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Filip Valica: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Product Startup Podcast, a podcast that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors, product designers, and other industry professionals. This podcast is run by Mako Design

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Filip Valica: and Invent, and hosted by Filip Valica. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial idea to putting your product on the shelf. We're taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business. Now onto the show.

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Filip Valica: If you consider the offline purchase process, you as the consumer, walks into the store. You look at the product. In the fashion world, for example, you try on the product. You know the color. You can see the color. There's no, you know, it's not a green dress that turns out to be blue

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Filip Valica: when it arrives in the post. You can see that it fits you. You can see the price right there and then. You know what you're paying. You can, you can touch it, you can feel it. And you can walk up to the

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Filip Valica: checkout. You can pay your money, have it put in a pretty bag for you. And then you're the one who's in charge of delivering that home.

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Filip Valica: Online, pretty much every part of that journey, apart from the price, is outside of the control of the customer. The Product Startup, episode 22. Welcome to the Product Startup Podcast, helping you turn ideas into successful products step by

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Filip Valica: step with your host,

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Filip Valica: Filip Valica. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Product Startup Podcast. So in the last episode, we talked with Megan Cox of Amelie Beauty. She talked about her wink-brand-lash-and-brow

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Filip Valica: oil that she found by experimenting on herself to solve her problem of diminishing eyelashes. So she created a formulation and then started mass manufacturing it. And her journey started

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Filip Valica: in her dorm at MIT and took her across the world to China and back. So if you haven't heard that episode, make sure to check out episode 21. Also, before we get started, I wanted to highlight

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Filip Valica: one reviewer on iTunes Australia. Brissy John wrote, so much great info on how to get a product created and philip is a pleasure to listen to hey thanks a lot for leaving a comment on iTunes and

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Filip Valica: letting me know what you think of the show it's definitely one of the only ways that i get comments back on how i'm doing other than you know the number of downloads that i get every week

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Filip Valica: and now on to today's episode Chloë Thomas is the author and creator of eCommerce MasterPlan a business that helps e-commerce entrepreneurs make better decisions she's also the host of the

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Filip Valica: eCommerce MasterPlan podcast,

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Filip Valica: the number one e-commerce podcast in the UK. So today we're going to dive in a lot into online sales and marketing, a lot of tips that we can all apply to our own businesses. So let's get started. Hi, Chloe. Thanks for coming on the show today. Hi, Philip. It's

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Filip Valica: awesome to be here with you. So I'm really happy to have you on the show because until now, we've talked to a lot of product founders and small business owners that have created products and

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Filip Valica: at taking them to market, and some of them are really good in social media and marketing, but we haven't really had a great overview for somebody that's starting out, and they need to kind of create their own plan. So I'm really happy to have you on so you can talk about

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Chloë Thomas: that. Can you give everyone a little bit of an idea of your experience and background? Yeah, of course I can. So I've been working in e-commerce for over 10 years now.

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Chloë Thomas: I started off working client-side for a high street retailer in the UK, who had a big mail order operation. So I've always found the buying and merchandising and product side quite fascinating, but it's not anything I've ever done myself.

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Chloë Thomas: I'll be honest about, apart from producing books, but it's not really something I've done myself. So I'm really all about getting traffic to the website and making sure it converts.

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Chloë Thomas: And about,

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Chloë Thomas: I've been running my own business, helping people do that since, in one variety or another for about the last eight years. And four years ago, I founded e-commerce master.

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Chloë Thomas: plan, which is my kind of business wrapper for everything I do to help e-commerce, business people make better decisions in their business because that seems to be the number one challenge is

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Chloë Thomas: what do I do next or alternatively what is what I'm doing, what I should be doing. And I produce a podcast, books,

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Chloë Thomas: courses,

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Filip Valica: mastermind groups, do a bit of coaching, all around

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Chloë Thomas: helping out those kind of people, really? Awesome. And we'll definitely link to some of that in the show notes. And I know you've got some freebies out there for everybody listening to. There are always stacks of freebies on the website. So I think that there is a page,

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Filip Valica: freebies on the top menu, should anyone want to go and try and get hold of all of them. But yeah, there's always free stuff going on. So for somebody that's just starting out, they have a product that they are finished doing the

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Chloë Thomas: design and they've got some of the manufacturing sorted and they're looking to start working on their marketing, what is maybe the first few steps that they should take to make sure that they're approaching it in the right way? Well, I suppose the first thing is to understand who

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Chloë Thomas: the customer is that you're trying to target and work out what the right way to get the product in front of that customer base is. Because depending on the product, it can sometimes be that you're better off jumping onto a marketplace rather than trying to create your own website straight

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Chloë Thomas: off. Or by marketplace, I mean anything from Etsy, so the more specialized end of it, right the way up to Amazon or eBay.

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Chloë Thomas: And then it can also be worth considering going down the wholesale route as well. So I think the first thing to do is to make sure that your product is one which

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Chloë Thomas: you're going to be able to get enough noise and get enough traffic to the site in order to be

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Filip Valica: able to drive sales yourself because putting up a website is only the first step. You've then got to find a way to get the traffic there. And that can either be very easy or very difficult. Right. Absolutely. I've seen some figures that say that a

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Filip Valica: e-commerce site converts on average at 2 to 4% being on the high end if you're doing a

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Chloë Thomas: really good job compared to Amazon that might convert in the 20, 25% range just because the people that visit Amazon are already in a state of wanting to purchase.

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Chloë Thomas: Completely. And, you know, all of us Amazon purchases know how dangerous that website is. You know, you go on it. You see something like, oh, I'll have that. And then it arrives in the UK Prime arrives the following day. I think it's two days in the state. And it's like, oh, my

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Chloë Thomas: God, more Amazon parcels. What was I doing yesterday? I wasn't even drinking and I've got all these Amazon parcels because they've just built that trust with the consumer and they've done so much.

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Chloë Thomas: So it can be the right place to go. But I mean, if what you're doing is something in the craft or the textiles market, then Amazon probably isn't the right place to go. But I guess the key

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Chloë Thomas: angles which make it really strong to build your own website is, I would guess it boils down kind of two key things. One,

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Chloë Thomas: and you don't necessarily have to have both of these, but if you've got both of them, then it should be really good for you. One is, is your product kind of like newsworthy enough and interesting enough that you're going to be able to attract an audience on social media

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Chloë Thomas: via a Kickstarter,

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Chloë Thomas: be able to go out there to bloggers and get them to write about you? So that softer side of marketing is your product interesting? Or, you know, or get it on TV. The other one, would be, is your product obvious enough in a keyword sense?

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Chloë Thomas: So if you're selling jewelry, for example,

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Chloë Thomas: what one person types into Google as silver jewelry or amber jewelry or women's jewelry is totally subjective compared to what another person will put in, which means the whole SEO and paid traffic angle.

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Chloë Thomas: So paid keywords on Google AdWords is going to be really difficult for you if you're going down the jewelry route.

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Chloë Thomas: So whereas if you're selling,

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Chloë Thomas: I had a lady on my podcast who designed the ultimate miso soup.

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Filip Valica: So someone who's Googling miso soup probably wants miso soup. So A, you're going to do well on the search engine because your site is all about the thing that your customer is going to be searching. But also, the keywords should convert if you go down the Google AdWords rate.

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Filip Valica: So those are the two big things. So I wanted to touch on one of the things that you said. You said if the product is something that people can connect to, or at least that's how I interpreted,

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Filip Valica: There was two guys that we had on the show previously, Matt Hoffma, Eric Palombo, they have this unique product.

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Chloë Thomas: They make miniature construction materials like cinder blocks. That was probably one of the products that I've seen just take off almost virally because of the nature of the product. You know, they show a picture of it and the product markets themselves almost.

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Chloë Thomas: Yeah, that's a perfect example of the sort of business, or the sort of product, which it's not going to work.

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Filip Valica: Amazon might work. It might not work, but it's kind of more of an impulse piece and a, wow, that's so cool piece. And that just is going to fly on social media. You're

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Filip Valica: going to be easily able to get press coverage, blog coverage, etc., podcast coverage about it. And therefore, that's when I would definitely go build your own website. So let's look at the other

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Chloë Thomas: side of the coin. Like you said, the jewelry. We've had people on the show that do something that's maybe a little bit harder to differentiate. For example, textiles or clothing, where you have a lot of competition.

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Chloë Thomas: Is that the point where you would say, okay, maybe I need to be on a larger e-commerce site where I get traffic sent to me? It can be a tricky one to work out what the best route forward is with those businesses because there's kind of so many angles that could impact on it.

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Chloë Thomas: You know, if you're a jewelry designer who's got a really key angle, they know they've got quite a unique customer base. you know if you're doing kind of the more the rock end or you know it kind of identifies with the

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Chloë Thomas: movement then you're probably going to be able to get the blog coverage the podcast coverage the softer coverage the PR coverage that's going to enable you to build your brand and get you

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Chloë Thomas: out there if you're just great at creating really beautiful jewelry but there's no kind of real

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Filip Valica: differentiation to it then you're probably going to find me you may well also build your own site, but you're probably going to find that an Etsy or a botica, which is a jewelry specific

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Chloë Thomas: marketplace, those are of stronger ways to get your product out to the market. It doesn't mean your product's any less good, any less quality, any less desirable. It just changes the way in which you can market it. Right. You might end up bending way more effort, you know, time and

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Chloë Thomas: money to try to market your site and compete against all the other noise that's out there in your knit. Exactly. You have to look at the product in a bit of a bit of a cold and heartless

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Filip Valica: way and go, if I was a jewelry blogger, would I want to blog about my product? Is there something sufficiently interesting about it? And do I have the budget to make this be the piece that

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Filip Valica: features in Grazie or Vogue rather than something else? And if there's not something particularly interesting about that piece,

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Chloë Thomas: as beautiful and as marvelous as it is, you're going to struggle down that route. You've got to kind of find some other routes. While we're talking about channels, you were talking about e-commerce. Do you have an opinion on multi-channel commerce on

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Chloë Thomas: And if people should open up a brick and mortar, when they should do that, or is it all basically case by case, depending on what the founders really have in terms of their vision for the product? Wow, there's a tough question.

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Chloë Thomas: It's interesting. I think I see more offline businesses launching a store than I see online businesses launching a physical store.

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Chloë Thomas: where I see simply because if you get used to the online financial setup you have very low overheads you know

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Chloë Thomas: you don't need a lot of space and renting a store is ridiculously expensive if you're not used to that all of a sudden you've got manpower that's got to be there all the

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Chloë Thomas: time you've got to have enough stock to fill it all the time you've got to keep it pretty clean it and all this there's all this extra rigmarole so often people don't quite get there So I see,

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Filip Valica: but that doesn't mean that the face-to-face model isn't worth pursuing. But I think if anyone's going to go down it, I'd start off with maybe a pop-up shop

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Chloë Thomas: or being part of a local market or a specific market that fits with that product, which it's a great way to get extra feedback as well, but that can be a good way of testing out

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Chloë Thomas: the face-to-face deciding if you want to go down that way, down that route. Absolutely. So even maybe looking into consignment or something like that where you're just, you're using other retailers existing footprints and just coming in with your own product and

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Filip Valica: offering it at a huge discount just for the opportunity to try it out in a retail setting. Definitely. And it's one of those ones which if your fashion or jewelry and those kind of

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Filip Valica: areas, if you can build a relationship with a local boutique owner and maybe offer to stump up the money for the wine and cheese to do an evening for their list where you showcase their

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Chloë Thomas: products, that can be a great way of getting the right people to look at your product to give you feedback and to generate those sales well okay so let's go back on e-commerce now let's say one way or another i think everyone should have a website of some kind and it might not be a site that you're selling

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Chloë Thomas: your product directly from but it's at least a site about your product and the company and it refers

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Filip Valica: some traffic over to where they can purchase the product would you maybe agree that in whatever case everyone should have a website at this point definitely and it should capture email addresses too.

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Filip Valica: So that all that work you've done and getting products out there and getting people excited about your product, at least you're gathering something from that. You know, you're getting them to follow your Facebook page to follow you on Twitter, Instagram, if that one's relevant

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Chloë Thomas: to you as well, but also that you're capturing email addresses there. So you can keep people updated on the story of the product and what's coming next. Great. And so you hit on two things I definitely wanted to dive into. Oh, cool. One of those is capturing email addresses, which is easy if you're

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Chloë Thomas: already have some sort of an online or digital product, but maybe it's a bit more difficult if you have something physical because you don't have something to trade for the email address. And I think

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Chloë Thomas: people or a lot of consumers are used to trading something for it. So what would be your plan in that case?

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Chloë Thomas: I'm so glad you asked me about that because it's one of the things I find most fascinating about the world of e-commerce.

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Chloë Thomas: I obviously straddle kind of both worlds. I straddle the B2B world of, you know, giving away a checklist or a download or an e-book and all the rest of we've already said my site is full of freebies in order to get that email address and that that B2B

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Chloë Thomas: strategy of giving away knowledge to get emails and so forth. And obviously, you can't do that in the e-commerce world. But I'm forever amazed by the stats I hear from people who are running

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Chloë Thomas: straightforward pop-ups, simply saying sign up to hear about our latest news or sign up to be the first to hear about our sale. They're not giving anything away. They're not giving our way a discount.

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Filip Valica: They're not giving away anything physically. They're just simply saying, if you love what we do, sign up. So you're hearing more about us. And people are still getting really solid sign-up rates

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Filip Valica: from that. So don't think that you need to give away your margin to get that sign up. You can simply say,

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Filip Valica: would you like to sign up for our emails because they're full of awesome content? And I think if you keep it on brand, you put a couple of trust symbols in there as well. You know, like you promise not to spam them and so forth.

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Filip Valica: You will capture quality email addresses from your quality customers. That's a really good point that you brought up about not necessarily just offering a discount.

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Chloë Thomas: So recently I clicked on a banner for a service that digitizes some of your analog memories. You like photos and VHS tapes and that type of thing. And I didn't buy right away. They didn't convert me.

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Chloë Thomas: And then I noticed that every day I waited, the coupon code that I was sent got like higher, right? And so then it just became a game for me to see how long can I wait? What is the biggest discount you're willing to go through?

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Chloë Thomas: And they went up as high as 60%. And they started with 10. And at that point, I lost all confidence in whatever price that I was paying online as being the true price for that retailer. Yeah, it's interesting the way people do that.

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Chloë Thomas: because I think by all means, in some sectors and that sector is highly competitive, you are going to see people offering a discount to get the sign-up, but you shouldn't just keep discounting and discounting,

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Chloë Thomas: because it erodes trust with the consumer, because the savvy consumer will go, yeah, just like you were, how low are you going to go, how low are you going to go? And then you go, my God, you were trying to rip me off by getting me to pay the price that's on the website.

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Chloë Thomas: And that's just, that's not a good way of creating a trustworthy relationship with the customer, especially when it's a site like, I'm guessing with the site you're talking about, you have to send them your precious memories in order for them to back them up.

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Chloë Thomas: It's like you've got to build trust in that scenario, well, the customer's just not going to do it. I mean, for me, any promotion you run has to be designed to get the customer to do what you want

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Chloë Thomas: them to do as cheaply as possible. So whenever you're starting off with email sign up gathering or whenever you're starting off when you're trying to encourage that first purchase, you've got to at least start off

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Chloë Thomas: with your best margin position on that offering.

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Filip Valica: So in the case of an email sign up, with not giving anything away to get that email sign up, to get your benchmark of response. So then if you do start going a 10% off voucher code, a free P&P voucher code, a add-on free

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Filip Valica: gift when you order the product or something, you've then got a benchmark to see how much that giveaway increased the response by.

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Filip Valica: You can easily work out what that cost, or you should be able to easily work out what that cost you, and then you can decide whether it was financially viable to be offering that for the uplift you got in sales. So you have to set those benchmarks before you

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Filip Valica: start giving away, because you may find that to add a giveaway only increases response by, say,

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Chloë Thomas: not point five percentage points, but it's costing you an extra $10 per customer. And all of a sudden, And that's, whoa, that's really not worth it. Totally understand. And initially you mentioned about telling a story.

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Chloë Thomas: And I want to kind of pull at that thread a little bit because I've seen some smaller brands succeed really well by giving a sort of behind the scenes look at their operations,

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Chloë Thomas: including maybe creating the prototype for the product and testing it and going to manufacturing and giving them kind of an insider's view as if they were on the factory floor or on the workshop floor.

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Chloë Thomas: And people will absolutely sign up for things like that, you know, especially if you put in some video content and some extra things that you won't find necessarily on the website.

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Chloë Thomas: Yeah, I think the more you can do online to build a relationship with the human being who is there considering buying from you, then the more likely they are going to be to buy from you.

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Chloë Thomas: If you consider the offline purchase process, just to make it really clear in everyone's heads how important this trust-building activity is. If you consider the offline purchase process, you as the consumer walks into the store,

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Chloë Thomas: you look at the product, in the fashion world, for example, you try on the product. You know the colour, you can see the colour. There's no, you know, it's not a green dress that turns out to be blue when it arrives in the post. You can see the colour. You can see that it fits you.

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Chloë Thomas: You can see the price right there and then, you know what you're paying. You can touch it, you can feel it. And you can walk up to the checkout, you can pay your money, have it put in a pretty bag for you, and then you're the one who's in charge of delivering that home.

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Chloë Thomas: Online, pretty much every part of that journey, apart from the price, is outside of the control of the customer. So they have to trust you that the photo represents the product, that the information you've given represents the product,

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Chloë Thomas: that it's going to fit you, that you're going to be good with customer service, that you're going to deliver it to them in one piece when you said, etc, et cetera, et cetera, that the price they seal at the beginning is the price they pay at the end.

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Filip Valica: There's not suddenly a 20-quid postage charge. So we have to go a lot further than the offline world does to build trust before someone's going to buy from us and telling the story of the product and showing them the humans behind the

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Filip Valica: business, you know, at minimum you should have a really high quality about us page, not that

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Chloë Thomas: just gives your address and a contact form, but that says, this is how we came up with the product. Here's some photos of the people behind the business. This is who works in our warehouse, you know, and the more you can do with that, especially

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Chloë Thomas: if it's a product you've created and manufactured to help people understand the product, to make them feel bought in, to make them feel like someone who's in your corner who's backing you, then that's going to make them so much more likely to actually transact and also

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Chloë Thomas: so much more likely to then tell everyone else about you. Right. So you're trying to foster that relationship as much as you can by creating a connection and maybe even getting some feedback. So it's not just a one-way conversation, right? So how are you

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Chloë Thomas: engaging the customer or making sure that they're hearing what you're saying and giving them the opportunity to give you their input? Well, I think that the input part really comes towards the,

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Chloë Thomas: once they bought from you. So that's the point at which I definitely have a review system that's asking them to come back and leave a review. I'd also have a private Facebook group for customers,

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Chloë Thomas: which scares the pants of some people, but it is a really powerful way of building that relationship even further. You know, so we've, you know, you launch with one iteration of the product and you're trying to decide between a couple of other iterations. If you've got a Facebook group

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Chloë Thomas: with a couple of hundred people who bought the product and you go to them and go, we've got these couple of ideas, what do you guys think? It's like, bang, you just get this phenomenal input

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Filip Valica: coming back into the business, but you also get them feeling like they're part of it. And just put yourselves in the shoes of a customer, you know, think of a brand you love. And they come to you and say, we're thinking of doing this with our next shoe.

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Filip Valica: What do you think?

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Chloë Thomas: How much more likely are you to build the shoe, to buy the shoe that someone that you've given feedback on that was listened to? You know, it's so powerful in both directions.

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Chloë Thomas: I think prior to the point of which someone's purchased, then having like a web chat function on the website is a really simple way.

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Chloë Thomas: of enabling that Q&A relationship to start and making sure that that kind of pings up in front of them at the point where you know people are really engaged. You don't want it pinging up on the homepage. You want it at the point where they've started exploring the product

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Chloë Thomas: or they've got stuck in the checkout. Yeah, I've seen that on a lot of pages where if I leave the browser idle, the chat will automatically pop up and say,

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Filip Valica: how am I help you with this product today? Honestly, I've never used that before just because I've thought that it's just somebody on the other end of the world or maybe even a chat bot. And so I might be old school, but I haven't really tested that out yet myself.

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Filip Valica: It's an area which is getting, it's just started to get a lot of press about tactics and methods.

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Chloë Thomas: You know, previously it was just kind of seen as a customer service channel. But in the last couple of months, people have started revealing how they've been using it as a sales generating channel. You know, we worked out that if we pop it up here and we say this, then we're likely to get them talking to them.

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Chloë Thomas: And we've worked out which of our customer service reps are the best people to be on it. And they then work to solve the customer's problems, engage in the conversation and get them to buy.

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Chloë Thomas: And there's a lot of interesting science and tactics going on around that at the moment, especially with the bigger retailers who've got the volume coming through. That's interesting.

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Filip Valica: I'm sure they're able to test things really quickly and iterate. I wanted to touch on the comment you made about the Facebook group. Are you saying that we should limit the groups of people that have already purchased from you,

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Filip Valica: or is it also a group of people that may be like your brand or what they've seen you project as your values and culture,

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Chloë Thomas: and they just want to connect with you at a deeper level before they buy? I think it's a tricky one.

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Chloë Thomas: If you're only selling via your own website so you know exactly who's bought and who hasn't, then I'd have separate ones, maybe have a Facebook page for the general public and then a group just for your customers.

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Chloë Thomas: I say that partly because you want to segment the opinions. The opinion of someone who's put their money where their mouth is and has bought your product is considerably more important to you than someone who keeps saying they're going to buy it.

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Chloë Thomas: So I would aim to keep those separate. I've experienced that myself when we're going through the prototyping stage and we're

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Filip Valica: getting some feedback from customers. You'll get a lot of feedback that some of it might even contradict itself.

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Filip Valica: but once you get customers to actually spend money, that's the feedback, like you said, has the most value. Someone taking their wallet out is a pretty big deal.

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Chloë Thomas: It's very much a retail truism or adage or something we always seem to be saying in retail, which is that if you ask a customer what they want, you won't get anywhere near as much truth as if you look at the data of what they actually did,

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Chloë Thomas: especially with kind of segmentation and targeting, you can ask them as many times as you like, you know, which of the categories on our website are you most interested in buying from? And it will be totally different from if you actually track what they actually purchase, where they actually went on the site.

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Chloë Thomas: So there's kind of, you know, if you think if it's a hierarchy of data, you're far more interested in purchase activity than you are in browsing activity than you are in, yeah, I like that activity, you know? Right. It's really important to remember that.

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Chloë Thomas: You said that one of the first things that we can do whenever we throw up a website is to capture emails what's maybe the next couple steps you know we talked about creating an about page and creating some engaging content to start this relationship and conversation with a customer

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Chloë Thomas: what is the next step after that well the key first thing to do after you've got the email address is to deliver on whatever promise you made to get the email address and that really comes into

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Chloë Thomas: an email welcome sequence which these days are so easy to do um you do them you can do them very easily with just Mailchimp, which is, I think, free up until you've got a couple of thousand

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Chloë Thomas: people on the list. So it's really easy to do. There really is no excuse not to. But your first

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Filip Valica: email you send them should deliver on that promise. So if you promise them a voucher code, it gives them the voucher code. If you promise them interesting information about what's going on behind the scenes, it includes interesting information about what's going on behind the scenes.

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Chloë Thomas: And you deliver that really quickly because when someone gives you their email address, they're testing you out for the first time to see if you're worthy of their trust. So you've got to prove that you are. Then that welcome email should,

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Chloë Thomas: that welcome email sequence rather should then go on to educate them about your business, who you are, why they should buy from you, why your product is great. And also, you know, include those all important call to actions

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Chloë Thomas: to buy, whether that's from stockists, Amazon or from your own site. And those welcome sequences, they can be just one or two emails or, you know, sometimes if you've got a really complex product,

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Chloë Thomas: might be 10 or 20. It really depends on the, on your, on your buying process of your consumers and how quickly they buy. But at the same time, you can start it with one email. So, and then build the second

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Chloë Thomas: email when you've next got a chance to build one. So there's no excuse for, for not starting. Yeah, that's a very good point. And would you say you subscribe to a similar model that maybe Gary

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Chloë Thomas: Vanderchuk talked about in his book, Jab Jab, Right Hook, which is provide value, value, and then you promote a product and then value value and then do it again. Yeah, I describe to the to the to the wider theory of don't just try and sell.

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Chloë Thomas: But I think when you're when you're selling, when you've created a business to sell a product you've designed,

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Chloë Thomas: a physical product that you've designed, it can be quite hard to think of three things to say on the value front that don't in any way suggest buying the product. You know, so it maybe that you go,

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Chloë Thomas: you know, here's the welcome email delivering, whatever we said, we were going to deliver. The next one is an email telling people all about how you created the product. Now,

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Filip Valica: you're going to put a link in that to buy it because you'd be crazy not to. You know, you're not going to send them an email saying, here's, here's the really cool way we designed and created our product. Isn't it awesome? I'm not going to tell you how you buy,

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Chloë Thomas: though, because you might actually want to buy. So you kind of, because the product is fully central, you can't give in the same way as you would in an information setting.

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Chloë Thomas: So you're going to end up putting the call to actions in. And then, you know, you've got other great things like in the world of trust, if you've got multiple products,

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Chloë Thomas: people like to buy what other people like to buy. So if you're doing, if you send them an email showing these are our nine bestselling lines, then it's working on the great information, the great trust,

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Chloë Thomas: but it's also showing them a big, big fat call to action as well. So you can manage to get some really nice, warm jab style content out there.

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Chloë Thomas: But you're probably still going to end up with some kind of sales call to action in there, just because it actually gets to the point where you'd be doing the customer a disservice

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Filip Valica: if you didn't put a link to buy. yeah understood in some of the emails that you get i'm sure you get emails from other retailers and you

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Chloë Thomas: might shake your head a little bit what are some of the issues that you've seen that are maybe the top one or two problems that people have when they're writing these types of emails oh well there's there's

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Chloë Thomas: of course you always get the email that shouldn't yet have been sent right way too easy to do i did get one the other day which i think may have made it no it did make it into the book um my latest

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Chloë Thomas: talks through all these different stages that we're talking about today, and it's called customer manipulation, how to influence your customers to buy more and why an ethical approach will always

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Chloë Thomas: win. But I had this email that someone sent, which said, when you opened it up, the first line was dear failed prospect.

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Chloë Thomas: I was like, nice one. And they did actually, I think if I'd have done that, I'd have just gone, I'm going to pretend that never happened and hope that, you know, people hadn't opened it. But they actually sent one the following day with an apology in the subject line

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Chloë Thomas: and then the actual dear Chloe in the email itself. And I was like, no, that's just, that's just encouraging me to go and find the one you screwed up on. So yeah, that was, that was quite a funny one.

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Chloë Thomas: I'm glad I'm in your failed prospect list. It'd be interesting to kind of see what their tactic was then at that point. Now that they consider you failed, what is their strategy to get you back on to the train? Oh, no, that was quite obvious. Because it was an invitation to an open air champagne

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Filip Valica: reception on top of some hotel in London yeah it was um it was come to our beautiful event this summer and um and we'll convince you to buy from us so uh yeah that was a b-to-b one that wasn't a

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Filip Valica: b-to-c company but i i think the the other challenge people have is is working out what to say you know we we kind of live and breathe in our business and we forget that even the

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Chloë Thomas: what we find dull and commonplace and something that that that we do take for granted isn't for our new customers.

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Chloë Thomas: So I find when you kind of got writer's block and you can't think of anything that you can say to encourage the customer, you're like, oh my God, I've got to send an email out this week or I need another idea for my welcome sequence or my post-purchase sequence or something. What am I going to say? What do I do?

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Chloë Thomas: It's a bit like blog, writers' block as well. Go back to those customer reviews, to what the customer's said.

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Chloë Thomas: I'm also a big advocate of taking the kind of the free text responses and putting it through a word cloud. So, you know, where it makes words bigger and smaller, depending on frequency.

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Chloë Thomas: And then using that to go to take a stab at what's important to your customer base, you know, and then that quite often can be great at getting rid of writer's block because it's like, oh, oh, the biggest word on here is customer. And I haven't talked about customer for weeks.

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Chloë Thomas: I better send something out about customers.

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Chloë Thomas: So that, that can be really helpful as well when you get those, those kind of blocks.

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Filip Valica: One other thing that I've used that for as well is to use the same terminology that your customers use. So, sometime, someone may refer to your product as something suited for a couch, but you've been using the word sofa or love seat.

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Filip Valica: And it might be something minor, but by marrying some of that language, you're able to have a better connection with them.

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Chloë Thomas: I completely. I did it for a client of mine who we did a two-stage email sign-up sequence. So when someone signs up to their emails, they then land on a survey page that asks them a couple of questions like they're a travel business.

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Chloë Thomas: So it asks them, why would you, why do you, which bit of the area do you like coming to? Who do you travel with? You know, lots of radio buttons. So single choice answers. Then it has this open box of why do you come here?

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Chloë Thomas: And we got so many responses that we chucked them through a word cloud. And it was really interesting that we normally talk about it being dog friendly. we talk about the gardens

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Chloë Thomas: and we talk about cottages because they rent cottages and the biggest words were beaches and relaxation and we never talk about the beaches and we never talk about how relaxing or how picturesque the area is

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Chloë Thomas: either in the views. So we're like, wow,

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Chloë Thomas: right, time for us to tweak our copy somewhat.

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Chloë Thomas: So yeah, it's really it amazes me what you can learn from those little word clouds let's say you don't have any customers yet but you're looking to

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Chloë Thomas: tailor your brand or your marketing approach how can you get that feedback i know a lot of people talk about ab testing and things like that but at some point you're starting out with nothing and you're

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Chloë Thomas: just having to kind of take a guess at what your audience would respond to or an educated decision

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Filip Valica: how would you go about doing that yeah i think the problem with ab testing is you need a certain amount of traffic or volume before it becomes statistically significant anyway. So certainly in the

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Chloë Thomas: early stage of when you're trying to move fast, if it takes you a month to get enough data, it's just too slow.

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Chloë Thomas: Whenever I come up with, whenever I meet with someone who's like got a

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Filip Valica: really good product or a really great idea and they're saying to me, how do I go about, you know,

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Chloë Thomas: launching this online? I'm like, right, before you spend a penny on marketing, on the website, on any of the rest of it, go get yourself a market stall in a place where, you know,

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Chloë Thomas: your customers are, you know, if it's high-end, you know, rent a space for the day, you know, a stool for the day in one of the big malls in England, or if you're, if you're,

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Chloë Thomas: you know, relatively simple and you just want to quickly get some feedback, go to a great to a local market and rent a stand for the day. And just take your products, even if you haven't got enough volume to sell, just take the products along and ask those people some questions.

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Filip Valica: Very similarly to, to Philip, I know how you suggest people should do it in the their prototyping stages,

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Filip Valica: but it's to, but the angle becomes slightly different because you're kind of going, would you buy this? How much would you pay for this? And then those who would buy it and who would pay for it, you say, right, what social media platforms are you on? You know, do you mind if ask how old you are, etc?

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Filip Valica: And you use that to kind of quickly get some ideas about the type of person who's going to be buying this product. And, you know, you can even say to them, where would you expect to see this advertised? Where would you expect to hear about this? Where would you expect to go to buy it? And that can very quickly give you an idea about where, where, where you're

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Filip Valica: your marketing could go. So do you find that people are pretty forthcoming with those answers or are you

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Chloë Thomas: having to treat them with something or incentivize them to get them talking? Well, that's a really interesting question. It's been a very, very long time since I've done it myself.

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Chloë Thomas: I'll be brutally honest.

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Chloë Thomas: I think it's with anything. You'll find some people will be quite forthcoming and some people less so. Yeah, yeah. Just stop trying to sell to me. I'm just looking at your product and right away from you. But, you know, if you, if you spend a whole day on the stand, you only get a couple of

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Chloë Thomas: good answers, at least you've got a couple of good answers. You're better off than you were the day before. Absolutely. Yeah, some data is better than no data. Also, just to kind of take that to another level, if, if you're selling to a community where there's a really passionate

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Filip Valica: forum in existence, you know, a traditional forum or a, or a Facebook group or something, and you can get the permission of the admin to post some pictures of your product, explain the

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Filip Valica: product and get garner feedback there that can be another great way of doing it so you don't necessarily actually have to leave your desk that's a great idea and i've actually done that with a lot of my products is that i'll join a couple groups especially if it's a niche that i don't know enough about

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Filip Valica: and kind of get a feel for the culture and see what people sharing and how they interact with each other and the like you said the words that they're using things that are important to them and that gives you a better overall picture it's still a little bit difficult because you can't just lump somebody that

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Filip Valica: likes baking into a certain mold, but at least it gives you a better idea. Yeah, it's a starting point, isn't it? You mentioned social media, what types of social media they use. How would you go

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Chloë Thomas: about creating a social media strategy for a new company that's just starting out? Oh man, you're asking all the tough questions here.

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Chloë Thomas: I would start off by identifying one, possibly two social media channels that you're going to really focus on because you've got to do it well

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Chloë Thomas: and you also want to get if you know if you think that social media channel is going to work for you and it doesn't you want to know sooner rather than later which means you really need to focus on it you know doing splitting your effort across three for six months and then discovering two of them

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Chloë Thomas: don't work when you could have really focused on one and discovered after a couple of months it didn't work so you could move on to properly focus on another is um is a much better use use of your time because you get answers faster. You're still putting in the same amount of time and effort, but you get the answer quicker.

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Chloë Thomas: That's really good advice. I was just going to ask a little bit deeper question then. For example, each social media channel has their own way of communicating to the people that are on it, Instagram, Facebook.

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Chloë Thomas: And there have been a lot of changes recently on the algorithms and what floats to the top or what people are sharing and what they see. For example, Facebook is so much more difficult now to get some of that attention from your target market, even from people that.

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Chloë Thomas: have liked your page and have connected with you. I know everyone preaches, well, you just need to create shareable content or valuable content or provide value through social media.

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Chloë Thomas: And I understand the words that people are using, but the mechanics of actually creating that is just so difficult. And at least in practice for me, for a product that is not, like we mentioned earlier,

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Filip Valica: that doesn't sell itself, what type of content could somebody that sell, let's go back to your jewelry example, what would their strategy be? Yeah,

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Filip Valica: it's really challenging because as the social media platforms get noisier and noisier, quality content becomes more and more important.

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Filip Valica: But yet, you can still be producing great quality content, but it still might not be seen because you're not getting the engagement to cut your way through the algorithms. So you can still quite often end up having to pay money for it and pay advertising clicks.

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Chloë Thomas: But at the same time, if you get the content spot on, then it can be either very cheap with the clicks or it can be, it can actually go viral naturally still. I think for a, for a jewelry business,

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Chloë Thomas: you've got to have fantastic content,

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Chloë Thomas: fantastic photography of the product.

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Chloë Thomas: Again, going back to my slightly terrible example earlier of kind of the rock-focused business, you know, the rock chick angle, if your photography matches the look, if you're becoming something of a known designer yourself, then if you can share bits about,

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Chloë Thomas: what you're up to, get people to buy into your story and really get that photography right, you're probably going to find it a lot easier than the person who's just making another set of silver jewellery that doesn't stand out.

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Chloë Thomas: And that's why,

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Chloë Thomas: you know,

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Chloë Thomas: it can be a bad idea going down the social media route when you could be doing other things. So if you're kind of like that bog standard jewellery, I'd go for an Etsy or a botica first and foremost. You're still going to have to work that platform, but at least you're somewhere that's already got

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Chloë Thomas: traffic because you could spend an awful lot of time trying to generate that traffic on Facebook

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Chloë Thomas: or Instagram, et cetera, and not really getting there. It's worth a test, probably, but I'd be more harsh with the results. No, and I've definitely experienced that myself on Facebook.

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Chloë Thomas: Early on, there was a trend in these 500 word blog posts, and then a few people started touting the advantage of these 2,000, 2,500 word blog posts. And I thought, okay, I'm going to be one of those people. I'm going to add tons of value in this post. It's going to be an end-to-end article on this one

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Chloë Thomas: topic and you know i publicized it in all these different facebook groups and i get like six likes and maybe 10 clicks and you think okay i'd definitely miss the mark somehow but i don't even know how i miss that mark because you're not getting that feedback to say hey you know what it was too

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Chloë Thomas: long or it didn't hit the content that i was looking for but the the interesting thing on that is um one of

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Filip Valica: the uh it might be buzzfeed or one of the other big facebook content publishing companies they published an article called, oh,

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Filip Valica: it was something about cannabis being a cure for, for dogs with cancer or something. It was something utterly, utterly ludicrous. Or, you know, cannabis will fix your

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Filip Valica: sofa or something. And they, if you actually click on the link and go through to it, you'll find a blog post, which they've written under that headline, which says, we created this

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Chloë Thomas: blog post to see if anyone actually ever reads our articles or if they just like it anyway.

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Chloë Thomas: And basically, all these people had liked this ludicrous story,

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Chloë Thomas: despite the fact that actually, if you click through, they went, the first line said, this is not a real story.

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Chloë Thomas: So I think, I don't think you can judge the quality of your blog posts based on whether people like them on Facebook or not. I think you can judge the quality of your Facebook posts based on whether someone likes them or not.

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Chloë Thomas: But then that comes down to, you know, where they're appearing and whether they resonate with that specific audience. it can be it's a whole science in itself Facebook advertising but if you've got a really interesting

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Chloë Thomas: product like the miniature um miniature blocks is it yeah yeah the miniature blocks guys you know there are one there are some fantastic groups on Facebook are very passionate people into

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Chloë Thomas: the construction industry into build it yourself and hacking and that you know this is about five or six different really passionate um groups or trends that you can could tap into with that,

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Chloë Thomas: where people are going to see the imagery and go, I get it. I want it. That's brilliant.

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Chloë Thomas: So you can see for them how, you know, it'd be quite hard to do Facebook advertising badly. Whereas for another business, it just becomes, it's really, really tricky. And often in that

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Filip Valica: scenario, I think you need to try and find something which is easy for you in the same way as Facebook is easy for those guys. Yeah, or just get a bunch of different cats, I guess. Yeah, cats always

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Filip Valica: works. No, that makes me feel a lot better. Also makes me think that I just need to restructure the headlines of my articles. What about Instagram? We haven't really talked about that much. Do you have any tips for people that are looking to branch out on Instagram? I know it's very

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Filip Valica: image-based and it's a bit difficult on Instagram because you can't click on any links. You have to go back to the bio of the person that posted the photo unless you put maybe something in the photo

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Chloë Thomas: that's like a coupon code or some way to track. It's really difficult to see if the engagement that you're getting on there actually turns into a sale. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, the first thing is to make sure your profile is working for, you know, with a really

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Chloë Thomas: clear call to action to come through to your website.

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Chloë Thomas: So that's the first thing to do. The second thing is then to you've got to kind of plan the content in advance and make sure the quality of the imagery reflects the quality of your brand.

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Chloë Thomas: It's not just a case of, you know, you're a high, if you're a high end brand, then it can't just be kind of scrappy little photos here and there. So that one, you need to be careful of the, of the, of the quality is representative.

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Chloë Thomas: And then it's, it's about just trying to build that, that listener, or not listeners. It's a, it's a visual platform, Chloe.

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Chloë Thomas: The, build the following. And I think where, where people seem to see some really, really good responses on Instagram is when they're paying influencers to share their product in

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Chloë Thomas: the same way as you do an influencer outreach program with blogs or with PR. You can do that on Instagram with highly followed Instagram people, not necessarily celebrities. They can just be highly followed in that particular niche. Often money changes hands for those.

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Chloë Thomas: And that is okay under the legal structure of that platform. But that could be a really good way to very quickly grow brand awareness and get people coming through to your website. No, that's a really great idea.

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Chloë Thomas: And while you were talking, I was thinking of other ways of growing traffic to your website or to increasing sales.

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Filip Valica: Do you have any tips for people that are looking to reach out to influencers on YouTube or maybe other blogs? I know some of them have started charging for it. And it could be a little bit tedious for someone that's just starting out. They might not have any employees.

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Filip Valica: And they're having to do all this research to find the 200, influencers in their space and then email them one by one directly with a customized pitch

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Chloë Thomas: to say, hey, I just produce this product and would you be willing to review it or give away so many units to your audience? Well, the first thing I'd do is I'd get rid of the tedium of the research and I'd use

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Chloë Thomas: Upwork to create a research brief and get someone else to do that for me. And I make sure that that research brief is, you know, it's clear of what sort of sites you're

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Chloë Thomas: looking for, what sort of bloggers you're looking for. But I'd also make sure that research brief is gathering some stats to enable you to prioritize what it comes back with. You know,

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Chloë Thomas: so number of Twitter followers, number of Instagram followers, number of Facebook page followers,

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Chloë Thomas: especially whichever social media channel you're going after. You know, if you're going after Pinterest, it needs to focus on that one.

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Chloë Thomas: Because, and you could also ask the person who's doing the research to go to a tool like similar web, which will give you an estimation of the number of traffic, amount of traffic to that website.

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Chloë Thomas: That then enables you to, you know, maybe they

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Filip Valica: come back with 100 different sites you could go to. You can then sort that based on traffic volume or sort that based on number of likes. So then you can, you can decide which ones are the most

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Filip Valica: important ones. I think the outreach is more powerful if it comes from the person behind the brand.

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Filip Valica: Unfortunately,

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Filip Valica: people might not like to hear me saying that. But there are well, of speeding that up. So in, if you're using Gmail, there's a tool called canned responses,

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Chloë Thomas: which enables you to auto fill a Google email with, um,

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Chloë Thomas: with a subject line and the content. So then you can just add in the, the bit of personalization in there. So that, that saves a huge amount of time. I think you have to go to labs in settings to turn it on. But, um, but I use

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Chloë Thomas: that a lot for podcasts and various other bits and pieces of what I do. And it guys, It saves me so much time. Not me. Mine are handcrafted, each one, guys. I'm not going to stoop to Chloe's level. I just want to throw that out there. You should. It saves so much time.

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Chloë Thomas: No, I'm just kidding. No, I absolutely love that tool. You know, there's other mail-merged tools as well. I wouldn't recommend doing a mail merge, but at least it could create the drafts for you, and then you can tailor the drafts that way. I mean, I think the other thing I'd say is don't feel like,

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Chloë Thomas: if you've got a list of 100, don't feel like you have to do them all on one day, because if they all respond on the same day, you're not going to be able to get back to them quickly anyway. So it's fine to do five a day over the course of a month or so,

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Filip Valica: which is why having some way of prioritising them is really important because you want to put the most important one first, of course. And then don't forget to follow up with them. There's another Gmail tool called boomerang,

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Filip Valica: as in the stick you throw and comes back.

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Filip Valica: And that costs, I think it's about $14.99 a month. But when you send an email, you can tell it to bring that email back into your inbox if they haven't replied after X number of days,

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Filip Valica: you can also use it to pre-shedule emails, you know?

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Chloë Thomas: So if it's like midnight and you're doing these and you don't want someone to know you're working at midnight, then you can create all these emails and schedule them to go out the following morning at 10 a.m.

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Chloë Thomas: or if you know they're in a different part of the world, schedule it to go out in the right time zone for them. So that's a really handy tool that I've only started using about a month ago, but I'm using more and more and more.

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Filip Valica: Yeah, absolutely love that tool as well. Yeah, great tips, Chloe. And I'd love to talk to you about all of this stuff in more detail. We haven't even touched on branding, offline stuff,

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Chloë Thomas: paper click advertising, remarketing partnerships and any of the good stuff. So we're going to have to have you on the show again.

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Chloë Thomas: Before we do that, could you give everybody maybe your best tip for if they're just starting out with their business and they're looking to grow and they need to market? What should they be spending most of their time? on.

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Chloë Thomas: Oh, wow.

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Chloë Thomas: Ouch.

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Chloë Thomas: I think the thing which you have to do is to find a source of quality traffic to get it to your website. So I think certainly in the early stages, the focus has to be

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Filip Valica: on right. What are our 10 ideas for marketing and getting traffic to the site?

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Filip Valica: Let's start with the first one. Go at it.

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Chloë Thomas: And if after a couple of weeks, we're not getting the results we

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Filip Valica: wanted. Let's try the next one and let's try the next one. So that could be, so you're kind of doing kind of a quick and dirty test of all of them because as we know, social media, it takes months to fully pay back.

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Filip Valica: Google AdWords takes months to properly optimize and so on and so forth. And PR, you know, it can take months and months before you hear anything. But if you start off and you're

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Filip Valica: posting on Facebook really good quality content for two weeks, that's really interesting, hitting the right groups, you're really going for it, and you've got not a single click through to your website,

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Filip Valica: then you can be pretty certain that there's probably something else I could be doing first to create myself a bit more traction.

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Filip Valica: Great advice. And also, we haven't had enough time to get into all the detail, but wanted to throw up the link for your book, customer manipulation, how to influence your customers to buy more, and why an ethical approach will always win.

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Filip Valica: And I have to say, it's actually really affordable to get it on Amazon. So go ahead and click on the link and give Chloe a shout, you know, if you need some help with that.

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Filip Valica: And Chloe, can you also mention where they can find you and where they can get some content like your podcast and other freebies? Of course. I will just say about the book.

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Chloë Thomas: It goes through the five stages of getting a customer to know about you, then to give you their email address, then to make the first purchase, then to make another purchase, and then to become a total screaming advocate. So it really does cover in a lot more detail,

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Chloë Thomas: 99% of what we've been talking about today. So I think you'll all find it really useful.

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Chloë Thomas: I was just going to say, I actually just bought it. So everybody that's listening, I'm not a paid infomercial. I just thought this was like really cool stuff. And I'm an information junkie. So I'm on Amazon right now. But sorry, go ahead. Awesome.

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Chloë Thomas: Sweet. Thank you very much. Where you can find the rest of what I'm up to is at ecommerce masterplan.com.

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Chloë Thomas: There you can find the podcast, which is totally free to air, goes out every week with a different e-commerce business, from those who've just launched through to we had Tesco.com on a couple of weeks ago.

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Chloë Thomas: And that's the one of the fifth largest retail, the fifth largest retailer in the world. So we really do cover it all. And you can also find lots of various freebies and downloads and other products and bits and bobs on my site. So just head over there, ecommerce masterplan.com. Awesome, Chloe.

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Chloë Thomas: Thanks again for providing just so much value in one hour. This could have really easily gone on for another couple hours. So thanks again for coming on the show, and I look forward to having you back on hopefully pretty soon. Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure.

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Chloë Thomas: And that's all I've got for today, everybody. Thanks for listening. I put all the links that we've covered under the show notes posted on the product startup.com slash episode 22.

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Filip Valica: Join me next time as I speak with Tamar Lucien, one of the founders of Mental Happy.

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Filip Valica: Mental Happy is a service that sends a personalized cheerbox with an assortments of tools, treats, handmade crafts, and a personal note curated for the recipient to help them feel better.

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Filip Valica: Tamar was inspired to help others feel good with Mental Happy through her own moment with life's lows, including a falling business and a failed relationship. So tune in next week to hear that episode.

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Filip Valica: Lastly, if you've brought your own physical product to market or know someone that has, I'd love to have you on the show. I really appreciate your support, everybody. I read all the comments and questions and definitely try to incorporate them into the future episodes that we have here.

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Filip Valica: Thanks again for your support and I'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast with your host, Philip Belisa. For more great content and to stay up today, visit theproduct startup.com.

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Filip Valica: Your guide to getting there.

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Filip Valica: Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Product Startup Podcast, the show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market and turn it into a big success. This podcast series is brought to you

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Filip Valica: by Mako Design + Invent, the first firm in North America to provide global caliber end-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors, and small product businesses. If you're looking for product development help on your invention, head over to

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Filip Valica: Mako-design.com. That's m-a-k-o-design.com for a free consultation from one of Mako Design for design studios from coast to coast. Thanks for listening, and see you next time.