In this episode, Drew talks with Andrew Youderian on the  eCommerceFuel.com podcast to explain how to leverage post cards in your business, how his companies are gearing up for Black Friday, and more.  Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher Highlights The best way to utilize post cards for a significantly higher return on investment than other marketing outlets (i.e. Facebook) What to focus on when gearing up for Black Friday How to use post cards for your business Links / Resources PostPilot’s On-Boarding Concierge  Ramit’s Copywriting Course NerdMarketing.com AutoAnything.com RightMessage.com Klayvio’s Holiday Guide Klaviyo Liquid Web eCommerceFuel Job Boards eCommerceFuel Forum

Nerd Marketing Ecommerce Podcast

Podcast 41: eCommerce Fuel interview – Post Card Marketing for eCommerce

In this episode, Drew shares his favorite resources and private equity investment contacts. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights A few names to file away and pull-out when you're looking to sell Links / Resources Brian Colton, Brooklyn-Equity Carson Biederman, Digital Fuel Capital Tom Clark, Comvest Dominic Ang, Turn/River Capital Kingswood Partners Me Chris Yates, Rhodium Weekend Empire Flippers,  Justin Cooke Quiet Light Podcast, Episodes two and eight Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. Read The Transcript: Hey, everybody. It's Drew Sanocki with the Nerd Marketing Podcast. We are talking about buying and selling businesses in this short web series if you will. This one, this episode, is the final one. Here I kind of want to open up my contacts to you and walk you through some people who are doing some interesting buying of businesses like yours, so these are ... Just file it away. If you hope to sell someday, these are some of the people who may be interested in buying your business, whether you run a SaaS company or a direct-to-consumer brand. I'm going to give you some resources here, and also just want to make it clear that it's not what you know; it's who you know. Part of fetching a good valuation and being able to sell your business or raise money for your business is knowing the kind of people who would love to own your business, right? Because these buyers, these funds come in a million different flavors. What we want to focus on here is not Robert Smith and Vista Capital. He's going for the billion-dollar SaaS companies. I want to talk about people who are playing in our space, direct-to-consumer and for smaller companies. First up is a friend of mine over in Brooklyn. His name's Brian Colton. He runs Brooklyn Equities. Brooklyn Equities is his vehicle for buying just solid, good direct-to-consumer brands. He owns one called Sherrill Tree that I want to say he bought back when it was doing about $1 million in revenue and is now at $40 million in revenue. I mean, he's just had a couple big success stories. Those numbers, don't quote me on them. I'm just trying to give you a sense of what he buys. His typical checks are typically $5 to $15 million, so he writes checks that size in return for which he wants majority ownership of the company. He'll take a board seat. He's targeting growth-ready companies that are doing under $5 million in EBITDA. I would also say I've seen him go after companies that are high in recurring revenue, often from B2B, so it could be an e-commerce company with a strong B2B play. I mentioned Sherrill Tree, so they do arborist equipment, so again, lots of B2B buyers, which means high recurring revenue, which means lower risk in the business as I went over a couple of episodes ago. So, his name's Brian. He's at brooklyn-equity.com. I am an operating partner with him on his funds, so feel free to reach out to me with any questions about Brooklyn Equities. Number two would be Carson Biederman at Digital Fuel Capital. Carson's up in Boston, another friend of mine. Great photographer and great ... just really sharp digital marketing mind. Again, probably goes after deals of the same size. I would say Carson a little bit more likes companies with passionate customers where content can play really well. He's got ski.com. He's got a couple sports apparel companies where there's a passionate user base. He sees that as a differentiator versus Amazon. He also owns Vermont Teddy Bear, which is a brand a lot of us are familiar with. I've certainly heard of them, growing up in the Northeast. Carson's operation is a little bit different at Digital Fuel Capital because he is growing an internal team of operators and marketers,

Podcast 40: My Private Equity Rolodex

In this episode, Drew talks about six things you can do to maximize your company's valuations. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights Six tips to maximize your valuation How to decide on your story Tips for minimizing risk Diversifying your traffic sources Getting your company on autopilot How to network for selling Links/ Resources: Built to Sell, John Warrillow, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber IRCE Shop.org Flippa Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. Read The Transcript: Drew Sanocki: Hey everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing podcast. This is Drew Sanocki. We're talking about investments in private companies. We're talking about maximizing your valuation in this episode. I think it's a really important episode for that reason. Everybody wants to maximize your valuation, whether you're raising money ... If you raise money, if you're going to raise a couple million bucks, you want to do it at a higher valuation so you give away less of your company. Obviously, if you're going to sell your company, you want to maximize that valuation so you can get more money in your pocket. This isn't the typical maximize your valuation list that you'll see on a number of brokerage sites. Just Google it. You'll find plenty. This is my take, based on ten or so years in the game, on the things that I see, in particular around direct to consumer brands, and SaaS brands. Really, I've tried to distill it down to six tips, six things you want to do to maximize your valuation. Drum roll please. Number one. I would say decide on your story. What I mean by that is are you going to raise money or sell off of a growth story, or a profitability story? I'll give you an example. Karmaloop. When we acquired the assets of that business, it was probably ... They couldn't tell a growth story because the company was in bankruptcy. It was a declining asset. They're in bankruptcy. You can't tell a growth story. They couldn't also tell a profitability story, because they were in bankruptcy. You put those two things together, and the business fetches a much smaller valuation. So assuming you could do one or the other, try to decide now if you are going to be selling a growth story in a couple years, or selling that profitability story, because it's going to dictate what you do, and decisions around your business. If you are going to sell the growth story, you want to put as much of your profits back in the business, step on the gas, run Facebook ad campaigns at a lower return on ad spend. Whatever it is, you want to sell that growth story, so you want to lower your profitability, and always favor growth at the expense of profits. On the flip side, you're going to sell a profitability story, you want to do what you can to maximize the profitability of the business, like your target return on ad spend goes from two to ten, or something, to just generate as many profits as you can. The growth story and the profitability story determine very different kinds of buyers, and very different multiples, as we discussed multiples in the last episode. If you are growing, and you choose that growth story to tell, you sell that in your deal book. Then, you could also argue that you get valued off of multiple of revenue. Conversely, if you're on board with the profitability story, you want to maximize that owner's discretionary cash flow, because that's the thing that's going to drive the multiple of the business, and the ultimate valuation. So, I'd say, number one, decide on what story you want to tell. Number two, you want to reduce risk in the business. We talked about how valuations go from nothing for the smallest, riskiest businesses, all the way up to the public equity markets,

Podcast 39: The Six Things You Can Do Today to Maximize Your Valuation Tomorrow

In this episode, Drew talks about the three highlights of how deals go down in the private equity process. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights Three highlights on how deals go down in the private equity Links / Resources FE International Quiet Light Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. Read The Transcript: Hey, everybody. welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Drew Sanocki. I'm still here in San Diego, still stuck. East coast is being slammed by another nor'easter. My wife's watching the kids. It's always good when you negotiate with your wife like, "Hey, I need you to watch the kids because I got this business thing I gotta deal with on the west coast. It's only gonna be 48 hours. I'll be back in a couple days." You negotiate that, she signs off, and then you're there for the whole week, and every time they FaceTime you, they see palm trees in the background, and you FaceTime them, it's like dark because it's snowing. They're losing power and stuff. So shout out to my wife, Sarah. I love you. Thank you for watching the kids. But it allows me to talk a little bit more about buying and selling a company, private equity. In this podcast, I'd like to delve into kind of how it goes down. I was working on the AutoAnything deal for maybe two months. It was accelerated because AutoZone wanted to close the deal by the end of their fiscal quarter. Typically, these process ... I've been a part of deals that have gone for like six months, and those are only the bigger ones. On the other end of the spectrum, when I sold Design Public, my small first retailer, that probably took about a month. It has to do with a lot of things: how sophisticated your buyer is or your investor, how buttoned up your own business is. But today I kind of want to talk about how the deals go down and really highlight three things. Number one is the process. This is the process you will go through if you go to sell your business or raise money or, if you are on the other side of the table and you wanna buy a business. That's the process. Number two: quick sidebar on valuations, just where you get them. Do they come out of thin air or not? And I just wanna touch on the third thing: control. That obviously applies if you are not exiting a business, but if you take an investment, control becomes a big thing. How much control do you give up of your company? Again, this all applies whether you are doing the buying or the selling, but let's start with the process. The process for ... I've probably been a part of 20 different deals, some as the buyer, some as the seller. It kind of all follows the same four or five steps. The first step is that, if you are selling, you hire a banker to run your process or a broker or decide to do it yourself, but the general idea of the process is that the banker or you, whoever's running the process, creates a deal book. The deal book is, I don't know, 10 to 20 pages, nice and pretty, with a lot of charts and graphs showing just what a wonderful investment your company is. You spend some time working with the professional to kind of put that deal book together, and then you or whoever you've hired approaches potential buyers with that deal book. The idea is to drum up interest. Typically, the banker will add some urgency into the process like, "Hey, here's the deal book on Auto Anything, and if you are interested, we'd like some approximate bid or something by next Thursday." There might be a couple calls with potential investors then or potential funds, but the first step is assembling that deal book and getting it in front of the right people. That's, I'd say, the more proactive way to sell your business. There's always the reactive way,

Podcast 38: How you sell a business—“the Deal Process”

In this episode, Drew talks about his own personal experiences in buying and selling companies, and gives a brief intro to private equity, which he'll discuss in the next few episodes. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights Insight on selling Drew's first company, DesignPublic Intro to Private Equity Links/ Resources: Robert Smith Kingswood Partners Bill D'Alessandro Turn/ River Capital Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. Read The Transcript: Drew: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. This is Drew Sanocki, and I am podcasting from San Diego, where I've been working on AutoAnything. And for like the fifth time this winter, I am stranded in San Diego. So the New York airports are down, I can't go home. There are no flights in and out of there. So what better thing to do than podcast, right? I can probably think of a million better things. But seriously, what better things than to bang out a short series on buying and selling companies? We're going to call it buying and selling companies. I call it private equity, but I think most people don't know what the heck private equity is, so we're going to call it buying and selling companies. As you may or may not know, I just recently worked on a transaction to buy autoanything.com. It's a drop ship retailer based here in La Jolla. And as part of that I've podcasted about maybe one or two times. Some people are curious about private equity, how it happens, why they should care about it, why is there private equity. And it boils down to one thing, and I think it's ... these are probably the funds, or the groups of people that would buy you someday. If you are listening to this podcast, you're probably running a small direct-to-consumer brand, or SAS company perhaps, maybe an agency. Well, a lot of those things get bought by private equity funds, or small private investment groups. And so, why do you want to know about this stuff? Well, it's ultimately to fetch a higher valuation for your company, and to know about how to exit. That's probably 90% of you. But 10% of you, maybe you want to get in to private equity. Maybe you want to get into buying and selling your own company. And why would you want to do that? Well, for a number of reasons. I think it accelerates your growth. I think you can just get to where you want to go faster if you're working with some capital, or with other people's capital. So it's of interest to you too for that reason. So I want to spend three of four episodes doing a quick overview of buying and selling companies, at least my own experience with it. And I'm going to start with a story. And the story is of a young, handsome man, probably like 10% body fat. Am I painting you the picture of myself, maybe 15 years ago? Actually no, it was more like seven years ago when I sold my first company. But I'm walking through the West Village of New York, and in my hand I've got a FedEx package. And in the FedEx package is a bunch of signed documents to sell my company at the time, Design Public. And this was my baby. I bootstrap designed Public in 2003, we started the business, and now at the time it was like 2011. And we found a great buyer who we worked really well with, and they gave us an offer we liked. So at the end of months of work, of diligence of them going through our books and a lot of legal back and forth, in that FedEx pack was the signed purchase agreement. As soon as I got to the FedEx/Kinko's, I put that thing on the counter, and that was the point of no going back. It was my company up until that document was mailed. Once it gets mailed in, it triggered all sorts of things, like the money went in ... their money was already sitting in an escrow account,

Podcast 37: Intro to Private Equity

In this episode, Drew talks about buying a company, and a few major lessons he learned from doing the deal. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights The Lessons I learned from the AutoAnything deal Links / Resources AutoAnything Press Release Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. Read The Transcript: Who is tired of hearing about Karmaloop? Raise your hand. "Here goes Sanocki, the one trick pony. Karmaloop again? We've already heard about that, Drew. Tell us something we don't know." Right? Well, this is the problem when you have one big recent case study that kind of is very relevant to your audience. I mean, I've done stuff since Karmaloop. I was the CMO of this company Teamwork and I run my agency, Growth Engines. We've got a number of direct to consumer brands, but the problem there is I can't talk about a lot of them. Today I'm excited to announce something big and something I've been working on a long time. I was part of a team that bought a new company, and the company is called AutoAnything. Autoanything.com, they are in the car accessories category. They sell things like floor mats and converters and things to sup up your car or Jeep or truck. It's the reason I've been in California so much. I know I've been saying, I do this podcast from San Diego. Been here for months, going back and forth to New York, and it was because I've been working on this deal. AutoAnything, the deal was announced today by AutoZone. We bought it from a public company, AutoZone, I guess about an $8 billion company. There was a divestiture, so what that means is, any company that size owns a number of different business units and for some reason or another, they decide that this business unit isn't core to their business and they want to get rid of it or think it'll be better off as an independent entity. I was part of a group that could move fastest and put the right offer together to acquire the asset. AutoAnything itself is a beast of a business. I mean, a million plus skews. If you can imagine in the auto category there is a make, model, year of every car and if you're selling something like a floor mat make, model, year, and then that thing comes in every color imaginable. Just a huge product catalog. It's primarily drop ship, but they do own a couple private label lines and brands, which obviously have great margins. It does about, I can't get into the specifics, but call it a nine figure retailer and seven figures in EBITA, so seven figures in profits, which is great. It all depends on the deal price, on what you buy it for, and obviously I can't get into that, but we're happy with it. Obviously it made sense for all parties. Man, I learned a ton in the process of this deal, and would love to kind of start getting into it, start getting into what we're going to do with the company. Just for me as a marketer and as an online merchandiser, I look at a number of assets here that I'm excited to work with. First, there's just the scale of this business. You know, you don't get to work on a nine figure business every day. There's four million people on the email list, from what I see a lot of discounting going on and not a lot of lifecycle marketing, so that gets me excited. Four to five million visits a month, there's just traffic. You know, there's scale here. Scale that you can sink your teeth into and make changes and see results very quickly. Some of you might be saying, "Drop ship retail," I mean, this was my first reaction when I heard drop ship retail, like, if I started a business today, an eCommerce business, it wouldn't be drop ship. Right? Because you don't have anything proprietary and you're selling the same stuff your competitors are. "Drew, why did you buy a drop ship retailer?" Well,

Podcast 36: So we just bought AutoAnything.com ….

In this episode, Drew talks in-depth about the tools that made productive work possible during a 7-month long trip across the globe with his family. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights 19 Online tools that made it possible to work and travel for 7 months Productivity tips and hacks for combining work with travel Links / Resources Download my list of Top Nerd Travel Tools Sanebox Worldwide101 (Mention Drew sent you and get 20% off your first month) Sovereign man Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. → Read the Transcript Drew:Hey everybody. Drew Sanocki here with the Nerd Marketing podcast. This is an early morning podcast. I'm recording this at 4:30am because I am on the West Coast and I'm still on East Coast time. Got up this morning at the nice time of 3:00 a.m. I don't even have my kids here with me to get me up, so what else would I want to do at zero dark thirty but bust out a podcast? I'm here working on a big deal, and more on that in an upcoming podcast episode. Today, I know I promised everybody my top tools, my top travel tools. These are apps and tools and gadgets and cool things that I really appreciated when I spent seven months on the road with my family going to Europe over the last year. We're about to go to Asia. We're thinking of a trip to Asia again for another six or seven months. These things are going to be in my travel bag or on my laptop or on my phone. They really help run my business remotely. I think I mentioned in the last episode that one of the visions I have is running an iPad business or being an iPad leader. What that just means is I want to be able to run everything off the iPad. I don't want to do it on my computer. Initially I laughed when I saw these kind of senior private equity guys show up at board meetings just with their iPads, but now I get it. There's nothing better than getting on an airplane with just your iPad and a small bag of your clothes and just kind of sitting down, preferably in first class or business class, you take out the iPad, do a little bit of work, watch a couple videos, watch some Seinfeld and that's it. I don't want to be hunched over a laptop the rest of my life so iPad leadership is kind of what I'm going for and that really has helped inform some of these tools. I started out to do a list of about 12. I think I ended up with a list of, I don't know, I want to say 30 or so. Too many to go into in this podcast, so what I'm going to do is highlight some of my favorites on the podcast and then you can go to the show notes and download a PDF that has the whole 30, many of which you probably know about, but I think what I tried to do here is be a little bit different from the standard Tim Ferris bio life hacking stuff and just talk about what a typical dad might appreciate on a trip or a typical parent. So, without further ado, SaneBox. Let me start with SaneBox, which I've talked about before. It's an app to help you manage email. The primary benefit is fewer interruptions, right? It's like reduced information that you have to process on a daily basis. This holds true if you're traveling, it holds true if you are going into your office every day, but there's a lot of evidence that shows that the more information you've got to process, your willpower goes down, you just kind of get beaten down and stressed out. The beauty of SaneBox is you can configure it, or when configured the proper way, you can open your inbox at any time and all you see is the most important stuff and it's typically, in my case, I've got the thing so dialed that it's like three or four emails that I need to respond to at any one time. If I open it at 9:00 a.m., 10:00 p.m., middle of the night, it's just the most important things.

Podcast 35: Top Nerd Travel Tools

In this episode, Drew talks about the five different observations he had while working and growing his business during 7 months of travel with his family, and the people and tools that made it possible.  Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights Five different observations I had working and growing my business while travelling How the 80/20 rule saved my life (because airport wifi is shady) If you're making more than $100,000 a year, hire an assistant yesterday through Worldwide101 How you can use Sanebox to triage your emails (and an assistant to triage your Sanebox) When you should start swinging for the fences Links / Resources Growth Engines Worldwide101 (mention Drew sent you and get 20% off your first month) Sanebox Checklist of 12 online apps and tools to use for work while traveling  Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. → Read the Transcript Drew: Hey, everybody. This is Drew Sanocki of the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Today I want to talk about the five things I learned while I was traveling and working. It's kind of funny that the number one question I get is not about, like, "What was the coolest thing you saw?" or "Where were the nicest people?" or "Where was the best food?" The number one question I get from entrepreneurs is, number one, "Did you work?" and number two, "How did you work?" To answer those questions, I put this podcast together. Yes, I did work, in short. I have a couple of different businesses I'm involved in. The primary one I'd like to talk about here is growthengines.io. That is an agency catering to direct-to-consumer brands and to private equity funds that often buy or sell those brands. That business today is bigger than when I left. I think a big reason is because I embraced these five things I'm going to talk about today. Without further ado, the number one observation that I have after six months abroad or seven months abroad is that, really, the 80/20 rule reigns supreme. I know I beat that dead horse all the time on this podcast, but you don't fully understand it, you're not forced to comprehend it until you are on some remote island in the Caribbean, and there's no WiFi, except for the one hour when you're going through the airport on the way in and on the way out. I mean, talk about a constraint. What that forced me to do is, you can't be online all the time. What you really need to do is think through what are the most important things you need to do that week, such that when you hit a WiFi connection or can get cell phone coverage, then you can log back on and accomplish those things. So, what didn't I do during those times? I mean, really, the 80% of my work that doesn't give me any results, and those were things like this podcast, for one. Actually, the podcast gives me results, but I dropped it. I stopped doing the podcast. Bookkeeping. Tinkering on my blog. I mean, how much time do I spend, do you spend, messing around, moving fonts on your blog or configuring colors or something, just so it looks nice? Really, there was no time for that at all. So, drop that. Coffees and calls. These two things are a huge time suck, especially when you're in a city like I am, where there are a lot of people, and everybody wants to meet, and "Hey, Drew, you want to grab coffee?" or "You want to hop on a call here?" If you add that time up, those are hours every week I would spend at coffees or on phone calls. So, I really could not do those at all. Those got dropped. Calls to my mother, for example, also got dropped. I mean, completely unessential, right? I mean, I don't need to call my mom. So, I would go months without calling her. No, I didn't, but reduced amount of time calling my mother. You'll block out so much non-essential stuff.

Podcast 34: Productivity Insights After Six Months on the Road

We're back! In this episode, Drew talks about where he has been the past 7 months, and 3 things listeners can expect from upcoming episodes of the podcast. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights A little look at where I've been the past 7 months The podcast is back (obviously) Over the next few sessions, I'll be talking about buying more assets I'll share some lessons I'm learning with my other company, Growth Engines, Inc. I'm developing a course on e-mail marketing Links / Resources Drew's Instagram Sara's Instagram  Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. → Read the Transcript Drew: Hey everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. I'm back. I am back. It's 2018. I have been on hiatus for seven or so months, and I have just been overwhelmed by the number of people out there who are asking, "Where's the podcast? Drew, where's the podcast, how come you haven't podcasted in a while?" That's just among my two kids, and even people on my e-mail list are asking for the podcast to come back. I don't know why. It's not something that I think adds a lot of value to anything, but some people like audio, so I'm going to roll with it. In this podcast, I wanted to kick of 2018 and set the stage a little bit, catch everybody up on what's going on in nerd marketing, like you care, but there is some things in it for you. Give you a little trick I've been experimenting with, and then we'll move on to some content in the next couple of podcasts. The big thing is, I just got back from a seven-month trip with my family. We left back in March, came back to the States in early November, or I guess around Halloween. This was awesome. It was life-changing. It was really an incredible time. We went to the Caribbean, we went over to Europe and did the Clark Griswold thing. Again, yes, this is with the kids. I've got a five and a three-year-old now, but at the time they were two and four. Brought the wife also. Yeah, it was just amazing. It's too much to put into a podcast. A lot of falconry and boating and beach time and visiting museums and eating cheese and all the good stuff that comes with that. I think the big thing for me was that it really allowed me mentally to punch out of the system, or the systems. I think when we live in a place, we are at the mercy of several systems. It can be the career system where you feel like you've got to do something in your career. There's the housing system, you've got to own some sort of housing or play that game. The school system, where in New York it's just a nightmare. You got to get your kids into the right schools, and there are all sorts of things you got to do to get that kid into the right school. It was really liberating to just eject and break free of all those systems. The rent system, I didn't have to pay rent for six or seven months. I think if you're really enlightened you can break out of those systems without needing to break out of them geographically, but moving geographically can't hurt. It was really liberating for me and my wife to leave for seven months and just be this nice, independent, mobile family unit without a lot of constraints. It allowed me to think about a lot and to plan for what I really wanted to get out of the next couple years in my life, and that brings me here. It brings me back to New York. We came back to New York for the holidays. We are planning on travelling again, maybe in a month, and this time we're talking about the West Coast, Asia, and the idea would be that we get back to the States in time for my five-year-old to start first grade. We are homeschooling him now, which I thought he would end up really weird, but he's great. Because home-schooled people are always really weird, but my kid is fine,

Podcast 33: The Podcast is Back and Three Updates for 2018

Drew is joined by Patrick Shanahan for another round of Tradecraft - this time featuring a tool for postcard marketing, and a chat app that reveals what your customers really want. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights Drew is off to travel the world with family in tow, expect new episodes from sandy beaches and other exotic locales. A new emphasis on video content A shopify app to trigger the sending of physical postcards to people in your database Who to make the target of your postcard marketing A chat app Patrick uses to get in touch with what his customers really want How to collect customer feedback into something actionable Links / Resources More Tradecraft in Episode 28 and Episode 30. Touchcard.co Drift Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. → Read the Transcript Drew: Everybody, welcome to the Nerd Marketing podcast. This is Drew Sanocki and I am joined today by Patrick Shanahan, my trade craft partner. How're you doing, Patrick? Patrick: Good, Drew. Nice to talk to you again. Drew: Today we're going to go over some tips and tricks, what we see working out there, what's helping us do our jobs better as online marketers. You've got a couple things, Patrick? Patrick: I do, I do. I've got one I'm quite pleased with, so I'm fired up to talk about it. Drew: I think people like these episodes. They like hearing what's working. Patrick: Yeah, they do. I mean, I've looked at your stats, they're the most downloaded so obviously it's working. So, you just come off your big talking circuit, I know you talked about that in the last episode, but you're about to go full vagabond. Hit the road. Want to tell us about that? Drew: Yeah, it's something really exciting my wife and I've wanted to do for a long time so next Saturday we're packing up, and we're going to the Caribbean, and we're not coming back to New York for probably six months. I think that we're not going to be in the Caribbean the entire time, but we'll do Central America, and Europe. We're taking the kids, obviously. We're really looking forward to it. I mean, we're stressed about the packing and getting everything done and we're trying to liquidate a lot of our personal belongings that we really don't care about or want to store, but with any luck it'll all come together by next Saturday when we're on that flight. Patrick: Amazing, amazing. I can't believe you're taking the kids. That's going to be an adventure, buddy. Drew: Yeah, we debated leaving them at home for six months, but we thought we should... we thought they'd miss us so we're going to take them with us. Patrick: Well, congratulations, that's amazing. And are you going to stay podcasting? Drew: No, I'm shutting down the podcast for six months. No, I'm going to... I'm going to keep podcasting, I'm going to do some video. A lot more video. Maybe not quite as much writing, the long form emails, they take up a lot of time, so I think I can try to move a little more into video and audio for the next six months. Patrick: There we go, so the future dispatches will be from sandy beaches and other places hither, and thither, and yon. Drew: Yeah, you know, I feel like I've got a lot of things I want to cover. We've been talking a lot about this concept of a cash flow business, or a lifestyle business, and we're just scratching the surface. We're talking about customer problems and brand, and there's a lot more I want to talk about on that and what I see working for you, Patrick, for me, at Nerd, and through my own consulting. So I want to share that on the podcast. And, really, I think video's going to be a great medium for that. So, maybe you'll see a lot more of me now that I'm leaving the country.

Podcast 32: Postcard Marketing and A Powerful Chat App (Tips/Tricks/Hacks)

A few updates from Drew - recaps of three recent events he spoke at, the key learnings at each of them, and a preview of the near future for Drew and Nerd Marketing. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights RECAP: Traffic and Conversion Summit Niche businesses - why they're great, how they fail, and where retention marketing comes in The "Scrum" approach to growth RECAP: Brand Growth Intensive Workshop with Austin Brawner RECAP: Masterclass with ConversionXL What's Next: Build a Bigger Business Course for Shopify Catalogues - A resurgence of old school mail marketing? A couple of new courses are coming Much, much more Links / Resources Check out Drew's free, 7-lesson email course Double Your Ecommerce Touchstonetests.io More on basic segmentation in Google Analytics in Episode 16 Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. → Read the Transcript Hello everybody, and welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast, episode 31. I am Drew Sanocki, and I am coming at you from New York City, where I'm finally taking a break. A break being defined as being an hour break, not like an extended break. Man, I have been running the gauntlet of E-commerce speaking engagements, and workshops, and classes. I'm going to tell you all about that stuff today. A lot of good stuff to report. Basically I want to spend this podcast just kind of reconnecting, welcoming all my new listeners who I've met over the past month or two since my last podcast. I want to do a little bit on what I've been up to, and then where I'm going, what I'm working on next. Let's start with the former, so what I did first. I spoke at Traffic and Conversion. This is the huge E-commerce and digital marketing conference that's put on in San Diego. It was, I guess about early March, this Traffic and Conversion went on. I was one of 10 or so speakers, and it's easily the largest E-commerce and digital marketing conference I've ever been to. Thousands and thousands of people, it's put on by DigitalMarketer.com. Obviously the focus is on traffic and conversion. A lot of big speakers. We had some people from Uber, some people from Casper, plus a lot of industry people there. I was asked to speak about Karmaloop, and what went on there, and database marketing more generally. I'm happy to share my deck with you guys, and kind of what I did. Maybe I'll do that as a separate podcast. But, my big takeaway from this was that the industry is still really focused on acquisition, and traffic, and hacks, and tricks, and bells, and whistles, and things that, silver bullets that people think are going to get them 10x growth in a year. It's not to say that those things don't exist, I think they do. But, we gotta beware of survivorship by us, right? Most of the blog posts that get published talk about these things, but it's not reflective of the vast majority of other companies that are around just slugging away, just applying pressure over time, and growing slowly. It's not to say one's better than the other, it's just to say, "Hey, when you read a headline you're focusing in on what that author tries to promote, and uses to promote that post." Even within a post. You read a post on DigitalMarketer.com about some company that 10x'ed revenue in a year. Even within that company that 10x'ed, there was probably a whole mess of stuff that happened behind the scenes before they figured out the one thing that would catapult them to the next level. Just beware what you read. I think you see it in the eyes of the people, when you look out at these conferences. They're just, they want the quick win. I think I've been there, I've been in those seats when I was running my own retailer. I too, read those headlines because they draw me right in.

Podcast 31: Traffic & Conversion Summit 2017 Recap + More Updates

From taking advantage of the 24-hour news cycle, to improving your sender score - Drew and special guest Patrick Shanahan share a few of their favorite tips, tricks, and hacks. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Digital marketer Patrick Shanahan joins Drew to talk tips, tricks, and hacks in this episode of the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Learn how one eCommerce company used newsjacking to turn a hot-button topic into huge sales. Plus, resending emails to boost your overall open rates, and a clever hack Patrick calls a "Reverse LeadMagnet" to improve your sender score with Google. Highlights Drew has a new office, some hilarity ensues Newsjacking – using the 24-hour news cycle as a marketing channel Resending to unopens - an email technique you need in your toolkit Speculating on the mysterious Google Sender Score Patrick's "Reverse LeadMagnet" technique to improve sender score A tip on segmenting your audience by email client Much, much more Links / Resources Apply now for Drew's 2-day Brand Growth Intensive workshop Check out Drew's Conversion Playbook to build a proven system that explodes your conversion rate in less than 30 days More on newsjacking in this article. Check out Black Rifle Coffee's viral tweet here and the resulting wins. Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF.

Podcast 30: Newsjacking and Resending Emails (Tips/Tricks/Hacks)

Austin Brawner from Ecommerce Influence joins Drew to share four killer strategies to make the most of the all-powerful email marketing channel. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. To accurately convey just how valuable a sophisticated email marketing strategy can be to an Ecommerce retailer, Drew enlists the help of Austin Brawner from Ecommerce Influence. Both Austin and Drew have a ton of experience consulting and providing audits to companies asking the big question, “What can I be doing better?” Typically, the answer is – smarter email marketing! As Austin says in this episode, most retailers are only using 10% of the available power of their email service provider. Automation, segmentation, retention campaigns – these are the strategies the most successful retailers are using. Learn about each of them in this episode of the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Plus, an announcement of The 2-Day Brand Growth Implementation Intensive – a live event unlike anything you’ve attended before, hosted by Drew and Austin. Highlights The big shift that turned Drew’s first big Ecommerce retailer around. The role email marketing has played in Austin’s Ecommerce career. The benefit of fixed costs in email marketing. Typical list management issues that Austin discovers while consulting. Benchmarks for desktop and mobile opt-in rates. Responding to pop-up concerns. Segmentation and targeting: sending the right messaging to the right customer at the right time. ”Good dog” and “bad dog” automated emails. The only thing holding companies back from succeeding with these strategies? They don’t actually implement them. Drew and Austin are hosting an intensive email marketing workshop. Links / Resources Apply for a spot in Drew and Austin’s Intensive Email Marketing Workshop. Ecommerce Influence More on Discount Ladders in Episode 02. Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Austin Brawner: Hey, what's up Drew? How are you doing, man? Drew Sanocki: Hey, Austin. I'm doing well. How are you? Austin Brawner: I'm good. I'm pumped to be doing this joint podcast together. We've been talking a long time about doing a joint podcast or a joint project and here it is and hopefully, it fulfills everything. We've been getting lots of e-mails from people wanting to hear us on the same podcast. Drew Sanocki: Either they want to hear us on the same podcast or they want us to fight. Austin Brawner: Which is great because we're actually going to be fighting on this podcast. Drew Sanocki: We're going to do both. Austin Brawner: We'll take care of both. Drew Sanocki: Yeah, I mean nerd marketing and e-com influence have been sort of sniffing each other's butts for what? Six, eight months now? Austin Brawner: Maybe longer, maybe longer. We've had a lot in common. We've been thinking about ways to work together and this is kind of our, well, the podcast here is kind of our idea of bringing our knowledge together from spending, you spent how many years longer than I have, 10, 15 years in e-commerce. Drew Sanocki: Yeah. You're rubbing it in. 15 years. Motherfucker. Austin Brawner: Our, the last half a decade at least, in e-commerce, driving sales and we wanted to come together, bring a podcast together where we share our best tips, the stuff that we've learned that works and it's working right now. Drew Sanocki: Yeah, I think, I listen to a lot of e-commerce podcast and really, I find that you and I talk about a lot of the same stuff. We're always hammering home the importance of retention, of e-mail marketing, of lifetime value and so I'm psyched. I'm psyched that we're doing this joint podcast and we're going to talk about some cool st...

Podcast 29: Email Marketing Strategy with Austin Brawner

Drew and digital marketer Patrick Shanahan share their favorite eCommerce marketing tools of 2016. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. We all know that there is no one silver bullet guaranteed to push your business to success, but certain tools can be a big help on the path to higher revenue. Special guest Patrick Shanahan, a digital marketer from Art Storefronts, joins Drew in this episode to talk about just that – key marketing tools that brought him wins in 2016. Learn about PushCrew, an in-browser notification system, and hear Drew talk at-length about Drip – an email service provider with some serious automation chops. Highlights 00:20 - Introducing special guest Patrick Shanahan 01:30 - More episodes of the Nerd Marketing podcast are coming 02:15 - Where has Drew been? Announcing his new CMO role at a SaaS company. 04:55 - Recap of SaaSFest 2016 08:36 - Let's talk about some shiny objects 09:18 - Tool #1: Klaviyo – an email service provider that Drew loves. 15:50 - Tool #2: PushCrew – An in-browser push notification tool that Patrick has had success with. 24:08 - Tool #3: Drip – A fairly new email service provider with unique integrations, automation abilities, and unique features. This is the one Nerd Marketing uses. 33:15 - How to use Drip to keep your list healthy and your emails out of the "promotions" tab. 36:52 - Front-end personalization using Drip. Links / Resources Klaviyo Drew demonstrates how to use Klaviyo for effective win-back campaigns in Episode 25. PushCrew Learn more about in-browser notifications in this DigitalMarketer article. Drip Check out Drew's free, 7-part course on doubling your business. Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Drew Sanocki: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Welcome back to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. This is Drew Sanocki. I have a special surprise today. I have a guest here in the Nerd Marketing studio. My guest's name is Patrick Shanahan. Patrick, how you doing? Patrick Shanahan: Drew, good. Happy to be joining you. Drew Sanocki: For all of you who are listening right now, all three of you, probably don't know who Patrick Shanahan is. Patrick and I have been working together for almost a year now. He's actually not here in the studio in New York with me. He is out in California. Patrick, why don't you introduce yourself to the three or four listeners of the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Patrick Shanahan: Are you kidding me? We're at least up to seven. You've got seven listeners now, I think, on a good day [crosstalk 00:01:02]. Drew Sanocki: It's three. Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. I run marketing, actually, for a eCommerce shopping cart that's a neat shopping cart called Art Storefronts. It's basically a shopping cart for three legs of the stool, the niches. If you own a print studio that reproduces art or if you're an art gallery or if you're an artist. Been running marketing over there for awhile. We're kind of in startup mode but growing pretty quickly. Yeah. Drew Sanocki: Awesome. Patrick, also, has been helping me out a little bit with Nerd Marketing. He has always been pushing me more to do more podcasting and releasing more content. That is my promise to you know. I guess this is December 2016, going into next year, I really want to hit he podcasting hard. We've gotten a lot of good feedback from our email subscribers and the podcast listeners that they enjoy the podcast. I think it's worth doing. I'm going to try to be a little bit more regular with the podcasting. As part of that, I think Patrick's here to help and hopefully add some value to you guys and help you grow your businesses. What have I been up ... I obviously have not been producing content.

Podcast 28: The Top Marketing Tools of 2016 with Patrick Shanahan

Average Order Value as a key multiplier to increase your company's revenue, and how to implement premium service upsells to increase your AOV.Subscribe: iTunes | StitcherThis week's campaign is so simple and effective you'll be kicking yourself for not thinking of it ages ago.It's Drew's "One-Two Punch" Email Campaign designed to increase your order frequency.It starts with asking yourself one question: "What kind of recurring needs do my customers have?"Tune in to hear the rest of the campaign implementation, as well as a little bit about why Drew favors increasing the number of purchases over the number of overall customers.Highlights00:21 – Drew may have ruined his son's reading habit by introducing him to the world of Star Wars02:40 – Recap: three multiples that will grow your revenue03:20 – Focusing in on frequency. Why more purchases instead of more customers?05:18 – The "1-2 Punch" Email Campaign07:00 – Campaign results example (10% lift!) and why it works so well07:50 – How to get started on setting it up for your biz09:18 – Some ESPs have even easier ways to set the campaign up10:00 – Recommendations for related episodes on frequencyLinks / ResourcesMore ways to increase frequency? .Check out Drew's free, 7-part course on doubling your business.More on frequency in Episode 6.TranscriptPrefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later.→ Read the Transcript Hey, everybody, this is Drew Sanocki. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast, Episode 27. I'm talking about increasing your retention today using a technique I call the 1-2 Punch.Before I get in to that, does anyone have small kids? It's my 4 year-old's birthday. He's really into reading, like loved reading the classics. Yeah, the classics of being 4, a 4 year-old classic, whatever the 4 year-old classics are.Little House on the Prairie, stuff like that, he's into it. My wife was thrilled, English major, kid's reading the classics. We're out at the beach the other day, and he's bored with the classics. He's hyped up so I decided to just tell him the story of Star Wars.I started, you know, "Okay, so enough about whatever you're reading, Pride and Prejudice, you know Miss Havisham. Okay, so there are these two spaceships. One attacks the other one and Darth Vader comes off, but there's a princess who puts the plans in a droid and fire the droids off, and Darth Vader needs to get the plans." He's, you could see it in his face.He was like, "You've been giving me Miss Havisham, and there's this other world out there of like spaceships and lasers and light sabers? There upon ensued, it's been like a week running now where he's, every time we go to bed, he does not want to read the classics anymore, and he wants me to tell Star Wars stories. Not even, he's just stopped reading, he just wants me to talk, so I kind of poned myself because I've got to tell the stories now. I'm on the hook. Before I could just toss him a book.My wife is thrilled now, by the way because that's all he talks about. He needs to know these various technicalities of what's going on in the Star Wars series as opposed to lessons learned from classics or something.Anyway, that's what I've got going on. All this which brings me back to increasing your retention and the 1-2 Punch.Okay, so we're going to bring it back to ecommerce here. Bringing it back. There are three ways, three multiples that will grow your revenue. AOV, average order size, frequency of purchase, the number of times somebody buys from you on average, and then the third one, the number of customers. Right?Three ways, only three. I like focusing on those three.I wrote a short free course about them at nerdmarketing.com/double, but today we're going to talk about the second one, increasing your frequency, your customer's order frequency. How do you get them to buy more often. In stepping back, why would you want this to happen.

Podcast 27: A “One-Two Punch” Email Campaign to Increase Order Frequency

Clear, actionable, data driven strategies to grow your ecommerce business.

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