Matt Edmundson: [00:00:00] So welcome back to the e commerce podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmundson. This is a show all about helping you deliver eCommerce Wow. And to do that. I am chatting to the wonderful chap called Jay Neyer from Lantern Sol. We are going to be getting into what it looks like to grow your brand from six figures to seven figures to eight figures and beyond.

From the man who has been there, done it, read the book, seen the film, got the t shirt and all of that good stuff. So grab your notebooks, grab your pens because you're going to want to get into all of this. But before we do. Let me just take a few moments just to say if you haven't done so already, make sure you go over to the website, sign up for the newsletter, ecommercepodcast.

net, uh, and we'll be sending stuff out to you. It's all getting revamped at the moment, the newsletter. It's going to be so much better than it was and it was pretty cool before, but it's going to be so much better. Uh, so those changes at the time of recording probably were about two [00:01:00] weeks off, I think, so.

Let me tell you, that means by the time this has come out, it's been working for a little while. So go over to the website, e commerce podcast. net, sign up to the newsletter. We only send out one email a week. It's pretty cool, pretty tame, uh, and pretty insightful. Uh, and so yeah, go do that. Also come follow me on Instagram, not Instagram.

What's the other one? LinkedIn. That's what I'm using a lot of, uh, come find me on LinkedIn. Would love to meet you there. Matt Edmundson, uh, come say, how's it? Uh, we get to meet a lot of e commerce's on LinkedIn. A lot of, a lot of listeners, which is great. And you tell me the stories and, uh, and I love to hear them.

So yeah, do come do that. Anyway, enough about that. Let's talk about Jay, a modern Renaissance man. It says here in my notes, which I think is fantastic. A philosopher, a musician, a multilingual mastermind beyond his creative pursuits. He's a powerhouse in e commerce has generated over a hundred million in sales and developed over 500 websites and apps.

[00:02:00] He's a featured speaker for Shopify and Amazon and Jay blends big picture thinking. With technical expertise to turn six figure brands into eight figure success stories, which coincidentally is why we have him on the show. Yes, it is. So, uh, Jay, welcome to the show, man. Uh, great to have you all the way from Cincinnati, which I believe is in Ohio.

If my American geography serves me. Yeah, it's great to have you. Yeah, it's good to have you. It's good. Are you a Cincinnati Reds fan? That's what I know about Cincinnati. There's a baseball team.

Jay Neyer: Yeah, for the sports scene, you know, we don't have a lot of accolades. Um, I also travel a fair amount. So, Cincinnati's home base, but I bounce around all over the world.

Uh, fortunately, my work I can just do from a laptop. So, whether it be in Brazil, or Colombia, or somewhere in Europe, I'm, I'm most often not traveling, so I've lost track of their games and scheduling over the years. I, I frankly, uh, prefer to put my time and attention to other things outside of [00:03:00] sports, but I, I root for them just for the sake of my friends and family wanting to be happy.

Indirectly. You could say I'm a fan.

Matt Edmundson: Indirectly. A fair play. I, I appreciate that. I, I remember when I was a kid, and I appreciate this is going back a long time. Uh, but when I was a kid, my dad, uh, traveled to the States with, for business for the first time. And it was a big deal. You know, this was sort of in the early eighties.

This was a big deal when your dad sort of traveled to the States and he ended up going to Cincinnati and he bought me back this t shirt, the Cincinnati t shirt, which I think is still in my mum's attic, if I'm going to be honest. Uh, and he bought me back a Cincinnati Reds cap, um, and he said, you have to support the Cincinnati Reds baseball team.

And I'm like, well, sure, why not? I don't know anything about baseball. We didn't have the internet back then. I was never going to see the game. Um, And then that's the last time I thought about it until I've just spoken to you now. So

Jay Neyer: yeah, well fun fact for you, Cincinnati Reds, they were the very first professional baseball team in the U.

S.

Matt Edmundson: Ah, okay. [00:04:00]

Jay Neyer: Yeah. Well, there you

Matt Edmundson: go.

Jay Neyer: Some trivia, some useless trivia knowledge you'll never need, but now you know.

Matt Edmundson: Well, you never know, it might come up in a pub quiz. Um, you know, those, those kind of questions come up all the time, don't they, in, in pub quizzes, which is, uh, it's wonderful to have it. I'll have forgotten it by the time we finish recording, though.

But, uh, at least I know it now. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Well, listen, let's jump into it because I, I loving your bio. You know, you've done a lot of work. You've had your own e-commerce store, which you, you mentioned before we hit the record button, which you built, sold, and uh, and, and got out of there. You, you now help other companies with their own eCommerce stores and, and helped them scale.

Uh, and so I'm intrigued 'cause your story is a little bit similar to mine in the sense we both built quite big online businesses and sold them. Uh, and so it's like, it's like looking into a mirror, uh, J is, is, is what it is. Um, and so I'm kind of curious about your story. How did you, how did you get into e commerce?

Jay Neyer: Yeah. So in school, back in university, I was doing a [00:05:00] double major in philosophy and accounting, and I figured if I just picked the two most opposite things, I'll find something in the middle. And, uh, it, it, it worked out pretty well. I, uh, I started doing accounting internships and I was just bored out of my mind.

I was sitting behind a cubicle, just hating my life, hating my job, hating my outfit that I had to put on every day, really not liking where I was at. And I remember very vividly one day driving home after, um, there was like a pub crawl or something like that after work. And I just, I felt like I was just surrounded by the most.

Uninspiring people you could imagine just having the most boring conversations. And I remember just crying on my way home. Like, how is this my life? Like, how did, how did this, how did this happen? Like, where did I, where did I go wrong? And so shortly after that, I decided I'm going to start reading about famous entrepreneurs, try to make something of my life.

And it seemed like technology was a common theme. And so [00:06:00] I figured I'm going to learn how to code. How do I do that? I'm going to start building a website and I'll start building it for myself. Uh, so I started off making a website, making a blog, just screwing around, really making a couple of websites and then sharing it, publishing it out.

And then someone approached me and said, Hey, my family business needs a new website. Can you build it for us? We'll pay you a thousand bucks. And my eyes just lit up cause that was the first time someone had ever offered me money for something like that. And I just couldn't believe it, that people pay for this.

And so that just sent me down this whole path of building websites. Later launched, uh, some e commerce brands. My first one was unsuccessful and had a lot of lessons from that. I can tap into, but the second one, uh, really took off after lots of years of perseverance and, um, we were fortunately able to grow that to eight figures.

Matt Edmundson: That's great, man. That's great. I do feel like we connected somehow. I did accounting at uni, although I did accounting and law, so they were quite [00:07:00] similar. I left university and thought, I never want to be an accountant, ever. But it's been quite useful knowledge to have.

Jay Neyer: Absolutely. So

Matt Edmundson: I'm super grateful for it, and I'm grateful for good accountants, I really am, but it was never going to be me.

Right. I read the business books, got into entrepreneurship and the reason I got into e commerce was because somebody came to me and said, can you build me a website? I'm like, sure. And they said, do you know how to do it? I'm like, no, but how hard can it be? Right. And this was in 1998. So, uh, here we are, however many years, almost 30 years.

Geez, is it really that long?

And so I did fascinating, uh, absolutely fascinating. So you, you've, uh, you've built businesses. Some of. not worked, but one obviously clearly did work. Um, and you've, you've learned a lot from that. So let's jump straight into it. Cause I know, um, I know I'm fascinated by your insights and stories in this. So [00:08:00] we've got a website.

Um, in fact, I was talking to a couple today, their company turns over a half a million a year. Um, they, they, Um, sell products online. They got an econ business sells half a million on year. We're looking about do we do an equity partnership with them? Um, how do I grow that brand from its six figures up to eight figures and more?

Let's jump straight into it. What's your first thing that we should think about?

Jay Neyer: Yeah. First, I just like to look at the overall economics of the business. What type of industry is it in? Is it in a growing and expanding market? Is it in a contracting? Um, it's very different strategies when we have price points of items that are, uh, called like 600 to 1000 bucks versus it's more of a consumable product where it's maybe 20, but you're trying to just build out that that lifetime value.

So one of the very first things I do is just look at the historical standing of it. Um, and just the total addressable market size. What does that look like? Uh, after that, what [00:09:00] I would look at is how are its current revenue channels. So how's it getting new customers specifically? Is that coming from referral, SEO, paid ads, email?

What is their customer retention look like? Um, and then really typically the main growth magnets are going to be the paid ads, SEO front, uh, working with influencers. We can dive into some of that in a bit. Um, but if those economics are positive, like I, what I often find is many business owners just don't know their numbers in terms of like, what is, what is the max we can acquire a customer against the AOB versus LTV.

Um, and if they really know those numbers and it can help determine just how aggressive you want to get with scaling. Um, we have some accounts where they just have insane lifetime value from a single customer and, you know, we've been acquiring customers for say that lifetime value is 250 and we're acquiring customers for 18 and like, I'm telling you, like turn up the gas, put more fuel in people, just, you know, apprehension.

So you'd be surprised, like, I think just, I, [00:10:00] I'm kind of numb to. Uh, or I guess I just have less emotional investment because oftentimes this is like someone's precious baby that they're trying to care for. I'm like, Hey, I, I can't do anything to potentially put in a position of jeopardy. And I totally get that.

But, um, the nice thing about my perspective has just been from just, you know, comes down to a spreadsheet at the end of the day. And if you know those numbers, you can turn those knobs dial it up and just get the whole machine, uh, producing more. Um, and then on the backend. So I'd say that's typically like more of the front end top, top.

piece of the funnel of the growth engine, more middle funnel. I'd start looking in terms of like the, the website CRO, how's the conversion rate? Um, what is that, uh, bounce rates and things like that. Um, I would also be looking at their email performance. Generally, we look to have a benchmark of email doing 25 percent of total store revenue.

Matt Edmundson: So

Jay Neyer: in your case, if you guys are doing. Uh, half a million. I'd be looking to see that email is doing at least 25 percent of that. If it's not, [00:11:00] chances are, it's probably under optimized. Um, and yeah, just going through that kind of complete audit and then figure out what are, what's, what, what pain points, where can we massage friction out of the system to probably get the most return on, um, time or capital invested.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, that's a long list. I wish she's great. Um, thank you. I've been hearing, um, Uh, the, the fray, maybe it's just me, maybe I've just been out of the wrong, the right circles for a little while. But more recently I have heard people talk about Tam than I have, maybe in the last two months I've heard people talk about that more than I have in the last six years.

I don't, I don't know if this is just me, uh, or whether this is something that has come out of it, but you mentioned that and I was kind of curious as to why.

Jay Neyer: Uh, I find it very relevant specifically if I'm calculating like SEO or even paid ads for that matter. If like, I'm trying to [00:12:00] just get a sense how much global search, so if I'm trying to capture.

Whatever percent of a specific keyword or phrase that has a lot of purchase intent. I want to see how many people are looking for that. So like insurance in the U S is one of the most competitive keywords that's going to have way more competition than Cincinnati plumber, for example. And so just getting a sense of how many people are actually looking for the specific service or product is going to give you a sense of.

How much ceiling is there for really scaling and growing? Um, and it's, it's more so also just see directional, uh, growth. So I look for growing industries or collapsing industries. So like, Hey, newspapers, physical print is probably not an industry I want to be investing a lot in right now, but maybe digital collectibles or other things where I see market expansion.

It's really easy to just, you know, ride a wave that's carrying you forward versus trying to row a canoe upstream. Um, and, and that happens with business owners that we consult with. So, you know, we can [00:13:00] quickly, easily identify, is this a growing or contracting market? And when it's growing, it just makes it a lot easier for us to do our jobs and position them well versus, Hey, we have a full team trying to paddle a canoe upstream for you.

And we can probably make some distance and some performance, but at the end of the day, we're, we're still rowing upstream. And so there's only so far we can get with that. So I find that very helpful for just. Getting sense of direction

Matt Edmundson: like it can be a simple case of I like what you said there, Jay, about just going to Google and typing stuff in and seeing what the search volume is on something to give you some sort of idea.

I mean, obviously, you can research it further and get more accurate figures on the market size, but, um. It's a, it's a, it doesn't have to be massively complicated to give you some kind of insight, which I like

Jay Neyer: to give you more specifics. We typically use like a trust keyword, get a mapping of how much search volume keyword difficulty also using [00:14:00] the Google ad planner.

So, I mean, honestly, just between both those tools, you can get enough information if you feed in like a good list of. of keywords or phrases that we want to, those tools will summarize very effectively for you. How much monthly searches, even if you're just doing that monthly searches and keyword difficulty, um, you can get a sense of like, where does it make sense to direct my attention and efforts.

Matt Edmundson: And do you find yourself just predominantly looking at, say, keyword searches in the States? Um, or are you looking at all the countries that you're selling in or potentially selling in, I suppose?

Jay Neyer: Yeah, we know we look across the board, majority of our clients are U. S. based, but we have plenty international.

We have some, you know, throughout Europe. Uh, I'm also really into languages myself. So, uh, the volume from those is also pretty noteworthy. So Spanish speaking markets, even in the U. S. The Spanish speaking market is pretty significant. And I think Expected to be at least 50 percent by 2050 or I'm not sure the exact year, but it's, uh, it's an important demographic as [00:15:00] well.

So, um, I would pay attention to both of them. Um, but it really just depends on where you can service your clients. And sometimes you might have logistics of like, Hey, we'd love to be able to fulfill to people in the EU, but we just don't have a warehouse there. And for us to fulfill a single unitary order, the economics of it just don't make sense.

So, um, it can apply in both contexts.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, no, fair enough. And of course, if you don't have a warehouse in Europe, give us a ring. We've got one in the UK. Anyway, um, do you, switching back to what you mentioned a second ago about you love languages. It said here in your little research that you're a polygot, which I think is one of the best words around.

I just think it's just such a great word, but you can, you can obviously speak multiple languages. How important is it for e commerce sites? So, for example, I'm a U. S. website, um, obviously there is a lot of Spanish speaking, and certainly in certain parts of the U. S., like I was in Miami a few, a few months ago, [00:16:00] and actually I was, I was surprised because I've not been to Miami for a long time and I was surprised how little English was spoken and how much everything was Spanish.

I don't know why, I just, it just was what it was. Um, how important is it then to think about or look at, say, multilingual sites? Would you do an English version and a Spanish version? Um, or do you just focus on English and think actually everybody can copy, paste and put it into ChatGPT for the translation?

Jay Neyer: It definitely starts with English first. It will make a difference of like somewhere like Miami is probably gonna be more, that's going to be more of the case than somewhere like Minnesota, for example. Um, but in general it's like, Hey, why would we not want to have more keywords and potential volume?

Like, is there anything that would impede this product from being sold to someone who speaks and feels more natively comfortable in a different language? Like very rarely is that the case. So, uh, it's always going to be a value add, I would say. Is it going to be the most value add compared to, uh, you know, your [00:17:00] list of 10 or 20 other things you could be focusing on, you know, that could be subject for debate.

Um, but I would say when in doubt, like it's, it's, it's definitely a value item in my experience and can potentially also just help unlock other different keywords or phrases that. Um, otherwise you wouldn't be able to optimize around.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, it's an interesting, it's quite timely actually, because one of our companies, which does sell into continental Europe, um, we're to, we're now looking at getting, say, the labels of the product translated into French, possibly French, German.

Um, And seeing if that has an impact on things. Uh, and so this whole language and translation and, um, understanding search terms in German are going to be very different to search terms in English. Uh, but understanding what they are is, uh, that's a skill in its own right. Right. I mean, you've got to have a good grasp of things going on there.

So you've, you've sort [00:18:00] of, you've, you've given your list, so you take an overview. You're looking at, you know, is this growing, is this expanding? So let's assume we're in an expanding industry. It's a growing market. The company, the company that I spoke to earlier, um, I won't mention their name or their industry because if they're listening, I've not got their permission to share their story.

But, uh, you know, if I did, I would quietly say, um, They are in, I would say, a very fast growing market. Um, but it's quite a, I say fast growing market, I think it's more of a very established market. It's a very big, sort of, niche space. Um, they've stagnated for two years. They've not, sort of, grown, uh, in any way.

Um, their profit isn't, they, so they focused more on profitability than new customer acquisition. Um, which I thought was an interesting choice. Uh, so that's sort of them. I don't know if you want to throw anything else in there. I appreciate the limited data.

Jay Neyer: Uh, [00:19:00] so like roughly what type of average order value would you say

Matt Edmundson: about 30 U.

S. Dollars.

Jay Neyer: Okay. And is this a consumable or something you would have a repeat usage or what would that LTV look like?

Matt Edmundson: Well, the in an interesting question because they didn't actually know what their lifetime value was. Um, of a customer. So going back to your earlier point of customers, not People not actually knowing their data, which I find intriguing because I'm like, well, this has got to be one of the first questions I'd like to know the answer to.

So they're looking at that. Now I'm going to suggest their lifetime value is probably around 70 bucks. And I think they, um, they have about a 25 percent return customer rate. So 25 percent of the customers come back and buy for a second time.

Jay Neyer: Okay. And then last question for the sales that they are getting, um, do you know, break down what channels are this coming from?

Paid ads, search. 95

Matt Edmundson: percent is coming from paid meta ads.

Jay Neyer: [00:20:00] 95%. Okay. So not like Google that egg hasn't cracked yet.

Matt Edmundson: No. Well, yeah.

Jay Neyer: Step number one is definitely the LTV piece. And even if you want to, like, those are pretty different numbers between that 30 and 70. Um, like that just highlights some of the main differences between, um, Like looking at it from the LTV versus the AOV standpoint, because 30 is like, you're, you're going to have, you're going to have a tough time regardless, just because of that lower price point.

So I will also look to see what we could do to raise that AOV to whether bundle more items, increase the perceived value, even if it's digital add ons or other guides or whatever things to just improve the overall value, because. CPMs, even for like really good accounts, I would say if we're a 20 is a pretty good benchmark.

So just the cost of advertising for a thousand impressions, like you're already going to be eating into that 30, um, acquisition pretty quickly. And so it's kind of like, I'm guessing [00:21:00] probably why they haven't scaled is because they have the top out for the ad spend of what they're willing to go relatively capped.

And honestly, based on those numbers, I would say it's probably higher at the 25 percent because if it's 30 average order, and we call it 70, that means like 2. 1, 2. 1 or 2. 3, 2. 2 in that range, in terms of orders per customer. And I, I, they should ideally look at that on like a, uh, a 60 or 90 day interval, because sometimes where LTV can screw you off, it's like.

It affects your cash flows a lot, which I learned from when I was previously having a business myself. So you're paying for tomorrow's inventory with funds today, um, and so you don't want to be like in a negative cash, cash cycle crunch. If you're building on that LTV, but that capital isn't coming in for another, you know, if it's, if it's six months or 12 months instead of that, and that can get a little bit more tougher to calculate.

But. Um, I would say [00:22:00] the retention seems really big. I would look to at least get 25, even pushing up to 30 percent on the email. So making sure that they're really retaining customers as best as they can, since it seems like it's an item that people come back and reproduce. Um, the meta dependency, what I would do, walk into meta in a second.

What I would do outside of meta is look at SEO. If they haven't done any specific strategies, you'd be surprised at how well that still works. Um, and then Google ads as well, uh, very oftentimes. Without knowing the product, I would say like, I'd be surprised if they can't replicate some of those models over to Google.

Um, but getting on the meta side, cause that seems like where it's ultimately working and I'm, I'm usually a fan of going deeper in areas versus trying to go wider, like before you've really built out a channel, I think for many businesses, it's like, Hey, we don't need to do more things. We just need to do the, the handful of things that we're doing just exceptionally better.

And so of all the things I'd say, probably going deeper on meta would really help starting with those economics would be step number one. [00:23:00] Um, what we've been doing for a lot of brands that we've been able to grow up to eight figures is, uh, doing whitelisting with influencers. So we're in this age of influencers now where people just have a much better relationship with an individual than like a corporation or a logo.

And many of these businesses are just going to have frankly, zero brand recognition. So. Where we've had a lot of success is, um, running these ads through influencers accounts, and these can be micro influencers. We've had people with a thousand followers, 2000 followers, and have really great success. And we've had, you know, notable, famous people like Joe Rogan or Gronk, uh, having ads as well.

And those are obviously like very different calibers in terms of level of influencer. But even on the smaller end, we continuously see that whenever brands do this, they have better results. And it's a win, win, win. It's a win for the brand because they're getting better acquisition costs. You know, their economics on the ad model makes sense for the influencer.

It's [00:24:00] a win for them because the. The brand is essentially paying to send traffic to their page. So like for one of the influencers I calculated, we had sent them over 18 million, uh, impressions from a different accounts that they paid 0 on. So obviously you can imagine a lot of that converts into followers.

And then hopefully it's a win for the consumer as well. Assuming you have a product that people want and need and, uh, ultimately, you know, you're, you're providing your service by getting it to them at a. Uh, and more economies of scale. So we'll oftentimes do more whitelisting at, um, on the ad creative side.

And then on the landing page side, what we've been doing lately is having specific landing page funnels, uh, carry off of that influencer. So I'll give you an example of that. We had an account where we had all the ad creative specific, um, with an influencer, and then you come to that page and, Oh, it's the same person.

So you just have a consistency of that buying funnel that's worked really well, um, for top of funnels. Also, I'd say [00:25:00] like doing listicle type of content of having a landing page that, um, especially if you have an item that's less of a commodity and you need to do a lot more education on. Uh, I'll give you the example of like, maybe, maybe you're selling a sleep supplement.

You want to help someone get better sleep. What we do is put together a guide. Here are the top five recommended neuroscience, uh, tips for getting better sleep. And maybe three or four of them will be like peer reviewed articles or things pointing back to doctors and medical advice. And then maybe we'll slip one item in that's about their product or service that's being offered.

So it's, it's kind of going for a softer sale. Where you're not like pitching directly your product, but just educating on a subject or a pain point that they have, and then introducing your product as part of that solution. So we see that work really well for top of funnel. And then going down to the bottom of the funnel, it's honestly just like static images still work great.

Like we, people often jump straight to video, but we see like images really work really well for that [00:26:00] reconversion, just product shots, maybe testimony or feature feature a call out. And those, those still do wonders.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, they do. Uh, I, I can attest the images are still doing very well. Um, I'm, I'm curious again.

I've got lots of notes here, Jay. So I, I'm going to pick on the, the first thing that stands out. So talk us through the, Influence, uh, thing a little bit more. So more and more people are talking about this. I was just on LinkedIn earlier, and Jordan Wester just posted. Jordan Wester, previous guest. I don't know if you know Jordan.

Really interesting guy about social commerce. And he was, he was posting about influence marketing, as has Jordan's been. And he He was waxing lyrical about it and more and more people are, especially with the way social commerce is now starting to, it's seemingly starting to take off. Finally, we'll see what happens with tick tock, obviously, in America, but it seems to be sort of taken off at least a [00:27:00] little bit.

How do you go about finding and recruiting good influencers? Is this something you do as a in house? Is this something you get clients to do? Is this something that you get an agency to do? What's your, your tips there?

Jay Neyer: It's a little blend of both. Um, there's platforms that we've utilized in the past too.

Honestly, the best what we've seen, uh, either working directly ourselves or with clients that we work with is just get a VA and spreadsheets and just direct outreach. It's very much in the paint, like just getting into the weeds and sending out massive messages and trying to be targeted and engaged with it.

That's frankly what we've seen work best compared to other platforms where you've paid to facilitate those marketplaces. TikTok and Instagram also have marketplace for creators. So I anticipate more tools coming around that specifically. Um, the model is still very nascent and I'd say [00:28:00] continuously growing.

And I think it's. Even though it's like, there's a lot already in that, I think we're just going to see more and more over the next five years of what I, I predict that to get even bigger, not less. Yeah. That's what, that's like one of the examples of, I was referring to of like, what are growing pools versus shrinking pools.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah.

Jay Neyer: Um, and so honestly, yeah, getting a, getting a VA and. Going through the DMS is, it's frankly where we see many brands get that. Um, but you also want to make sure you have a compelling offer. It can point to examples, keep it focused on them. So again, when we do that, we just show like, here's another influencer.

Here's, here's Brian, for example. Here's the numbers of how many millions of people we've sent to his profile. Oh, yeah, I spent 0 on this. So we're giving you free marketing so you can have some assets to just make it a, a no brainer for them. Um, that I think will also, you know, you could send the exact same pitch, but then you make it more about them, you get significantly sign up rates versus before, like, [00:29:00] Hey, we want to do this confusing thing that you don't fully understand, you know, like I found so much message of what you sent sent to the prospect in mind.

So just keep it focused on them, how they're getting benefit, um, why it's a win, win, win.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, clarity, I think is super important, isn't it? So you mentioned that you're sending them. A lot of people to the influencer's social profile, if I've understood that correctly. Um, and so the influencer is also therefore benefiting in terms of growing their following.

Um, and I'm curious, how do you drive people to there? So when you say that about an influencer, we're going to drive, you know, whatever people to you. Are you using paid ads to drive traffic to their channels?

Jay Neyer: No. So, uh, how, how it looks in the back end is we link our ad account to their profile. So suppose you're the brand, you're still footing the entire bill for all the ad spend.

They're just linking their profile to your account. [00:30:00] And majority of the cases too, we're still sending them to the brand landing page or the brand website. Um, but this is coming up from their profile, so we're not, we're generally still doing conversion based campaigns that are the pixels incentive and goal is to capture an actual purchase versus like sending traffic to profile or something like that.

Um, but they're getting the spillover from people who also just see them, see their content, uh, click on their page, you know, cause from that, from that ad, you can, who's, who's this guy who's. Talking about this product. What are they all about? Click on the page and go down their funnel that way. Um, so it's still typically conversion campaigns that we're running.

Matt Edmundson: And do you find with influencers, it's, it's, um, a case of, you still need to set a fee or are people a lot more aware of. Uh, no, I want a percentage of sales. I, I, I, um, I, I think I'm going to send a lot of people to your site. So I, I want, you know, 10 percent or whatever. I don't know, whatever a good rate is.

This

Jay Neyer: is a good question. This is where we see a lot of [00:31:00] variance. And so I'll give you an example. We have, we have one particular client who has, uh, very expensive products that are very heavy to ship. So it's not feasible for them to just be like slinging these things all around giving you a free product because you can either go free, you can go paid route for paid for posting or commission route of based on volume.

And usually we, I mean, we've done all three depending on the size of the account. I would say we also try to leverage and get good social proof in the forms of product reviews and things like that. So anytime you can combine that with influencers, it's really helpful. Especially on the micro level, they're probably more likely to do that.

And it's a lot easier for you to facilitate like an actual purchase on your website that can also lead back into, uh, a verified review, getting the testimony, getting the content from that. Um, but we also, you know, again, some of our partners have been able to work with influencers like Gronk or, uh, or Joe Rogan.

And those have, you can imagine like [00:32:00] some of these have, actually with Joe, it didn't have any cost. The product was just that good. Um, but for Gronk, there's definitely compensation payment affiliated with that. And so, uh, for smaller brands, again, even, even when we run the same content with whitelisting and just from the brand account, 95 percent of the time, we still see better performance with the whitelisting.

Um, so even, even with individuals who have like a micro influencer of thousand, 2000, like we still see good results with it.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah. That's really fascinating. Really fascinating. I am super curious about the influencer landing page. Um, just explain, I mean, you said obviously there's a photo of or an image of the, the influencer on the page, so there's that connection, uh, which comes, which comes through that, um, uh, dig into that for me a little bit more if you could.

Jay Neyer: I'll just go off of the topic of sleep. You know, this isn't a client at all by any means. I'm just the first thing that popped in my head, but we'll run with it. So suppose I have a product that's for helping with sleep, and I found a list of, Um, 10 or [00:33:00] so sleep experts on Instagram, people who talk about it on their channel.

What I would do is approach them and say, Hey, I want to set up a win win win partnership with you, where we're going to be running this whitelisting content from your account. We'll build out landing pages. We're going to be paying for all this traffic. You're going to get free impressions for, you know, whatever the weekly.

Podcast or show that he, that they do on their own individual, you're not going to get new eyeballs on that. So I'd approach them about that and then I'd say, okay, you know, assuming they give me the thumbs up, let's do this. What I would maybe then do is create a landing page specific around that. Uh, we'll just call him Dr.

Jay. So Dr. Jay has a landing page where it's his image at the top. Here are five tips. Dr. Jay has for getting better sleep each night, and one of them might be, um, using, uh, Like turning off your screen at least an hour or two before night using low light or red light, ideally in the evenings, um, talking about caffeine, the latest that you can [00:34:00] have at the end of the day, and then maybe item number four is this specific supplement that helps.

Uh, get sleep. And then number five might be talking about having a cooler bedroom. And so like four of these items are just kind of tips or items. And then, Oh, one of these is also a product or a service that I'm offering that you could consume with that. And so that would be more top of funnel when we're trying to educate.

And that's generally going to be more necessary for people who have zero exposure to you. It's going to be a much softer sale. And we're trying to make that look like more like a. An article or a blog publishing versus being like, this is very obviously a website of someone trying to sell me something.

Um, so that's about that would look like a top funnel if you're more middle funnel. And I have some notoriety, a simpler form of that could just be more of like a collection or a product page. And the simplest form even is just having your hero banner with Dr. J or whatever influence in that image, just so you have some continuity and then you can also, it'll be a lot easier to get into that, some of that tracking.

[00:35:00] If you do have, uh, like commission, revenue share, things like that. See how traffic, how traffic is coming in from it.

Matt Edmundson: Really smart. I like it. And you didn't know this, but I actually sell a sleep supplement. So I'm going to steal all your ideas. Thank you. Uh, it, it, it, it. It is, um, it is interesting, isn't it, how it's, it's not, I don't think e commerce is becoming more complex.

I just think it's becoming more nuanced, isn't it? And you, you're now, years ago, you just go, there's a sleep supplement, just take it, what's wrong with you? And then you had to do the blog post and say, this is, you know, something interesting about sleep supplements. And then you have to do the YouTube video.

And all of these things sort of happen and now we're getting influence to talk about it because like you say, um, building your own brand, that brand recognition is not as straightforward in a very crowded, noisy place. And so the influencers have got to do it for you. Um, so I don't think e commerce is becoming more complicated.

I [00:36:00] do think it's becoming more nuanced and learning these new strategies. I say new, but it's sort of old school thinking, but In a new way, isn't it? Seems to be having quite a big impact.

Jay Neyer: Definitely. Back in the day, at least from my experience, as used to be, their targeting was way better. So you had some meta, you could just tell it exactly the type of person that you're trying to find.

Uh, and it was really good at finding that person. We see the opposite today. So like, there's really only four levers. In the profitability equation, it's like it's CPMs. How expensive is it to advertise click through rate? Are people engaging in the content conversion rate? Are they making the purchase?

And then all that. Multiply against the AOV, like how much are people ordering for? And today it's like, you actually want to do as broad. We see better performance just going very wide and broad because you're going to have lower CPMs versus otherwise, if you're trying to dial all these knobs and just try to get hyper specific, you just, you just end up.

Cranking up your CPMs. And so it [00:37:00] eats up tremendously into the equation. So those four numbers and data points haven't really changed. Like even back in the day, those were still the same numbers, but now we're seeing like, okay, where, where are those trends shifting? So we anticipate CPMs to kind of gradually increase more and more each year as advertising gets more expensive.

How can we keep those CPMs lower, still get the impressions. Um, and still get the relevancy, but without jacking up the rest of the equation.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, but all excellent points Jay and I did Which gives me another two hours of conversation that I think we need to have really just digging into this a little bit more But I'm also aware of time and and so what I want to do Uh, before I get too carried away, I've started and I've remembered, uh, on this particular occasion.

Uh, I've started, I say I've started, I've been asking guests now for a while for a question, which I go and answer on social media. I don't answer on the podcast. I go [00:38:00] and answer on social media. If you want to know my answer to Jay's question, come find me on LinkedIn. Uh, that's where I'll be answering it.

Uh, so Jay, what's your question for me?

Jay Neyer: My question would be if you could leave one message on a billboard for the world to see, what would your message be?

Matt Edmundson: Oh, that's such a good question. As you started talking, I was like, if you could just leave one message. And for some reason I went to the old school answer machine messages.

Do you know what I mean? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, which I thought was, I thought, but I like the billboard one as well. So no, very good. If you want to know my answer to that question, like I say, come follow me on social media. Uh, but Jay, listen, I, uh, fascinating conversation, but, and, um, congratulations on all your success.

Uh, it seems to be, um, Well earned. Uh, and I'm fascinating. And if people want to reach out to you, if they want to find out more about how maybe you can help them, maybe they've got [00:39:00] a Shopify site. Maybe they're six figures. They want to go to eight figures and just need some good old conversations with you.

Good looking self. How would they do that?

Jay Neyer: Yeah. Uh, my website, lanternsol.com L A N T E R N S O L. You can also find me on most social media platforms, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Jay Neyer, J A Y and then N E Y E R. So just send me a message. Uh, come check out our website. Be more than happy to help.

Matt Edmundson: Fantastic. We will, of course, link to all of those things in the show notes, which you can get along for free with the transcript on the website, e commerce podcast dot net. Or of course, you know this by now, if you're listening to this on a podcast player like Apple podcast or, um, Spotify to scroll down because the show notes, they show them these days, don't they?

Uh, and so we will make sure all of those links are in the show notes, but Jay, listen, thanks for coming on the show, man. Really appreciate it. Great to meet you. Uh, and thanks for your work. Thanks for giving me a massive strategy around my sleep supplement. Thanks for having

Jay Neyer: me. It was

Matt Edmundson: awesome. [00:40:00] Uh, it was great.

Uh, what a great conversation again. Now let me do this huge round of applause. Yes. We like the cheesy sound desk. Oh yes, we do. Now be sure to follow the e commerce podcast wherever you get your podcast from because of course we have got some more great conversations lined up and I don't want you to miss.

Any of them. And in case no one has told you yet today, let me be the first. You are awesome. Yes, you are created. Awesome. It's just a burden. You've got to bear. Jay's got to bear it. I've got to bear it. You've got to bear it as well. Now, the e commerce podcast is produced by pod junction. You can find our entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app.

The theme music was brilliantly written by Josh Edmundson. And as I mentioned, the show notes, the transcript. The links, everything are on the website, ecommercepodcast. net, which where is the place you go to to instantly sign up to the newsletter, which I mentioned earlier. Uh, so go do that. But that's it for me.

That's it from Jay. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a [00:41:00] fantastic week wherever you are in the world. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.