EcomCrew PodcastPortal: Amazon

E102: Amazon Product Launch Strategy for 2024

“Seeing all these things that other people … are doing, especially the black hat sellers, and not being able to beat them by using my white hat tactics–it's a very brutal position to be in. But the thing is, one day, I want to be left with a chair when the music stops and they won't.” – Mike Jackness on his long-term Amazon launch strategy

Earlier this year we came upon a chilling situation–more and more sellers are employing black hat tactics to try to win more sales on newly launched products. With so much competition on Amazon it's very tempting to do the same, even though we all know it's against Amazon's TOS and doing so is very much like playing with fire.

And we all know what happens when Amazon finds out. I haven't been suspended before, but I know what it's like to suddenly lose so much money overnight because the platform you depend on decided to basically kick you out. I've heard of so many dreadful stories of Amazon killing accounts and leaving sellers in the dumpster. I don't want this to happen to me–I certainly don't want to be stuck with a million dollar's worth of gel pens I can't pay bills with.

So I got to thinking, what does amazon really want? If I need to win in this without risking my account, I need to think of a long-term strategy that plays by Amazon's rules.

That's how I came up with the strategy that we've been using to launch our newer products. We've started to get some real traction, and with this success, we decided we will be using this strategy moving forward to 2018.

In this episode I talk about exactly how we plan to launch products next year, step by step. A word of warning though: this does not involve fast and easy tricks and gimmicks–this strategy takes longer, but is every bit worth it.

Here's the  breakdown of what I discuss:

  • The why and the how of building an email list off of Amazon
  • Reaching out to customers in a way that is not against Amazon TOS
  • The purpose of contests and giveaways
  • Using ClickFunnels to offer upsells to people who joined the contests (I will email my ClickFunnels landing pages to you for FREE when you sign up through our affiliate link)
  • Using free plus shipping offers
  • Developing a 5-star product
  • How to properly use Amazon PPC when launching a product

If you decide to try out ClickFunnels and want a copy of our landing pages, send us an email to let us know. ClickFunnels has made it really easy to share pages, so sign up here if you haven't done so.

Resources mentioned:

AsiaInspection
Stamped.io
ClickFunnels

If you found this episode useful, let us know by leaving a review on iTunes or by leaving a comment below. Thanks so much for listening, and until next episode, happy selling!

 

Full Audio Transcript

Mike: This is Mike, and welcome to episode number 102 of the EcomCrew Podcast. Today I'm going to be talking about my 2018 launch strategy for products on Amazon. It's crazy that it's almost 2018 already. We've been mapping out the strategy for quite a while. I'm going to go through step by step how I plan on launching products in 2018, and basically what we've done for launches here at the end of 2017. It's been a heck of a ride this year, and we’re really starting to get some traction with this new plan. So I hope you guys enjoy this episode, and we'll talk to you on the other side.

 

Mike: Seeing all these things that other people I know that are selling doing, especially the black hat sellers, and not being able to beat them by using my white hat tactics, it’s a very brutal position to be in. But the thing is, one day, I want to be left with a chair when the music stops and they won’t.

 

Mike: Hey everyone, and welcome to this episode of the EcomCrew Podcast. Today I’m going to be discussing my Amazon launch strategy for 2018. Before I get into that, I want to give you guys a little bit of a background on how I kind of came up with this strategy and why. And the biggest thing is, I don't remember the exact day, but it was around one year or maybe a year and a month or maybe a year and two months ago when Amazon like really lowered the boom hammer on incentivized reviews.

And it was a tough day for me because it was so easy before that to launch a product on Amazon. I've been in business for over 15 years myself. Really if you add up all my entrepreneurial career, it's probably close to 20 years. And this was one of the easiest times in history for me to make money and to be successful launching products on Amazon. It was really like shooting fish in a barrel. It was just so easy to bring in just about any product, throw up a giveaway on something like Snagshout or Jumpsend, or whatever it might be, give away five, 10, 15, 20 units per day depending on whatever sales volume you needed to get the number one spot.

And just like that boom you had the number one spot, or at least you're on the first page. You would get all these fake five star reviews. I didn’t really think much about how much I was hurting things at the time. But then one day obviously Amazon came along and said, okay, we're not going to allow this anymore. And it really just completely changed the landscape on Amazon. But on that day, I made a pretty important decision for the future of our business, because everyone else was scrambling to figure out what the new found thing, the new whiz bang way of doing this was going to be moving forward.

But the thing that was really important about that was they were looking for the thing that was going to work “today,” and not looking for a long term strategy. And for me I was like, you know what, I've been through this before, this feels very familiar. I've had this happen a couple of times before in the SEO space, in the affiliate marketing space. When you're doing Google search rank optimization, you're kind of living by the sword, dying by the sword, and with Google take it, they can give it away. And that's certainly happened to us.

I mean there was a couple of times, two occasions. The last one was when the whole Penguin and Panda thing happened where I literally lost a six figure profit business overnight, where a couple of different affiliate sites that we had that were ranking quite well and were bringing in tens of thousands of dollars each per month, and just complete profit because there's almost no overhead in Affiliate Marketing. Just one day I woke up and they were completely de-indexed.

And it's just a gross feeling. It's worse than never having the money at all because you kind of get to the point where things are going so well and you're just like really happy and proud of yourself for how things are going. And then all of a sudden one day that's just completely gone. And it's brutal. But the difference there is, yes there was some investments in domain names and investments in my time and content, but whatever I had been paid up to that point, that money was already in the bank. And I was able to go do whatever I want with it.

I could go buy a new car, pay off credit card bills, go on an expensive vacation, whatever it might be. Anything I had done up to that point, I had no debt obviously because there wasn't anything to buy in advance. So it was a pretty clean cut business. And even though it hurt really, really bad, I'm pretty resilient and I was able to bounce back and reinvent myself, and was able to get through that “disaster.”

But I look at the business I'm in now, and it's a very similar situation with Amazon and Google, where Amazon kind of holds the strings on the puppet, and if they want to chop your legs off from underneath you, you’re at mercy to them. The difference here is, I have almost a million dollars in inventory that's back in my warehouse and in my 3PLs. And if something would ever happen to this business, I'm now stuck with a million dollars worth of coloring pens and gel pens and markers and coloring books and baby clothing, and all that stuff.

I can't pay my taxes with those items; I can’t pay my mortgage with them. And the money that I have built up in inventory certainly is not in the bank although the IRS looks at it that way because the inventory is not a deduction. It's an investment, it's an asset. So it's basically having gold bars back in the warehouse that I can't touch until I sell through them, and then I got to buy more of the same thing. And it's just one of these perpetual cycles.

But one day if my Amazon account were to get shut down; I'd be up the creek without a paddle so to speak. And I just don't want to be in that situation. I've been through it like I said a number of times in the past. And so I made a decision on that day. I sat down, I was like, let me figure out how I'm going to be able to get past this problem long-term moving forward. And it took me a couple of weeks to kind of map out a strategy of thinking about first of all, what does Amazon ultimately want to hear? What can I do to kind of provide that to them?

I do the same strategy by the way now with Google which has worked out incredibly well. Our search engine rankings on Google organically have been just absolutely awesome. But I want to do the same thing for Amazon. I want to be able to launch a product without having to use any coupons or giveaways or fake review strategies, or going to Fiverr or going to review groups or using ZonJump. All these different tools I hear about out there that are really today's gimmick I would say, and think of a way to lay this out strategically long-term, and how to do that.

So that was the approach I was taking, and I knew that this would take way longer than just jumping on the bandwagon for whatever people were going to start doing in the short-term. And I also knew that it was going to seem very unfair from my perspective seeing all these things that other people I know that are selling doing, especially the black hat sellers, and not being able to beat them reliably day after day by using my white hat tactics, and having these hat tactics coming after me, it’s a very brutal position to be in.

But the thing is, one day, I want to be left with a chair when the music stops and they won’t. And that’s the big key here. And we've been able to be successful, like very successful, probably more successful than we've ever been now that the strategy has been playing out for almost a full year. I'm going to kind of go through that today.

So the first step to this whole strategy comes down to being able to build an audience off of Amazon. This is something you have to absolutely be able to do. There isn't a way to do it on Amazon. If you're relying on just Amazon alone, the most you can do is some PPC and headline search ads, and that isn't going to be enough to move the needle especially in a more competitive market. So to move the needle in a competitive market, you have to absolutely have an audience out there that you can rely on to do whatever it is that you want to do with.

And this is an asset for your company not like on Amazon, right? I mean Amazon audience is not an asset. Like if someone buys something from you on Amazon, you're not permitted to talk to them in any way, shape, or form. There's definitely some grey hat or black hat things you can do to reach out to them, but it's certainly not allowed by Amazon's terms of service. So if you have a list that you've built off of Amazon and for some reason Amazon shuts your account down. Or maybe — I know this sounds crazy, but maybe Amazon isn't number one day, or it may be Wal-Mart does take over or some other platform that we haven't even heard of yet becomes the number one platform.

If you have an audience outside of Amazon, this is an asset you can use to point to anywhere you want, whenever you want, pretty much on a dime. And that's again that's an asset that you have and it's going to make your company way more valuable. If you go to sell your company one day and you say I have this asset of 100,000, 250,000, a million, whatever it might be e-mail list and pixeled audience of people on my Facebook or ManyChat, this is going to be way more valuable than saying, I sell X number of widgets on Amazon every day or every month or whatever it might be, way more valuable to you.

So again the first step is to build an off Amazon list. And we're doing this now for three separate brands. We are doing it for ColorIt, Wild Baby and for Tactical, building this off of Amazon to have when we’re ready to launch products. So the way that we build these audiences is a few different ways. The first one is through contests. You guys have heard me talk about that on the podcast over and over again.

So there isn't really a reason to get into that in detail. You can go back and listen to one of those older podcasts. It's still completely relevant. But the basic idea is that we're going to give away some particular item every day for a month and try to get people on our email list by doing that, or get them pixeled or get them on our ManyChat list, one of those three things. And if we can do all three, that's really the trifecta, and that's the thing that we're really going after to be able to do.

So the contest a lot of times what we will do is we either do want to two things. Number one, we’ll run a contest for our competitors’ brands, something that's well known in the industry that's akin to what we're selling. So I don't want to mention any brand names on the podcast, but let's just say I'll use big name brands. So let's do something like let's say I'm trying to open a fast food restaurant, but I don't have my fast food restaurant open yet, and I'm going to just giveaway gift certificates of something like McDonald's.

So every day I'll give away a $25 gift certificate to McDonald's to my competitor, and advertise on Facebook to a list of people who like McDonald's as my audience on Facebook. I know this is going to convert incredibly well, like I mean there's people that like Facebook or like McDonald's on Facebook. That's an audience that would exist, let's say it's a million, two million, five million, whatever number of people.

You know that if you run an ad to those people for a gift certificate to McDonald's as a giveaway or a contest, they're going to be interested. It's a one to one relationship. There's no question about it. Now the extrapolation that you're making is that I'm opening up this fast food restaurant called Mike's Burgers or whatever, and one day I'm going to try to advertise to these people that like McDonald's and try to convince them that Mike's Burgers are better, and that's kind of the whole idea.

So the first step is to run a contest, number one to people that are going to be a competitor eventually to me, because I don't even have the product yet, but eventually they'll be my competitor and get them on my list. Get them on my email list; get them to come to a landing page to sign for the contest. So I get them pixeled, or get them to express interest in the contest originally through ManyChat or through Facebook Messenger and get them on my Facebook messenger list.

So I'll do that for a month or two and start to build my list. This usually costs me somewhere around fifty cents per email subscriber. And it's one of these things where it just — you have to take a leap of faith and build this list and think that eventually these people are going to be worth what I'm spending on them to me in the future. And I already have worked out this math and done it successfully for a couple of other brands, so I know that this works. So I don't have to worry about the name because now we're just like full force ahead doing that concept.

The second part of that concept would be then to give away a product. Instead of a competitor's product, it's going to be a product, it's going to be agnostic, it's not going to have a brand name on it. But it's going to be a product that I plan on eventually selling. So I'm going to be giving away, let's say I'm going to use the fast food analogy again, a burger a day or whatever it might be, a package of burgers a day, whatever it might be.

But I'm not going to actually bring those products in. That's the big key. What I'm going to do is go to AliExpress and find the hamburgers on there that are at least 80% like the product I eventually plan on launching, and doing that as the giveaway. So I'm going to give away this hamburger every day for a month contest. And again I'm sourcing the product from AliExpress. Again I just want something that's going to be at least 80% like the product I eventually hope to launch.

I am going to make a better product with better packaging and all the other things that we talk about. But for now all I'm curious in is can I sign up people through these contests that are interested in these hamburgers. So I’ll run that contest for a month or two, and once I get a list of people, now I have two separate buckets of people. I have people that first liked my competitor’s product, and I have my products that — or liked the things I plan on launching. And I've now run a contest let's say for three to four months at this point collecting, probably you should be able to get tens of thousands of people sign up under that timeframe.

And then what I do is I then send them an email to a ClickFunnels landing page, and you can go to EcomCrew.com/clickfunnels to sign up for ClickFunnels if you haven't yet. And if you do that through our link there, I will send you these pages in this funnel for free if you just email support@ecomcrew. And what I'll do with this funnel is I’ll then sell the product, and I’ll pick up some arbitrary number. Let’s just say I say, oh these hamburgers normally sell for $50, but today only you can get them for 70% off, for just $15 today only.

And I'll email all of the people on that list to that ClickFunnels landing page, selling the hamburgers for $15. I’ll find the hamburgers for sale on AliExpress for usually around ten, so I'm actually making a 50% margin on that with no inventory to purchase, and I can fulfill all the orders through AliExpress. Now, I don't really care too much about selling that product and making money off of that sale. That isn't the primary objective.

The primary objective is to then test, is this audience that I built interested in buying hamburgers or not. And if they are, they're going to buy the hamburgers. I'm hoping to see a 1% conversion rate on that email list because I know when I eventually get that product and I email the same list about a product on Amazon, that my conversion will be much, much higher, typically in the 5 to 10% range. I just want to make sure they respond.

So my juncture here at this point is to test the hamburger, is it going to sell that audience or not? If it doesn't, I'm going to go try to find another product. If the hamburger sells successfully, I'm going to develop that product. That's the key thing, right? So I already know that there's a high likelihood of that product converting, it's going to do really well, I'm going to go develop hamburgers.

Now, the next part to that is once the hamburgers are developed, I'm going to do a few things here. First of all, a big key here is I'm going to make sure that when I launch my product on Amazon that I'm going to come out of the gates with a fury here. I mean I don't want to just be lax [ph] and cool about it. I need to make sure that my product launches as successful as possible. I'm going to go after the new best seller badge. And we've been able to do this now successfully time after time with the strategy I’m about to talk to you about.

So I bring these hamburgers and I realize it's probably three months later at this point than when I did my test run. So over that three months while I’m waiting for my hamburgers to come in, I'm still running contests and giveaways and freebies and stuff, building this list even bigger than it was before, knowing that I'm about to get these hamburgers in. So hopefully at this point now I've got let's say 20 to 50,000 people on my list, maybe even more, and I'm about to launch my hamburgers on Amazon.

Now the key thing is when I send the products in Amazon, I'm going to put a start selling date in the future. So let's say like right now it's December 1st just to pick a random date, and I know these hamburgers are coming in. When I create my listing, I'm going to say that these are going to have a start selling date of January 31st, because I don't want the clock to start ticking on my new bestseller status. And I want to — remember coming out of the gates with a bang.

So what I'm going to do is set a start selling date of January 31st or something in the future so the listing doesn't go active. I'm going to make sure that I have a very well put together listing with really good titles and imagery and bullet points and enhanced brand content and backend keywords. All that stuff is set perfectly from day one. Very important to like have a completely built out listing.

We used be like really lazy about this, and like when we get to it we'll get to it, we just want to get the product up. But that's not how Amazon works. You need to show early sales and sustainable sales. So once my listing is ready and all my inventory is checked in at Amazon, and I have enough inventory in Amazon to be able to sustain whatever number of units per day, let's just pick a random number like 50. Let's say I need to sell 50 of these per day to be able to get to that number one page organically that I’m looking to get to get to — I'm going to have everything ready to go for that launch.

Now what I want to be able to do at that point is drip out this in a sustainable way. I don't want to sell a thousand of these in one day. That does nothing for me except look cool. What Amazon wants to see is sustainable sales. So I'm going to drip this out to my list. Let's say I have 50,000 people on my list. I might only email 2,500 of them at a time. I'm trying to sustain sales over a three week, 21 day period.

So typically I'll take whatever my total list is and divide up by 21, and send that out in little bite size chunks day after day. I’ll also send reminders as well to the people that I sent earlier in the process, because again I want to sustain sales over a long period of time. So another part of this is also making sure that you launch PPC effectively. So I’m going to launch my sponsored product ads, my product placement ads, and my headline search ads all on day one with very aggressive budgets to make sure that I'm getting as many sales as I can through PPC as possible.

And eventually what the whole idea here is that, you're going to run out of ammunition in your tool chest. It's kind of like teaching a kid how to ride a bike. Eventually when you first start teaching this kid how to ride a bike, you're holding on to them by the back seat, keeping them from falling over and being able to stay in a straight line. It's kind of the same thing here with your listing. Eventually with this influx of traffic, you're going to be able to sustain the organic traffic relatively quickly.

Again we've had several products we've done this with now this year in 2017, and we're going to employ this strategy all next year in 2018. And the key for us has been again having the volume out of the gates, getting the initial reviews. So we're going to sign up for the early reviewer program, get those first five reviews as quickly as possible. We're going to follow up with people and try to ask them for reviews. Again we have them on our own email list.

So our email flow looks like something like this, where we say, this new product is launched on Amazon, we really want you to have an opportunity to get it before anybody else. It's a brand new product at this special offer price, even though we're not going to change the price later. Please go buy and check it out. And then we remind them again a couple of days later. If you haven't had a chance to go buy it, please do so. And then we’ll send another email at the end of that to say, please leave a review. If you bought the product, please leave a review on Amazon.

We are also doing the same thing on social channels. We’ll run ads to the product. So people that have become fans of us, we’ll run ads to them for the product, and we’ll drip that over time as well, trying to drip our budget over time to sustain that. And anybody that responds on social ads, we’ll then respond to them and say, please leave a review, like one by one, very guerrilla marketing tactic way of doing it.

Our most recent product that we just launched has over 100 reviews in the first six weeks. I'm not joking when I say that I didn't do a single review club, a single coupon discount offer. None of those gimmicks whatsoever have been employed. This is all the stuff I just talked about, 100% organic. Now, the big key is, one of the things I find is that we really legitimately try to launch a five star product. So we are obsessive in the product design phase, on the product itself, on the packaging, on the inserts.

This is something that we talk about in our course over and over again, EcomCrew.com/course. But this is something we focus on like painstakingly to make sure we get right. Again, making sure that we have a legitimate five star, or worst case four and a half star product. Don't fool yourself into trying to make a polyp [ph] poop smell like a rose. If you realize that what you're selling isn't all that special, or isn't that good, it's probably not going to impress your customers either.

So try to develop a legitimate five star product. People are more likely to leave a review if they're really impressed, if they've blown away by the product. And if you have a five star product, you're going to — if you can legitimately have a five star product on Amazon, we've been able to split test this now, not because we want to, but just because sometimes we go from five stars down to four and a half stars, or vice versa back up to five stars. And the conversion rate difference on a five star product is just so much higher.

So if you can really hold yourself to that standard, it makes a huge difference. But that's really the whole thing in a nutshell. Now the next thing that we’ll do to continue to get traffic is free plus shipping offers. And so as the brand continues to grow, and as we're developing a new brand, like Wild Baby and like Tactical, we've already found these products — I actually have one sitting right here on my desk right now. We are looking to develop free plus shipping offer products as another mechanism to get people on our list.

So the whole flow for that would basically be, all right well now I have these — let's say I'm selling 12 packs of hamburgers. If I can sell somebody one hamburger for just shipping and handling, and get them to try my hamburger and they really like it, I'm going to have more customers down the road. And whether that's a consumable product or it's a product that people will buy that product and then be interested in the rest of your line, it doesn't matter. As long as you can get your brand name in front of them, get them on your list, and be able to sell them a product later, that's the key.

So right now, we're in the process of developing for each brand at least three free plus shipping offers. So we'll have a hamburger, a cheeseburger, a fish sandwich or whatever it might be, it doesn't really matter. As long as we have multiple products available to run free plus shipping offer ads on Facebook, that's the key. So when our free plus shipping offer offers as Facebook ads, get one hamburger today for free, just pay shipping and handling, the customer will come buy that offer, execute on that offer.

But the real key is the upsells after the fact. So the whole idea here and again I do all this through ClickFunnels. We don't do this on Shopify because ClickFunnels is a more compact way of doing it. There's you're building a funnel not a whole web page, which is just way more successful for these many offers that we're doing. So it doesn't matter which one of these free plus shipping offers we throw in at the top, they are all interchangeable.

So we'll do a free plus shipping offer for the hamburger, a free plus shipping offer for a chicken sandwich, and a free plus shipping offer for a fish sandwich let's say. And all three of those will be running concurrently on Facebook because they’ll appeal to different people. So that offer will be up and running and some will come in let’s say and convert on our hamburger offer. Now, once they do that, the big key here is the upsell offer will do after the fact.

So they buy the hamburger and as soon as they do, we’ll say, hey do you want to customize your order? You can now take advantage of this fish sandwich offer, or you can get the chicken sandwich, and we sell that at full price. So we're trying to convert people in to these other products. So we also use these free plus shipping offers, but it's actually we're doing it a full price. We’ll also offer them the hamburger, to get more hamburgers.

So you can get another hamburger also for free, just pay shipping again or whatever it might be, trying to get the average order value up somewhere through this process. And we’ll typically offer between three to five upsells. It's very much like Go Daddy or this is the plan when you check out there. It's annoying as hell, but it works. They're trying to up sell you domain services or web hosting services or whois blocking services or whatever the hell crap you’re doing on GoDaddy.

It's an endless stream of upsell offers, and we do the same thing ending in our most high value offer. So it's usually another product that we're actually trying to sell on Amazon eventually. It might be a $50, $70 item up-sell offer that also coincides with the same products that we're selling. So maybe it's get a year supply of fast food or whatever it might be, a variety pack at the end. Whatever offer, it makes sense to kind of get people to go through that funnel.

Again that whole process is twofold. Number one, you're just — number one really what you're trying to do is get people on your list, that's what you really care about. But these are higher value people because they're actually making a micro commitment purchase. They're doing this free plus shipping offer at a minimum. Usually about sixteen to 20% of the people that take us up on the free plus shipping offer will take us up on upsell offer immediately.

So that gets your average order value up on these free plus shipping offers. It makes the advertising campaign profitable from day one, and now you're getting people on your list, so when the next product comes in, you have a bigger list and a higher value list so you can then send people, okay now go check out my chicken parmesan sandwich I'm now selling on Amazon. Be the first one to get it over here, and market to them that way. And it's just incredibly successful.

So again to recap this whole thing because I know I went to over a lot. Number one, build that audience. Number two, test a product. Number three; continue to build your audience while you're waiting for that product to come in. Then number four, when you launch the product, get it on Amazon with a start date in the future. Have the listing perfected. Number five, start dripping out to your list that you already have, whether that's through email or through Facebook bots, or through Facebook ads.

And we also in the stage, one thing I didn't talk about we’ll also run a video ad to cold traffic right to Amazon. We know that this is a losing proposition, but we're just trying to get outside traffic in Amazon for that first 21 days, and get any sales that we can to continue our momentum. Then the next step would be to launch PPC at the same time that you're launching a product to make sure that again that you're getting as many sales as you can.

So we’ll launch an automated campaign with a very high budget. So manual campaign bidding on the terms that we think are going to be the ones that are going to convert, and let those run. And then the last part is basically then to let your little kid on this tricycle run on his own. Take off the training wheels and let the product just do its thing. Continue obviously to run PPC, but get that down to a level that is profitable. And you'll hopefully by this point have the number one your best seller badge and your product is off and running, and you're ready to go do it again for the next product.

So, I hope you guys found that valuable. Again this is our Amazon launch process for 2018. And we're excited about it because it has been working so well at the later half here in 2017. The one little tidbit of information I forgot to mention in this whole thing is you're probably wondering this, is how do you market this to people off of Amazon, because we also obviously have our own websites like ColorIt.com that are on Shopify.

And what we do with that list is we tell them that the product got into Amazon first, and we know that you're excited to get this product. It just unfortunately isn't in our ColorIt warehouse yet, but if you’d like to have it right now, you can go to Amazon. Here is the link to go buy it. It'll be in stock in ColorIt.com soon, but we just don't have it available there yet even though obviously we have the inventory. We just we want to push the traffic to Amazon to get that thing rolling on day one. So that's the strategy we take with that.

So we don't make it available on our own channels or other channels like eBay until we've got our little kid riding down the street on his bike without the training wheels and us having to hold him up. That's kind of the whole strategy. So that's a full circle. We came out right almost exactly at 30 minutes, so worked up perfectly as far as timing on this episode.

And again guys, I hope you really found this information valuable. You can go to the show notes, I'll be talking about that here after the episode to download this information, or leave comments if you have any questions. So, I hope you guys found this episode valuable, and we'll talk to you in the next episode.

 

Mike: And that's a wrap. I hope you guys enjoyed episode number 102 of the EcomCrew Podcast. Again, if you want to go to the show notes, it's EcomCrew.com/102. You can leave a comment. If you have any questions about this whole process I talked about, I’d be happy to help you over there. And again it does help the EcomCrew Podcast, if you help. Go to EcomCrew.com/clickfunnels if you haven't signed up for ClickFunnels yet and you're going to do that part of the strategy I mentioned.

And if you want to get our free funnels that we've been using for this whole process, I'll send you over the exact templates I've been using. Once you sign up for ClickFunnels, it's easy to share a template. They make it really easy. All you got to do is e-mail us at support@ecomcrew.com with the account that you're using for ClickFunnels so that we can send those right over into your account.

So again EcomCrew.com/102, to get to the show notes. EcomCrew.com/clickfunnels if you want to deploy some of these strategies with ClickFunnels that we've done. And as always if you guys have a chance to leave us a review on iTunes, we really appreciate that as well. And until the next episode guys, good luck with everything, happy selling and we'll see you in the next episode.

Michael Jackness

Michael started his first business when he was 18 and is a serial entrepreneur. He got his start in the online world way back in 2004 as an affiliate marketer. From there he grew as an SEO expert and has transitioned into ecommerce, running several sites that bring in a total of 7-figures of revenue each year.

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17 Comments

  1. Awesome info Mike. I have a couple of questions.

    1. You mentioned that you launch everything hard right out of the gate. AMZ PPC, Headline Ads, etc. Are you doing all of this initially with 0 reviews? I assume so since you are saying on day one of launch but I just wanted to clarify.

    2. In the email launch portion you said the email flow starts by offering at an “introductory price” but then you said “even though we’re not going to change the price later”. Do you launch the product with an initial low price and then raise the price as reviews increase and position improves or do you just launch at the price you want to sell at and leave it there assuming it performs where you expect?

    Thanks again. Great content.

    1. Hey Joe!

      1. Yes, we have 0 reviews to start with. There isn’t much we can do about this. We do try to join the early reviewer program and individually reach out to each customer the best we can on social, via email, etc. to try and get those first 10 reviews. Once you get over 10 it seems like you’re over the hump.

      2. We launch the product with a price of at least 80% of what we eventually plan on selling it for. We will inch it up over time to that 100% mark, or even 120% mark. At some point we will get Profit Peak doing its thing. The main point here is that we don’t put it up at some silly low price.

  2. Click Funnel seemed like an answer to my needs, but I thought it was disappointing they try to sell you a URL then limit places you can have your own URL registered at before it can be verified. So – Network Solutions, no compatibility. Seems unfortunate they limit their business and try to lure people into having them control their URLs.

    1. Kristin,

      I’m not sure who gave you that information, but that isn’t true. You can use any domain that you want with ClickFunnels. We’ve been using it on ecomcrew.com, coloring.club, colorit.com, tacticl.com, etc. Some sites we are using a subdomain and others we are using the root / main domain.

  3. Hi Mike and Dave I hope all is going well. I had a few questions on your email marketing attribution. I believe in one of the podcasts you stated that 50% of your revenue came directly from email. Which attribution model do you use for this number (first click? Last click? Or multi touch?). Also I believe you stated that Amazon was 55% of your total revenue and email accounted for 50% of your revenue. This comes to over 100% so I wanted to see if you could give clarification on this? I’m not trying to be critical but this year we are starting to track email Much closer and I was going to use your numbers as a benchmark against ours and I just want to make sure that I am comparing apples to apples. Thanks so much I love the podcast I listen to every episode religiously.

    1. Hi Patrick,

      I’m speaking for Mike a bit while he’s out of town, but I believe he uses last click and I believe that is a percentage of website revenue not overall company revenue.

  4. Hi.

    I believe you mentioned in Podcast 102 a PDF for “How to launch” a product? Is that correct? If so, where can I find it?

    Thank you

  5. Hi Mike,

    I listened to your podcast E102 a while back and followed your advice. Thanks so much for the road map! My product is now in Amazon and I have the go-live date on hold while I am finishing up the listing. I also have a pretty decent list from off of Amazon (emails, Messenger and Pixel).

    Do you have any resources that explain your specific email process / sequence that you send to your list? For example I have heard that before you offer the product for sale you should first send your list 3 emails that just offer free valuable information. Then on the fourth email you would send your offer which would be a discount.

    If you have any resources or information along these lines could you please point me in the right direction? Thanks again for all the GREAT advice!

    Thanks,
    Kevin

    1. Hi Kevin,
      There’s a blog post that gives a pretty good run-down of the process and after that we have a great Amazon Launch Strategy course coming out at the end of the month.

  6. Hi,

    Great podcast!

    New to this, but I found the competition method to build an e-mail list interesting.

    How to get a competition up and running and make sure people sees it? Or do you have a podcast for that?

    Thanks!!!
    Peter

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