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Jeremy Weisz 5:29

Really, I didn’t know that

Dean Dutro 5:30

Yeah, it has they’re done. And makes sense, because their whole system was I mean, there’s literally a dinosaur they’re named after a dinosaur. But anyway, so he’s clearly—

Jeremy Weisz 5:42

They’re extinct now.

Dean Dutro 5:44

Yeah. We, they’re still growing and evolving. They have all these new features. We don’t leverage their SMS just yet. They’re still catching up to some other companies, we use a company called PostScript. And often also Attentive for SMS, depending on the size of the client, and they just have great customer service, one of the things I look for in software partners is do they have good customer service? Can you get on the phone with someone? Right? And that’s really hard to do with most software companies. Klaviyo, PostScript, Justuno, his email capture and conversion pop up software we use. You know, they even have a dedicated Slack channel that they connect with us on. Right. So you gotta get with the software that have great customer service. Because it means they’re they’re committed to you and committed to improving their product over time. So those three are like the ones I highly, highly recommend.

Jeremy Weisz 6:38

Those are the big ones. Yeah. I mean, you say like Klaviyo is easy to use? It’s because you guys are masters at Klaviyo. All? Yeah, you know, a lot of times people will get super confused with those things. But I want to dig into we’re going to talk about SMS, we’re going to talk about email. And I would love to have you talk about just some of the series I mentioned, there’s all these different types of emails that people should consider sending. Because I think some people have a notion of well, you just go out and you send a broadcast email whenever you want. And, and you would in most people who use email correctly would argue differently. So what are some of the things people should be setting up inside of their emails to support and nurture their customers?

Dean Dutro 7:25

Yeah, and that’s a great question. I will say, if you’re not sending any emails at all, then you should just start sending campaigns, you know, tomorrow to some folks. But uh, you know, ultimately, email is about sending the right message to the right person at the right time. And luckily, in eCommerce, all that stuff is very trackable, right, so we base our conversations, our flows, strips automations. Everyone has different jargon for it, I call them flows based off the customer lifecycle in eCommerce, which is very, very simple. You have prospects, new customers, repeat customers, what we call like your VIP customers, lapsed prospects, and lapsed customers. And for each of those stages, you can create, you know, an email flow three to 10 emails, depending on how advanced you want to get that targets each of those. So it comes out to be eight, eight flows, on average, I call them the foundational flows.

Jeremy Weisz 8:27

There should be a book, I’m waiting for your book, the foundational flow, yeah.

Dean Dutro 8:32

Just get some interviews and transcribe it so many times. But the foundational flows, what they do is they accomplish several things, right? So email is a combination of brand indoctrination, right? So letting people understand and get to know your brand, customer support and customer service. Right? So how can you use email as a customer support tool that provides a really great experience as well. And then also letting them know about new product products, sales, things like that. So you have to have a mix of these things in there. The sort of top four flows, I would say people should get started with, is get a welcome flow for prospects. Right? So put people through a series of emails that informs them about your brand, because I guarantee they’re price shopping. And they’re looking for indicators such as trust, social proof. Do you have good deals? Do you have high quality products, so whatever your sort of leverage is use that. The next is the new customer email. A lot of people don’t set this up at all. But there’s something that happens when people purchase things called buyer’s remorse. And what that means is you immediately regret a purchase you just made, right? Like how many times you’ve been at the supermarket or purchased a car, and you’re like, Oh, shit, was this the right decision? I don’t know if I should have done that, like was this impulsive? So you want to pepper people with affirmations that hey, you made the right choice here. Like, and we’re here for you if you need anything if anything goes wrong. And then of course, everyone probably knows about this buy now cart abandonment emails, right? So these are people that are intending to buy, but something happens. And I don’t think I really need to talk about that everyone kind of knows what that is by now. And then a really well—

Jeremy Weisz 10:18

I think, you know, Dean people. I mean, I was shocked by the metrics of cart abandonment, like, I don’t know, it’s, is it like 90%? Or 95%? or something of that? They add it to their cart, and then don’t buy it?

Dean Dutro 10:32

Yeah. Yeah, right. It’s like 74% of people that add to cart don’t purchase.

Jeremy Weisz 10:39

Okay.

Dean Dutro 10:39

Now there’s two, there’s two different things to think about. One is add to cart, right, which is you click that add to cart button, and then it ends up in your, your cart icon, the other is added to checkout. Right? So those are two separate things that often get confused. Your add to cart versus add to checkout or checkout started metrics, the conversions are gonna be different, because that checkout started is where they’re putting in their credit card information where they’re putting in their address, it’s a signal to to buy, right? So you actually would have two flows? I’m probably getting way too technical here.

Jeremy Weisz 11:15

No, I say no, keep going.

Dean Dutro 11:18

Yeah. You’re—

Jeremy Weisz 11:20

I mean, anyone, the only people listening this, you know, they probably are, you know, when you get too technical, it’s not too technical for someone who’s actually has an eCommerce store and is interested in things that you know, we will talk about general business stuff on here, so you can stick with it. But I believe, you know, the honestly, for any company, this is this applies to any company, this is not just eCommerce, right, this is you should have a welcome flow, you should have a new customer flow, you should have a you know, if it’s set up with the right email, like a cart abandon like someone, if it’s a course if it’s a service, if it’s something so anyways, keep going with it. Yeah.

Dean Dutro 11:56

Yeah, no. And that’s, that’s exactly the point is the customer lifecycle doesn’t really change from industry to industry, right, but the tools change and how you can apply changes, right. But if you have that foundational knowledge of this is what people go through. This is the average purchase time, this is the average repeat purchase, you can kind of make educated guesses, because I think marketing is part art, part science, and it’s always unique to your brand, right. But there’s some foundations that run rampant no matter what. So anyways, yeah, 74% of people abandon checkout. And so you just want to follow up with those people, you know, and again, you don’t have to give a major discount, but educate them, you know, provide good customer service. And then I like to use what I call a discount escalation ladder, which is we don’t provide discounts until they’re like, it’s like a last ditch effort, right? where it’s like, we’ve sent them all the good information, we’ve done all the customer all the purchase objections, we’ve gone through the process, they’ve been to our site, and like forever reason they’re not buying, let’s give them a discount. That’s the approach I like to take.

Jeremy Weisz 13:04

I like that the panel, your margin, the patented discount escalation ladder, you have a lot of interesting stuff. And you will is interesting, because we’ve all experienced this as a customer, I have like where I like it, I’m gonna get it I go in, it’s amazing. I mean, talk about low hanging fruit if you don’t have a cart abandonment series, right? Yeah. It’s someone who went and entered everything in there went to checkout and didn’t checkout. So maybe their kid like, fell down the steps or something. I don’t know. I mean, or whatever happened, they just had to go away. But talking about the discount escalation ladder, you know, I’ve been I’ve, you know, gone to add something to my cart. I’m like, Oh, I got busy. And I went off, I’m gonna go back and buy it. And some of those companies sent me like, Oh, 20% off, I’m like, Oh, good thing, I waited, they sent me a 20%, I was gonna go back and buy anyways. But if they sent me like you said, A escalated, you know, different emails, and just there was education information that would have just reminded me to do it, and I would have bought it anyways, as opposed to give the most and I appreciate the 20% discount. But then you also wonder, Well, what do you know, if there’s a trust factor there, if someone just offering a discount right off the bat is like, well, should I have just waited. Should I wait all the time now for buying companies from this product? Because they’re giving you know, so there’s that can have a negative effect as well?

Dean Dutro 14:25

Yeah, right. And, and what’s what’s that kind of a long term negative effect. But what’s really interesting is that over time, you can create segments in your email system of discount purchasers, and non discount purchasers. So then you can start to target different people with different sales or product launches with either no discount or discounts based off their past purchase behavior. So over time, your you know, it should start to level out because it’s gonna be a large percentage of people that never purchase with a discount. We know that because if you offer 10% off, you know, for adding your email and there’s only like eight to 10% of people sign up for that, which means anyone else that purchases isn’t using a coupon code.

Jeremy Weisz 15:11

Some of the best, you know, over time, I’ve probably interviewed some of the best direct response copywriters, direct response marketers in the world. Okay. And they always talk, Dean about list segmentation, how important is for list segmentation? Can you? Can you walk me through a little bit about what you’re looking at? Because you’re looking at the back end? And you’re looking at all these metrics inside of Klaviyo? What do you see is how people should segment their lists?

Dean Dutro 15:39

That’s like, that is a very tough question.

Jeremy Weisz 15:43

Well, you you hit on it a little bit with, you know, discounts. That’s one way, you know, you can segment and look at sending really customized messages or emails. So one would be, you know, people who bought with a discount, what are the other kind of metrics or things you’re looking at on the back end?

Dean Dutro 16:01

Yeah, so one of the key things you want to think about initially, right, because you could segment a million different ways, right. So I really like to think about it from a 2080 perspective, and then a growth perspective of your brand and email list size. What that means is when you’re first starting, is all about engagement. Right? So who is engaging with your brand, who sometimes engages with your brand, who like rarely engages with your brand, and who’s never engaged with your brand, actually called them groups A through E. So group A’s are people who will open almost every email, Group B is like they open every two weeks, Group C is once a month, or D is once a quarter, and Group E, you take them off your list. And there’s actually a technical definition of engagement from Google, which is about 120 days. So if someone is on your email list and hasn’t engaged with your brand, whether it’s opened an email, clicked an email been to your site, or purchased anything in 120 days, they’re automatically considered unengaged in Gmail’s eyes, right? A lot of people don’t know this. But if you go to your trash, and you search and you search in your trash bin, you’ll see emails you never deleted in your trash, now, your spam but your trash, because Google is basically saying, hey, you haven’t opened an email from these guys in a long time, it’s not technically spam, because you haven’t marked it as spam. But you haven’t unsubscribed, let’s just put it in their trash. Right? And a lot of people don’t know that. So you got to really be aware of that and, and keep that 120 day, you know, segmentation in mind. So depending on your, there’s 100 different ways you could do it. But a good rule of thumb is like, if you don’t know, start with anyone who’s opening email last 30 days, see if your open rates are high, which would be 30% or more 35%. Then once you send it to those people expand it to like 90 days, and see what does engagement look like, if you send two people haven’t opened in 90 days, if it’s still, you know, 20 25%, you go all the way until you’re about 15%, open rates for campaigns. And then you start scaling back because that’s that’s where it gets a little sketchy in terms of your overall deliverability to see how much information but—

Jeremy Weisz 18:11

No, I love it. Because you look at engagement first and filter first by engagement. And then there’s other ways you can obviously filter and segment things.

Dean Dutro 18:20

Yeah, cuz it’s about deliverability first, right? It’s about building trust with Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, whatever email systems people use, because without that trust built, then your emails are going to succeed. The foundational flows also really help build trust. In fact, I say the foundational flows tee you up for success later, because it builds trust, trust, open rates, click through rates with your subscribers with Gmail, because it’s very targeted. And then when you send a campaign, you know, for Black Friday, your open rates should be higher, and you should, you know, make a bunch of money.

Jeremy Weisz 19:00

You know, and I love what you said about 80/20, I think about 80/20 on hourly basis, okay with everything and people. So I want to hit in we talked about the eight foundational flows, what stuck out to me, like a bat signal was the VIP, right? Because if you think about 80/20, like 20%, you know, people first of all, I had Perry Marshall on my podcast, you should check it out. Yeah, he wrote the 80/20 Sales and Marketing book. It’s a fantastic book he was personally mentored in was his relationship with Richard Coach who wrote a lot of the 80/20 principle books, if you check them out on Audible, but, you know, 20, you know, 80% of our sales come from 20% of our clients. I mean, it’s just, you know, the 80/20 principle, right. So the VIP could even be 5% or 20 95% of revenue comes from 5% of our clients, potentially. Right. So I’m curious on VIP flow? What are some things that you find how you communicate with those VIPs? Or what do you do with those? VIPs? Yeah, so

Dean Dutro 20:09

this is a, this is one of our, I think, unique flows that we build out for our clients that we’ve tested over time. So one is the, you want to start moving into text based emails, right? And video based emails. So typically, what we’ll ask our clients, Hey, can you create just a selfie video of you thanking your best customers for being loyal, joining you on the journey and show some gratitude towards them. And then hint that because they’re a VIP, they’re going to get special access to new product launches, first, you know, emails from you etcetera. So I like to start with a simple letter from the founder, and then a video from the founder, right? And those performs so well, they’re usually, I don’t know, a paragraph, maybe two, no links, no sales, no language, and they crush it. They absolutely crush it. You could go a step further if you’re willing to and identify your VIP customers. And we’ve got a couple of clients who have started doing this actually heard this from someone I had on podcast. But if someone spends $1,000, with you, or $2,000, with you, depending on you know, on your price, whatever your price point is, these people, they’ll call those customers.

Jeremy Weisz 21:35

100% it’s like the Lost Art of talking to someone over the phone.

Dean Dutro 21:39

Yeah, that blows people away, you know, and you never know who you’re going to call or send a video message like that, to who may happen to have a large Instagram following, or a large social media following. And then they post about it, right. So there’s some, like, I call it like backyard marketing at scale, which is, like, when you’re over barbecuing with someone, like you’re wearing like a cool shirt. You know, people are like, oh, like, tell me about that shirt. And you’re like, Oh, I got this from these guys. What if you’re like, I got this from these guys. And then they called me and thanked me. You know? But then imagine that, you know, with 5000 Instagram followers, or 10,000, or whatever, so you just—

Jeremy Weisz 22:20

Never know.

Dean Dutro 22:20

Just never know, yeah.

Jeremy Weisz 22:22

I mean, they are your premium. You know, they’re your VIP customers, right? I mean, they love you the most obviously, they’re showing it with their wallet by buying stuff from you. So yeah, so if people don’t get anything else out of this entire interview, like right now, you should probably after this interview is done, listen to the rest of it, but look and see who are your best selling, just give them a call, like, say thank you and, and chat with them. You know, it’s like, so simple, and it probably will take 10 minutes, but it will have a huge impact on them and your business. Right? Um, yeah. So thank you for sharing that I love that VIP. Then the next thing I want to ask about Dean is I want to kind of talk about SMS and email a little bit. And SMS like, I don’t know, there’s not a text that comes through that I don’t see or chat. Yeah. And I would think even your, I would argue like you seem busier than me. So I would guess that you also look at all your text messages. deliverability. And the viewing rate is huge. Talk about there was a golf company. Talk about the golf company and what they do with SMS.

Dean Dutro 23:37

Yeah, so SMS is like, there’s like a gold rush where there’s a gold rush for phone numbers, right? Because people are starting to see the value of it, right. And if you get into it early enough, I think you’re going to be positioned long term for long term success with your customers before your competitors get in. Because they’re not going to want to have, you know, three golf companies texting them, they’re gonna have one, right? And they’re gonna want to be loyal to them, right. So you got to get in early. But ultimately, like for these guys, we started text messaging from about three, maybe four months ago, zero list. So it’s, it’s an investment, right? And it’s just like growing your email list and a lot of ways, but it’s a little bit different than email. I think it’s an auxiliary benefit, that has a potential to be a main source of input from people for so for a couple of reasons. Let me take a step back for these guys. You know, we’re three months, we collected three or 4,000 emails, and or phone numbers. And from that, you know, we’re making 30 or $40,000 a month from text messages. That being said, we’re also sending emails at the same time we’re sending text messages. So you know, there’s there’s data out there that shows that if people see—

There are multiple touch points there.

Multiple touch points, right, so it’s not 100% attributable that could come from the email or fake Facebook ad or SMS, but the more touch points you have, right, the more likely people are going to convert, which then increases your overall margins, increases creates revenue velocity. The hardest part about SMS is the character limit is very tight, right? It’s gonna be very direct and to the point, and a lot of people are unsure if they should prioritize collecting emails or collecting phone numbers. That’s it. That’s a big sort of hump that people have to get over. Like—

Jeremy Weisz 25:30

Can you do both at the same time with an email opt in capture? or?

Dean Dutro 25:34

Yeah, so I like to do is, is present the email opt in first. A company that does this really well as Hydro Flask. If you go to their website, you’ll see how they, how they build it. I think they use Attentive for software, but how they do it is, and I think it’s genius is the capture the email first, just like a typical pop up. And then the next page says, Oh, we also have this SMS program. If you want news faster or better deals and your, you know, phone number to join the SMS list, then you capture both, but if they don’t answer it, you sell their email. Right? So now you’re you’re you’re able to potentially collect two sources of data from them. And then you email them the relevant information. Now, in regards to SMS, you know, right now you’re gonna have 99% open rates, right? In the future. I already know this, because I’ve seen screenshots I think we might have talked about. It was you and I talking about it in the mastermind. Apple is starting to create like promotions tabs in their text in their in their I messages. It’s in beta, but they haven’t launched it. So in the future is gonna be Gmail, where it’s like your inbox, and then your promotions, which makes a lot of sense. And why wouldn’t they do that? And then I’m sure there’ll be data on like, the average number of text message subscriptions people subscribe to my guess it’ll be like, six. Right? So can you get on phone numbers early? I imagine, you know, if you just look at your text message screen, you only see maybe seven or eight messages. You don’t want them all to be from companies. Right? So I think it’ll just be like a matter of how things look on your phone.

Jeremy Weisz 27:15

Mm hmm. What are some of the incentives Dean, that you’ve seen work with SMS? because like you said that one company takes you another page. I mean, I used it even with the chiropractic office I owned, if someone’s sitting there, the staff would be like, if let’s say they came in for a massage, be like, Listen, if you want to discount off today’s massage, of $10, you could just subscribe right now. And you’ll get you can unsubscribe at any time, but you will get the best deals, you’ll get the best, you know, the information first, etc. And because that is a valuable touch point, you know, what are some incentives, you’ve seen that work with companies?

Dean Dutro 27:56

Now honestly, it doesn’t have to be too different than email, I used to be in the camp that if someone’s going to give you their phone number, then you should offer better discounts. I don’t believe that anymore. Because I think it’s a preference choice. Right? What you’re really offering is a preference. So your email discount should be the same as your SMS discounts. In my opinion, a lot of people started going Oh, like, we got to collect all these phone numbers. So offer them better discounts. I thought that too, but it’s really a matter of preference, right. And what I’ve seen is demographically there are certain demographics that actually prefer text message, you’d be surprised to hear it’s often baby boomers. So companies that target baby boomers like a golf company, for example. They like texting better than email, right. And the other thing is, is the key to a successful SMS program is if you make it a two way communication channel, so you need a customer service rep. Or you can do it yourself. If you just want to get started, where people can respond to you via text, just like they’re texting a person, the people that do that are going to far outperform and get massive ROI, you know, by hiring a person to feel these numbers because people don’t really respond to promotional emails, you know, like no reply to a black friday email. Never, never, I know. But if you encourage that on SMS, I think that’s going to be an extra piece and layer of customer service that that will help your brand grow.

Jeremy Weisz 29:27

So is there in this way, this is kind of a separate topic a little bit but lets you know when you go into a website, and oftentimes you’ll have a chat feature, right a thing pops up go Hey, how can I help you? Does the recommendation of the software you use and help people set up these flows for use that type of technology? So like if someone enters in or is it more like a lead capture that where people are capturing that, that text message because when I picture two-way conversation I picture that, you know, that box shows up, whatever, there’s tons of intercom, there’s a bunch of ones and you’re typing in there. Does this also replace that from the web page? Or is this just totally a separate piece from just an SMS perspective?

Dean Dutro 30:15

I imagine in the future, it’ll be a lot more integrated. Yeah, right as, but you can, like you can collect phone numbers and emails from those chatbots and send it to your software. But you have to still view it in another software. So I imagine the future will be integrated. I hate chatbots. Because often they’re bots. Yeah. And, and I have to, I have to wait on the website. I don’t want to wait on someone’s website. You know, like, I want to send them a message and then hear back without waiting. So that’s why I think SMS well—

Jeremy Weisz 30:45

Asynchronous?

Dean Dutro 30:47

Yeah, exactly. But I, you know, I think those chat bots are still good. But SMS, you know, because you don’t have to wait on site is, is going to be the best route.

Jeremy Weisz 31:00

For what you recommend is you’re sending like broadcast messages, or text messages, but it allows a two way communication. So they can, I mean, not all of them will be like deals or sales that may be just, whatever, some kind of information and encouraging someone to respond back.

Dean Dutro 31:17

Yeah, and just like an email, your SMS messages, you can create a flows. So you’d still target the same people with a slightly different smaller message. And it’s very powerful. The receipt, people love the receipts on their phone, right? Just getting a text message saying, confirm your order, your order has shipped, let’s perform really well. But sometimes you can add in a little discount here and there and those but people love people respond really well just just see all their friends peace of mind, again, that buyer’s remorse that you’re tackling.

Jeremy Weisz 31:54

I feel like Dean, this is you can correct me if I’m wrong. This is also low hanging fruit, what percentage of companies that come to you with email do not have text message at all?

Dean Dutro 32:06

Almost all of them, all of them.

Jeremy Weisz 32:07

Wow.

Dean Dutro 32:08

Yeah, I’d say like 90% aren’t using text. And if they are, it’s very basic.

Jeremy Weisz 32:14

That’s shocking.

Dean Dutro 32:15

It’s very shocking. Yeah, I think it’s because it’s hesitancy. It’s that are we intruding on people as their privacy issues, you know, you want to be US based in the United States is an opt in culture, or excuse me, opt out culture, but around phone numbers, it’s a lot more restrictive. So they want to make sure you are opting in. So you know, the specific language you have to use on your website, that to some people, they may think it’ll hurt conversions, or to look bad or whatever. But it’s, it’s not a big deal. Especially as it goes to market.

Jeremy Weisz 32:48

Is there a language that you found make people feel warm and fuzzy to give an email or sorry, a text? Like, you know, it always, always, I always think of not using the word spam, like we use words like we will not spam me, well, that means we’re probably going to spam. I mean, that’s what they’re thinking, right? Why using the word spam at all? So is there any language you found that is good to add to that is not total legalese speak, but is good for them? Make them feel good, but sounds like a normal human being.

Dean Dutro 33:20

I just think using humor from your brand works really well. You know, like, you don’t like you’re not gonna trick people into giving you their phone number, you know, like you’re not and just being straight up like, hey, like, you can enter your email, get a discount and enter your phone number and get a discount, right? And you can make it look nice, make it humorous. And then with there’s specific language you have to use, right? So you just use that and people feel safe. Some copy works better than others, some design works better than others. I really like two step opt ins which means you ask someone if they want a discount, they say yes or no. It’s called a micro conversion. And by doing a micro conversion, you’re more likely to get a second Yes. And a third. Yes, right. It’s some psychology term of escalating yeses or some can’t remember.

Jeremy Weisz 34:11

Yeah, Robert Cialdini talks about in his book Influence and I forgot the exact example but they asked people to put like a small sign and then or sign a petition and then went back and anyone who signed the petition, they put it like a monstrosity of us. I’m probably I’m butchering it. You could just check out Influence Robert Cialdini, but it goes to your point, you get this small commitment. And then the next commitment. Oh, yeah, we’re gonna put a big billboard on your lawn. Is that okay? Oh, yeah, sure. I already signed it, you know, so yeah.

Dean Dutro 34:41

Yeah. And we may be tested. So we find that two step usually converts higher, but not always, right. There’s certain brands where it hasn’t worked as much. I don’t know why, but it could, you know, it’s always worth an AV test.

Jeremy Weisz 34:56

I want to talk about email. So that’s fascinating. Thanks for going down that path for the SMS piece. And let’s talk about email. And we were talking about before we hit record about how it has saved companies in some respects. And I didn’t want you to tell me anything else, because I want to hear it on here. But what did you mean by that?

Dean Dutro 35:19

Yeah, so there’s this concept I’ve been, I’ve been playing around with someone’s probably already come up with it. But it’s the idea that if you’re in influence, like if your brain has 1000s of followers on Instagram, or Facebook, or YouTube, or other social media, TikTok like your basically your rental business, right, you don’t own any of that at all. If you think you do, you’re wrong. And even your SEO you don’t own because Google can change your algorithm at any moment. And then your visitor count goes down to nothing. I’ve seen that happen in the last six years, dozens of times where someone gets banned from Facebook advertising for zero reason, right, especially during the pandemic, like they crack down hard on companies during the pandemic. And those companies, like if they didn’t have an email system, they wouldn’t be making any money at all. So what happens with email, there’s two major benefits. One is that, and I would say this about any owned marketing, but specifically email, because you can send out promotions is that it’s a profit driver. So the cost to send 10,000 emails versus 100,000 emails is like $1,000 difference, whereas the cost to drive 10,000 visitors versus 100,000 visitors is like 100 grand difference, you know, I’m sure I’m butchering those numbers. But so what happened is, over time, as you collect more emails, and you engage with people, your cost to acquire massively decreases, which means your profit margins raise, which means you can invest in your front end channels again. The other piece is, if your Facebook account gets banned, or your Instagram account gets banned, or Google changes, SEO, you have a list of 50,000 people 100,000 people, hopefully, that you can sit still send emails to and make money, right? And you’ll probably be like, holy shit, I’m making a higher profit right now. Because I’m not spending any money on ads. So it’s this interesting flip, where sales go down, profit goes up for a momentary, you know, time, but it gives you enough space to figure out what to do next.

Jeremy Weisz 37:27

Yeah, I mean, also, we’ve seen with a lot of these social media channels, the organic reach all you know, even if you have 100,000 people, or whatever 10,000, the organic reach of those is just greatly diminished. It’s a, you know, it’s a payer to pay to play. At that point. He’s like, Oh, we can charge people for the so getting them off of those platforms and getting him into an email or text or whatever that you can deploy whenever you want is important. I’m talking about some of the things you’ve been looking at, you know, I’ve been in the room with some of the top Amazon sellers around that have not they’re all multi channel, right? They have their eCommerce store, they have Amazon, they have, you know, ebook, whatever it is. Talk about some of the stuff you’re doing as far as Amazon sellers go.

Dean Dutro 38:18

Yeah. So you know, I used to be in the camp of like, you should own your marketing, you should get off of Amazon and you get off a Walmart or whatever and, and screw them like they’re taking your margin. But as I got more familiar with the power of Amazon, and different sellers who are doing Amazon, well, who often don’t have a very big like Shopify presence, for example, run marketing presence, you’re starting to see a lot of people go omni channel, right. And so right now we’re testing. And I’ll probably follow up after this podcast in a few months with some results to put in. But ultimately, I have this theory and hypothesis that we want to use your own marketing to create sales velocity for these other channels. So specifically, Amazon, because Amazon is so huge. So if you think about it, you know, the average Shopify website has a three to 5% conversion rate, which means 97 to 95% of people that come to your site are not purchasing. But I guarantee they’re looking elsewhere. There are competitors on Amazon for different pricing, they want two day shipping, right? So there’s this thing called the spillover effect. And either they either find you through ads, sometimes they find you through Amazon. So if you look at a product on Amazon, oftentimes people will search the product in Google to see if there’s better discounts. That’s called,

Jeremy Weisz 39:40

Or to see if they’re legit, that’s Amazon goal. They go to the website, and then they go back to Amazon to buy.

Dean Dutro 39:47

Yeah, exactly. So it’s just kind of back and forth. And there’s no way to accurately track it, but we know it happens, right? And you could ask people post purchase, you know where they found you and maybe you find a ton of people To find you from Amazon, but what we’re betting on is that we want to use Amazon’s algorithm to our benefit, right? So if I have, you know, 10,000 email addresses, let’s say I send 50% of them directly, let’s say it’s a, what’s coming up, Mother’s Day is coming up, let’s say I have a Mother’s Day product I want to promote, I have it on Amazon, I have it on my store, but say, send 50% to Amazon and 50% to my store. Right, and these are emails you’ve already collected. We know that the average Amazon conversion rate is 17%. That far outstrips any Shopify site by a wide margin. So if we send those 5,000 people, you can directly correlate, you know, a boost in traffic of 5,000, to increase sales on Amazon, right, and then you can compare to see if the amount of sales catches up to the margin you make on your site. So that’s, that’s one thing, that’s a benefit somebody down from going too fast, because this stuff excites me. The other piece is the long tail effect of sales velocity by using your own marketing to send traffic directly to Amazon to increase your organic reach on Amazon, right, thus lowering your ad spend, thus increasing profit, thus creating a cycle of growth, right. So I just went on a huge tangent, but basically, the idea is that Amazon rewards you for sending outside traffic to their site. So if you send direct traffic there and people purchase, you’re going to show up in the rankings higher just like you would in like Google first page of Google, right? That should lead to more spillover effect, which means more people are going to go from Amazon to your site, which means you collect more emails, which then means you have more emails to send to Amazon, which then just creates this growth cycle for you. That’s the theory. I think it will take three to six months to really know if it’s true or not. But there’s some indicators that are looking pretty good.

Jeremy Weisz 41:54

Yeah, I mean, Dean, that makes perfect sense. Because if you think about Amazon, right, um, when you send traffic to Amazon, and you know, there’s a couple things that obviously signal increased rankings in Amazon, right, which is, reviews, and sales, right. And so if I’m Amazon, I want to reward people for sending people to Amazon, or even if you if you didn’t, but you get like 1,000 more sales on that product, it’s gonna signal to Amazon, this is an important product in like, what you’re saying is your you may lose some margin, if you send them obviously to Amazon or your website, but you could see a tenfold increase in sales, potentially, if you boost up and you’re in the top page for a certain keyword terms or that product, which would far outweigh the margin that you would gain by sending them to your website.

Dean Dutro 42:47

Yeah, right. So if you can think about as an investment, right, and in sales velocity, and then a lot of those people end up buying on your site anyways, you know, especially if it’s a product that people like.

Jeremy Weisz 43:01

I’ve had, I’ve talked to some sellers, Dean that said, they put on their website. And I don’t know, again, like it’s something that you have to track, but they put on their website. Um, this is the same low price that you’ll get on Amazon on their website. And they thought they were kind of worried about it, because they’re saying, oh, we’re also on Amazon that may signal for them to go over to Amazon to buy but what some people go to Amazon to find the lowest price and so they found by telling them, this particular product in this particular person found by telling them on the site, this is as low as prices you’ll get on Amazon they just bought on the site and they didn’t even go over to Amazon. So it said they said increase their conversion rate tremendously by putting that on their website. Which I find it could be counterintuitive, like you’re telling them you’re on Amazon, they may go over and buy there but—

Dean Dutro 44:01

I think there’s a big sense people know how big Amazon is. And unless they’re in a hurry to get something some sort of like you know, product you need, like toilet paper or some sort of groceries some sort of like, you know, product that you just need quick they’re willing to wait in support these other companies. I think there’s a big at least I feel that I’m not sure if you feel that way but I kind of get that sense from people I talked to even like my grandparents were like, I don’t really want to buy for Amazon like when I go to the local shop and buy, like grandpa, they’re online buy for them on their website.

Jeremy Weisz 44:40

No, totally. And you do. People are conscious that probably either consciously or subconsciously that Amazon takes a chunk and they just want to interact with that business owner to business owner and not like the big conglomerate. Um, Dean, first of all, thank you. You know, I have I know we have couple of minutes left I have a last question or two for you. But before I go into that I want to point people towards the checkout more checkout worthecommerce.com check out what they have going on, check out their podcast, The Relationship Commerce Podcast, and it’s on there. You know, you can go to the podcast page on Worth eCommerce and check it out. They have some amazing episodes with people like Amir from Habit Nest, Rob from endūr Apparel, and many, many more talking about their journey in eCommerce and how they’ve grown. So I encourage you to check out those episodes. Dean, last question or two, I want to talk about you, you are really one of the sharpest minds on just business stuff in growing a company. And I learned a lot from you about how you lead the company and how you attract talent. And so I love to talk a little bit about just the company in the culture, and you actually use to help recruiting. I mean, that’s what you did. And so I love to have you talked about, you know, attracting and recruiting talent for a second.

Dean Dutro 46:17

Yeah, definitely. And I’ve got some extra time if we do go over if you got time, because I think is pretty important. And thank you for the kind words, I always feel like I’m learning as I go. And anything I’ve learned is through being in the fire, but also reading a lot of books. And mentorship. So thank you for that. Yeah, recruiting Mike, my first job out of college, I was a recruiter. And I didn’t know what that meant, at the time, his first large billion dollar company called aerotech. And the owner owns like the, like some football team, like the Baltimore Ravens or something and but they taught me two things taught me how to recruit and they taught me about culture building. And there’s a reason why they are multi billion dollar company, right? It was because of those two things in sales, honestly. They’re, they’re basically a sales engine and provided amazing service for people for companies. But, you know, they, they teach you how to recruit, they teach you how to talk to people to ask specific questions to see, you know, what are their goals where they want to go? And do you have something that fits with that. And when I recruit, you know, when I first started in business, it was kind of a fail, right? Like, the first business I started was, the whole idea was, I want to travel, I want to work remote. I was with my co founder, Ryan, we’re like, we’re gonna live on beaches, we’re gonna drink beer, we’re going to be in the sun and we’re gonna make a bunch of money. And like, we did all that except make money.

Jeremy Weisz 47:52

And so it’s still a win.

Dean Dutro 47:54

It’s still still a win, you know, we ended up broke in debt. And I ended up living in my grandparents house for like a year. And so he, after that venture, we were, you know, we’re in like Thailand and Bali and Australia. And it was a wild time, a really fun time. But also very stressful looks at me, and which is a new thing I’ve been to that place before. But what I realized is that we didn’t have a vision, or a mission that would attract people, or values that would attract people that would want to work with us. That attracted the wrong kind of people, right, the sort of short term friends and relationships, and then you move somewhere you don’t hear from them again. So I kind of went back to the drawing board and started talking about Okay, what are my values? What’s important to me? What did I miss while traveling and to me, that was community. And I come from a small business background. So my parents and my grandparents, specifically, my mom, my grandma both had their own businesses and their towns.

Jeremy Weisz 48:57

What were the businesses?

Dean Dutro 48:58

My mom had an apparel company called Lipstick Whiskey. It’s like—

Sounds great.

She would go to rodeos and stuff and sell like, like whiskey shirts and stuff. It’s like got whiskey or got rodeo. And then my grandma was a kitchen designer, and had a kitchen to design business since she was in her 30s in Santa Barbara, Alaska, and then in Bend. And so small business was important to me, but also saw the struggle with it right? Like times are good, times are good, times are bad, it can be rough. And I always thought it’d be cool to help other business owners grow. And I found email that became a way to do it. And so the mission became how can I help small businesses during more than million bucks in revenue using, you know, email or SMS? That vision has changed little. That’s still of course, it’s like working with these businesses, because a lot of people think entrepreneurs make a boatload of money. It’s not usually true for a long time. You know, like, you don’t make good unless you’re a unicorn. You don’t really make That’s good have money until you’re 5, 6, 7, 10 years in. And so how can I accelerate that process for people, and that resonated with the people, I wanted to hire a lot of freelancers, I worked at a co working space, which had a lot of creative freelancers in Portland, and recruited my first like, almost 10 employees from there, and refer them to I just talked about what I wanted to do, like what the values were and what the mission was. And people latched on to that. And if you align your values with theirs, and really dig into, like what they want, which is usually growth, career opportunity, like a fun place to work is kind of like, you know what I like and you don’t really have to recruit, right? Like people will come to you. And that can spread and your job posts, the way you position your job posts, we talked about mission and values, you know, you could do an AB test saying, here’s the job, but you just list the responsibilities versus here’s our company, here’s our culture, here’s the job, you’ll get, like 10 times more people applying starts there. But having that is really important, I think.

Jeremy Weisz 51:06

Yeah, that’s, that’s huge in you know, I love that you share that advice, because people often think of just kind of nuts and bolts, put what’s in the job description. But if you start with the mission, it’s your saying it’s something people can get behind, and you’ll attract even more people and better people to.

Dean Dutro 51:23

Yeah, and then they’ll refer people to you, right? So, you know, we went from six employees to 10 to 30 to 50 in a year. And, you know, probably 20 of them were like referrals from other people. I always joke like, we absorbed other agencies, because, you know, people will leave and come here, and hopefully, hopefully knock on wood, we’re creating environment, they don’t want to leave, you know, go to other agencies, but sometimes it happens.

Jeremy Weisz 51:50

They’ll tell their friends and be like, hey, like, this is awesome. I love working here, and they’ll attract their colleagues from other places.

Dean Dutro 51:57

Yeah. And one of the things that I think is most rough for me as a business owner is like not losing a client, but losing an employee. I’m like, where do we go wrong? What did we do? How can we improve? It’s like, that’s like, harder than losing any client person weird reason for me. But you know, it happens and, and you grow and move on.

Jeremy Weisz 52:17

Dean, last question, thank you so much for your time on this is I always like book recommendations, audio book, physical book, and you always have great recommendations when it comes to that. And so I love to hear a few of your favorites. I know you had recommended to me Who Not How, um, and I listened to that with Dan Sullivan, Benjamin Hardy, and actually funny. Yesterday, I had Reid Tracy, who’s the CEO president of Hay House who actually is the publisher of that book. I didn’t realize it at the time. So we keep I brought up what are some of the books and he’s like, oh, we did Who Not How. I’m like, Oh, that’s that was recommended to me. Cool. What are some other your favorite business or leadership books that you like?

Dean Dutro 53:06

Cal Newport has a new one out. It’s like the death of he I can’t really tell. It’s like the death of email, which is I think he’s super ironic. That we’re talking about email marketing is this growth engine and viewers, you know, but it’s more about productivity in the workplace, and getting away from emails and back to like, memos, in a sense and thinking long and procedurally about things versus react, reacting to things. He estimates that like, you could save hundreds of 1000s of millions of dollars a year, if you can, you know, get better at not doing email.

Jeremy Weisz 53:43

Well, I mean, that’s, you know, Slack has proven that and some of the other tools with internal communication with teams for sure.

Dean Dutro 53:50

Yeah. You know, I see I, I stopped reading a lot of like leadership books and have last few years got really into biographies of leaders because I feel like you find little tidbits of informations and like little sayings and strategies and the way they implemented things is I Benjamin Franklin is my favorite biography. He was a master at business, and politics and science. He’s, I always think of like America as like him. Like, he’s like the go to person, but he’s, he’s got some really good business stuff in there. He talks about his competing with other publishers. And he’s got like, just some crazy stories. He pretended to work at another publishing house that was competing with him under an anonymous name, and got so popular on purpose then ended up switching to his publishing house, so that that other company would crash. I was like, holy shit, like you’re sorry. But anyways, I just read the Barack Obama biography, which I thought was really good at some good leadership tips in there. strategy so I like stories, you know, and sometimes the business books are often repetitive. I find towards the biographies you’re like I can’t miss this scenario sounds really interesting. How could it apply to me?

Jeremy Weisz 55:15

Yeah check out thank you for that recommendation checkout biographies checkout worthecommerce.com and Relationship Commerce Podcast, Dean and the first one to thank you. This was fantastic. Thanks, everyone.

Dean Dutro 55:27

Thank you, Jeremy.