of e-commerce is not subscription based. Right? Those are the, those are the stories we all hear about. We love. And like, I enjoy what we get to work on this project, but there is an opportunity if you’re not subscription-based to like, do that very simple thing in someone’s mind, but harder to do with technology and let them know about the other things you offer or things that you have a partnership with, that you offer that you make money on, that you already have made the customer for somebody else.
Sam (11:50):
You know, let’s say you, I mean, can just use a super simple example of like something like a household. Good. Right. So let’s say you sell mugs on the internet, right? Well, you gotta put stuff in the mugs and that’s a subscription recurring product that goes in that mug. And maybe it’s a, like a really nice tea or coffee. And if you partner with a brand that you like, I’m sure they have an affiliate program, most good ones do. And you can recommend that to your customers through a story of you using it in an email automated as part of that journey, knowing that they bought a mug and not a bowl from you. Right. And so if you’ve got a mug, now you can be delighting them, helping them to get more value out of your mug. They’re more likely to refer people because they’re using their mug and people are seeing that on their Zuma. That’s a beautiful, you know, mug that I got that you have, where did you get that? Oh, I got it from this person. And then so on and so forth. And now you’re selling also greater lifetime value by doing a partnership, or you could have your own thing, right. That you’re using. Does that feel relevant?
Charles (13:03):
So you’re thinking something, so kind of some followup sequence of based on what you purchased now, let’s, let’s stop providing you some ways of using that thing. Right. So it’s the mug. Here’s some things you can do with that mug. It’s a camera has a photography course. Like basically here’s how to actually get use out of the product that you just purchased from us.
Sam (13:25):
That’s all it was down to. Yeah. It’s getting use out of it. And also the other thing is if you make something that has a lifespan, right. And you know that the lifespan of the product and it’s just like a, it’s a use cycle. Right. And it ends, I mean, this is a good example. If you’re in the car, automotive e-commerce business parts wear out, you know, that that person who bought that part likely in X amount of time on an average use is going to need a new part. Why don’t you be the one? Why don’t you set up automation that reminds them at that interval? And it could be three years out, which you’re not going to remember in your brain. You’re not, you know, good luck keeping track of it on a spreadsheet for all the people who bought this part. Like it’s impossible. It’s crazy to think of. You’re just thinking about your next new customer and marketing that you have to do. So if you also have automation in place to handle that, then three years down the line, or it could be six months or whatever that you cyclist EV you’re making maybe 50% of those sales again, through you versus that person going through the search process again, when someone else, you know, those kinds of things,
Charles (14:36):
The concept’s been around for years, right? When you think of your checkbook, right? You get to that, you know, you have 150 checks, you get to a hundred number, 135. And there’s that thing in there saying like, you should go order more checks, just fill this out, basically as an address, you just like fill out your information. They already have their checking, checking information, and we’ll just send you more checks. I’ve mentioned on the show before I have a little planner you know, a journal kind of journal out my business, the kind of business high-level tasks for the week. And I think there was two weeks left in it. It’s a weekly thing, two weeks left. And as the thing saying, you should probably go buy another one of these because you’re going to run out and it takes about two weeks to ship.
Charles (15:14):
So literally get to that one. And you’re like, Oh, okay. That’s one of my, and it’s actually a task plan. And so you’re like, Oh, my task for the week is go buy another planner. So there’s ways that that’s like the old school offline way of just like, you know, it’s a book, it’s a checkbook, just gem piece of paper. And they saying like, you should go do this again. But you’re saying, you know, now, okay, you purchase this product. You start, you can monitor usage, that sort of thing. And just, Hey, you know, you’re going to need to buy X kind of consumable. Why don’t you come over here? Just kind of remind a follow up reminder, sort of I’m
Sam (15:45):
Yeah. Follow up reminders. And that’s one of the biggest opportunities and, and one of the smartest opportunities to grow your business, you know, if you’ve got something that eventually needs to be replaced, like that planner is a great example. Checkbooks, great example. There’s I mean, the examples are just endless, right? Then you can, you can put the physical thing in there too. And you can, you could even track in your system. If someone bought one that had that in there, do we see a more recurring revenue off of the people who bought the one that had the note in there? Yep. And you can also follow up with them with an email and a text message. Hey, it’s been 120 days since you bought your planner. It’s only got 150, would you like to order another one? Yeah. Like I like to get it down to that level of like, wow, why are, you know, why aren’t I not doing that? Like, that’s the feeling that I want people to have. It’s like, why am I not doing that? It’s so easy in concept. You have to get the technology in place. You’ve got to design it, but it’s so easy and concept in terms of generating greater lifetime value of a customer that you’ve already done, the hard work of acquiring.
Charles (16:55):
And then I think when people hear automation and e-commerce, they think of it as like this bad thing, right? Like a chat bot that nobody wants to chat with a, you know, you know, support and have some like, you know, garbage that like no wants to like have an automated reply.
Sam (17:09):
Yeah. Bad automation. Automation is a category of that automation. Yeah.
Charles (17:13):
This is good automation where even though as a user, right. Like I know obviously the guy wrote that planet. Didn’t it like call me on the phone, but I don’t really want, I don’t want that either. I just want some reminders sent to me, like, you don’t have to buy another one, the checkbook, like, cause you get, you get to the end of the checkbook and you say, Hey, buy this again. I don’t remember. Like, I don’t know. I just want more, I just want more checks. I don’t like, I don’t want to search. I really don’t want to do anything. I just want checks to appear at my house. And like here’s some money. That’s right. Yeah. So that’s good automation where, when you’re the recipient of it, you actually just want the automated thing. You just want to basically say like, yeah, cool. Need that check a box. And it does the thing that you want at that moment.
Sam (17:52):
Yeah. And do the best you can to lower the friction, to actually make that repurchase, you know, don’t make people go through rigmarole.
Charles (17:59):
That’s a good example too, of technology. Right? Because this is something that you, if you had to account for every order that came through, if you had to kind of set a reminder and have someone in support, say, Hey, we’ll reach out to you. And 152 days, that’s going to go off the rails real quick
Sam (18:16):
And think about like how many people that, that doesn’t scale either. Yeah. Right. Hi, you’re now making a meal, you know, a hundred thousand, 200,000 orders a year of an item. Can someone reasonably send that many emails, you know, on a random schedule, along with all the other things they do? Yep. Probably not. You know? So that’s the other thing is like you get people in the journey where they’re ready to make that purchase again. And you’re not investing more human time that you have to pay for, to do it. You’re investing time and money into a system once. Then it’s set up, of course you should tweak it. You should monitor it. That’s where like tracking the effectiveness of things comes in. But, and there’s a whole kind of conversation on automation relative to that because a lot of people do their tracking very manually, which is kind of crazy. And also generally inaccurate too. Like there’s, you’re just gonna miss stuff. So, but if you want to talk about how can automation make you more money, that’s a way that automation can make you more money. Once someone’s made a purchase, find an, and here’s a simple exercise you can do. You can put a list together were five things that someone is going to naturally buy after they’ve bought what I just, what they just bought from me. And then you be the one to tell them about it using automation,
Charles (19:40):
The nice thing, like you said, you don’t even need to go on selling it necessarily. You can just say, Hey, you bought the mug, go buy the tea over here. He has a referral link. So it’s not even,
Sam (19:49):
That’s what I mean by like, you don’t have to do the work of building a tea business. You can just find some tea that you really like, and you can become a partner with and then recommend it to your customers. And so those five things don’t actually have to be five things that you procure yourself and make, because we live in a digital world where people have affiliate links and people are used to that. And you know, it’s kind of a dirty word, right? Like it can be kind of like a, Oh, I don’t want to be an affiliate, blah, blah, Hocking stuff. But the reality is if you present it as a way, like, Hey, we partnered with them. We really liked this stuff. We wanted to introduce it to you because we think it’s great. And it’s, it’s an equal value in quality to our product, right. That was to be a pretty boring mug. But then you have, for those not watching us holding the mug up in front of screen. Yeah. I’ve got like all these beautiful pottery bags. And of course I got this white one today, but bottom line is that if you take that, you can, you can massively increase the amount of revenue that you get per customer. And that does another thing that gives you the ability to then go back to the top of your funnel and spend more, to get that better customer.
Charles (21:02):
That’s the thing, because at some point you’re going to be competing against someone right next to you. And I forget who said this, but whoever can spend the most to acquire the customer wins, right? So it’s like spending more, being able to Simone, spend more, it’s a superpower, right?
Sam (21:18):
And how do you get that super power? You make more per each customer. So how do you make more per each customer? You find more things that are relevant to the purchase that they just made to offer them. And then you use automation to get that in front of them. And you can have a little campaign about this. You know, if we go down the route of the, the, the company that sells mugs, wanting to sell tea, you can have this whole automation about T you know, it’s a campaign that’s like this really cool, maybe five part story about the tea company, how you learned about it. Now you’re connecting people. Now you’re using the power of psychology and marketing to connect people and hopefully make more sales. You know, that’s where you have to see, is it working? Is it effective? But the bottom line is more communication about relevant products. Don’t worry if people are unsubscribed, I guess it’s always going to happen. But if you are getting interest and people are taking you up on those things, then continue down that path because now you have a greater lifetime value and people appreciate the communication. And then they’re more likely to refer you because you’re top of mind while they’re using that, would you say it’s more of it kind of plays into when you’re trying to say that? I think based on what we just talked about, that’s the light
Charles (22:37):
Dwight. Okay. So what will be an example for then when you start talking about it?
Sam (22:39):
So refer is a great example of refer is, you know, give 10, get 10 right dollars. Let’s say you give $10 to a friend. You get 10 to spend with us. That’s like straight up referral type of communication, especially in the e-commerce world. Right. You’re trying to get them to introduce someone else to your brand and that’s the bottom line. So that’s your, that’s your whole goal with it. And if you can do that, then you’re making another customer for yourself and you didn’t have to spend more money on advertising, organic posting to do it. And that’s, that’s the key,
Charles (23:20):
When’s the right time to kind of hit them with that offer. Cause I mean, you see them, okay. Cause you see a lot, people do it wrong, right. Where, and that fulfillment email like, Hey, your order shipped, you know, give 10, get 10. And you’re like, I haven’t even got the order yet. Like what are you? I don’t even know if I like the product. Like why would I refer it to, you know, someone on my Facebook feed if I haven’t even like seen it yet. So like how would you get that? And when do you get that?
Sam (23:46):
So I think with the referral, there’s the thing to keep in mind is that it doesn’t, isn’t limited to one time. Right? And then it’s going to be a little different for each product. But the goal is if we think to ourselves, when is that moment that I’m getting a wow experience that I’m getting like the highest high of the product experience. That’s when you want to ask somebody for the referral, when they’re most excited. So you have to take that in. You have to do some critical thinking for yourself because there’s so many products in e-commerce. But if we take one for example, right here would be a good example. I have this, this Suunto watch, right. They, and I don’t know if they do it or not, but like I have to log in and create an account that I then like upload my, you know, runs and back country skiing and client, whatever, too.
Sam (24:43):
And so what if I were the company, if I saw that a user had successfully uploaded an activity, so first I would like have a campaign to get them to upload that first activity, use the watch. I want them to use it before I ask for referrals. Right. That’s the delight I want to like, make sure it’s really clear. They have instructions. I want to remind them, Hey, it looks like you haven’t uploaded anything to the platform yet. You know, here’s what you can see. Here’s how you do it. If you have any questions, you know, we have, if we have a support team, then reach out type of thing. I’m going to try and do it without involving humans first. But then when I see them upload that first, you know, run to the platform because it’s tied to the watch and that, you know, probably is going to be the same email they use to purchase. I want to then ask them for referral. Cause they just got the use out of it. You with me? Yep. That would be the example. So you gotta think like when are you creating that wow. Experience? And then do you have the technology infrastructure and the data to actually power the automation?
Charles (25:51):
I mean, you could even do this a lot more low tech in some ways, right of, Hey, when you use this product, you know, maybe it’s not the watch, it’s a hat, right? Like when you use this product to go skiing with post-it pick put it on our Instagram or whatever, and then at least, you know, Oh, they must’ve been skiing cause they have a picture of them ski with a hat on now let’s follow up with them that way.
Sam (26:12):
Exactly. So you can do low-tech absolutely. A good I’m trying to think of, so I’m just looking around, you know, like it’s, you can just look around your desk and see products that you bought and like, Oh, here’s one like chapstick, right? Is it chapstick company? I really like out of Joshua tree, California and I would give it like, as soon as somebody got this, I give them about, you know, two or three days to have an opportunity to use it. And I would do that probably four times at a minimum, you know? So wait two or three days, three days and just remind people that, Hey, we have this cool thing. It, you know give a chapstick, get one or something or get 5% off, you know, something like that that gives people some kind of incentive to buy it because you’re using it. It’s a consumable and you want that repeat purchase. And so I would just give people, you know, if I knew the amount of time it took for someone to likely use it, then that’s what I, that’s how I would use it in that case. Okay.
Charles (27:17):
The other one’s talking about knowing how much time, right? Because you know that chapstick, you can get it two days after it’s there, you’re going to open it and start using it. But those back country skis, you might buy them. It could be months before you can actually get out there and use them. So it’s a very different,
Sam (27:31):
So then it’s going to be seasonal, right? Whether it’s changing, they bought it in the Northern hemisphere. So, and we know that because everybody gets shipping information and e-commerce, and now we’re going to send a campaign, a referral campaign when the winter season begins throughout the winter season, you know, asking people to share pictures, but that’s all going to be automated or set up in advance on a yearly basis.
Charles (27:56):
Some tools you’d use to actually do that, to kind of get, get all that data.
Sam (28:00):
So one of the tools that we use and for us, and I’m going to preface this because it’s not about the tools, because if you can find a tool, that’ll do the job, great tools are always changing. So you gotta make sure that the tool does the job for what you need. Don’t, you know, it’s not a game of, Oh, I heard about this tool. It’s like, that’s good now. See if it actually does what you are. I’m sure you see that all the time.
Charles (28:25):
We see it all the time. I think people get way into like the tools and what they can do. And our biggest competitor here is Microsoft Excel. Right? Like, and that’s probably most, you know, that’s like, that’s like the de facto tool that does almost every B2B thing possible. So yeah, you can get way too into tools. So I definitely know that,
Sam (28:46):
But that said though, I’ll give some too. So yeah. So those are pretty cool. So one of the tools that we partner heavily with is a tool called Ontraport. And what’s really nice about them is you can hook up. They are not an e-commerce platform in the traditional add to cart sense. They’re more in this marketing space you know, landing page and you can have an order form, but if you’re in raw, e-commerce like Ontraport is not the tool you’re using to actually manage the inventory and stuff. But it is the tool to manage your marketing campaigns because you can hook up your e-commerce store to it and then power all this data driven marketing off of it and slice and dice your segments any way you want to so that you go, Oh, I’ve got this great idea for a promotion or a sale or some kind of communication you want to do.
Sam (29:38):
You can say, show me all the people who bought this and have been a customer for this long and are in North America, you know? And so you can slice off, get that and send a campaign out to them that you designed and automated. And you can also have those automated aspects of the journey that sometimes the e-commerce platforms don’t handle, you know, an e-commerce platforms usually good for some basic automation, right. It sends the receipt, right. And if you hook up some kind of shipping tracking solution, then people appreciate getting their tracking information. That’s another opportunity is when something’s actually been delivered, use that date as then the driver of the weight from when they’ve purchased it. Cause it’s the actual date. They got it.
Charles (30:26):
Yeah. And I think a lot of systems are getting better with, you know, drip, Klaviyo. They’re all kind of hooked into the platforms.
Sam (30:33):
Yeah. That’s another example. So I do encourage people to say, does, is there a native, you know, we use Ontraport heavily as essential because a lot of customers who work with to have a mix of digital, and this is another opportunity for eCommerce stores, digital products and e-commerce products. And they do, they do a promotion of a digital EEG and a physical product bundle. So I wouldn’t rule that out either for those in the e-commerce world, what can you take and make a digital product that requires, you know, effectively, you don’t, you’re not calculating your profit margins on a physical product because it’s digital. So once you build it, you can sell it. And can you sell that along with your physical product? And it’s usually much faster, easier to create than bringing a physical product to market. Yeah. And it took me down another rabbit hole.
Charles (31:27):
No, and I think digital products, one of those things that not a lot of e-commerce folks talk about it, but I know. And vice versa. Yeah. That’s actually, that’s a good point.
Sam (31:36):
You’re separate worlds. You know, that, that, there’s a lot of really smart stuff happening in the digital world, which we have to spend a lot of time and a lot of really smart stuff happening in e-commerce. And I’m hoping that those worlds collide more and more in the coming years, because I think the opportunities for learning are incredible.
Charles (31:56):
What’s a good example of a digital product you can kind of, I, I see, I see they do surprisingly well in the e-commerce world, but what are some examples that you’ve seen?
Sam (32:05):
So here’s a good one. And this is someone, this is a consumable product. And it happens to be kind of a similar vein. It’s a customer of ours. So I can tell it very accurately. They have a e-commerce store called omelet green. They sell like a herbal tea that is also has some medicinal properties for like lowering your blood glucose level. So it’s really good if you’re diabetic to help manage that. Right. And they are also, they have this, actually this came after they did their digital stuff, funnily enough. So they went to e-commerce after they’re in the digital world, but they still have their digital world, which is the guys are PhDs and they help, they have an entire DIY and full, personalized coaching program. So you can get like, just access to the material to lower your diabetes. If you’re type two down to a level where you can basically get rid of it, or if you’re type one, how to manage it really well.
Sam (33:05):
Cause the, both of the guys who started this thing are type one diabetic they’re partners in the end. So they’ve, they like experimented on themselves, went through, figuring it out, got PhDs and the chemistry of it all and the biochemistry. And you know, now they help people with that and they’ve helped a lot of people successfully. So they created an e-commerce product that they use just in their own life and package it up. But so a good example of what they sell is they sell this e-commerce product that is consumable, which is great for recurring revenue. And then they have this digital product. That’s the guide on how to actually in their case, take a heart smart action plan is what they call it, you know? So to put some words to it. So it’s you get the T and the action plan of how to manage your diabetes with it.
Sam (33:55):
And so it gets people into their ecosystem. It also gives people a tool and they’re able to sell both a physical product and a digital product. And so the margins are a lot higher on that sale and they use automation and our guests get people the full picture, yeah, run ads. That’s not automated other than just, you know, there’s somebody doing Facebook, advertising, Google advertising, and on their team, they get people in, they run people through a webinar that’s where they’re inviting them to the advertisement. And then they follow up after the webinars. So they’re selling at the end of the webinar, or they’re giving the people the opportunity for the offer after the education. And then they follow up for like five or six weeks, five or six weeks. Most e-commerce does not do that five or six weeks, just information, great stories, success story about the product and the plan that are real testimonial style that they give people.
Sam (35:00):
And that is how they drive revenue to that. So they just capitalize as much as they can on. And I would hope so because they’re a customer of ours, but you know, they do the work to attract. And then they just use automation to follow up after that live webinar. And they found that live webinars do better than recorded ones. So they just roll with that. And they also have some recorded ones, but they’ll do live ones and they just follow up to people, quote, unquote, buyer die, you know, leave their ecosystem. And that generates a ton of sales for them. And because you’re selling a physical and a digital product, they’ve got a one-time digital product. That’s super high margins with the opportunity for other digital products that are payment plans or subscriptions like work with a nutritionist. And then they have a super low ticket offer. If you will compare to that, the actual product of this tea that’s made with the, you know, the, the it’s called like Alma green that they like and were found to be effective, to keep like glucose down, if you’re doing other things as well. So that’s a good example of that. And that’s all recurring revenue for them. And they can also afford to spend more to get that customer because no matter what they’re going to, they’re making some money and they bundle it up in different ways.
Charles (36:20):
I think a long follow-up that helps too with people get used to hearing from you. And it becomes now, you’re not just a stranger, you’re actually you know, you’re actually someone they know and you’re an email address. They recognize when they get that email, it’s not like, Oh, what’s this again? And like, ah, whatever it’s Oh yeah. They sent me emails every three days. So whatever they’ve been sending me emails nonstop every six weeks and it starts to become, you know, now maybe they didn’t open the first three, but by email number nine, all of a sudden they’re like, eh, they start reading it. And it’s, that’s like, yeah. So unless people are hitting like that unscarred button right at the beginning. But if you can just get over that little bit, that little bit at the beginning, now, all of a sudden you could actually have a conversation with them. And I think knowing that is yeah. And like you said, most e-commerce brands they’re sending the one or two follow-ups and then it’s okay.
Sam (37:06):
Forgetting about you, you know, but you, but like, they’ve done a lot of hard work, whether it’s through organic content or paid advertising to get you there. I mean, that is like, that is the hardest work of business can do to get right. You know, getting that interest. And honestly the easiest work is following up, but it’s just forgotten. Cause we’re all onto that new next customer that we can get. But if you just put it in place fiber, I mean five or six weeks for an e-commerce, don’t be afraid, you know, don’t be afraid to try that.
Charles (37:38):
I think a lot of people you’re focusing on, everyone’s focusing on some sort of number or some sort of metric KPI, right. What’s my revenue per month. What’s my, like that sort of thing. But I think sometimes just, it’s a lot more valuable, like you said, slowing down a little bit and let’s focus on the average, the
Sam (37:57):
Lifetime value, right. Or the average lifetime. There’s a lot of different ways to say the same thing, but
Charles (38:02):
Basically the total value of that,
Sam (38:05):
How much money does someone spend with you over before they stop spending money with you?
Charles (38:10):
And that’s a lot harder to track. It’s not as like exciting and easy to move, but like you said, it’s more of that tsunami that like, once you start moving that number, now it’s going to really, okay. Multiplied by thousands of orders, thousands of users, thousands of customers. Now we’re really looking at, Oh wow, this is a small bump. There is really moving the bottom line. And kind of like you’re saying, it’s to run, you know, double ad spend, you have to, you know, double your ad spend. But this is a lot of things you can, a lot of leverage, you can pull that isn’t doubling spend, but can increase revenue, can increase the bottom line. Great.
Sam (38:47):
Exactly. And then the whole deal, right? If you bring it back to this idea of automation is that if you use automation to power, the communication about this and delivering those offers to people and those stories and whatever it is, you’re using communicates to get people to, to you know, opt in or buy the next thing, really buy the next thing in this case, then you’re not manually doing it. Right. And you can scale it. And that’s the key it’s like automation gives you the power to scale. That’s like the bottom line, it gives you the power to scale without extra human resources. I like that. And as soon as you add more human resources, things are inconsistent. Again. Even if they’re the best, like people take time off life happens. It’s just the reality. And so whatever you can automate do that. And then like hire, spend your money on really smart, creative people who can attract more business for you.
Sam (39:39):
But everything past the track, see if there’s a piece of technology that can do it for you, you know, and it can be configured and set up, right. Because that’s what you wanna do. You don’t, you don’t want humans doing anything past, you could talk about. Maybe they could do some stuff in convert, but really anything past the track, you shouldn’t, you know, as much as you can, don’t hire people to do it. There are situations where it’s required, but that’s why people automate their manufacturing. That’s why people automate, you know, the idea of automation first started in fulfillment, right? In the whole process, the building of things, you know, you were automating stuff. So that’s most of what we think about an automation doing a task. And if you think about your marketing and your conversion efforts as sequences of tasks of communication, then use automation to power that,
Charles (40:33):
Yeah. I like I tell you, there’s a lot of times, you know, there’s we automate 99% of orders. There’s at 1% that the humans do better. S where, and that’s okay. And like, you know that, okay. Ups ran over the box and it’s for a wedding tomorrow morning. So we have to get this tonight, down to ups. So they can next day air. Like, and that’s something that can like, you’ll never be automate that like, Oh, it’s for a wedding. I didn’t understand. Okay. Let’s, let’s kinda get down to ups right now. The fulfillment center.
Sam (41:00):
Yeah. You’ve got the 99% of it automated. Then you can actually
Charles (41:05):
Can beyond that, right? Yeah. They get, they can get their phone call and they’re not so bogged down. And I’m just going to, I’m sending spreadsheets around, they’re now going, Oh, they can hear the problem and understand and go, all right, that other 99%, that’s just, that’s running in the background. The computers get that. That’s what the robots do. This 1% that really requires me. And, you know, to make a phone call and to figure out, to really figure out how to, okay, there’s a problem. How do we solve this problem out of the box? That is where the, you know, the people should be spending their time in the business. So I like to ask, that’s definitely how we think about a toe.
Sam (41:38):
Exactly. Right. And then there’s another thing that comes to mind here. I put on my desk when I was looking for products, but this is and for those not watching, this is a handwritten, thank you note. Right. But it’s merged out of a system and it’s written by a machine that looks handwritten. And so these kinds of things that were
Charles (42:02):
Now, there’s a robot, it’s a robot that holds a pen. So it’s not like a printer that like the participant it’s a robot and the robot can basically have handwriting and they get better and better. And, but they’re really using pens. So that like, you know, when you move the pencil on the edge on, at the end of the sentence,
Sam (42:20):
It’s not, it doesn’t look like it’s printed because it’s not, it’s literally written with a pen.
Charles (42:25):
Yeah, exactly. So it happened to be by a robot, but you can, like you said, scale so you can send out thousands of those and,
Sam (42:30):
And that’s right. And you could send it right after they buy something and you could include a purse. Like you could merge the thing that they bought into that message so that you know, that the, you know, they feel like it’s not just a generic message. Yep. And you can do these personalized things with the data you have, and you can use automation to kick off that process. After the purchase happens, it sends out for everybody. That’s a great way to do, you know, encourage referrals because people open physical mail still. Yep.
Charles (43:05):
Well, especially when it’s handwritten you know, I get those once in a while, even though the Henry ones, it’s, you know, they’re selling you something usually like yeah. Ones here that they want to buy the house, you know, Hey, Charles, I want to buy it. And you’re like, what? But you look at his handwritten, like write this to me. And like, you really do read it.
Sam (43:22):
Yeah. And especially if you’re an e-commerce right. If you just bought something from someone versus trying to get sold, something you’re not interested in, you just bought something and you get like a handwritten, thank you. Note, that’s where we have this saying, and it’s on our website, but it’s be human where accounts otherwise automate. Right. But part of that is use automation to be human as well and create a human connection because the reality is, you know, that going out, that’s why you put it in place, if you did. And it doesn’t lessen the impact on the person who receives it. Yeah. It just allows you to do that for everybody. And people can argue philosophically, however you want. But if you’re hearing, you’re trying to generate revenue, that’s a great tool.
Charles (44:09):
Yes. And hopefully the people here just want, they want the revenue, right. Because at the end of the day, too, you get the revenue to help more people. And that’s kind of a goal of this whole thing, right. That sure. I could hand write. I could write all these notes by hand and do a hundred orders a month, or we could get the product in the hands of a lot more folks help a lot more folks, but we need to augment some parts of the business with, with helping different ways.
Sam (44:34):
Do you think about kind of like a bionic suit, right? How can I use technology to help me lift more, you know, move faster with less energy.
Charles (44:42):
Love it. All right. I could talk about this all day, but I watch the time. So if people want to kind of see more of what you’re doing, kind of check out the site, what could they do that?
Sam (44:52):
Yeah. Mobile pocket office.com is the best place to go. It’s really easy to book a call with us. And if people want to engage with us, the way we work is we, we sit, we have an engagement where we actually go through everything that makes up your process. We go through those five pillars. And then from there, we’re able to discuss the outcomes of what are you able to and what do you want to automate to augment your business? And then we put the technology in place and the key is then we teach you how to use it. And that way you can run with it. So that’s how we work. And it’s really exciting to see when, when people have that ability, you know, the big thing it does. I mean, you mentioned it, we were discussing before the show, but the big thing it does for people is it, it gives back their time, not, I mean, number one, it grows, you know, it grows your business. Sure. That’s huge. That’s amazing. That’s wonderful. But it gives you back your time as a human to do whatever the hell you want outside of just being a you know, robot to your business, a slave to your job that you created for yourself.
Charles (46:00):
Yup. Love it. Okay. I will link to that in the show notes and people want to reach out. I’ll definitely have it all there. So appreciate it. Come on it. Thanks a lot. It was great chatting. Thank you.
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