Happy Friday!
Man, what a busy week it has been. All 3 of my boys are in basketball and Christmas is in full swing. On top of that I’ve been working more than average lately. I’m looking forward to January.
I’m really, really excited about today’s topic, because it’s something I’ve been in the weeds with for this past month. I think a handful of readers will make some good money if they implement some of the things below. The first half is the relevant backstory, and the second half includes the money-making tactics that you can implement. Okay, let’s get to it!
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I want to talk about eCommerce today. eCommerce gets a bad wrap at times because many a guru have sold worthless drop shipping courses. Why do dropshipping courses sell so well? Because it’s the allure of easy money. Someone else does all the work and you just pop in on your Facebook ads campaign every now and then. Nope, those days are long gone, and that’s a good thing.
eCommerce is tough, but really, really fun. Like, really super fun. Of all the niches I’ve had my hands in, I probably know the most about eCommerce. To quickly recap:
So yes, I am addicted to the dopamine hit of someone in another state or country finding your site and placing an order. It’s magical! I love Shopify. Lately, I’ve been falling in love with Shopify’s email-focused counterpart, Klaviyo.
One of the downsides of owning a holdco is that you miss things in your portcos sometimes. Especially when you’re at the “messy middle” like we are now. We aren’t yet big enough to have gray-haired CEOs at every company we own. We have operators but we step in and help a lot. Our operators are world-class, but they’re focused on operating, not growing. For now, that’s still my job. I love it, but I miss a lot of things.
Back in October I was talking to my now buddy Sam Thompson when he stopped by the office. He offhandedly mentioned a popup called Amped that could triple our Texas Snax email opt-in rates.
I was intrigued…so I gave it a shot. Keep in mind I had only been spending about 5 hours per week on Texas Snax at that point, so it wasn’t a top of mind company, but I wanted to pull on this thread.
We added the popup and sure enough, our email opt in rate went from 3.7% to 10.6%. And it also collected SMS on about 85% of those as well. So I kept pulling the thread…
“Hmm…I wonder if we could optimize our top of funnel traffic with our Google Ads?”
So I logged into our Google Ads account and what I saw shocked me. We were converting new customers at an absurdly low price. And our budget was $50/day. ONLY $50/DAY!! That’s nothing, especially when you consider around 14 million people per month search for Buc-ee’s on Google alone.
I love my partner in this biz, but he is famously very cheap, and he was managing the Google Ads campaign at this point. I kindly asked for his trust so I could take it over myself, and he relented. Over the next few weeks I scaled our adspend exponentially, and our sales and traffic EXPLODED.
It was one of those moments where you’re stoked it’s happening, while also kicking yourself for not doing this 3 years prior! Gah!
So now, to recap, we are capturing emails from over 10% of visitors, AND increasing our traffic by stupid amounts. This means that our email collection rate is getting bonkers. So I kept pulling on the thread…
By this point I’m working 16 hour days, with around 11 of them being all in on Texas Snax. I logged into our Klaviyo account to see if I could optimize our email strategy.
That was a very deep rabbit hole, my friend. Since that day in November I’ve likely spent 150 hours in Klaviyo. Tweaking, optimizing, scrubbing bad emails, segmenting good emails, etc, etc etc.
At this point, I’m clinically addicted to Klaviyo. As a typical entrepreneur, I am somewhat of a jack of all trades. My knowledge of tech tools is a mile wide and an inch deep. But when it comes to Klaviyo at this point, I’m pretty freaking great at it! It’s so fun! I’ve been using it for around 3 years for MHP Guy, Mining Syndicate, Texas Snax, Cofounders, and a project called Bizy, but I only knew about 30% of its capabilities.
Without getting too into the weeds, Klaviyo has two main mediums and marketing pillars:
The two mediums are email and SMS.
The pillars are Campaigns and Flows.
Campaigns are just that, an email campaign. Or, an email blast as a boomer might call it.
Flows are automations that will email customers at certain steps of their journey. For instance, if they subscribe, a flow will send them a 4-6 email welcome flow over the next few weeks.
Or, if a customer keeps adding apparel to their cart but never checks out, a Flow will know this and send them an apparel discount at certain intervals.
Super cool stuff.
Klaviyo has a zillion metrics and tracking features, but here are the improvements I made to Texas Snax after diving in deep for a few weeks:
Anyway, you get the point. What I’m saying is that Klaviyo is awesome. I’m not an affiliate or a referral partner, I just think it’s insanely underutilized by over 95% of users, and here’s how I know.
I’m in a private group for $1m+ eCommerce store owners, and I asked a handful if I could audit their Klaviyo accounts to see if they were doing things I could apply to my own brand. When I dove in I was shocked. I didn’t see one brand that was well optimized.
One brand sold over $10m/year worth of drone parts, and he was leaving $300k/month worth of revenue on the table by not optimizing. He was also paying thousands per month for dead emails that needed scrubbing. he was very grateful.
Another was sending way too many emails and burning through her list.
Another didn’t even know Flows existed.
And that’s why I’m writing this email.
There is a MASSIVE OPPORTUNITY out there to learn Klaviyo and charge phat monthly retainers to make brands more money.
How does one get rich? By helping others get rich, and this is exactly that opportunity.
Klaviyo just went public this year, so I took a peek into their S-1. If you’re a nerd like me, have a gander. This was my favorite part:
130,000 customers! If you divide that by their revenue then the average customer is paying around $475/month, which is an email list of about 50,000.
That’s a decently sized eCommerce store. You’d be shocked to learn how many 7-9 figure Shopify brands are out there.
So, you need to learn Klaviyo. How? Three ways:
You need 1 case study.
Then get a Carrd site and throw up a landing page with your case study. Now you can start looking for customers. Go back to those eCommerce groups and offer your services for performance only. As in, they only pay you if you bring them more revenue.
This is all very, very trackable within Klaviyo. There will be no question.
Once you exhaust that avenue you need to find more customers via cold email.
How do you find all those customers? Oh, that’s the easy part. BuiltWith.com
Built With tells you what all websites are…built with! For instance, you can export a list of all Shopify sites, that include owner contact info, and scrub out all the ones that don’t use Klaviyo. It’s all right there.
Built With is priced at around $450/month, but it’s okay, because I’m cheap, and I don’t want you to spend all that. So go to Upwork and find someone with an Upwork account to run this export for you for $20. Or just buy the list off someone on Upwork, like I counsel here.
Now you have at least 50k potential Klaviyo customers, but you need to email them. How? Use this guide.
What’s your pitch?
“If I can’t make you an extra $50k/month from Klaviyo then my service is free. Give me read only access to your Klaviyo account and I’ll send a free Loom with my plan.”
If you dig into their account and see it’s already well optimized, then you don’t take them on as a customer because you don’t want to work for free.
This is a $5k - $10k/month service. You don’t think you can find 5 - 10 customers willing to pay you that out of 130,000? Especially when you consider that almost all of them have no clue what they’re doing.
You could be at $20k MRR within 3 months of reading this email.
Or, another opportunity?
Buy an under-optimized eCommerce store. My friend Connor encapsulated by thoughts exactly in this tweet.
I think this is a massive opportunity. I would find a store that has:
That’s it. Buy it with some cash down and a seller note and add an insane amount of value in the first 90 days.
I might actually be talking myself into doing this as I type this. Who’s in?
Conclusion
Man, that was fun to write. You can take this playbook and apply it to any software like Klaviyo that is growing like crazy and making people rich.
Where there’s software charging thousands per month and growing like crazy, there’s a ton of opportunity around it.
It’s similar to Salesforce integration agencies. People need help with this stuff, and Klaviyo really isn’t that hard. The feeling of hitting send on an email and watching live visitors go from 80 to 800 in 5 minutes is truly magical.
As always, I hope this email causes you to act on something.
What I’m Working on Lately
Well, I kind of already covered that, didn’t I? I’m neck deep in Shopify reports, Klaviyo and Google Ads. I started a Performance Max campaign for the first time and am seeing amazing results so far.
I’m also shopping around for a new warehouse to manage this growth. Our gross margins are 45%, so we can’t afford a 3PL. That’s okay though, because I hate 3PLs, and I was one myself!
We’re hoping we can find a warehouse that will also be zoned for use as a pet crematorium, as referenced in this post. We’re concurrently in talks to both buy an existing one in W Texas and start one from scratch here in DFW. We’re just trying to get the seller down on his unrealistic price.
How’s that for diversification under one roof?
I’m also still helping my wife with real estate stuff and consulting on a couple MHP investing projects. It sounds busy, but remember, there’s always time.
Thanks for reading! You guys are the best. This newsletter grows at a stupidly slow rate, considering the time I invest in it, so I would always love it if you shared via the link below.
Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner.com