The Unofficial Shopify Podcast

Customer acquisition costs are more expensive than ever, so how can small brands acquire their first customers without spending big on paid traffic? Our guest today has a practical approach to that problem most brands can implement today.

1. How can a brand get customers if they don't have a budget for ads?
2. Why should brands invest in BFCM planning when it's so far off?
3. What are big brands doing that small brands can replicate?

Val Geisler is the Customer Evangelist at Klaviyo. Prior to joining the Klaviyo team, Val was an email marketing consultant for B2B and B2C brands. Because she's obsessed with improving how brands and customers connect, Val loves digging into the best ways to use different channels to make lasting connections. And memes. Val loves a good meme, too.

Show Links

• Episode 223: Getting Customers for Life through Email
• Curie Deodorant
• Val on Twitter: @lovevalgeisler
• House of Wise
• Blum
• Klaviyo

Sponsors

• Free 30-day trial of Zipify OCU - (To get an unadvertised gift, email [email protected] and ask for the "Tech Nasty Bonus".
• Try Bold Product Upsell, free trial
• Save 20% on Turbo, a blazing fast Shopify theme - Use code KURT20 at checkout
• Improve your shop’s search engine ranking with Venntov SEO Meta Manager

Never miss an episode

• Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts
• Join Kurt's newsletter

Help the show

• Ask a question in The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook Group
• Leave a review
• Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

What's Kurt up to?

• See our recent work at Ethercycle
• Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
• Apply to work with Kurt to grow your store.

Imagine scaling a business from $3 million to $30 million in a vertical that's as competitive as it gets.

Today's episode is a deep dive into the world of dropshipping automotive parts—a tale of triumph that stretches from the roots of eBay to the heights of a multimillion-dollar business.

Joining us is Sean Reyes of Shock Surplus, to tell us how he propelled his brand from modest beginnings to a dropship titan that cornered the market in 2020.

We'll unpack the journey of a brand that's not only thrived but dominated, dissecting the blend of tech-savviness, market understanding, and the audacious spirit needed to excel.

Sean's story is one of precision growth and the art of capitalizing on market opportunities, from navigating the COVID-19 pandemic to mastering the Facebook ad landscape.

Expect to gather a trove of actionable advice, from leveraging education as a powerful marketing tool to the nitty-gritty of data management with a product catalog that would make a librarian weep.

We'll explore how Shock Surplus has built a robust community by fostering genuine connections with their audience, leading with education, and backing it up with expertise.

Hear how authenticity in content creation and customer education has established Shock Surplus as a trusted authority in a niche market.

Don't miss this behind-the-scenes look at scaling an e-commerce business, a must-listen for any entrepreneur aiming for the stars.

Hit subscribe, and leave a review if you love what you're hearing. It's about growth, not just in sales but in knowledge. Tune in, turn it up, and take your store to the next level.

Show Links

• shocksurplus.com
• Not on Shopify? Start your free trial

Sponsors

• Free 30-day trial of Zipify OCU - To get an unadvertised gift, email [email protected] and ask for the "Tech Nasty Bonus".
• StoreHero - Get a unified view of your sales, marketing & profitability metrics.
• Loop Returns: Ecommerce Returns Management for Shopify - Brands using Loop retain over 50% of their revenue by promoting exchanges over refunds.

Never miss an episode

• Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts
• Join Kurt's newsletter

Help the show

• Ask a question in The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook Group
• Leave a review
• Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

What's Kurt up to?

• See our recent work at Ethercycle
• Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
• Apply to work with Kurt to grow your store.

In this episode, we'll pull back the curtain on how coupon extensions work, and reveal new data showing how they really impact key performance metrics like average order value and cart completion.

1. How do coupon extensions like Honey and Capital One Shopping get the discount codes that they share in their apps?
2. When a coupon extension is present in a user's browser, how does that impact attribution?
3. What is the impact that coupon extensions have on average order value and cart completion?
4. If a merchant is doing affiliate marketing, what should they know about coupon extensions and how they affect affiliate fees?

Kathleen is VP of Marketing at clean.io, where she's on a mission to help ecommerce brands grow profits and make smarter marketing decisions by improving the effectiveness of their discount strategies. Prior to joining clean.io, Kathleen spent 11 years as the founder and CEO of a digital marketing agency where she advised hundreds of companies on go-to-market and digital marketing strategies.

Show Links

• cleanCART - 14-day free trial
• clean.io
• Honey
• Capital One Shopping

Sponsors

• Free 30-day trial of Zipify OCU - (To get an unadvertised gift, email [email protected] and ask for the "Tech Nasty Bonus".
• Try Bold Product Upsell, free trial
• Save 20% on Turbo, a blazing fast Shopify theme - Use code KURT20 at checkout
• Improve your shop’s search engine ranking with Venntov SEO Meta Manager

Never miss an episode

• Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts
• Join Kurt's newsletter

Help the show

• Ask a question in The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook Group
• Leave a review
• Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

What's Kurt up to?

• See our recent work at Ethercycle
• Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
• Apply to work with Kurt to grow your store.

Learn the current state of on-site conversions from Privy founder Ben Jabbawy.

After capturing over 100 million emails with Privy, Ben Jabbawy reveals:

• The most effective pop-up campaigns (that you probably aren't running)
• the dirty secret about checkout abandonment emails
• and what they're doing with $4.25M in funding

Ben is the founder of Privy, the leader in on-site conversions for Shopify stores. Through Ben’s leadership, he has helped grow Privy to support over 300,000 marketers in 180 countries. His data-driven approach to lead capture and on-site personalization has helped brands like Leesa Mattress, The Beatles, The Ellen Degeneres Show, and now you.

Tune in for more details!

Resources

• Privy's guide to cart abandonment
• Coupon code UNOFFICIAL gets 20% off any Privy premium plan for 3 months. Valid for new subscriptions only.

Share your thoughts

• Ask a question in The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook Group
• Share this show on Twitter

Never miss an episode

• Subscribe on iTunes
• Join Kurt's newsletter

Help the show

• Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings & reviews help, and I read each one.
• Subscribe on iTunes

What's Kurt up to?

• See our recent work at Ethercycle
• Take a ride with Kurt on YouTube

Grow Your Store in 2018

• Apply to work with Kurt to grow your store.
• Prefer to DIY? Read a free sample chapter of Kurt's book Ecommerce Bootcamp, absolutely free. Tell me where to send your sample at ecommerce-bootcamp.com
• Learn what's Shopify Plus got that regular Shopify doesn’t?”

Sponsors

• Try Bold Product Upsell free for 90 days
• Save 20% on Turbo, a blazing fast Shopify theme
• Improve your shop’s search engine ranking with Venntov SEO Meta Manager
• Outsource your Shopify customer service with Simplr

Earlier this year, we helped migrate one of our first clients onto Shopify Plus. As part of that re-platforming, we tried a new app called Retention Rocket that had dramatic results.

That shouldn't be a surprise if you're familiar with the co-founder. Dylan Whitman started BVAccel, the largest Shopify agency. His experience as an agency owner directly led to the creation of Retention Rocket

You'll hear:

• How insights as an agency owner led to the creation of Retention Rocket
• Why rising acquisition costs are the biggest threat to your business
• The intentional reason they're NOT in the app store

Ryan Somrak Started in the eCommerce industry 10 years ago running sales for Bronto software where they grew the company from 0-50M having never raised a single penny of VC funding. Successfully sold to Netsuite for 200M in 2015, and eventually purchased by Oracle in 2016 where he helped open their 1st Santa Monica location. Now Ryan heads up sales at Retention Rocket.

Tune in for more details!

Special Offer from Retention Rocket

• Retention Rocket: Free Install & Free Trial
• 50% Off 1st 2 months Platform Fee
• Dedicated resources to install for non-Shopify Plus stores.

Show Links

• Example store: Yvonne Estelle's

Transcript

Kurt: Hello and welcome back to the unofficial Shopify podcast. I'm your host Kurt Elster in a beautiful kind of gray, rainy, but I don't mind Skokie, Illinois, high top, Westfield Old Orchards professional building in. This is my version of Wayne Tower in Gotham city. Anyway, I want to hop in the time machine and tell you a story.

Kurt: A good eight years ago, early in my career before I was the Shopify guide and fully committed to it, I had an office and below that office where some retail shops and there was one wonderful shop called [inaudible 00:00:37] that sold fine linens and tableware and basically expensive French home goods for your house. And it really is very pleasant store to go into and it turned out the owner had an interesting background and was a fun person to talk to and she said, you know, right now my website, I think she used to like Front Page. She's like, I wish I had something better. I said oh I cold help you out with that.

Kurt: And we got them on Presta Shop. And it was way better. But you know, over time it was a big pain. And she stayed on that custom Presta Shop theme we developed for seven years until at the very beginning this year we moved her to Shopify plus and it was just phenomenal. I mean you can imagine going from like old and busted to the absolute super car of a E-commerce platform that is Shopify plus, really had a phenomenal impact on her business. First just in time savings, then second in a better user experience that resulted in a higher KPIs across the board. And then third, the sheer number of opportunities that were opened up by apps. Like in the past, her Google shopping was, she was literally like writing her own Google shopping feed, manually uploading it.

Kurt: I mean, just crazy stuff. So now we get to automate that stuff, which freed up bandwidth for this single owner seven figure business to then turn around and start trying new things. And of the new things we tried was one that utterly prints money and has been a phenomenal experience that I want to tell you about, and that's retention rocket. So it was new to me, I was skeptical, but it looked cool. The more I learned about it it sounded good. So I said, okay, well let's give it a shot. We tried it, and just utter phenomenal success. So I've got with me Ryan Somrack from retention rocket and I'm going to, we're going to pick his brain and hear about retention rocket and why he believes it is absolutely crucial to your marketing, along with a brief history of the platform because it's kind of interesting.

Kurt: So Ryan started in the E-com industry ten years ago running sales for Bronto. It's my understanding that Bronto is like the enterprise equivalent of Klaviyo and he while with them went from zero to 50 million and ACV having never raised a single penny of AVC funding. Yes, a man after my own heart, successfully sold to NetSuite for 200 million in 2015 eventually purchased by Oracle where he helped them open their first west coast office in Santa Monica. And now Mr. Ryan, where are you?

Ryan: Hey Kurt, now we are in San Diego.

Kurt: And whatcha doing in San Diego?

Ryan: Yeah. So I'm running the sales team here at retention rocket.

Kurt: Cool. And what the hell is retention rocket? Describe it for me?

Ryan:<...