Hi, and welcome to the 1st of September monthly blog post on AidanBooth.com!
After 7 weeks on the road traveling through the French Alps, to Stockholm, through Scotland, and wrapping up with our Blueprint Academy mastermind event in London, I’m now back in my office in Buenos Aires (it’s good to be here!).
Here are a few of the highlights…
Being on road for such a long time with my wife and our 9 month old in tow, I was constantly reminded of the need to be incredibly effective in the ‘work time’ I had available…
I spent a lot of time thinking about effectiveness, and business growth for people with very little time available. Next month I’ll share my detailed thoughts about that, and how to effectively run your business on minimal time.
From ZERO to $108,000/MONTH…
This month is about a success story from one of our 100k Factory students (Rory). Rory and his business partner have progressed from ZERO (they started from scratch) to now earning over $108,000/month.
In addition to being a 100k Factory member, Rory is also a member of the Blueprint Academy, and we asked him to share his story with other Blueprint Academy members at our recent mastermind event in London (in August). You can actually download his entire presentation by CLICKING HERE, and read the summary notes below.
Here’s what we cover:
- Why the 108K Factory?
- Why It’s All In The Numbers!
- The Email Automation Tools You Can Use In Your Business Every Day!
- Powerful Screenshots!
- What Other Emails Can You Send?
- What Other Things Can You Do To Help Achieve 20% Net Profit?
- Why a VA is Crucial To The Success Of Your Business
- How To Choose The Perfect VA For Your Business
- What Duties Should You Give Your VA?
- Our Final Thoughts
Why the 108K Factory?
$108,000 in revenue in JULY (one month) from ONE simple eCommerce store. That’s what Rory and his partner have built… pretty darn impressive however you slice it.
Rory’s journey started as a 100k Factory student.. but what he’s built is actually $1,000,000 Factory, because he’s doing over $100k EVERY month now 
Here’s a screenshot showing the $108,000+ revenue generated in July:
Why It’s All In The Numbers!
These are the exact numbers that Rory is using that are making their projects successful:
But what do these numbers mean, and why YOU should know your numbers…
- 100,000 – Current run rate per month
- $18.79 – Average cart value in the month of July
- 200 – Average numbers of orders a day
- $2.15 – Lifetime value per visitor over the last 90 days
- 3x – Return on ad spend (for example; spend $1, get $3 back)
- 16% – Customers returning (repeat purchasers)
- 7% – Conversion rate on the site
- 250% – Mark up everything by this amount including shipping
- 60% – Margin
- 20% – Net profit
- 10am – Time to get out of bed providing there’s $1,000 in the bank by this time!
- 25c – The amount of money received for every email sent out. By not using your email list you are leaving money on the table, there are many different tools available for email automation, which we’ll delve into deeper in this blog post
- 2 – Two business partners are working on this business
Having a business partner is really important, to find out why, check out my August 2017 blog post, ‘How To Find The Perfect Business Partner’: http://www.aidanbooth.com/business-partners/
TIP: Knowing these numbers is paramount to your business success, if you don’t know your numbers, you won’t know if you’re making a profit or not and where the money in your business is.
The Email Automation Tools You Can Use In Your Business Every Day!
As we’ve mentioned above, tools are key when it comes to building and growing your eCommerce business.
Here’s an overview of some of the email automation tools currently being used and tested by one of our students:
Remarkety
Remarkety is eCommerce email marketing, you can recover abandoned carts, wake up inactive customers, make product recommendations and send automatic follow up emails.
Remarkety is purely for eCommerce, they don’t deal with any other kind of business, making it an ideal email marketing solution.
With Remarkety, you can maximize the value of every customer, decrease acquisition costs and increase sales.
- Pros: Excellent tool, good user interface, with excellent reporting
- Cons: No SMS integration is currently available
Check out Remarkety here: https://www.remarkety.com/
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is an email marketing platform, powered by data, built for ecommerce and web businesses.
- Pros: More functionality than Remarkety (although not required)
- Cons: Chunky cluncky platform, a little over complex for its requirements
Check out Klaviyo here: https://www.klaviyo.com/
Carts Guru
Carts Guru has multichannel retargeting to include: emails, Facebook ads, Instagram, SMS, and automatic calls.
Carts Guru sends out an abandoned carts email sequence together with an SMS message, the idea behind this is to force email opens and force conversions, giving you an overall open email rate.
- Pros: Email automation software that includes SMS integration
- Cons: It doesn’t include shipping in its reporting, and the stats are a little inaccurate
Check out Carts Guru here: https://carts.guru/en/
Powerful Screenshots!
Very kindly (with a little arm twisting) Rory agreed to share their screenshots using the tools mentioned above of their campaigns.
Remarkety – generated revenue (over a 10 day period):
Carts Guru – generated revenue (please note the figures have been adjusted by reverse engineering to paint a more realistic picture). We’ll talk more about reverse engineering later on in this blog post…
Combined revenue @ $11,424 over a 10 day period using the power of email automation.
What Other Emails Can You Send?
As we’ve seen above the use of email marketing should be a crucial part of your marketing business plan, let’s look at what other emails you can send to your customer:
- Cart abandon
- Browse abandon
- Inactive customers
- Welcome series
- Order follow up
- Happy Birthday
- Feedback request
- Campaigns content*
- Campaigns sales*
Let’s look at the figures:
- Open rate 30% (apart from * as these are sent manually)
- 28% click through rate
- 25c per every email sent out
Here’s an example sequence of emails:
1st email: Sent 1 hour following abandoned cart with no coupon ‘Abandon 1 hr no coupon’.
2nd email: Sent 24 hours following abandoned cart with no coupon ‘Abandon 24 hr no coupon’. Please note this email will also be designed differently to grab attention, and may say ‘running out of stock for example’.
3rd email (split test A): Sent 30 hours following abandoned cart with ‘Abandon 30 hr Giveaway Private Split A.
3rd email (split test B): Sent 30 hours following abandoned cart with ‘Abandon 30 hr $5 Split B’.
Let’s look at those split tests in more detail…
Split Test A
In split test A, a private offer was made to people who felt the shipping was too high (this was based on the free product + shipping model). Bearing in mind you can’t discount shipping by a percentage or give away a coupon for a product that’s free, therefore you have to think outside the box and that’s exactly what our student did by using an app called ‘Easy Lock Down’.
The app locks down a product so no one else on your site can see it by creating a private page with a password. A private offer was created to those customers who felt shipping was too high, adding a value to the product and discounting the shipping down to 75c, thus providing a new offer.
For more information on the Easy Lock Down app, check it out here: https://apps.shopify.com/easylockdown
Split Test B
In split test B above, a $5 giveaway was made to 27 people, let’s look at the figures:
- 576 revenue : 346 gross profit
- 135 coupon value
- 211 profit
In this example, $12 was made for every $5 coupon given out, wouldn’t you do that all day long?!
Please bear in mind you can lose on this offer, but that’s quite rare.
4th email: Sent 48 hours following abandoned cart with a 10% coupon ‘Abandon 48 hr 10%’.
The next email was the ‘free plus shipping abandon recovery’.
- 5th email (split test A): Sent 120 hours following abandoned cart with ‘Abandon 120 hr free ship > $30 Split A’.
- 5th email (split test B): Sent 120 hours following abandoned cart with ‘Abandon 120 hr free ship > $50 Split B’.
Let’s look at those split tests in more detail…
Split Test A
The test here is quite simple, in split test A, free shipping was given for all orders over $30.
Split Test B
In split test B, free shipping was given for all orders over $50.
And the winner was (surprisingly)….!
TIP: The results of this test just goes to show that split testing is absolutely key in your email campaigns
The last email in the sequence named ‘abandon 168 hr’, is asking for feedback.
At the bottom of the email list some ‘recommended for you products’ so it isn’t a hard selling email, leaving a better taste in the customers mouth at the end of the series.
All of the above screenshots relating to the campaigns have been taken from Remarkety, so you can see exactly how user friendly the interface is.
What Other Emails Can You Send To Your Customer?
Use your imagination and think outside the box as to what other emails you can send to your customer.
As an example, send out a ‘staff picks’ email weekly, check out the stats from the example campaign below:
What Other Things Can You Do To Help Achieve 20% Net Profit?
As we’ve discussed above, email marketing can make a huge difference to your bottom line. Here are some other things you can do to help make more sales, keep more money in the business, and achieve 20% net profit.
Let’s have a look at these in more detail…
World Domination
That goes without saying 
The main market we deal with is the US, it’s important to start here as it’s such a huge marketplace, then scale to the following countries:
- Australia
- Canada
- United Kingdom
- New Zealand
- Ireland
- Etc.
Here’s a breakdown of the countries Rory sells to:
TIP: Always use epacket for delivery, but bear in mind the cost of epacket varies from country to country, so please factor this in to your numbers
Systems
It’s important to have good systems in place, (Rory currently has 3 VA’s in the Philippines and 1 locally).
Here’s a breakdown of their duties:
Partner 1: Emails, and finding and testing new products (tests 20 per week)
Partner 2: Facebook ads and finance
All other tasks are completed by VA’s, which we’ll look at further later on in this blog post.
TIP: Remember, systems can ALWAYS be improved and what doesn’t get measured NEEDS to be improved!
Offer
One thing Rory has learnt is it’s not necessarily the product that’s the winner, it’s the offer.
They had a particular product selling for $13.95, they could sell and scale it but it wasn’t making the 3x required.
The solution?
They reverse engineered the whole process and added $2, the product ended up being their best winner for over two months, and it’s still selling to this day!
Reverse Engineering
By reverse engineering the process, ask yourself ‘what would have to happen to make it work’, as an example look at the following:
- Your conversion rate
- Spending on ads
- Cost of product
- Etc.
TIP: You can also reverse engineer the process by using historic data
Google Adwords
Currently on test, therefore there’s no results as yet, but something to watch out for!
Testing
Testing to find your products is absolutely key to your success, test, test and test some more!
Email Automation
As we’ve discussed here, you’re leaving money on the table if you don’t do this, so don’t ignore this aspect of your marketing.
Messenger
Use the messenger bot to build conversations with your customers, this will not only reduce support requests, but it can also answer questions like:
- Where’s my order?
- What’s the shipping time?
- Do you have this product?
- Etc.
Why a VA is Crucial To The Success Of Your Business
As we’ve mentioned above, having a VA is critical to the success of your business, freeing up your time to concentrate on the most relevant tasks associated with your skills.
Having a VA, will undoubtedly save you hours of valuable time.
TIP: Put a value and consider what is the best use of your time, concentrate on the best tasks, and outsource the remainder to a VA
For example, when looking for products in AliExpress, Rory puts all the links into a Trello board, and their VA comes back with the following:
- Product descriptions
- Pricing
- Facebook ads
- Ad text
- They even loads the products into the store
TIP: Trello is an awesome management tool, it keeps track of everything, from the big picture to the minute details, check it out here @ https://trello.com/
What Duties Should You Give Your VA?
As we’ve seen above, setting up your products descriptions, ads, etc., can be an enormous task that can be given to a VA to do, but there’s also so much more you can pass across and make better use of your time, such as:
- Product testing
- Fulfillment of orders
- Customer support
- Products going out of stock
- Facebook moderation
- Etc.
TIP: Facebook moderation is critically important, one negative comment on your Facebook ad means your sales on your ad will drop straight away, you can also use automation rules for this within Facebook
How To Choose The Perfect VA For Your Business
When choosing a VA, you need to set up a job with a detailed description, you can use sites such as Upwork, Freelancer, or Onlinejobs.ph to do this.
In your ad put ‘reply with Subject: code’ (make this up), also include an hourly rate.
When you receive the responses, eliminate everyone who doesn’t do that as they either haven’t paid attention, or haven’t read the entire ad.
Once you’ve eliminated some of the potential candidates, have the top 3 – 5 complete a task and choose those who do it quickly and accurately.
TIP: Build a cog in the machine by creating standard operating procedures for critical tasks with screenshots and/or videos
For more information on VA’s check out the following blog post ‘Virtual Assistant Gameplan’: http://www.aidanbooth.com/virtual-assistant-gameplan/
Our Final Thoughts
There are many things you can do to help grow and scale your eCommerce business, and as we’ve seen above, email marketing can seriously increase your bottom line and increase the lifetime value of your customer, so don’t avoid it!
Remember, testing is the key to your success, not only in email marketing, but in every aspect of your business
The 100K Factory business model has generated many successful students, so please do take the advice and tips provided herein and apply them to your business to generate more sales to help grow and scale your ecommerce business empire.
Thanks for reading!
Aidan
Case Study: From ZERO to $108,000 Per Month… shared from AidanBooth.com
Case Study: From ZERO to $108,000 Per Month… syndicated from Aileen Batts Blog
from Leslies Tumblr http://lesliesrubin.tumblr.com/post/164840026352
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