eCommerce business' need lovin' too
Published: Sun, 11/08/20
Former Navy Nuclear Engineer and software & marketing automation specialist who is — when it comes to using Zapier especially — like a cross between Steve Jobs & Dr. Frankenstein.
And it’s all about using a cheap zapier account to get all the new business you can stand.
Let the fun continue…
BEN SETTLE: Let's switch to e-commerce businesses. If anybody can use Zapier, it seems like it's e-commerce. Every time I get questions about "I have an e-commerce store, how do I use email for my store…?” And I always tell them that the product is a product. The email writing part is all the same. But what they need is to slice and dice and segment the list. Explain some ways that you've seen e-commerce stores use Zapier to make a whole lot more money than they were previously.
TROY BROUSSARD: This is where you have to go deep into what systems you use. So a lot of it depends on what data you can get at with e-commerce store and how you do it. But again, there's lots of hacks around it with email notifications, and things like that you can do as well. But you can look at abandoned cart sequences that you may be able to trigger. You can look at things that people have visited or bought, and then use Zapier to throw them into a Facebook custom audience to re target them based on their buying preferences, for example.
So if they're in the electronics section and you can grab that detail and use that to not just add them to a generic come back to our site kind of bullshit retargeting which most people do, but actually get hyper, hyper focused. And put them into a separate segment of retargeting that's specifically around the products and preferences that they bought. Stuff like that can be very, very powerful with e-commerce. And there's a lot that you can do with Zapier with that. And sometimes it's not necessarily about the automation, but it's about the semi automation.
And what I mean by that is let's just hypothetically say that, because Facebook's changing their, stuff all the time so let's just say hypothetically that there's no way to add them in real time into your Facebook retargeting. Well, you can always use Zapier to build a CSV file, write a little text delimited file that you upload or have an assistant once a week go through and upload all of that into your retargeting campaigns.
So there's lots of ways to do it. Even if you know you can't do something real time, you can still do it in batch mode, or process it like that. But segmentation is really the key with e-commerce. And e-commerce is not really my specialty, but a segmentation is. So being able to identify different segments of buyers. One of the ways that you could do this, and actually Perry Marshall does a lot with this, is using RFM with Facebook.
BEN SETTLE: And RFM is how recently someone bought, how frequently they buy and how much they spent basically.
TROY BROUSSARD: Absolutely. It's just a simple metric from one day Five. So the lowest possible RFM score would be 1, 1, 1. The highest possible RFM score would be a 5, 5, 5. So I can look at a score like a 3, 1, 5. And I can say this person has bought, and like, between 90 days and six months ago, they've only ever purchased one thing from me, but it was expensive as hell, they bought my top end system. And I can just look at that from a 3, 1, 5 score. And understand exactly that person's buying tendencies in history, just from that one, three digit number. It's very, very powerful.
But let's say that your email platform and your shopping cart platform don't have RFM. Well, you could log every sale to a spreadsheet in Google Sheets as it comes in real time, and have that spreadsheet calculate their RFM. Now remember how I said that you can use your Google Sheet to then trigger automation as well. You could have it calculating the RFM. And then let's say their monetary value increases from a three to a four, when that four gets written in the field that could trigger and kick off an automation that could trigger an automated postcard, direct mail follow up. It's just endless, where you can go with this. It really, truly is endless.
Now, you wouldn't want to send a postcard campaign direct mail campaign to every person on your list because it's expensive as hell. But after they've spent a certain amount of money, and you know that they have an M value of four on your RFM score, then they've invested a lot with you, it's worth spending $20 on a direct mail campaign for this client to see if you can get them to spend a few thousand more. So that would be kind of an example Ben, of how you could literally create your own RFM system using Google Sheets. Even if you don't have it built into your platform. And honestly, RFM is one of the most powerful ways that e-commerce can expand if they're using it smartly.
BEN SETTLE: I remember you talking about how you once to triple the size of an e-commerce business, a client of yours.
TROY BROUSSARD: Oh, yeah.
BEN SETTLE: Is that how you did it?
TROY BROUSSARD: A lot of it was segmentation. A lot of it was segmentation based and just follow up to be quite honest. Most email commerce stores and... Like, we joke all the time, Ben, because we go to masterminds together and shit, and you don't really have anything to say, because the only thing you ever say is just "Email your damn list. Do it again. Keep doing it. See what happens." Well, with e-commerce, typically, e-commerce companies are absolutely atrocious at emailing, and they just don't email. And so that's kind of the scenario that was going on here. I helped him with emailing and I helped him with segmentation. And we use Zapier to kind of create some of those segments and help him do that, and then send out more emails. So the combination of the two was huge.
BEN SETTLE: So bottom line with Zapier is, no matter what kind of business you're doing online, Zapier, let's you play with it, like a mad scientist, all these different variables and factors and all these different things you can do and it's just an endless, bottomless hole of all the stuff that you can do with it to make sales.
TROY BROUSSARD: Yeah I like to say, really simply train the monkey, don't be the monkey. And so, if there's something that you can automate, just train the Zapier monkey to automate it for you. Quit being the monkey and doing it manually yourself. I mean, that to me is just stupidity. Now, first of all, you want to eliminate busy work in the first place. So if what you're doing makes no sense to be done, get rid of it entirely. But if it needs to be there, and it has to get done, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to do it. And if you can automate it, look to automate it. So train the monkey. Don't be the monkey.
BEN SETTLE: Well, here's my last question for you. Who and what is a “Moshe” and what have you guys been cooking up behind the scenes with Zapier?
TROY BROUSSARD: Yeah. Moshe and I have a long history together. Moshe has been a long term protege of mine, a client in many of my coaching endeavors and someone that I have worked with for years. And as I worked with him and uncovered his genius, he became my top protege. I mean, he's somebody that followed everything I taught with my marketing automation and my segmentation teachings, and everything I teach about in subtle selling and automation and automation magic stuff. Moshe just absorbed it like a sponge. He's one of those technical savant that can hear and learn from one scenario, extrapolate it, and then solve a whole bunch of other things. He's just a savant that way, he really is.
And so Moshe, through that process of working with me over the years, and through the fact that he was so good with automation and Zapier, he started just going deeper and deeper. And every time he would, I would challenge him with something new. And see, he has no programming background. This is what is really interesting. I really want people to get this. Moshe has no programming background. I'm a programmer. I'm a software developer, I think like a machine because I've done it for 27 frigging years at this point or more. Shit, I've done it since I was 12. That's 38 frigging years. So I mean, I've been programming my entire adult life. So I have this mindset of programming. Moshe doesn't he's not a programmer.
And so if anything that should be very, very encouraging to people to what you can do. You don't have to be a tech programmer to master Zapier. But I've taken kind of a programming mindset and kind of brainwashed in a positive way and whitewashed over Moshe's way of doing things with my programming mindset. And so now he's kind of developed programming type techniques with what he does in Zapier. And it's just really cool, because it's a perfect case of the student surpassing the master. At this point, he's far more proficient with it than I am. Even though a lot of kind of the automation background and stuff came through working with me over the years, he's just taken it to a whole another level and hyper specialized, which, in and of itself is a powerful marketing lesson.
I mean, we talk about that all the time, Ben, about specializing in one specific thing, and that's what Moshe has done. So he's taken this big concept of marketing automation and segmentation. And he's hyper specifically focused at around Zapier. And gone really, really deep in and what things that he can do inside of Zapier. So I joke with people and they say, "How did you do that?" And I'm like, "I got a Moshe for that." So I encourage people to find their own Moshe. And that's why he and I teamed up to create this Zapier boot camp live training. Because it's the perfect synergy of strategy from my side and the technical savant from his side unifying into a live training environment where you don't just get a curriculum, but you get live interaction and have that ability to go back and forth and bounce some of your stuff off.
Because here's the thing. Zapier is not a system. Zapier is a framework. And you have to understand how to apply the framework to the tools that you have. There's going to be different pieces on the puzzle board that you need to mix together. And you have to understand the framework, the structure of how to manipulate and build the puzzle. It's not, this is the same puzzle you're going to solve every time that never works. With Zapier, every solution is going to be unique. And so it's really about the mindset and the approach to solving. And that's really what we teach in this training is how to develop that mindset so that you can start small, peel the onion one layer at a time, focus on the tools that you're really needing and understand the methodology and the framework of how to build Zap so that you can apply that into ever more sophisticated and robust solutions over time.
And that wraps up part 4 of the interview.
Plus, if you buy Troy & Moshe's live Zapier (with the recordings) training from my link below by tonight’s deadline, you also get:
“elBenbo’s Copy-Soaked Brain”
This was an unadvertised bonus I did for our $399/month coaching program in Learnistic.
The tl;dr of it is this:
Part of my copywriting process is, I read my sales letters out loud 10x's before running it. This audio is the 4th of 10 readings of the elBenbo Press sales letter — with all the edits, bumps, and ideas being worked out and arranged at that stage, and with all the psychology & insights going through my brain as I think about, work on, and write/edit my own sales copy.
The deadline to get all this is tight.
You got til tonight, Sunday, 11/8 at midnight EST.
Details at this link:
https://www.EmailPlayers.com/zapier
Ben Settle