Your Shopify Growth Problems Are Math Problem (Wearing Marketing Costumes)

Jay Myers: I first ran across you as a person on LinkedIn maybe four or five months ago. I saw this guy posting good content, sharing advice

and I thought, okay, this, this guy, seems like he knows what he's doing. And then I think you dmd me and we, how do we make that connection?

Marc Rodill: I think so, yeah. 'cause I saw you had posted some stuff and I said, Hey man I've been interviewing experts just like you, and I'd love to come talk about them. And you were like, I'd love to interview you. I said,

Jay Myers: And now here I am interviewing you. That's how like we we're flipping the, flipping the mic here, but it's been so good to get to know you. And last, last week, geez, was that that was last week, man time. It's so much happening, but last

Marc Rodill: feels like a long time ago.

Jay Myers: it does, it feels like a month, but it was literally basically this day, almost last week, one day one.

But we were down in Dallas together sitting on a podcast panel and that you were hosting and it's been so good to get to know you and I know you have a ton of value to, to add mer to, to merchants. And I'm really excited for this episode. I have a wide open agenda of topics I wanna talk about.

'cause I know you're, you're helping brands make some serious impacts on their a OV. But before we get into that, give us the quick background on who you are, your story, and kind of how you became this e-commerce person.

Marc Rodill: Yeah, I mean, you know, and, and that reminds me, so I'll tie it up at the end of how we, we, how we met when I DMed you. But you know, I just have a long sorted tale, you know, 15 years overnight success. Just got started with Googling how to make money online because I was a waiter at a restaurant young, probably think like 19, 20 years old, not real good at people PE skills, you know, so waiting tables and not having people skills was a little bit nerve wracking to me.

But so I didn't want to do it anymore. So I googled how to make money online like a lot of us do. Came across this forum back in the day. They're still running, but it's like the original marketing. Internet marketing forum. And a lot of people, like in the physical product space, think like e-commerce.

eBay was like the original, but it's not, it's actually not true. The, the truth of the matter is the real wild, wild west was eBooks,

Jay Myers: Hmm.

Marc Rodill: this is before you could even download a video or an MP3 because there's, you're trying to sign onto AOL, it's like it crashes, and you can't get in.

But so I fell into that world and for me, it, it made sense at the time because I didn't have a lot of money. So like inventory creating products was sort of off the table for me. I don't come from some, I'm on the other side of the railroad tracks basically. And you didn't have to talk to anybody, right?

So I'm like, this is perfect. So I jumped into that world and essentially failed in business eight times. A wide variety of businesses over a decade, essentially. Like they would always start off really well. I'd always make money, so I was always proud of myself 'cause a lot of people never made a dollar online, but I was under this illusion, like I was gonna be a millionaire in 30 days, you know?

So I was telling this to my family and they were always like, typical the internet's a fad. You should get a job, go to college, join the military. And I hate to say this, but I was always really desperate for my parents' approval. So I show it to them and they'd be like this is a pipe dream.

You should do something real with your life. And I would, I would shut it down. But after like my eighth business failure, this one was a local business. I was repairing sliding glass doors for a living. It failed. And I had this epiphany like. It's me. That's the common denominator in this thing. Like I eventually just reach a place where I wasn't willing to do what was necessary to grow the

Jay Myers: Hmm

Marc Rodill: And not really big into meditation. 'cause I was on my last straw, you know, I actually started meditating three hours a day hour and a half in the morning, hour and a half in the evening, and then six months later COVID hit. So it was super helpful to have that base to go through that process.

But yeah, so eventually I just got fed up and I said, you know what? I'm gonna do what I always wanted to do. Which is work with companies, 'cause I was a, I had a seminar back in 2009 and I never knew this. I was really naive, but this very unassuming man came on stage and he had, I was like, eh, this is a, this is a laid back seminar, this Frank Kern's, mass control, the first one for people who know, laid back surfer, dude, very cool at the time.

So very unassuming, older gentleman comes on, straight laced and I'm like, eh, I'm not gonna get any value out of this, but whatever. I'll see what he has to say. And this whole world opened up to me where he revealed that, yeah, you could work with companies, real companies that sell physical products, they have logistics, manufacturing, customer support.

They're doing all these things. And you could work with them to help them grow their sales and profits and they would pay you. And I was like, you can do that. I want to do that. You know? So I started dabbling into that. And so after the eight business failures, I finally went back to it and I said, you know what?

I'm gonna do this. So I went and got two clients in the e-commerce space. Both of them were supplement companies doing some email marketing campaigns for them. Basically just taking proven campaigns and then modifying them for these companies. And they were working really well. Within the first 30 days, they were working really well.

And then all of a sudden Hurricane Ian comes through at 2 20, 22, totally wipes me out my town. I was in Fort Myers, Florida, the whole city. Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Sanibel Captiva, tourist hotspot of the world. Beautiful tourist destination. Complete landfill. For, for like ever, so I lost everything.

And I ended up work, I came across this young guy who was working for a big fancy e-commerce company that sold digital products. And I got in and one thing led to another. Within 16 months of working with them, we ended up generating $4.7 million on the backend, working with them in just the way that I've always wanted to work with companies.

And I went through that experience for two years. We did about five and a half million total during my tenure there. And then I said, you know, what do I really want to do next? And so I, a lot of that was partnering that we did with them strategic alliances, marketing campaigns, and I wanted to bring, I've always wanted to do all that stuff with companies, but I never felt like I was ready, so I had to be ready.

And so I got ready. And I said, I started talking to some of my mentors and my peers and they were like, so you always want to do this, so you know, you can't do everything. So you learned a lot about partnering. Why don't you put on a little demonstration and see what you could do to add value to others by working together with lots of really top level experts.

And I said, yeah, exactly. So I went out and I started reaching out to the top guys in the e-commerce space and I said, Hey, come on to my, I have an interview series. I'm starting 10 minute e-com success. I want your best tip tactic strategy. What is it that, you know that adds the most profit sustainably?

You could scale your business. It's not a growth hack. You know, someone could actually use this and see bottom line results and you Yeah, after a couple failed starts, you know, 'cause I had different ideas. At first it was gonna be supplement based 'cause that's kind of like my thing. But so brought 'em on. 28 experts later got a really nice series that I put together with some leading experts and great tips that I've essentially consolidated. 'cause when you have that much content, it can be overwhelming to know people are busy. So how do you, how do you focus your time? So I indexed it by foundations, spotting areas of opportunity, driving traffic, increasing your conversion, doing backend retention and marketing.

So if you could get, we talked about this on stage at Sub Summit when I brought you up, up for the panel, which, that's when we met in the dms. I said, Hey, I love what you're doing. I'm gonna be going to Sub Summit because Paul Chamber saw my series and invited me out. I'd love to interview you and I'd love to come on your podcast and talk about what I've accomplished with the series.

And you were like, young killer. So I was there at Sub Summit the first day, first conference for me, and you flew in from Shopify additions the second day. Then Chase Climber flew out and I saw his podcast, and then I gotta to see you interview Bobby DeMars, front row seats, you know, didn't have to pay for the ticket.

But that was great. And so me and Bobby, after, after you and I hop off here, I'm gonna be chatting with Bobby. We're gonna game plan. So it was really

Jay Myers: He is a great guy. Yeah. You two men with great beards too.

Marc Rodill: Hey, I appreciate that.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Now you're not just doing the podcast is fantastic. I love the concept of, obviously that's like we, I love that that's what we're about. These 1% wins, like 10, 10 minute tips. Like it's sometimes it doesn't take a lot, right? Like you, we overcomplicate things and we think we have this mountain of.

Lists. Like I, I could literally look at an e-commerce store and make a list of things for years that long projects, but, you know, small improvements added over time end up making a big impact. And so I love that concept.

Marc Rodill: Yeah, exactly like what you said before we hopped on with Atomic Habits, which I've read too. You said Hey, like he told everybody in on his blog and in now his book 1% Improvement every Day leads up to Massive at the end of the year. And so you, you said this on stage at Sub Summit, you were like, if you could take one or two big ideas from this conference and not just have them as ideas anymore, but actually get them into implementation, what or two big ideas can revolutionize your business.

Jay Myers: Totally, totally. I always look back at, I like to ask people, looking back at the last year, what was the most impactful thing you did? Or what moved the needle the most? And like in any business, you can often look back at the past year and kind of go, okay, there was. This one campaign, or we figured out how to turn, customer emails into UGC content, which then became ads, and now we're running those in our AdWords and those we're seeing double conversion.

And you know what, like that might have only been a couple days of work figuring that out. But that one thing has an out outsized gains. And I

Marc Rodill: It almost always boils down to leverage, right? What you just said is leveraging your content to, slightly tweak it and modify and place it into another location. If you find something else that's working, you can double down on that. It doesn't take a lot of time. But so spotting those opportunities and then actually taking action on them is critical.

'cause we're just, everybody's drowning in content these days and the internet is like worse than ever before. People are pumping it out. 'cause AI's really just changed the game.

Jay Myers: I think what would be amazing, I've got a, a number of ways we can go here, but given that you, you started this, this show and you've talked to a number of experts in states, I'd love to pick your brain on a little bit of it and pull out some of those learnings. What would you say is a, a common theme among all the experts you've talked to?

Marc Rodill: Wild theme. I, you know, I sort of didn't expect this, but in hindsight it makes total sense. But you get on with these experts and. Basically, you know, a really good person to telegraph. This is Cindy Thomason. Just to start it off, Cindy Thomason wrote Profit First for e-commerce sellers, and she's an accountant, profit, first certified accountant.

And she was talking about differentiating yourself in business. First of all, is putting more of yourself into your business, making it personal and stop looking at what everybody else is doing to see if oh, maybe I should copy that. But you don't have any context behind the scenes of whether or not that's working.

And so if you want to differentiate yourself, bring yourself into the business. But on top of that, you really need to be focused on the numbers, the cash flow, the profit, right? And she's, she's profit first and she said, I always made a big deal about focusing on profit. That's really important. But she found like a, a lot of things don't make it onto your p and l statement, like your inventory before it's sold.

Owner draw. Debt interests, things like this. And so she said, getting a handle on your numbers, getting a handle on your cash flow, knowing what's actually happening is super important. And the, the common theme across every expert was essentially that they're numbers driven. They're focused on the numbers that matter

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Marc Rodill: The, like Chase Climber came on and he was like, I've doubled e-commerce stores sales and profits over and over and over again just by focusing on a OV conversion and traffic.

That's it, right? But, but unfortunately, what they all agreed on is that shockingly, like a lot of e-commerce store owners don't know their numbers.

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Marc Rodill: actually, they don't know the critical day-to-day numbers because as Jesse Fuge said, I don't know if Jesse, but Jesse

Jay Myers: I do.

Marc Rodill: from Bootstrap Giants, Andrew Warner's partner, from Mixergy.

He said I really encourage people, the number one thing I encourage them to do is obsess about the numbers, but what I found is that they, they feel bad about the bad numbers and good about the good numbers. So they'll look at the good ones, but they won't look at the bad ones. But he's I actually prefer it sometimes when the numbers are bad, because it's an opportunity to learn what not to do, right?

And sometimes what not to do really moves the needle more than what to do.

Jay Myers: Totally. And numbers. If, if, if something is too good, it also often means there's not an opportunity there. But like when we look at certain cohorts of customers that have bad retention or a certain co a channel that you're getting customers from, that their conversion is. 0.5% versus from another channel, it's 5%.

So that, I see that as an opportunity. So how, why is it only 0.5% from, from the, from our Facebook ads, for example. What, what is it about that channel? How can we optimize that? So like finding these numbers is I think too many people try to use data to validate their assumptions versus

Marc Rodill: Yeah, exactly.

Jay Myers: uncovering opportunities.

Marc Rodill: A lot of times they think they're, they, what they'll do, like Jesse actually said was like. A lot of people will aggregate their numbers so then they can see at a glance that, hey, this thing's converting or it's producing profit. But what they like to do, because he actually, he started this company where they actually help VC companies make purchasing decisions on these, on these brands to see if it's a good a purchase and they can't get the data from McKinsey and things with Goldman because McKinsey and Goldman claim they are really good at doing the digital marketing numbers, but actually they don't really know as deeply in there either.

They know the rest really well, but what he likes to do is he'll deaverage them so he'll take 'em and actually split them up. So like you said, you could find out this one's 5%, this one's 0.5%, right? So maybe you stop doing the 0.5, but if you aggravate it all, toge, you aggregate it, you're, you're still at 4.8% across the thing and you're like, that's great.

But as you start to scale that you can't get the incremental gains you're looking for 'cause you're scaling the bad stuff too.

Jay Myers: So if you're a e-commerce operator and you're setting up a, a dashboard or a spreadsheet or however you're tracking it, of your key metrics, what are you setting up? What are you looking at every day, every week?

Marc Rodill: So I'm not, that's not my wheelhouse. But what I do is I recommend that they do that, right? Chloe Thomas came on from e-commerce Master Plan, and she's like big into marketing. She's, she's killer, but she's, she's oh, I wish I could share you some cool way to do your, your Facebook ads, or a YouTube video or something.

But she was like, at the end of the day, the, the single best thing you can do if you want to drive marketing is to be able to make good decisions quickly, right? And so she's always you need to find a way with tools, whatever it takes to pull all of your data from all these different locations, right?

So your product data, your marketing data, your customer data. And consolidate them into dashboards. And she made a solid recommendation for Bright Parl at the end of her interview. And they do great data driven, you know, AI driven data analysis to con take your inventory and track it properly. Like Ron, Ron Shaw, who came on my series, we didn't talk about this in his interview, but later, right after he came on, he pumped out a newsletter where they saved, they're, they're doing like 50 or $60 million a year in sales and they're in Walmart now.

They bootstrapped their way up to Walmart, but so he, he said we added

Jay Myers: you're talking about just for listeners.

Marc Rodill: yeah, obvious collagen supplement flavor, collagen supplement company back in the day they were like the only ones doing this, but,

Jay Myers: yeah. There's a ton now, boy. It's,

Marc Rodill: changed. Yeah. But they found a million dollars a year in profit just by doing some of this data analysis on their inventory tracking.

Just tracking inventory properly.

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm. It's crazy. Collagen is such a great thing because it's one of those things we, we have a number of. Brands that use our subscription tools for it, and it's, you have to take it every day. Otherwise it's not effective. I don't actually, I don't take it personally, so I don't, but that's I know, if you have your protein powder here a couple days later, it's fine.

But apparently collagen loses it. Its effectiveness if you don't have it every day. So it's like this built in re regime that you have to follow. And

Marc Rodill: that's a great for supplements. I mean, a lot of supplements act like that. I had a, I had a guy on that sells, like men's and women's opt optimize your, your body type of supplement. And so mo most of these things you do need to take every day. But even a protein powder, if you're really hitting the gym and you're not taking your protein, like you're not gonna get the, the results you're looking for.

Jay Myers: yeah. Totally. And that's, that's all in, in how you educate your customers on it too. You, you, they should be taking it every day. 'cause it's yeah. I think I just, the, on the analytics thing that. Because it comes up a lot. A lot of times merchants ask what should I be tracking? I, I do think, we could do a whole show on it, but I, I always think it comes down to track what lets you make decisions.

And so you kind of said it like, what makes decisions quickly? And so there's some analytics what's my traffic on my store? Okay, that's okay. That's a fine metric. It's a little bit of a vanity metric. If I saw that I had a thousand visitors last month and 1500 visitors this month, that what decision am am I making from that?

Is it good traffic? Is it bad traffic? Why did it go up 500? Am I getting not qualified traffic? Are they buying am I, is one channel more, one channel less so just a, you

Marc Rodill: needs to be in context. Yeah. So Chloe's what I asked her. I'm like, so what do you track? Like metrics, what exactly is it? She's like everything. But, so once you track everything, you might have everything being tracked on the backend, but then you select certain areas of focus. Like she said, a lot of, a lot of brands that she's talked with, they waste a lot of time Monday morning like compiling data so then they can make good decisions.

And like all of Monday is com compilation. But she said if you just use the tools and set things up properly, it will compile all that data for you. And then you can just look at the numbers that you're focused on, that matter in the context that you need to focus on them. And that was the biggest thing is like every single expert was like, I we're shocked how often people just don't know.

Jay Myers: Yeah. So what would you say is a, a, a big opportunity right now? For, and an opportunity can be positioned as I always say it's a, it's a challenge or an opportunity like when someone, when someone's struggling with something like even an employee at Bold instead of saying. You're struggling with this thing.

It's, here's an opportunity. It's a, so sometimes a challenge actually is the opportunity. So what are some of the biggest challenges or opportunities for, for brands right now? Maybe based off of some of what you're hearing from, from these interviews?

Marc Rodill: So that, with that foundation of just being obsessed about the numbers, knowing what they are, knowing the ones that matter, and then really being honest with yourself when the numbers aren't good and facing it Jesse said, like they just won't face it because they feel bad about it and that just, it handcuffs their growth because in the bad numbers there's often so much opportunity.

You know, you really gotta get right with that. Once you get right with that. The opportunities. 'cause e-commerce is one of these industries where it's very complex and complicated and difficult and the competition grows every day. So

Jay Myers: mm.

Marc Rodill: you're, you're running into lots of issues with profitability when you scale cash flow, tracking all of this stuff.

But, so I, in my mind, not being much of someone who works on the front end, I work on the backend. I brought on two Meta ads experts who I was thinking, okay, cool. These guys are gonna talk about how to do a cool way with your meta ads to drive results. So the first one was Andrew Ferris from a JF Growth, formerly of the Common Thread Collective.

And he had an opportunity where he worked at. KLO, which was like a Rings company, worked his way up to Common Thread as marketing guy, and then was moved over to four by 400, which is their sister company. It's a HoldCo. And he scaled them from six figures to eight figures in growth. And he said, that was some of my biggest lessons because I learned that it didn't matter if I scaled them to eight figures.

Because what we learned is if you don't have your p and l if you don't have your inventory right, if you don't have these metrics, then a lot of times you might be growing on the outside. It looks good to the public, but in behind the scenes you're like dying because you don't have the numbers fixed.

And he said. After all these years, going through that process and working with brands, the biggest area of focus is fixing the p and l, doing p and l design, right? So figuring out your logistics, your shipping, your manufacturing in a way that it's actually profitable. And same thing with there's this really cool guy that I made fast friends with on LinkedIn, Steven Pemberton.

Steven worked with a company at one point called 10 Tree, where they like plant, plant 10 trees for every

Jay Myers: I have a lot of their clothing too. Yeah.

Marc Rodill: Yeah. They added him and his partner Josh, added three quarters of a million dollars in revenue to them in, in one quarter. And the way he did it is they just, they built enough trust with them where they said, look, if you really want us to help you, we need to get access to all of the numbers and all of the data.

If you're not willing to look at it, we are. So he went in there and they found these different areas to optimize not only their logistics, but their messaging across all channels. And so aligning that messaging is critically important these days. 'cause not it's not like back in the day, in the wild, wild west of e-commerce where you could just run an ad to a order, checkout page, make a profit and call it a day.

You know? And a lot of these brands experienced that maybe five years ago when there was gold in the streets. Like I brought on Pretty Boy, pretty Boy broke into Men's Skincare and they said, there's no such thing as a four or five CAC anymore. So what we've learned is we gotta be a real business.

We have to have alignment throughout every step of the process of the customer journey, front end, middle of the journey, back end of the journey. And so that's the biggest opportunity, is just dialing that in. And that can add a lot more profit to the bottom line.

Jay Myers: that's such a great takeaway. And if one step of it feels disjointed, it collapses. One of our 1% win episodes a couple days ago, actually, I don't think this one is, this one's not out yet, but I can't remember who I was talking to, but it had this kind of revelation that generally we think social post, someone sees a post, clicks on post, goes to your product page, maybe, maybe buys, right?

That's actually not the journey at all. The journey is they see your post, then they go to your profile. So if it's Instagram, that's, I see your post, I'm gonna okay, click on the, on the user, go to the profile, go through some of their posts on their homepage. See, click, read some of their highlights, read, watch their stories.

If they look legit and if you've told the story well on the profile, then they go to your site. But but the, the flow is often we just think from post to product page. And some brands have a great profile, but I think like it's a big missed op opportunity is really not having a ideal account profile on whatever social profile or platform you're, you're on.

And if the, to your point, if the messaging is different, if you're, if you're speaking a certain way in a certain tone and in a post, but then on your profile or on your bio links and you go there and it feels different, if it feels disjointed

That trust factor goes down and you're basically screwing your conversion opportunity, like it has to flow.

Marc Rodill: really four layers of trust there before the sale. 'cause people think, oh, I run an ad. They go to my website and they buy. But, you know. The first layer of trust is that first contact, that first advertising contact where they see your content and they go, you know what?

This looks like a cool product. I trust that maybe it, it could be effective for solving my problem or helping me achieve my goal. But so they go maybe, right? And then they go to the website, and then the website has to telegraph the same thing. Product demos, good copy. The way you write it, the brand messaging and the, the the color scheme and everything has to be aligned to that first point of contact and they have a little bit more trust.

And from there, you, you, you wanna capture the email, right? So you could build a lead list and have some prospects. So they have to have enough trust from the ad to the website to go, you know what? I'll give this a chance. They're offering an incentive or free content or a discount. I have enough trust with this that I'll exchange my email to learn more with whatever they're sending me.

A free series of emails or content, of course, whatever. And so they go there. You've got that third layer of trust. Fourth layer, now you're finally at, okay, I think I will take out my credit card and buy. So once you reach that point, the game's not over. They have to have a good experience every step along the way from the purchase to the fulfillment, to the unboxing experience.

And then, like you said, and you say a lot at Sub Summit, that is not yet a customer, a member, a subscriber that is just a lead who you've now had the opportunity to build that trust with. You're just getting started when you make that purchase.

Jay Myers: Man, I'm so glad you were listening at sub. It's so true. It's when we, when your customers buy something from your site, they're not really a lifelong customer by any stretch of the imagination. They're trying your product, they're testing it out. They're, 'cause remember, you're not, you're not a retail store.

They can't pick it up. They can't hold it. So they, they wanna see it, they want to touch it, feel it. And then you've got this opportunity from the moment they buy to really optimize the whole experience. Like from day one, from actually from second one, from when they purchase to that order confirmation.

What's that experience? The two to three emails? I believe that they should get day one, not just one, but then scale it down after that. And you educate them. You build trust. You tell your story. You reinforce the value of the product. So by the time they get it, they, it's like someone telling you about the wine you're about to drink or the steak you're about to eat and how it's farmed or raised or the grapes.

By the time you get that wine, it's gonna taste better because you know so much about it and the whole experience versus just if they came out with a glass of wine and here's our house red. That house red could be amazing, but they just called it the house red. And you, you won't, I just, it's a proven fact.

You won't appreciate it and value it. You won't tell people about it. You won't recommend it to friends. 'cause the story's not there.

Marc Rodill: Yeah, that just helps them feel better about their purchase, you

Jay Myers: exactly. Yes.

Marc Rodill: quality of the product.

Jay Myers: Yeah. I wanna dig into one another area like that comes up a lot and you've probably got some insight onto this is just. T traffic acquisition last few years. Obviously there's a lot going on every, I mean, the iOS updates, that was a couple years ago now, but I think some brands are still feeling the effects of that.

But more recently, like Temu buying up every ad on Facebook and Instagram rising, the cost 30, 40%. Acquisition is becoming, like traffic acquisition is becoming harder and harder. What are some of the strategies you're hearing for, for generating more like good quality buyer traffic?

Marc Rodill: A buyer with high intent and then you know something that's not eating you alive, essentially. There's lots of ways to do it now. One of the, one of the things I really like to talk about, 'cause I didn't know this when I brought him on, but some people know this guy, he's a little bit, maybe more behind the scenes, but not at the, not at the Google events, but, so Frederick Valets, I interviewed Frederick, and basically I learned, 'cause I'm not, I don't play in that sandbox of a front end advertising.

I never have. I've always done, the way I've always generated traffic is through partners partnering, essentially. But, he comes on and he says, not a lot of people know this 'cause they don't think about it much, but that's just because Facebook has a captured audience on social. Facebook has the largest social audience in the world.

Everybody's on there. So when they think of advertising, they think of Facebook because that's what they see all the time. And so Meta's huge for that reason. But the truth of the matter is, is that Google has a much larger advertising platform than Facebook does. Facebook has the social audience, but Google still has a larger network.

And so there's a lot of opportunity there to get it right. But Frederick was one of Google's first 500 employees. And he was the executive who led the creation of Google AdWords. So if there's anyone who knows AdWords better, it's Fred. And so Fred left and he ended up starting a software company that where Google aggregates the data.

Kind of goes back to what we talked about earlier with numbers. Google aggregates your data so you don't actually, you can't separate what's performing, what's not performing as well as you, you could. And so he created a software that actually now splits that data back apart and it does it automatically.

And so kind of, sort of back to dashboards. It sends you the information and it tells you what to do to optimize and where your areas of opportunity are. And so since he's launched, he now has 12 offices and 12. Continents across the world, more than 70 employees or something. And you know, similar to your company's being large, from doing smart things.

And he's, he's managing like $5.3 billion in ad spend for his clients. And so I said, that's cool. Can you gimme an example of a company that, you know, you revolutionize their marketing on ads? And he said, yeah, we, we have lots of them obviously 'cause we're managing so many billions of dollars. But, so a good example of this for e-commerce.

A lot of our clients are e-commerce, he said was a company called Barbecue Guys. So like BBQ guys,

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Marc Rodill: and by splitting this data, using software, automating the, 'cause you could see okay, my ads are performing really well on these types of platforms and not so well on these ones, but sometimes they're not performing so well on these ones.

'cause we don't, we haven't optimized for it. But the numbers are good. They're just small. And so if you're on videos by accident and they're performing, but you're not doing anything with it, you could double down on it. And so he, that's what they did with them and 300% lift. ROI doing that. And don't sleep on Google basically is a big tip.

And then Ron Shaw, this was super cool Ron, if you anybody knows anything about Ron, he is got the Chew on this podcast. They pump out a newsletter. They're very big on building in public, which I love that sort of like sneak peek behind the curtains of the numbers. What's working, what's failing. 'cause they had a couple brands that failed a coffee brand and a pet brand.

They're like, they're like, you know what, sometimes you don't always win, but for, for what they discovered very early. He said to me, he's I've never really shared this before much. So I was like, okay, that's crazy because you share everything. He is yeah so here's the thing you asked for.

The biggest thing that we do, that we've done that's like sort of moves the needle really big is very, from the very beginning we met a guy that was doing international. So international logistics and we got in with them and what we accidentally discovered is that we could copy and paste, literally word for word, duplicate our ads on meta and run them in other countries on meta. as long as it was an English speaking country where the culture aspired to be like a Western culture, then we could run the same exact ads with no changes and they performed. And so every year we did it from the very beginning of our launch. It just continued to grow every year 'cause we handled the logistics properly and he gave lots of tips on how to do that.

Essentially it's, he's it's 32% of our business, our 60 56, 50 to $60 million per year business. A third of it's international. You don't have to do much with the ads if you're already on meta other than run them internationally. And I shared that with a a guy that I met at Sub Summit, watch gang you know, we're game planning.

And he's yeah, we, we want to get international. Who is it that you should connect with? And so I told him and he's oh yeah, that guy's on our radar, so we're gonna be doing that, but you could just copy the ads. I'm like, yeah, you could just copy the ads.

Jay Myers: And just translate them, but keep the same,

Marc Rodill: No, they're

Jay Myers: even Oh, if they're English speaking. Sorry. You're

Marc Rodill: speaking countries.

Same exact ad.

Jay Myers: Huh? Crazy. Yeah, I mean, it's, I think there's a lot. I'm, I'm, I'm in Canada, so we typically buy from a lot of places in the world. Like it's, I, I ran online source since 98 and I would say that only, usually about 5% of my customers were from Canada. So it's quite normal that we are used to shipping across border, buying across the border.

Half the stuff we buy comes from the US and it's just a normal part. Like we go back and forth with the US all the time, but a lot a lot like, I don't know what the percentage is, like it's. The vast, vast majority of brands that we work with at Bold that are in the us, they only sell within the US and they kind of, and, and, and to be fair, the US is 10 times the population, more than 10 times the population of Canada.

So you can build quite a big business just within the us. With, in Canada you kind of, Canada's the same population as like the state of California. So like you, we kind of have to sell outside of Canada if you really want to grow big. But I think because of that, a lot of brands just don't look outside the US because they think it's too much work or it's not.

It's, but it's, it's not,

Marc Rodill: look at the world, right? I mean, what is there like six, 7 billion people on earth? Not all of them speak our language, obviously, but there's whatever, 300, 350 million people in the us. If you could find English speaking countries overseas that aspire to be Western, then you increase your total addressable market,

Jay Myers: yeah. And there are some considerations. I'm actually gonna find a good guest for this. 'cause there's some things you wanna, as far as like logistics and taxes and regulations and all that, but it's, it's everyone I know that's done, it said it's generally always been worth it. And there is a bit of effort, but you know what, that bit of effort is often what your competitors aren't willing to do.

So that's what, that's what separates you and that's what, like the guys at Obvi, that's obviously it's worked for them.

Marc Rodill: Yeah, obviously.

Jay Myers: a great, right?

Marc Rodill: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No pun. Yeah,

Jay Myers: there.

Marc Rodill: But, so there are things you run into, 'cause you do go up, your shipping, handling, fulfillment, logistics process does increase as it has to, and then you do have to treat those customers differently. He said to speak to like subscriptions and members and they found that they could not get them to stay sticky just because they purchased differently.

And this might come down to just their total allowable dollars that they have. He said they buy, but they don't buy the way we would like them to buy. Traditionally in the US they won't stay subscribed as far as we've been able to discover. But what they will do is they'll save up for a purchase and then they'll buy when they're ready.

So they had to do, they did have to modify like their email marketing campaigns on the backend to, adapt to that.

Jay Myers: So that's getting more traffic. Quick win. Consider international. What about converting more traffic that comes to your site? Any, any learnings from, from your guests on how to either just, you know, maximize the conversion, increase it, optimize it? Any, any,

Marc Rodill: things. Yeah, so it's, I mean, it's a marketing series, marketing and sales business series focused. So there was a lot of conversion experts. There was a lot more traffic experts too. But so those were the two biggest ones that I say big wins easy. And also in most brands wheelhouse, 'cause a lot of 'em are doing paid advertising.

But there's things you could do with SEO that were in there, you know, to optimize for that. But so with conversion though, aside from traffic. Don't, like Kurt Elster came on, which is one of my favorite guests. I was very nervous actually to meet Kurt and it came across in the video. I just came right out with it.

I was like, I'm very nervous to meet you because Kurt is very charismatic, funny. He tells really good stories. He makes e-commerce like he engaging with his personality. So I always inspire sort of to model that basically.

Jay Myers: awesome. I agree.

Marc Rodill: and he also basically created in many ways the e-commerce industry because he is like the first podcast ever.

And I mean, I think he started back in like 2012 and he's just been weekly ever since. And so he really kind of like inspired people to get into e-comm, hey, if you wanna have life financial freedom, but get into e-comm, there's a huge opportunity. And so that is just. Obviously snowballed to this day.

It's, it's become a very different landscape. And so that's kind of the bad news. Like the bad news is you can't just run ads, get a customer. Like you said, that's not a real customer, it's just a lead. Back in the day, you could get away with that. You sell your product and you say goodbye. But the bad news slash good news is now you gotta be a real business.

And so if you become a real business, then there's huge opportunity for people who do things properly, but don't sleep on your website. Foundationally like Kurt said, he's we see this so many times. Brand comes to us and they want to increase their conversion. We start with foundationally, what's your website doing when it loads?

Like he said, his favorite test for a brand is and this was like Thanksgiving I think, around the time that we actually spoke. And he said, here's my favorite test. Can your drunk uncle on Thanksgiving, when you hand him your cell phone, can he understand and navigate the website so easily that even he can make a purchase?

And and the other thing was is like if it's your, and it has to be like your grandmother's old phone, right? Because he's you'll be surprised how many consumers are still operating on an older phone

Jay Myers: Oh, totally.

Marc Rodill: And if your website doesn't load quickly on an old phone, you are losing so much money.

So he said, fix your navigation process. Don't put about me at the top. Make everything above the fold. You need a lightning fast website that operates on these old phones and just doing something so small. 'cause like over time, a lot of brands. The more you build, the more like tools and software you have, and the more bloated it gets, and it, it really does impact your conversion rates.

Now to speak to that speaking of Kurt, he actually started his company with this guy named Nick. Nick de Sabado was his first episode, and Nick's kind of a kooky guy, so is Kurt. But these guys are childhood friends. And Nick comes on and he was like, you asked for my best thing. I'll give you it.

I call like when a break. He does design. So Nick says, he's I hate the term CRO, I don't like it at all. But unfortunately, because of that, I've developed a reputation for it because I have quadrupled the conversion rate of my competitors more than two dozen times in five years doing design that converts.

And he said, my secret is, is I call the customer. So we, we incentivize the customer to get on the phone with me. I peel back the curtain and I ask them about their experience. And he's always I want the customers who really care about the brand. So they're kind of like, if they're kind of upset, that's good because they believe in your brand, but they know that you can do better.

And so he'll ask them, he'll go deep on some questions after being a little light, creating some space for them to open up. And he said, I don't do anything with your website until I talk to them. And then we get on a call with like the, the executive board and we say, based on what they are actually saying, here's what we could potentially do.

And so he's the biggest thing that we've done to really move the needle, aside from optimizing design and like heat maps and stuff, is we just take the actual words they're saying. And we put those into the headlines and the product descriptions. And so that one simple thing has quadrupled conversion, and he's driven, he's contributed to billions of dollars in sales across brands doing that.

So that's the two best things.

Jay Myers: I love that. I'll just add one thing to expand to that. 'cause, 'cause I've seen a number of brands use chat, GPT, and they load in all the product reviews. And so they'll take like thousands of reviews, even be hundreds. It doesn't have to be that many. Put it in a spreadsheet, doc, pdf, d, f, whatever.

Throw it into chat. GPT, ask it to find all the. Benefits and reason, benefits and reasons people buy and things people love about this product. And create a product description using a benefit first language rather than like features and whatever. And position it against competitors in a way that that kind of ca I forget how the wording was, but like calls out how competitors are not as good.

Marc Rodill: Tearing them down.

Jay Myers: Without tearing them down,

Marc Rodill: it's like a

Jay Myers: they do,

Marc Rodill: Yeah.

Jay Myers: so what they do is they take the positive reviews from your product, take all the negative reviews, and this involves a little scraping, but take all the negative reviews on a direct competitor's, a product, things they don't like out.

So I don't know, say you sell a coffee maker and the. Negative reviews on your direct competitors are all around. If you go to all the one stars and it's all takes too long, takes a minute to warm up I could get coffee faster through a drive through, or I don't know. They take all of these, summarize them, and then you take the benefits of yours and it's like coffee when you want it, that taste great, tastes great, and doesn't make you, and you don't need to read a book while it brew or something like that.

So like you can hint at it's better than your competitors without saying unlike our competitors, I do this. It's, you know what I mean?

Marc Rodill: That, that's, that's a good point. And it reminds me of something that Alex Hor said that I watched in the video the other day. 'cause the other thing you were doing is you're being hyper-specific about their experience and so that, that builds trust when, when you understand like their actual experience of using that product.

And he said. A lot of companies, they do like marketing speak, so it's just like the same old, same old that everybody else is doing. So his example was like, if you're selling weight loss, don't say, are you overweight? 'cause that's so trite and that's what everybody does. You know, it's so you're trying to sell me something basically.

And he was like, he was like, the way that you say it in a way that connects with them, that makes them understand where you're coming from is, do your legs rub together when you walk up the stairs and it makes a rash? Or do you ever find yourself out of breath and sweating in places that you didn't even know you could?

Things like that work a lot better than just like this trite marketing phrase, are you overweight? And you sort of just did that there kind of naturally, right? Where you're like, no, waiting for the coffee to brew while blah, blah, blah. So I thought that was pretty good.

Jay Myers: While you, while you read a novel. Yeah. I did a, one of the daily 1% episodes today was I about the, the first 60 seconds. I, I, I have this kind of. Belief that the first 60 seconds when someone hits your website, I, I dunno for anyone listening here, go back. I think it's number the 1% win, number six or seven, I can't remember.

But the, the, when someone hits your website and the first 60 seconds, they need to feel three things. So yes, there's like trust, authority, you need some logos, you're messaging, but they need to feel three things. They need to feel that, oh my God, that's me. They need to like, say that in their head. Oh my god, that's me.

So like what you just said is bang on. Not, are you overweight? Not, it's do your leg, are you tired of your legs? Tired of, of the burning legs after you walk around all day from your, from in your thighs or whatever it is,

Marc Rodill: Yeah, and that's just hormo, yeah. Hormo, I can't take credit, but, so it's a very common thing in direct response marketing is the more you understand the customer's problem and what they're experiencing, the more they have this sense like, oh, this person gets me. So if they understand my problem really well, then clearly they probably understand the solution really well too.

Jay Myers: Totally.

Marc Rodill: And you'll see, excuse me, you'll see in or Moses's videos, like in the comments all the time, people are like, man, I feel like this guy just speaks to me in every video. Like he knows exactly what I'm going through.

Jay Myers: Yeah. It's okay, so it's the June 4th one, but yeah, so it's, oh my God, that's me. And then the next thing they need to feel is I'm not alone. And then the third thing is, you, you can lead me. Ah, oh my God, that's me. And then I'm not alone. There's others going through this as well too. While the good news is.

You know, 42%, like 42% of American, not the good news, but 42% of Americans actually struggle with the same thing as you're not alone. And then something along the lines of this is actually why we developed this cream, because I suffered with it and family members and it, it affected my daily life. I couldn't play with my kids.

I couldn't jog. I wanted to get back to the things I love. So I developed this. So it's oh my God, that's me. I'm not alone and you can lead me. And they need to somehow feel that. Like it's, it's you know? And yeah. I love that. I love that concept.

Marc Rodill: When we have a problem, a lot of times we get kind of like myopic and in our own world and we feel like separated, you know, sort of in survival. We're trying to solve a thing, but we're embarrassed or we feel shame or guilt, so we don't really want to open up about that. And it could feel like you're, you are all alone when you're not sharing or reaching out to others.

'cause you're just, scared that maybe someone won't understand you. So I could see, yeah, that's super powerful.

Jay Myers: Yeah. And, and just so many websites, if you go to right now, like I, they'll, all they're doing is talking about how great their benefits are, how great the product is, how great the features are. And I don't like land on their site and go, oh my God, that's me. Or you know, like in this, it applies to everything.

It can be, say you sell a drink and you know, maybe you're tired of waking up hung over and not functional the next day. And then maybe you're selling like a non-alcoholic drink or something. So it could be like, yeah, that is me. Okay. I other people are the same and this is the solution. It, it applies to everything.

Yeah. So it, it, it blows my mind though, how many e-comm websites don't do that. You get so in the trees that all you wanna do is sell, sell, sell. And your website isn't just to sell, your website is to identify and build a relationship. They need to see that you're solution, see that they're not alone, and see that you can lead them

Marc Rodill: Ties right back to trust.

Jay Myers: a hundred percent.

Before we run outta time here, I wanna ask you what was, what's your favorite strategy? Because we've pulled a lot. And even if we ended this episode 20 minutes ago, I feel you know, I say there's, if you get one piece of advice from an episode, that's a win. There's probably been like six here already, so we could hang up and that's good.

But before we go what is your, what's been something that you really thought was like from anything, any, in any category of any episode that you think is the most important or that you just appreciated the most?

Marc Rodill: So you know, what I do is I focus on one thing and one thing only as a service provider. So I have a specialized knowledge where, brands, companies, businesses, service providers, it doesn't matter what you sell, who you are, who you sell to. They many times they're doing all of these things that we've talked about, because that's what it takes to make sales and build customers, is tap into these different layers of trust.

So they're doing all of this because that's what's required, but they sort of, nobody really takes advantage properly, like an ethical, moral way of that trust that they've built with that customer, right? They just really undervalue what happens after the sale. They don't, they don't realize that this whole process of creating that sale is to create that trust.

And then once you actually deliver, like they go, they see your advertising, it's good content, they have this little layer of trust. So that's the first layer. The, the second layer, they go to your website. It's aligned. It's very well designed. It's speaks to them, their problems, their their needs. You know, it, it indicates that there's a solution here that can solve their problem.

Hey, you're not alone means you're not the only person with this problem and we've solved this problem. And so they're like, I'm still on the fence. I need a little bit more education. I'll sign up for your free, do hickeys so I can get maybe a discount or an incentive, but maybe I'm still not ready to buy, but thanks for the incentive.

So they sign up and then that welcome series or whatever starts to build that foundation of your brand story, who you are, why you're doing this. And then they finally purchase, they get a good. Experience of receiving the product, they unbox it. And then if they get a good quality product from you, and it does make an impact towards achieving their goal or solving their problem, like you said, you have a lead.

You have a lead for life if you do it right, because there's no sale ever occurs in a vacuum any single time. We buy a product to solve a problem and it's good, and we're like, we start to see the vision that our problem can be solved, it's human nature. We, we immediately start thinking of what are like other things that I could purchase to make this even better or faster or less stress free, or solve additional problems, and it doesn't matter what you sell. You're not the only person selling to that customer. So you can actually add a lot more value to their lives. By thinking of the entire customer journey, so they, once they purchase this one product, they're willing to take action to solve their problem.

They're willing to take out their credit card and make a purchase. That's when you have a hot prospect. Not, not because they buy, you don't, you have a customer, but you have a, you have the beginning of a relationship. And so one of the things that I like to do with com, the only thing that I do is my specialized knowledge is helping people maximize the value of that customer by leveraging that trust that they have with them to increase their LTV, which obviously helps lower their customer acquisition rate in the long run.

And so if you can identify what else they're buying that they love, that you don't sell 'cause. Nobody has enough time, money, or energy or resources to sell every single product or service that a customer will ever purchase along their journey. So turns out your competitors, your indirect competitors can become some of your best collaborators.

And so a lot of people, they overlook that value of trust that they've built with the customer. They don't think about it after the fact. They just think about, Hey, I wanna sell more products that I sell to this customer. And but they, a lot of people want to collaborate and work with other brands 'cause you get this halo effect of being associated with these other brands.

But, so rather than going to these other companies and saying, Hey, you have a great product. We have a great product. Let's trade these. I'll promote you, you promote me. That mentality of what can I get from this brand upfront? Stops those deals from ever taking place. So if you go to another brand who you've identified that your customer's buying this product, they're having a great experience, they've already done the product development right, and they have great customer support, all of their logistics are dialed in, rather than going through all of that process yourself, you can leverage that by surveying your customers, finding out what they're actually buying that helps them in addition to what you sell, and then bringing those products into your backend marketing to add a lot more value to the customer.

And if they get a really good experience out of that, they had a good experience with you. 92% of customers, right? And you know this, you talked about this at Sub Summit, 92% of customers when they're finally willing to buy because they want, they're committed to solving their problem, they are open. Two additional recommendations for other products that will help them achieve their goals faster.

And so if you can get those into their hands, now you, you've really done three major things. Number one, if they had a good experience with you and now they have another good experience with another company, you've just increased your customer loyalty. 'cause you're a curator, you're helping them sift and sort through all the noise.

And then obviously because you have these deals, if you have a good company quality product, a sizable list, you have purchasing power built into your customer base so you can negotiate pretty fair deals. Win-win deals with these guys and send them the customer. They do all the order taking, the fulfillment, the processing of the credit cards, the customer service.

You don't have any logistics or overhead in that process. You get a commission. That commission is straight to your bottom line. And we see companies, they actually produce more profit doing that many times than they do on their core business when they do it right? And so if you can build that into the back end of your business, it gives you a halo effect 'cause you're associated with these other brands.

And the third thing is it really breaks up the monotony of your emails sometimes. Because customers, when they buy from you and you just keep giving them content about what you do, eventually they sort of get it. They open your emails and they're like, okay, you're

Jay Myers: selling to me again.

Marc Rodill: I get it. It's gonna be about you, but I'm interested now that I bought your product. I'm interested in solving ancillary related products to this. And so if you send them some stuff like that. They get another reason to open your emails that's new and exciting and fresh. 'cause they have something to look forward to.

So it helps with retention. Yeah. So that's my favorite thing.

Jay Myers: Imagine if you got an email from a brand that said five products we love that aren't ours. Like just completely not self-serving, but more

Marc Rodill: doesn't take much. It doesn't take much, right? Because if you have one good, if you have just one good company that you promote, you're sending one or two emails a month to promote them. And then that's once a month. If you can do that once a month for 12 months, you can really drive, like easily, you could drive 20 to 30% more revenue.

But the, the fun part is that revenue is profit. And once you have a number of these partners going, maybe you do twice, a twice a month. Excuse me, like recommendation of the month. But so to break up that monotony of the recommendation of the month, every now and then, like you just said, you get maybe a grouped offer, our five best recommendations and then so it gives them something like, oh wow, this is awesome because you just saved me a lot of time.

If I do a Google search on any of these, I'm gonna get a hundred thousand plus results. I don't know what's good, what's bad, who to trust. You've done that work for me. Oh, and it's a good quality brand that I've seen around before. You guys are associated with that brand. That's so cool. So it does a lot of cool benefits for

Jay Myers: Yeah, I think that's neat and I mean, it kind of ties into something I. I talk a lot about that. I didn't make this up. I heard this from Seth Godin. He said, it's better to find, rather than find more people for your products, find more products for your people. And we often spend so much time trying to find more people, find more people, but, but we have a pretty decent audience.

We have a pretty decent list of customers. We need to find more products for our people. And that can be your own products. By have adding more complimentary SKUs that you can sell or through partners, which is a great, great suggestion. Where Or Or both. Or both. A hundred percent. It's not exclusive. Yeah.

Marc Rodill: 'cause one of the best ways, 'cause a lot of times people will survey their customers and they'll be like, what other categories of products are you interested in? Or they'll they'll think about their customer experience and try to identify what they're, what they're actually buying.

They'll, so they'll go, you know, because smart brands, obviously the ones that scale to seven, eight figures, they realize it's not just about acquiring new customers. You want to monetize the customer on the backend. But, so they'll go through all of this investment in product development before knowing for sure that that product will work.

And a lot of those products will fail. So even sometimes, even if you find out exactly what your customers are buying, because that's what, you know, that's one of the, that's one of the secrets to this, is you don't survey them about what they might potentially buy. Because they'll give you a lot of answers that might be on the right track, but it might be off not on the right track.

But if you find out specifically. What have you actually purchased in like the last 90 to 90 days to 180 days that, you know, change your life? Similar to what happened when you bought our product? How did something that helped you other than what we sell? You can identify, okay, this is probably gonna be a big win if I promote this, but, so you promote it.

If it is a big win and you are interested in making new product skews, now you just got paid to do that market research and you're pretty sure if you come out with your own now you could do like a pre-order and you can fund the, you could literally fund all of your product development this way.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Genius. Mark, this has been fantastic. Where can people go if they want to gimme all the details of your, your podcast? I know you do some consulting. Where can people go to to learn more about you?

Marc Rodill: Best way. If you'd like to learn, some things, one or two things that you can potentially use, good ideas are great, but if you, if you wanna move an needle, you need to implement. So I, I interviewed the 28 leading experts so far. I'm on a journey to continue to do that. As often I want to interview all of the best guys in the game.

And so I've got you in there on, on sub summit stage with Andrew an Andre from Berg. I mean, they only grew to a million members per month. You

Jay Myers: Insane. Insane when

Marc Rodill: a thing or two. Yeah. Huge company. Paul Chambers and you and Andre were on stage with me giving your best tips. That was a. A panel of U three.

So it was a 30 minute episode, but the rest of these episodes are 10 minutes. What's your most profitable tip Technique strategy. That's really, you know, move the needle for your company. 'cause there's brands or your clients if you're, you know, an expert. And so that's 10 minute e-comm success, like the number 10 10 minute e-comm with one m success.com/j for anybody who listens to this.

And then you sign up for that. You get the full series immediately, 28 episodes. But like I sort of said in the beginning, that can be like, even though they're 10 minutes, it could still be overwhelming 'cause they're in chronological order. So I made a little index by topic. So depending on where you're at in your journey as a brand, maybe you need some foundations.

Maybe you need to know your numbers. Maybe you need to identify areas of opportunity or drive traffic, or convert or do some backend retention. Each one of these guys, they're a proven expert in their field, and you can go straight to that index and find what works best for you. So that's where I would send you.

Yeah, and if you sign up for that, obviously i'm going to email you and if you wanna if you have any questions for me, you could just respond to that email.

Jay Myers: awesome. I'll make sure those links are in the show notes as well.

Marc Rodill: Appreciate it.

Jay Myers: thank you so much. This has been a ton of fun.