Hello and welcome to another episode of the Winning Shot
Fight podcast. If you've not tuned in before
and you're thinking already, this podcast sounds horrendous.
Oh, you've tuned in before. I was like, Nick, what has
happened? You sound awful.
I don't have my microphone or camera or anything with me
because I'm currently on holiday and as I just said to one of my
team as well, the show must go on.
We couldn't miss a Tuesday tea break talks given that we've
only just launched them a few weeks ago and there's loads
going on in the Shopify world so I don't want to miss out.
I might be quick though and sorry if I don't sound my normal
self again. I'm currently on holiday and and
I've just been out quite a long walk as well so I'm quite tired.
But anyway, today, what's my tea of choice is the first bit we
always talk about and then we're going to talk about Shopify
news, something from our partners and also any learnings
from the agency and updates from our side.
And then we've got I gave it this name last week and I
haven't googled it to see if someone else has come up with
this yet, but Quivia, it's a question about some trivia.
Quivia came up with that after far too much caffeine a few
weeks ago. Anyway, let's kick off the tea
of choice today. I've I've actually not got a cup
of tea with me right now, which I know sounds terrible given
that we're talking about Tuesday's tea break talks.
I've just been out for it. All you all you can drink.
I was going to say all you can eat, but all you can drink
afternoon tea and I've had 4 rounds of English breakfast tea
here in the Cotswolds in the United Kingdom, so also the
middle of a heat wave and here we are drinking hot tea.
Yes, we are really, really British with our tea drinking.
Anyway, that's a cup of tea. I hope you guys have got a
drink. If not, hit pause, go get a
drink. And if you're in the Cotswolds
or in the West Country area of the UK, Huffkin's Cafe is where
I had my afternoon tea and it was absolutely delicious.
It was a gift to my wife for her birthday.
I was going to say how old she was but that would be really
rude. It was for her birthday recently
from some of our friends. All right, let's talk about
quote of the Week then, just before we jump into today's
agenda. I love this.
So Simon Sinek said people don't buy what you do, they buy why
you do it. People don't buy what you do,
they buy why you do it. It's really important in
marketing to have that brand story that people adopt and
engage with. Otherwise you're just fighting
product to product. So that brand story literally
went into a shop today. I can't remember the name of it.
Apologies. Really hot.
Went into a small toy shop and got chatted into the chat there
because when I went to pay it, Shopify point of sale on there,
ended up helping him with a few technical things at his tilt as
well in Burford in the Cotswolds.
So yeah, if you're listening to this, then I have actually
solved your problem and I will e-mail you in the next few days.
And tried to help him there and then as soon as I walked away
about 10 minutes later, I know how to fix that actually, so I
will, I will send the chap an e-mail and let him know how to
do it. But I saw the Shopify logo and
couldn't resist. Anyway, let's talk about Shopify
news. There's only two things on this.
Sometimes we have like 1012 things.
There's only two things on the change log of Shopify updates to
Shopify thought were worth talking about today. 1 is a new
feature which is automatic discounts for customers based on
eligibility criteria. So that's quite nice.
So you could be running, for example, a billboard or out of
home, some sort of advertising campaign that's physical in the
real world IRL. Some of my gaming, I'm not
gaming myself. Some of my friends and gamers,
they say IRL in real life, which I quite like.
So if you're running a marketing campaign IRL and somebody sees
that and it says anybody who's based within 5 miles of our
store, our factory or warehouse, whatever it might be, it's 10%
off. You can actually do that by as
soon as someone puts that in the delivery post code, it
automatically applies the 10% off.
So you can do it based on the criteria.
The second thing as well, which won't affect a lot of you guys,
I think it will affect some. If you are selling cross-border
and you have to worry about duties and import taxes and that
sort of thing. You can actually change those
when you edit an order now, which I don't think was a
feature before. A little bit outside of my skill
set, much more on the customer acquisition side, but I thought
I'd read out. I, I know a lot of my clients
talk about that and so do you guys who, who e-mail in to us.
We do have some people that can help with that.
So if you've got any major questions, give me a shout and I
can certainly ask some of the agencies or even some of the
e-commerce consultants that we, you know, and work with as well.
Partner this week I've slowly going through all of our
partners and sponsors. This week, I'm going to talk
about Saguno, who are their joint longest running now with
Inventory Planner since we changed the the partnership and
also the sponsorship to be annual.
And these guys have been running for a very long time.
We actually have had seven. I went back and checked my
emails. We've had 7 e-mail platforms
pitch to come and sponsor the show.
We've had two others in the past, but Saguno's the one we've
gone with long term. They've also just renewed for
another year. So thank you, Chris, Brian
Jenner, the team, you guys are absolute legends.
We've also put a few clients in touch with these guys and I've
got 7 very quick points as to why.
It was just by chance. There were seven other e-mail
platforms and seven points of it. 7 reasons why we partnered
with them. And I want to read these out
because these might be super beneficial to some of you guys.
Most e-mail platforms are faceless, but Saguno aren't.
Saguno are a small, lean, agile team and you can actually talk
to them and work with them and ask them questions and stuff
like that. Brian who's been on the show a
few times most recently I think it's about 6:00 or seven weeks
ago, we post an episode with Brian, one of their clients who
did an incredible amount of where basically a whole business
migration, not just websites, but a business migration new
brand and start emailing customers and Saguno helped
stagger stagger those initial emails so they didn't just get
blacklisted by new domain emailing lots of people and
everything going wrong. So they're not Saguno are not
faceless if you want to talk to them.
It's my second point. We can put you in touch with
Brian or you can reach out to Saguno directly or winning with
Shopify customers get a free analysis and consultation, which
is amazing. And again, I'm not reading this
out because they're paying us money and I just want to promote
this stuff. They really best e-mail
platform. We've moved several of our
clients onto this, as as I said, and this is I'm jumping to the
end now, I'll go back to the points of the second in my
notes, but those clients, there's three in particular I'm
talking to, which we've introduced to Brian, and Brian's
already started doing the analysis.
Two of them, I think I've already started moving over to
Saguno. We're going to get them on the
show to talk about the new features and the fact that it's
integrated and everything else, which is my next point #3 Saguno
is fully integrated into Shopify, which means if you
segment your customers in Shopify, you just start emailing
them straight from Saguno within your Shopify interface.
It's not lots of other e-mail platforms where you have to
integrate Shopify into that platform.
Any integration, the stuff that can go wrong, it tends to be
quite smooth for most of the platforms, but haven't embedded
in Shopify does come with some advantages.
And 1 is that all of your customer information now in the
customer section of Shopify is always live and up to date.
The biggest thing I hear from brands or one of the biggest
things, I can't say the biggest thing.
There's probably 50 biggest things and all joint biggest.
One of the biggest things I hear from people is saying I don't
want to over e-mail people. I don't want to e-mail them
about like leave a review your products arriving today, here's
a newsletter and an abandoned basket because you also did that
a few days ago, but just before you ordered.
I don't want to e-mail them too much in one go.
And that's something it gives a lot of brands and store owners
and marketing people sleepless nights.
So again, having it all integrated means you can
actually control that a lot easier.
The Shopify notifications, delivery notifications and
fulfillment and logistics and your e-mail marketing, you can
kind of get all three of those things working a lot easier.
I mentioned the Shopify integration, sorry,
segmentations that this might not be live just yet.
I think Brian and I know you're listening to this, Brian, hello.
I, I think, I think you mentioned to me the other day
when we were talking to one of the, one of those brands, you
were saying that it was coming soon or coming in the next few
weeks or it might already be out.
So apologies if we got that wrong, but that, that feature is
absolutely amazing. Tuesday's segmentation.
So if it's on the road, Matt Bryan, pressure's on, mate.
Let's get that thing live as fast as possible, please,
because I know, I know a couple of our clients want that.
You can use Tamba to design stuff.
It's directly integrated within Saguno, so you're still working
within Shopify. You can use Canva to quickly
drop an image in and it's a big integration.
Spent quite a lot of time working on that and it was
launched probably about 9 or 10 months ago.
Now it's really starting to test my knowledge and it's me testing
myself on my memory, which I know it's bad.
And my wife would say she's actually in the next room as
well looking after the baby. So anyway, so pop ups number
six, you can use pop ups, which is a, a separate Saguno app, but
directly integrated with it, Shopify and everything else.
And as soon as someone fills out something on a pop up, so it
might be a 10% off discount or an offer or something like that.
Once they fill out that form, it goes straight into Shopify as a
customer and Saguno's already triggered and ready to go.
And that leads me into #7 is then you can use those pop ups,
abandoned baskets and stuff. Use all of that with some
automation so you can say if you do this, then we're going to do
this and here's a flow. And if you don't open stuff, for
example, you can send again with a new subject line.
We use Saguno ourselves, Brian and the team.
There's a couple other people, but Brian's the main person I
e-mail if anything goes wrong. Love you Brian.
Great. But with the with that, with
some of those automations of sending the subject line again,
we use that ourselves at winning with Shopify.
And it's amazing to see actually the open rates are pretty much
the same as the first time. So we're getting twice as many
opens just by using a simple feature feature.
They're not the only e-mail platform to have that.
But again, it was like when you just click and send them a
newsletter. Do I want to do that?
Yes, I do. Done.
Really simple and time is many people in this space.
Onto some of the learnings from the agency.
Then we've got 2SEO3PP C SEO1. I mentioned Yost LLMTXT the
other day, which is a new feature, new file that Yost will
create within your Shopify store for you.
And LLM is the crawler for AI bots like Chachi, Petit, Gemini,
et cetera, et cetera. Claude Bard, you know what the
difference? It's not called Bard anymore, is
it? Microsoft Copilot, I believe.
I can't keep up with all these different AI bots.
We have two or three views internally.
My team tell me that one's the best one.
I go with that. But also if you didn't catch it,
it would have gone out on Friday episode with Janice.
Janice had the most amazing way of saying that when AI came out,
her team, she's marketing director for a brand, sorry,
managing director for a brand policy Genes managing director
for a brand called look fabulous Forever.
And as soon as AI came out, she got everyone around the table
and said, guys, go and explore AI, play with it, break it, and
then come to the table with how it can boost the business.
It's a really good way of doing it, especially if you've got
that team. But using, we've been using
Ghosts LLM on both, some of our WordPress more B to B lead Gen.
people filling out forms, site clients, but then also
e-commerce people buying products online.
And we're already getting an uptick in the amount of AI
results that we're appearing in front of.
And there are good ways you can measure that.
I'm not going to get into that today, but certainly go and use
Yost if you haven't already for those LLMS. If you're on
WordPress, it's free to use. I think you get an initial trial
as well. I should know this.
Apologies, Yost, but definitely go and check out the Yost
LLLMTXT feature for using Yost on your store.
The second one, this is quite interesting.
There's been an algorithm update.
I would have mentioned it last week, I think if I haven't
apologies. So my brain is not in work mode,
although one of my team was like, are you working?
Nick was like, no, no, no, no, I'm not working.
I'm just recording a podcast. Leave me alone.
But but love you anyway, Dan. So one of the things we've been
doing with the off the back of this algorithm update is the
bigger, more what we call generic keywords in SEO.
So to get an example here of men's clothing, we've been
creating a page in Shopify rather than a collection.
One of the biggest things that I see on stores that have a wide
range of products or products that are like really niche, but
fall into a bigger, wider range of products or a word or name
that a customer would look for to find them.
It for example, men's clothing, women's clothing, that's quite a
big thing. So actually having a collection
means I've just searched for women's clothing and bang,
there's 20,000 women's clothing items in front of me.
I'm overwhelmed as a customer. It's a bad user experience by
definition, unless it's part of your branding.
But I'm going to go with the the massive sites I see doing this.
So we started creating pages instead of a collection.
The page has lots of tiles, little bits of news and other
things. So you can go to read some blog
posts and fashion articles about women's clothing or men's
clothing and how to come into different collections within
that. So you could say these are our
top selling products. These are our biggest
collections at the moment. Apologies, I'm getting text
messages while I'm doing this as well.
I normally have an out of office on, but the but, but using using
that page means you can have a lot more control over where
you're sending people and that kind of thing because they're
probably not ready to start adding products to car.
It's just I'm a man, I want to buy some clothing and, and let's
let's go. Amazing.
So those are the two SEO ones. So we're on to PPC now.
So splitting performance Max campaigns on Google Ads by
product, we've been doing a bit of that recent, we'll say a bit,
we did a lot of it recently. We've been doing a bit on the
podcast on these little Tuesday talks about that.
Now I've had a few people e-mail me and say, hey, I've split them
into this. It's not working.
And they've actually gone in, got access to your account with,
with their permission. My ad sounds like I've hacked
them with their permission. I've gone in and, and actually
had a look at the account And what's happened is you've gone,
these products sell well and these don't and split them.
So I thought today would be a good opportunity and this was
flagged by one of my team as well as one of the learnings
from last week. Having done this on a client or
a new client, seeing the way they split it.
When you split a campaign by products, you've got to think
about search terms and a search term is what the customer types
in to Google to then trigger one of your ads.
So if you've got five, I'm going to give an example of there is a
tissue on this desk. I just blew my nose.
How disgusting. So if you were looking for
tissues or tissue boxes on Google and somebody actually had
these tissues and they came up in Google Shopping, but I've got
five boxes in my skews or five skews that are selling really
well for these tissues and five skews that are not selling well
of these tissues, Then I split the campaign to go these are
five that do well and these are five that don't.
The problem is now, if somebody searches for tissue box, which
campaign would you like Google to show?
Because it's going to choose one.
And therein lies the problem. So actually, if you then think
about that and say, right, I'm going to split the campaigns now
by ranges that work well, I'm going to have a whole campaign
for tissue boxes or I might have a campaign for my, I don't know,
desktop items with where a box of tissues would live on the top
of a desk. So this might be my desktop
items campaign. So I've got tissue boxes, I've
got ornaments, I've got table lamps, etcetera, etcetera,
laptop stands and loads of other bits and pieces.
So that's where actually the search term is really important.
I've not mentioned that the last few weeks, so sorry if I've sent
anyone down a bit of a rabbit hole, but that's where PPC,
sometimes you get to a point you do need somebody like us to come
and have a look. The second one out of the three
PPC ones here, splitting performance Max by gender.
So in performance Max, you can change the targeting settings to
say I want to target men, women, unisex or unknown.
I think it's just men, women and unknown.
I'm not going to get into a debate about genders today
because I, I, I, I know I'm going to get some emails about
this. So please don't e-mail me.
I'm not going into that. It's just Google.
Contact Google if you're unhappy.
They have male, female, and then they have, I'm pretty sure it's
unknown or or not applicable. And we've done some campaigns
now where we've got one which is the unknown, but one which is
for men, one which is for women. And the rest of the campaign is
pretty much the same in terms of the products targeting.
And then we can change the ad copy accordingly.
So we target more towards men, the language we use and the
benefits of the same product that for a woman we would target
slightly differently. And if we don't know, we just go
kind of unisex, but safer in the middle.
So interesting way of doing it, but we're getting some really
good results from that. One of our clients got 20%
uplift in revenue without changing their budget or
anything else, just purely by doing that.
So that's been quite a big win. And that was about 3 or 4 weeks
ago. So we've got a good, good amount
of data on them. And finally this one, I've had
an e-mail about this. This is exciting.
I love when you guys emails, e-mail me.
So if you, if you just like the show, send me an e-mail.
If I hear from you, then it's like, OK, cool.
We'll keep doing this. We'll keep sharing information.
We're not going to stop anytime soon.
We love the podcast, but this one is where we took a
performance Max campaign and we turned it off and we made a
standard shopping campaign. The client we've done that on
started really strong, had a bad week, then kind of balanced off
and it's been tanking the last two weeks.
It's just not worked. Point here being is everything
is a test. So if you're testing something
and it doesn't work, you've just got some learnings of what not
to do. But obviously use the best data
you can, the best hypothesis before you start running a test,
say got the best chance of the test actually working.
However, we've done the same experiment, not for the client
I've been talking about, but for another client we've done it and
their ROI has gone from 1.9 to 1 to 2.5.
Same budget, same product range, but actually standard shopping
has worked better than performance Max.
When we're testing these things, just looking at the clock, we've
got a few minutes. I mean, there's no limit on
these, but they're supposed to be short on Fridays.
But just to just to share for one quick minute is when we do
tests, we always try to create the most isolated environment
that if the test doesn't work, we've not wasted too much money
and we've also not broken anything.
So if your target ROI based on margins, running the business,
making a profit, etcetera is 4 to 1, anything that's like 3.23
point, 5 nudgy, nudgy to get it up to four and above, right?
We don't want to change too much there.
Anything that's maybe 2 to 2.5 or worse than 2.5 maybe now it's
like, well, it's just losing money at the moment.
We've actually got nothing to lose.
And what we end up with most clients is we have a minimum
shelf. So in this example might be 3
below 3, we're making a loss, 3, we're break even.
It's not very exciting, but we're not losing money.
We might be getting more orders from those customers later, but
on that initial order, 3 to 1, break it, break break bare
minimum 4 to 1 is like, OK, we need to spend a bit more, but we
need to spend it wisely in the right areas, etcetera. 5 to 1,
just spend what you can. And that's, we don't start like
that on day one, but that's a relationship we build with
people and we get it in writing going within reason.
Please spend whatever you want, but let us know every time you
increase the budget or please e-mail me every Monday,
etcetera. And having those three ROI
targets is really important whether you're using an agency
or not. I'd recommend every brand has
that. And then you look at it both at
kind of account level or site wide level.
And then you also look at that on campaign by campaign level.
Let's go within my campaigns. That's them.
Well, that's not. And this thing here is just
wasting money. So that's it from the agency,
right? Quivia, Quivia, Quivia.
And someone last week said they had so much fun testing the rest
of their team on this for the rest of the week.
So, so Brian, I hope this has helped and wasn't Saguno, Brian,
by the way, it was a different Brian.
This is my Quivia. So it's a bit of trivia and then
a question. This week, Mark Fraser purchase
the first item that eBay founder Pierre.
I'm going to get this wrong. I'm so sorry.
A media, a media, a media, something like that.
Pierre, a media listed on the site.
So Mark Fraser bought the very first item from eBay when eBay
first launched it from the founder who launched his first
item that he listed, which was a broken laser pointer.
How hilarious. The question then is what year
did Mark buy his broken laser pointer from eBay?
It's a first ever eBay customer. What year do you think it was?
I'll give you a clue. I was 5 at the time.
In fact maybe I wasn't. I might have been 4.
Depends what month it was in. It was 1990 older than I look.
1995 S 1995. Mark Fraser bought a broken
laser pointer from eBay and eBay had begun.
Think how big it is and how amazing a business it is.
Now I'm locking my phone. I'm going back to my holiday
now. Thanks for tuning in back again
on Friday. Hope you guys are having a great
week.