#12 Mastering Facebook Ads & Retargeting: The Secret to Success for Boutique Retail, with Reza...

Get ready for episode number 12 with Rezaq Jabi, Co Founder at Shoelace Technologies. And if you love analytics and you're wondering all about Facebook ads and retargeting, you better sharpen your pencil.

Now.

Let's talk about your business strategy and the juicy details of what actually works from mainstream fashion to fashion on Main street and the entire ecosystem behind it. How do we scale your company and do it with the balance and the happiness that we all seek? Let's hear from from those insiders, experts and strategists that actually make it happen. I'm your host Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat. Hey guys, I'm about to keep this week's intro real short because the content you're about to hear is jam packed with value. It's like having your own mini Facebook ads training right inside of this podcast. In case you have not yet met Reza, he spoke at the 2017 Boutique Summit in Dallas and he's the co founder at Shoelace, the Shopify app that automates retargeting journeys for ecommerce stores. And we're so thrilled to have Shoelace back at the 2018 Boutique Summit as a key partner of our event. So get ready to meet Reza in person again and ask him all of your questions. This week we're not only digging into retargeting ads and pixels, but also your basic customer journeys with paid traffic. And if you'd like a visual to go along with this week's show and you're a member at the Boutique Hub, make sure you visit our training library and watch the April training video on Facebook. Ad Sales Funnels this is going to walk you through the basic three part sales funnel covering new customer acquisition, sales conversion and retargeting. Plus it has plug and play examples for you to use. Plug and play right into your own business. So trust me, if you've been overwhelmed by Facebook ads before and you simply wanted to outsource, that's okay. But I'm telling you, I know that you can do this. I've seen hundreds of boutiques learn to do it on their own and Shoelace makes it so simple. Now with the basic understanding plus using an app like Shoelace, you can drive some pretty significant traffic. Alright guys, let's get started. This week if you are listening, don't forget Shoelace is a member at the Boutique Hub and has a special special rate just for you. If you want to try out their service, go find them now in the Service Providers directory on the boutiquehub.com and then you got that pencil ready. It's gonna be fun. Let's get started and talk all about Facebook ads. All right. Hey, guys, welcome back to the podcast. This week, I am so excited. We are gonna be answering some of your most asked questions from boutique owners, all about Facebook ads and. But we're also going to be talking about what it's like to create a startup to solve a big issue that so many people are facing today. So I am grateful to be joined by Reza Kajabi, the CEO of Shoelace, an app that automates retargeting journeys for e commerce stores. And for those of you who've been to the Boutique Summit before, you've already had the chance to meet Reza. So, Reza, welcome to the podcast.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to chat with you today.

Yeah. So for those of you who have not been to the Boutique Summit and didn't have an opportunity to meet Reza last year, Reza, I'd love to hear more just about how you kind of got started in this journey, creating Shoelace and solving this issue for retailers.

So our story begins. We're three co founders of Shoelace. At this point, Our team is 21 people, so we've grown quite a bit. But the way that we got started was the three of us were working together at a startup in Toronto, and we just felt like we would make a really great team. We knew that most companies fail not because the idea isn't good or anything like that. Mostly companies fail because the team isn't right or the founders don't work well together. So we just felt that our starting point of being a really great team was the right ingredients to start a company together. And we were just determined to build something together. And so about three years ago, we quit our jobs together to start a company. And at the time, we didn't know what we were going to do. We didn't have a specific idea for a problem that we wanted to solve. Just that the three of us wanted to work together and build something. Which sounds a little bit crazy, but. But we believed in each other so much as a team that we were confident to take the plunge. And so while we didn't have a specific idea, there was. There was a theme that we were very interested in. The theme was like, you know, you look at most software products today, and the way that you get value out of the software is you have to, you know, have a strategy in mind. You have to learn how to use the software tool. You have to log into the software tool, do things, and then, and then through that process, you then extract some value from using the app or the software. And we felt like, you know, if you fast forward way into the future, maybe 10, 15 years from today, surely at some point software will become intelligent enough to just create value for people without them having to do anything or learn anything. And so while we didn't have a specific idea, that was the nature of the kinds of problems that we wanted to work on. Something that allowed the software to be intelligent, to just basically do things for people without them having to do any work themselves. And, you know, we looked at a few different problems and talked to a lot of different customers about various places that we could start attacking this problem. The way we think about it today is actually much bigger than, you know, retargeting or Facebook ads or the vision of the company we like to talk about is the idea to make expertise accessible at scale. And so how do we take human expertise and turn it into software so that everybody can get access to expertise? And our view is that it's probably impossible to automate all expertise for all businesses, but that the right approach towards this bigger journey that we want to go on is to, is to try to automate some expertise for some businesses. And for us, the some expertise, we've decided for it to be retargeting. So this very specific, you know, advertising strategy that targets people who have left your website without completing a purchase and encourages them to come back and either complete their purchase or buy from you again if they've already bought. And that is the one very specific type of expertise that we're focused on. And then for who we're trying to automate it for is very specifically for online store owners and e commerce merchants. And so while there are a number of businesses that could probably use retargeting, and many of them do, we felt that in order to truly automate something, we need to be very specific and targeted for who we want to do it for. And so that's how we've kind of started off on this journey to automate retargeting expertise for e commerce merchants. I think at some point the scope of our offering is going to be much bigger than that, but that's going to be a long time away. I think that we still have a lot of work to do just to take, we think about our next couple of year roadmap is like, just imagine what it's like if you hired the world's best retargeting expert. And what would that experience be like through software? And that's effectively our roadmap that first we're trying to understand, like what it means to be the world's best retargeting expert through research and experiments and then trying to take that expertise and turn it into software so that, you know, if we can, if we can establish one expertise and then each of our clients can just get access to this expertise, we think that it's a more efficient approach than each individual store owner trying to become the world's best retargeting expert. And what starts to become pretty cool is as we work with thousands of different businesses at this point, we have several thousand online stores that use Shoelace. The, the more of these campaigns that we run, the more retargeting that we automate for various merchants, the more we take those learnings and bake it right back into the product. So that when a new person signs up to use Shoelace, they're kind of tapping into the collective expertise that we've learned over spending millions of dollars on retargeting ads for merchants that are just like them. So that's kind of the gist of our story.

That's pretty cool. How did you, I mean, you're in Canada. How did you first get hooked up with Shopify? Because this is a Shopify app. And why Facebook? Over getting started on Google or any other type of retargeting.

So in the beginning, our approach to getting some customers to listen to us was just like, you know, we would randomly pick a few businesses and send them out, try to like find the owner and send them an email to say, hey, we're a bunch of founders and we're working on something. Would you be willing to share your advice? And in the early, like, class of businesses that we were, that we were trying to approach, they weren't actually online store. One of the people we reached out to was like a person that had a maid service online. And that person who agreed to say, yeah, I'm happy to, to kind of be your guinea pig and try some of this for my business, he also said, well, I also run this online shop as well, aside from this maid service that I have, and could we try this on that one as well? And we just realized that like, you know, retargeting for online stores is just such a no brainer because we can track the success of the campaign based on how many sales it's brought. And it's just, it's such a better fit than any other business. And that is how we kind of accidentally stumbled into E commerce as saying like that is a good, that is a good vertical to start with. And when you look at E commerce, I think it's just so clear that Shopify is such an important player in the space and I think their growth has been pretty phenomenal. And they're a Canadian company, we're a Canadian company, so maybe that's something to do with it. But I think Canadian aside, Shopify is a world class company. And I think when you're want to get started in E commerce, whether it's to start an online store or whether it's to build software for online store owners, I think Shopify has built such an incredible ecosystem to bring that together that for us it was just kind of an obvious first start. Obviously at some point we think about our offering as being useful to business owners who are not necessarily just on Shopify and we'll get there eventually. But I think from a starting point perspective, it's been wonderful. And then to your question about Facebook, I think it was also. I think there's a couple of ways that we looked at it. One was just like the ad creatives on Facebook and Instagram we just felt looked nicer than any other ad network available. And so we felt like it was a good place to start just because of some of the creative work that we wanted to do on the campaigns. And also when you think about advertising for online merchants, I think Google has been wonderful for search and it's obviously a super powerful ad network. But in the case of merchants who don't necessarily have their customers looking for their products and they want to try to find a way to just get in front of those people based on what their interests are and what like a lookalike audience of merchants that are like them, Facebook is a really cool platform to allow for that kind of behavior. And so when we kind of, when we looked at the ecosystem of E commerce, we felt like Facebook and Instagram were such an important ad network for most of the customers that we spoke to. And so it felt like a good start to start off with those platforms, but very similar to the E commerce platform that were available on Facebook. And Instagram has been just the start. I think when we. Part of what makes Shoelace useful is when, you know, a customer leaves a website, they kind of go through a journey of ad experiences as opposed to seeing the same ad over and over again. And you know, part of what we're trying to create is make that journey happen across the web, not just happen on Facebook and Instagram. And so we'll be adding support for Google and Pinterest and other ad networks as well. But I think it's like, you know, in any business, if you try to like boil the ocean on day one, like you're just not going to get anywhere. And so for us it was very important if we wanted to say that we don't want to build like an easier to use Facebook, we don't want to build a self serve tool that people still have to like do things. And if we want to try to automate every single decision on behalf of our customers, then the more things that we try to offer, the more decisions that we, that we'll have to try to automate and the more difficult it will be to provide something great for people. And so we felt that by adding constraints it allowed us to do really well at certain things as opposed to saying, you know, we could have been trying to do something like we'll automate all of your advertising on Facebook and Google and everywhere else. And it's just like then we try to do too much and it doesn't turn out to be really great. But if we say very specifically for e commerce stores of this certain size who are on this platform, who are going to retarget on Facebook and Instagram, we want to be the absolute best in the world within these constraints. And then when we achieve that, then you start to expand as opposed to like, you know, trying to take on too many things at once and kind of when, if, if and well, when you fail in that approach, you're not really sure where you went wrong because there's so many things that you tried to juggle. And so we've always been trying to be mindful about not juggling too many things at the same time. So that was kind of the, the reason for why go, you know, specifically Facebook. It almost had more to do with starting off with a more narrow focus than, than anything specific about like Facebook over Google, for example.

Yeah, you know, it's kind of the same thing when we talk about marketing with our boutique owners. Often when you target everyone, you reach no one. Same kind of approach the focus and go from there. For someone listening who's not familiar, not used Shoelace yet. Can you give me your most simplified, in a nutshell version of specifically when you log in to the app, when you connect the app and shopify what your users can expect from that experience, what you offer right now?

Sure, yeah. So I think the biggest thing I usually talk about is the fact that our app doesn't have any buttons that say something like create a campaign or like upload your audience or anything like that. When you sign up to Shoelace, I would, I would say think of it as like hiring the world's best retargeting expert to manage all of your retargeting ads from end to end. And so the experience is you install Shoelace connected to your Shopify store, connected to your Facebook ad account, and connected to a bunch of other marketing apps that you use that. We use those integrations to make our ads a lot more powerful. So we, we have integrations, for example, with all of the major product review apps that we can use to pull five star reviews and use that content inside of the ad creatives. We have integrations with, for example, apps like mailchimp to take your emails and turn them into retargeting ads. And so connecting Shoelace to a bunch of your different tools like your Shopify, your Facebook and a bunch of your marketing apps is like the way to get set up. And then after that, basically you just wait until your, your audience reaches a minimum threshold to receive your first campaign. And if you connect us to your own ad account using your own Facebook pixel, we can use that historical audience. It doesn't have to build from scratch. The moment you connect to Shoelace, and then when that audience reaches the size, when it's ready to receive the first campaign, then it's again, exactly like a human expert would do it. You would receive a text message or email from Shoelace with a retargeting campaign fully created with the ad budget set with the audience targeting set with the ad creative, and copy everything made for you. And what you receive over email is a proposal to preview that campaign. And so it's almost like, you know, if you imagine you hire someone to go do some work and then they'll bring it on your desk and say, what do you think about this? Is, is this good? And you basically just sign off on it and push the button to say, approve that. Yep, this is good. Let's go live. Or maybe make a couple of small edits to it. If you want to revise the wording a little bit to make it sound a little bit more like your brand voice or adjust the budget a little bit. Like, we'll be very specific about what budget we think makes sense, but we'll also set some parameters of being able to go a little bit higher or lower based on your preference. And so making a couple of those edits, you push approve and then the campaign goes live and, and then over the next few months, as our system looks at how the campaign has been performing, you'll receive updates every couple of weeks to say, we noticed that this placement on Facebook wasn't doing so well, so we turn it off. Or this ad wasn't doing so well, so we turn it off and let's replace it with this one. And so you'll receive those kind of like proactive messages to continue to make the ads go better. And the way the actual campaigns look are if the way to think about Shoelace is that we try to recommend strategies that make sense given your audience size. And so we think that if you have a seven day, seven days worth of visitors on your website of let's say 1,000 people compared to if in seven days you have something like 100,000 people come to your website, that has a big impact on what your, the complexity of your retargeting strategy. And so we take that into account and, and send a campaign suggestion based on that. And so if somebody has, for example, 100,000 visitors over their, over a seven day period, we start to make the segments of the audience a lot more granular to say let's isolate people that add it to cart. Let's isolate people that view the product, let's isolate people that left off of the homepage, and let's have a different ad experience for each of these people based on where they left in the funnel. Whereas, you know, if your audience is a little bit smaller in that like 1000 size over a seven day period, then it doesn't make sense to introduce that kind of complexity to the retargeting campaign because if you do, then each of those audiences are going to be so small and they won't really get any delivery in Facebook. And so part of the kind of promise of Shoelace is that as you go and like work on your business and drive more traffic and grow, as that happens, you won't have to worry about like, you know, hey, I've, I've increased my traffic by quite a bit over the last few months. I should probably be making some changes to my retargeting ads. Wouldn't have to worry about that because we monitor those changes and send proactively a message that, hey, looks like your audience size has grown. Let's add a couple of more stages to the, to the retargeting campaigns to accommodate for this flexibility. So it's kind of just like trying to deliver peace of mind around the question of what should I do about my Retargeting campaigns over the course of the many years that I run my business and that the idea is that Shoelace will answer that question, propose the right strategy, and then execute the strategy as well. And that's kind of the product experience. And I think one of the things that I know that a lot of our customers enjoy most about Shoelace is that we're kind of just getting started. We create a lot of value for a lot of people. But every day our team is thinking about what are some of the assumptions we had about retargeting expertise last year that are no longer true this year. And things change so fast that it's not just about, you know, we have this one thing and then we automate it, and then we sell that product for the next 10 years and our industry changes so fast and something that was a good thing to do eight months ago may no longer be the same thing. And so that's another benefit of using Shoelace is that we're always like, living at that, at the bleeding edge of, you know, what, where the industry is going or what is happening with retargeting and then bringing that back into our. Into our product so that people don't have to worry about, you know, am I. We've heard that Instagram stories are about to become a thing that you can use like carousel ads instead of an Instagram story, like, should I be using that in my retargeting campaign or not? For example, like those types of questions that occur when new things come up are things that we're always on the lookout for and incorporating it into the product and introducing it to all of our customers.

Yeah, that's so smart. Because the average e commerce store owner or boutique owner, if they have brick and mortar as well, they're wearing so many hats and juggling so many things. So to take that off their plate is super helpful. Can you talk about conversion rates? And just like the uplift in conversions that happen when you use that type of retargeting, are there some industry stats that you can share that you think these types of retargeting ads help convert for these customers?

We're going to have a lot more data to share around this sort of thing very soon. We're conducting a bunch of. A bunch of research to have pretty data driven answers to some of these questions. So I don't have, I don't have a lot of our own research to share, which is what I would be most comfortable with. But I will share those reports with you soon so you can Share it with your community as well. One of the things we've noticed is, as we've worked with so many merchants, there's just a lot of benchmarks that we can learn and understand that we can put out to be helpful to the ecosystem. And we're working on that soon. But some of the things that we've read and seen is, you know, on average, the difference between doing retargeting and not doing retargeting typically results in something like a 12% sales lift in the sense of, you know, adding more sales given a certain audience size. So another stat that I'm sure most boutique owners would see if they shop and if they log into their Google Analytics or to their Shopify store is something like 98% of traffic will leave without buying anything. And so that's a whole lot of people that are coming to the website and are leaving without buying anything. And, you know, when you look at that as just like numbers on a screen, it's like, why is this happening? Why are so many people leaving without buying anything? But if you think about those people behind the data points on the screens as being like real humans. Well, you know, not everyone's going to visit a website or visit an online store with their credit card in their hand, just like ready to purchase on the spot after, after discovering your brand for the very first time. It takes some time to be, you know, to build some trust with people. I think there's another stat that says, like, on average, a prospect needs something like nine or ten various touch points with a brand until they're comfortable to buy. And so, you know, that's why things like email marketing start to become really effective, where somebody might sign up for your newsletter and then receive a few emails and then get confident enough to buy from, from your brand. But if you look at that stat of 98% of people leaving without buying anything, and that what that conversion rate usually looks like is if you take, let's say you have a brand that has 2,000 visitors on their store and that their conversion rate is only 0.5%. So that basically means that let's say out of 2,000 visitors, only 10 people buy. If the average order value of those 10 people is about $100, then those 2,000 visitors are going to result in about $1,000 in sales. But if you find a way to increase those conversion rates and say, you know, we still have those same 2,000 people, but instead of 0.5% conversion rate, what if we can get a 1.5 conversion rate which basically means instead of 10 people buying from the 2,000 visitors, what if 30 people bought from those 2,000 visitors? That's like a huge difference, where in the first case would be $1,000 in sales, and in the second case would be a $3,000 difference in sales. So the idea is that if you can convert more of your existing traffic to become sales, and through that process increase your conversion rate, that can have a really, really big impact on your total sales. And so you think about retargeting. It is one of the most powerful ways to do that. Where you know most people will come to your website not left an email address, you don't have any other way to get in touch with them. But retargeting allows you to reach those prospects on social media and other places throughout the web so you can get in front of them again. And our approach to retargeting, and we're running a lot of tests to kind of understand the difference between our approach to retargeting and what regularly people do, is that we say that instead of showing somebody the same ad over and over again, you should take them through a sequence of ad experiences and show them a variety of ad content that talks about your brand story, that builds trust with the consumer. Maybe it shows product reviews of things that other people have bought. Maybe it shows a blog post or something like that that you've written. And through that process of exposing the prospect to a variety of different touch points about your brand, that you build that kind of relationship to bring them to a point where they're ready to buy. And I think that's just retargeting for the purpose of converting visitors that haven't bought from your store to encourage them to buy. But what about people that have bought from you before? I think a lot of people just take the audience list of past purchasers and just exclude them from the retargeting ads, which is the right thing to do because you don't want to annoy those people with the same ads. But in the same way that you get in touch with past purchasers through email and you drive repeat purchase with those same people, retargeting is an important tool to use for that as well. So you have, for example, a new collection that that comes out, or you have a new sale or something like that, and you send an email to your past purchaser list, you know that not everybody on that email list is going to open, for example. And so another way to get in front of those people is to do a retargeting campaign that targets those past buyers specifically to encourage repeat purchase. So if you look at, you know, the different stages of the funnel, which starts at somebody visits your homepage, then they look at a collection, then they might look at a product, then they might add to cart, and then they might buy, and then they might buy again. You look at through that, like whole customer journey. Funnel retargeting can play a big role in improving, improving the conversion rates at each stage. And one of the things that we like to tell people a lot is depending on which stage of the funnel you're trying to improve, the measurement of success isn't always sales. You know, some boutiques may not have the budget to spend towards this sort of thing, and that's fine. But the bigger you get, the more, and the more you understand, like the lifetime value of a customer, the more you understand, like, how much you're able to spend to acquire a customer. And then it's like if you can target people who left off of the homepage, for example, people who didn't even look at a product while they were on your site, you know, retargeting to that group of people with the idea of immediately converting them to the sale is potentially the wrong way to look at it. Whereas, you know, what you may want this group to do is to come back and then just look at one product, just move to the next stage of the funnel that they left the homepage without looking at any products. And that's, that's the thing that you would like them to do as, as a next step. And so if you have a retargeting campaign that targets those people with a carousel of products, and then a percentage of them come back and check out a couple of products, that is a successful outcome of that campaign. Even if none of them bought, for example, you know, obviously when you look at the entire retargeting campaign of the whole funnel, the math should work out in a way that's profitable. But when you isolate each of these various segments, what success looks like should be different. And so, you know, we think that there's just so much that goes into retargeting. And what we're trying to do is first, like, understand all of these different pieces ourselves continuously, because they change a lot. And then say, how can we bake this into a product experience so that people don't have to worry about, you know, what should my retargeting strategy be for people who left at the very top of my funnel who didn't even look at a product like what should I be doing with that group and how do I measure the success? We're trying to answer those questions and, and put them into the product experience. But so yeah, sorry for the long winded answer, but to your question about conversion rates, I think it is very important to think about which stage of the funnel is trying to be optimized and then kind of measure success that way.

It's such a good answer. I want to actually stay on this topic for just a minute. A couple key points that I wrote down while you were talking. First is if there's someone listening who is feeling overwhelmed by some of those stats in terms of conversion rates and understanding. If I have a 2% conversion rate, so 98% of people come to my site and they bounce off, what does that look like if my sales goals for the year are half a million or a million dollars? The stats that you were giving for those people who are listening, I want you to know that our March training bundle inside of the training library on the boutiquehub.com for our members is all about this very topic. So we break down all those numbers and help you understand what those conversion rates need to be so that you can then go and create a traffic plan and understand, okay, this is the new traffic that I need to drive. Cold traffic every month. This is the warm traffic I need to convert. Here's how I can increase my average order value so that I can then meet whatever those sales goals are. Because I think sometimes there's so many boutique owners and E commerce store owners that have this big number goal at the end of the day and the end of the year, but they don't then have the data and the traffic plan worked backwards in order to lay it all out and make it happen. So first thing I just want people to know that's available. Second thing I want to talk about as you illustrated each part of the funnel and you gave some really good examples, I just want to break it down one step further and have you even reiterate them one more time. Let's talk about the funnel in terms of three stages. First, new customer acquisition, second, conversion of warm customers, and then third, retargeting, which we've this entire conversation has been about retargeting. But in each of those three stages, if you can give like just one or two key highlights, what should people be looking for in terms of types of ads and the types of ad outcomes? Like you said, it's not always conversion, but it's warming people up to your brand. So in Each of those three stages, what are some key metrics you think people should look for?

Sure. So at the very top, the idea of driving high quality traffic to your site, that's such an important topic, and it's kind of the engine that makes everything else work. Because if you drive the wrong traffic to the site, then even your retargeting campaigns or anything else is just not going to be that great. Because if it's not the right audience coming to your store, then spending lots of money trying to retarget to that audience becomes a waste of effort. And so, yeah, I think starting off there is a very important place to think about. I don't know if your podcast has show notes, but there's a blog post that I've written about lookalike audience ads, and if you do, you maybe can include it in the show notes because it's a topic where. So the basic premise of lookalike audience is a very powerful thing offered by Facebook. This isn't a thing that Shoelace offers, but is not incredibly difficult to do. And the blog post I've written lays it all out. And the idea is you take the list of your existing customers. Let's say you have several thousand people that have bought from your store before, and Facebook, through their lookalike audience option, allows you to upload this list of past customers and through their magic algorithms. And it's not so magic. It's mostly just based on a ton of data that they have across all of their users. They try to find people that look like your past, your past customers. And there's additional settings that are, you know, so it's great to upload people that have bought from you so that the lookalike audience is based on your existing customers. And then there's a couple of settings inside of the Facebook ads that, that you choose to say. I want Facebook to optimize for conversions, and very specifically, I want Facebook to optimize for purchases. And so, you know, based on what Facebook knows of its past website behavior of their users, it will try to show your ad campaign to people who are most likely to buy. And so, you know, there's a lot of complexity that can be added on top of these kinds of lookalike audience ads. But that is the basic, you know, foundation of it. And I highly recommend the blog post I've written on the topic. And it's a great way to drive really high quality traffic to the store. But, you know, that's just one channel, I'm sure Ashley. And a lot of the content that you talk about to boutique owners, you probably talk a lot about how people can drive great traffic, not necessarily through ads. And I think that's a very important part of new user acquisition too. But I'll stick to what I know best and talk about that, the way to acquire this through Facebook ads. And then so the next phase you talked about was to kind of convert those leads. And I think one of the interesting things about this style of advertising on Facebook, you do want that initial cold traffic to result in some sales. So the success metric of those campaigns, from a lot of what we've seen, that type of ad campaign targeting cold traffic based on lookalikes, based on a conversion objective of purchase, it does result in sales. If, you know, if you have a product that has a fit in the market and there are people who want to buy this product, and you find a way to get in front of the right people, even that cold traffic will convert. See it all the time. It's just what percentage of them will convert and then how much more of that traffic can you convert later on? And so you do want to see some success with that initial cold traffic. I think some of the ranges we've seen, and there's so many parts that go into this, probably need so much more time to, like, dissect each of those parts. But it's like, you know, this kind of a lookalike audience strategy. One of the things that has a huge impact on the overall success is like, what is the average order value of a store? If the average order value of a store is like $15, for example, or $20, it might be very difficult to have any positive return on ad spend on this, like, targeting of cold traffic because it's expensive to target people. And when they do buy, if the value of that purchase isn't really high, it becomes hard to make the math work. But if, you know, average, a nice average order value is like, you know, anything over $60 and maybe in the kind of 100, 150 range, that's like a wonderful average order value. And so given that kind of average order value range, you know, I've seen people get one to three times return on ad spend just on this cold traffic, which is pretty wonderful. I would attribute a lot of this to Facebook's powerful data network of being able to isolate the right people for your product. And so that is probably what you want to see if you run such a campaign, such a, you know, cold traffic targeting campaign. You do want to see some sales with it to Ensure that you know you're reaching the right people. So I'd say anywhere from like one to three times return on ad spend is probably a great place to see yourself. Sorry I went so long on this one. And the second one we're not at. Are we at retargeting yet or.

Second one is converting warm traffic. So conversion of existing customers, right?

Yeah. So I think for converting of existing customers to have them kind of repeat purchase. Is that the idea?

Yes.

Yeah. So I think like there's a few ways that I've heard some people do some really cool things on this is like you know, having a, I think a community on Facebook of just your buyers and sharing exclusive deals like stuff like that. I think you talk about this sort of strategy as well, Ashley. I think I've heard and I think that's really cool. I think what, what seems to work really well is email marketing for this channel is really big. So you know, constant new email campaigns about like new products that have been added or sales or discounts or exclusive offers to, to existing members. I think is, is, is a good, good way to start. But also like, I think if again, I think most people in this like digital age that we live in forget that on the other side of the computer, like these are real people. And so I think there's a lot to be said about building real relationships with some of these customers and even with things that are like, you know, in the types of packaging to use in the orders that get sent or like some kind of a thank you card or some way to establish that as a boutique owner you are a human and you're not just like, you know, a company trying to sell goods. And I think that is one of the ways to differentiate against really big companies like Amazon or other retailers that, that people are going to go to for speed and cost and stuff like that. And I think what is the unique differentiator of your store? And even though that's not like, you know, a quick tactic of a thing that can be done, I think it's a more longer term strategy to try to build towards like what is, what do you want the new customer's experience to be like from the moment they make a purchase to the touch points that you have with them. And I think building that relationship of a pleasant experience is probably the foundation upon which any marketing tactic is going to have an effect on encouraging repeat purchase from existing customers. So I think it's like, you know, think about a time where you ordered something from somewhere online and you Just had a great experience. How likely are you to recommend that place to a friend or how likely are you to shop from there? Again, I think that is probably the single most important thing for driving repeat purchase with existing customers. Just treat people great, treat people nicely, treat customers with respect and, and try to make their ordering experience from you enjoyable and then they'll remember you. And then the next time they see something that you, that they like, that you're offering or a sale that they have, they might get triggered to buy because of the email that they saw or the ad that they saw. But the foundation of that experience is what they feel about you and if they like you as a brand or not. And I think thinking about your overall brand strategy beyond just, you know, what tactics, what hacks can I use, what kind of ads can I show and this sort of thing, I think those are all wonderful. And if you, if you, if you add those things on top of a foundation that is based on just like caring about your customers, I think it'll work well. And don't know if that's the, that's the kind of growth hacky answer that some people might have been looking for, but I believe that it's extremely important. And ultimately that is the sort of foundation that great businesses can be built on. And not so much quick hacks or anything like that.

You know what's really unique about that answer? The way I see E commerce boutiques and then all of these other types of E commerce, say T shirt shops or all these other things that are happening on Shopify, it's like they come from two different worlds. And what I want the listeners to get out of this is I want them to see how to marry both worlds. Because the world is all about customer experience and treating that customer as a real person and relating as the boutique owner, being authentic and showing that you're a real person. But the downfall to that is I see so many boutique owners trying to do it all organically and they're just cutting their teeth trying to make these sales and drive these conversions. They don't understand that there's this whole world of data that if they would just plug into this world of data and driving traffic through paid ads, they could have that cash flow that they're looking for. And that's the other world of Shopify that I want to talk about. All of these we'll say T shirt stores or I'll give you an example. This January we were at a big apparel market and ran into this woman who has a shopify store selling denim that would be really familiar in the biker space, like denim with like blingy pockets, that sort of thing, and then skull and crossbones T shirts. So not like a boutique as the boutique hub would define it, but more like a specialty product. And she's really nailed her niche customer and her strategy is, you know, she's got this e commerce store, she drives cold traffic and just works Facebook ads all day long and you know, is a multi, multi million dollar business using that data and paid traffic. So how can a boutique owner listening really hone in on this and marry the two worlds of both customer experience and data and paid traffic? Do you think there's certain techniques that shoelace helps like in your ad creation, in your copy, in your imagery? What can boutique owners take away to help them understand how to marry those two pieces of the business together?

Yeah, so I think it's a really great observation the kind of two different worlds and, and some of the pros and cons of each. I think the, let's call it the kind of the Internet marketer style, maybe drop shipping type of online store that has kind of mastered the data part that you were talking about, has mastered the paid ads part. And in some cases I've seen a lot of those shops also offer great customer experiences, but in many cases they don't really care for example about that other side and, and the customer experience isn't pleasant. It's not as authentic as you might see in some more like established brands. And I think the idea of marrying what's great from each side together is like, it is such a powerful combo. And I think it, I think the first step is, is for brands that are on the kind of boutique side that are less acquainted with this kind of paid ad side and the ability to scale through this kind of channel. I think the first starting point is to just get a glimpse into that world. And I think that, you know, you do a great job trying to showcase that part of the ecosystem to, to the boutique owners. And I think the, the, I think the first starting point is to just understand and learn. Like what are some people doing online that you should just like know and be aware about. And I think it's kind of mind boggling that some of the, some of the online shops that, you know, even the site experiences don't look that great, that the designs aren't wonderful, the product images aren't great and those stores could be doing really, really, really well because they've mastered some of the kind of paid ad Strategies which I think if anyone learns about what's going on there and does take the time to build a wonderful brand experience, to put really great imagery and wonderful photography and just like, care about their customers and their brand experience, the thing too that kind of becomes obvious is like, well, if a shop that doesn't do any of these things and doesn't do a lot of this, doesn't put as much care into their brand story, but is able to scale in this way, then that must mean that somebody who, who, who does put the time and attention into building their brand and their brand experience, if they adopt some of the strategies that those other folks are doing, then more often than not they're also, they're going to be in an even better situation. Because I think it's, for example, if, if there are brands that through their organic work, through their communities, through their, like, grassroots efforts, have built a boutique that has, you know, thousands of sales per month and kind of hundreds of hundreds of orders coming in, that is a great starting point for really rich data to, you know, feed into Facebook, into some other places to scale a paid ad strategy on top of it. That I think it's a, I think it's a really great starting point. And so I think, to answer your question, I think it's just like stepping outside of the comfort zone a little bit to learn what some other people are doing, I think is a really great start. And I think the lesson for me always there is that I think what some of the shops that their kind of bottleneck is mostly around, like, everything needs to be perfect. My brand imagery needs to be perfect. I'm not going to do paid ads until xyz. Like, those kinds of excuses for, you know, when it's the right time to invest in some of these areas. I think getting over that hump is probably an important thing because it's kind of like any, anybody who wants to do something that they're not familiar with, it's like, it's uncomfortable. It's not a great experience. And you often find excuses to say, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to focus on more of this effort. And then when I get to XY random thing, I'm going to start thinking about what, what my paid ad strategy should be like. And I think if you find yourself uncomfortable and you think it's difficult to jump into stuff like paid advertising, I think that is probably a good signal that you should do it. I think any time that I've personally grown professionally or like, learn Anything valuable is when I stopped doing the thing that I was more comfortable doing and took on a challenge that was a bit more uncomfortable. And so, yes, I 100% agree with you that the two worlds can be married. I understand exactly what you're talking about. I think it's a great observation. And I believe that the combination of those two worlds, the authenticity of real boutiques, real brands that care about their customer, that care about their brand, mixed with the digital marketing savviness of some of the kind of online Internet marketer type of shops, the combination of those two, I think, is extremely powerful. And yeah, I think that I have seen boutiques that are doing it well and have added paid ads to their strategy. And I think one of the things that we can do a lot more of and certainly will, is to showcase some of these case studies and portray some of the authentic brands that are doing a killer job on scalable paid advertising, that have allowed them to really grow their businesses and just using those as examples that people can learn from and say, hey, this is possible for me too. So, yeah, I think you're doing an insane amount of good work in this area as well. And I think people who are part of the boutique cover are in the right place to learn about what the other side of the coin looks like. So, yeah, I think it's really great what you have built.

Thank you. Thank you. You know what? You have no idea how much I nerd out on this topic and how much I enjoy talking about this. I could go on for days, as I'm sure you could, just talking about how those boutique owners can use those strategies to be successful. So thank you for that. I want to kind of take this just one kind of quick step further. For those who are listening who have been through our programs like Boutique Bootcamp or are mildly familiar or expertly familiar with ads, we'll say you and I talked about how you have some customers who marry both using Shoelace plus some of their own ad strategy. Can you talk about if a boutique owner is familiar with Facebook ads? How do they decide what pieces should they take on themselves and run and test on their own, and what pieces should they let software like Shoelace take over and automate for them?

Yeah, that's a really great question. I think that one of our big challenges is to explain to people where exactly we fit in the puzzle, particularly for people who are really great at Facebook ads. And we have a lot of our customers that are extremely great at Facebook ads. And the way it makes sense is to say, in the overall effort of running paid advertising on Facebook, on Google and wherever else, there's a lot of things that go into it. And I think that most of those things are not automatable yet by software. I don't believe that it's fully ready for primetime yet of like, you know, just plugging into an automated software and letting the thing fly. I think it, I think a big part of being successful in paid ads requires some human oversight, it requires some work. It requires a lot of human effort that can't be fully outsourced to software. However, our view has been that parts of the equation are ready to be fully automated, are ready to be fully delegated off to a piece of software so that somebody can spend more time doing the things that are not yet ready to be automated. And so our feeling has been that the one part of the ad strategy that we think can be completely delegated to software is retargeting. And that's the one chunk that we have been taking a stab at trying to automate. And we'll continue to be working heavily on this specific problem. And so the way we usually talk about it is to say some of our customers have like an in house marketing team that are running, doing creative and doing Facebook ads and doing a whole bunch of work. And what we generally say is if the partnership between that team or that person or that company and shoelace is that you go and spend the effort to figure out how to scale high quality traffic to the site. So if you have, for example, 2,000 visitors and you talked about the kind of end of year goals and backtracking what you need in terms of traffic goals in order to get there, I think that's a wonderful way to look at it. And if those are some of the big challenges of like let's say we have 2,000 visitors a week to the site, somebody should be thinking about how do we get to 20,000 visitors a week? How do we get to 100,000 visitors a week? And that part of the problem is incredibly challenging and requires a lot of attention. So what we say is you go out and try to solve that problem and try to increase traffic of high quality visitors at the top of the funnel to come to the site for the very first time. And then for everything that has to do with retargeting of what happens from the moment they hit the website to when they ultimately end up buying, how do you split the audiences from the various stages in that funnel from when they looked at a product to when they add it to cart to when they bought again, that entire piece of the equation to fully delegate that to Shoelace so that you can spend all of your time and all of your energy on figuring out how to drive really high quality traffic to the top of the funnel. And so I had mentioned earlier that, you know, one of the benefits of Shoelace is as people's top line audience grows, our system adapts to that and says if your audience has grown, here's a new complex or strategy that we think we should run to account for this. And so you kind of just rely on Shoelace to take care of the retargeting side. The person or the team at the company can spend all of their time figuring out how to drive really great traffic at the top of the funnel. So that's generally the kind of collaboration that people are doing with Shoelace. And it even applies to agencies, people who are like professional digital marketers that are working with clients and running their Facebook ads. We're seeing more and more adoption from agencies who are using Shoelace spending their time bringing quality traffic to the top of the funnel and then outsourcing the retargeting to Shoelace. I think the way we kind of think about it is like time is extremely valuable and if there is a thing that you can outsource or delegate a piece of your work to that you that you think can free up your time and you believe that the person or the software that you delegate your piece of work to can do a great job at it, then I think too many people are. I have the same problem as well. Like I try to do too many things myself, don't delegate enough, don't like, take enough things off of my plate. It kind of becomes destructive at some point. And so we're trying to build something that gives people that peace of mind that if you do fully trust and rely on delegating your retargeting the shoe lights, that you won't be disappointed about doing that. So that's the nature of the setup that we've seen work really well for our clients who do have Facebook ad experience in house, and for those who don't. We it's been very tempting for us to try to offer solutions that do the kind of top of the funnel advertising too. But our feeling has been like if we try to do that, then we won't be great at one specific thing. And so the area that we've tried to help merchants that aren't so great at Facebook ads themselves yet is to write content that helps Figure out what are the kinds of strategies to do to drive high quality traffic at the top of the funnel and hope to be creating a lot more content for that. And I know that some of the workshops and things you run also do a really great job teaching people about that sort of thing, but that's kind of the relationship between what to do in house versus what to delegate to Shoelace.

And we'll make sure that not only are the links to the blog posts that you've written available in the show notes, but we're going to put some exclusive, exclusive bonuses and downloads for our members at the hub in the training library from you and from Shoelace so we can expand on the things that have been talked about in this podcast and leave our members with something extra and something special they can use in their business. So as we kind of wrap up our time together, I'm thinking about like you as an entrepreneur talking about having so many things on your plate, and I fight that same battle every single day. So as you think about yourself, your own company, going through 500 startups, all these things, plus all the entrepreneurs you work with through Shoelace, what would be some key pieces of advice that you would give to another entrepreneur who's listening, whether they're an e commerce store owner or somewhere else in this business? What's your key takeaway for success?

Right, yeah, I think I'm still trying to figure that one out myself. But I think that the one thing that comes to mind for me on this that I know I've definitely struggled with in the past and I know that many people do, is that is that things just take time. Like there's just not, there's not a quick answer for everything. There isn't a, you know, silver bullet. There's a very good book called the Hard Thing about Hard Things by pretty popular investor who also used to be a founder. And in there he talks about this idea of like there is no such thing as silver bullets. There are just lots and lots and lots of lead bullets. And that that is the true answer. And this idea of like always being in search for a silver bullet, what is this the one thing that is going to change my business or this one thing that is going to like make all the difference? I think realizing that like most often there is no such thing, there is not this one thing that's going to make all the difference and it's just the long hard work of just pumping out the lead bullets, of showing up to work every single day, working on some of these Challenges and realizing that it's going to take a really long time for meaningful progress to happen. I think the thing that I've always thought about is, like, it's not about having a huge impact overnight. It's to have, like, measurable progress over a period of time. And so if you measure your growth as a business, and from one month to the next, you grew by a certain amount. And then from one month, from that month to the next, you grew by a little bit more. And you grew by a little bit more. As long as there is that, you know, cadence of progress, that's what matters. And then you kind of trust that over a long period of time, there is this, you know, that something really great is going to snowball into existence as opposed to kind of, you know, if you're always in search of what can I spend my time on this week so that my entire business changes next week is going to that, you know, that I think you can spend years doing that kind of an approach and then you won't end up having something meaningful. Whereas you start thinking about what can I spend my time on this week that is going to move my forward, my business forward a little bit or a little bit more. And I think some of the strategies that again, you talked about, and I'm sure that a lot of the work you do through Boutique Hub is based on a lot of these sorts of things where it's like, what is the end goal for the year and how do you work backwards? A kind of a plan towards getting there. I think my, my biggest takeaway and in trying to do anything meaningful is that it just, it will not happen overnight and you need a lot of patience to see it through. And just kind of that consistency and persistence is the answer over kind of any one thing that is going to. Going to change your entire business. So that would be my, my one takeaway for sure.

Reza, that your answer is so good. You're so spot on in a million different ways. But I love that this whole episode's about Facebook ads. Because when I get asked questions about Facebook ads and people say things like, oh, I tried it and it didn't work, or I spent money and I lost it, my one piece of advice for them is, well, it's not gonna happen overnight. There's not a silver bullet. I'm not gonna teach you one thing and it's gonna work tomorrow. It's about testing and testing, and it's a faucet that you turn on and it turns up and produces this return over Time. So amen to everything you're saying. Drop the mic. You're so stupid.

I appreciate that.

So, hey, you, as an entrepreneur, you mentioned a couple of books and some other leaders that you follow. What other books and podcasts are your favorite? When you feel like you're trying to fill your cup and stay motivated and working on a new idea, where do you go to learn?

Yeah, So I think, you know, some of the podcasts I listen to, I don't know if they'll be as applicable to just some of your listeners because, like, some of the. Some of our challenges, like a software business, are very different to an e commerce business. But I think about, like, there are a couple of podcasts I really like. There's one that's called Masters of Scale. It's a podcast by the founder of LinkedIn, and he interviews a lot of founders who have achieved scale, like the founder of Facebook or Airbnb, and like, what some of the crazy stories have been of what they've gone through, which I think a lot of it are certainly transferable to entrepreneurs of any kind, for sure. So I think that's a really great one. I think there's the. The book I mentioned, the Hard Thing about Hard Things. I really like that one where it just talks about, you know, how things are supposed to be hard. I think that there's another. Just a quick thing that somebody sent me a note recently after we shared an update about, like, a difficult thing that we were going through, and person reached out and said, hey, it's actually supposed to be hard. And like, I think sometimes that's a really great reminder that sometimes people complain about the journey being hard or the process being difficult, but just that reminder of that's what it's supposed to be like. It is supposed to be difficult, and you're supposed to figure it out. Despite that, I think is an important lesson and certainly one that comes across very much in the Masters of Scale podcast. I also, for example, I turn to a company called Intercom, who are a lot more popular in the software world than they are in the e commerce world. They build our. If anybody goes to our site, the little chat bubble that is on our website is powered by Intercom. And there's just like a phenomenal team that produces a lot of great content. They do a lot of great work, and they have a very interesting podcast called Inside Intercom, where sometimes they're just interviewing other people inside of Intercom, some of the product managers or people that have built some of the software. They put out a lot of really great content. So I follow them. I think in the Shopify world, Shopify's the Shopify Master podcast is a really great one.

Well, last question, and this is one I love to ask all the guests who come on the show, because I think it speaks volumes to not only what you're building as a company and the customers are trying to serve, but just the greater picture of our life. And that is someday, you know, once you have your grand exit, which every founder dreams of. Right. Once Shoelace has done its job and it's gone wherever it's supposed to go, and you are an old man, right, Sitting on the porch, hard to imagine you're the guy in the hoodie. I think we just need to remind people, like, startup founder wearing a hoodie.

I love that.

So once that's all over with, what is the one thing you want people to look back and say, like, this is what Reza did. This is how he impacted my life, and this is the legacy that the company left?

Yeah, that's. That's a tough one. I think. I think about, you know, one of the things that drives me the most about Shoelace and just the work that we do, and I think the work that I will do with. With anything I ever work on is just this idea of, like, personal growth. And I think that one of the ways that we think about why Shoelace is meaningful to us is that we are trying to build something really big, something that at some point has, like, you know, several hundred people working at the company, for example, maybe at some point, much more than that. Who knows? And the idea that through this process, the company is going to grow a lot, but what really matters is that through that process, a lot of the people on the team are going to grow a lot. A lot of people who join our team and some of the people that we look to to kind of bring onto the team aren't necessarily people who have had, like, insane amounts of success at a previous job or people who have, like, have the best resumes, like ourselves as founders. We didn't necessarily have, like, perfectly polished resumes and, you know, somewhat come off as, like, underdogs in the world. And, like, we think about some other people who are in a similar situation in life who have a lot of potential and a lot of talent. And we've hopefully done a great job to find those people and bring them onto our team and find a way to do that many, many times over the course of building Shoelace that we weren't necessarily looking for People with polished resumes to bring into the team and kind of build a company that way? But can we bring on, find people who are extremely talented, who haven't necessarily like found their place to kill it yet and use Shoelace as a platform that people grow an insane amount from the moment they join to however long they spend with us to be able to look back at their time with us at the company to say, I've spent like my, my. I've done my best work and have grown professionally and personally in, in an insane amount during the time that I've been at Chile. I think my, my biggest joy and happiness if I'm like that 60 year old person just, you know, looking back at things overall is to say how many of those experiences could we have created and then through that process, how much value have we been able to create for the people who use our product? And when we think about the vision of the company is to say, can we turn human expertise into software? And I think that can take us a really long way. And I'm excited to see where we go with that as a company. And I think those will be the two things that I'll be the most proud of, like how many, how many people we impacted through kind of bringing them on to join the team as we grew, who experienced a ton of personal growth and went through a ton of challenges through the process. And how much value did we create for people by being able to make expertise accessible to everyone? It's kind of what I look for. And yeah, I hope that we get there.

I love it. Well, Reza, thank you so much for sharing your time with us today and your knowledge and your expertise. I know that there's a lot of key takeaways that I jotted down and I'm sure our listeners did today too, so thank you. And we can't wait to see what's next for Shoelace. So if anyone's listening and has questions, you can hop on over to Shoelace's site or again, all the details are in the show notes and in your guys service provider profile on the Boutique hub.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Ashley. It was great chatting with you again.

Did you guys love that episode? All of the nerd inside of me was literally jumping up and down because I truly believe that this is not out of reach for you guys. You can make this journey into growth and significant traffic using Facebook ads by just digging in and taking it one step at a time. You can totally do this. And I really do see our E commerce and boutique Industry today really divided into two camps. First, there's boutique owners who love connecting and relating and serving and really sharing what's unique and all making it pretty at the same time. And the second camp, which is the online marketers. They drive millions of dollars in sales selling owl salt and pepper shakers to a highly targeted niche of shoppers who are literal ride or die owl fans. Now, my goal for you is to marry the two. Maybe not with that owl obsession tied in, but you get the point, don't you? You can drive loads of traffic that's highly targeted and break through the noise to reach your customers who do need and really do love following you. And this is how you do it by using Facebook ads. So if you'd love to hear more from Reza and Shoelace and of course meet him in person at the 2018 Boutiques and Summit this June in Dallas. Make sure you use our special offer code on the Shoelace service providers profile on the boutiquehub.com for members or reach out to Reza anytime. I know he would love to hear from you. All right guys, shout out this week to our listener of the week, Ashley from Southern Grace, who says we're a brand on the Boutique Hub and our whole staff loves listening to this podcast. It's super motivating and we get a flood of insight about our retailers and new ideas for how to serve them. Thank you, Ashley. Thanks so much for listening, subscribing and leaving a rating and review that helps our podcast reach those podcast gods, if that's what you want to call them, who allow our show to have more reach and allow us to bring even more guests on the show. All right guys, I'll be back next Tuesday with a guest that you guys know and love. I know you're gonna love this episode, so until then, let me know what your biggest takeaway from this episode was and your burning Facebook ad questions because I know you've got them right now. Tell me what's on your mind over on Instagram Jalderson and I'll be sure to get back to you with a video message in reply. Alright guys, see you back here soon on Boutique Chat. Hey guys, thank you so much for listening to this episode. We hope that you loved it. Don't forget to hit subscribe. Subscribe and leave a rating and review down below for a chance to be one of our featured listeners each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and how to access complete show notes and bonus downloads from our guests, head on over to the boutiquehub.com and join the community. We'll see you next week.

Sa.