Hello, welcome to another episode winning with Shop 5
podcast with me, your host Nick Truman, agency owner, podcast
host and general confused person like the rest of us.
I'm joking, I'm not confused, I have very sarcastic humour and
it gets lost on most people. So apologies.
But welcome to the show, it's the first time tuning in.
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just over 8 months away, but it's going to be absolutely
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I've just realized there is something in the way of the
camera. There we go.
This is what happens when I record episodes on my own,
completely unsupported by anybody else.
Things start to go wrong. But anyway, we we're going to
talk about a few things as we always do on a Tuesday tea of
choice this week. I'm still on water.
I've drunk loads of tea today, but I'm having a bit of a bit of
a health health push this year, like most of us going to see if
it lasts. So far we're nearly in Feb.
Anyway, we're going to about a few things.
We've got quote and fact of the week.
We've actually got 2 two and something we think you guys
should focus on. We've got some big topics to
talk about. A couple of our sponsors have
sent a few bits and pieces in as well.
And then we're going to play Quivia at the end.
And no doubt we're going to go on some tangents, my estimate
based on my AI that put a couple of these notes together for me
where I asked it to, to shuffle some of the notes for me and
give me some more stats on them. The AI reckon is going to take 4
minutes, and I'm already over 1 1/2 minutes in and I haven't
started. So we'll see how this takes.
Anyway, e-mail, You guys need to be focusing on e-mail.
We could have done this, Inquivia, but this is an amazing
stat that Daisy's pulled together.
The number of global e-mail users reached 4.6 billion in
2020. Five, 4.6 billion people are
using e-mail on a regular basis. These stats are from HubSpot, by
the way. It's projected that by 2028 it's
going to be 4.9 billion. And that's also from Statist.
Statista one. What a horrible word to try and
pronounce Statista. So 4.9 billion people on the
planet using e-mail. So e-mail needs to be an
important channel. And actually, and here we go,
tangent number one or three, possibly the third tangent so
far. I find with a lot of our clients
that we work within the agency, e-mail is massively untapped.
It's not something we do. So I'm not saying it's something
that we should be doing and we're not.
But e-mail is massively untapped.
If you acquire a customer from Google, from Facebook, it costs
you lots of money. SEO takes lots of effort and you
need to be doing those things anyway.
So you want to get as much revenue as possible from that
customer once you've got them in the door.
So if you get them in the door and they only buy once, a bit of
a disaster. If you get them in the door and
they don't buy, There is also an opportunity to get them to sign
up to e-mail some how shameless plug, check out Saguno.
They are one of our sponsors. They're one of our partners, but
we also introduce lots of our clients to Saguno because Saguno
is fantastic. It's built into Shopify.
We also had one of the guys from built for Shopify itself on the
show a few months ago, which is actually amazing to talk to
somebody from within Shopify and and I didn't put my foot in it
once. Classic words on my team, but
e-mail tends to be quite untapped if you look at it this
way. Imagine if your business was 80%
existing customers buying again and you were just adding a few
more in the top of that journey, a few more almost like that
wheel that just keeps going round and round and round. 80%
of your customers keeping that wheel going round and 20% to new
customers. Actually, you can be really
aggressive and target just really good VIP customers, which
might take you 20 touch points and sign up, but you can afford
to do that if it's only using, if they're only taking up 20% of
your actual turnover. What a lot of brands do, and
this tends to be the life cycle of, well, not maybe the life
cycle, but certainly the way that a lot of e-commerce brands
get going. Google Ads comes along.
And although we manage Google Ads, we're very good at it, and
we spend millions of pounds and dollars on Google Ads every
every month at the moment, which is quite exciting.
But we spend lots and lots of money.
And as great as it is, businesses become sixty, then
70, then 80%, then some 19 to 95% reliant on Google
advertising. Your credit card gets banned one
day, or some issue happens, or Google decides to suspend your
account to review something. Turns out you're completely
innocent. Your whole business grinds to a
halt. So what happens then is people
then go, OK, we've got Google's working really, really well for
us. What else can we get from Google
SEO? Let's get on the SEO route.
And that's great. But the point being is the more
that your business starts to grow, the more you want to
diversify and have multiple advertising channels.
And if you want to diversify, make your business as
sustainable as possible. It's probably the wrong word to
use because we often think about planting trees and not using
plastic when we talk about sustainability, but you're going
to make your business more robust the more resilient
financially. Actually relying on existing
customers is the best way to do it.
Say every single marketing channel completely broke, but
people could still purchase on the website.
Your loyal customers will still just go, do you know what I love
that hoodie. I'm going to go buy another one
and they'll just go straight to your website and they'll just
buy 1. And that's the what you really,
really want from your customers. So building that loyalty is done
through e-mail and a number of other channels.
But email's incredibly important.
So if your e-mail is below, probably I'm going to make some
numbers up here and it's going to make some of you go like, oh,
we're nailing it. Let's do less.
And some of you are going to start sweating.
But if it's below sort of 20% of turnover and also the returning
customers, if you're paying to bring those back in, it's fine.
A lot of brands have to do that. Unfortunately, Google and Meta
have a bit monopoly on it. But you want to know these
statistics to set some targets to beat it.
I think if you're like 70 to 80% plus reliant on new customers
all the time, bit of an issue. And it's one of the things we
talk to our clients about a lot is we're doing great and we're
growing here, but it's creating a potential future problem.
You need you need that recurring revenue from existing customers.
Second statistic, then 26%. This is again from HubSpot. 26%
of marketers report e-mail marketing is one of the most
effective channels for segmentation and personalisation
as well, which is no surprise. This puts it in the top three of
use cases, tying with paid social media, and I don't know
what the other one was, sorry, I haven't actually got it open,
but it gives you an idea that actually e-mail should be
working as hard as paid social for you, especially again, that
segmentation and personalisation.
The other thing you can use e-mail for that brands don't use
it anywhere near enough for is you can build an audience in
e-mail and then you can integrate that audience into
Meta, into Google and target those guys And there'll be a
like unlimited amount of use cases you guys can test to see
which one actually starts to convert the best, right?
Let's talk about a few things going on today then.
So marketingweek.com have announced that there is a
massive, I'm actually going to open this article and read you
some of it, marketingweek.com. We'll put a link to this in the
description as well. If we haven't, apologies.
You can find it on Google. The title is TikTok deal closed
to avoid US ban. Under the new agreement, the US
app will be split from the global business with its
algorithm to be trained only on U.S. data.
This is massive. I've rarely seen tech companies
come up against countries like this.
But the United States have made it very, very clear that TikTok
needs to behave in a certain way for it to be OK in their
country, which I find fascinating because it's not
normally America. America's normally the, you
know, the home of free trade and like, let's just let everyone
live whatever life they decide and want to pursue and live.
It tends to be other countries that be a little bit stricter, I
would say, with these kind of rules.
The last time I saw something like this and I, I'll be honest,
I think I keep up a lot with the kind of UK political news, but I
don't keep up massively with global stuff.
But the last time I saw some of this is when Google basically
agreed it was going to turn itself off in China and it
agreed that with the Chinese government, which is not going
to run Google in the whole of China.
Things have changed a lot since then.
We're going back to probably 22,000 and eight, you know,
20-10, something like that. But I just saw it absolutely
insane. Again, Daisy's pulled this off
as one of the biggest stories going around at the moment, but
that is huge. So if you are using TikTok in
the United States, a highly, do you recommend having a look at
what that means for you? It probably doesn't mean
anything overnight because it's just the way that the algorithm
is being trained is going to be slightly different to US users
and the rest of the world. But whenever something like this
happens, some brands freak out and all the marketing managers
sit in meetings saying, like, oh, it's this, it's this, it's
this. And three or four years ago, my
team and I had a bit of a conversation about this and
said, you know what we're going to say to hell with those
conversations and we're going to go, whatever happens, there's
something we can do about it. And so I would look at this as
much as possible. If you rely on TikTok a lot, if
you advertise on TikTok, if you have a lot of your customers on
TikTok, if you use TikTok shop, I'd be looking at this and
saying, what are the opportunities to exploit this as
much as possible as fast as possible because every time
something negative happens, there'll be some sort of
opportunity because it'll be negative for everybody
overnight. You find a way to navigate that.
So I highly recommend if you're AUS brand, keep a very, very
close eye on this and start looking at how else could we use
TikTok and what's actually going to change now that the US
algorithm's going to be completely separated from the
rest of TikTok. We've got a few fun
announcements for you, Yost, if you use Yost.
Happy days. This first one's for WordPress.
We don't have many WordPress listeners, but I thought I'd
read it out anyway because it's quite a big thing.
Site Kit by Google integration is now available for WordPress.
Well, excited means you can just install loads of the Google
things and all the tracking scripts and the pixels and stuff
and a click of a button. Fantastic.
And do all of that through Yost, which is really, really cool.
The two that we can use on Shopify.
Sorry, I had a sudden moment forgetting what my podcast was
about. I've only been hosting it 5 1/2
years. But yeah, there's two things you
can do now. One is you can track brand
visibility using Gemini, which is Google's AI Gemini with Yost
AI brand insights. That is super exciting because
again, let's go back to that marketing manager meeting room.
This seems to be on my heart a lot the last sort of six months,
that marketing manager meeting room, when they're reporting up
to the owner or the senior reps or whoever it is they're
reporting about what marketing's up to you right now.
One thing that they'll say quite a lot is like Google ads, ROI's
gone up, we're spending more and SE OS improving loads.
What we do. And again, if your brand's over
a sort of 5 million a year turnover, we'd be more than
happy to look at look at this for you guys as well.
If your brand is going that way. We look at, oh, sorry, if your
ROI is going up, loads on SEO and PPC and revenues increasing
nicely. We look at how much of that is
your brand terms, someone looking for your name and how
much of it is not your brand. Somebody just looking for the
item like iPad case or like leather iPad iPad case on
Google, for example compared to somebody that types in like I
want to buy again, We use a big brand and I'm going to buy a
super dry T-shirt. I assume you guys have super dry
in the US Japanese brand massive here in the UK, but this shirt's
made by super dry as you probably see down there you
probably can't see there we go. But this shirt's made by super
dry. So if I'm searching for a super
dry check shirt like this one casual in extra small slightly
bigger than that. If I'm looking for that item,
then I would type in super dry to find it so that's a brand
search. I've already decided I'm buying
it from Super Dry, whereas if you type in just you're looking
for a check shirt, you haven't decided on buying from Super Dry
yet. So it's brand versus non brand.
And we find that actually going back to this, the brand, the
brand visibility tracker using Google Gemini, I think this is
really, really important because the more your brand grows, the
more you want to try and keep some sort of cap on it.
On Google Ads. We've had brands before say,
look, we're doing 12 to one ROI and our margins are fantastic.
Like we only need to be at 4:00 to be profitable and we're at
12. It's fantastic, $12.00 for every
$1.00 we spend. And then we look at it and say,
the problem is you can't grow that because it's all reliant on
your brand name. You're not actually acquiring
new customers through this. You're not targeting people that
are deciding between you and 10 other brands.
That is a growth problem and you're not going to be able to
grow. So I'd highly recommend having a
look at that. Some of it's not obvious in
Performance Max and, and how to do on SEO as well.
It's a little bit, a little bit of a black box, but we, we can
provide us some data on that. So yeah, reach out to us if you
want spec dot digital, SPC dot digital is our website.
And, and the second one, sorry, not again.
Third one's the final point from, from Yost and second one's
available to everybody is Alex at Yost and absolutely legend.
I mentioned him almost every week at the moment.
He's also done a search engine journal post about agentic.
I call it agentic 1st. So I was like, do you mean it
Agentic? Yes, Agentic Commerce may be
relevant as UCP was launched on Sunday, this is Sunday last
week. Just Gongs asked them last week
for it. So it's just over a week ago.
Again, we will link to that. If you run at any commerce
store, you're on Shopify, it's highly worth having a quick read
of that. It's an amazing article.
And then we've also got something from Tax Cloud.
This is what happens when I ask around what's going on,
everybody tell us what's happening.
Tax cloud, right? Super fun tax.
Everybody loves tax. So tax Cloud help you file your
returns and pay your tax in all the countries.
Sorry, all the states you need to across the United States.
It's US only. But if you didn't know,
Chicago's PPLTT tax has increased for SAS and cloud
services in 2026. The reason I'm reading it out
word for word as well is tax is not my world.
But what I highly recommend again is going to open the
article and what I highly recommend you do, which you'll
be able to see here on the Tax Cloud website, sign up to their
newsletter. It's called tax radar, sales tax
radar. As soon as tax rates or anything
else change across the US, they will let you know immediately.
If you're running a Shopify store and it's doing anything
better than than it's kind of started and it's kind of about
to do something. As soon as you are trading,
you're going to have to worry about these things.
So if you get the right tech like tech cloud in place early
on, all of this stuff will be automated for you.
Guys in Tax Cloud are amazing. And we've got a webinar coming
up in the next few weeks as well.
I don't think we've announced the date because I've not read
it out, but I know Byron and the guys at Tats Cloud and Yoast.
No, yeah, sorry. Tats Cloud and Saguna are
working on getting that in the diary at the moment.
Amazing, right? That's the end of the news.
And we had a couple of tangents, which is fantastic.
We're going to do trivia, or Quivia, as I call it.
Question about trivia, so here we go.
First one in the UK, how long does the average child spend on
YouTube per day? I assume it's similar in the US.
How long I'm going to sit for water because I've been talking
a lot, but how long does the average child in the UK spend on
YouTube every day? So if you sell products, they're
designed for children or your target audience's children could
be running ATV program or something like that 92 minutes a
day. I found this quite shocking
because we're trying to keep our little baby.
She's only nine months, but we're trying to keep her off
screen. As soon as we touch our phones,
she's now like, oh, let me have a look.
So we're trying to encourage her to enjoy the real world.
Or as one of my gamer friends says, says IIRLI think it is in
real life, probably 1 known phrase to some of you and the
rest of your life. No idea.
And then last one, what percentage of the world's
population use social media? Percentage of the world are on
social media. So we spoke about the e-mail one
earlier. Email's really, really
important. If you did marketing, Google's
obviously important or I won't be sitting here and running a
career for nearly 20 years on Google advertising.
But what percentage of the world's population use social
media? The answer is 64%, which all
things considered, I thought was quite interesting because, and
again, it's from Hubspot's marketing stats.
I thought it was quite interesting because the, when
you think about it, you're like, all right, let's take out the
really kind of, you know, the, the older people demographics
get, the less they do use social.
That is kind of a fact. The younger kids get, the less
they're using it, Although depends if we're including
YouTube in that social media, but 20, sorry, 64 percent is
huge. Guess what?
The, and then finally, it's part of the answer on that.
But guess, you know, no surprise for this.
And guess what the most downloaded social media app was
in 2025. We talked about it already.
It's Tiktok. Tiktok was the most downloaded.
So if you're a brand that is wanting to grow and also to a
younger demographic or to sort of teenagers and people in their
20s, Tiktok is absolutely where you need to be at the moment.
I hope you've enjoyed listening to today's show.
It's been absolute pleasure reading out some news headlines,
sharing some advice on that. We're going to be back hopefully
with the guests this week. We haven't recorded 1 yet, but
we will be recording one before Friday.
People in my inbox are waiting to hear back from.
So we should have an amazing guest this week.
And if you haven't already, go and sign up to our summit.
If you are a tool bit software, you want to get involved in
either the show or the summit we're going to be running in
September, please do reach out. We'd love to hear from you.
We've got loads of opportunities to get involved in the show at
the moment as much as we are. We've got more sponsors than
ever right now, but more opportunities and more content
being created. Thanks much tuning in.
Hope you join me again on Friday and back again next Tuesday with
Tea Break Talks. Thanks again.