Note:
This transcript was auto-generated from “audio” it will have some typos and other mistakes 🙂
SUMMARY KEYWORDS:
people, referral program, woocommerce, Shopify, customers, spend, email, friends, book, e-commerce, website, coupon
SPEAKERS:
Jay Gibb, Amr The Internet Guy
00:00
Online with Amr the internet guy stream it today on your favorite podcast platforms. This podcast focuses on entrepreneurs and business owners helping them become more successful and conducting their business on the web without being stuck with technology, getting a headache, pulling their hairs out or buying expensive software.
00:17
Hey, everyone, and welcome to another episode of online. Today we’re discussing e commerce. So if you have any interest in electronic commerce, or you do already have an e commerce website, be it on Shopify WooCommerce, or something else, you’d want to listen to this specific episode. My guest today is a former software engineer, and he’s the founder and CEO of a b2b software as a service company that helps 1000s of WooCommerce and Shopify store owners optimize their word of mouth sales, and he’s been doing it for a really long time. His aim is to actually lower your acquisition costs, you know, if you’re in E commerce, it’s a very competitive space. And most of people who do own online stores, they’re facing very tough competition that is driving their advertising cost up and up and up, which makes customer acquisition quite expensive. And it actually depends on what you’re selling. So most of the people who are owners of small and medium businesses, they’re not selling expensive stuff online. Usually, their average order is about $100 or less. So it makes no sense for them to have a customer acquisition cost, that is $40 or $50. There’s just a bit over the top, and it actually erodes their profitability. So what Jay, who’s my guest today and I will be speaking about is how to actually lower your cost of customer acquisition, and how to use the word of mouth, which is the most powerful marketing tool that ever existed, but how to automate that word of mouth and use it as a tool to grow your E commerce business. So without further ado, let’s meet Jay. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of online today.
02:15
We welcome Mr. Jay Gibb. Hey, Jay.
02:19
Hey, what’s going on? Amr?
02:20
How’s it going?
02:21
Good. Good, man. How are you? It looks like it’s quite sunny where you are? Yeah.
02:27
I’m in Southern California. We’re about in Southern California. Pasadena.
02:32
All right. Nice. Yep. It’s a bit cold where I am now. Like, I’m kind of trying to blow my hands up in reverse.
02:40
You don’t have any wildfires anymore?
02:42
Oh, yeah. No, no, the when it rains, of course, when it rains that much. It puts them out. Good luck. Yeah, I mean, we both like both California and British Columbia. We have these wildfires in the summer. And we’ve had a crazy summer like it was quite hot.
03:02
Heatwaves that kill people!!,
03:04
there was a ton of fires. Luckily, this year, they didn’t come very close to me. But last year, they shared it last year. They’re like right outside my neighborhood. So it’s very, very tense last year, but this year, we kind of got away with it. So
03:22
how close are you to Orange County?
03:25
Ah, I mean, as the crow flies pretty close, but you know, with Los Angeles traffic, it’s about an hour away in LA. Yeah. Everything in LA is at least 45 minutes away. Orange County from Pasadena is probably about an hour. You know, depends on traffic.
03:44
Alright, last time I was there, I think it was what 2014 If I remember. I don’t go that far. Now. Seattle is my my limit. It’s a quick drive from here
03:58
you got a you got a hockey team and everything. So yeah, we’re
04:01
good. We’re good. And we’re open now. So you know, I think this week, this last weekend, it was the first time the fans came back. You know, to watch hockey. So I don’t understand hockey. So you know, I’m not a full Canadian because of that, but kind of a SOCCER GUY myself.
04:22
Fair enough. Well, at least it’s a global sport. Yeah, what I what I found in the US here with the friends that I’ve met, who don’t, don’t get into hockey, it’s usually because they don’t know what the blue lines are for. So if you ever, ever get invited to a hockey game, or you know some hockey fans ask you to go hang out. Just go study the blue lines and make sure you understand what they’re for. And you’ll probably enjoy the game a lot more. Yeah,
04:45
I mean, I think part of it is because I can’t skate. So I feel like a little bit left out because like when I I usually like the games that I can play. I don’t have to be professional but at least I can play the game a little. Yeah. And enjoy it but because I cannot skate I kind of ditched hockey because I feel kind of, you know, at a disadvantage.
05:07
Fair enough. It is hard. Yeah. It’s partly why I’m so fascinated by what they’re able to do on the Exactly. It’s
05:15
like, if I cannot keep my balance, how can you skate, play, fight each other do everything all at once is like it’s it’s really? It’s amazing. It is amazing. Yep. So Jay, I mean, I, initially when we were introduced, and I looked at what you do my understanding, and maybe my understanding is wrong, but my understanding was that you help people who are in E commerce. So is that fair to say?
05:48
Yeah, yeah. Yes, of course. Yeah. That’s, that’s, that’s the summary. Right? We the way that we do that is with software. But yeah, the one of the most valuable use cases of the cloud sponge products is for ecommerce, and ecommerce growth in particular, you know, helping ecommerce stores with their word of mouth and the features that they might have on their website, that their their existing customers would use to spread the word and tells her friends and to share coupons and registries and things like that. So we’re very much focused on helping ecommerce is, you know, direct to consumer ecommerce stores. In other words, like WooCommerce, and Shopify stores to help them double or triple their word of mouth sales, right? That’s kind of the place where we’re primarily focused.
06:48
Where did the idea come from Jay? How did you think like, I need to do something about this?
06:56
Well, the E commerce focus came after we observe. So we built the software first. And when we first built the software, we didn’t really know who would use it, and for what purpose. And then 10 Years went by right, and we got a lot of customers. And we talked to them all. And we observed what they were doing and how they were using what we had built. And notice that there was a pattern, right? There was a large percentage of our successful customers were ecommerce stores, right? So we started paying attention to those guys, and looking more carefully at like, what are the most successful ones in our customer base doing? And, you know, that’s when we decided to focus from a marketing perspective on the E commerce cohort and on that segment of our market, right. But the software itself is it’s just a tool, right? You can use it for all kinds of stuff.
07:54
So the first software we’re talking about is one that you’ve developed in 2010.
08:01
I mean, what we have today is basically a highly evolved version of of 2010 of our sort of original API, right? And the ways that you can think about it, what I find to be the easiest way to sort of imagine the software that I’m referring to, is just start with one button. Imagine any any ecommerce site that you are familiar with, your listeners are probably imagining their own ecommerce site, right. And there’s one button that we sell, that makes a really big difference. And that’s the Add from Address Book button. And so it’s usually it looks like a button that’s got a little address book icon on it. Sometimes it’s a button that says a label, like
08:49
I love the idea. So the software started as not started, I mean is as simple as a button. It’s just a button.
08:56
Everything behind the button is expensive, of
09:01
course, yeah.
09:04
Oh company of people and years of engineering would have gone into providing the service, right. But at the end of the day, your site probably has several places where you want your users, your, your fans, your customers, to be able to tell their friends about your product. So some of the examples of that would be if you’ve got a referral program, there’s probably a place where you’re asking them to type in a comma separated list of email addresses of their friends, right? If you’ve got a gift registry, probably there’s some place where they’re supposed to upload a spreadsheet of names and email addresses that you know for a wedding registry or something that’s coming out of the e commerce Store. There might be like a coupon interface where you’re letting people send a coupon to their friends similar to a referral program, but more of a one sided referral program right or even just the most simple case, on the product pages, you probably have a little panel like every ecommerce site has. It’s got a little tweet and Facebook posts. Yeah. Share it with your friends. Yeah, a little sharing like panel, right. And usually those panels have one of the buttons on that panel is a envelopes is basically just a mail to like it opens an email client. Right? And that sucks. It’s terrible. And we’re here to fix it.
10:29
Right? So yeah, cuz he opens, it takes you out of the website, right? It opens a new tab or a new window, now you’re out of the website, you’re gonna send an email, probably don’t come back to the website, because you know, your focus is going somewhere else.
10:42
Yeah, you’re opening it. A lot of times people use Gmail, but then clicking that button opens a client, like a desktop application. Or, you know, you know, and even even when some people do, and they they’ll, they’ll send that email. As a business owner, you don’t know, anything. Yeah, it’s all over the message. Like,
11:01
it’s all happening outside of your website. So you don’t know, yeah, you cannot measure even if it’s successful or not.
11:08
Exactly right. And so what we do is we take those places that I just listed, including the mail to link, and we, we basically provide a way to make all those things perform better, right. And we do it with a contact picker, which is basically like, a way for people to navigate their own address book, without leaving your website. And they can, you know, go and search their address book and select their friends and populate those comma separated lists, or those CSV files, or whatever from the address book without having to sort of do a bunch of extra work. Or, you know, for something like the mail to link will do, our software will basically replace your mail to link with an actual form, where you can type in an email address and include a message. And then that email gets sent by the ecommerce store instead of through the user’s email. So you can control the subject, you can personalize the email with all the data that you got from the address book, if they used it, you can add the custom message and put your marketing and branding around that message. And you basically just get like, like way better open rates, and click through rates and all kinds of improved engagement scores, when you spend a bunch of time with a with a team like classifiers team and a product like ours, to really optimize all of those different word of mouth, sharing features on anywhere, and any ecommerce store.
12:42
So let me backtrack for a sec. For a store owner, like so for everyone out there who have an e commerce Store now. And it, this is a great time, because I think all of the states, and all of the provinces in Canada had some kind of a grant for shop owners and business owners who did not sell online, you know, up to until COVID hit, and then they got some grants or loans or whatever to help them to start the online part of their business. And what happens, the majority of like, let’s say, for example, if I’m, let’s say I’m a small bakery, and now I started an online store, or people can order, you know, croissants and baguettes and whatever, for me online, and they don’t have to go and order through Uber Eats or whatever, because I didn’t want to give away 30% of every sale. But I’m new to this. And I’m quite used like, for being offline, people come to my location. And people tell each other about some of the products about which products I like the most and, and you know, so it’s kind of a word of mouth and kind of an offline sort of thing. And now that I’m online, I don’t want to lose that. So your software from Cloud sponge, you call it what sorry. I mean, it’s called contact picker, right?
14:19
The contact picker is kind of like the the one thing that all of our different products have in common. Yeah,
14:27
so will help me have this integrated on my website or my online store, whereby an existing customer or even a visitor when they think that something interesting is on my website, like a specific product or a specific offer, and they want to share it with their friends. They can just click it will connect to their address book, wherever that address book is. So if it’s Google like if they use Gmail or if they use like Microsoft Outlook or Something like that would just read the addresses from their address book and enabled them to do this share right there. And then in like kind of one click after the initial connection, of course, to just connect and bring the details, right? Yep. And then for me as the store owner, I get to see how successful or you know, how many people are sharing? What are they sharing which product is the most successful? Which one of my clients is the most active? So it’s kind of another additional engagement. And I’m bringing the offline word of mouth to my online store. Yeah, that’s right. I love that. And this works with the two main online stores like the two main like Shopify as a network, and WooCommerce for people who host their own stores. Right.
15:59
Yeah, and more than that, right. So we’ve been around, we’ve been doing this for 11 years, right? And we have most of our customers have integrated our products in their own way. Right. Now, yes, we have a WordPress plugin called better sharing. That is made by us and supported by us that’s specifically optimized for WooCommerce. So anybody using WooCommerce, can use the better sharing plugin to get this functionality. And then we also have some some modules or some add ons for, I guess, plugins, I can’t remember what they call them on Spotify or Shopify, but we have the same thing for shop Shopify. But any store can work, right, especially, especially if, you know, a store owner has an engineering team. You know, it’s just really simple technology. At the end of the day, it’s just a JavaScript script that you can run on any page. And you put a button on the page, and you sort of tell it, where you want the contacts from somebody addressbook to go. And so it’s pretty technology agnostic. And then any customers or sort of trials that we get people that come through, and they need help with that, they can just ask us, and most of the time, we’ll just do the integration for them, right? Because obviously, if if, if it’s a customer that’s asking for something new, most of the time, that person represents a bigger group of people that might want the same thing. And so we have a budget for actually building those integrations for you know, customers that maybe need something that’s not supported out of the box, we’re happy to assist and find ways to work together to get those integrations done and, and make sure that those people are successful with our product.
17:52
Does it save anything, like for people who are a little bit worried to, you know, some people, if they click on a button, and this button brings their contact list, and they can show it online, they may have a fear that they’re sharing this information with, you know, an unknown business or an unknown person? I’m a techie. So I do understand that probably, it’s just them. But like, what do we say, to put their minds at ease?
18:25
Yeah, so they’re most people are like that, right? At the end of the day, most people see that ad from addressbook button. And don’t use it. Right, just to be totally transparent with you. But with the anecdotally, what we know, from our customers, is that, you know, in the, for example, in the case of a referral program, where there’s some kind of reward, right, like, Yeah, I mean, you’re putting your friend’s email addresses and you got $1 coupon and if any of them buy something, then you also get $20 off your next order, that kind of a referral program, which can be powered by any number of referral program platforms that exist out there, right. It’s not us that does that, that, you know, probably a lot of people who have ecommerce stores already have one of those. Anybody that out of the let’s, let’s say out of the total number of of your users that actually send a referral through a program like that and have the option of using their address book for it. Maybe only five to 10% of them will use the address book, right 95% 90 To 95% will still prefer to just type in one email address. Because that’s all they needed. Or maybe like you say they’re not comfortable with sharing their address book. But anecdotally, like from our customers, what we know is that that 5% five to 10% of people that use the address book, they will generate 50% of your that’s where that’s where we get the double double your word of mouth sort of marketing positioning that we have. It’s because like, even if a small percentage of people use their address book you’re talking about your superfans. Right? You’re talking about your customers who love you the most out of your entire customer base, these are the people who love you the most, right? These are the people who really want to share the love and share, you know, spread the word about your product. And, you know, why would you put friction in front of that person, write that person, you want to make it as easy for that person as possible to spread the word, right? And so that’s the five to 10%. Those are the people that they want to share your product with 10 or 20 of their friends. And doing that. manually typing email addresses one time, it’s comma separated, especially if they’re on a mobile device. Good luck very hard. Yeah, they just won’t do it. It’s almost even for the most motivated person, it’s almost impossible, right. But with something like a contact picker, that really highly motivated person who’s going to be one of your advocates, and he’s going to be helping you spread the word, you know, virally, if you give them an easy way to access their contact, and just go find those 20 friends and tap, tap, tap, tap, tap and select those checkboxes and go, they’ll do it all day long, right? And so that that’s why, even though there is kind of an immediate reaction that people would ask, like, oh, like, I would never do that. So why would I put that on my website? The fact is, like, people do it, I wouldn’t be in business. If they didn’t do it, I wouldn’t be here right now. Right? I wouldn’t be on your podcast right now. Right? They’re definitely doing it a lot. And it makes sense to get to provide that functionality to make sure that you’re really leveraging the, you know, the loyalty that you have from your most your happiest customers. And we
22:01
it’s, it’s good to clarify that they’re not actually giving you the shop owner, the address book, they’re selecting the two, the three the 10 people who they think will benefit from that specific product or offer. So we’re just giving them a visual way to pick the people who they think would benefit. And they’re sending them an email, I mean, the without having to go to their email, client, and type in anything, because you do provide as a shop owner, you provide everything all what they need to do is to click who they want to send it to click send. And that’s it. It’s all taken care of. So they’re not actually giving you their address book.
22:47
That’s right. They’re giving you permission to read it. And cloudfone just facilitating that. But we’re not saving it. We’re just displaying it on the screen and then obliterating it. Exactly. And, you know, as a shop owner, you’re not doing anything with it, other than what you’re being asked to do. Right? So they’re asking you to send, you know, a coupon to five of their friends, these friends. Yes. And then you do that? And then that’s it. Right? You don’t, you know, you don’t.
23:18
And then the only thing you got would be these five friends, which they picked? Because they thought they’re interested or they would benefit from your offer.
23:29
Right? Yeah. And you know, the right thing to do as a store owner in that situation is nothing you send the email that you’ve been asked to send. But you don’t it’s not a good idea for privacy reasons to save those email addresses. You don’t want to put them on any mailing lists, you know, goes profiles, you want to send them reminders, like just, you know, just follow the golden rule, right? Treat other people’s email addresses exactly yours to be treated. And send them do what you’ve been asked to do. Your user gave you this email address to send a coupon and
24:00
send a coupon. And that’s if they come back and buy other things. And then because they become your customer, and then you they could be on your list because they’re now a customer but
24:10
Right. Yeah, exactly. Yep. And that’s how you stay. You know, you stay clear of GDPR issues in Europe and pipe the issues in Canada and CCPA issues down here in California, is, you know, you don’t want to you don’t want to keep track of this sensitive data. You just kind of want to do what your user asked you to do and then move on. Right.
24:33
Perfect. And how is that? How does that affect SEO? Because I’m feeling that’s a lot of engagement, right?
24:45
Seo? Yeah, I’m not sure if there’s much of a connection. Can you unpack that for me a little bit?
24:49
So I’m thinking because let’s say I have a product on my online store, and I have 10 Loyal existing clients who have bought that product who like that product. So now what they’re going to do, they’re going to come and share this with a few selected people from their address book. Which means a, those loyal customers are coming to my website in order to share the product. So that his traffic be, they’re sending this link to others so that they can come back and see the product or the offer whatever is on that page. So I’m thinking this is a good bump up for SEO. It’s a byproduct, it’s not your goal, but would be a byproduct. Right?
25:43
Maybe. I mean, I think SEO for me anyway, is more about making your website, like optimized for the search engine crawlers, right? What you said is true, though, like you would, of course, increase your traffic a little bit, which is not directly SEO. But yeah, you’re gonna increase your traffic. And if your site is set up with, you know, advertising pixels, from like Facebook and Google and Twitter and Quora and whatever other advertising networks are interesting for you, then that those friends, the traffic that’s generated, you know, you can then start to do retargeting ads to those people and remind them not by email, because as we just discussed, that’s not okay, right. But you can remind them with retargeting so that now they visited your site, because their friend sent them a coupon, and they clicked it. And now as they traverse the internet, and they go to their Facebook profile, and their fear ads, you know, they’re your ads will pop up in front of them, reminding them about this coupon that you’ve been sent, right? So that’s obviously, you know, a little bit more advanced, you know, some some personalization and some, some marketing automation would be required to do that. You certainly can get that sort of secondary level benefit from the, from a program like this, which I think is kind of what you’re driving on with your SEO question.
27:17
Why should people have a referral program?
27:23
Well, I think we’ve already touched on the answer that a couple of times, like in a couple different ways, right, but mainly because the referral program is going to be something that’s engaged with by your superfans. Right? It’s going to be something where you’ve got repeat customers, and they want to earn discounts on their future orders, right? Because you have something that they love, whatever it is that you have, if they can get it for less. Yeah. So if they’re like, oh, like, I’m definitely gonna buy more stuff from this store, because I love this store, how can I, what do I have, and that’s when they start looking for these extra things, right. And so then, you know, if the if you’re like, Hey, by the way, like, earn a 10% discount on your next order, by referring one of your friends, they’re gonna do that, or they’re at least going to really think about who in their life would be the right, you know, people that would actually agree with them about, you know, how awesome your story is, right. And so, you know, I think a referral program. Again, it really like it multiplies your happiest customers, right? It’s not something that the other people that don’t buy something from, you will really benefit from, or you won’t benefit from those people. But those people that love you, and that come back often, and that really love your product, like those are the ones that are going to look around for that referral program. So that they can send, you know, spread the love, right, and send your product to people that they know, and send those coupons and get those rewards. Right. And so I think it’s a no brainer for any any ecommerce store. You know, that has happy customers, which hopefully is most of them have some, you know, segment or cohort of happy customers. I think it’s nowadays it’s a total no brainer to add a referral program to almost any site, right? WooCommerce
29:20
Yeah, even non ecommerce sites.
29:23
Yeah, there’s 50 different ways to do it with with with Shopify and WooCommerce. Right. And we’re integrated with a lot of them, right, a lot of a lot of these referral program providers. They’ve already they already acknowledged that a contact picker is an important ingredient in the recipe. And they also acknowledged that building it themselves would be crazy because it’s really hard to do. And so we have partnerships with all kinds of referral program providers to allow their customers to add a contact picker to their interface. That’s all you know, powered by cloud sponge through a partnership
30:00
Yeah, this is great. And we have mentioned Shopify a couple of times. And I’ve always told, you know, when people come for consulting, if they want to build an online store, and they’re looking to choose between, let’s say, for example, Shopify and WooCommerce, I would usually ask them a few questions to see which one will be better for them. And one of the issues that always used to, you know, that that have come up quite a few times was that some people don’t like to go on Shopify as a network, because they don’t own like, it’s hard to have full control, because you’re like renting it Software as a Service, basically. So you’re kind of renting a store on the Shopify network, which is a great network. But then when you want to add plugins and stuff, you’re not like it’s not easy, and you don’t have a lot of control. One of the things I’ve seen on your website was a store audit for Shopify. And I wanted to ask you about it like, what what does it do? And, you know, because I don’t see a lot of add ons to Shopify, unless you get them from Shopify.
31:19
Yeah, no, in order in order to be like an add on provider, you have to basically build something that Shopify adds to the marketplace.
31:29
Yeah. becomes part of their ecosystem. Yeah.
31:32
Yeah. You know, it’s it. You know, I don’t, I don’t know exactly. But it seems to me that most people can start at Shopify, you know, when they’re just tinkering, they move. And then they either either they get really successful and move to Shopify Plus. And like get really started spending some serious money and getting some clout and being able to sort of manipulate Shopify to do whatever they want. Or they go to WooCommerce and probably get, you know, an engineer, they probably hire a person to work for them, to really be able to craft the the experience that they want down to the pixel, right and be have full control over everything. And so WooCommerce is probably not for everybody at the beginning of the journey, just because it does require a certain minimum amount of technology understanding to get WordPress site and understand hosting and register domains, like you sort of have to do a lot of those things on your own. And not everybody knows how to do that stuff. Right? So there’s a bit of an initial barrier there. But there is a there is definitely a bit of a migration from Shopify to WooCommerce later in the journey, right? Indeed, yeah. And to your question, you know, the audit that we do is regarding your word of mouth sharing features. So anybody, anybody listening to your podcast, right? Well, we’ll make a landing page for you guys will just be a cloud splinters.com/our, the internet guy. And you can go there, give us your email address, we’ll give you a PDF file, it’s like a six page PDF file. That’s basically like a scorecard, where you can go through it line by line, and sort of it’s gonna ask you questions about functions and features of your site, to make sure that, you know, you’re you have everything you should have. And each of those things that you do have is optimized for word of mouth. And then, at the end of that experience, you can put yourself on a calendar for me or one of my customer success people. And we do like a live tear down, right. So we’ll get on a call just like this on a zoom call with with one of your, you know, with an ecommerce store owner, or you know, just a person who works there that’s responsible for the experience. And we’ll we’ll basically go through the checklist together, right? We’ll talk about it, we’ll say, oh, like, you know, do you have wish list and registry functionality? And if not, that’s okay, but why not? Right? Do you have coupons? If not, why not it? Do you have a referral program? If not, why not? You have a, you know, a sharing link on your product pages? If not, why, etc, get to understand like, what’s the what are the things that have been done, and if it had been omitted, let’s make sure that they weren’t just like unaware that they could have done that. Let’s make sure we’re introducing everybody to the possibilities that they might not have considered. And then we go deep on each of those and look for the best practices that we know with regard to well obviously doesn’t have a contact picker. That’s the thing that we’re at the end of the day, you know, trying to help people with, but also, you know, the emails that get sent out let’s take a look Look at the personalization, right? Is it just? Is it just like a static email that goes out and it’s being sent to somebody who’s never heard of your store before? And like, what is it? Like, what does it actually look like? And then we’ve got playbooks for like, the different areas of the email that should be personalized, or could be personalized with address book data, and really, like help to make sure that for whatever features do exist, they’re performing at their best, right. And so we do that just for free, as you know, as a lead generation activity, for any e commerce Store that that wants, you know, another, another set of eyes, right. Another opinion on on what they’re doing.
35:42
Would you also guide them? Like, for example, if they don’t have a referral program? What are the tools that they can use? Or what are the referral program providers that they can get in touch with?
35:55
Yeah, yeah. So we, like I said, we’re integrated with a lot of referral program software. And so we know, not everything. But we know, we know a little bit about each of their strengths and weaknesses and like target markets, right? And so once I get to know or what’s one of our Customer Success, people gets to know, an ecommerce store, we get a sense for, like, geography you in how much sales do you do? Like, how much do you typically spend on technology? Like, what’s your budget for something like that? Right? Is it? If you’re just getting started? Maybe, you know, 50 bucks a month? Sounds like a lot, right? Maybe if you’re further along $30,000 a month? sounds totally reasonable. Right? Yeah, kind of depends on where you’re at. So once we get a little bit of vibe, and we understand, you know, who we’re talking to, and where they are in their journey, then we can make a couple suggestions, right? We can suggest a WordPress plugin, or we can suggest a SASS tool. It really, you know, there’s no single answer for everybody, of course, but because we’re exposed to, you know, this industry a lot, specifically around this particular problem. Most of the time, we can make, we can narrow it down pretty fast down to, you know, one or two obvious choices for each person that we talked to
37:19
the important thing, like, I’m not trying to scare you guys. But you know, when we say there is a spending, like, you know, because Jay just mentioned 30,000, and suddenly people who say, Oh, my God, I don’t have that amount of money. Okay, it’s all in the return on investment. So it’s all ROI. So for companies who are spending as much as 30,000 followers on something like that on a referral program, is because it will bring 100,000 additional sales. So for them, spend 30, Get 100, it makes sense, you get almost three fold. For every dollar spent. If you’re a small business, you’re spending 50, you probably get 150 worth of things. So that that’s the idea.
38:04
Yeah, and I just say those two numbers as being kind of the wild extremes, right, like, yeah, you know, when I say something like 30 grand a month, like I know, there are some of our partners in the referral program space to charge that, right. Yeah, but their customers are like, Starbucks that make millions Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s not us, right. It’s not the normal people. And then at the other lower end of the spectrum, you know, there’s like, just plugins and small referral program, tools and things that you can use, that are 50 bucks a month, right? So I’m just trying to draw a whole spectrum for like,
38:39
yeah, no, I know, you’re not trying to scare people. It’s just we, I’ve had some episodes that were around digital marketing, and you know, you know, people go to agencies and agencies, they will know, how much is your ad spend? And so I’m encouraging every business owner now, you know, before looking at how much they’re spending, they need to actually assess what’s the return on that investment. And and it’s the same thing with any spend, really, so you know, you can pay up designer $5,000 to do your website, you can pay a web designer, $20,000 to your website, or you can do it yourself. Which way to go will depend on what kind of return you’re expecting. And you know, of course, if you do your due diligence, it should work.
39:27
Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of a universal truth and entrepreneurship, I think, right? To a certain extent as long as people in that Do It Yourself frame of mind. Don’t forget to quantify your own time. I think a lot of people feel Yes. Oh, god, yeah. Like, oh, I could do this for free and I’ll do it and they can and they’re not wrong. But they forget to multiply the hours that they spend doing that thing but hourly rate, pick an hourly rate, I don’t care what it is just decide for you So how much of your time it’s funny
40:01
how then it becomes more expensive when you do that. And you realize that you’ve spent 100 of your bill or hours doing something that’s not in your core business. And this time could have been spent. So it’s not only that you’ve wasted some of your billable time, but you may have missed opportunities to sell to your clients, because you were busy, for example, building your ecommerce website, when you could have hired someone to do it for you. I mean, it’s the same thing when we were just saying a little bit earlier, I started ecommerce businesses usually choose Shopify because it’s easy, and it has a lower barrier to entry. But what they don’t know is they’re going to spend hours trying to figure out the design, they’re going to spend a little bit of time I don’t know, if it’s hours or minutes, or whatever, entering each product themselves, like you’re creating your own product. Whereby, if you pay somebody whether on Shopify or WooCommerce, you just give them a list of products and images, and they just take care of it. So you know, it frees your time from having to build all the nitty gritty bits and pieces towards, you know, linking your shop with your payment gateway, and all these things are taken care of, and you don’t have to spend time learning how it’s done. Unless you are becoming a web designer or developer yourself.
41:24
Right? Yep. Totally.
41:27
So Jay, how would people find you? Where do they go?
41:32
Clouds phonies.com/amor, the internet guy.
41:35
Nice. So I like having my name there on the link.
41:40
It’ll just be like all one word lowercase, just you know, I’m really internet guy. And then, you know, we’ll make a page there for you guys. That has the the workbook that I mentioned, which will lead you to a place to get a tear down if you want one. And then there’s contact, contact methods right there, you’ll be able to join our Slack community or email us or whatever you like, whatever is convenient for you, as you know, we’ll put it all in one place. Perfect. Thank
42:08
you very much, Jay.
42:10
Yeah, my pleasure.
42:11
Cheers, the more ecommerce sales everywhere. Cheers. Take care. Bye, everyone before we go away, if you have an e commerce website, and you want to discuss its performance, or if you want to get into E commerce and you’re not sure where to start, feel free to book a free consultation, just head to human talents.ca click on Contact Us and fill up that form. And I’ll respond to you once I get your email. Thank you and see you in the next episode.
