Hey, everyone. Scott Austin here. And if you've missed this podcast a bit, you realize, you know, I believe one of the hardest things in e-commerce is acquiring customers. And the secret sauce that every brand owner has to figure out is how they're going to acquire customers for their business. Now, I actually work with my clients mostly on the website side of things, and not as much on the customer acquisition side.

So I wanted to bring in somebody who's an expert on customer acquisition and have them talk to you about how they've helped a brand acquire more customers. So I have Sean McCarthy here from customers. I a customer acquisition agency. Sean, welcome to the podcast. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the brand that we're going to talk about today in this little case study?

how long have you been working with them?

So. About a year ago to today, how much of they grown their traffic or revenue in that year's time to set some expectation of, you know, real estate growth opportunities?

I love how calmly you just roll out. Are we grown from 90,000 to 250 in a few months time? Well done, well done. That's awesome.

what was the big change in that time frame that, you know, what were they doing for customer acquisition at the start? And how has the mix of customer acquisition changed in traffic sources or channels to to make that that growth happen?

Makes sense. Makes sense. And you know, doing 20 K of spend a 90 K in revenue. And knowing that they had a lot of other channels, including the organic and the repeat sounds like their Roas was pretty bad on their ad spend. Like they might have been even losing money.

accurate?

Okay.

Do you got to look at the whole spend holistically,

using the word hope voice in that sentence, instead of just per ad campaign or whatever is what? What I hear you saying, there.

So if you have a brand doing 90,000, which is not, you know, it's good money, right?

There's a lot of brands that would love to have that amount of spend and not doing a lot in ads, as I said. So the, you know, over a million a year,

but they really want to grow. And you said they they really needed a strategy

put together instead of just ad hoc throwing ad dollars at different platforms.

So how did how do you develop an ad strategy for a brand that's doing well? So they have a good product that repeat customers is another sign. They have a good product.

You know what? What do you think about when putting together that strategy for how you should

spend their money, and what channels to approach?

this year so far with the brand, how many different ad platforms have you been advertising on?

So you've got

Google ads. You've got Facebook ads. And you mentioned you need to determine beforehand how you're going to measure.

My guess is you're not measuring

You got some middleware, I guess, that are that are going to bring the data from both those in the middle. Is that accurate or do you just look at Facebook ads, metrics and Google ad metrics in their platforms?

Okay.

Yeah, that's what I was leading up to. So

explain for our listeners

what an attribution platform is.

And just to explain that for people who may not be close to ads, it is quite possible that you could have had a visitor to the website from a Google ad that is now, you know, pixels. And Facebook knows that this person has been to the website before. Therefore they show them that ad again, right? So that person might be getting that ad because of things they've done outside of Facebook with the brand.

But Facebook's taken too much credit for that. That effort.

So it sounds like you have a very customer centric funnel you're thinking about, not a channel centric funnel.

Or to two different channel funnels kind of thing. But you looking at the whole customer experience, they may come in through one platform, you may remind them through another platform, and whatever closes a deal closes the deal. But you got to look at it from a customer centric view.

So let's start at that top of funnel. Because you had mentioned before. You know, you're trying different, you know, creative, different ads, different messaging, and all that kind of stuff. How do you figure out for a brand? You know, what spaghetti to throw against the wall, right. How do you know what things you're going to test in and how many different things do you test?

What percentage are successful? What I'd like, you know, the audience understand is how hard it is to do this and how, you know, you're trying different things and how many of them work. And, you know, so many people think like, oh, I failed at this. Like, no, you didn't fail. You should learn that didn't work. That's not a failure.

That's that's learning right kind of thing.

So tell us some of those horror stories, if you would, for, you know, what a brand should expect to experience in that type of funnel challenge. You're going to go through.

I assume you're using Klaviyo for email.

this situation,

and you're using that list to generate the list back to the ad platforms.

And I assume you're also sending a welcome series. If they don't even get down to to the cart kind of thing. So.

So your attribution engine or software, as you called it earlier, is also giving you customer identification higher up the funnel than you would from your normal Shopify process.

Makes sense. Makes sense now.

We were on the top of funnel. How hard it is to. You know, I I'm just thinking from the creative standpoint, like,

are you doing, you know,

product ads? Are you doing video ads? Are you doing slideshows like,

like

what sort of different things? And it sounds like, you know, you were focused on Facebook in the, in the start.

You know what what kind of energy are you putting behind creating the ads? Not from the creative standpoint, but from the production standpoint. You know, time, money, you know, those kind of things to come up with a variety of ads to test out. What should a brand owner expect to be investing in that that effort?

But. But to be clear there, because I checked out their website. Right.

They're doing these photo shoots with, you know, lifestyle photography, lifestyle video.

It's not just, you know, product photos.

There are people there enjoying life. You know, there's serious production behind that. And they do have a good bar, you know, good quality bar for that kind of stuff.

It's not like you just whip out your iPhone and take a photo of of your product in the corner of your, of your warehouse kind of thing.

Yep, yep.

Which they were doing for a brand reasons. And now you get to leverage those for for customer acquisition reasons.

 

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, that's how I, I think yeah, they can easily transfer into, you know, scaling so quickly because they had the content that gave you the ammunition you needed to to see what works and what doesn't work.

You know. You know.

Is that Facebook and Instagram? When you say Facebook or they just on Facebook?

Yep,

yep. And once again, I'm trying to, like,

have brand owners understand how hard and expensive it is. Not trying to scare them away. It's trying to make them aware of a the time or you said 14 to 30 days.

You got $0 from that. What was that ad spend approximately like how much money was

I don't want to say wasted, but how much money was spent to learn that that wasn't the right opportunity at that time for them.

Okay, so not. Not a ton of money. Then.

So if you get the wrong person in the beginning,

you're just going to keep spending money on the wrong person.

Yep, yep.

So,

sounds like we have four tools here in addition to our Shopify store. We've got Facebook ads, Google ads, Klaviyo, and then attribution,

which is

all tied together. So you got to set up each one of those and then connect all four of them together. Correct.

Yep.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I hate the, the undefined medium

inside of my ga4 reports.

Yeah. And just so the people listening understand? You know, most apps you add to your Shopify store are using JavaScript. And when you when you load up a page, you know, you'll see, you know, all of a sudden, after five seconds, a line of text will appear in the middle. And that was an app adding JavaScript in. And that is normal.

There's nothing wrong with that. That's the way we want our websites to work. But there is this, as you said, asynchronous way that things happen. So, you know, if the the whole page with all the JavaScript takes 10s to load and someone clicks after 3 or 4 seconds continuing their shopping experience, some of that JavaScript is not going to load, and therefore you're going to lose some of this tracking.

Yep,

yep.

So once you get all four of these tools set up, which is, you know, in your job unto themselves

and working together, you've now got the levers where you can shift as you did. Right. You looked at Facebook. It wasn't working as well as you wanted it to. You shifted it to Google because you're more comparing apples to apples now with this middleware in the middle.

Is that is that an accurate summary?

Yep.

As a Shopify store owner, you understand how useful cross sales are to your business. They're a great way to increase average order value, and they're also really powerful for your customers. For example, here, the customer with a chocolate puffin may also want to buy the Puffin gift card or a customer buying a meal plan may also want to buy a snack plan or a customer buying a home bar may want to get an important accessory for that bar, and nothing goes more natural with a duvet cover than the duvet insert.

Now, traditionally for carousels, what a lot of stores are doing is that they cross-sell in the cart. Like here, or they'll even do a bundle up on the product page like here. Now, there's nothing wrong with these carousels and they can be useful for your business. But with linear shopping experiences, we have a more powerful way to do carousels.

This is especially useful in the case where there's more than one option. So here, trying to bundle this puffin with one gift card could be easy in a bundle up here on the product page. But let's say there's more than one type of gift card for the customer to choose from. This is where linear shopping experiences comes in.

You click on the Add to Cart button. That product is added to the cart, and then we ask the customer, right then, hey, do you want to add a gift card to your puffin gift? Yes, please. And then they're taken to see all the different gift card options. Maybe they want a moose or a lobster or one of the different puffins.

They get to choose whichever one of the products they want. They get asked after adding the meal plan. Do they want to add snacks to their order? And then they see a whole bunch of different snack options to choose from? Now on the bar example, there's only one accessory for the bar. We say, hey, do you want to look at the cutting board insert accessory?

If they say yes, we can take them straight to that product page. And for the duvet cover, there is actually more than one duvet insert available in the store. They get to see all the different duvet insert options that they have. So Linear Shopping Experience is an app that's going to naturally place in a very intuitive, logical format for your customers.

Cross sells into your store, and for every given product you can do a unique cross-sell. So that cross sales can point to a collection, a product page, or even just a page like a landing page that you've designed for that cross-sell experience. Add linear shopping experience to your store now, and get the benefits of these natural and intuitive cross sales for your business.

So now let's let's go to the fun part of this story

now that you've shifted to Google, what was the things that you did to have them have that sounds like hockey stick growth in not only customers but revenue.

Like.

The, the, the the the the demand.

Makes sense. Mixes. And one of the things you mentioned there that I really like is,

you

know, when you talk to some brands that, like a shoe brand, right?

Oh, who's your potential audience? Well, everybody. Everybody wear shoes like. No,

I did all right.

And you guys were smart enough to say, well,

we're not going to go create a market for ourselves.

And build awareness over the benefits of barefoot. We're going to find that people that already understand the benefits, and we're going to make ourselves known to those people. So, you know, which is in niches is what I always say. And you can, you know, focus small enough and small enough. You're going to be more successful instead of, you know, as you mentioned, you mentioned Nike and Adidas, those you can't compete against the big brands.

No small brand can. But

they can compete against them in their own arena, not in the arena that Nike and Adidas are playing in.

That's

that's what I like about, you know, the strategy and the learning you guys had. Because over in Facebook, you're probably, you know, looking for the more what I call unintended shopper and building awareness where you went to Google, you're like, no, let's find the people who already are asking the question, you know, or you know, the question of what are barefoot shoes?

Or where do I buy barefoot shoes? And let's service that knee first.

Yep.

this all sounds very complex.

Is that is that an accurate summary

of

these systems together and make it all work?

Okay, tell me how it can can be not complex because. Because that would encourage me a little bit.

You know.

Yep.

Yep.

So, on the remarketing side,

And not just remarketing. But once you've identified

and know who your your your audience is from your top of funnel. Sounds like you had three channels you were using. One was Facebook, second was Google, and the third was Klaviyo.

Was there any differences between which ones worked better or worse, or any best practices across the three of them?

In all, three contributed to the final sales numbers.

Yep.

So I'm glad you say it's not overly complex. It sounds to me, though, like this isn't a side job for somebody at a brand. Right? If you're if they're in the, you know, they need to be in the marketing team. If you're going to take it on inside your brand, you're going to have to have a dedicated person doing these things.

Or if you're going to or you outsource it to an agency,

you know, a lot of a lot of my audience are very small brands where, you know, there's, you know, 2 or 3 people at it and they're not gonna be able to take this on for too long on their own. I assume, because there's so many pieces to this puzzle,

and you have to know how each one of those pieces interact, make sure they're set up properly and all that good stuff.

Or am I wrong in that? Should it should I give them, you know, more

more faith that they can handle that challenge?

Yep.

Yep.

Yeah. Because,

you know, I love the success story of. Oh, we started it. You know, 90 K per month in revenue. And just a few months later,

you know, we're already at, you know, 240 or 250, whatever the number was. You know, that's wonderful.

And it is wonderful and not sarcastic at all on that.

But 

that takes an investment in money and time

and expertise.

It's not like, you know, because a lot of brands, you know, and this is the brands I work with a lot also, you know, we do these small growth things and then they all add up over time. But if you really want to accelerate it, you're going to have to spend and invest. But you have to spend it.

Invest smartly to accelerate that, you know, organic,

whether that's through social or search or whatever works. But you're you're not as much in control. You don't have a dial to turn as much as you do with paid ads,

but there's complexity behind that.

Yep.

Yep.

Makes sense. And I want to focus on that. Put a little more money behind it for just a second.

Is.

With a ring of shoes. You had some success metrics before you worked with them about their products, right? The high repeat purchasers was a probably a really good indicator.

You probably already also had conversion rate.

When should a store be?

What metrics should they look at and measure themselves? Buy and go. Now's the time for me to invest in paid advertising. These metrics you're showing I'm leaving money on the table by not investing in paid.

Yep.

Yep. So that was the shift from Facebook to. To Google.

Now, if a brand is at that point, I love, by the way, if you're if you have 25% repeat customers, you're you're not

bringing in enough traffic.

it's a guideline. It's not a hard rule. Every brand's different, all that kind of stuff.

so let's say a brand is doing that.

They got 25% or higher repeat customers. What should they think about when, you know, and they're a small brand and they need an agency. What should they be looking at? Who should they go to? What should they be thinking about? Spin business models, all that kind of stuff. How do how do they find a good quality partner?

Let's let's say no for this one.

Yeah. Well, I love your answer. Right? Because every agency that I've talked to, like we're doing right now, every time I ask that question. Because I think it's a really important question. I love every single time they're like, no, do it yourself first, right. Do not hire an agency in the blind. And my my advice for the audience is never hire an agency that tries to convince you to spend more.

They should be trying to convince you to spend less. And to me, that's a really good indicator of does that agency care about your business, or do they care about short term revenue for themselves? And all these agencies are going to, you know, work with you to minimize your spend over the beginning periods so that you can increase your learning and not just throw, you know, money against the wall or money to fire whatever the rent expression is.

So I love your answer of, you know, do it yourself, get smart about it. And you had a couple, you know, touch points along the way, like start with this much ad spend when you get up to 20 K per month. Then you bring in attribution engines and and have that slow step by step, you know, linear process to get you from A to B instead of, oh, we're going to make you rich overnight kind of strategy.

love all that. And that makes a lot of sense.

As we get ready to wrap up here, you know, if you were to give one piece of advice to to brand owners in this space, you know, what would that be?

Do you,

the,

The.

When you do,

it makes a lot of sense.

If someone wants to get in touch with you. Sean, how do they, reach out and find you?

Excellent. I'll put that in the show notes. Thanks for your time today. I really appreciate it.